"Regulators voted Friday to close the Gulf of Maine winter shrimp season for another three years, raising fears that the fishery decimated by rising water temperatures may never bounce back."
"For the fourth-generation crab fisherman John Beardon, the warming of Pacific waters off the coast of California has meant toxic crabs, shortened fishing seasons and a near decimation of his livelihood as a crab boat captain. Now he would like to see the industry he says is responsible pay for the damage."
"For Cainnon Gregg, 2018 started out as a great year. After leaving his job as an installation artist to become a full-time oyster farmer in Wakulla County, Florida in 2017, Gregg began raising small oysters in baskets or bags suspended in the shallow, productive coastal waters of Apalachicola Bay."
What will a divided Congress mean for environment and energy issues? This week’s TipSheet explores the question by looking at the Democrats who will now lead key House committees once the new Congress is seated next year. Take a lightning tour of a half-dozen top panels, their anticipated leadership and the issues they tackle, including drinking water safety, environmental justice and climate change, infrastructure, science policy, natural resources and more.
"The percentage of Americans who fish is in decline and that decline has had an impact on conservation projects, because hunting and fishing licenses help fund everything from habitat restoration to clean water programs. So there are efforts to lure more anglers to the sport — and those efforts seem to be working, as more and more young women are taking up fishing."
"Valuable species of shellfish have become harder to find on the East Coast because of degraded habitat caused by a warming environment, according to a pair of scientists that sought to find out whether environmental factors or overfishing was the source of the decline."
"There is an 80 percent chance of the El Niño weather pattern to form and continue through the northern hemisphere in winter 2018/19, a U.S. government weather forecaster said on Thursday."
"A new study says that many large-scale hydropower projects in Europe and the US have been disastrous for the environment."
As the Trump administration challenges wetlands preservation policy under the Clean Water Act, an important related practice has come into question. Mitigation banking — the creation or preservation of one wetland to offset the loss of another — has become a billion-dollar industry. But as this week’s TipSheet reports, the legal and regulatory tangle aside, wetlands permitting and mitigation continues, likely near you. Tracking the local story.
"A small, brownish weasel that spends much of its life in the water, hunting for fish and frogs, the American mink is a signal for the ecological health of where it lives. Right now, the mink is not doing very well along the Hudson River, largely due to decades of PCB pollution ... ."
