Honest, it's just a " narrow regulatory change, " US Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne told reporters when his department was revealed to be altering the Endangered Species Act in the last months of the Bush Administration. Journalists didn't buy it. As the New York Times put it in an editorial, " The Bush administration has never masked its distaste for most environmental laws or its ambition...

Islands make up 5.3% of Earth’s land area yet maintain an estimated 19% of bird species, 17% of rodents, 17% of flowering plants, and 27% of human languages. Species diversity is disproportionately threatened on islands in relation to the islands’ proportion of both global land area and species, with 61% of all extinct species and 37% of all critically endangered species confined to islands. La...