"Increasing misuse of chemicals is causing health and environmental damage especially in emerging economies and governments must do more to carry out a promised clean-up by 2020, a United Nations report said on Wednesday."
"A state plan to rank communities by the cumulative effects of pollution on residents has raised objections among local business leaders, who say it would kill job development in areas identified as disadvantaged."
Ancient chestnut trees in Europe are vanishing. "The culprits: a moth that produces leaf-eating larvae and a bacterium that makes trunks bleed and die. ... A cure? Not immediately in sight."
"The case of Julia Trigg Crawford versus the Keystone XL oil pipeline will soon return to the headlines."
"Canada's government finalized much-anticipated regulations on Wednesday for phasing out the country's old coal-fired power plants in a move critics condemned as a watering down of earlier proposals to cut carbon emissions."
"This year's outbreak of West Nile virus is the worst since the illness was first observed in the United States in 1999, officials from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday."
"Ice fields in southern South America are rapidly losing volume and in most cases thinning at even the highest elevations, contributing to sea-level rise at 'substantially higher' rates than observed from the 1970s through the 1990s, according to a study published Wednesday."
Earth Island Journal devotes its cover and much of the current issue (Autumn 2012) To "A Special Report on the Environmental Pollutant Called Money in Politics."
"The number of poor Americans who repeatedly ran short of food shot up by 800,000 in 2011 to nearly 17 million compared with 2010, the U.S. government said on Wednesday."
"The province of Quebec is responsible for 75 percent of the maple syrup produced in the ENTIRE WORLD. So it’s no surprise that they keep a strategic maple syrup reserve -- hot weather ruins the volume and taste of the syrup crop, and pancake fiends can get ugly, so it pays to have backup. Which is all very good planning, until more than a quarter of the syrup nest egg disappears."
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