Don't be fooled by a cool summer.

Steve Kramer spent an hour and a half swimming in the ocean Sunday - in Maine. The water temperature was 72 degrees - more like Ocean City, Md., this time of year. And Ocean City's water temp hit 88 degrees this week, toasty even by Miami Beach standards.
Kramer, 26, who lives in the seaside town of Scarborough, said it was the first time he's ever swam so long in Maine's coastal waters. "Usually, you're in five minutes and you're out," he said.

http://www.sanluisobispo.com/living/health/story/822072.html

Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food

Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer.
Continue reading here, http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1917458,00.html

Monsanto

Percy Schmeiser is a farmer from Saskatchewan Canada, whose Canola fields were contaminated with Monsanto's genetically engineered Round-Up Ready Canola by pollen from a nearby farm. Monsanto says it doesn't matter how the contamination took place, and is therefore demanding Schmeiser pay their Technology Fee (the fee farmers must pay to grow Monsanto's genetically engineered products). According to Schmeiser, "I never had anything to do with Monsanto, outside of buying chemicals. I never signed a contract. http://www.organicconsumers.org/monlink.cfm

NASA Satellites Unlock Secret to Northern India's Vanishing Water

Beneath northern India’s irrigated fields of wheat, rice, and barley ... beneath its densely populated cities of Jaiphur and New Delhi, the groundwater has been disappearing. Halfway around the world, hydrologists, including Matt Rodell of NASA, have been hunting for it.More here, http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/india_water.html

Millions of missing fish signal crisis on the Fraser River

The Fraser River is experiencing one of the biggest salmon disasters in recent history with more than nine million sockeye vanishing.
Aboriginal fish racks are empty, commercial boats worth millions of dollars are tied to the docks and sport anglers are being told to release any sockeye they catch while fishing for still healthy runs of Chinook.
Between 10.6 million and 13 million sockeye were expected to return to the Fraser this summer. But the official count is now just 1.7 million, according to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
Read here, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/millions-of-missing-fish-signal-crisis-onthefraserriver/article1249976/

More than 350 species, including world's smallest deer, discovered in Himalayas in past decade

KATMANDU, Nepal - The world's smallest deer, a flying frog and catfish that stick to rocks -

as well as more than 350 other species - have been discovered over the past decade in the Himalayas, making it one of the world's most biologically rich regions, an environmental group said Monday.

Sea change in store for supermarkets?

Environmental groups that have been sounding urgent alarms about dramatic declines in fish and seafood stocks are taking Canadian supermarkets to task for the role they play in the emptying of the oceans.
A global study entitled History of Marine Animal Populations, presented in May at the Oceans Past conference in Vancouver, has intensified concern about the looming crisis. Marine researchers combing through historical records covering the past 2,000 years have determined there are 85 to 90 per cent fewer fish and marine mammals today than there once were. Read more here, http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2009/08/07/f-seafood.html