By Oliver Buckley 1 August 2018 (Sky News) – Earth Overshoot Day is the date when we have effectively consumed more resources than the planet can naturally replenish over the course of that entire year. The day has shown a trend for appearing earlier and earlier since its inception – and today marks its earliest […]
By Christina Hoover Moorehead 25 July 2018 (ChavoBart Digital Media) – The southeastern United States is losing trees fast. Between 2000 and 2012, trees in the region were cut up to four times faster than in South American rainforests. Smith: “In the southeastern U.S., what’s driving the loss of forest cover is industrial-scale logging.”That’s Danna […]
DURHAM, North Carolina, 25 July 2018 (Duke Today) – The coal industry may have declined in the last decade because of the rise of cheap natural gas, but a coal mining method called mountaintop removal is still taking place, particularly in central Appalachia. A new web-based mapping tool shows, in more detail than ever before, […]
24 July 2018 (Global Witness) – Global Witness today reveals that at least 207 land and environmental defenders were killed last year – indigenous leaders, community activists and environmentalists murdered trying to protect their homes and communities from mining, agribusiness and other destructive industries.Severe limits on the data available mean the global total is probably […]
By Anne Barnard; photography by Josh Haner 18 July 2018 Barouk Cedar Forest, Lebanon (The New York Times) – Walking among the cedars on a mountain slope in Lebanon feels like visiting the territory of primeval beings. Some of the oldest trees have been here for more than 1,000 years, spreading their uniquely horizontal branches […]
By John Sullivan 3 July 2018 (Princeton University) – Researchers using satellite imaging have found much greater than expected deforestation since 2000 in the highlands of Southeast Asia, a critically important world ecosystem. The findings are important because they raise questions about key assumptions made in projections of global climate change as well as concerns […]
By Joe Sandler Clarke 19 July 2018 (Greenpeace) – Moves by the disputed President of the Democratic Republic of Congo Joseph Kabila to grant oil and logging licences in the world’s second largest rainforest have thrown efforts to protect the area into disarray, potentially weakening the push to avert the worst consequences of climate change.Congo’s […]
OAKLAND, California, 13 June 2018 (Global Footprint Network) – On August 1, humanity will have used nature’s resource budget for the entire year, according to Global Footprint Network, an international research organization that has pioneered the Ecological Footprint resource accounting metric. The Ecological Footprint adds up all of people’s competing demands for productive areas, including […]
By Dom Phillips 19 July 2018 Rio de Janeiro (The Guardian) – Remarkable footage has been released of an uncontacted indigenous man who has lived alone in an Amazon forest for at least 22 years. Semi-naked and swinging an axe vigorously as he fells a tree, the man, believed to be in his 50s, has […]
By Adrianna C. Foster 16 July 2018 This summer a team of scientists from NASA Goddard, American University, and the Forest Service are conducting joint field work and flights with Goddard’s LiDAR, Hyperspectral, and Thermal Imager (G-LiHT) within south-central Alaska to study the ongoing spruce beetle outbreak and develop methods for early detection of beetle […]