In Reykjavik we have 24 hours of daylight in June and about four hours in January. It's one of the cleanest, greenest, and safest cities in the world — a "greening up" that's urgent as temperatures across the Arctic rise faster than anywhere else in the world.
Fort Pond and Big Reed Pond in Montauk were free of harmful blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, blooms when Concerned Citizens of Montauk took water samples earlier this week, but a number of testing sites in Montauk, Amagansett, Springs, and East Hampton showed elevated levels of enterococcus bacteria, even before Wednesday's heavy rains.
In 1861 -- only 10 years after Yosemite Valley had been "discovered" -- Carleton E. Watkins, perhaps the most famous early Western photographer, wandered this extraordinary natural wonder with heavy camera equipment strapped to mules and snapped images that inspired Abraham Lincoln to secure the world's first national park, in perpetuity, "for public use, resort, and recreation."
Today, many of our national parks -- Yosemite and Grand Canyon especially -- are perilously overcrowded, a reminder of what happens when a public patch of land becomes #instafamous.
African elephants are in trouble. According to the Save the Elephant organization, their numbers have fallen from as many as 10 million a hundred years ago to as few as 400,000 today, and they could be nearly extinct by the end of the next decade.
