By Kathy Marks, Asia-Pacific Correspondent Lush tropical rainforest once covered almost all of Indonesia’s 17,000 islands between the Indian and Pacific oceans. And just half a century ago, 80 per cent remained. But since then, rampant logging and burning has destroyed nearly half that cover, and made the country the world’s third largest emitter of […]
A global campaign will make young people aware of the danger the illicit drug trade represents to hundreds of species in Colombia’s rainforests By Jamie Doward, The Observer, Sunday 25 October 2009 Until recently, the Gorgeted Puffleg was rather obscure – in fact, until four years ago it did not officially exist. But although the […]
By Jeremy Hance, mongabay.com, October 25, 2009 Indigenous natives in the Amazon are headed to the town of Salvacion in Peru with a plan to forcibly remove the Texas-based Hunt Oil company from their land as early as today. Peruvian police forces, numbering in the hundreds, are said to be waiting in the town. The […]
This is the future of peat wetlands all over the world, wherever humans are drawing down the water table. Thousands of illegal wells were drilled around the Tablas de Daimiel wetland in Spain, a UNESCO biosphere site, to irrigate local fields. The water table fell 12 meters (40 ft), the underground peat dried out, and […]
• Less than 1% of Tablas de Daimiel remains as lagoons• Fires burning underground as illegal wells dry out peat By Giles Tremlett, in Madrid The EU has begun an investigation into a unique Spanish wetland park that is being devastated by underground fires. Local officials have admitted that mismanaged water resources at the […]
By Jeremy Hance, mongabay.com, October 22, 2009 In December of 2006 it was announced that the Yangtze River dolphin, commonly known as the baiji, had succumbed to extinction. The dolphin had survived on earth for 20 million years, but the species couldn’t survive the combined onslaught of pollution, habitat loss, boat traffic, entanglement in fishing […]
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 […]
From TreeHugger: 5. Exxon Valdez March 24, 1989. The tanker Exxon Valdez, captained by the now infamous Joseph Hazelwood, ran aground on Prince William Sound’s Bligh Reef, spilling more than 10.8 million US gallons (40.9 million liters) of crude oil into the sensitive natural coastline. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that 26,000 gallons […]
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 […]
By Peter Griffiths LONDON (Reuters) – Global warming will leave the Arctic Ocean ice-free during the summer within 20 years, raising sea levels and harming wildlife such as seals and polar bears, a leading British polar scientist said on Thursday. Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at the University of Cambridge, said much of […]
