wetlands

White House announces Gulf restoration task force amid criticism of Army Corps

In response to criticism that the Army Corps of Engineers has failed to take needed action, President Obama is creating a federal task force to overhaul management of coastal restoration efforts in Louisiana and Mississippi. White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Nancy Sutley made the announcement this week in an interview with Bloomberg News. […]

Army Corps urged to honor Obama’s priority of restoring New Orleans area wetlands

Louisiana’s threatened wetlands provide a critical barrier to hurricanes and flooding.With the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaching, a coalition of 17 advocacy groups called on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to promptly honor President Obama’s pledge “to restore nature’s barriers — the wetlands, marshes and barrier islands that can take the first blows and […]

Learning from past civilizations

To understand our current environmental dilemma, it helps to look at earlier civilizations that also got into environmental trouble. Our early 21st century civilization is not the first to face the prospect of environmentally induced economic decline. The question is how we will respond. As Jared Diamond points out in his book Collapse, some of […]

Looking at climate change from a regional perspective

"Climate change poses a tremendous threat to the Puget Sound and Georgia Basin area."

Clear. Concise. Depressing. The quote comes from Patty Glick, senior global warming specialist at the National Wildlife Federation, but it was echoed in the words of all the speakers at the three climate-change panels held Wednesday at the Puget Sound Georgia Basin Ecosystem Conference in Seattle.

Scientists of varying disciplines from all over the region shared their research and forecasts for the future. But one big question for the day arose: How do we take all of this climate change science -- which is primarily based on predictions that are global in scale -- and translate that into local management decisions?

Competing offer for U.S. Sugar complicates Everglades restoration plan

Florida’s intent buy out a giant sugar operation in a move to restore the Everglades is being complicated by a competing offer from the Lawrence Group, a Tennessee farming company. sources:

Everglades restoration going slowly, poorly, federal report says

The roughly $10 billion restoration of the Everglades is “making scant progress toward achieving its goals” due to built-in bureaucracy, funding troubles, and more, according to a report from the National Research Council. The report paints a bleak picture of federal and state rescue efforts, which together comprise the largest ecosystem restoration project in history. […]

Everglades restoration deal could still benefit Big Sugar

When Florida Gov. Charlie Crist announced in June that the state would buy 187,000 acres of land from U.S. Sugar Corp. to “jump start” an Everglades restoration effort, environmentalists cheered visions of flowing, fresh water and pristine, untouched habitat. But that may not turn out to be exactly the case. Crist initially said he would […]

How did so much water get into a New Orleans canal?

Here’s a question I’d like to know the answer to. Hurricane Gustav dealt New Orleans a glancing blow, passing it by to the west. Yet as the world saw, the city’s Industrial Canal — a large ship channel running north-south close to neighborhoods — filled nearly to the top, and there was some alarming, if […]

EPA puts kibosh on wetland-destructive Army Corps project

The U.S. EPA has vetoed a giant, expensive plan to build the world’s largest water pump in the Mississippi River delta. The so-called Yazoo Pump flood-control project would have sucked 6 million gallons of water a minute from 67,000 acres of wetlands along the Yazoo River. The scheme, proposed by the U.S. Army Corps of […]