Monday, 17 Apr 2006

With all the coastal flooding, extreme weather, and bad hair days wrought by climate change, will any place in the world be safe for long? Today, a reader living below sea level in Belgium asks advice maven Umbra Fisk for relocation suggestions. She moves quickly to help him find dry land for his brood.

The Kittens Are Next ...

Global warming is bad news for baby walruses

It seems global warming is now separating babies from their mothers. Heartless bastard. The cute and bristly walrus makes its home on Arctic ice shelves, which are melting rapidly as unusually warm water flows in from the Bering Sea. As their happy walrus home melts and collapses, baby walruses can be separated from their mothers and swim out into deep waters, where they -- sniff -- drown. In the space of two months in 2004, a Coast Guard ship came across nine walrus calves swimming alone, a highly unusual sight. "[T]he calves would be swimming around us crying. We couldn't rescue them," says a member of the research team. Hear that? That's our heart breaking. Sea-ice melt also causes trouble for adult walruses, who find food by diving off of ice shelves into shallow waters. The conclusion of researchers: if the walruses (walri?) can't adapt to melting sea ice, we may see fewer of them in the future. And that could mean no more goo goo g'joob.


The children are our future, we always say. (We still love you, Whitney Houston!) So this Earth Week we're pleased to present as InterActivist sixth-grader Terrain Johnson, an ambitious aspiring green entrepreneur, alongside Colleen Contrisciane, a program coordinator for Earth Force, which gets kids involved in environmental campaigns. They chat about their ongoing fight against water pollution, the environmental vice they both share, and more. Send them a question of your own by noon PDT on Wednesday; we'll publish answers to selected questions on Friday.

They Put the "Dies" In "Subsidies"

Gulf of Mexico "dead zone" traced back to farm subsidies

You know that massive "dead zone" that shows up every year in the Gulf of Mexico? The oxygen-starved, life-free patch of water about the size of, oh, Connecticut? That's your tax dollars at work. The zone is caused largely by nitrogen-based fertilizers, which flow downriver from farms in a small set of counties in the Midwest -- farms the Department of Agriculture subsidized to the tune of some $30 billion between 1997 and 2002. In contrast, in that period conservation programs in those same counties received ... $75 million. Love those priorities. This info comes from a new study by the Environmental Working Group. "In the crudest sense, we're paying people to pollute," says an EWG ecologist. A multistate compact to shrink the dead zone to one-third its current size by 2015 has been ineffective so far, possibly because despite incentives, the program is voluntary. The hypoxic area is a major threat to Louisiana's fishing industry, one of the world's most productive.

Moderately Bueno!

Mexico City air is a little better than it used to be

Two decades ago, Mexico City's air was widely deemed the worst on the planet. Today, while the city of 20 million is still one of the world's most polluted, it's no longer top dog. (Several cities in China now dominate the charts.) A concerted effort to clear the Mexican capital's air led to the dismantling of a major oil refinery in 1991, the phaseout of leaded fuel, a restriction on the number of vehicles allowed inside the city on any given day, and the introduction of bus lanes. Respiratory problems are still prevalent, but aren't as bad as they used to be. Ground-level ozone pollution is now only a problem about 80 percent of the time. Suspended pollutant particles are only at unacceptable levels one day out of three. A Canadian resident of the city sums it up: "It's still bad, but it's much better than it used to be." We'll guzzle sangria to that! Of course, we were going to guzzle sangria anyway.