Deep beneath the surface, vast communities of alien sea life make their home on underwater mountain ranges, or seamounts, most of which are completely unknown to science. In the South Pacific, orange roughy -- an ancient-looking fish that suffers the great misfortune of tasting good to humans -- lives to be 150 years old, reaching sexual maturity only around its 33rd year. Nearby, invertebrates ward off would-be predators using highly evolved chemical defenses -- some of which, we're beginning to discover, may also treat human diseases.

Then the bottom-trawlers arrive: fishermen dragging giant nets that indiscriminately slurp up all life in their path, razing the corals and sponges that make up the undersea canopy. The wake settles, but life does not return; in deep, dark environments, things grow too slowly to bounce back.

This summer, NRDC science and policy experts helped win the passage of a landmark international agreement that, as of September 30, will dramatically restrict bottom-trawling in 52 million square miles of the South Pacific's high seas. Even New Zealand -- home to 90 percent of the vessels that trawl the region's high seas -- signed on, signaling that they too recognize the folly of such unsustainable practices. The next step is to close the major markets in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Here at home, regulations adopted last year under the reauthorized Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act will close all U.S. ports to countries whose fishing vessels operate in violation of international laws and agreements governing fishing. The European Union plans to consider similar rules this fall.
-- LMW

In the late 1960s, Peabody Energy, an international coal mining company, entered into an agreement with the Hopi and Navajo tribes of Arizona's Black Mesa to begin what would become the nation's largest strip mining operation. Over the ensuing decades, Peabody would do more than mine coal on tribal lands. Each day the company pumped more than a million gallons of groundwater from the local aquifer to turn the coal into a slurry that could be piped some 273 miles away, to the Mohave Generating Station in Laughlin, Nevada -- one of the dirtiest conventional coal-fired plants in the United States. Sacred springs ran dry (see "A Thirsty Nation" by Tim Folger, Fall 2004). In the late 1990s, the tribes turned to NRDC to stop Peabody from squandering their water, and NRDC launched an investigation into the loss of natural and cultural resources on Black Mesa. Now, after years of struggle, both the mining operation and the Mohave power plant will be shut down. This past spring, Southern California Edison, one of the primary owners of Mohave, announced that it would not invest in necessary upgrades to Mohave, citing unresolved water issues.
-- Erika Brekke