By Philip Ross 7 May 2015 (IBT) – Instead of rain, São Paulo has cracked earth and chaos as a devastating drought is making enemies out of neighbors in Brazil’s largest city, the site of a historic water shortage the likes of which hasn’t been seen in decades. Many residents have gone to drastic measures […]
By Jason Dearen11 May 2015 ST. AUGUSTINE, Florida (Associated Press) – America’s oldest city is slowly drowning. St. Augustine’s centuries-old Spanish fortress is feet from the encroaching Atlantic, whose waters already flood the city’s narrow streets about 10 times a year — a problem worsening as sea levels rise. The city relies on tourism, but […]
By Carol Glatz29 April 2015 (Catholic Herald) – Dealing with climate change will take more than just global policies and agreements, it will also take a unified stance from the world’s religions, the secretary-general of the United Nations (UN) said at the Vatican. To have development without destruction and “to transform our economies, however, we […]
By Lynne Rossetto Kasper9 May 2015 (Splendid Table) – Three years ago, I interviewed Eric Prince, a research fisheries biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Southeast Fisheries Science Center. He and his colleagues had found that a huge dead zone, an area of the ocean with very little oxygen, had developed in the […]
By John R. Platt 7 May 2015 (Takepart) – For the first time, plastic particles have been found in the stomachs of tuna and other fish that are a staple of the human diet. More than 18 percent of sampled bluefin, albacore, and swordfish caught in the Mediterranean Sea and tested in 2012 and 2013 […]
By Richard Nemec 8 May 2015 (NGI) – A trio of environmental groups in California on Thursday filed a complaint in state Superior Court seeking to have declared illegal new state interim rules governing oil/gas operators’ use of wastewater injection wells (see Daily GPI, April 24). The lawsuit by Earthjustice on behalf of the Center […]
São Paulo, 5 May 2015 (AFP) – Cases of dengue have soared in Brazil where the disease has caused 229 fatalities this year, the health ministry has said, as authorities try to combat its spread using transgenic mosquitos. The health ministry said it had logged 745,900 cases nationwide in the first 15 weeks of the […]
By Elahe Izadi9 May 2015 (Washington Post) – Drive hunting – when groups of hunters on canoes fan out far off-shore and clap stones together as they round up dolphins – has been taking place off the Solomon Islands for many years. Now, researchers who examined detailed hunting records and interviewed locals say more than […]
By Holly Moeller 22 Aprl 2015 (Stanford Daily) – Last week, a 20-million-dollar industry hit the brakes when the Pacific Fishery Management Council voted to close the West Coast sardine fishery, effective immediately. It’s unusual for a fishery to be shuttered so abruptly (the current season would normally have run another two months until the […]
By Thomas Erdbrink5 May 2015 TEHRAN (The New York Times) – Every day, when I walk to our supermarket in the western part of Tehran to buy the groceries my wife tells me to get, I pass a long row of plane trees, neatly planted decades ago according to the design of ambitious city planners. […]