EcocentricOceans
Full disclosure: I don’t ‘cruise.’ The idea of boarding a moveable city and being forced to share every meal for a week with friendly strangers does not sound like fun to me. Add ship morgues, and the fact that U.S. ships are now required to have sexual assault forensic specialists on board, and I think we’re dealing with …
EcocentricEndangered Species
Later this month, heads of state and diplomats from 11 countries will meet in St. Petersburg, Russia for a “tiger summit” to discuss how to stop tigers from going extinct.
It’s the first time heads of state have gathered for a meeting about a single species. But to many conservationists, the meeting shouldn’t have been needed at all.
EcocentricTechnology
Another blueprint for the Green Green Revolution was announced today at the 3rd International Rice Congress, and this time it’s all about — you guessed it — rice. Well, according to rice types anyway (the corn guys might have a different theory). But the scientists that unveiled the Global Rice Science Partnership (GRiSP), a …
EcocentricEndangered Species
Getting out of harm’s way isn’t easy when you’re a plant. If the water is rising or a fire is approaching, anything that can run, fly or slither can at least move to higher ground. But trees and other vegetation are pretty much stuck. That’s at least true with high-speed, real-time dangers like floods, but a slow motion disaster—global …
EcocentricWildlife
All along the northern coast of Sicily there is evidence of organized crime: empty tonnaros, or tuna canneries, that went out of business last century when the massive blue fin tunas they hauled from the Mediterranean for generations finally disappeared. Sicily’s ghostly tonnaros may not have much to do with the Corleones or the
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EcocentricWildlife
Call it the deformed canary in the coalmine. Scientists have found that several species of wild birds in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska are growing deformed beaks at rates never before recorded. The birds, whose beaks are severely elongated, curved or even crossed, have developed what’s called avian keratin disorder, and though the
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EcocentricForests
Mount Merapi continued to take its toll today, as the bodies of four rescue team members were recovered from the slopes of the volcano. In the past two weeks of eruptions taking place in west Java, over 140 have died, and civilians have been forbidden from entering a 20-kilometer zone around the volcano.
The archipelago of Indonesia,
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EcocentricUncategorized
There was a very scary story out of Georgia today after two Armenian men pleaded guilty during a secret trial to smuggling highly enriched uranium into the former Soviet state and trying to sell it to an undercover agent posing as a representative of Islamic radicals.
EcocentricEnergy
In recent years, Germany has led the world in the adoption of solar power. Now the country’s national energy agency is concerned that Germans’ love of sun beams may paradoxically leave them in the dark.
In an interview with Berliner Zeitung on Oct. 17, Stephan Köhler, head of Germany’s energy agency DENA said harnessing the sun’s …
EcocentricPolitics
New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was the belle of the ball this morning at a international climate change conference here in Hong Kong. He was here as the new chair of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, a group of 40 cities worldwide committed to tackling climate change. (Here’s a map of participating cities.)
Bloomberg shared
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