"One of Canada's top experts on Arctic issues is warning of the 'near-inevitability' of an Exxon Valdez-scale oil spill at a fragile choke point in Alaskan waters if Canada ends up shipping oilsands fuel to China via pipeline terminals on the British Columbia coast."
Houston-based freelance writer and photographer Wendee Holtcamp has covered conservation, adventure travel, environmental issues and science for magazines and websites since 1997. She offers an online writing class, teaching aspiring and established writers everything from improving one's writing through observation journaling to crafting killer queries to the business end of building a successful and lucrative freelance career. Next class starts June 2.
"SALMON, Idaho -- The U.S. government is seeking to close caves in national forests in the Northern Rockies to stem the spread of white-nose bat syndrome, a disease that has killed an estimated 5.5 million bats in 19 states and is spreading westward, officials said on Wednesday."
A Chicago Tribune investigative series on flame retardant chemicals helps illustrate how federal agency control of what scientists say to reporters can help the chemical and tobacco industries. By reporter Michael Hawthorne.
Freelance writer William Souder has reported on a wide variety of environmental subjects and is the author of three books, including the forthcoming On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson, marking the 50th anniversary of Carson's Silent Spring — and, by extension, a half century of environmentalism.
"Something awful is happening in the waters off Peru's northern coast, where some 3,000 dolphins have died and washed ashore since January. This rates as one of the worst, if not the worst, Unusual Mortality Event (UME) ever recorded. ...
"Polar bears are capable of swimming vast distances, a potential survival skill needed in an Arctic environment where summer sea ice is vanishing, a study led by the U.S. Geological Survey showed on Tuesday."
"Pacific reef shark populations have plummeted by 90 percent or more over the past several decades, according to a new study by a team of American and Canadian researchers, and much of this decline stems from human fishing pressure.
Quantifying the decline for the first time, the analysis, published online Friday in the journal Conservation Biology, shows that shark populations fare worse the closer they are to people — even if the nearest population is an atoll with fewer than 100 residents.
The US Agriculture Department's Wildlife Services agency, at farmer request, kills predators that may harm farm animals. But critics say it does serious harm to non-target species and uses needlessly cruel and indiscriminate methods.
Harbor porpoises began disappearing from San Francisco Bay during the height of Navy ship activity there during World War II. "We don't know why they disappeared. … It's very possible that they just abandoned the place because it became too hard to feed, reproduce and raise their young," said William Keener, a co-investigator and spokesman with the nonprofit Golden Gate Cetacean Research group. "Then all of a sudden, the porpoises were back."
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