EcocentricOil
For all the attention over undersea oil plumes and seafood toxicity and depressed Gulf residents, it’s easy to forget that this well technically still hasn’t been killed. And now it looks like the final end of BP’s cursed Macondo well won’t be happening any time soon.
After days of struggling over how to deal with concrete that had …
EcocentricOil
Twice over the past month and a half I’ve sat with groups in Louisiana and Florida while Kenneth Feinberg—the booming Boston lawyer who is running the multi-billion dollar oil spill compensation fund—made his pitch. The audiences couldn’t have been more different—worried and wary fisherman in the tiny Louisiana village of Port …
EcocentricOceans
The Associated Press has a nifty exclusive: an interview with the mayor of the Japanese town of Taiji. If that name rings a bell, it’s probably because you’ve seen The Cove, the Oscar-winning documentary that details the dolphin slaughter carried out by the residents of the village. Though The Cove makes it seem as if the dolphin hunt is …
EcocentricOil
There seem to be two rules to being a passenger on a Greenpeace ship. One: if you take a beer from the refrigerator, always remember to log it on the drinks sheet. (And pay your bar bill before you leave the boat—otherwise, I believe they make you walk the plank.) Two: there is no such thing as a passenger on a Greenpeace ship. …
EcocentricOil
We’ve learned so many wonderful new terms during the more than four-month old BP oil spill: top kill, static kill, bottom kill, Corexit, junk shot. It’s time to add one more: Oceanospirillales. That’s that name of an order of proteobacteria that are currently chowing down on the plumes of underwater oil created by the spill—and …
EcocentricInvasive Species
The dreaded Asian carp are back in the news today. The five Great Lakes states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Ohio—suing to beef up anti-carp defenses scored a legal victory yesterday:
On Monday, a federal judge held an initial hearing and scheduled more hearings for expert testimony in early September. The
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EcocentricEnergy
Bill Gates—through his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—revolutionized the health world by focusing vast amounts of money on diseases of the developing world that hadn’t responded to traditional philanthropy. (That’s why TIME put Gates, his wife Melinda and U2 frontman Bono on the cover as People of the Year in 2005.) Lately, …
EcocentricUncategorized
Update [11:11 PM EDT]: It’s worth taking a look at some of the recommendations made by the IAC report:
The IAC report makes several recommendations to fortify IPCC’s management structure, including establishing an executive committee to act on the Panel’s behalf and ensure that an ongoing decision-making capability is maintained. To
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EcocentricUncategorized
I’m on the road again—or in this case, the high seas. I’ll be spending this week in and around the Atlantic island of Bermuda with Her Deepness, Sylvia Earle—the famed American oceanographer I can best describe as America’s Jacques Cousteau. As I’ve written before, the 75-year-old Earle—who has spent her career exploring the …
EcocentricOceans
Over on the Time.com mainpage, I have a piece on the worrying bleaching events ocurring to coral reefs around the world, thanks largely to warming ocean temperatures. Though the sudden bleachings we’re seeing in places like Indonesia immediately have to do with unusually warm water temperatures caused in part by this year’s El Nino, …
