Ecological News

The Interior Department today announced plans to significantly downsize a George W. Bush administration plan to develop oil shale in the West, a move likely to spark fury among Capitol Hill Republicans.

The U.S. government will require natural gas drillers to disclose which chemicals they use in hydraulic fracturing on public lands, according to draft rules crafted by the Interior Department.

While the Canadian and provincial governments at first proposed that a plan to implement monitoring of oilsands extraction be controlled by the government and conducted, in part, by an industry-financed operation, a group of scientists insisted that the monitoring be independent and include aboriginal participation. The scientists prevailed.

It’s no surprise that oil companies, labor unions, environmental groups and an association of pipe manufacturers would want to lobby Congress about the Keystone XL pipeline. But Quakers? The American Jewish Committee? The makers of John Deere tractors?

The tiny black bivalves dislodged on a frigid afternoon were too puny for any self-respecting chef to serve up on a steaming plate. No, these mussels were headed for an eventual trip to a Texas lab where scientists plan to sample their tissues for more than 100 contaminants.

The massive radioactive fallout from the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant has sparked fear in seafood lovers and commercial fishermen both at home and abroad, and some worry the contamination could pass through and even become more concentrated in the ocean food chain.

The future air quality in Allegheny County may be determined by pending federal standards concerning air pollution that crosses state lines.

A preliminary report by the State Department of Health into “Tourette-like symptoms” has ruled out infectious or environmental public health concerns.

The Hanford nuclear facility in Washington state is the largest, most complex and most expensive environmental cleanup effort in the world. USA Today’s investigative reporter, Peter Eisler, says the project is over-due, over-budget and still quite dangerous.

For once, the sound of construction trucks is music to the ears of Lake Barrington residents who have complained for decades about a sprawling, illegal dump that is now undergoing a final cleanup by the Illinois EPA.

A state House panel is considering a bipartisan measure that would ban the sale of baby products that contain bisphenol A, an organic chemical that has been linked to reproductive problems in laboratory animals.

Tests reveal parts of the Acid Brook, which run through the former site of the DuPont explosives factory, have been recontaminated with toxic metals and chemicals – more than 15 years after the company and the federal government said the tributary was entirely cleaned.

Researchers are questioning results from a high-profile paper suggesting that malaria may kill twice as many people worldwide as previously estimated. The statistical analysis, published yesterday in The Lancet nearly doubles the World Health Organization estimate of global malaria deaths in 2010, revising the figure upwards from 655,000 to 1.24 million.

Malaria kills more than 1.2 million people worldwide a year, nearly twice as many as previously thought, according to new research published on Friday that questions years of assumptions about the mosquito-borne disease.

Kids who were breastfed as babies may have better lung function, and a lower risk of asthma, than those who were formula-fed, two new reports suggest.

Temperatures have plunged to new lows in Europe, where a week-long cold snap has now claimed more than 220 lives as forecasters warned that the big freeze would tighten its grip over the weekend.

Council has failed to address the social determinants leading to diarrheal diseases – typhoid included – and is appealing for Government's intervention to holistically arrest the crisis, a senior official admitted yesterday.

The famine is over in Somalia thanks to good rains, a bumper harvest and donor aid, but the next 90 days will be critical to ensure the country does not slip back into extreme hunger, United Nations officials have said.

Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy. They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.

Like a science fiction fantasy, the Yucca Mountain repository was intended as a permanent store for a small mountain of lethal waste accumulated in more than half a century of American nuclear activity, civilian and military.