What the climate’s ‘new normal’ is doing to Lake Superior
The lake and its shoreline communities are experiencing a series of climate impacts that run queasily parallel to the problems of saltwater coasts that have become familiar in recent decades.
Earth Journal
Earth Journal aims to clarify environmental issues in the news, lend proportion and perspective to competing claims, and engage MinnPost readers in exploring subjects that lie beyond the headlines — with a special emphasis on solutions to environmental challenges.
With parasitic mites in ascendance, honeybee losses reach a grim new high
A principal researcher says he worries about commercial beekeepers, not their honeybees, disappearing if trends continue.
What the historic floods of 2019 show about the folly of engineering U.S. rivers
Great recent reads on disrupted river transport nationwide, a long history of trying to make the Mississippi behave, and the ongoing crisis in getting barges through New Orleans.
Once a world leader in creating public lands, U.S. now leads in shrinking them
The driver is industrial use, like mining and logging, and the pace of lifting protections is accelerating.
New energy finance still flows heavily to the same old fuels, global study finds
The world is off-track for long-term sustainability, and maybe for meeting short-term demand growth as well.
Air pollution may damage every organ in the human body, research review finds
Fine particulates are linked to cataracts; also, they may travel directly from nose to brain, bypassing lungs.
Air pollution afflicts nearly all of U.S. national parks, 33 at city-like levels
If you’re planning to visit Sequoia this summer, best check for smog alerts; on many days the ozone is as bad as L.A.’s.
Great reads: ‘Cancer Alley,’ un-wilding Kenya and fighting a California inferno
The 10,000 residents of Reserve, Louisiana, have a pollution-driven cancer risk 50 times the U.S. average, and little reason to think the EPA will help them.
Environmental review in Minnesota: a brief history of its birth and decline
Contrary to what you may have heard, Minnesota’s Environmental Quality Board requires full environmental impact statements for only a handful of projects each year.
A new survey of the Arctic chronicles a system that’s falling apart
Arctic temperatures have risen more than twice as much as the Northern Hemisphere overall — in winter, nearly three times as much.
What’s driving amphibian decline? The world’s worst disease for biodiversity
A pair of fungi are implicated in 501 species declines, exceeding the havoc caused by rats — and house cats.
New book explains the origins of the invasive carp crisis — and how we didn’t get here by accident
Andrew Reeves’ “Overrun” demonstrates convincingly how this crisis, decades in the making, was no unforeseeable convergence of accidents and errors.
From new jobs for coal country to the moose’s long decline, some great reads
Also: Why unfunded cleanup costs are a virtual certainty in mining for copper, nickel and other metals.
Now we know how much global warming is reducing the world’s seafood harvest
The study finds an overall decline in sustainable fish catch of 4.1 percent worldwide. It represents an annual loss in seafood production of about 1.4 million metric tons, or a bit over 3 billion pounds.
EPA enforcement actions, under Trump, are declining at historically steep pace
The total of civil penalties collected from polluters “was the lowest in both actual and inflation-adjusted dollars since at least 1994.”
World food supply relies on biodiversity, now declining at a disturbing pace
Our collective choices undermine security, too: Of 6,000 plant species cultivated for food, just nine account for two-thirds of global crop production.
A bright spot in dark times: Congress advances a major public-lands package
The White House is expected to give its blessing to what, by general agreement of the environmental commentariat, is the most extensive advance in protecting public lands and waters for at least 10 years.
The ‘Green New Deal’ isn’t all that new — but maybe this idea’s time has come
Thomas L. Friedman gets credit for coining the term in 2007, but others were thinking along these lines still earlier.
Northern lakes are losing their ice cover at an accelerating rate
An example of the coming unpredictability is Madison’s iconic Lake Mendota, where ice used to form early and last all season; this winter it has reopened and refrozen twice so far.
Wood-eating marine pests might offer a path to renewable energy breakthrough
The same protein that makes bugs’ blood blue can break down the main barrier to making cheap, clean energy from woody biomass.
