OnEarth magazine

Great Stories, Great Solutions A Survival Guide for the Planet

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Putin' On a Show: It's nice to see Vlad raising awareness for the highly endangered snow and Persian leopards - but here's why the rehabilitation center for this Olympic mascot is all PR and no purr.

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Meet the Sochi Mascots: A snow leopard, a gummy bear, and a Teletubby. Right? Keeping with the mascot tradition of Olympics past, they're ambiguously adorable.

Sochi is in the news today for less adorable reasons:

"Poisoned drinking water, illegal landfills, flooding, the fronts of houses falling off—these are just some of the complaints coming from people living near Sochi, Russia, the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics."

Read about this and more of the day’s best environmental news and #greenreads from around the web at Today OnEarth.

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Followed my friend Mike and his 9-year-old son over lichen-colored rock and fallen trees tangled with grapevine. Mike carried a box of white laboratory mice, the protocol being to offer up to four mice, one at a time, to any Mexican spotted owl we happened to see in this narrow canyon in the Gila National Forest of southwestern New Mexico. If that owl were to swoop down, grab the mouse, and eat it on the spot, it probably did not have hungry nestlings nearby. But if the owl were to swoop down, grab the mouse, and take her prey away—and if we were to track the flap of those chestnut-colored wings through ponderosa pine, following that suddenly flying mouse—then we might discover a nest of piteously ugly and relatively rare Mexican spotted owlets (Strix occidentalis lucida).

It all sounded improbable to me. But Mike is a gifted naturalist, and the U.S. government was paying him to camp out, hoot between dusk and dawn, wait for answering hoots, and confirm the location of any breeding pairs of Mexican spotted owls. One of those pairs frequented this canyon, where Douglas fir grew along the rocky bottom; where the sky had darkened now to a cobalt river above our heads; and where the scale was intimate, nothing grand, the original feng shui. Story by Sharman Apt Russell continued here...

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A View from the Vortex: OnEarth's Photo Gallery

Very glad these intrepid photographers were working while I was sleeping. Thanks guys. Hope you still have all your fingers.

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Greg Laden offers a clear, scientific explanation of the weather phenomenon in his post, Go Home Arctic, You're Drunk.

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Winter does not disprove global warming: Good to know. Donald Trump and Doge much confused.

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OnEarth Magazine sent Reportage photographer Marco Di Lauro to Liberia earlier this year to document the environmental and social effects of oil palm production, which consumes an increasing amount of forest and farmland. In the accompanying article, reporter Jocelyn Zuckerman writes:

The oil palm companies in Liberia enjoyed a brief honeymoon. (In addition to GVL, the Malaysian corporation Sime Darby runs a 769,000-acre operation in the north of the country.) But it wasn’t long before local communities began to cry foul. Villagers I met during a visit to the Sime Darby concession accused the company of destroying their crops and grave sites, polluting streams, displacing residents by force, and failing to get “free, prior, and informed consent” before clearing their land. The work of planting and watering the oil palm was too hard, they said, the wages too low, and safety equipment inadequate or nonexistent.

Read the online version of the story here.

Marco Di Lauro, an award-winning photojournalist, joined Getty Images in 2002, covering international news stories in the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa and Italy. Marco’s main topics are war and religion: he has covered the wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and the second intifada between Israel and Palestine. He is based in Rome and available for assignment.

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  Today OnEarth: A Toxic Explosion Rocks Texas, Don't Mess with Nebraska, Eat the Fish Eating the Atlantic

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Just got chilly in here: Following last month's announcement that British curriculum guidelines for elementary-school-aged children would essentially be skipping over the topic of climate change, public outcry has been fervid. Now Sir David Attenborough -- the Gandalf of British environmentalism -- is adding his remarkable voice to the fray. Guardian

Plans to drop climate debate from national curriculum 'unacceptable' | The Guardian

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This bottle redeemable for $150,000: A Colombian activist who helped organize the work of Bogota's 5,000 impoverished waste-pickers and recyclers has been honored for her efforts with a Goldman Environmental Prize, awarded by the eponymous San Francisco-based foundation that annually recognizes one "grassroots warrior" from each of the globe's six inhabited continents. Nohra Padilla grew up poor, picking through the trash in Bogota dumps before becoming an organizer and recycling activist. Now, in addition to the $150,000 prize, she can enjoy a new degree of social acceptance for waste-picking -- which, thanks to her efforts, has resulted in 1,500 tons of recyclable material collected daily that gets resold in international markets, and in city-issued paychecks for the people picking it all up. Los Angeles Times:  Colombian activist's work earns environmental prize

More of the day’s best environmental news and #greenreads from around the web at Today OnEarth.

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Stop, thieves: You can't just walk into the corner store and take a bottle of water without paying for it, right? Well the same goes for industries that remove water from the ground beneath Pennsylvania, says the head of that state's Fish and Boat Commission, who's considering imposing a fee on water "extracted by industry and permanently removed from the environment." The Pennsylvania Constitution makes explicit that Pennsylvania's water is owned by Pennsylvanians, he says -- and they should be paid a fair price for its removal. But "the bottled water industry, for instance, pays nothing to remove the water that it treats, packages and mostly ships out of the state. The Marcellus Shale natural gas industry also extracts water for free, since the process of hydraulic fracturing pumps water so far below the water table it is rendered unusable." Associated Press

More of the day’s best environmental news and #greenreads from around the web at Today OnEarth.

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Press pause: Last Friday was the deadline for the EPA's decision to begin imposing greenhouse-gas limits on all new power plants. Last Friday was also -- as was expected -- the day that the EPA gave itself an extension, citing the need to review more of the 2 million comments that the proposal has generated: a delay widely seen as a necessary measure for making the strongest case possible. Washington Post

More of the day’s best environmental news and #greenreads from around the web at Today OnEarth.

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Saving desert for last: What, so pumping your filthy tar-sands oil through the middle of the American Grain Belt isn't enough for you, Canada? Now you want to dig up and ruin our national forests, too? A Canadian speculative mining outfit is planning "to blast a mile-wide, half-mile deep copper mine on 4,000 acres of the [Santa Rita] mountains, 50 miles southeast of Tucson," in Arizona’s Coronado National Forest. The battle over the mine -- which is opposed by farmers, ranchers, environmentalists, and Tucson's mayor -- has highligted the urgent "need to reform a 141-year-old law that governs hard rock mining on federal lands."  Proposed Copper Mine in Arizona Highlights Weakness of Federal Mining Laws |Earth Island Journal

More of the day’s best environmental news and #greenreads from around the web at Today OnEarth.

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  Today OnEarth: Canada Digs (up) Arizona, Recognizing a Recycling Hero, Sir David Speaks Out

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Put on a happy face: Given how dire lots of our current problems are (see above), can environmentalists look on the bright side? One of our fellow nonprofit enviro publications is going to give it a try ... for a whole month (or, well, the amount of April they’ve got left, considering they’re off to a bit of a late start). Good luck there, guys. Let us know how it goes. Grist: April is Happiness Month at Grist

More of the day's best environmental news and #greenreads from around the web at Today OnEarth.

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Drought denial?: A new study says that last year’s Midwestern drought was a freak occurrence not caused by climate change. Not so fast, says the climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who contends that the study didn’t take into account lots of global warming-related factors, including the dearth of snowfall in the Rocky Mountains, which affects the overall moisture in the atmosphere and thus rainfall during the summer months. We suspect lots of people are going to be arguing about this one for a while to come. Associated Press: Report: Global warming didn't cause big US drought

More of the day's best environmental news and #greenreads from around the web at Today OnEarth.

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You so crazy: Does believing that NASA faked the Apollo moon landing or that the Queen killed Princess Di make you more like to buy the idea that scientists the world over are making up global warming as a way to gin up more research grants (or something)? New research suggests yes -- climate denial goes hand in hand with the acceptance of other paranoid conspiracy theories. New Yorker: New Research: The Psychology of Conspiracy Theorists and Climate Change Deniers

More of the day's best environmental news and #greenreads from around the web at Today OnEarth.