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NASA has bold plans to … send rodents into orbit

A while back I blogged on the folly of NASA's Moon-Mars program, and how it's killing real science the agency could be doing. Yesterday I received an email from NASA alerting me to a new funding opportunity:

Part of “Healthy Forests” law struck down by court for skirting eco-reviews

A key part of the Bush administration’s “Healthy Forests” law, passed in 2003, was effectively struck down this week by a federal appeals court. The “hazardous fuels reduction” rule let the U.S. Forest Service get out of analyzing the environmental impacts of timber sales up to 1,000 acres in size and prescribed burns up to […]

Bycatch is the ugliest thing you never see in the fish market

Commercial fishing creates a mind-boggling amount of waste, at least 7.3 million tons (PDF) annually of discarded fish ("bycatch") which are either unwanted, illegal to keep, or mangled in the gear. And this number from 2004 is a conservative estimate, not fully accounting for several major fishing countries.

Marine photographer Brian Skerry has some very intense imagery that illustrates this phenomenon, and he's provided a couple here for your interest (more are at his site: look under portfolios for global fisheries). The first one shows discarded fish raining into the depths from a small vessel: the second, below the fold, shows three shrimp caught in an hour of towing a net in tropical waters: what's under the shrimp is the incredible pile of unwanted critters which died for that meager handful.

Bush admin ignored best science when considering sage grouse species protections

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service must reconsider its decision not to list the greater sage grouse under the Endangered Species Act, a federal judge ruled this week. The judge said that the FWS ignored the best available science on the species when deciding whether to list it in 2005; he also expressed doubts about […]

Australia ratifies Kyoto Protocol, over a quarter of U.S. bird species imperiled, and more

Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: No Continent Is an Island A Beak Outlook Angrier By the Dozen It’s Really A Musing Good Car-ma

Remember how we urgently need to bomb Iran to destroy their active nuclear weapons program?

Turns out not so much.

Water, water, everywhere

Good lord, it’s a deluge! I wish we could export some of this water down to the Southeast.

The economy is an ecosystem

It is increasingly argued by people who used to be climate change deniers that preventing global warming will be too expensive to contemplate; even the Stern report, which was put together by a sympathetic economist, estimates that the world economy would have to decrease annual growth by about 5 percent. On the other hand, reports are emerging that argue that green jobs will reinvigorate the economy, creating an entirely new green-collar job sector.

I want to argue something much stronger -- that by building green industries, such as wind, solar, geothermal, public transit, zero-emission buildings, and others, we will not only provide millions of jobs, we will be able to rebuild our manufacturing and machinery industries and thereby expand the middle class and the long-term source of our wealth. I will argue such an expansion can be environmentally sustainable.

In order to understand why this is so, we have to understand how the economy works, looked at from a production-centered point of view. Think of the economy as a kind of ecosystem -- a system that is full of various niches and levels, as a natural ecosystem is.

Help us get our Umbra back

So I’m getting ready to make my Christmas wreath and I’m wondering whether there’s someplace I can get organic pine cones and I go to check it out with my No. 1 eco-tipper Umbra and OMFG SHE’S BEEN KIDNAPPED! That’s right, they’ve absconded with Umbra. Yes … they. Word has it they’re making her eat […]

Holy December, Batman!

It’s snowing!