Last Wednesday health officials declared an environmental state of emergency after thousands of fish were discovered dead in the Mataquito River. A local sheep farmer named Andrs Valenzuela reported over the weekend that three of his animals died, presumably from drinking contaminated river water. This is not the first time CELCO, which last year boasted record earnings of more than US$600 million, has been blamed for serious environmental problems. Suspicion immediately fell on the nearby...

BANGKOK: Thai Union Frozen Products PCL, Asia s biggest canned tuna exporter, is cutting costs to offset rising prices as climate change reduces tuna catches, the company s president said. He expected dollar-based revenues to grow by eight percent this year, at the bottom of its target range of 8-10 percent, as higher tuna prices slowed demand. TUF, whose Chicken of the Sea brand accounts for about one third of earnings, planned no major merger or acquisition deals this year in an effort...

My job has been to force students to examine the foundations of their environmental commitments - their belief that intervening in nature can only endanger it, because nature knows best. But in the field, we meet tree farmers and ranchers who not only talk the green talk, they can show us the healthy ground where they walk. Many students have come to think about people in natural resource industries as the enemy. If the West is about anything, it's irony, which tends to expose how unstable...

Fisheries managers use the 3-year-old jack chinook counts at Bonneville Dam to help predict the return of upper Columbia adult 4-year-old spring chinook the following year. While this year's spring chinook fisheries are winding down, many are looking into the crystal ball to see if next year will be feast or famine. Through Thursday, the upriver jack chinook count was 18,169 at Bonneville, which points to an extraordinary return of jacks this year. The chapter will focus on muskie fishing...

After four days that began with high hopes of an end to two decades of deadlock, the Fisheries Agency's (FA) billion-dollar campaign to overturn the international ban on commercial whaling is again in ruins. Iceland's commercial whaling campaign -- restarted last year -- has been stalled, perhaps permanently, by concerns about mercury and other chemicals detected in whale carcasses. Japan in particular has never accepted the conservationist takeover of the IWC and has waged a $750-million...

When they first started their venture, as a way to fund Sea Gulch, they sold the statues right off the back of the truck like farmers selling our wares, Silverthorn said. Highway 101 and catching the attention of hundreds of motorists passing through who stopped to marvel at the craftsmanship made possible by an artisan and a rough-and-tumble logger's tool. And at that time, chainsaw carving was unheard of - it just hadn't been seen before. Kowalski and his wife, the late Floris Kowalski,...