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Archive for October 17th, 2010
Washing away of acid rain offers lesson
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 17th, 2010
Boston Globe: James H. Kellogg hoists a canoe on his shoulders and hikes up a rough trail to Haystack Pond, cradled beneath a mountain peak. The Vermont biologist, snug in a life jacket labeled "acid lakes,`` is on a mission to learn whether the harm humans do to the earth can be healed. Twenty years after Congress ordered huge cuts in pollution from Midwestern power plants that had long rained acidic particles on the lakes, streams, and forests of New England -- one of the most controversial ...
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World food conference focuses on subsistence farming
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 17th, 2010
AP: About 1 billion small farmers worldwide, many of them women, face drought, the effects of climate change and a lack of technology as they struggle to feed families on what they can raise on an acre or two of land. Their problems will be the focus of this week`s World Food Prize symposium, as agriculture officials from around the world gather to talk about what can be done to fight hunger. As many as 60 farmers are expected to join agriculture officials from the U.S., Afghanistan, ...
The Colorado River runs dry
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 17th, 2010
Smithsonian: From its source high in the Rocky Mountains, the Colorado River channels water south nearly 1,500 miles, over falls, through deserts and canyons, to the lush wetlands of a vast delta in Mexico and into the Gulf of California. That is, it did so for six million years. Then, beginning in the 1920s, Western states began divvying up the Colorado's water, building dams and diverting the flow hundreds of miles, to Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and other fast-growing cities. The ...
UN Japan forum ‘key time’ to solve global nature crisis
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 17th, 2010
BBC: A major UN meeting aimed at finding solutions to the world's nature crisis opens on Monday in Japan. Species are going extinct at 100-1,000 times the natural rate, key habitat is disappearing, and ever more water and land is being used to support people. Some economists say this is already damaging human prosperity. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meeting will discuss why governments failed to curb these trends by 2010, as they pledged in ...
UN meeting aims to set species-saving goals
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 17th, 2010
AP: An international conference aimed at preserving the planet's diversity of plants and animals in the face of pollution and habitat loss begins Monday in Japan, facing some of the same divisions between rich and poor nations that have stalled U.N. climate talks. Seventeen years after the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity was enacted, it has yet to achieve any major initiative to slow the alarming rate of species extinction and loss of ecosystems despite global goals set in 2002 to ...
Brazil: Amazon drought emergency widens
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 17th, 2010
Aljazeera: Brazil has adopted emergency measures to deal with one of the Amazon region's worst droughts in decades. A state of emergency has been declared in 25 towns as key waterways and rivers are left completely parched, the Amazonas state government said on Saturday. SPECIAL COVERAGE So far, the severe months-long drought has affected 40,000 people in communities who depend on the South American rainforest for sustenance. In response, the government has airlifted six ...