This is news from a couple weeks ago. Nonetheless, worth writing about and bringing to more people. Also, there is a petition going around on this and if you haven’t signed it yet, I imagine you would like to. And one more important way to help ensure this kind of thing doesn’t happen (or happens less) is by donating to your local SPCA, as the new “One Dollar for One Dog Challenge” Facebook page advocates.

Basically, the story is, British Columbia saw a slump in tourism at Outdoor Adventures Whistler following the 2010 Winter Olympics, so an employee there was ordered to kill 100 sled dogs that were no longer needed by the company.

What happens to that mass of garbage and waste when a land-fill is full? New research is hoping to show that turning the whole area into vegetation will be a real benefit for the environment.

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientist Pat Millner and safety manager David Prevar have worked with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and private consultants to design and conduct a pilot study for an alternative way to cap landfills.

Northern Australia has suffered its fair share of trials and tribulations these past few months, with floods burying huge swathes of Queensland under water only to be hit by one of the most powerful cyclones ever to hit the country.

Extreme rain events such as these may be a growing trend though, according to new research.

Genetically engineered salmon may be approved any day now.
By now, you’ve probably heard Obama’s salmon joke. The one that induced laughter in an otherwise largely divided Congress during his State of the Union last night. Calling out the often complicated, bureaucratic nature of government regulation, Obama said:

The Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they’re in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them when they’re in saltwater. And I hear it gets even more complicated once they’re smoked.

Researchers have found a plant with a genetic mutation that allows it to survive drought better without losing any mass.  This discovery could potentially lead to plants that are bred to survive in low-water conditions, perhaps reducing the amount of water used for agriculture.

Stomata and Water Use
If you recall from biology, plants have pores – or stomata – that they can open and close to regulate how much carbon dioxide they take in and how much water they release.  A plant would close it’s stomata during a drought to conserve water, which is essential to its survival; however, when a plant does this, the mass of the plant suffers.  So when crops are in drought conditions, they produce less food.

According to new research published in the latest edition of the journal Nature Geoscience the current impact of CO2 on the atmosphere will have lasting effects for the next thousand years, in the best case scenario.

Within the proposed thousand years, the computer simulations created saw climate change patterns reversing in places such as Canada, desertification in North Africa as the land dries out by up to 30 percent, and ocean warming by up to 5°C in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica is likely to cause the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet and cause a sea level rise of at least four metres.

Earlier this month the fisheries minister of Belize announced that all forms of trawling will be banned in Belize effective December 31, 2010.

Oceana, especially Oceana’s vice president for Belize, Audrey Matura-Shepherd, led the push to get bottom trawling banned, opening an office in Belize to tackle this matter last year. Additionally, UNESCO has been putting a lot of pressure on the country to change fishing practices there. It threatened to take the Belize Barrier Reef System of its World Heritage Site status.

The state-run Nepal Electricity Authority has had to cut power for 11 hours a day beginning this week, because river water levels have dropped dramatically, according to AllHeadlineNews.

With its steep terrain topped by glaciers, Nepal has the greatest hydro power potential in the world, at 84,000 megawatts. To date, only a small portion of that has been developed, 600 megawatts – enough to serve a small population who live a much less energy-intensive life than people in the US.

We depend on bees and other pollinators to pollinate our crops to produce food.  In recent years, there has been a marked decline in the number of pollinators due to colony collapse disorder (CCD) – a syndrome that wipes out entire colonies of domesticated bees.  The exact cause of CCD is unknown but it is thought to be a virus and it doesn’t appear to yet affect wild pollinators.

Researchers at the Pennsylvania State University have been studying virus transmission between domesticated bees and wild bees to determine if a virus could be transmitted from a domesticated colony to a wild colony.  The conclusions are grim.

Humanity has moved about in such a way, disrupting many fragile ecosystems the world over, and introduced new and often harmful species into these environments, to a point that mass extinction could be on its way, according to a new study that looked at the effect invasive species have and had on biodiversity.

“We refer to the Late Devonian as a mass extinction, but it was actually a biodiversity crisis,” said Alycia Stigall, a scientist at Ohio University and author of the PLoS ONE paper.

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, otherwise known as DARPA, has been developing next generation solar technology and a slew of other game-changing innovations designed to drive the military into a more sustainable future. The latest example is a new kind of  bioplastic made from yeast. And what, you may ask, does bioplastic have to do with national defense?

Bioplastic and National Defense
As it turns out, bioplastic has everything to do with national defense.  Disposing of waste is part and parcel of the “logistical nightmare” and troop risk equation that fossil fuels pose for overseas bases. Whether trucked off site to landfills or burned on site, the disposal operation requires fuel and plenty of it. Just to give you some idea of the volume involved, a couple of years ago the military’s Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) estimated that the 135,000 U.S. troops stationed in Iraq were generating 446 million pounds of plastic waste annually.

Is there or isn’t there a breeding population of cougars in the region immediately west of and in the northern Great Lakes states?

The question has arisen again after news that a dead cougar found in southwest Minnesota is of indeterminate gender.  Had the animal been clearly identified as female, the likelihood would increase that a breeding population has been established outside the nearest known population in the Black Hills of South Dakota.