The dark side of new species discovery: Interview with herpetologist Bryan Stuart

By Laurel Neme, special to www.mongabay.com21 December 2011 Scientists and the public usually rejoice when a new species is discovered. But biologist Bryan Stuart has learned the hard way that the discovery of new species, especially when that species is commercially valuable, has a dark side-one that could potentially wipe out the new species before […]

Thousands of horses abandoned by owners last year –Charities overloaded, many horses sold as meat

By Tim Rich and Jonathan Owen15 January 2012 Thousands of horses are being abandoned or tied up and left to starve, many by desperate owners unable to afford the costs of keeping them. A national crisis has seen Britain’s biggest horse charities under unprecedented pressure from the sheer number of animals needing their help. Redwings […]

Rena anger grows as safety record questioned

January 15 (Fairfax NZ News) – As cargo from the wrecked Rena continues to wash up on the shoreline, the government faces calls for a royal commission of inquiry into the maritime disaster. The container ship – which ran aground on the Astrolabe Reef off Mt Maunganui in early October – broke up seven days […]

Honeybee problem nearing a ‘critical point’

By Claire Thompson13 January 2012 Anyone who’s been stung by a bee knows they can inflict an outsized pain for such tiny insects. It makes a strange kind of sense, then, that their demise would create an outsized problem for the food system by placing the more than 70 crops they pollinate — from almonds […]

Dörte Siedentopf on Fukushima nuclear disaster: ‘They haven’t learned anything from Chernobyl’

By arevamirpal::laprimavera7 January 2012 (UPDATE: Second part of the translation is posted, translation done by the reader Florian Zschage.) (H/T to the readers who did the translation and the summary of the original German article on TAZ. Thank you.) What struck me about the article interviewing Dr. Dörte Siedentopf, other than the negative health effects […]

Geopolitical implications of ‘Peak Everything’ – U.S. is ‘an empire in decline’

By Richard Heinberg 10 January 2012 From competition among hunter-gatherers for wild game to imperialist wars over precious minerals, resource wars have been fought throughout history; today, however, the competition appears set to enter a new—and perhaps unprecedented—phase. As natural resources deplete, and as the Earth’s climate becomes less stable, the world’s nations will likely […]

Bowing to pressure, Beijing begins hourly smog data

Beijing, January 12 (AFP) – Beijing on Thursday began publishing real-time air quality data on the Internet, bowing to a vocal online campaign for greater government transparency over pollution in China’s capital. The move followed the announcement that Beijing would change the way it measures air quality this month to include the smaller particles experts […]

‘Doomsday Clock’ moves one minute closer to midnight due to continuing inaction on climate change

CONTACT: Patrick Mitchell, (703) 276-3266, or pmitchell@hastingsgroup.com10 January 2012 WASHINGTON, D.C. – Faced with inadequate progress on nuclear weapons reduction and proliferation, and continuing inaction on climate change, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) announced today that it has moved the hands of its famous “Doomsday Clock” to five minutes to midnight. The last […]

Eight endangered rhinos killed by poachers in Kruger Park

January 11 (Sapa) – Eight rhino carcasses have been found in the Kruger National Park, SA National Parks says. “Yesterday [Tuesday] on patrol, eight rhino carcasses were found. Three carcasses were found in Lower Sabie and five in the Pretoriuskop section of the park,” said spokesman Reynold Thakhuli. He said all the carcasses were of […]

Graph of the Day: Sumatra Deforestation, 1995-2009

Eyes of the Forest analyzed government concession data and EoF’s own remote sensing analysis and field investigations of almost 1.2 million hectares of SMG/APP associated concessions in its mostly Riau study area covering close to 940,000 hectares of HTI (industrial timber plantation) concessions and around 45,000 hectares of a HPH selective logging concession that allows […]

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