The recent spritz of rain notwithstanding, California is in the midst of what Gov. Jerry Brown called “perhaps the worst drought [the state] has ever seen.” And yet, despite the desperate state of affairs, every day the city of Los Angeles flushes hundreds of millions of gallons of potenti...
Not surprisingly, the largest market for bottled water is here in the United States. In 2007, Americans purchased 8.8 billion gallons of water and bottled water sales netted a hefty $11.7 billion. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, bottled water costs 240 to over 10,000 times more p...
The culmination of the five-year project has been the development of an integrated action planning toolkit on wetland conservation and management, which can be adapted to help provide bespoke solutions to protect valuable ecosystems around the globe.
Launched today at events in China, India and Vie...
In the heated exchanges about the consequences of the ongoing federal government shutdown, one important impact has been largely overlooked: the devastating consequences of this closure on the work of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Like the National Institutes of Health, th...
When did everything become Plastic?
When I was a kid, we collected shells on the beach, not plastic trash. There wasn't enough disposable plastic in those days for plastics to collect on the beaches. Plastic bags came into heavy use in American grocery stores when I was in high school in the late '...
Hydraulic fracturing has been occurring off the coast of California for about 15 years, in the same sensitive waters where all new oil leases were banned since the 1969 Union Oil Santa Barbara spill, the third worst spill in American history.
The California Coastal Commission wasn’t even aware the ...
The Maryland Department of the Environment has brought another water pollution lawsuit against a subsidiary of NRG Energy, just weeks after the company agreed to pay millions of dollars in penalties and mitigation costs to settle a suit related to other facilities.
The new suit, filed in June, conc...
Most people believe that golf courses do nothing but guzzle water, but experts say that during the rainy season, the green grass on the courses actually helps replenish the county's drinking water supply.
Golf courses use 2 to 3 percent of South Florida's water each year. But during heavy rains suc...
One quarter of the US' rivers and streams have fish with elevated mercury.
At least our rivers don’t light on fire anymore. Inspired by a well-publicized fire on the Cuyahoga River in 1969, the passage of the Clean Water Act in the US led to huge reductions in water pollution. Despite those positiv...
Which is more important, pandas or pinot? Researchers say that is a question conservationists and wine-growers will have to answer in the coming years as climate change sparks a hunt for cooler places to grow wine grapes, even if those places are home to sensitive animal populations.
Already, big p...
The United States is one of the world's biggest users of water—many Americans use as much water as approximately 900 Kenyans. As a result, water resources in the U.S. are shrinking. In the last five years, there have been water shortages in almost every part of the country, including the wor...
