Tagged: environment

Breeding numbers were down for some bird species for the third straight year in a row in the Everglades.

Nesting numbers for wading birds fell by 38 percent compared to the past decade. That's according to an annual survey compiled by the South Florida Water Management District.

Next time you go to the Everglades you'll have the option to pick up an anti-vulture kit.

The park is offering the kits so people can protect their cars against vultures during the winter months. The black vultures sometimes rip the rubber and vinyl parts--such as windshield wipers and sunroof seals--off of cars.

Once upon a time, snow fell in Miami.

Seems whenever the weather gets even moderately cold, someone somewhere in South Florida invokes Jan. 19, 1977 -- the day it snowed in Miami.

Not only did the snow make front page news in The Miami Herald, the front page about snow made The Miami Herald Front Pages book. 

Arnold Markowitz wrote the day's story, the beginning of which reads as follows:

Snow fell Wednesday on Miami.

Florida’s only wading bird on the endangered species list, the wood stork, is on the mend.  From a low of about 2,500 nesting pairs in most of South and Central Florida in 1984, the bird has since grown to around 7,000 to 9,000 nesting pairs. 

But it doesn't mean all is well with the Everglades.

One of Palm Beach County's oldest public schools is hoping to become one of Florida's greenest.

According to the World Health Organization, as of 2010, over half the world’s population lived in cities.

By 2050, that percentage is expected to increase to 70 percent.

The Florida Department of Health said today there is not a cancer cluster just east of Hialeah, in a neighborhood often referred to as Broadmoor.

On July 19th, 2012 a resident from the Broadmoor area, Vanessa Shelton, went before the Miami-Dade County Commission during a public hearing about a nearby metal recycling facility.

Utility companies in Florida are allowed to charge customers for power plants that may never be built.

It’s allowed under a law passed in 2006, and the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy wants the law overturned.

A legal challenge is now before the Florida Supreme Court.

When it comes to clean energy projects like wind farms, where people stand on a proposal sometimes depends on where they sit. Take the case of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, certainly a champion of green causes — until someone proposed building a wind farm off Cape Cod, where the liberal lion liked to do his sailing.

He fought the wind farm until he died.

09/24/12 - Monday’s Topical Currents is with writer and naturalist William Bryant Logan. He's shown the complexities of simple topics in his books such as Oak and Dirt. His latest work is Air: The Restless Shaper Of The World.  Breathing air gives us life and brings hurricanes, skydiving and fungus. It blows the dust which feeds the seas' food building block: plankton. We may forever fight dust at home but airborne particles bred South America’s rain forests.

09/10/12 - Monday’s Topical Currents is with Jenny Brown, the author of The Lucky Ones: My Passionate Fight For Farm Animals. She’s a former television documentary producer who once flipped burgers at McDonald’s but now operates the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary in upstate New York.  She became devoted to the cause of farm animals after working undercover documenting abuse in Texas.  Brown promotes a vegan diet.  

The whitewall rubber tires, which until recently had been on the bottom of the ocean floor off the coast of Broward County, now look like deflated, salt-encrusted life preservers, and reek of the decayed smell of barnacles mixed with sea spray.

They are the stars of an art exhibit called “The Eclipse,” open now in Miami’s Wynwood district, a tribute to a failed plan to create an artificial reef and mankind’s attempts to remove the tires and save the ocean from even more destruction.