Story Archives of 'Environment'

In New Hampshire Envirothon students work in teams to solve real-life environmental and natural resourcss problems. Cliff Lerner is the Envirothon team advisor at Keene High School, and says the program is one of the most motivating activities for his students.

War and environmental degradation share a long history.

The Romans blighted the fields of Carthage with salt back in 146 BC. The flattened villages of Flanders...Agent Orange stripping the jungles of Vietnam...the burning oil wells in Iraq. These are just a few illustrations of the long term environmental ruin left after battle. There’s a term for it, in fact: ecocide, literally meaning the killing of the environment.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, 12 years of conflict have cost more than five million human lives. One million people have been displaced, many living in over-crowded camps with little food and little hope. More tragic still, the enduring toll on the environment will likely affect citizens for generations to come. Washington Post reporter Delphine Schrank spent a year in the DRC as an International Reporting Project fellow. She witnessed the bloodshed and the ecocide and joined us on the line from New York with more.

The Atlantic: As Go The Hippos...

(Photo by *Simian* via Flickr/Creative Commons)

A new report finds that New Hampshire’s Great Bay Estuary has lost more than 90 percent of its oyster reefs over the last 15 years.
Pollution, disease, and over-harvesting have all played a part.
But as New Hampshire Public Radio’s Amy Quinton reports, marine biologists are hoping a new man-made reef will help stem the oyster’s demise.

Re-branding is not such a subtle art. Remember when Kentucky Fried Chicken became "KFC"? Or when the scandalized Blackwater security firm ditched its name altogether and became "XE"?

Then there’s the field day the left had when the Bush administration announced its "enhanced interrogation" program, or how environmentalists jumped on Bush's Clear Skies Inititative as an evisceration of the Clean Air Act.

Now environmental PR firms are re-working their language to push people who are on the fence about climate change over to their way of thinking. A Pew study in January found that climate change ranks at #20 on a list of people's concerns. The term turns people off, fostering images of shaggy-haired liberals, economic sacrifice and complex scientific disputes.

As part of our Next Green Thing series, we’re turning to Jonathan Hiskes. He reports on climate politics for Grist and he recently detailed some of the new terminology being advised by the non-profit PR firm EcoAmerica and why that language is setting off peoples' truth detectors already.

Grist: It's Got A Ring To It, No?

New York Times: Seeking to Save the Planet with A Thesaurus

(Photo by Peter Beazley via Flickr/Creative Commons)