News Forum Archives: January 2004
Pineapple republic: in Costa Rica, a fed-up rancher takes on a produce giant
Sierra, March-April, 2002
by Marilyn Berlin Snell
Pablo Beita, a Costa Rican rancher from Volcan, knows the river he was born near because he used to swim in its clear and enlivening current with pigs. As the eldest son of Marcelino and Caridad Beita, the boy was charged with watching the family’s animals—which included oxen as well as the buoyant swine. The challenge with the pigs was that they tended to become disoriented in the rapids and swirling eddies, so it was hard to get them across to where the rainforest gave way to fenced pasture. Pablo often had to jump in and drag the animals to safety by their velvety ears.
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Water Pump Case Tests Federal Law
January 14, 2004
By Felicity Barringer
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., Jan. 9 For nearly half a century, a pumping station in South Florida has been pouring millions of gallons of storm runoff annually into the Everglades, keeping the farms and backyards of western Broward Country dry but filling the wetlands with water often tainted by pollutants, mainly from phosphorus-rich fertilizers.
The station, known as S-9, is not a filthy factory, leaching mine or toxic dump. It is a large pump in a squat, nondescript building at the intersection of two levees. But its role in raising the level of phosphorus in the Everglades puts it at the center of a Supreme Court battle that could end up changing the reach of the Clean Water Act, the landmark 1972 law that established a federally controlled system for keeping the nation’s waterways clean.
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Warming May Threaten 37% of Species by 2050
Tue Dec 30, 1:22 PM ET
By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
In the first study of its kind, researchers in a range of habitats including northern Britain, the wet tropics of northeastern Australia and the Mexican desert said yesterday that global warming at currently predicted rates will drive 15 to 37 percent of living species toward extinction by mid-century.
Dismayed by their results, the researchers called for “rapid implementation of technologies” to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and warned that the scale of extinctions could climb much higher because of mutually reinforcing interactions between climate change and habitat destruction caused by agriculture, invasive species and other factors.
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Iran Asks ‘Why Are Our Earthquakes So Deadly?’
Tue Dec 30, 1:22 PM ET
By Erik Kirschbaum—Reuters
TEHRAN (Reuters) – Poor design, primitive materials and widely ignored building codes were prime causes of the high death rate in the Bam earthquake, Iranian officials and foreign experts said on Tuesday.
In stark contrast to a tremor of similar strength last week in California that killed just two people, the toll in Friday’s Iranian quake could reach about 50,000.
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