Our oceans have been the victims of a giant Ponzi scheme, waged with Bernie Madoff–like callousness by the world’s fisheries. Beginning in the 1950s, as their operations became increasingly industrialized--with onboard refrigeration, acoustic fish-finders, and, later, GPS--they first depleted stocks of cod, hake, flounder, sole, and halibut in the Northern Hemisphere.

[R]unoff from all but the largest farms is essentially unregulated by many of the federal laws intended to prevent pollution and protect drinking water sources.

Over 1,500 farmers in an Indian state committed suicide after being driven to debt by crop failure, it was reported today.

A global ministerial meeting was putting the final touches here Saturday to resolutions for tackling the world's water crisis but activists attacked the process as a corporate-driven fraud.

A tidal wave of man-made trash is threatening world oceans, damaging wildlife, tourism and seafood industries and piling additional stress on seas already hit by climate change, conservationists said on Tuesday.

A decade into its worst drought in a hundred years Australia is a lesson of what the American West could become. Bush fires are killing people and obliterating towns. Rice exports collapsed last year and the wheat crop was halved two years running. Water rationing is part of daily life.

On a cloudless December day in the Nevada desert, workers in white hard hats descend into a 30- foot-wide shaft next to Lake Mead.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions must fall sharply to avoid inflicting acid damage to the world's marine ecosystems, more than 150 scientists warned Friday.

Nearly 2 billion people in Asia, from coastal city dwellers to yak-herding nomads, will begin suffering water shortages in coming decades as global warming shrinks glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau, experts said.

President-elect Barack Obama may ban offshore oil and gas drilling in some areas of the Outer Continental Shelf, according to Ken Salazar, Obama’s choice for secretary of the Interior Department.

If the Clean Water Act can't protect a subalpine lake inside a national forest, something obviously is very wrong.

New research is bringing national attention to the world's imperiled coral reefs. Australia's great barrier reef is growing at its slowest rate in 400 years, due most likely to global warming, ocean acidification and other environmental threats.

The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that military training trumps protecting whales in a dispute over the Navy's use of sonar in submarine-hunting exercises off the coast of southern California.

Corals, lobsters, clams and many other ocean creatures — including some at the bottom of the food chain — may be unable to withstand the increasing acidity of the oceans brought on by growing global-warming pollution, according to a report Tuesday from the advocacy group Oceana.

Now, scientists say, it is a near-certainty that global warming will drive significant increases in waterborne diseases around the world.

But beneath the waves, scientists have uncovered an alarming secret. They have found streams of gas bubbling up from the seabed around the island of Ischia. 'The waters are like a Jacuzzi - there is so much carbon dioxide fizzing up from the seabed,' said Dr Jason Hall-Spencer, of Plymouth University. 'Millions of litres of gas bubble up every day.'

The environmental movement, only recently poised for major advances on global warming and other issues, has suddenly found itself on the defensive as high gasoline prices shift the political climate nationwide and trigger defections by longtime supporters.

Fighting a fierce north wind and cresting waves, a dozen Cucapa Indian fishermen were in trouble before they were halfway home, their small boats and balky outboard motors overmatched by the roiling estuary of the Colorado River Delta.

Sun screen lotions used by beach-going tourists worldwide are a major cause of coral bleaching, according to a new study commissioned by the European Commission.

Carbon dioxide spewed by human activities has made ocean water so acidic that it is eating away at the shells and skeletons of starfish, coral, clams and other sea creatures...

Dependra Das stretches out his arms to show his flaky skin, covered in raw saltwater sores.

A controversial land swap proposal could open portions of an Alaska wildlife refuge to oil drilling, dividing Alaska natives and stoking opposition from environmentalists seeking to protect the bears, moose and birds that live there.

Scientists who conducted the most comprehensive survey to date of New Zealand's Antarctic waters were surprised by the size of some specimens found, including jellyfish with 12-foot tentacles and 2-foot-wide starfish.

Today some 1.2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water and 2.6 billion lack proper sanitation (adequate sewage disposal). As a result, tainted water supplies are blamed for the worldwide deaths of 1.8 million children, according to the United Nation's Human Development Report for 2006.

Half of the waters in the United States are at risk of pollution or destructive development because of a wrongheaded Supreme Court decision in 2006.

The president wants to increase spending on every major category of our government's nuclear program except one: cleaning up the toxic legacy that lurks at nuclear reservations and facilities around the nation.

A concealed threat is hanging over this old Wild West mining town: A billion gallons of toxic water is trapped in a collapsed drainage tunnel in the hills overlooking Leadville and could blow at any moment with devastating effect, sweeping away mobile homes in the town of 2,600.

Nine more species of shark are to be added to the endangered list as scientists warn that oceans are being emptied of the fish by overfishing and finning.

Warming seas around Antarctica could soon unleash an invasion of predators for the first time in millions of years that would decimate the region’s fragile, biologically diverse ecosystem.

"We seem to have crossed a tipping point," Lubchenco said. "Low-oxygen zones off the Northwest coast appear to be the new normal."

From Chile to the Philippines to South Africa to her home country of Canada, Maude Barlow is one of a few people who truly understands the scope of the world's water woes.

The Pacific island nation of Kiribati has created the world's largest protected marine reserve, a California-sized wilderness brimming with reefs, fish and birds, conservation groups said on Thursday.

Lake Mead, the vast reservoir for the Colorado River water that sustains the fast-growing cities of Phoenix and Las Vegas, could lose water faster than previously thought and run dry within 13 years...

The potential that global warming has to dry up water resources in the American West and the food supplies of 1 billion people in the poorest regions of Africa and Asia are the focus of two studies released today.

With water becoming increasingly precious in California, a rising number of farmers figure they can make more money by selling their water than by actually growing something.

Recent laboratory tests found so much mercury in tuna sushi from 20 Manhattan stores and restaurants that at most of them, a regular diet of six pieces a week would exceed the levels considered acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Despite claims that enough energy is sitting off the coastline to power millions of homes, plans for wave and tidal power stations are minuscule compared with those for wind and solar plants, and long timelines are the reality.

One of Appalachia's coal-mining giants agreed yesterday to pay $20 million, the largest such fine imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency, after an investigation found more than 4,500 instances in which mine runoff tainted nearby waters.

The waters of the Yangtze have fallen to their lowest levels since 1866, disrupting drinking supplies, stranding ships and posing a threat to some of the world's most endangered species.

Five thousand children die every day globally because they do not have access to clean toilets, health experts said on Tuesday.

A vast flotilla of industrial trawlers from the European Union, China, Russia and elsewhere, together with an abundance of local boats, have so thoroughly scoured northwest Africa’s ocean floor that major fish populations are collapsing.

Kinkri Devi, an illiterate and impoverished woman who had waged a long and at least partly successful fight against illegal mining and quarrying in the mountainous northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, died last Sunday in Chandigarh, India. She was 82.

A federal judge yesterday severely limited the Navy's ability to use mid-frequency sonar on a training range off the Southern California coast, ruling that the loud sounds would harm whales and other marine mammals if not tightly controlled.

More than 1 billion people on our planet are forced to drink foul, infected water, which has killed at least 22 million people in the last decade.

The federal government will open up nearly 46,000 square miles off Alaska's northwest coast to petroleum leases next month, a decision condemned by enviromental groups that contend the industrial activity will harm northern marine mammals.

China has abandoned controversial plans to build a huge dam which would have submerged one of the country's most renowned tourist areas and forced the relocation of 100,000 residents in the south-western province of Yunnan.

Free hybrid-car parking. Cash rebates for installing solar panels. Low-interest loans for energy-saving home renovations. Money to tear up desert lawns and replace them with drought-resistant landscaping.

Jonathan Mayhew, a third-generation fisherman from Martha's Vineyard, Mass., knows firsthand that a school of northern Atlantic bluefin tuna is a marvel to behold.

For two decades, Ms. Dai was best known in China for her crusade against building a dam across China's longest river.

A groundbreaking scientific study has today established for the first time a large-scale and deadly link between fish farms and sea lice infestations that threatens to wipe out entire populations of wild Pacific salmon.

Atrazine, the second most widely used weedkiller in the country, is showing up in some streams and rivers at levels high enough to potentially harm amphibians, fish and aquatic ecosystems

Developing countries in Asia could face an "unprecedented" water crisis within a decade due to mismanagement of water resources...

The world's oceans appear to be soaking up less carbon dioxide, new environmental research has shown, a development that could speed up global warming.

The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man's land between San Francisco and Hawaii.

If Georgia orders watering restrictions in metro Atlanta beyond the current outdoor ban, it will be taking drought-fighting steps that not even arid Southern California or Las Vegas has had to make.

We are creating an ecological crisis by not taking care of our water supplies.

A rise of two degrees centigrade in global temperatures – the point considered to be the threshold for catastrophic climate change which will expose millions to drought, hunger and flooding – is now "very unlikely" to be avoided, the world's leading climate scientists said yesterday.

The 44 trends tracked in Vital Signs illustrate the urgent need to check consumption of energy and other resources that are contributing to the climate crisis, starting with the largest polluter, the United States, which accounted for over 21 percent of global carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning in 2005.

Two-thirds of the world’s polar bears will disappear by 2050, even under moderate projections for shrinking summer sea ice caused by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, government scientists reported on Friday.

The North-West Passage -- the sea route running along the Arctic coastline of North America, normally perilously clogged with thick ice -- is nearly ice-free for the first time since records began.

Hundreds of protesters on surfboards, swimming in the harbor and lining the docks held the Hawaii Superferry at bay for nearly two hours yesterday at Nawiliwili Harbor on Kaua'i, setting the stage for a legal showdown in a Maui courtroom this morning.

If we learned that Al Qaeda was secretly developing a new terrorist technique that could disrupt water supplies around the globe, force tens of millions from their homes and potentially endanger our entire planet, we would be aroused into a frenzy and deploy every possible asset to neutralize the threat.

The plastic bag is an icon of convenience culture, by some estimates the single most ubiquitous consumer item on Earth, numbering in the trillions.