By Cameron Atfield4 May 2013 (Sydney Morning Herald) – The United Nations has put the Queensland and federal governments on notice that the Great Barrier Reef could be added to a list of endangered world heritage sites. In a draft decision released Friday night, expected to be adopted when UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee meets in […]
Australia’s iconic marsupial is at risk from shrinking habitats, road traffic and dog attacks – and increasingly, global warming By Neena Bhandari for IPS, part of the Guardian Environment Network 30 April 2013 SYDNEY (guardian.co.uk) – Australia’s iconic marsupial is under threat. Formerly hunted almost to extinction for their woolly coats, koalas are now struggling […]
By Charlotte McDonald-Gibson 29 April 2013 Brussels (Independent) – Environmentalists hailed a “victory for bees” today after the European Union voted for a ban on the nerve-agent pesticides blamed for the dramatic decline global bee populations. Despite fierce lobbying by the chemicals industry and opposition by countries including Britain, 15 of the 27 member states […]
24 April 2013 (mongabay.com) – Rainforests that have been affected by even low-intensity fires are far more vulnerable to invasion by grasses, finds a new study published in special issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. The findings are significant because they suggest that burned forests may be more susceptible to […]
By Sonya Auer, University of Massachusetts, Amherst26 April 2013 (LiveScience) – Plants and animals in a given area form an ecological system of interacting species. Impacts on one, or just a few, species can ripple throughout the system and have indirect effects on other species within a larger community. Many plants and animals are sensitive […]
28 February 2013 (EPA) – The proportion of rivers and streams in poor biological condition, based on the Macroinvertebrate MMI, ranges from 26% in the Western Mountains ecoregion to 71% in the Coastal Plains ecoregion. The three most widespread stressors to rivers and streams — phosphorus, nitrogen, and riparian vegetative cover are depicted by ecoregion. […]
By Matt Smith27 April 2013 Yscloskey, Louisiana (CNN) – On his dock along the banks of Bayou Yscloskey, Darren Stander makes the pelicans dance. More than a dozen of the birds have landed or hopped onto the dock, where Stander takes in crabs and oysters from the fishermen who work the bayou and Lake Borgne […]
By Anne Thompson, chief environmental correspondent26 April 2013 (NBC News) – While the possible construction of the Keystone XL pipeline has made for contentious disagreements from the halls of Congress to ranches in Nebraska, the real environmental debate begins in a place most Americans have never heard of. Nearly 700 miles north of the U.S.-Canada […]
By Neela Banerjee23 April 2013 WASHINGTON (Los Angeles Times) – A federal appeals court unanimously backed the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate a controversial form of coal mining called mountaintop removal, overturning a lower court decision that barred the agency from stopping a large coal mine in West Virginia. The ruling by the D.C. […]
By Mark Hertsgaard22 April 2013 4:45 AM EDT (Newsweek) – “It’s as safe as Dawn dishwashing liquid.” That’s what Jamie Griffin says the BP man told her about the smelly, rainbow-streaked gunk coating the floor of the “floating hotel” where Griffin was feeding hundreds of cleanup workers during the BP oil disaster in the Gulf […]
