Capping and containment of the last sections of the former Sydney Tar Ponds nears completion. Looking northwest from the top of the old Sysco slag heap, this image, taken Wednesday evening, shows the mouth of the newly restored Muggah Creek. What appears to be black soil at the side of the stream is actually plastic sheeting, part of the engineered containment system for the stabilized and solidified coal byproducts below. From the same vantage point, the view to the southwest shows the Ferry Street bridge in the distance. Containment and capping of solidified wastes in the north Tar Pond, on the...

I generally refrain from commenting on developments in the Sydney Tar Ponds project, because I know better than most the PR minefield faced by those charged with getting the job done. Nevertheless, the Government of Canada has just released a short video that sanitizes the history of the cleanup in a manner so patronizing and false, it demands comment. Here's an excerpt from the video's smarmy narration: In the years and decades that followed, Sydney would see good times, and it would see hard times. But the resilience of its people would never falter. Faced with the environmental legacy of a century of...

Earlier this week, various blogs and media outlets reported that Beijing was experiencing frightful levels of air pollution. To document the crisis, China hand James Fallows cited what he called "the indispensable (and highly controversial)" Twitter feed @Beijingair, which produces hourly readings of  fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in Beijing. On Monday, @Beijingair showed readings in excess of 300 µg/m3, contributing to conditions the US EPA characterizes as "hazardous," and warranting "health warnings of emergency conditions." What caught my attention was Fallows's assertion that the @BeijingAir feed is "the only known source of PM 2.5 readings in China." That is astounding: one PM2.5...

A 100-hectare sediment plume kicked up by the Sydney Harbor dredging project, and presumably laden with industrial contaminants, has some officials annoyed over Environment Canada's failure to regulate the project. Gerry Langille, a Sydney-based industrial photographer often used by government agencies, snapped the photos Wednesday in calm conditions at slack tide. They have since circulated widely among federal and provincial bureaucrats. The Google Earth screenshot at left shows the approximate location of the upper photograph. The photo below shows the shoreline at Pt. Edward where the dredged material makes landfall, and where most of the sedimentation appears to originate. The infilled material...

When Henry Shukman, a writer for Outsideonline.com, visited the 30 km exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, here’s what he found: The wild boar is standing 30 or 40 yards away, at the bottom of a grassy bank, staring right at me. Even from this distance I can see its outrageously long snout, its giant pointed ears, and the spiny bristles along its back. It looks part porcupine, a number of shades of ocher and gray. And it's far bigger than I expected, maybe chest-high to a man. The boar is like some minor forest god straight from...

Polish filmmaker Bartosz Konopka recounts the history of the Berlin Wall from the perspective of rabbits trapped in the no-man's land created by the structure. Freed from hunting pressure, they multiplied and prospered. After all, no one was shooting at them. Such structures, known to biologists as "exclosures," often belie their brutal genesis with an unintended beneficial impact on wildlife. After all, they exclude the most destructive of predators: people. The DMZ between North and South Korea is said to be teeming with otherwise endangered wild animals. Until the cleanup began last summer, the fenced-off Sydney Tar Ponds was...

In his game effort to wish away the cheque-writing scandal, Conservative blogger Stephen Taylor posts a telling email from an anonymous Harper MP: When we formed govt the crats stopped bringing cheques to announcements & we were FORCED to cough up the $ to buy our own. Specifically, at [a government department I was involved with] the crats used to like to be in the photo ops giving out chqs, as though it was coming from them. They detested Conservatives being photographed handing out chqs, so they stopped bringing the chqs – when they even bothered to show up for announcements....