June
June 15, 1977
The U.S. Supreme Court upholds the 1973 Endangered Species Act and stops construction of the Tellico Dam. According to the Ecotopia web site: The lawsuit leading to the decision had begun in 1975, when law professor Zygmunt Plater and then-student Hiram Hill filed the first petition under the Endangered Species Act. They called on the Department of the Interior to list the snail darter as an endangered species. The snail darter is a small fish that lives in the Little Tennessee River below the Tellico dam site. In 1976, zoologist David Etnier, who discovered the snail darter, joined Platner, Hill and others in filing a lawsuit to stop construction of the dam. On May 25, 1976, a judge ruled that it was too late to stop the project. The government had already spent $80 million and the dam was almost finished. But the plaintiffs appealed and on June 15, 1977, in the case of Tennessee Valley Authority vs. Hill et al., the Supreme Court ruled to suspend construction. “It is clear that Congress intended to halt and reverse the trend toward species extinction whatever the cost,” said Chief Justice Warren Burger in his opinion.
June ,1974
- Sherwood Rowland and Mario J. Molina describe the way refrigerants (CFCs or chlorofluorocarbons) break up ozone in a catalytic cycle in the June issue of Nature. Rowland and Molina win the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1995 along with German atmospheric scientist Paul J. Crutzen.
June 9, 2001
Science magazine publishes NASAsatellite survey of over 2,000 glaciers showing that most of are shrinking. Many thousands of NASA images from the Terra spacecraft are compared with aerial photos over the decades. Most glaciers shrank Ôby hundreds of metres, some by several kilometresÕ.
June 14, 2001
European leaders scold US President George W. Bush in a European tour for his stand on the Kyoto global warming treaty.
June 5, 2005
World environment day held in San Francisco, the first time the event has been held in the U.S. in 30 years.
June 18, 2006
Whaling impasse -- International Whaling Commission (IWC) passes 33-32, with one abstention, a nonbinding resolution criticizing a 1986 whaling ban as unnecessary and responsible for the depletion of fish populations. But pro-whaling commission members don't have the 75% supermajority threshold needed to rescind the moratorium. The vote was viewed as a sign of the growing influence of the Japan-led pro-whaling contingent of the 70-member commission. Antiwhaling groups and countries claim Japan was promising smaller IWC member countries financial aid packages, but Japan denied the charge.