Publication Items

By AL CROSS

Many if not most environmental stories have their roots in rural places. Those are the places where extractive industries do almost all their extracting, where America ultimately puts much of its solid waste, where farm fields get the fertilizers that create dead zones in the sea.

By RHITU CHATTERJEE

In 2003, more than 50 people in the Midwest became ill with the monkey pox virus. The source for the African pathogen – pet prairie dogs that were kept next to infected Gambian pouch rats in a pet store.

In the early 1970s, Arkansas aquaculturists imported the Asian Black carp to control fish parasites in aquaculture ponds. Now these mussel-eating fish are happily lurking deep in the waters of the Mississippi River Basin. Scientists fear that they may be driving precious endangered snails and mussels to extinction.