Environment

Al Gore made waves for his work raising awareness on climate-change issues. Another poisonous environment has captured his attention as well: a climate that threatens reasonable public discourse.

Tim Fitzgerald, a marine scientist with the Oceans Program at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), shares tips for selecting fish that are good for you — and for the environment. The EDF's "Seafood Selector To-Go" is available online and in a pocket-size guide.

With both the cost of and demand for oil rising, nations with large energy reserves are redrawing political and military alliances, and oil-rich countries like Russia and Venezuela are enjoying greater influence. Michael Klare, author of Rising Power, Shrinking Planet, calls it the "new international energy order."

That guilty feeling after a big meal? It might be about more than calories and cholesterol. New Yorker science writer Michael Specter explains how carbon emissions released during food production are having an impact on the environment.

James Hansen, a leading NASA climate scientist, says the Bush administration has tried to silence his warnings about global warming. Writer and scientist Mark Bowen wrote a book on the affair: Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming.

David Wilcove, one of world's leading experts on endangered species, discusses his new book, No Way Home, which chronicles the decline of the world's animal migrations. Wilcove is professor of ecology, evolutionary biology and public affairs at Princeton University.

Primatologist duo Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth discuss their new book, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. The husband-and-wife team spent years studying a group of baboons in Botswana, observing their behavior, vocalizations — and even their feces — to better understand the primates' complex social structure.

A MacArthur Fellow and co-founder of the Pacific Institute, Peter Gleick runs one of the nation's leading water-conservation assessment centers.

The institute's biennial report, The World's Water, surveys global water trends and issues, including the links between water and terrorism and the growing risk of flood and drought.

Investigative reporter Mark Schapiro explains in a new book that toxic chemicals exist in many of the products we handle every day — agents that can cause cancer, genetic damage and birth defects, lacing everything from our gadgets to our toys to our beauty products.

Climatologist Kerry Emanuel, professor at MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, was named one of the world's 100 most influential people last year by Time magazine — in part because of a study he published, a month before Hurricane Katrina, that looked at thousands of hurricanes over several decades and found that the average power of the storms had doubled.