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New York State will move a step closer this week to opening up the Catskills and the Southern Tier to natural gas drilling, as a key environmental assessment is made public. WNYC's Ilya Marritz explains.

REPORTER: Property owners, energy companies and environmentalists have been waiting more than a ...

New York State will move a step closer this week to opening up the Catskills and the Southern Tier to natural gas drilling, as a key environmental assessment is made public. WNYC's Ilya Marritz explains.

REPORTER: Property owners, energy companies, and environmentalists have been waiting more than a year to learn ...

At the first ever New York Climate Week, some in the advertising business are assessing their own impact on global warming. WNYC's Ilya Marritz has more.

REPORTER: Everything is marketed as green these days, from cars to condos.

Kelly Stephenson is with Ogilvy Earth, a unit of the global ad giant Ogilvy ...

That loose knit-group of political imposters who take on big issues through big stunts are hitting a local media outlet. Their latest action is timed to correspond with the first-ever New York City Climate Change ...

The first ever New York City Climate Week kicks off today. It's timed to coincide with a summit of world leaders at the United Nations. WNYC's Ilya Marritz has more.

REPORTER: It begins with what activists are calling a Global Wake Up Call. At exactly 18 minutes past noon today, bells ...

The New York City Council has passed a bill to reduce emissions from school buses. The legislation mandates that starting next school year, 600 older buses be retired and more than 6,000 be retro-fitted with pollution control equipment to reduce students' exposure to fumes. Isabel Silverman is a lawyer with ...

City health officials are making a new push to make New Yorkers healthier. This time, it involves getting outer borough residents to exercise more and banning smoking in city parks and beaches. As WNYC’s Fred Mogul reports, a similar effort launched during Mayor Bloomberg's first term in office has had ...

A bill is headed for Governor Paterson's desk that would create a public-private weatherization fund. Advocates say it could be a game changer in the effort to make buildings more energy efficient. WNYC's Ilya Marritz has more.

REPORTER: The government would put in $112 million to start. Advocates hope the fund ...

New York City's sewage operations will get freshening up, through $220 million in federal economic stimulus money. With the funds, which are coming to the city through Albany, the city will upgrade equipment at four wastewater treatment facilities, and replace sludge ships, which carry raw sewage to the plants. Governor ...

The USTA bought 500 recycling bins, enough to put right next to every garbage can on U.S. Open grounds.

Over the course of its two-week run in Queens, the U.S. Open tennis championships are believed to generate about $420 million in economic activity for New York City. That's according to an eight-year-old estimate by the city comptroller's office. Many sports economists question such big numbers, saying they're overblown. But there's a different kind of influence the U.S. Open has that can't be overrated, and that's its effect on the environment.

GARZA: This grand slam is two weeks. We have 700,000 people come to this facility.

Rita Garza is senior director of corporate communications at the United States Tennis Association, which runs the U.S. Open.

GARZA: It's a lot of volume in a short amount of time.

That means lots of media, and their TV trucks and laptops, drawing energy. Hundreds of staff, printing out programs, stat sheets, and press releases. and thousands of players and fans, eating and drinking.

GARZA: We sell about 500,000 plastic bottles, between our water and our iced tea and Gatorade and things like that. And sell about 20,000 aluminum cans. That's a lot.

Garza and I are standing in one of the many hallways that lace through the guts of Arthur Ashe Stadium, the main showcase court at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. She just finished showing me the loading dock, where the USTA has installed a new chute and compactor just for recyclables. It's done so because this year, for the first time at the U.S. Open, the USTA is setting out recycling bins throughout its entire 43-acre site, to collect plastic bottles and metal cans. In the past, the organization relied on its waste carting company to recycle, trusting it was picking the materials out of the garbage. Another first: the USTA is recycling the 18,000 to 20,000 plastic tennis ball containers used at the Open.

The Federal Aviation Administration says it will change rules for flying over the Hudson River, in the wake of a deadly crash last month. Pilots will be required to use a common radio frequency when flying below 1,300 ft.

New York Representative Jerrold Nadler's office says the FAA isn't going far ...

The Croton water treatment plant in the Bronx is overdue and running at double its original budget. That's according to audits by city comptroller Bill Thompson. Thompson, who's also running for mayor, says the public was misled about the costs of the project, now at $2 billion, more than double ...

The US Environmental Protection Agency is citing problems with how New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection monitors thousands of contaminated sites. WNYC's Bob Hennelly has more.

REPORTER: The EPA Region two audit of New Jersey's DEP says the state lacks basic quality controls to ensure the accuracy of its testing and ...

The city's Department of Sanitation is test driving three new hybrid garbage trucks. Commissioner John Doherty says the new trucks should increase fuel efficiency by as much as 30 percent compared to those already on the road. He says it remains to be seen if the city will add the ...

Despite the heat and humidity, some of New York City's most popular beaches are closed today, because of concerns about rip tides from Hurricane Bill. Even though Bill is hundreds of miles away, he's churning up high waves and dangerous rip currents along the city's Atlantic Ocean beaches. The city ...

New York City is the former oyster capitol of the world. There was a time when New York Harbor had over 350 square miles of oyster beds, half of the world supply. Street-side oyster vendors were as popular as hot dog carts are today. Local oysters were a delicious treat, they cleaned the waterways and they bolstered aquatic wildlife. But oysters have since disappeared from New York Harbor, mostly because of human intervention. Now, there are new efforts to reintroduce them in Jamaica Bay.

Mark Kurlansky, the author of The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell, and Jeffrey Levinton, distinguished professor of ecology and evolution at SUNY Stony Brook, visit The Brian Lehrer Show to talk about the history of oysters in New York Harbor, and plans to reintroduce them.

Listen to the whole show:

Andrea Bernstein: Let's start with a history. I'm very intrigued by this idea of oysters being sold like hot dogs.

Mark Kurlansky: Well, oysters are an animal that lives in brackish water, which is water that's saltier than fresh water but not as salty as the sea. Estuaries of rivers, places where fresh water dumps into sea water are the ideal climate. New Yorkers too easily forget that the five boroughs of New York City are at the magnificent estuary of the Hudson River and the estuary used to be full of oysters.

That means the East River and the Hudson and out in the harbor around Staten Island and Liberty Island and Ellis Island, which used to be called Big and Little Oyster Island. The coast of the Bronx, back when the Bronx had a non-industrial coast, and the Brooklyn coast into Queens and Jamaica...it was all full of oysters. There was this tremendous natural resource that was identified with New York so that, for centuries, if somebody said they were going to New York City, the typical response was 'Enjoy the oysters!' They were sold everywhere.

Bernstein: Until when?

Kurlansky: Until 1927 when the last bed was closed. A process began in the 1880's when they started understanding about germs. There were chronic epidemics in New York history and they never really understood the cause of them. Everybody sort of assumed that it must be caused by foreigners and immigration and poverty. Then they started understanding what really caused things like cholera and developed the ability to trace them. They kept tracing them to oyster beds. One by one, with each disease outbreak, a bed was closed. The last bed, which was in Raritan Bay between Staten Island and New Jersey, was closed in 1927. Then it was over.

Seven years ago, the United Nations conducted a study of human development in the Arab world. Now it has released a follow up and there’s not a lot of good news for the 330 million ...

Forestry experts are evaluating the extent of damage done to hundreds of trees in Central Park during last night's fast-moving thunderstorm. About 100 trees were knocked down, and hundreds more have broken limbs, and may need to be taken down.

"Many of them are just snapped off ...

The city's parks commissioner say parents should pay no heed to a new report that cites potential hazards in playgrounds. The New York Public Interest Research Group cites things like peeling paint and a lack of protective services in more than 40 percent of the 29 playgrounds it surveyed. Parks ...

A stretch of lower Manhattan along the East River is set to get a new, two-mile promenade. The project is meant to transform the waterfront into a more pedestrian and bike-friendly space.

City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden says a newly constructed Pier 15 will have an education center and cafe and ...