You probably wouldn’t know it from the U.S. media, but there’s a whole continent south of the U.S. Latin America rarely gets the media or public attention it deserves in part because of good reasons—years of relative political stability after the civil wars and juntas of the Cold War era, along with generally prosperous …
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Did Fracking Help Cause Oklahoma Earthquakes?
The good people of Oklahoma were rattled on Nov. 5 when the state was hit by its largest earthquake on record, a 5.6-magnitude temblor that struck 44 miles (71 km) east of Oklahoma City. (The previous biggest quake was a 5.5-magnitude tremor that hit in 1952.) Fortunately, no one was hurt, although 14 homes were damaged, and the …
The Environment Will Be the Real Victim of Overpopulation
Maybe it’s just the fact that the official day has been set for October 31—Halloween—but there’s a distinct whiff of panic and fear around the expected birth of the 7 billionth person on the planet. Here’s Roger Martin, chair of the NGO Population Matters, writing in the Guardian recently:
The 7 Billion Day is a sobering
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New Zealand Copes with an Ongoing Oil Spill
You can’t get much more remote than New Zealand—Auckland is over 1,000 miles away from Sydney, which is itself pretty far down there. But doesn’t mean New Zealand is exempt from modern environmental ills. Earlier this month the Liberian-flagged cargo ship Rena ran aground on a reef off New Zealand’s north island, spilling tons of …
Climate Change Caused Crises Half A Millennium Ago, Too
Al Gore’s televised, 24-hour PowerPoint extravaganza last month predictably sparked some hot debate – much of it not about the science itself, but about Gore as its mouthpiece (common themes: he’s a hero, he’s become irrelevant, he’s a hypocritical capitalist). But a key message within Gore’s Climate Reality Project was …
Government Report Blames BP on Oil Spill. But there’s Plenty of Fault
Federal investigators from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Resource Management and Enforcement (BOERME) finally issued their long-delayed report today on the causes of last year’s Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill. The results are not very surprising: BP, and to a lesser extent contractors like Transocean and Halliburton, made …
Why We Need to Test Geoengineering—Soon
The writer and activist Bill McKibben has a saying: “You can’t negotiate with the planet.” What he means is that climate change will continue to unfold based on the amount of carbon we spew into the atmosphere—along with other physical factors—whether we chose to believe in it or not.
That’s worth remembering as we enter this …
Organic Farms May Keep Bacteria at Bay
Given how the cracks in our food system have recently expanded into troubling chasms – remember the ground turkey Salmonella scare, and the emergence of an antibiotic-resistant Salmonella strain – health experts are once again fretting about farms and the drugs used in them. And with good reason. Antibiotics may be some of the …
Scientists: We Want More Children
We Ecocentric writers have the privilege of constant exposure to the most cutting-edge science research around – we’ve written about sexy birds, Arctic oil, paper solar panels, and countless other incarnations of the weird and wonderful. But sometimes it’s easy to overlook the hardworking folks behind these discoveries, and it …
Lethal Levels of Radiation Detected at Fukushima
In many ways, it looks like daily life in Fukushima is slipping back into its familiar routines. In Koriyama, a town south of Fukushima City, a group of taiko drummers set up in front of the train station to perform in an annual summer festival. Girls cruise by on bicycles in their plaid skirts and white socks in the unusually mild …
