Iowa's future washing down the river By The Des Moines Register's Editorial15 April 2011 The proposed reorganization of Iowa's Department of Economic Development might be an example of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. However pleasing such a rearrangement might be, it won't keep Iowa's economy from sinking. And Iowa's economy might well sink [...]
Search for Super Corn Seeks to Limit Nitrogen Use, Pollution By Jon Birger, Bloomberg Business Week15 April 2011 Illustrator: Yuko Kondo/Bloomberg Businessweek Marc Albertsen, the bespectacled, 62-year-old research director at Pioneer Hi-Bred, DuPont Co.’s seed-development unit, was catching up on paperwork one morning in July 2007 when he got a call from an assistant, Sharon [...]
Learn and play at LUMCON this weekend By Houma Today.com12 April 2011 HOUMA — Want to learn what creatures live at the bottom of the Gulf dead zone? Or go on an airboat ride into the marsh and get your hands on some of the Gulf’s sea life? Located near the end of the road [...]
Ancient Ocean 'Dead Zone' Delayed Life After Mass Extinction By Wynne Parry, LiveScience.com1 April 2011 A flood of nutrients may have created an oxygen-starved ocean about 250 million years ago, preventing life from bouncing back for a few million years after a mass extinction wiped out 90 percent of marine species, a new study indicates. [...]
Don't end DNR role in regulating water By Mike Delaney, opinion in the Des Moines Register7 April 2011The Raccoon River Watershed Association (RRWA) is opposed to transferring authority for water quality programs from the Iowa Department of Natural Resources to the Iowa Department of Agriculture (SF 500). The RRWA board believes that transferring the authority [...]
The EPA: Cleaning Up Crappy Water Since 1970 By Paula Crossfield, The Huffington Post24 March 2011 This is a story about crap -- literally, tons of it. Piling up in Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and being sprayed onto farm fields, animal manure is polluting the nation's waterways and is nearly impossible to regulate. Last [...]
The Big Idea: Perennial Grains By By Robert Kunzig, National Geographic7 April 2011 Photograph by Rebecca Hale, NGM Staff Humans made an unwitting but fateful choice 10,000 years ago as we started cultivating wild plants: We chose annuals. All the grains that feed billions of people today—wheat, rice, corn, and so on—come from annual plants, [...]
Large slick' could be huge plankton bloom By Houma Today22 March 2011 HOUMA — Scientists at a Cocodrie marine-research center say a miles-long discolored patch on the Gulf originally feared to be oil may actually be a huge algae bloom — the kind that fuels the annual dead zone off Louisiana's coast. The patch, estimated [...]
Eutrophication: Mapping the first steps that lead to dead zones By RTSea Blog19 March 2011 Dead Zones - an alarming term used to describe aquatic areas where oxygen levels are so greatly reduced as to push out or kill most fish, plants, and shellfish. It's a dramatic descriptor for the extreme end result of two much [...]
EPA takes heat over bay pollution 'diet' By Timothy B. Wheeler, The Baltimore Sun16 March 2011Farmers complained Wednesday to a sympathetic audience in Congress that the Environmental Protection Agency's "pollution diet" for restoring the Chesapeake Bay is based on flawed science and threatens to drive growers out of business with burdensome and unnecessary regulations. Appearing [...]