Unforgetting Exxon Valdez

On the eve of the 20th anniversary of one of the world's great ecological catastrophes - the Exxon Valdez oil spill - The New York Times has carried a telling editorial. Excerpt:

More than $2 billion has been spent on cleanup and recovery. Exxon has paid at least $1 billion in damages. Supertankers have been made safer with double hulls, emergency teams given better equipment. Some fish species, though not all, have recovered. Yet the Exxon Valdez still sends a powerful cautionary message: oil development, however necessary, is an inherently risky, dirty business — especially so in the forbidding waters of the Arctic.

More here

The Walrus, minus the carpenter

Here's an endearing portrait of that wonderful, little known and oft-misunderstood fatso of the Arctic pack ice known as the Walrus. Natalie Angier in NYT: In the public pantheon of marine mammaldom, dolphins are adored, whales revered, and seal pups make old Bond girls swoon. But walruses remain perversely, lumpishly obscure, known mostly for their sing-song linkage with a carpenter, an eggman and goo goo goo joob. To which Dr. Schusterman and his colleagues might well respond with a blast of a Bronx kazoo. Odobenus rosmarus is a magnificent creature, they say, behaviorally, anatomically, acoustically and taxonomically in a category all its own. More