University of Florida News

State policymakers at this week’s 2008 Climate Change summit in Miami will focus on renewable energy in Florida. The meeting is important and timely.

With the economy faltering, state and federal cutbacks threaten to slow scientific progress. As many commentators have noted in recent months, that is not a welcome trend for a nation facing the leveled plane of a globalized economy.

This week the governors of Alabama, Florida, and Georgia will discuss the allocation of the Apalachicola, Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers (ACF) among the three states.

When Dade County relocated its public library to a new building in 1985, the last several hundred books were moved by a human chain. The Everglades: River of Grass, the last of them all, was carried by a runner like a torch.

Buried in a recent National Science Foundation report is an eye-opening piece of news: The University of Florida has jumped 10 spots among top academic research institutions in research and development spending.

Absent from last week’s headlines about Gov. Charlie Crist’s veto of a 5 percent tuition hike for universities was an important piece of good news: The governor let stand $20 million for a new biofuel pilot plant to be built by the University of Florida.

Environmentalists whine a lot. I whine mostly about biodiversity loss, global warming and mismanagement of ecosystems. As an environmental scientist, I whine with copious data, stultifying statistics and assumed authority. Even friends get tired of my harping and ask for solutions, not more details about the problems.

For nearly 20 years, I’ve studied radical environmental movements. Fifteen years ago, I met with a small group of them in a forest in Tennessee. One among that group now faces sentencing before a federal court in Oregon for crimes attributed to the Earth and Animal Liberation fronts.

The fire season has barely started, but the costs of wildfires in Florida are already soaring. Few homes have been destroyed so far, but with more dry weather likely, more will probably go up in flames before the summer rains start. Given that the disastrous fires of 1998 didn’t get cranking until June, 2007 is likely to go down as the costliest fire season on record.

Durham police report that the lacrosse players presented neither a special nor unique case.