Environment

Gov. Phil Scott’s newly minted Climate Action Commission held its first meeting Tuesday, and while past Vermont governors have also convened special panels to study the issue, commission members insist this latest one will deliver results.

The draft National Climate Report both refines and underscores the impact of human activity on our climate. We're focusing in on the effects in Vermont and the Northeast.

Next week, people across the country will turn their eyes - hopefully safely protected - to the skies to watch a rare solar eclipse. We're looking up too. We'll talk about the eclipse, and about stargazing, astronomy, and all the latest from space - including the dramatic final mission of the Saturn probe Cassini. 

The next gubernatorial election is still more than a year away, and it's been more than 50 years since an incumbent governor lost a reelection bid in Vermont. But the leading Democratic challenger to Gov. Phil Scott says he thinks the Republican incumbent is vulnerable.

Recreation businesses involving activities such as skiing, hiking, mountain biking and boating bring a lot of money into Vermont. But until now there hasn't been an organized effort to bring all of those businesses together and possibly provide some organized state support.

Vermont farmers are taking part in a regionwide effort to put off haying, when possible, to give grassland birds a better chance of surviving.

The state is proposing a new rule for Great Hosmer Pond, in Craftsbury and Albany, and the draft language takes the unprecedented step of limiting the hours when rowing sculls and racing shells can be on the water to make room for other uses, including high speed motorboating.

Here in the north country, we spread a lot of salt on our roadways to melt the ice that causes hazardous winter driving conditions. But that salt has to go somewhere.  Flora Krivak-Tetley, a PhD student in Biology at Dartmouth College, is part of a group of researchers with the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network that has been taking a look at how salt is affecting waterbodies from Maine to the Midwest.

A flowering plant thought to be extinct in Vermont has been rediscovered.

Winged loosestrife is a native plant related to the non-native invasive purple loosestrife.

Sitting on my desk at home is a small vial of alcohol containing three pickled, blacklegged tick nymphs, each no bigger than the period at the end of a typed sentence… three tiny alarming arachnids.

A researcher at Middlebury College says the tick population has doubled, and in Rutland county the mosquito count is up by 30 percent. But down in southern Vermont there's an historic infestation of fungus gnats.