Thursday, Dec 04th
Last update08:06:32 AM GMT
Environmental Glance
A few months ago I was asked by a neighbor near our farm to attend a town meeting at the local high school. Some gas companies at the meeting were trying very hard to sell us on a plan to tear through our wilderness and make room for a new pipeline: infrastructure for hydraulic fracturing.
Radiation captured by HEPA filter air cleaning machines at Radiation Station Santa Monica doubled in a 52-day period ended August 1 over the previous period. The tests were part of EnviroReporter.com‘s ongoing monitoring for Fukushima fallout and ocean-borne contamination in Southern California and across the United States.
Over 2,374 tests since March 15, 2011 have yielded high radiation detections in air, water as well as food and drink. Yet as alarming as many of those tests have been, new information uncovered by EnviroReporter.com strongly suggests that the Fukushima contamination has insinuated itself into the environment and human beings in ways previously not known to the public.
Brussels bureaucrats have ruled that gardeners who sprinkle coffee grounds around their cabbages to kill slugs are breaking the law.
Many coffee shops let customers take the grounds home for free, which can then be used as a mulch or to improve compost.
But the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has warned that any gardener using coffee granules to deter slugs falls foul of EU regulations.
The extent of Arctic sea ice reached a record low Monday, according to the University of Colorado National Snow and Ice Data Center, and is on track to decline further in the next two weeks.
The news that the Arctic sea ice cover had shrunk to 1.58 million square miles (4.1 million square kilometers) on Sunday came two days after Royal Dutch Shell’s drill ship, the Noble Discoverer, took advantage of reduced sea ice and started sailing from Alaska’s Dutch Harbor to the Chukchi Sea, in anticipation of final federal approval for oil exploration activities there.
Leading water scientists have issued one of the sternest warnings yet about global food supplies, saying that the world's population may have to switch almost completely to a vegetarian diet over the next 40 years to avoid catastrophic shortages.
Humans derive about 20% of their protein from animal-based products now, but this may need to drop to just 5% to feed the extra 2 billion people expected to be alive by 2050, according to research by some of the world's leading water scientists.
The Tennessee Valley Authority was responsible for a coal ash spill outside Knoxville that federal officials say is one of the worst environmental disasters of its kind, according to a U.S. District Court order issued Thursday.
Had the federal agency acted appropriately, the underlying failure of the north dike "would have been investigated, addressed, and potentially remedied before the catastrophic failure," said U.S. District Judge Thomas Varlan of the Eastern District of Tennessee.
The authority repeatedly sought to have the case dismissed.
On the heels of Monday's report revealing New York state is set to allow hydraulic fracturing, over 350 people gathered outside a policy summit hosted by Governor Cuomo on Wednesday to protest the controversial plan.
The rally, a joint effort organized by CREDO Action and New Yorkers Against Fracking, hopes to sway the governor from going forward with the practice (better known as fracking) because of the irreparable environmental damages drilling may cause.
Page 94 of 200
