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Chipotle's Quest To End Factory Farms

Posted by GreenDog on Thursday, 01 September 2011 in Agriculture

by Morgan ClendanielIn this charming music video from Chipotle, Willie sings about going "back to the start" of American farming, before animals were pumped with antibiotics and kept in factories. A farmer, not content with his small family farm, starts to modernize. He turns his farm into a factor...

James Cameron to Stop Brazilian Hydroelectric Dam

Posted by bensor on Wednesday, 31 August 2011 in Environmental Heroes

Timed with the re-release of the blockbuster film Avatar in theaters last week, director James Cameron has joined forces with Amazon Watch to get the word out about "A Message from Pandora" and the battle to stop the Belo Monte Dam on the Xingu, one of the great tributaries of th...

Why the Valley Should Care About Sharks

Posted by bchristo on Wednesday, 31 August 2011 in Wildlife Conservation

The San Fernando Valley is home to Universal Studios, one of the most famous movie studios in the world. As a resident of Studio City, it is something I mention with pride to people I meet who are not from California. "Yes! I live right next to where all of your favorite movies were made!"...

Brazil Forest Law changes threaten to send climate achievements up in smoke

Posted by bchristo on Wednesday, 31 August 2011 in Forestry

Brazil: Proposed changes to Brazil's forest laws that will cut back protection and offer wide ranging amnesties for illegal deforestation threaten to undo the country's impressive performances in cutting back emissions and protecting biodiversity. "As it stands now, the forest law i...

BP Seeping Oil in Gulf

Posted by EarthDude on Wednesday, 31 August 2011 in Oil Spill

The Press-Register of Mobile, Alabama discovered new BP oil seeping just a mile from the site of last summer’s debacle. BP wasted no time at all in claiming that the oil wasn’t theirs… but the facts prove otherwise. The fingerprint is clear, as is the location of the oil — exac...

Outlook gloomy on global warming

Posted by EarthDude on Monday, 29 August 2011 in Climate Change

Deutsche Bank's head of carbon emissions research Mark Lewis can't see how the world can avoid dangerous global warming - judged as greater than two degrees Celsius - based on the targets agreed at climate change summits in Copenhagen and Cancun. Mr Lewis said a target to restrict global warming to...

Mollusc Stocks At Risk From Ocean Acidification

Posted by Wolf on Monday, 29 August 2011 in Fishing

Fishermen in Haiti and some African countries could lose their livelihoods as ocean acidification causes a decline in mollusc populations, a study has found. Human industrial activities release carbon dioxide, which dissolves in sea water, increasing its acidity. This higher acidity damages...

BP 'to be sued over oil spill'

Posted by bensor on Monday, 29 August 2011 in Oil Spill

Oil giant BP is set to take another battering after a US judge ruled thousands of fishermen and business owners hit by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster could sue for punitive damages, it has been reported. Judge Carl Barbier, who is considering some 500 cases against BP and its main co-defenda...

Scientists Call for Better Management of the Deep Sea

Posted by bensor on Sunday, 28 August 2011 in Ocean/Seas/Coastlines

The deep sea is in trouble. A recent study has found that it's being damaged by human activities, and that this is only likely to get worse. Scientists are now calling for better management and conservation of entire deep-sea ecosystems. It's so 'out of sight, out of mind' that people have used the...

New Jersey Monitoring of Ocean Waters

Posted by amir on Sunday, 28 August 2011 in Ocean/Seas/Coastlines

Two New Jersey legislators held a press conference in Belmar last week to underscore the importance of improved water quality testing to make ocean waters safer for swimmers. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-6th District) and Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), who coauthored the Beaches Environmental Assessmen...

Our Dwindling Food

Posted by Wolf on Thursday, 25 August 2011 in Food

As we've come to depend on a handful of commercial varieties of fruits and vegetables, thousands of heirloom varieties have disappeared. It's hard to know exactly how many have been lost over the past century, but a study conducted in 1983 by the Rural Advancement Foundation International gave a clu...

Time to Start Work on a Panic Button?

Posted by Aaron on Thursday, 25 August 2011 in Climate Change

For two decades, the world’s governments have failed to meet their own commitment to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas. As frustration builds among scientists, some of them have begun to argue for research on a potential last-ditch option in case global warming starts to...

The Problem with the Pipeline

Posted by EarthDude on Tuesday, 23 August 2011 in Fossil Fuels

The proposed Keystone XL Pipeline would start in the town of Hardisty, which about a hundred and twenty-eight miles southeast of Edmonton. It would cross the Canadian-U.S. border in Montana, jog through western South Dakota, then head down through Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma all the way to refine...

Sustainable Consumption: International Pre-Conference (Nov. 6th, Hamburg)

Posted by Aaron on Tuesday, 23 August 2011 in Sustainable Development

Young researchers in the inter- and transdisciplinary field of research on sustainable consumption as well as in the field of sustainability sciences in general are warmly invited to attend the pre-conference “Research on Sustainable Consumption – Present and Future Perspectives for Young Academics”...

Planet Without Apes

Posted by bchristo on Tuesday, 23 August 2011 in Wildlife Conservation

Viewers of this summer’s Hollywood blockbuster “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” may be surprised to learn that before our earliest ancestors arrived on the scene roughly seven million years ago, apes really did rule the planet. As many as 40 kinds roamed Eurasia and Africa between 10 and 25 million ...

Biodiversity Hot Spots: Top 10 sea locales make sobering list

Posted by plantitfilm on Tuesday, 23 August 2011 in Ocean/Seas/Coastlines

Biologists have identified the world's most vulnerable coral reefs. Each so-called hot spot is a marine region rife with organisms found nowhere else and threatened by human influence. The 10 hot spots "represent very high priorities for conservation because they contain a disproportion...

Seeking Protection for Coral Sea "Hotspot"

Posted by plantitfilm on Tuesday, 23 August 2011 in Ocean/Seas/Coastlines

The Coral Sea is perhaps best known and celebrated for the area that occupies much of its western edge: the Great Barrier Reef, which fringes the northeastern Australian coast. The world's largest coral reef, it was designated as a World Heritage Site in 1981 in recognition of its extensiv...

Lessons learned from the two worst oils spills in U.S. history

Posted by bchristo on Sunday, 21 August 2011 in Oil Spill

One year after the notorious BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and two decades after the Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound off the coast of Alaska the scientific lesson is clear – microbes matter! Despite vast differences in the impacted marine ecosystems and the circumst...

9 new leaks in China oil spill

Posted by EarthDude on Sunday, 21 August 2011 in Oil Spill

US oil giant ConocoPhillips, already facing legal action and mounting public anger over a huge oil spill off China's northeast coast, has found nine new leaks in the same area, authorities said. The State Oceanic Administration said on Saturday ConocoPhillips had reported the leakages near a pl...

Species Shifting Habitats Faster

Posted by EarthDude on Sunday, 21 August 2011 in Animals

Due to global warming, plant and animal species are shifting their natural habitats towards the north at a faster rate, reveals a survey of over 2,000 species. The survey, a four-decade-long analysis of various species across Europe, North and South America and Malaysia, revealed that organisms...