By ANDREW JACOBS4 May 2013 BINGZHONGLUO, China (The New York Times) – From its crystalline beginnings as a rivulet seeping from a glacier on the Tibetan Himalayas to its broad, muddy amble through the jungles of Myanmar, the Nu River is one of Asia’s wildest waterways, its 1,700-mile course unimpeded as it rolls toward the […]
3 May 2013 (mongabay.com) – On Thursday roughly 200 indigenous people launched an occupation of a key construction site for the controversial Belo Monte dam in the Brazilian Amazon. The protestors, who represent communities that will be affected by the massive dam, are demanding immediate suspension of all work on hydroelectric projects on the Xingu, […]
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 […]
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 […]
25 April 2013 (mongabay.com) – Mobile device giant Samsung has admitted to using tin sourced from a controversial mining operation on the Indonesian island of Bangka, where unregulated mining kills 150 miners a year and causes substantial environmental damage, reports the Guardian and Mongabay-Indonesia. Samsung’s admission came after a campaign by Friends of the Earth, […]
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 […]
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. […]
