EcocentricWildlife
Call it the Aflockalypse, the Aquapalypse or some other clever term that will soon be trending on Twitter. What’s clear is that something odd seems to going on with the birds in the sky and the fish in the waters. First on New Year’s Day, the residents of Beebe, Arkansas awoke to find thousands of dead birds scattered over rooftops …
EcocentricPolitics
At noon today, Republican John Boehner will be sworn in as the 61st Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the GOP will take over partial control of the government. (Apparently the outgoing Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, actually hands over the gavel to the new leader, a ceremony that certainly has more gravitas than the Internet …
EcocentricUncategorized
A quick update on the shark front: In one of the first acts coming back from his Hawaiian vacay, President Obama signed the Shark Conservation Act of 2010 into law on Tuesday.
The bill, which I wrote about here a couple weeks back after it passed the Senate, will tighten the ban on shark finning — the practice of catching sharks, …
EcocentricWaste
So you’re one of the lucky ones who received an iPhone 4 (or iPad, or Kindle, or Android) for the holidays. After you get over your initial excitement and manage to set up your new digital plaything (here’s a tip—buy a protective case), you still have one more task before you: get rid of your old electronics, which suddenly look so …
EcocentricEcocentric
So far 2011 has not treated Australia well. Vast areas of the county’s northeastern Queensland state have been hit by some of the worst flooding on record. Tremendous rains—thanks in part to an unusually strong La Nina weather pattern—fell in late December, triggering floods that have affected half the state’s 715,000 sq. mi. …
EcocentricWildlife
Scientists call it the Beepocalyspe. (OK, not scientists, but I like to call it that.) In late 2006, whole hives of honey bees began dying overnight for reasons that are still unclear. Scientists called it colony-collapse disorder (CCD), and it’s as scary as it is mysterious. Adult bees simply leave the hive, ostensibly in search of …
On the last day of 2010, a miniature panda cow was born on a Colorado farm, the product of years of crossbreeding to create one of 24 known cows with panda-like coloring. TIME takes a look at other animals in miniature form
EcocentricHealth
iPhone users around the world experienced a rude awakening on New Year’s Day. Or rather, they didn’t—because of a glitch in the iPhone’s calendar software, alarms set over the weekend failed to go off, causing tens of thousands of people around the world to be late, at least according to the tweets. It’s unclear just how widespread …
EcocentricRegulation
Over on the Time.com homepage, I have a piece on the coming war over the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from industrial and power sources—the first of which began on January 2. Regulation will be the story for climate politics in the U.S. this year—check out the piece here.
EcocentricUncategorized
Some time late in 2011—at least according to the people-crunchers at the U.N. Population Reference Bureau—humanity will reach a new demographic milestone with the birth of the 7th billion living person. (As a measure of just how fast global population is growing, the 6th billionth living person—Bosnian Adnan Nevic—is only 11.) …
