RSS Feed
Author Archive
Resilience: A New Conservation Strategy for a Warming World
Posted by Yale Environment 360: Jim Robbins on July 13th, 2015
Yale Environment 360: The San Francisco Bay was once one of the richest estuaries in North America. Almost completely enclosed and protected from the open ocean, and with more than 200 freshwater creeks feeding into it, it was a fertile refuge for young salmon, halibut, sturgeon, anchovy, and smelt. It was lined with some 200,000 acres of tidal marsh, and the connected Sacramento Delta doubled that, creating a region so rich and productive it was known as the Everglades of the West. By the middle of the 20th century,...
Posted in 
How cities are using nature to cut pollution
Posted by Yale Environment 360: Jim Robbins on August 23rd, 2012
Yale Environment 360: In Puget Sound, one of America's great estuaries, killer whales, seals, and schools of salmon swim not far from more than 3 million people who live in the Seattle region. The presence of such impressive marine life, however, belies the fact that the sound is seriously polluted.
When it rains, storm water washes into the same system of underground pipes that carries the region's sewage, and 1 billion gallons a year overflow into the sound when area sewer systems contain more water than can be treated....
Can Ecological Corridors Heal Fragmented Landscapes?
Posted by Yale Environment 360: Jim Robbins on October 10th, 2011
Yale Environment 360: The rugged Cabinet Mountains of northwestern Montana are an island of wild country with a population of fewer than 30 grizzly bears, their existence tenuous because they are cut off from others of their kind by distance, roads, and other development. Biologists are concerned about the small number of females, since they reproduce only every three to four years. So in recent years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has occasionally caught a sow near Glacier National Park, trucked it to the Cabinets,...
Canada: As Alberta’s tar sands boom, foes target project’s lifelines
Posted by Yale Environment 360: Jim Robbins on July 6th, 2011
Yale Environment 360: The Sand Hills of Nebraska are a unique Great Plains prairie ecosystem. The rolling dunes, rising to 300 feet, cover about a quarter of the state, and because the grasses and wildflowers there are adapted to wet, sandy soil, many grow nowhere else. Thousands of ponds and lakes dot the Sand Hills, nourishing the Ogallala Aquifer.
This region is an unlikely ground zero for a growing rebellion against a different kind of sand -- the Athabascan oil sands of Alberta, 1,400 miles to the north. But that...