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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EcocentricGlobalization
Sometimes, I admit, this green beat can be a little depressing. Shrinking icecaps. Rising seas. Endangered species. Air pollution. Acidifying oceans. Oil spills. Invasive Asian carp. And perhaps worst of all, the United States Senate. It can seem as if life is getting is worse every day—like a Beatles record played …
EcocentricPolitics
[Update 1:10 PM]: Ryan Cunningham of Glover Park Group wrote to me to note that by the numbers, Democrats who voted against cap-and-trade were three times more likely to lose then those who voted for it. That’s a striking number, though most of the anti-cap Democrats who lost were Blue Dogs representing generally conservative …
EcocentricGeoengineering
Although most of the attention on the end of last week’s meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Nagoya focused on the modest agreement made to reduce biodiversity loss, that wasn’t the only outcome of the two week-long summit. Member nations at Nagoya also agreed on a possible moratorium on research into the …
EcocentricEcocentric
The world’s politicians have, so far, done a perfectly crap job of dealing with climate change. The bold promises of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, which led to the creation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), have yet to be fulfilled. Kyoto Protocol or no Kyoto Protocol, global carbon …
