You know when you were a kid and you left your room as messy as possible for days, until your mother suddenly noticed and made you clean it up? The EPA is that kid. The problem is, the EPA has no mother to make it clean up. In fact, it's supposed to be that mother.

Just two days after the Environmental Protection Agency renounced any responsibility for regulating greenhouse gas emissions, Kenya's courts stepped up to thwart a massive sugarcane and ethanol project planned for the Tana River Delta, a biodiverse ecosystem that is home to significant portions of the world's greater flamingoes, African spoonbills, and  various sandpipers and terns.

I have always been this way. I want to listen to music through a good sound system, and I want to look at birds through good binoculars. I just don’t understand people who don’t feel the same way. There is no getting around the fact that great binoculars make birding more satisfying.

By "Tern" Alexa Schirtzinger--My morning news diet usually consists of NPR, the BBC, and a little New York Times. There's usually some dire event in Zimbabwe or Gaza or, of late, the U.S. economy. This morning, though, I was surprised to hear that people of my ilk are having trouble finding love:

By "Tern" Jessica Leber--More than what we eat, we are what we toss away. Anthropologists, archeologists, and so-called “garbologists" who wade through society’s dumpsters and landfills have long known in garbage veritas. Could our truth in trash be all that’s left some day?

By "Tern" Alexa Schirtzinger--Food metaphor: I adore ice cream. If I could eat it all day without getting indigestion or outgrowing my jeans, I probably would. But in college, morbidly afraid of the "Freshman 15,"
I knew I couldn't eat ice cream every night after dinner. I did, however, discover nonfat frozen yogurt, which I could eat with abandon.

Of course, it probably would've made more sense just to be reasonable and not eat creamy desserts every night. But I liked them!

By "Tern" Jessica Leber--The tuatara, an ancient reptile in New Zealand, may soon become extinct, according to a new study. The culprit is climate change, but the way in which rising temperatures will kill off these creatures is unusually insidious.

By "Tern" Alexa Schirtzinger--This Saturday, I went to investigate another of artist Olafur Eliasson’s contributions to New York, a “reversed waterfall” that complements the “Arctic Hysteria” Scandinavian art exhibit at P.S. 1, part of the Museum of Modern Art, in Queens.

By "The Tern" Jessica Leber--California’s recent and continuing wildfires have already devoured more than 600,000 acres, threatened some 10,000 residences and forced evacuations of large swaths of some counties. But the burning has also ensnared one of the rarest birds in the world.