Seizing wells and going on strike, Peruvian protesters stand up to Big Oil

By Deirdre Fulton, staff writer2 September 2015 (Common Dreams) – Demanding reparations for industrial pollution and adequate compensation for use of native lands, Indigenous activists in Peru shut down 11 wells in an Amazonian oil block on Tuesday. According to the Spanish EFE news agency, native protesters led by the Federation of the Achuar and […]

Lack of oxygen killing marine life in waters of Washington state’s Hood Canal – ‘It’s a dead zone anywhere east of Sister’s Point to Belfair’

By Hal Bernton28 August 2015 (Seattle Times) – A lack of oxygen in southern Hood Canal is killing fish, crab and other marine life, according to Seth Book, a biologist with the Skokomish Tribe who has been monitoring the marine waterway. Through the month of August, Book and other Skokomish staff have observed dead English […]

How humans evolved into super predators – ‘Our impacts are as extreme as our behaviour and the planet bears the burden of our predatory dominance’

20 August 2015 (UVic) – You need not look far to find the world’s “super predator,” a term used by UVic scientists to describe how human dominance has bred an unrelenting predacious global culture that threatens nature’s balance. Research published in the Aug. 21 edition of the journal Science by a team led by Dr. […]

River that runs through downtown San Jose, California dries up; fish and wildlife suffer – ‘Every stream is slowly going dry’

By Sean Breslin10 August 2015 (weather.com) – One of America’s 10 largest cities is swiftly losing its river, and the loss is having major effects on the ecosystem around it. The San Jose Mercury News said eight miles of the 14-mile long Guadalupe River that runs through San Jose, California, has now dried up, another […]

Stinking mats of seaweed piling up on Caribbean beaches – ‘This has been the worst year we’ve seen so far’

By David Mcfadden10 August 2015 KINGSTON, Jamaica (Associated Press) – The picture-perfect beaches and turquoise waters that people expect on their visits to the Caribbean are increasingly being fouled by mats of decaying seaweed that attract biting sand fleas and smell like rotten eggs. Clumps of the brownish seaweed known as sargassum have long washed […]

Image of the Day: Satellite view of algae bloom in Lake Erie

By Kathryn Hansen4 August 2015 (NASA) – On July 28, 2015, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured these images of algal blooms around the Great Lakes. The bloom is visible as swirls of green in western Lake Erie (top) and in Lake St. Clair (bottom). Earlier in July, NOAA scientists predicted that […]

Heat, drought cook fish alive in Pacific Northwest – ‘We’ve lost about 1.5 million juvenile fish this year due to drought conditions at our hatcheries’

By Doyle Rice1 August 2015 (USA Today) – Freakishly hot, dry weather in the Pacific Northwest is killing millions of fish in the overheated waters of the region’s rivers and streams. “We’ve lost about 1.5 million juvenile fish this year due to drought conditions at our hatcheries,” Ron Warren of Washington State’s Department of Fish […]

Record ocean temperatures threaten Hawaii’s coral reefs – ‘Unless we change the way we live, the Earth’s coral reefs will be utterly destroyed within our children’s lifetimes’

By Jeff Masters  24 July 2015 (Weather Underground) – Record warm sea surface temperatures in Hawaii’s waters threaten to bring a second consecutive year of record coral bleaching to their precious coral reefs this summer. According to NOAA, ocean temperatures in the waters near and to the south of the Hawaiian Islands were 1 – […]

Half of Columbia River sockeye salmon dying due to hot water – ‘The river flow is abnormally low, but on top of that we’ve had superhot temperatures for a really long time’

By Keith Ridler27 July 2015 BOISE, Idaho (Associated Press) – More than a quarter million sockeye salmon returning from the ocean to spawn are either dead or dying in the Columbia River and its tributaries due to warming water temperatures. Federal and state fisheries biologists say the warm water is lethal for the cold-water species […]

California drought: Measuring life in gallons – ‘Water, water, water, water. I never thought about it before. Now I don’t think about anything else.’

By Eli Saslow20 July 2015 PORTERVILLE, California (Washington Post) – Their two peach trees had turned brittle in the heat, their neighborhood pond had vanished into cracked dirt and now their stainless-steel faucet was spitting out hot air. “That’s it. We’re dry,” Miguel Gamboa said during the second week of July, and so he went […]

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