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Unable Was I, Ere I Saw Elbe

As if being battered by severe storms wasn’t enough, Central and Eastern Europe now face another threat: pollution unleashed by heavy flooding. In addition to concerns about contamination and disease from animal carcasses swept along by the floods, fears are now growing that toxic chemicals could be seeping from an inundated Czech chemical plant and […]

Laughy Tafty

The U.S. EPA has warned Ohio that it could soon be stripped of federal highway funds for failing to enforce national clean air standards. The move would be a major blow to the state, which receives more than $900 million in federal road funds every year. The EPA could also stiffen the pollution levels allowed […]

Nature Not Nurturing?

The Nature Conservancy, one of the world’s wealthiest environmental organizations, is drawing fire from other enviros for venturing into particularly unlikely territory: oil refining. In 1995, Mobil Oil gave the Conservancy a 2,263-acre Texas oil field that is one of the world’s last-known breeding grounds for the highly endangered Attwater’s prairie chicken. Rather than shutting […]

There Are Other Fish in the Sea

Sh*tting By the Dock of the Bay

Ten years ago, delegates attending the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro wrinkled their noses upon encountering the putrid smells emanating from the heavily polluted Guanabara Bay. The summit cast a spotlight on the plight of Rio’s bay and led to the creation of an internationally funded cleanup project. Now, with the follow-up Earth […]

Sun Worshippers

Clean energy is next to godliness — or at least that’s the position of the soon-to-open Cathedral of our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles, which has installed a $600,000 solar array that will meet 10 to 15 percent of the cathedral’s energy needs. The solar array is one of the largest to be […]

A Drinking Problem

Preventable water-related illnesses could kill as many as 76 million people by the year 2020 unless nations take action to improve their water-delivery systems, according to a report by a California environmental research institute. Most of the affected people would likely be children in developing countries, who are highly susceptible to such water-borne diseases as […]

Walk Softly and Carry a Big Computer Model

Unless you live there, you probably haven’t been following the brouhaha in North Dakota. So here’s the skinny: The U.S. EPA insists that the state is in violation of air quality standards because of the high concentration of sulfur dioxide in the air at the otherwise-pristine Theodore Roosevelt National Park and a national wildlife refuge. […]

You’ve Got Male

Saving endangered species is usually a matter of preserving habitat, fending off threats, and hoping for the best. Now, though, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine have found a way to incubate sperm from other animals inside laboratory mice, a process they hope could aid species whose survival is threatened by […]

Jungle Fever

Vines are the hallmark of any self-respecting jungle — picture Tarzan swinging in from offstage — but the situation is getting a bit out of control in the Amazon rainforest, where vines are growing so quickly they are choking trees and possibly interfering with the ability of forests to soak up greenhouse gases, according to […]