Daily Archives: January 3, 2009

Photo courtesy of Fondation Brigitte Bardot

Three years ago, customs agents discovered dozens of pieces of endangered baboons and monkeys hidden in a package filled with smoked fish at Kennedy Airport. (Guess huge pieces of monkey meat in fish filets are easier to spot than lead paint in kids’ toys, huh?) Monkey skulls, limbs, and torsos were all discovered in the contents, which the package’s owner, Mamie Manneh, apparently had shipped from Africa.

Her defense up until now was

Image courtesy of Velvet da Vinci

Anyone familiar with the art gallery scene knows it’s a dog eat dog world out there for artists—but Hilary Pfeifer’s new exhibit “Natural Selection” gives a whole new meaning to survival of the fittest. Her “installation within an installation” opening on January 9th at the Velvet da Vinci Gallery in San Francisco appears at first glimpse to be a straightforward greenhouse—but step inside, and you’ll find a

Image courtesy of California Safe Schools

To celebrate its 10th anniversary, the California Safe Schools organization gathered luminaries of the environmental health and children’s education world together for a program called “Your Life is Now.” The event featured speeches from high profile educators and environmentalists, and an award ceremony that honored two of the highest profilers of all—California EPA Secretary Linda Adams and Congresswoman Hilda Solis

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Image courtesy of Good

Green has gone mainstream—there’s no doubt about that now. Celebrities touting their “green” lifestyles, corporations announcing “green” initiative after “green” initiative, and politicians publicly calling for “green” legislation and policies all relentlessly graced the airwaves and internet pages throughout 2008. But was last year the year when eco-verbiage finally came to be much too much?

Chainsaw As Climate Adaptation Tool: Image credit:Chainsaw Art, Funny Part

As the Canadian climate has warmed, pine beetles have spread across vast acreages of Canadian forest land: estimated to presently constitute 7 percent of Earth’s total forests. In response to the threat of expanding pine beetle infestations, forest managers set “back-fires” to isolate infested areas, liberating plenty of C02 and putting the climate feedback loop in a still more wide-open position. It didn’t stop the spread, of course; and, it’s ju

photo by C+H

The Hawaiian island of Lehua will soon be ratless or, if you prefer, without rats. It is not a piper, pied or otherwise, that is leading these rats to their demise. Instead, helicopters are the chosen harbingers of doom. Equipped with bait hoppers full of diphacinone pellets, the whirlybirds of the apocalypse shall descend upon the uninhabited island and discharge their poisonous payload. The Polynesian rats, deemed invasive and destructive, will gorge themselves upon these granules f

China is delaying its construction of a massive earth-changing project that will divert billions of tons of water to its parched north, in an attempt to mitigate environmental damage.

The four-year delay, reports the Wall Street Journal, will impact the central of three sections of the “South-to-North” water diversion project, which at $62 billion may cost three times what the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest, cost. T