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Relax, It’s Just Pollution
EPA relaxes industry pollution-reporting rules In a holiday gift to industry, the U.S. EPA has relaxed rules on reporting toxic pollution. Under rule amendments approved yesterday, industrial plants will not […]
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Borneo to Be Wild
Scientists discover 52 new species on the island of Borneo Over the last 17 months, scientists have identified 52 new plant and animal species in the rainforests of Borneo, a […]
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Page Advice
What are the top environmental books? Just in time for slackers who haven’t finished their holiday shopping, Gristmill columnist Peter Madden of Forum for the Future has surveyed his colleagues […]
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Cheap forests and carbon sinks
A recently formed company ... has purchased 440,000 acres of timber land in southern Oregon for $108 million, officials said. [Emphasis added.]
Just in case you were wondering how much land that is: the sale covers nearly 700 square miles, an area well over half the size of the state of Rhode Island. Of course, Rhode Island is tiny, as states go. But it seems like a lot of land, and at a bargain basement price, to boot. At $245 per acre, even I could afford to become a real estate mogul. Heck, some houses cost more than $108 million.
Silliness aside, this sale makes me wonder whether a carbon trading system -- where polluters have to pay for emissions reductions or sequestration -- might create huge opportunities for ecosystem restoration.
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Like a Top 10 list, without 10
This isn't a top ten list -- I couldn't find that many signs of hope! And yes, I realize that some items on the list are only holding actions. The exercise was a little depressing; I had to wade through a year's worth of stories describing ecological devastation to come up with these.
Given all that, I would still say that 2006 was the best year the cause of environmentalism has seen in decades. I suspect that Grist, along with its readers and commenters, played a bigger part in that than most realize. May that trend continue and accelerate through 2007 and beyond. The list begins below the fold:
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A top ten list from the U.K.
Peter Madden, chief executive of Forum for the Future, writes a monthly column for Gristmill on sustainability in the U.K. and Europe.
What are the most important environmental books? At Forum for the Future, we polled 100 staff and colleagues from around the U.K. for the green books that had most influenced us, and came up with our top 10. The list spans the last 50 years, and contains the usual suspects -- as well as a few surprises.
Small Is Beautiful and Silent Spring are the runaway winners, and the top 10 also contains one novel, one children's book, and one autobiography. While a couple of titles on the list are peculiarly British, others have had a global impact.
It's interesting to see what didn't get the votes. There are no wildlife or wilderness classics, and no overt spirituality. Would that be different if this were an American list, I wonder?
And there's no place for a number of classic reference texts -- no Limits to Growth, Our Common Future, or State of the World. This might have something to do with the fact that great sources of information are not always the most riveting of reads.
Here's the top 10 in full:
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Summer Arctic ice could nearly disappear by mid-century, and more
Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: Santa’s Gonna Be Pissed Mileage in Mirror Is Smaller Than It Appears Unusual Weather We’re Having, Ain’t It? We’ll Be […]
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Kunstler on the xmas classics
Veering dangerously close to self-parody, but not quite crossing the line, Scroogian apocaphile James Howard Kunstler deconstructs that Christmas fave of young and old, It's a Wonderful Life:
