By Lynne Peeples23 March 2015 (Huffington Post) – Scientists are looking for — and finding — little bits of plastic in a lot of places lately: ice cores, deep sea sediments, coral reefs, crab gills, the digestive system of mussels, even German beer. Now, new research suggests they need not actually be searching for the […]
21 March 2015 (The Guardian) – Roundup, the world’s most widely used weedkiller, “probably” causes cancer, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) – WHO’s cancer agency – said that glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide made by agriculture company Monsanto, was “classified as probably carcinogenic […]
22 March 2015 (Desdemona Despair) – You may have noticed the ongoing mass-starvation event among California sea lions. (“Why are California sea lion pups starving?”; “Sick sea lions flood shelters in California – Pups wash ashore all along the coast amid what scientists say are strains on the ocean”) The sea lions are starving because […]
10 February 2015 (Conservation Letters) – Red List Indices for (a) pollinating and non-pollinating bird species; (b) pollinating and non-pollinating mammal species; and (c) aggregated pollinating and non-pollinating birds and mammals. An RLI value of 1 equates to all species being Least Concern; an RLI value of 0 equates to all species being Extinct. Improvements […]
By Chris Clarke 12 March 2015 (KCET) – Work has halted on a solar power facility in Imperial County due to the possibility that a rare lizard on site may be listed as an endangered species by the state. Construction halted Wednesday at the Tenaska Imperial Solar Energy Center West, being built by Tempe, Arizona-based […]
By Antonia Juhasz 12 March 2015 (Rolling Stone) – On January 27th, as the U.S. Justice Department expounded upon the catastrophic harms of offshore oil drilling in the trial against BP for the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, President Obama reneged on a 2008 campaign pledge by proposing to open up a vast stretch […]
By Chris Clarke10 March 2015 (KCET) – Stringent criticism of a draft of a 12,000-page plan that would manage renewable energy development on 22 million acres of the California desert has forced a drastic change in strategy for the agencies pushing the plan. The Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, known as the DRECP and released […]
By Richard Schiffman9 March 2015 (Yale Environment 360) – Ecologist Philip Fearnside has lived and worked in the Brazilian Amazon for 30 years and is one of the foremost authorities on deforestation in the world’s largest tropical forest. A professor at the National Institute for Research in the Amazon, Fearnside has focused his work on […]
By Ben Enticknap23 February 2015 (Oceana.org) – Recent national news stories have shown emaciated California sea lion pups being rescued and admitted to marine mammal rehabilitation centers. The sight of hundreds of withered sea lions is reminiscent of the all-too-recent California sea lion “unusual mortality event” in 2013 followed by a significant number of stranded […]
By Matt Walker4 March 2015 (BBC News) – Around the world, animals that pollinate flowering plants are in decline. An increasing number of pollinating mammal and bird species are moving towards extinction, according to the first study of its kind. Other, so far unpublished studies, also suggest that pollinating insect species are also heading towards […]
