Tag: Biodiversity
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Organic Farmer Taken to Court for Refusing to Spray Pesticides
The French agriculture ministry is prosecuting Emmanuel Giboulot, an organic winemaker, for failing to apply insecticide to his vines. The ministry wants insecticide to be sprayed to control the leafhopper Scaphoideus titanus—believed to be responsible for the spread of the grapevine disease—but Giboulot believes the pesticide is ineffective and damaging to pollinating insects such as bees,…
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Slideshow: Celebrating Denali National Park’s 97th Birthday
Today marks Alaska’s Denali National Park—originally called Mount McKinley National Park by Congress—97th birthday. The wildlife and rugged terrain that first made it a cause celebré for the conservation movement remain as striking as ever. [blackoutgallery id=”323202″] Modern-day Denali National Park and Preserve draws around 400,000 visitors per year, and it isn’t hard to see why.…
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Biomedical Bleeding of Horseshoe Crabs for Pharmaceuticals Puts Species at Risk
By Rebecca Zeiber New research from Plymouth State University (PSU) and the University of New Hampshire (UNH) indicates that collecting and bleeding horseshoe crabs for biomedical purposes causes short-term changes in their behavior and physiology that could exacerbate the crabs’ population decline in parts of the east coast. [caption id="attachment_322974" align="alignnone" width="500"] The horseshoe crab is bled for…
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Post-Sochi: Environmentalists Call on Olympic Committee to Consider Future Game’s Climate Impacts
A letter was sent to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) on Friday from Global Greengrants Fund asking it to change course on how it chooses future Olympic sites and to call on Russian authorities to release imprisoned environmentalists. The request comes as a final report cataloguing the extensive environmental destruction has been released, and as jailed Russian environmental activist,…
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Long-Overdue EPA Pesticide Regulations Fail to Fully Protect Farmworkers
By Ronnie Greene Ushering in what it called “milestone” changes to better protect the nation’s farmworkers from pesticides, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) lask week proposed a slate of updates to its agricultural Worker Protection Standard. The enhanced protections come 22 years after the EPA last revised the rules intended to safeguard the nation’s 2 million…