Publication archives

Acid rain may seem, like, so 1980s, but the problem has not gone away. Researchers reported this week that soils throughout the Northeast are continuing to acidify, despite a 50 percent decrease in acid rain since the peak in 1973. This may be contributing to declines in sugar maples and red spruce in the region, the researchers said.

There is mounting evidence that salvage logging of pine beetle-killed stands causes more ecological degradation than leaving them alone, scientist Phil Burton told a forum at UNBC on Tuesday.

You can grow Southern magnolia in Pennsylvania and kiwis in Oklahoma, but you wouldn't know that from the USDA's old hardiness zone map that gardeners use to plan their plantings, as USA Today details. They haven't been updated since 1990, and the past two decades have been marked by increasingly obvious climate changes.

Together with Twin Cities Public Television, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy co-produced a documentary on horse logging. The program showcases the environmental and economic value of horse logging and will air on Sunday, July 13, 2008 at 7:30 PM On tpt Channel 17 (in Minneapolis, it is on channel 13 with the Comcast Cable system).

At the heart of forestry is the way people use, manage, and benefit from trees and plants. The next two forestry Internet seminars focus on strategies that forest owners, foresters, and practitioners can use to control undesirable shrubs and trees and to improve the growth of desirable hardwoods.

While the sap-sucking woolly adelgid is laying waste to eastern and Carolina hemlocks in the forests of Southern Appalachia at an alarming pace, scientists at the Lindsay Young Beneficial Insects Laboratory at the University of Tennessee are working just as furiously to produce predator bugs that can demolish the invaders.

The excellent magazine out of the UK, Food Ethics, tackles the global food crisis in its Summer 2008 issue. The central question in the issue's title is an important one: Scarcity or Injustice?