Environmental Engineering & Toxicology

Kotzebue is an Alaskan city located on a sound bordering the Chukchi Sea, about 30 miles above the Arctic Circle. The city features the Nullaġvik Hotel, a number of B&B’s, several churches, and a restaurant called Little Louie’s that serves breakfast burritos and nachos. About 70 percent of the 3,500 residents are Iñupiat Eskimo, and native traditions hold strong too.

“Work with your mind, not with your hands.” Recent graduate Daisy Benitez grew up hearing these words so often it became her mantra. In fact, her life was shaped by this saying and by the lives of its authors: her parents. After earning a bachelor’s degree in environmental engineering (’17), she will continue her work in sustainability through the Master in Green Technologies program, with her graduate studies funded by the National GEM Consortium Engineering Fellowship, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) Fellowship, and the Switzer Environmental Fellowship.

As farmers battle in their above-ground war on weeds, they may inadvertently create underground casualties – unintentionally attacking the beneficial bacteria that help crops guard against enemy fungus, according to Cornell University research. Specifically, Cornell researchers found negative consequences of the weed-killing herbicide glyphosate on Pseudomonas, a soil-friendly bacteria.

With tens of thousands of people displaced and many billions of dollars in estimated damages from the impacts of Hurricane Harvey, an environmental group on Tuesday filed a formal request on Tuesday to discover why the Trump administration recently decided to lift flood zone restrictions designed to mitigate these kinds of costly disasters.

Furthering the State’s continued efforts to address the effects of climate change, California Natural Resources Secretary John Laird today announced the appointment of 14 leaders in state climate science and infrastructure design to the Climate-Safe Infrastructure Working Group. ... Through its deliberations, the working group will investigate:

Margaret Torn, a senior scientist in Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)’s Earth & Environmental Sciences Area (EESA), has been named by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) as a 2017 AGU Fellow. Every year, the AGU Fellows program recognizes members who have made exceptional contributions to the Earth and space sciences. Vetted by a committee of AGU Fellows, honorees represent no more than 0.1 percent of AGU’s 60,000 members.

YOU HAVE NO real way of knowing if your town, your family, or your children face the kind of water contamination that exposed everyone in Flint, Michigan, to lead poisoning. Not because Flint is an outlier–it may, in fact, be the norm—but because no one has enough data to say for sure. ...

Rising sea levels, as well as droughts and earthquakes, threaten the levees protecting the Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta, which supplies 25 million Californians with fresh water. But the state’s solution isn’t to build higher but lower—150 ft below the earth.

Living on the edge of urban sprawl in Los Angeles inevitably means dealing with the wild creatures who have lived here for thousands of years before homes were built, including rodents. But using anticoagulant rodenticide to control the rat and mouse population around homes can expose pets and local wildlife to this deadly poison, writes Fellow Nancy Steele.