White-tailed deer.
A new study is sounding the loudest alarm yet about lead poisoning from venison.
The study, issued this week in the journal PLoS ONE, analyzed 30 white-tailed deer carcasses hunted under normal conditions and found that all of them contained lead fragments, as did a variety of butchered products. And the tainted products raised lead blood levels in pigs that ate them, in a controlled study.
“We conclude that people risk exposure to … lead from bullet fragments when they eat venison from deer killed with standard lead-based rifle bullets and processed under normal procedures,” wrote the authors, led by W. Grainger Hunt, a senior scientist with the Peregrine Fund. “At risk in the U.S. are some ten million hunters, their families, and low-income beneficiaries of venison donations.”
It’s a fair warning, and I’d be likely to heed it. I have no reason to doubt the science. But the context for the findings is sticky, and even a little suspect.
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This is one of the six natural lakes now protected in the new Band-i-Amir National Park. Credit: Alex Dehgan/WCS
When I think of Afghanistan, I think of war, tribal strife and Bin Ladin. Not once, until I saw this announcement come through last week, have I thought of beauty, biodiversity or environmental stewardship. And yet, there it is.
Afghanistan even has a National Environment Protection Agency, and this week it announced the establishment of the country’s first internationally recognized national park.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) put up some of the money and teamed up with the Wildlife Conservation Society to conduct preliminary wildlife surveys, identify and delineate the park’s boundaries, and work with local communities and the provincial government.
The park, known as Band-e-Amir, will protect one of Afghanistan’s best-known natural areas: the spectacular series of six deep blue lakes separated by rare natural dams made of travertine, a mineral deposit.
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The Pakitsoq ice margin, where the ice study took place. Image courtesy of Vasilii Petrenko.
The good news — as it’s being couched out of the University of Colorado in Boulder — is that global warming is not likely to engender a great belch of methane from the permafrost that will kickstart a deadly methane cycle leading to further warming.
But I don’t suppose it’s any more comfortable to realize warming is likely to cause an outpouring of methane from the world’s wetlands.
Vasilii Petrenko, a CU-Boulder postdoctoral fellow, led a research team that investigated the cause of a burst of methane that took place immediately after an abrupt transition between climatic periods known as the Younger Dryas and Preboreal, about 11,600 years ago.
During this event, temperatures in Greenland rose 18° F (10° C) in 20 years. Methane levels in the air, over 150 years, rose about 50 percent, from 500 parts per billion to 750 parts per billion.
The researchers mined 1.1-ton (1,000-kg) samples from the west Greenland ice margin and analyzed changes in the trapped methane over time. Their findings were released today by the journal Science.
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Credit: Elva Robinson.
Often when moving to a new town, I’ll check out a lot of apartments before I find the right one. Other times I see a decent place and I just stop looking, even if there were more on my list.
That’s how ants do it, too.
Elva Robinson, a biologist at the University of Bristol in England, and her colleagues fitted rock ants with tiny radio-frequency identification tags (at left), each measuring one two-thousandth the size of a postage stamp, then watched as they chose between a poor nest nearby and a good nest farther away.
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I once knew a man who had done very well in the garbage business. I don’t know the details, but I do know he operated our city’s trash-pickup services (and grabbed the contracts in outlying, multiple-county areas as well).
I lost count of the number of fancy cars he drove.
Once I asked him: Why don’t we recycle here? He hemmed and hawed just a little, but basically said it comes down to the bottom line: it costs too much. And I said something like, ‘yeah, but it would keep a lot out of the landfills, wouldn’t it — could there be an ethical benefit?’” And he said, “trash is money,” and he laughed as if he’d made a joke.
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The Minard Construction logo; click on it to visit Jack's site.
Fast forward to this afternoon, when I got a call from my brother. Both of my brothers are in the construction business; this brother in recent years has been building high-end homes, often on the beach.
Jack’s business has always been green in the sense that he uses highly energy-efficient products in construction, and he’s consistently shown an interest when I’ve written about green technologies like residential wind and solar. But lately, he’s been taking a step back and considering how to implement a bigger-picture, Earth-friendly approach in his own work.
In some ways, he’s frustrated. Last week, he went to bidding meeting with other construction professionals. Sixteen demolitions of various commercial and residential properties are up for grabs in Pensacola, Florida, where, potentially, perfectly good materials will be ripped off or crushed and carted away to a landfill.
In order to reuse the materials, “you’d have to go in there and take it apart instead of tearing it down,” he said. “But the client is looking for the lowest bid.”
Now, my brother is getting involved with solutions.
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