By AFP It is the nation’s second water pollution scare in a month, after factories in the southern region of Guangxi contaminated water supplies for millions with toxic cadmium and other waste in January. The ship, reportedly South Korean, was docked in Zhenjiang city on the Yangtze river last Thursday when it leaked phenol — … Continue reading Cargo ship spills carbolic acid in Yangtze River→
By Julia Moskin / The New York Times News Service Silent in flannel shirts and ponytails, farmers from Saskatchewan and South Dakota, Mississippi and Massachusetts lined the walls of a packed federal courtroom in Manhattan last week, as their lawyers told a judge that they were no longer able to keep genetically modified crops from their … Continue reading Farmers speak out against GMOs→
By Jeremy Symons / National Wildlife Federation The toll of tar sands development has been largely hidden hundreds of miles to the North. Canadian forests once provided the last undisturbed refuge in North America for migrating songbirds, ducks and geese, and the vast stretches of wilderness in northern Alberta have been ideal for wild wolves … Continue reading Canadian government decides poisoning wolves will save caribou from tar sands→
By the Associated Press CARACAS, Venezuela — Crude oil that spilled from a ruptured pipeline has blackened a river in eastern Venezuela, and the state oil company said workers are containing the spill. Workers have removed a “good percentage of the crude” from the Guarapiche River in Monagas state, said Ramiro Ramirez, environmental director of … Continue reading Pipeline rupture contaminates river in Venezuela→
By Tanya Talaga / Toronto Star When members of Wahgoshig First Nation spotted a drilling crew on what they say is a sacred burial site, they demanded to know who the strangers were and what they were doing. The Wahgoshig, whose Algonquin reserve of 19,239 acres is 113 km east of Timmins, running south from … Continue reading Wahgoshig First Nation wins injunction against corporate gold drillers→
By Jeff Tollefson / Nature When US government scientists began sampling the air from a tower north of Denver, Colorado, they expected urban smog — but not strong whiffs of what looked like natural gas. They eventually linked the mysterious pollution to a nearby natural-gas field, and their investigation has now produced the first hard … Continue reading NOAA study: Natural gas could be as bad for climate as coal→
By Jeremy Hance, mongabay.com Protected areas in the world’s tropical rainforests are absolutely essential, but one cannot simply set up a new refuge and believe the work is done, according to a new paper in Bioscience. Unsustainable hunting and poaching is decimating tropical forest species in the Amazon, the Congo, Southeast Asia, and Oceana, leaving … Continue reading Majority of protected tropical forests “empty” due to hunting→
By Agence France-Presse The US approved its first new nuclear power reactors in decades on Thursday, despite objections from the country’s top regulator that safety issues raised by last year’s Fukushima meltdown were not fully addressed. Commissioners of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted 4-1 to approve the construction of two 1,100 megawatt Westinghouse-Toshiba AP1000 … Continue reading U.S. approves first nuclear plant in decades→
By Joe Satran Four years ago, the once-mighty Chinook salmon runs in California and Oregon were so small that the states agreed to an unprecedented moratorium on fishing. The conservation measures, along with some strategic modification of the dams that had hurt salmon in the past, seemed to work. Salmon watchers seemed optimistic that stocks … Continue reading Chinook Salmon Population Study Shows Many Salmon In Wild Aren’t Really Wild Salmon→
By Steve Connor The total volume of water that has melted from all of the world’s polar ice sheets, ice caps and mountain glaciers over the past decade would repeatedly fill Britain’s largest lake, Windemere, more than 13,000 times, according to one of the most comprehensive studies of the Earth’s frozen “cryosphere”. Using a unique … Continue reading Billions of tons of water lost from world’s glaciers, satellite reveals→