The numbers of wild butterfly species, especially the famous monarch butterfly, is dropping so alarmingly fast that the federal government, through the Fish & Wildlife Service, has actually stepped in to help. On Thursday, the FWS announced a plan to spend $4 million on revitalizing the monarch population, which has sunk from around a billion in
You’ve heard of the locavore, but what about the invasivore? Whether it’s lionfish, which are ruining reefs in Mexico, or wild boar, tearing up California valleys, invasive species are the latest offering on menus around the world. After being accidentally introduced to local habitats, where most of them don’t have natural predators, these organisms multiply—often
San Joaquin Valley water districts have sued to stop releases of Central Valley Project water down the Trinity River for fish, and farm advocates say a federal agency is sending mixed messages about the drought. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation on Aug. 21 announced it would begin releasing as much as 88,000 acre-feet of water
Forest ecologists finally got their wish: an entire private landscape on which to test methods of tree thinning and controlled burns to reduce risk of mega fires and minimize the effects of drought on California’s frozen reservoirs -- mountain snowpacks. A coalition of environmental groups recently bought a 10,115-acre parcel in the Sierra Nevada range
A state court has struck down rules governing runoff from farms along the Central Coast, a decision that could have broader implications for the state's $43-billion agriculture industry. The Sacramento County Superior Court sided with environmentalists who opposed a blanket waiver for growers in the Salinas Valley and other areas of the Central Coast, saying
Beneath the western United States lie thousands of old mining tunnels filled with the same toxic stew that spilled into a Colorado river last week, turning it into a nauseating yellow concoction and stoking alarm about contamination of drinking water. Though the spill into the Animas River in southern Colorado is unusual for its size, it's
The new price tag for restoring the Salton Sea: $3.15 billion. That’s how much money local officials now say they want from California, as detailed in a plan approved Tuesday by the Imperial Irrigation District’s board of directors. It’s less expensive than a $9 billion plan that died in the state Legislature, and local officials
Food is a constant tug-of-war between people and planet. We can’t feed ourselves without doing environmental harm. “Agriculture costs us no matter what,” says Rattan Lal, director of the Carbon Management and Sequestration Center at Ohio State University. “Every option has trade-offs.” Food production takes a toll, and neither maximizing the food nor minimizing the
It was mid-morning one day in May and somewhere deep inside a 25-story tower in Sacramento, an auction, cloaked in secrecy, was about to begin. State workers surrendered their cell phones and took positions monitoring computer screens inside the building that houses California’s environmental agencies. Across the world, traders logged in, poised to buy permits
BY THE EDITORIAL BOARD The lowly Delta smelt is all but gone, numbering so few in a June survey of the Delta that California Department of Fish and Wildlife scientists had no choice but to place the species’ population at zero. Salmon that depend on a healthy Delta ecosystem are in danger of becoming extinct.