Eating locally raised food is a growing trend. But who has time to get to the farmer’s market, let alone plant a garden? That is where an entrepreneur in San Francisco comes in. For a fee, he will build an organic garden in your backyard, weed it weekly and even harvest the bounty, gently placing [...]
Baltimore moved a step closer to becoming one of the first cities in the nation to ban plastic bags at grocery stores and retail chains after the proposal made it through a critical City Council committee vote. Intended to keep the hard-to-degrade sacks from winding up in waterways or caught on tree branches, the proposal [...]
Ukrops Supermarkets is planning to convert used soy oil from the chicken fryers in its 11 Richmond stores to biodiesel for use in its delivery trucks. They plan to expand the program to all 28 stores, and they hope to produce 25% of the fuel that their trucks use each year. Read (Richmond Times Dispatch)
Between a quarter and a third of the world’s wildlife has been lost since 1970, according to data compiled by the Zoological Society of London. Populations of land-based species fell by 25%, marine by 28% and freshwater by 29%, it says. Humans are wiping out about 1% of all other species every year, and one [...]
Scientists say they may have discovered the reason why swarms of locusts are driven to devour such huge quantities of vegetation. They suggest that locusts combine into swarms because they are frightened of being eaten by each other. Read (BBC)
Conservationists swoon at the possibility of it all. In Alaska, where melting arctic ice and eroding coastlines have made global warming an urgent threat, Juneau has cut its electricity use by more than 30 percent in a matter of weeks, instantly establishing itself as a role model for how to go green, and fast. Comfort [...]
Children who live in tree-lined streets have lower rates of asthma, a New York-based study suggests. Columbia University researchers found that asthma rates among children aged four and five fell by 25% for every extra 343 trees per square kilometer. They believe more trees may aid air quality or simply encourage children to play outside, [...]
Thousands of farmers are taking their fields out of the government’s biggest conservation program, which pays them not to cultivate. They are spurning guaranteed annual payments for a chance to cash in on the boom in wheat, soybeans, corn and other crops. Last fall, they took back as many acres as are in Rhode Island [...]
It’s a simple fact of life across the rural West, as it is in Montana’s mountain-ringed Big Hole River Valley. Flooding river bottoms to grow hay sustains the economy but means less water in the river for the prized wild trout population. The competition for water is not new, but it is intensifying as the [...]
Tagged troutEvery evening, a 45-car train rumbles away from the Clark Fork River, loaded not with copper, gold or silver ore, but with the toxic legacy of more than a century of mining: tons of contaminated mud from behind an old dam. Workers are removing 2.2 million cubic yards of the muck — and dismantling the [...]
Tagged Environment, troutAs many as 50 million birds are killed annually in US cell-tower collisions. As more towers go up, builders and researchers eye solutions. Today FAA regulations require both steady red lights and flashing red or flashing white ones. What Gehring found: Solid steady red lights were a big problem – creating an aura during cloudy [...]
In what is one of the worst calamities to hit bat populations in the United States, on average 90 percent of the hibernating bats in four caves and mines in New York have died since last winter. Wildlife biologists fear a significant die-off in about 15 caves and mines in New York, as well as [...]
Long a familiar sight on the roads of Europe and Asia, motorized scooters are still relatively rare in the United States. While much of the world views them as a practical – and often stylish – necessity, they’ve occupied more of a niche market in the car-centric US, where scooter riders were perhaps justifiably seen [...]
Starting today, Raleigh, N.C. becomes the nation’s only city to outlaw garbage disposals. Officials say the appliances allow grease to accumulate in sewers, leading to sewage spills. While people who already have them can keep using them, no new ones can be installed. Raleigh’s mayor hopes residents will start composting their food scraps. Many homeowners [...]
Sandbars—from small nooks and crannies to some the size of football fields—were formed by an artificial flood unleashed on the Grand Canyon. On a couple of big sandbars there were already beaver tracks, bighorn sheep tracks. Whatever benefits come from this year’s flood will be eroded within 18 months because additional floods are needed every [...]
In the last few years, an increasing number of Americans have turned their yards over to such mini orchards, planting them with dwarf and semi-dwarf fruit trees, even in dense urban areas. The backyard orchard makes sense, given the growing popularity of the local-food movement. Nothing is more local than the backyard, after all, and [...]
Roughly 5 to 10 percent of global CO2 emissions are related to the manufacture and transportation of cement, a major ingredient of concrete. With cement production expected to grow exponentially in coming decades, the industry is trying to address its environmental challenges. The manufacture of cement is relatively efficient when compared with other building materials, [...]
It was a farm idea with a big payoff and supposedly no downside: ridding lakes and rivers of raw sewage and industrial pollution by converting it all into a free, nutrient-rich fertilizer. Then last week, a federal judge ordered the Agriculture Department to compensate a farmer whose land was poisoned by sludge from a waste [...]
Hunting is on the decline across the nation as participation has fallen over the last three decades, and states have begun trying to bolster this rural tradition by attracting new and younger people to the sport. In West Virginia, state lawmakers gave final approval to a bill that allows hunting education classes in all schools [...]
As part of a research experiment believed to be among the first of its kind, an organic apple farmer in Michigan is using pigs to help protect his fruit from a tiny insect that is among the most destructive apple pests. More than two dozen porkers patrol his orchard, gobbling down fallen, immature apples containing [...]