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Record amount of sewage dumped into China’s Yangtze River

Last year, China’s state media deemed the Yangtze River “cancerous” with pollution; to stick with the analogy, it appears the cancer has spread, as a record amount of sewage was dumped into the river in 2006. That’s 30.5 beeeeeellion tons of (mostly untreated) industrial and human waste, an increase of 3.1 percent over the year […]

Britain quickly running out of landfill space, says study

The British, who apparently have a penchant for tossing rubbish willy-nilly, may run out of landfill space in a mere nine years, says a new report. Says Paul Bettison of the Local Government Association, which conducted the research, “Britain is the dustbin of Europe, with more rubbish being thrown into landfill than any other country […]

Thousands of gallons of oil spill in San Francisco Bay and Black Sea, and more

Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: Gnarly Sheen It Takes a Spillage to Raze the Wild The Suit of Damocles The Yay of the Land Barreling Ahead Capitol and Trade Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: It’s the Agronomy, Stupid Kitty Twister Smolder and Wiser

Six of world’s eight bear species under threat of extinction

Pop quiz: Can you name the world’s eight bear species? (Answer: American black, Asiatic black, brown, polar, panda, sun, sloth, and Andean. Gummy and Care are not acceptable answers.) Six of those eight are under threat of extinction, as the sun bear today joined four of its bear-ethren in the “vulnerable” classification on the World […]

Tanker spills over 500,000 gallons of fuel oil in Black Sea

On Sunday, a storm in the Black Sea sank five ships and ran others aground, including an oil tanker that split in half, spilling about 550,000 gallons of fuel oil — roughly half its cargo. Two other ships carrying fuel oil were among those that hit shore, but they apparently didn’t spill anything. At least […]

Electric motorcycle delivers man to side of van

"I'm the owner, not the driver, so this is going to be interesting to say the least."

Indeed:

Revisiting Into the Wild

When the news broke 15 years ago about an idealistic young man who starved to death in the Alaskan wilderness, I reacted badly.

Plenty of folks, myself included, go alone into the wild and emerge unscathed; in fact, restored to Muirean health and sanity. The national fascination with Chris McCandless' sad end seemed morbid to me -- a morality tale told by the comfortable to justify their easy, unexamined lives.

I still think a sick fascination is part of what made Jon Krakauer's book Into the Wild a bestseller. But I confess I have read only the excerpt from it published over a decade ago in Outside magazine, which may not do the book justice. It was somewhat misleadingly subtitled "How Christopher McCandless Lost His Way in the Wilds," and mostly focused on the mistakes he made, his tragic death.

Many people who heard of this story didn't want to take time to follow a reckless youth. I was one of them. But then I saw the movie, and I saw the young actor playing Chris McCandless make him become the man he wanted to be -- "Alexander Supertramp."

He had an extraordinary life; giving away his inheritance, burning his cash, walking off into the desert. He wanted meaning, more than anything. You could question his sanity, but not his sincerity. And nearly everyone he met fell in love with him, one way or another.

Six tons of fish soup in Russia, 500 tons of pee in the Pacific

Investigators found that fisherman caught twice their legal quota of bluefin tuna in European waters this year, despite an early closure to the season due to the stocks' precipitous decline ...

... a trout farm in Nova Scotia was torn apart by Tropical Storm Noel, freeing an estimated 500,000 fish and causing $1 million in damages ...

... endangered humpback and fin whales swam hundreds of miles north of their usual habitats in search of colder waters. "All signs point to global warming," said an advocate ...

... Korean scientists successfully transported a live flatfish out of water for a 20-hour transatlantic flight to Los Angeles. The fish went into an induced hibernation inside a plastic bag ...

... an Australian company was planning to use 500 tons of industrial urea in a bid to promote plankton growth in the Pacific. The company preferred the term "nutrient injection" to "dumping" ...

Friday music blogging: The Go! Team

2005’s debut album from The Go! Team — Thunder, Lighting, Strike — was a revelation. It sounded like nothing else on the planet. Reviewers fumbled for descriptions: late-’70s-cop-show-theme-song funk meets late-’80s girl rap meets sample-heavy electronica meets low-fi DIY garage production. Imagine walking down an urban street, with different music jamming out of different windows, […]

New study finds that pollution from ships kills 60,000 a year

It's surprising how much pollution ships emit: over 2,000 tons of diesel soot a year in southern California, for example, about 10 percent of the total in the region.

Worse, a new study by researchers at the University of Delaware and Rochester Institute of Technology finds that the burning of cheap, dirty, sulfurous "residual oil" on ships kills an estimated 60,000 people around the world. "Premature mortality" is the phrase used in the study.

Annual average contribution of shipping to (particulate matter) PM<sub>2.5</sub&gt concentrations for Case 2b (in µg/m³). Copyright © 2007 American Chemical Society

(h/t: The Blue Marble)