Tagged: environment

There are shark encounters you may laugh at — such as the one we posted about last week. The reactions of a young woman and man when a bull shark steals a fish from the end of her line are wonderful.

Then there are the stories that are no laughing matter — such as those coming in recent days from western Australia.

There are 151,347 trees, more or less, within Mandeville's city limits, and only about 7 percent of them are live oaks.

Those are among the findings of a study done for the city by two graduate students and their professors at the Southern University Agricultural Research & Extension Center.

Maggie Trenary, an inspector in the city planning department, tells The Times-Picayune (http://bit.ly/NrgLj5) that the low number of live oaks was a surprise. She says the city will have to plant more.

Transcript

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Montana is making it easier to hunt wolves. The wolf population has been growing even though wolf hunting is already legal. So wildlife officials are doing away with the statewide kill limit. They are nearly doubling the length of the season and the state will also allow trapping, which many conservationists call inhumane. Here's Dan Boyce with Montana Public Radio.

This past week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a report linking climate change to some of the extreme weather events of 2011, like the devastating drought in Texas and record high temperatures in Britain.

None of this bodes well for the future, but there is a glimmer of hope. It turns out that U.S. carbon emissions are down nearly 8 percent since 2006.