Europe’s fishing quotas are designed to protect European waters from over-fishing. They are imperfect instruments, however, and one of their unintended consequences is that they often force fishermen to dump huge amounts of dead, excess fish back into the ocean.
China Environment Minister: Yep, It’s Bad
China’s Environment Minster has published an essay on the web site of his young agency warning that if the nation doesn’t do more to mitigate the environmental consequences of the nation’s economic expansion, things won’t be expanding for long.
Zhou Shengxian writes:
“In China’s thousands of years of civilization, the conflict
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A Monkey-Wrenching Environmentalist Goes on Trial in Utah
Tim DeChristopher is nothing if not committed. Back in December of 2008, in the waning days of the Bush Administration, then-27 year-old DeChristopher threw a monkey wrench into a planned Bureau of Land Management (BLM) auction of thousands of acres of public territory in Utah for oil and gas exploration. DeChristopher—a college …
How Did Climate Affect Humanity’s First Steps Out of Africa?
We often use this little corner of the intertubes to think about how globalization is physically changing the earth – be it via our addiction to air travel or jeans made on the cheap. But we’re not sticklers. Recent research published in the journal Science presents archaeological evidence that might shed new light on exactly the …
A Documentary on Natural Gas Drilling Ignites an Oscar Controversy
If you watch the Academy Awards show on Sunday evening, you might notice Mark Ruffalo—nominated for Best Supporting Actor—and a number of other celebrities wearing a blue water droplet pin. The pins come from WaterDefense.org, a new campaign that is calling attention to the drinking water supplies that activists say are being …
Why Nukes are the Most Urgent Environmental Threat
Environmentalists: Wake up! There is a greater and more urgent threat to the climate than even global warming: the threat posed by nuclear weapons.
Why are nuclear bombs an environmental problem? We have long known that a large-scale nuclear war would lead to a sudden change in climate—called a nuclear winter—that could …
Invasive Fire Ants Have Established Themselves in the U.S.—And They’re Not Stopping Here
I’ve written a few times in the past about invasive Asian carp, the Chinese natives who were imported for fish farms in the Midwest, only to escape and make their way up the Mississippi River. They’re now knocking on the door of the Great Lakes, and a few of them may have even slipped past defenses and made it into Lake Michigan. The …
Guam Now One of the Shark-Friendliest Places on Earth
If you’re a shark, the Pacific Islands are not a bad place to be these days. Yesterday, the Senate of Guam followed Hawaii’s lead and became the third region to move to ban the sale, possession and distribution of shark products in the U.S. territory. Hawaii was the first U.S. state to make the move last year, followed by the …
The Once and Future Southwestern Mega-Drought
Lately, I’ve stopped worrying about climate change. Wait, that’s not quite right. But I only have so much worry bandwidth, and what is keeping me up at night lately is scarcenomoics, the idea that in a finite world, we may be hitting limits on some natural resources. Climate change doesn’t even have to play a major role in these fears, …
Oceans: Coral Reefs Facing a Triple Threat
I was traveling yesterday, speaking on a panel about electric cars at Harvard University’s Belfer Center, so I didn’t get a chance to cover yesterday’s news closely. But I wanted to note an alarming report published by the World Resources Institute (WRI) on the risks facing coral reefs.
The short version: coral reefs are in big …