10 millions pounds of chemicals dumped into Pennsylvania waterways yearly

By Vivian Nereim, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Thursday, October 22, 2009 An environmental group released a report yesterday chronicling the millions of pounds of pollutants released by industrial facilities into Pennsylvania’s waterways, saying that the state is the sixth-largest dumping ground for toxic discharges in the nation. The report, released by PennEnvironment, compiled data gathered in 2007 […]

Hydropower industry braces for glacier-free future

By Emma Thomasson RHONE GLACIER, Switzerland (Reuters) – Standing on the glacier at the source of the Rhone river, glaciologist Andreas Bauder poses next to a 3-meter high pole sticking out of the ice, and gestures above his head. “This is about the melt of one month,” he says, as fellow scientists drill into the […]

Most important inland wetland in Spain consumed by underground fire

National park which was once a ‘paradise’ now on fire and churning out tonnes of CO2 By Giles Tremlett, Las Tablas de Daimiel, central Spain They are meant to be Spain’s most important inland wetlands, but yesterday the lagoons at Las Tablas de Daimiel national park were not just dry, they were burning. Stilted walkways […]

Contaminated wells threaten 2 million people in Ha Noi with arsenic poisoning

HA NOI — The preliminary results from Ha Noi’s 2009 census, reported that over two million Hanoians are using drilled well water, while a series of surveys have stated that many of the drilled wells in the city are contaminated with arsenic. Nguyen Minh Ngoc, 27, was constantly annoyed with her relatives’ advice to use […]

Leveling Appalachia: The Legacy of Mountaintop Removal Mining

  During the last two decades, mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia has destroyed or severely damaged more than a million acres of forest and buried nearly 2,000 miles of streams. Leveling Appalachia: The Legacy of Mountaintop Removal Mining, a video report produced by Yale Environment 360 in collaboration with MediaStorm, focuses on the environmental and […]

Humanitarian crisis looms around shrinking Lake Chad

By James Kilner LONDON (AlertNet) – Once one of the world’s largest lakes, Lake Chad in west Africa has shrunk by 90 percent since 1963 and pushed millions of people living along its shores into a competition for survival, the U.N. said on Thursday. The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) blamed climate change and […]

Infernal landscapes of industrial China: the photography of Lu Guang

By David W. Dunlap and James Estrin Any effort to describe the photography of Lu Guang by reference to the work of other artists would almost certainly invoke the name of W. Eugene Smith. (It is, for instance, just about impossible to look at Slide 4 without thinking of “Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath.”) So […]

Pennsylvania blames mine discharges for massive fish kill

By Don Hopey, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Tuesday, October 13, 2009 A heretofore undisclosed underground flow of mine pool water between Consol Energy’s Blacksville No. 1 and No. 2 mines may have contributed to the highly salty, polluted discharges that caused the massive, month-long fish kill on Dunkard Creek. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection said stream […]

Water shortages cause 100,000 to flee homes in Iraq: UN

Paris (AFP) Oct 13, 2009 – More than 100,000 people in northern Iraq have abandoned their homes since 2005 because of water stress, after drought and over-extraction of groundwater caused the collapse of an ancient water system, UNESCO said on Tuesday. “Drought and excessive well pumping have drawn down aquifer levels in the region, causing […]

Food production 'must rise 70%'

Food production will have to increase by 70% over the next 40 years to feed the world’s growing population, the United Nations food agency predicts. The Food and Agricultural Organisation says if more land is not used for food production now, 370 million people could be facing famine by 2050. The world population is expected […]

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