Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans

For more than 50 years microbiologists have warned against using antibiotics to fatten up farm animals. The practice, they argue, threatens human health by turning farms into breeding grounds of drug-resistant bacteria. Farmers responded that restricting antibiotics in livestock would devastate the industry and significantly raise costs to consumers. We now have empirical data that should resolve this debate. Since 1995 Denmark has enforced progressively tighter rules on the use of antibiotics in the raising of pigs, poultry and other livestock. In the process, it has shown that it is possible to protect human health without hurting farmers.

‎”Beautiful” clouds and cold temps are destroying protective Arctic ozone—and people as far south as New York could get burned, experts say.

In the wee hours of Friday morning, delegates attending the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity in Nagoya, Japan, reached an ambitious agreement to save the world’s ecosystems. Representing almost 200 countries, the delegates pledged to protect 17 per cent of land and inland waters and 10 per cent of the oceans by 2020. Today, 13 per cent of land is protected but only 1 per cent of the oceans.

A report by the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations recently concluded that the ocean doesn’t have nearly enough fish left to support the current onslaught. Indeed, the report suggests that even if we had half as many boats, hooks, and nets as we do now, we would still end up catching too many fish.

(Source: crookedindifference)

In early August, a high-level U.S. government official asserted that more than three-quarters of the oil from the Gulf spill was “gone”—based on preliminary National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates. Since then a fiery backlash has erupted from independent scientists who have been tracking and studying the spill.

“The oil budget NOAA came out with was just a joke, a fairy tale scenario,” said Samantha Joye, a marine biogeochemist from the University of Georgia and one of the first researchers to detect and measure the deep plumes of oil. “I understand why people want it to disappear, but who in their right mind would believe that? It makes absolutely no sense.”

Scientists on a research vessel in the Gulf of Mexico are finding a substantial layer of oily sediment stretching for dozens of miles in all directions. Their discovery suggests that a lot of oil from the Deepwater Horizon didn’t simply evaporate or dissipate into the water — it has settled to the seafloor.

Scientists are still assessing the ecological damage wrought by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year. Other researchers, however, are looking at subtler signs of the disaster’s potential impacts on human health.

MORE energy is wasted in the perfectly edible food discarded by people in the US each year than is extracted annually from the oil and gas reserves off the nation’s coastlines.

In the intervening years, Rosenzweig hasn’t backed down. “The attitude we’ve had for 100 years is, let’s save habitats. We’ll have remnant patches and call them national parks and wildlife refuges. That slows extinction down, but it doesn’t change the endpoint,” he said. Mass extinctions won’t be avoided “unless we turn our attention to the habitats we haven’t paid attention to, that we haven’t even called habitats.”

In Tucson, those ignored habitats are backyards, schoolyards and the mosaic of neighborhoods and businesses typical of America’s suburban sprawl. Rosenzweig wants to arrange their habitats with a program built on a database of life-history characteristics on 300 local plant species, plus natural history records gathered from a century of research on Tumamoc Hill, an 870-acre island of relatively undisturbed desert west of downtown.