Publication archives

What goes up must come down, and toxic mercury is no exception. The metal is spewed into the sky worldwide by power plants, volcanoes and oceans. Mercury can travel half the globe and then fall in rain or snow back to Earth, where it's soaked up by soil, plants, trees and sediment. And fish. And people who eat fish.

A plan by Bolivia's leftist government to nationalize timber has unsettled some environmental and business groups working to improve the sustainability of the country's forests. "It's a time of uncertainty," said Richard Donovan, director of Smartwood, a program of New York-based Rainforest Alliance, a non-profit environment and conservation organization.

A rash of fires has transformed the incredible forest of Siberia from a vast "sink" that absorbs carbon dioxide and releases oxygen into a cause of global warming. "Suddenly, since 2000, fires have occurred frequently" in the taiga forest in Siberia, said Masami Fukuda, a Hokkaido University professor of snow ice science.

While the rest of Europe is steadily progressing towards sustainable forest management, Eastern European countries are facing many challenges, following the restitution of forests from the State to their previous owners, FAO said at the European forestry commission meeting (23-26 May) in Zvolen, Slovakia.

Developing nations have got far better at protecting rain forests over the past two decades but are a long way short of doing enough to save the crucial global resource, a new report said on Thursday.

The ancient Mayans abandoned their monumental cities in Central America's jungles over a thousand years ago, and many blame their civilization's collapse on massive deforestation. In the following centuries, a wildlife-rich forest regrew in Guatemala, now home to one of the largest tropical rainforests north of the Amazon.

A new damning report about our U.S. farm policy provides just the insights, astute analytical comments, and suggestions that we need to wake up our policymakers and as-yet-unaware physicians, etc.