Wildlife

While the Trump administration recently moved to roll back a ban on neonicotinoid pesticides in U.S. wildlife refuges, Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency on Wednesday unveiled plans to phase out two of the three main neonics currently allowed in the country. As The Canadian Press noted, “The agency has already announced plans to phase out the third pesticide in all outdoor uses, meaning it can’t be sprayed or used to pre-treat seeds before planting.”

The surge in volcanic activity in the lower Puna region of the Big Island of Hawaii is concentrated in the area surrounding the Puna Geothermal Venture. Scientific data clearly links the unacknowledged fracking activity at the Puna Geothermal Venture as a factor in what is occurring with lava flows and earthquakes.

A paper published in the journal Science uncovers for the first time a startling correlation between human migration and the extinction of large animals. With no indication that the trend is abating, the team predicts that all currently endangered large terrestrial species will pass within the next couple of centuries, leaving cows, at an average weight of 900 kilograms, the biggest things left.

When Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisc.) founded Earth Day in 1970, his hope was to make the environment a political issue in an era where US rivers caught on fire and thick smog choked cities. In many ways, it worked. Since then, major environmental laws have helped clean up much of the vivid toxic detritus in the soil, air, and water in the US. But our challenges today are no less daunting. The accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the loss of wilderness and species, and the acidification and pollution of the oceans have all become more acute — and more destabilizing. Here are some things we’ve learned about our amazing planet since the last Earth Day.