Amazon
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Amazon starts up site for green products, does not claim it will solve the world’s problems
When we're going to buy stuff, we want it to be as planet- and human-friendly as possible. But we don't want to be told to pat ourselves on the back just because we bought something made from bamboo.
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The Amazon rainforest’s clouds may come from mushrooms
I have not ever visited the Amazon, but in my imagination, it is populated by some serious, colorful, amazing fungi, all of which will either kill you or get you extremely high. But a new paper in Science found that the rainforest’s mushroom could have another vital purpose: producing a motherlode of potassium that helps […]
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This is what four decades of Amazon deforestation looks like. (Spoiler: It’s bad)
NASA satellites might capture some amazing images of the Earth's surface, but they capture some incredibly depressing shots, too.
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Critical List: Americans link climate change to hot weather; yet another Keystone XL bill
The majority of Americans are convinced that climate change had something to do with the warm winter and last year’s super hot summer. Good news: They believe climate change has consequences. Bad news: When it gets cold, they’ll be convinced we fixed it. House Republicans are going to vote today on yet another bill that […]
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Activists get Amazon to stop selling whale meat
Weird things available on Amazon.com in the U.S. include wolf urine, fresh rabbit, canned unicorn, deer butt, and (fake) horse heads. But until yesterday, the company’s Japanese subsidiary was selling something a lot more grisly: whale bacon, whale stew, whale jerky, and canned whale meat. Now, only a day after the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) put […]
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Newly discovered fungus eats plastic
A group of Yale students, poking around in the jungles of Ecuador, has unearthed a type of fungus that digests otherwise-unkillable plastics.
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Critical List: Finding a town to host nuclear waste; 3-D Amazon map
Now that the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage plan has been scrapped, a nuclear commission needs to find a town that wants to host the repository. Transocean isn’t legally responsible for some of the pollution from the Deepwater Horizon spill. Scientists mapped the Amazon in 3-D. The plan for protecting New Orleans from hurricanes requires […]
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The five big forest trends of 2012
In the past year, examples abounded of forests being protected or restored on a grand scale. But those successes put the colossal failures and the corrupting forces behind them in stark relief: For too many forests, some combination of rapacious corporate greed, rising global population and consumption (particularly in Asia), local corruption, ignorant or careless […]
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Amazon deforestation decreasing … but not for long
Despite reports of localized deforestation and violence against rainforest activists, a study on deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon found that the number of square kilometers disappearing each year has hit a record low. But politics has a way of screwing up progress like this, and Brazilian politicians are voting today to weaken the forest code […]