Latest Articles
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Love Birds?
It’s tough to be a po’ouli as Valentine’s Day approaches. Actually, it’s tough to be a po’ouli on any day. Scientists are doing their darnedest to save the extraordinarily rare Hawaiian honeycreeper from extinction — and right now, that means matchmaking. A team of biologists has outfitted the one known male po’ouli with a tiny […]
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Not Sharky’s Day
The cruel practice of shark-finning — in which the fins are sliced off of living sharks to make soup — has found its way into the heavily protected waters of Egypt’s Red Sea. The discovery of illegal shark-fin fishing in the region has alarmed both environmentalist and tourism operators in the region. Underwater tourism in […]
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Chesa-piqued
Saying that chemical contamination in the city’s water supply led to miscarriages and infant deaths, 25 women have sued Chesapeake, Va., and almost 170 more plan to do so. According to a growing number of studies, the chlorine commonly used to purify drinking water can cause birth defects and miscarriages when it mixes with organic […]
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Katie Alvord, author
Katie Alvord is the author of Divorce Your Car! Ending the Love Affair with the Automobile. She lives in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Monday, 11 Feb 2002 UPPER PENINSULA, Mich. It’s Monday morning and I’ve just completed my regular commute: strolling from bedroom to office, a journey of 22 steps, in my slippers. I […]
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Big. Yellow. Different. Worse.
The wheels on the bus go round and round, and the diesel fumes from the bus go far and wide. That’s the bad news from a study released yesterday by the Union of Concerned Scientists analyzing emissions from the nation’s 454,000 school buses. Nine out of 10 of those buses are powered by diesel fuel, […]
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Bitter Sweet
Two years of wrangling and two days of intensive, closed-door negotiations ended in compromise yesterday when the U.S. Forest Service and environmentalists agreed to allow limited logging of burned timber in Montana’s Bitterroot National Forest. Under the terms of the agreement, the USFS will begin logging about 14,770 burned acres; in exchange, it will not […]
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War and Peas
War is hell — and not just for human beings. A team of researchers from the U.N. Environment Programme is headed to Afghanistan to measure the ecological damage of decades of war, drought, famine, and more war. The study, which is part of a relatively new trend of analyzing the effects of human conflict on […]
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Rhode Island Lead
A Superior Court judge in Rhode Island paved the way for a landmark lawsuit earlier this week when he gave state Attorney Gen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D) permission to sue manufacturers of lead-based paint. The paint industry had attempted to derail the trial by calling for every one of an estimated 300,000 owners of lead-painted homes […]
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Kenya Opener
Even though Kenya is a major food exporter, it hasn’t reaped much benefit from the $20 billion-per-year global market in organic foods. Now some farmers and nonprofits in the African nation are trying to change that. Many Kenyans already grow their crops without chemical inputs, but up till now, not a single one has been […]
