"Like so many of the planet's natural habitats, wetlands have been systematically destroyed over the past 300 years. Bogs, fens, marshes and swamps have disappeared from maps and memory, having been drained, dug up and built on. Peatlands, a particular type of wetland, store at least twice the carbon of all the world's forests."
The cuteness of the fuzzy koala appears not to be winning it special protection in its native Australia, despite dwindling numbers, per a new volume on the endangered marsupial. BookShelf contributor Melody Kemp offers praise for “Koala: A Natural History and an Uncertain Future,” with a review that begins amusingly with bodily functions but ends dispiritedly with yet more koala habitat lost to housing tracts and wildfire.
"The National Park Service earlier this year completed its largest transfer of bison from Yellowstone National Park to the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Poplar, Mont."
"If you wanted to kill as many people as possible, deniably and with no criminal consequences, what would you do? You’d do well to start with a bird flu."
As part of our 2023 Journalists’ Guide to Energy & Environment special report, we’ve got highlights from last week’s reporter panel on the year ahead, led by #SEJ2023 conference co-chair Tom Michael (pictured, left). The focus was largely on the U.S. West, where challenges abound over issues like equitable siting of renewable energy infrastructure, regulating natural gas, managing wildfires and addressing the health consequences of climate-driven heat waves. Read our account, plus check out the full 2023 Guide.
"One year after the Super Bowl season was marred by a ban on Mexican avocado shipments, another threat has emerged: An environmental complaint that avocado growers are destroying forests that provide critical habitat for monarch butterflies and other creatures."
"Armed government officials with Brazil’s justice, Indigenous and environment ministries pressed illegal gold miners out of Yanomami Indigenous territory Wednesday, citing widespread river contamination, famine and disease they have brought to one of the most isolated groups in the world."
"In the last eight years there have been 535 mountain lions reported killed on California highways — a steady toll of one to two each week that scientists suggest may exceed the reproductive rate of increasingly isolated and inbred puma clans."
"The largest ever outbreak of bird flu is spilling over into mammals, including otters and foxes in the UK."
"The South is experiencing its earliest spring in 40 years of records, while spring is days to weeks early across the East Coast and Pacific Northwest".
Advertisement 
