By Elizabeth Kolbert 16 July 2012 (23 July 2012 issue of The New Yorker) […] It is now corn-sex season across the Midwest, and everything is not going well. High commodity prices spurred farmers to sow more acres this year, and unseasonable warmth in March prompted many to plant corn early. Just a few months […]
By Bobby Bascombe, www.guardian.co.uk 12 July 2012 Senegal’s capitol city Dakar sticks out into the Atlantic Ocean on a peninsula. It’s at least a thousand miles to the Sahara desert yet the air today is so thick with sand that the tops of buildings disappear in a sandy haze. It’s the worst sand storm in […]
By Kathy Marks 13 July 2012 Sydney – Climate change could transform the Australian outback, wiping dozens of small towns off the map, according to a new report commissioned by the federal government. With many rural towns struggling to survive, climate change – expected to make much of inland Australia hotter and drier – could […]
13 July 2012 (CNN) – A severe drought is spreading across the Midwest this summer, resulting in some of the worst conditions in decades and leaving more than a thousand counties designated as natural disaster areas, authorities said. Farmers in the region are suffering, with pastures for livestock and fields of crops becoming increasingly parched […]
11 July 2012 (The Daily Impact) – As recently as six weeks ago, the Pollyannas of industrial agriculture were all over the industrial media trumpeting the imminent “huge” corn harvest in the United States. They knew it was going to be huge (see, for example, Bloomberg News on May 24) because more US acres were […]
By Tom Whipple 11 July 2012 One has to go back to the 1930’s to find a time when so much of civilization was in turmoil at once. The 30’s ended with World War II, tens of millions dead, and much of the industrialized world in ruins. It is not hard to argue that the […]
By Janet Shamlian and Miguel Llanos10 July 2012 ATKINS, Arkansas – Drought now covers more than half of the lower 48 states but few have it as rough as Arkansas, where the entire state is listed as suffering from lower than average precipitation. “It’s just devastating,” cattle rancher Karen Haralson told NBC News. Having never […]
By WASBIR HUSSAIN, Associated Press8 July 2012 GAUHATI, India (AP) – The death toll has risen to 121 as damage mounts from monsoon floods that devastated the northeastern Indian state of Assam. Villagers are still finding bodies in receding waters. On Sunday the death toll stood at 121, including 16 buried in mudslides. About half […]
Caption by Tassia Owen7 July 2012 Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of Borneo, was once a lush tropical landscape full of some of the most sought-after timber in the world. In recent years, a combination of logging and agriculture has contributed to a rapidly changing landscape. Forests are gradually being cleared and replaced by palm oil […]
By Patrick Evans 6 July 2012 Chernobyl, Ukraine (BBC) – Much of the 30km exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear plant is pine forest, and some of it so badly contaminated that a forest fire could create a devastating radioactive smoke cloud. Heading north from Kiev in Ukraine, you can see old ladies and their […]
