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Rehabilitated turtle returned to ocean home

On Wednesday, more than 150 admiring beachgoers said goodbye to "Little Crush" as it was returned to its salty underwater home. This rehabilitated green sea turtle washed ashore five months earlier, underweight and ill from ingesting more than 70 man-made items discarded in the oceans. After being treated by a team of Walt Disney World animal-care specialists, it regained its health and was released into the ocean.

Little Crush (so named for his resemblance to Disney's turtle character in Finding Nemo) was also equipped with a satellite transmitter enabling researchers to keep tabs on its ocean voyages. According to 11-year-old Alex Custer, the ceremony was "awesome."

Little did Alex and those other 150 beachgoers know that Little Crush is not heading into a ocean of possibilities; he's heading into a sea of danger. He'll have to run a gauntlet of commercial fishing gear and may -- if he's like many other sea turtles -- end up hooked on a longline or captured in a net.

Alex and the beachgoers also likely don't realize that our government ignores its own laws and officially sanctions and allows the catching (and killing) of thousands of endangered and threatened sea turtles by commercial fishing operations every year. Not quite the Disney ending we'd (all) hope for.

In Clemente Conditions

Radioactive, cancer-causing tritium leaks into California groundwater Tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that can cause cancer, miscarriages, and birth defects, has leaked from a nuclear power plant near San Clemente, Calif. Groundwater tested at up to 330,000 picocuries of tritium per liter; we don’t know what a picocurie is, but California’s public-health goal for […]

Smoky Chokey

National parks aren’t breathing easy From California to Maine to Alaska — sea to shining sea, as it were — almost a third of America’s national parks suffer poor air-quality conditions, says a new study by the National Parks Conservation Association. Sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and mercury threaten wildlife, plants, visitors, and staff, and can […]

Still have glimmers of childlike wonder and hope?

Well, time to give 'em up. Dolphins are stupid.

(Thanks to reader ET -- or should I say, "thanks.")

Werbach and Wal-Mart

Lest I let a single article about Wal-Mart pass by without notice: check out the San Francisco Bay Guardian's long look at Wal-Mart's greening and the company's hiring of Adam Werbach.

(And lest I let you forget that I wrote an op-ed on the subject: here's my op-ed on the subject -- and a bloggy follow-up.)

Listen to Werbach:

Water scarcity will cause lots of scary things to happen.

In anticipation of World Water Week next week, news on aqueous gloom and doom abounds. This is, um, not comforting:

Cholera may return to London, the mass migration of Africans could cause civil unrest in Europe and China's economy could crash by 2015 as the supply of fresh water becomes critical to the global economy.

That's nearly as frightening as Snakes on a Plane (all the hype surrounding it, not the movie itself).

But seriously. By 2015? That's damn soon.

Analysts from 200 of the world's largest companies, brought together by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, made the grim forecast, also predicting (hoping?) that water scarcity will spur better management and water-saving technologies. As a third of the world's population already lives where water is overused or inaccessible, future conflicts over water are virtually inevitable.

The analysts, who took three years to study future water availability, came up with three potential future scenarios:

Restaurants substitute cheap fish to unknowing diners

Yesterday, NPR ran a great seafood story. It seems that restaurant-goers in Florida are ordering one fish and being served another. The St. Petersburg Times surveyed 11 restaurants that boasted grouper on their menus; DNA tests revealed that nearly half were serving cheaper substitutes. Who needs cleverly deceptive sales techniques -- like bait and switch -- when you can just use an oldie but goodie: lying?

Peter Schweitzer, Al Gore, and hypocrisy

About a week ago, USA Today published a piece by Peter Schweitzer, who's a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. It accused Al Gore of hypocrisy, for asking viewers of An Inconvenient Truth to scale back their lifestyles and carbon emissions while ... well, there were a number of charges. According to Schweitzer, Gore owns three homes and stock in Occidental Petroleum, still receives royalties from a zinc mine on his property, does not participate in the green-power option his utility offers in Nashville, and lets Paramount pay for his carbon offsets.

As per standard practice, the conservative media machine spread the charges far and wide -- most recently they popped up on Glenn Beck's show on CNN and, bizarrely, in a recurring poll on AOL's homepage.

A little more from ASEC’s founder

If Frank Scura is convinced he can turn around a sector that is the very epitome of heedless consumption, it's because he's been there himself. "My whole life was based on sex and debauchery," he says of his days on the nascent action-sports circuit in the 1980s. But one day, as he tells Gregory Dicum here, everything changed.

I had pretty much gorged myself on the fruits of Babylon and found myself empty. But when I went to Portland, I found sustenance. I found people who played music for music, who grew gardens, who were in touch with the Earth.

Then my grandmother died in eastern Oregon. None of us had ever even gone there, but I was going to go and be Grizzly Adams. I invited people to come start a commune with me, but nobody went. So I went anyway.

The Few, the Proud, the Marine Reserves

California will create nation’s most ambitious marine-protection program California wildlife officials voted this week to create 15 distinct marine reserves from Half Moon Bay to Santa Barbara, making about 110 square miles of ocean off-limits to most human activity and giving another 94 square miles or so protection of varying degrees. Backers hope the plan […]