EcocentricHealth
Remember the hole in the ozone? (TIME magazine does.) Thanks largely to the unchecked use of chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and halons in the postwar era, the ozone layer thinned dramatically—especially over the Arctic and Antarctic poles. That was bad news for life on Earth because the ozone layer blocks harmful blocks UV-B …
EcocentricUncategorized
In the safe, sanitized world of nuclear industry brochures, this was surely not supposed to happen: As it struggles to keep four reactors from melting down and thousands of spent fuel assemblies from blowing up, Tepco announced today that it has been forced to dump 11,000 tons of low-level radioactive water into the Pacific …
EcocentricUncategorized
I’m on my way to Orange County, California, for the 2011 Fortune Brainstorm Green conference. I’ll be moderating panels on the scalability of green energy, and the fate of green capital. One my panelists for the later meeting will be Mindy Lubber, the president of Ceres, a national network of investors, environmental organizations and …
EcocentricUncategorized
For a few hours this weekend, you could almost cut the outrage with a knife, as reports leaked out that BP, whose Macondo oil well spewed nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico last year, was looking for permission to resume drilling at 10 undersea locations in the Gulf (a complete ban on drilling was eased last …
EcocentricWildlife
GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons ignited an Internet firestorm when he uploaded a video of himself hunting and killing an elephant in Zimbabwe. What video? That would be this one:
[vodpod id=Video.5877956&w=425&h=350&fv=]
So is Parsons sorry for the elephant hunt—or at the very least, sorry that he put it up on the Internet? Absolutely …
EcocentricUncategorized
Sawdust. It’s not the first thing most people would choose to put between themselves and highly contaminated radioactive water. But a mixture of sawdust — ogakuzu in Japanese — with chemicals and shredded newspaper is precisely what nuclear safety authorities and power plant officials turned to in trying to plug a 8-inch crack …
EcocentricOceans
Few American consumers would mourn the loss of the anchovy. If it weren’t for pizza or Caesar salads, there might be no use for the little salty fish at all. But few people want to see the ocean’s anchovy stocks wiped out by radiation either. That’s just the scenario that seemed to be developing, however, when reports coming out of Japan …
EcocentricPolitics
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson—who has emerged as the Republicans’ favorite target as the party looks to dismantle environmental protections—sat down with us for a 10 Questions in this week’s issue. That interview was condensed to fit one page—click below for the full transcript:
EcocentricWildlife
It can be hard to feel much sympathy for bats. Like snakes or spiders or sharks or bunnies (OK, maybe the last one is just me), there’s something primordially alarming about bats, something that activates the lizard part of the brain and shutters empathy. Bats aren’t actually “flying rodents,” but you likely won’t see them on the …
EcocentricUncategorized
Finally, some good news for environmentalists. China has become the second most dominant publisher of scientific research in the world and within a few years will overtake the U.S., according to a new report.
The People’s Republic published 163,000 of the world’s 1.5 million research papers in major peer-reviewed journals in 2008, …
