Alaska lawmakers line up against whale habitat as beluga population plummets

By Erika Bolstad | McClatchy Newspapers WASHINGTON — If there’s one thing Alaska’s congressional delegation can agree on, it’s a distrust of the Endangered Species Act and a belief it could ruin the state’s economy. Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Democrat Sen. Mark Begich and Republican Rep. Don Young met Friday to express their concerns with […]

Starving sea lion pups washing ashore on California beaches

By Jaymi Heimbuch, San Francisco, California on 03.12.10 Sea lions are having a hard time finding food this spring, and pups are feeling the squeeze. Marine mammal experts report that dozens of sick and hungry sea lion pups have washed up on California shores this winter, many not making it even with the help they […]

Canada winter warmest and driest on record: ‘It's like winter was cancelled in this country’

By Margaret Munro, Canwest News ServiceMarch 9, 2010 From the balmy Arctic, to the open water of the St. Lawrence and snowless western fields, this winter has been the warmest and driest in Canadian record books. Environment Canada scientists report that winter 2009/10 was 4C above normal, making it the warmest since nationwide records were […]

Detroit: the last days

Detroit is a city in terminal decline. When film director Julien Temple arrived in town, he was shocked by what he found – but he also uncovered reasons for hope By Julien Templewww.guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 10 March 2010 20.00 GMT When filmmaker Roger Graef approached me last year to make a film about the rise and […]

Tide of acid-ocean fear rolls over oyster industry

As the Bluff oyster industry watches for hopeful signs of recovery, oyster fishers in the US are witnessing cause for concern, Craig Welch, of The Seattle Times, reports. The collapse began rather unspectacularly. In 2005, when most of the millions of Pacific oysters in this tree-lined estuary failed to reproduce, the shellfish growers of Willapa […]

Mysterious cancer kills California sea lions

By INGFEI CHENPublished: March 4, 2010 For 14 years, since they first reported that a disturbing proportion of deaths among rescued California sea lions were caused by metastatic cancer, researchers have been trying to pinpoint the source of the illness. In 1996, Dr. Frances Gulland, the director of veterinary science at the Marine Mammal Center […]

Aging boomers face stark economics

Declining finances, rising health care costs threaten a generation Not so long ago, Michael Blattman lived in the upscale Washington, D.C., suburb of Potomac, Md., earning $225,000 a year as senior vice president for a student loan company. As he reached his 50s, it never really occurred to him that his job wouldn’t last forever. […]

Extreme weather causing U.S. home foundations to fail

  By KATE MURPHYPublished: March 3, 2010 STEVEN DERSE, the owner of a corporate travel business in Nashville, cannot feel his house move, but he can hear it. “It’s an eerie creaking sound,” he said, and it echoes throughout his two-story Georgian-style house. It started two years ago when a severe drought contracted the soil […]

Common weedkiller turns male frogs into females

  By Maggie Fox, Health and Science EditorWASHINGTONWed Mar 3, 2010 3:36pm EST WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Atrazine, one of the most commonly used and controversial weedkillers, can turn male frogs into females, researchers reported on Monday. The experiment is the first to show such complete effects of atrazine, which had been known to disrupt hormones […]

The Crude in Syncrude: ugliness at the tar sands duck trial

  By Josh MogermanSenior Media Associate, Chicago Posted March 3, 2010 You want to know just how tone-deaf the tar sands industry and their Big Oil backers are? Yesterday, in a trial over the death of 1600+ ducks that had landed in a toxic mining runoff lake, lawyers for the Canadian tar sands company Syncrude […]

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