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Mexican police conduct anti-logging raid in butterfly habitat

Hundreds of Mexican police raided illegal sawmills near a monarch butterfly reserve yesterday in “the largest seizure of illegally logged wood in the country’s history,” according to the attorney general’s […]

Barge collides with tanker, spilling 2.7 million gallons of oil off South Korean coast

A barge collided with a massive oil tanker this morning about five miles off the coast of South Korea, damaging the tanker’s single hull in three places and resulting in […]

China’s population rapidly rising

The population of China is projected to grow to a staggering 1.5 billion people by not-so-far-off 2033. And they’ll be staggering because they can’t breathe the air.

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NASA has bold plans to … send rodents into orbit

A while back I blogged on the folly of NASA's Moon-Mars program, and how it's killing real science the agency could be doing. Yesterday I received an email from NASA alerting me to a new funding opportunity:

Part of “Healthy Forests” law struck down by court for skirting eco-reviews

A key part of the Bush administration’s “Healthy Forests” law, passed in 2003, was effectively struck down this week by a federal appeals court. The “hazardous fuels reduction” rule let […]

Bycatch is the ugliest thing you never see in the fish market

Commercial fishing creates a mind-boggling amount of waste, at least 7.3 million tons (PDF) annually of discarded fish ("bycatch") which are either unwanted, illegal to keep, or mangled in the gear. And this number from 2004 is a conservative estimate, not fully accounting for several major fishing countries.

Marine photographer Brian Skerry has some very intense imagery that illustrates this phenomenon, and he's provided a couple here for your interest (more are at his site: look under portfolios for global fisheries). The first one shows discarded fish raining into the depths from a small vessel: the second, below the fold, shows three shrimp caught in an hour of towing a net in tropical waters: what's under the shrimp is the incredible pile of unwanted critters which died for that meager handful.

Bush admin ignored best science when considering sage grouse species protections

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service must reconsider its decision not to list the greater sage grouse under the Endangered Species Act, a federal judge ruled this week. The judge […]

Australia ratifies Kyoto Protocol, over a quarter of U.S. bird species imperiled, and more

Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: No Continent Is an Island A Beak Outlook Angrier By the Dozen It’s Really A Musing Good Car-ma

Remember how we urgently need to bomb Iran to destroy their active nuclear weapons program?

Turns out not so much.