A portfolio of creature portraits by photographer Finlay MacKay
EcocentricFood
Cloned Food Feeds Controversy in Britain
A furor erupted in Britain this week after The New York Times reported that an unnamed British dairy farmer had sold milk from a cow produced from a cloned parent. Britain’s food watchdog, The Food Standards Agency, launched an immediate investigation and announced yesterday that it had found that, in fact, meat from the offspring of a …
EcocentricOil
Oil Spill: Static Kill on the Well—and Just Static in the Senate
The “static kill” is so called because that’s what BP aims to create—a static situation within its blown well, one where the drilling mud the company is currently pumping into the well offsets the pressure in the reservoir itself. If BP’s Houston-based drilling engineers want some advice on how to create a static situation, however, …
EcocentricOil
Oil Spill: Tracking BP’s Problematic Claims Process
After the oil spill, BP promised to make the Gulf right—and a big part of that was going to be its claims process. Gulf residents affected by the spill—like fisherman who could no longer fish, or seafood restaurant owners whose business had cratered— could visit one of BP’s 25 claims centers sprinkled throughout the Gulf coast …
EcocentricOil
Oil Spill: The Psychological Toll
We’ll be debating the long-term environmental impact of the BP oil spill for years, if not decades. But we can know one thing for sure right now: the spill is exacting psychological harm on the people of the Gulf coast.
That’s the conclusion of the first major survey of Gulf coast residents conducted since the well was capped on July …
EcocentricOil
Oil Spill: The 4.9 Million Barrel Toll
From the very beginning of the BP oil spill—when reporters were told that there probably was no oil spill at all—the people in charge have consistently underestimated the size of the spill. After that initial mistake, BP told us that oil was flowing at about 1,000 barrels a day from the blown well. (Each barrel contains about 42 …
EcocentricOil
Oil Spill: What’s Going On Under the Gulf?
With the coastal cleanup apparently downshifting and BP in the final stages of preparing for a static kill operation to help close the well, we may all soon need something new to obsess/post about. But the battle on the spill is actually just shifting fronts—from the Gulf coast and wetlands that have been the focus of coverage and …
EcocentricEndangered Species
Getting to Know What’s in Your Ocean
Every so often we get a glimpse — a transluscent body with a glowing orb hanging off its forehead, or this dragonfish, with teeth on its tongue and jaws that look like they could take your arm off. These missives from our oceans’ depths are as captivating as they are few and far between – the fruit of long, expensive forays to
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EcocentricUncategorized
How Will Drought Affect the Amazonian Rainforest?
The Amazonian rainforest isthe planet’s respiratory system–the more than 1 billion acres of trees help regulate the climate and produce more than 20% of the Earth’s oxygen. And that’s why one of the biggest fears surrounding climate change is the possibility of what’s known as Amazon dieback–the risk that higher temperatures and …