In my last post I mentioned that I would look for ways to reduce our exposure to and production of PAHs, and I’ve spent some time searching for specific campaigns, but I haven’t found much that seems like an organized approach. Instead, I found a number of smaller recommendations for individual action. To reduce exposure […]
Archive for the ‘pollution’ Tag
Coming clean with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons
A dynamic relationship with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons
In my reading on polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), many of the studies from a few decades ago focused on figuring out where they were coming from and if they posed a risk. Then, in the mid to late 1990s, I saw a shift toward looking for ways to limit exposure. What’s the upshot of that […]
There’s something in the air
Some of the reading I’ve been doing lately involves toxins in the environment, and I came across a term that hadn’t really made it onto my radar yet- “polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons”. I’m familiar with the idea of hydrocarbons, especially with regard to various fuels we use, but PAHs (as they are abbreviated) I am less […]
Are we at critical moss?
I’ve spent the last two weeks looking into moss conservation around the world– how are mosses faring? have we taken conservation action? do we need to? And I feel like the most common response I found in literature dated as recently as nine years ago was ‘We don’t have enough information to judge.’ This is […]
Fishing down the coral reef
Over the past week I’ve been looking into the challenges facing reef fishes and the environments they inhabit, and there are some very clear recurrent themes: overexploitation (on a number of levels), habitat degradation (for a variety of reasons), and climate change. These are all big issues and unfortunately some of them are probably not […]
Carving out a piece of the pie
I started looking into research on wetland loss around the world and quickly discovered that a large portion of what’s been published is about the Gulf Coast, specifically Louisiana. I could write for days about the situation all around me, but I know that wetlands in many locations are in trouble, so I kept digging […]
On a downhill slope
As I started looking into the condition of river otters around the world, it became obvious that a lot of the information out there deals with otters in Europe and North America– I would say easily 90% of what I’ve read so far. In some ways that’s helpful, because it means that researchers have been […]
Dwindling fungi?
A brief search through the literature resulted in quite a few studies and even a few books about fungi conservation, so I feel pretty confident in saying that people are paying attention to this issue. At the same time, a lot of that effort seems to be coming from the last 20 years, so it […]
Natural born flowers
In my last post I talked about some of the environmental concerns surrounding the cut flower industry, namely pesticides, water use, and the movement of parasites and diseases. While there are many other facets to growing flowers for bouquets, I want to highlight two other issues, both of which I think we can influence: wildflower […]
The smell of pesticides in the morning
I had been a little worried that I wasn’t going to be able to find much research concerning the cut-lower industry, or that, if I did, it would all be about developing new varieties of popular flowers. In fact, I was surprised at the extent of the literature- researchers have been paying attention to multiple […]