Environmental Glance
Take away the predators at the top of the food chain — the lions, tigers, wolves and cougars — and entire ecosystems start to change. A paper in today's edition of the journal Science suggests that humans' destruction of these top predators is causing reverberations worldwide in ways not apparent even a decade ago, including changes in the landscape and even increases in wildfires.
Although the idea that there are serious ecosystem consequences to the removal of top predators isn't new, with this paper, "it's come of age," says Aaron Wirsing, a professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Washington in Seattle.
A gas company that legally doused a patch of West Virginia forest with salty wastewater from a drilling operation killed ground vegetation within days and more than half the trees within two years, a new report from the U.S. Forest Service says.
Try organic gardening and lawn care with cheap homemade herbicides that are easy on the environment. See how vinegar, boiling water, salt and other simple ingredients and techniques can tackle any weed problem.
Serious spills of oil and gas from North Sea platforms are occurring at the rate of one a week, undermining oil companies' claims to be doing everything possible to improve the safety of rigs.
Warming air from climate change isn't the only thing that will speed ice melting near the poles - so will the warming water beneath the ice, a new study points out.
But a report produced by the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability found:
Scientists are to end their 20-year reluctance to link climate change with extreme weather – the heavy storms, floods and droughts which often fill news bulletins – as part of a radical departure from a previous equivocal position that many now see as increasingly untenable.
