I was volunteering for a very important local ecological group here in central Illinois and by the time I got home I was too exhausted to post. The place was Starhill Forest Aboretum run by Edie and Guy Sternberg:

http://www.starhillforest.com/

And I must say, WHAT THE HELL IS UP WITH THE AUSSIES

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100405/ts_nm/us_australia_ship

This is Australia’s third such recent disaster, he said, following two last year, another oil spill off the Queensland coast and a major oil well blowout in the Timor Sea.

It should be clearer within the next few days what the likely scale of this disaster may be, Smyth said. In a worst case scenario, the spilled oil could reach protected areas on the Australian mainland, he said.

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dot dot dot

Stranded ship “time bomb” to Great Barrier Reef

SYDNEY (Reuters) – A stranded Chinese coal ship leaking oil onto Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is an environmental time bomb with the potential to devastate large protected areas of the reef, activists said on Monday.

The ship was a “ticking environmental time bomb,” Gilly Llewellyn, director of conservation for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in Australia, told Reuters.

She said this was the third major international incident involving its owners in four years.

Australian government officials say the stricken Shen Neng I belongs to the Shenzhen Energy Group, a subsidiary of China’s state-owned China Ocean Shipping (Group) Company, better known by its acronym COSCO.

In 2007, COSCO was linked to a major oil spill in San Francisco bay, while last year it was tied to another in Norway, both of which damaged environmentally sensitive areas.

“We are seeing a concerning pattern potentially associated with this company,” Llewellyn told Reuters.

COSCO officials in Australia could not be contacted for comment on Monday.

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