Environment

Environmental officials are warning that air pollution concentrations could reach unhealthy levels in parts of New Hampshire during an upcoming temperature inversion.

New Hampshire fishermen who are hoping for federal disaster relief funds will have to wait a bit longer for those dollars. Money slated to go to the Northeastern ground-fishermen was caught up in the discussions surrounding the so-called fiscal cliff.

On a sunny day at Shawnee Peak, a family-sized mountain about an hour northwest of Portland, Maine, faithful early-season skiers carve their first turns on a good choice of trails thanks to the numerous snow-blowers going full tilt to cover the otherwise brown slopes. Ski patrol, in their tell-tale red jackets, say something’s changed about winter.

Come January, New Hampshire lawmakers will consider a bevy of bills dealing with the water quality of Great Bay. Some proposals confront waste-water treatment plant costs head-on, while others skirt that controversy.

The decline in the ecosystem of the Great Bay, coupled with Portsmouth, Rochester, and Dover's decision to fight the EPA over required wastewater treatment plant to upgrades is inspiring action in Concord.

Preliminary numbers for New Hampshire’s deer hunt are in, and it was a good year for hunters. A mild winter meant big deer populations, and a 4% increase on the hunting season from last year.

According to Fish and Game before the hunting season started there were about 85,000 deer in the Granite state. This year, hunters took about 14 percent of those animals, just fewer than 11,600 deer.

Sullivan, Strafford and Rockingham counties had the highest number of kills, and Belknap, Carroll and Cheshire had the least. It was the biggest dear season since 2007.

The Governor’s Water Sustainability Commission released its report Monday. The report finds numerous challenges, the biggest of which might be a lack of political will.

The commission's list of threats to NH’s water quality is lengthy: too much pavement, aging dams and public water infrastructure, increased rainfall from climate change, and so on. The report estimates over the next ten years the state will need to invest $2.9 billion to confront just the infrastructure side of these issues.