water
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New York City could open up 1,200 acres of rooftops for farming
Given how valuable space is in New York City, the city's rooftops are strangely empty. But a proposal from the city's planning department could change that by making 1,200 acres of commercial rooftops available for urban farmers to open greenhouses across the city.
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Climate change danger: Arsenic in the water supply
Droughts, climate change, and resource-intensive dairy farming have joined forces to make Mexico’s Laguna Region, once well-stocked with ponds, into a semi-arid semi-wasteland. Oh, and the drinking water is full of arsenic and it’s giving everyone cancer. Is this the most cheerful post we’ve ever written? Maybe!
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Critical List: Vermont can’t shutter nuke plant; microbes turn seaweed into biofuel
The EPA will test water in Dimock, PA, and is delivering drinking water to four homes there. Silly Vermont. You wanted to shut down a nuclear plant? Only the federal government can regulate nuclear power! For biofuels, seaweed could be the new corn.
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Biggest output of U.S. oil and gas industry is dirty water
The bad news: “Every day, U.S. oil and gas producers bring to the surface 60 million barrels of waste water, with a salt content up to 20 times higher than sea water and laced with hazardous chemicals,” reports John Kemp of Reuters. In an aging well, as much as 98 percent of the stuff that […]
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Water cyclists: An epic ride to raise awareness of a scarce resource
A year and a half ago, two Dutchmen set out by bike to spread the word about the global water crisis. Fourteen thousand miles later, they say the real work still lies ahead -- but first, they'd like to kick it with beers and a couple of nice girls.
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Critical List: Toxic chemicals on the rise; baby seals in trouble
The EPA may retest water in Dimock, Pa., where residents have linked polluted water to fracking operations. In its first round of testing the town's water, the EPA declared it safe.
GM is fixing up the Volt in order to avoid in real-life battery fires like the ones that started during testing.
As winter sea ice disappears in the Arctic, fewer baby harp seals are making it.
The amount of toxic chemicals shunted into the environment went up 16 percent between 2009 and 2010, according a new EPA report.
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What the Times’ organic tomato story missed: Golf courses
Farming organic winter tomatoes in Mexico definitely has its problems, but Del Cabo's Larry Jacobs says water isn't one of them.
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Organic food is not always sustainable food
Good food, as we've come to know it in that last few years, has a few characteristics: It's local. It's grown using responsible, land-loving techniques, like crop rotations and polycultures. And it's organic, raised without chemical fertilizers and poison pesticides. At one point, “organic” was shorthand for all of that, because the same people who cared enough to grow their vegetables with manure cared about environmental sustainability and tended to be local.
But now “organic” can be shorthand only for adherence to a certain set of rules that outlaw certain concentrations of certain types of fertilizers and pesticides, and as the New York Times points out, it sometimes doesn't mean much else. -
Can the 2012 Farm Bill protect the Ogallala Aquifer?
Kansas wheat.Photo: Brian McGuirkMy father farmed in Kansas and envied those lucky farmers in the wetter states to the east of us, who could grow 200-bushel corn and other lucrative crops like soy beans and sugar beets. He had to satisfy himself with wheat, a drought-tolerant crop first brought to the States from a place […]