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Many of President Obama’s progressive supports have soured on him in recent months, as the debt crisis and a Republican House has forced him to embrace deep spending cuts, and environmentalists are among them. There’s still unhappiness among greens over the White House’s perceived failure to push hard for carbon cap-and-trade legislation—legislation that was a major [...]
No matter how jaded you become, there is always room to be awed by the little shimmers of magic nature deals us on a regular basis. There’s something just plain cool about a world that offers up coral shaped like organ pipes, peppermint shrimp, and monkeys feasting on fermented leaves. A handful of unrelated studies [...]
As we reported last month, one of the biggest obstacles to sustainable fish farming is that raising big, popular carnivores such as salmon and tuna requires us to fish – and overfish – far down the food chain, in the ranks of smaller species like anchovies. Those are the little critters the bigger fish like [...]
I’m in Cameroon right now, working on a health story with the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (update: it’s now just GVF) and the viral ecologist Nathan Wolfe. I’ve been out of email and cell contact the past few days—hence the lack of blogging—and even now Internet contact is dicey. But while the signal’s strong I wanted to [...]
A newly released document says the Japanese government estimated in April that some 1600 workers will be exposed to high levels of radiation in the course of handling the reactor meltdowns at the stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. The figure was released in a document from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), [...]
It’s tough enough dealing with all the hectoring we get about eating less salt, using bigger forks, and making sure that this or that food group makes up only this or that percentage of our diet. All that, however, is only when it’s the nutritionists talking. Things get even harder when the environmentalists enter the [...]
If you’re eating a food that came in a wrapper while reading this, you probably eating palm oil — at least there’s a 50/50 chance you are. About half the packaged food found in a supermarket contains palm oil, according to the World Wildlife Fund, and a lot of that product comes from the lush [...]
As if the stifling, tripe-digit temperatures gripping much of nation weren’t bad enough, the heat wave is also contributing to dangerously high levels of air pollution—especially around the cities of the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic region. The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) air quality rankings range from 0 to 500—500 being the worst—and the air quality [...]
The word ‘famine’ may be a familiar one, but it is not thrown around lightly by the people who decide when there is one. The fact that most of us today probably associate the term with the 1984 crisis in Ethiopia is testament to its exceedingly careful dispensation; to use it too often would dilute [...]
I’ve been spending much of the last couple of weeks doing radio and other media for my aquaculture cover in TIME. Everyone wants to know the same thing: is fish farming really sustainable? “It depends” isn’t a very satisfactory answer, so I’ve been focusing on the efforts of some in the aquaculture industry to raise [...]
