Water

Greater Everglades Conservation Atlas: Fakahatchee Strand

Fakahatchee Strand hosts a diverse variety of ecosystems, from wet swamp prairies to dry hardwood hammocks and pine rock lands. Painter Margaret Tolbert captures the dramatic sweep of the prairie in December.
 
To View Video: 
via Greater Everglades Conservation Atlas: Fakahatchee Strand
- YouTube.

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Race to save Ecuador’s ‘lungs of the world’ park

yasuni

The Yasuni National Park, known as "the lungs of the world" and one of the most bio-diverse places on earth, is under threat from oil drilling. The race is on to find the funds required to develop new sustainable energy programmes that would leave the oil – and the forest – untouched.
In the early light [...]

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Fracking chemicals spill into Texas creeks

Fracking Denton Creek Txsharon

Sharon Wilson in Texas reports:
Huge thanks go to Brett Shipp for staying on this story. To recap:

A chemical plant blew up and I knew right away that fracking was involved.
Chemical fire spawns fish kill, criminal investigation
Waxahachie chemical firm cited for environmental violations
Chemical plant relocation upsetting Ellis County residents
Ellis County Commissioners catch heat from chemical plant [...]

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Oil and gas companies turn to psy ops

By Peggy Heinkel-Wolfe and Lowell Brown / Staff Writers, Denton Record-Chronicle

FLOWER MOUND — In the months before, it was just Tammi Vajda and several others who came to Town Council meetings.
They were outnumbered by other Flower Mound residents who favored natural gas drilling in town. They called Vajda names.
“My husband asked me why I did [...]

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Lists of lists, best and worst of 2011

THE ULTIMATE LIST FOR ENVIRONMENTAL “LIST JOURNALISM” from the Society of Environmental Journalists
One of the latest trends, as journalism and publishing turn
increasingly to online media, is “list journalism.” We know it when we
see it — without too much basis beyond personal opinion, a
publication will ballyhoo the Top Ten of something. We have long
suspected that the [...]

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Florida bill would work against water conservation

Bruce Ritchie reports:
A bill filed by a Senate budget subcommittee chairman would prohibit the Public Service Commission from allowing private utilities to charge customers higher rates for using large amounts of  water.
SB 1244 appears aimed at Aqua Utilities Florida, the largest private water utility in Florida. But the bill is raising broader concerns among some [...]

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Plan for a cleaner Gulf of Mexico, healthier region

Rick-Santorum-2-jpg

The Obama administration did the nation — and Florida in particular — a great service by putting forth an ambitious plan to restore the Gulf of Mexico. The blueprint unveiled this month could, over time, begin to reverse decades of man-made damage that hammered the gulf long before last year’s historic oil spill. The federal [...]

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Santorum takes on EPA over mercury limits rule

Speaking to voters in Iowa Monday, former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania ripped the Environmental Protection Agency’s new rule placing first-ever limits on the amount of mercury that coal-fired power plants can emit into the air.
The GOP presidential contender claimed the new regulations would shut down 60 coal fired power plants in America, and he [...]

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Study documents Nigerian children died from families’ gold mining. — Environmental Health News

Large numbers of infants and toddlers have died from lead poisoning in Nigerian villages where their parents process gold ore inside their family compounds, according to a report published Tuesday by an international team of researchers.
In two Nigerian communities, 118 children under the age of 5 died in a single year – 25 percent [...]

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Local residents protect the environment from their elected officials

Catherine Ryan Hyde summarizes the struggle Cambria has had with its own governing body, the Community Services District, to protect the local environment. The area is legally protected by state and federal law, but the CSD board of directors has pursued invading it to build a desalination plant. The full text of her summary includes [...]

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Barnett aims for a ‘water ethic’

Bruce Ritchie
Floridaenvironments.com
Author Cynthia Barnett of Gainesville says she traces the start of her focus on water issues to a St. Petersburg Timespage 1A story written in 2003 that she says made her “insane.”
Barnett is author of “Blue Revolution: Unmaking America’s Water Crisis.” It’s an important new book that challenges Americans to transform their views of [...]

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Japan Fukushima Disaster: Probe Finds Response Failed

Fukushima_nuclear

Japan’s response to the nuclear crisis that followed the March 11 tsunami was confused and riddled with problems, including an erroneous assumption an emergency cooling system was working and a delay in disclosing dangerous radiation leaks, a report revealed Monday.
The disturbing picture of harried and bumbling workers and government officials scrambling to respond to the [...]

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Hog farm cleans up

 David Zucchino of the Los Angeles Times reports one of the good stories of 2011:
December 25, 2011

Reporting from Yadkinville, N.C.
Loyd Bryant used to pump manure from his 8,640 hogs into a fetid lagoon, where it raised an unholy stink and released methane and ammonia into the air. The tons of manure excreted daily couldn’t be [...]

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New study confirms long-term water quality damage from mountaintop removal coal mining « Coal Tattoo

mountain top removal

A major new study out today in one of the most respected scientific journals around confirms the pervasive and irreversible impacts of mountaintop removal coal mining here in Appalachia. The study is called Cumulative impacts of mountaintop mining on an Appalachian watershed, and it appears online today in the Early Edition of the Proceedings of [...]

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Laws prevent using fish remains for fertilizer

New Times fish story

Kathy Johnston reports in San Luis Obispo’s New Times on a project that needs some laws to change
Using fish heads and fish carcasses to help crops grow well—an ancient practice that pre-dates the Pilgrims—is an idea that recently caught on in San Luis Obispo County.
People enthusiastically jumped on board this fall to make a fish-composting [...]

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Quake exceeded TEPCO’s “once in 10,000 years” scenario – AJW by The Asahi Shimbun

Tohoku Electric Power Company's Onagawa nuclear plant experienced a fire and the earlier story of a malfunction at the Tokyo Electric Power nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture, seems to be causing concern.

Tohoku Electric Power Company's Onagawa nuclear plant experienced a fire and the earlier story of a malfunction at the Tokyo Electric Power nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture, seems to be causing concern.
The movement of the bedrock under the Fukushima No.1 nuclear power plant during the Great East Japan Earthquake was larger than pre-quake estimates [...]

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Unseen sewage leaks pollute waters

Heavy rains routinely trigger big sewage overflows in Baltimore, but there is growing evidence that chronic leaks from the region’s aging, cracked sewer lines are a bigger threat to public health.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/videogallery/66669135/Environment/Sewage-leaks-threaten-Baltimore’s-streams-and-harbor
Though storm-fed spills can be dramatic, Baltimore’s’ streams and harbor are also fouled on sunny days as storm drains yield grayish discharges that look and [...]

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Saving the Amazon, from forest floor up

Brazil Amazon in the Balance 1

Just three years ago, the manmade fires here were so fierce smoke would blot out the Amazon sky, turning the days dark. Towering rainforest trees exploded in flames, their canopies cleared to let pasture grow for cattle.The ash that snowed down onto this jungle town was shin-deep. Dirty layers hid red-hot timber chunks, glowing coals [...]

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BP: Halliburton destroyed key oil spill evidence: Alaska Business Wire | Alaska news at adn.com

BP in a high-stakes court filing on Monday accused Halliburton of destroying damaging evidence about the quality of its cement slurry that went into drilling the oil well that blew out last year and caused the nation’s worst offshore oil spill. BP accused Halliburton of having intentionally destroyed evidence about possible problems with its cement [...]

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Green Home Rehab

green houses

A new 1,600-square-foot split-level on Voluntown Road, it is the Builders Association of Eastern Connecticut’s answer to a market in which new construction faces stiff competition from the surplus of houses for resale. The prototype is meant to showcase assets rarely found in older homes: ultra-greenness and affordability.
The problem, said Paul Stone of Lombardi Realty [...]

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Benzene in Sand Creek measured at 400 times amount tolerated by national drinking water standards, EPA tests show – The Denver Post

forsale

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency clean-up coordinators today said the black goo leaking from the Sand Creek shoreline north of downtown Denver is a "a gasoline-like material" that contains cancer-causing benzene.
Highly-toxic, benzene has been linked to leukemia and federal authorities have determined that even minute amounts are harmful.
EPA lab test results released Thursday evening indicate benzene [...]

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