pollution

Silent Earth book cover

Silent Earth describes the crisis of declining insect populations, but Ben Courtice writes that it falls short on the solutions required to turn this around.

Barry Healy reviews a new film about the industrial mercury poisoning of a Japanese village and the photographer who exposed the story to the world.

Margaret Gleeson reports on a resident-organised protest aimed at getting a dirty coal-fired power station on the NSW Central Coast to clean up its act.

Chris Slee takes a look at a new book that explores the huge environmental cost of China's rapid economic growth over the past 40 years.

The people of Sydney are facing not one, but five proposed waste incinerators, writes Susan Price. If built, they would create thousands of tonnes of toxic ash per year and release dangerous air pollutants.

School Strike 4 Climate outline just 10 of many reasons why you should join students when they go on strike to save the climate on September 20.

Inaction on global warming is heating not only the planet, but also the mood of residents who visited Labor MPs offices in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

A jury has found gas company Linc Energy guilty of causing serious environmental harm at its trial underground coal gasification (UCG) plant near Chinchilla on Queensland's Darling Downs.

I moved to Perth in June last year from a small, rural town in central Pennsylvania. There I witnessed first-hand the impact of the “fracking” boom — the rapid exploitation of the unconventional gas resources in the Marcellus shale play. It hit rural Pennsylvania particularly hard because it is economically depressed, struggling to make ends meet by farming and what's left of manufacturing that has not been outsourced to China, Mexico, and other exploitable labour pools.
Five families are suing Xstrata, the Queensland government and the Mt Isa council over alleged lead contamination. As part of their case, they commissioned US neuroscientist Theodore Lidsky to examine brain tests on Mt Isa children. His report found some Mt Isa children had brain damage from long-term exposure to lead, the families’ lawyer, Damian Scattini, told ABC News on September 17.
In Australia, the question of environmental protection has increasingly been linked to the need to reduce or contain the nation’s population level size. This is often tied to the argument that the high level of consumption in First World countries is unsustainable.
The crude oil belching out of the floor of the Gulf of Mexico since the explosion on BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 20 has formed giant plumes beneath the surface of the water. That’s the latest nightmarish evidence that the gulf oil catastrophe, among the worst ecological disasters in US history, is much worse than either corporate giant BP or government officials have admitted.