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A new DEQ report says that 63% of Virginia’s rivers, lakes and streams are polluted according to this morning’s Richmond-Times Dispatch. The polluted area has grown by over 2000 miles since the last report in 2004, just two years ago! Not to mention the tidewaters… The river numbers don’t include tidal waters, which are considered…

Read their press release about the event. No one has yet been harmed, and it sounds like they’ve even charmed one of the coal truck drivers, who turned down money they offered him to compensate for his time. Read more as the story unfolds. Appalachian Voices, always partial to the legislative route, worked this year…

Experts in the UK are calling for a complete shutdown of nuclear power facilities after cracks were found in the cores of up to fourteen seperate nuclear reactors.

The deal calls for tariffs on Canadian lumber when U.S. prices fall. If the softwood lumber agreement initialed by the U.S. and Canada two weeks ago were in effect today, as prices have been trending downward, the American lumber industry would be protected by export taxes. The softwood lumber agreement, which was initialed on July…

Day One – Saturday July 15 – Two Part Hike. [See below for detailed information on directions, meeting places, and meeting times] Our first stop will be the site of a recent timber sale just outside Elliott Knob, an inventoried roadless area. Extensive logging has taken place in a low-lying area with 120 year old…

… Unlike other clean energy sources such as solar power, electricity from wind has now become competitive in cost with electricity from conventional sources, due largely to advances in turbine design over the last 30 years. According to the AWEA, today wind electricity sells for half the price of nuclear power about the same as…

Hundreds of amphibian species will become extinct unless a global action plan is put into practice very soon, conservationists warn. More than a third of all amphibian species are said to be in peril. The losses are caused by land-use change; commercial overexploitation; invasive species pushing out native amphibians; and a wave of disease. In…

Kevin Robertson is a fire ecology research scientist with the Tall Timbers Research Station’s Fire Ecology Program in Tallahassee, Florida. He writes, “One question of concern to the public is how much of the carbon, nitrogen, and other nutrients stored in plants goes into the atmosphere, versus going back to the soil, when we burn.…

Since 1500, more than 150 bird species have disappeared from the world, including the much lamented dodo. This ground bird disappeared from its island home before Carl Linnaeus, the father of scientific taxonomy, even described it in the 18th century. Given that many of the nearly 10,000 known bird species have only recently been described–including…

[Louisiana] Federal environmental officials have decided that before a 200-acre timber operation in Livingston Parish can begin, the landowner needs to prove the cypress forest he wants to log can grow back. Environmentalists have fought the logging of coastal cypress, saying that once cut, they are lost forever because new cypress can’t grow in many…