By MICHAEL BURNHAM AND NATHANIAL GRONEWOLD of GreenwirePublished: May 4, 2010 NAIROBI, Kenya — It’s the rainy season, but the sun is still baking the Mathare Valley slum. A half-million people live in this warren of shacks clustered amid 10 square kilometers of the Mathare River. When the rains fall, drops spill like marbles on […]
By Cahal Milmo Monday, 3 May 2010 The English oak, the quintessential native tree which saved a monarch and defines the British landscape, is under grave threat from a little-understood new disease that forestry experts fear is spreading far more rapidly across the country than previously estimated. Acute oak decline (AOD), which is thought […]
By Rhett A. Butler, www.mongabay.comApril 28, 2010 Industrial soy expansion in the Brazilian Amazon has contributed to deforestation by pushing cattle ranchers further north into rainforest zones, reports a new study published the journal Environmental Research Letters. The authors — including Elizabeth Barona, Navin Ramankutty, Glenn Hyman and Oliver Coomes — analyzed annual census data […]
By Jim Robbins For many years, Diana Six, an entomologist at the University of Montana, planned her field season for the same two to three weeks in July. That’s when her quarry — tiny, black, mountain pine beetles — hatched from the tree they had just killed and swarmed to a new one to start […]
By Jeremy Hance, www.mongabay.comApril 28, 201 Niall O’Connor from the World Wildlife Fund warns in a Carte Blanche production that if the ecological destruction of Madagascar continues, the poor island country could become “Haiti-like”, where he says, “most of the biodiversity, most of the forests are gone”. Carte Blanche, an African investigative journalism show, went […]
By Jeremy Hance, www.mongabay.comApril 26, 2010 Forests continue to decline worldwide, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS). Employing satellite imagery researchers found that over a million square kilometers of forest were lost around the world between 2000 and 2005. This represents a 3.1 percent loss of […]
Reporting by Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Bill TrottCARACASSun Apr 25, 2010 3:18pm EDT CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez on Sunday ordered troops to crack down on wildcat miners who use mercury, chain-saws and high-pressure hoses to strip gold from beneath the South American nation’s jungles. Venezuela’s southern forests contain some of Latin […]
By Patrick Oppmann, CNNApril 23, 2010 8:03 a.m. EDT Hoh Indian Reservation, Washington (CNN) — For the Hoh, life centers on the silver waters just off their reservation. Throughout the tiny Native American tribe’s history they have lived and fished on the westernmost point of Washington state where the river that shares their name meets […]
By SIMON ROMERO; Maria Eugenia Díaz contributed reporting from CaracasPublished: April 22, 2010 YUNÉK, Venezuela — The mist-shrouded mountains rising out of the forest here form one of the world’s most beguiling frontiers of exploration and research, inspiring Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 fantasy novel “The Lost World” and teams of biologists who still mount expeditions […]
By Jeremy Hance, www.mongabay.com April 22, 201 The biodiversity crisis, the climate crisis, the deforestation crisis: we are living in an age when environmental issues have moved from regional problems to global ones. A generation or two before ours and one might speak of saving the beauty of Northern California; conserving a single species—say the […]
