Two boys were charged with killing more than a half million bees at a honey business in Iowa last month. “All of the beehives on the honey farm were destroyed and approximately 500,000 bees perished in the frigid temperatures,” Sioux City police said in a release. The suspects, a 12 and 13 year old, allegedly […]
The Trump administration is rescinding Obama-era rules designed to increase the safety of fracking. “We believe it imposes administrative burdens and compliance costs that are not justified,” the Interior Department‘s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) wrote in a notice published Friday in the Federal Register. The 2015 rule required companies drilling for natural gas and […]
The Republican-controlled 115th Congress has introduced at least 63 separate pieces of legislation that would strip federal protections for specific threatened species or undermine the U.S. Endangered Species Act, according to a new analysis from the Center for Biological Diversity. That’s one such bill every six days in 2017 alone. The majority of these bills […]
The Trump administration, which is trying to expand offshore oil drilling, has issued a stop-work order on an independent study aimed at making the process safer. The Interior Department’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) ordered the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to halt its study on Dec. 7. “The National […]
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will consider allowing the bee-killing pesticide thiamethoxam to be sprayed on the most widely grown crops in the U.S. The application, if approved, would allow the highly toxic pesticide to be sprayed directly on 165 million acres of wheat, barley, corn, sorghum, alfalfa, rice and potato. The proposal by […]
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released on Monday a human health and ecological draft risk assessment for glyphosate, concluding that the widely used—and highly controversial—pesticide is “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.” According to the EPA’s announcement, the assessment “found no other meaningful risks to human health when the product is used according […]
British Columbia’s provincial government Monday announced a decision to prohibit grizzly bear hunting province-wide. In stark contrast to the province’s decision to protect its estimated 15,000 grizzly bears, the Trump administration in June removed endangered species protections for the roughly 700 bears found in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Following the removal of federal protections, Idaho, […]
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released multiple scientific assessments last week that found commonly used neonicotinoid pesticides can kill and harm birds of all sizes. Separate analyses also found the pesticides pose significant danger to aquatic invertebrates, which play a crucial role in supporting larger ecosystems. The troubling assessments come on the heels of […]
By John R. Platt Don’t mess with Texas butterflies. They have lawyers. This week attorneys representing the North American Butterfly Association filed a suit against the Trump administration for its plan to build a section of the U.S.-Mexico border wall through a significant portion of the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas. The construction plan […]