Reports of the mysterious white nose syndrome, a fungal phenomenon that has reduced certain bat populations to near extinction levels, seem to have died down of late. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean the disease is doing the same.

One species in particular has scientists worried. This fall, when the Virginia Big-Eared Bats return to their caves for their six-month hibernation, there’s some concern that they won’t emerge in the spring. Learn more about what the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park is doing to keep the species alive (thanks to a grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service), and about white nose syndrome itself.

Photo by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation; Little Brown Bat showing symptoms of white nose syndrome.

We asked you recently what kind of food you think it's most important to limit your intake of. From the poll options, an overwhelming number of you chose Processed Foods as the food to eat less of, with Sugar coming in a distant second. Here are the complete results:

Of the following, which food do you think it's most important to limit your intake of?

There are many other foods and ingredients that people choose not to consume that weren't in the poll, from caffeine and artificial sweeteners to gluten or any kind of meat. The reasons why we choose to limit some foods are just as varied: flavor, health reasons, weight loss, personal ethics, political statements. For some, it's not a choice but a neccessity, either for financial reasons or as the result of a food intolerance or severe allergy.

Knowing that MOTHER EARTH NEWS readers are often health-conscience and choose to grow their own food, we're curious: Have you cut back or eliminated certain ingredients or foods from your diet? If so, why, and what affects have you noticed as a result?

Today, all over the world, bloggers are writing about climate change as part of Blog Action Day.

MOTHER EARTH NEWS is participating in this event for the third year in a row, and as it happens, we write about climate change all the time!

So, for a quick look at this important issue, here are three of our recent articles we think are helpful in understanding the problem and thinking about possible solutions. 

1. Climate Change and Your Garden. For gardeners everywhere, the issue of climate change is getting personal. Here’s how changing climate patterns are affecting what you can grow in your garden.

2. The Amazing Benefits of Grass-fed Meat. Here’s a piece of the climate change puzzle you might not have heard before. Raising cattle on grass instead of grain (and buying grass-fed meat) can help sequester carbon, build more fertile soil, and produce healthier meat — all at the same time.

3. A Plan for the Solar Revolution. Burning fossil fuels is a big part of the problem. Renewable energy is a big part of the solution. 

(And for the MOTHER-lode of information on global warming, you can find all the climate change articles we’ve ever written here on our website.)

It’s fall — leaves are changing color, song birds are migrating, Vs of ducks and geese gracefully and noisily wend their way south for the winter, and scores of species are eating and storing, preparing for the cold months ahead. If you’re like millions of other Americans, this is one of your favorite times of year to watch the seasonal changes in your particular eco-nich. And what better place to view the seasonal highlights but at a National Wildlife Refuge?

The Federal Government has been in the business of protecting wildlife resources since 1864. According to the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service: “The first Federal action aimed in part at protecting wildlife resources on a designated area appears to be an Act of Congress on June 30, 1864, that transferred the Yosemite Valley from the public domain to the State of California. One of the terms of the transfer was that State authorities ‘shall provide against the wanton destruction of the fish and game found within the said reservation and against their capture and destruction for purposes of merchandise or profit.’” 

Today, the National Wildlife Refuge System has designated more than 520 units in all 50 states, plus American Samoa, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, the Johnson Atoll, Midway Atoll and several other Pacific Islands, encompassing over 93 million acres of valuable wildlife habitat.

Next week, October 11 thru 17, has been designated National Wildlife Refuge Week. There’s at least one Refuge in every state and you can find if there are special activities happening in your state next week on this Special Events Calendar. But whether or not there is a special event in your state, this would be a great time to visit the National Wildlife Refuge closest to your home.

The recent PBS series National Parks: America's Best Idea has drawn some great attention to our nation's protected wilderness areas and, hopefully, has reinvigorated our appreciation of the parks in the process. Along those lines, as pointed in Don't Be a National Park Bagger (from Utne Reader, MOTHER EARTH NEWS's sister magazine), it also elicits some important questions about the environmental impact of travel and about how we travel, specifically, the impact of taking fewer but more engaged trips versus that of taking many more cursory trips.

From carbon footprints to added wear and tear on everything from trails to monuments, travel of any kind leaves its mark on the environment, a point that's been discussed in MOTHER EARTH NEWS and, even more so, in travel-oriented blogs such as Vagablogging and World Hum. The difficulty of balancing the environmental effects of your travels with a desire to see and appreciate firsthand the natural and manmade marvels of the world isn't an easy task, and is an issue that's inspired numerous blog posts, articles and passionate discussions on travel forums and other online communities. What do you think? Would you travel less, or otherwise change the way you travel, out of concern for the environment?

Photo by ISTOCKPHOTO

This Sunday, Sept. 27, PBS kicks off their six-part series by Ken Burns about America’s national parks. The series is magnificent, as befits the subject, and hopefully it will inspire a reinvigorated interest in our nation's most beautiful natural spaces. (Find out more about the series in The National Parks: America’s Best Idea – A New Series from Ken Burns and PBS, a write-up by the MOTHER EARTH NEWS editors covering all six episodes.)

Along the same lines, we asked you a couple of weeks ago which national parks you visited most recently. The exciting news is that of the 949 readers who took the poll, 711 have been to a national park recently. And of the specific parks listed, Great Smoky Mountains National Parks recorded the highest number of poll-taking attendees, with 210 votes. (You can see the full survey results below.)

And that’s not all. Some of our readers have been sharing remarkable photos from their national park visits at the MOTHER EARTH NEWS photo-sharing site, cu.MotherEarthNews.com — from the Great Smoky Mountains to Glacier National. If you have photos from a recent park visit, put ’em up! We love them, and, who knows, they may appear in the CU department of the magazine.

Now, though, we want to hear your stories. What’s your favorite memory of our national parks? We know that MOTHER’s readers have some good ones, so take a minute to share them below. Haven’t been yet? Where do you want to venture first?

Photo by iStockphoto

Which U.S. national park have you been to most recently?

1. Grand Canyon National Park 10% (92 votes)
2. Yellowstone National Park 11% (104 votes)
3. Yosemite National Park 6% (58 votes)
4. Great Smoky Mountains National Park 22% (210 votes)
5. Olympic National Park 3% (31 votes)
6. Other 23% (216 votes)
7. None 25% (238 votes)

Total Votes: 949

Check out this compelling roundtable discussion of four expert climate change scientists: The State of the Climate — and of Climate Science.

It originally appeared in the June 2009 issue of DISCOVER Magazine. (I just "discovered" it ...) The introduction does a great job of describing the crossroads we're at today as science and public opinion meet:

"In the list of world challenges, global warming might be at once the most alarming and the most controversial. According to some predictions, climate change caused by human activity could cause mass extinction in the oceans, redraw the planet’s coastlines, and ravage world food supplies. At the same time, a significant portion of the American public questions whether global warming will really cause any major harm; many still doubt that human-driven warming is happening at all."

Here are a few highlights of the discussion:

"I spend a lot of time studying the ice sheets at the bottom of the planet—how they form and how they collapse. The poles are like the planet’s air conditioner. When things are working well, the poles keep the planet nice and cool and we don’t think about it. When things stop working, the poles can start to melt and there’s a puddle on the floor. Today both poles are getting warmer; in Greenland and Antarctica you can see the surface of the ice dropping, and you can see there’s less mass when you measure the ice from space. The process has been ongoing, but it looks like it’s happening faster than it was. We know the ice sheets have come and gone in the past. Why is this any different? One of the most compelling reasons is that in the past the ice sheets from the two poles didn’t move together—one would lead and the other would follow. This time, both the north and south are spewing ice into the global ocean, accelerating at the same time." 

— Robin E. Bell, a senior research scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

[... the Earth got warm in the past, too] "but it got warm over millions of years, and ecosystems had a chance to adapt. What we’re seeing are rates of increase in greenhouse gases and warming that exceed natural rates by a factor of 100. So what we’re doing is really unusual when seen from a geologic perspective.

[Humans are doing in centuries what natural processes do over millions of years?] "Yes, and the other timescale mismatch is that what we do over the next decades will affect life on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions of years. We are at a critical juncture in earth history. If we don’t do the right thing and there are geologists around 50 million years from now, they’ll be able to look at cores and see the remnants of a civilization that developed advanced technology but didn’t develop the wisdom to use it wisely."

"To me the most compelling evidence [that human behavior is actually warming the planet] is the fact that the stratosphere — the upper atmosphere — is cooling while the lower atmosphere and the land surface are warming. That’s a sign that greenhouse gases are trapping energy and keeping that energy close to the surface of the earth. I mentioned that in ocean acidification, you actually see animals that should make shells unable to make shells anymore. You could demonstrate the same kind of effect in a bell jar in the lab. There is a level of certainty about it."

— Ken Caldeira, a professor at Stanford and staff member in the department of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington

"One of the most remarkable achievements of the 20th century was the way we were able to increase the global food supply in pace with unprecedented population growth. We will have to raise the food supply another two times to feed all of the people that we think will be alive by the latter third of the 21st century. We have reason to be somewhat sanguine about doing it if climate stays more or less the same, but how will we do it with the climate change? Based on our simulations and on 25 years of research, what bothers us most is that in the tropics, where the majority of poor people live today, crops are currently raised at temperatures pretty close to their photosynthetic optimums."

— Bill Easterling, Dean of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences at Pennsylvania State University

You can read the full discussion and learn more about the credentials of the panelists at The State of the Climate — and of Climate Science.