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Governments and industry around the world spend billions of dollars each year on environmental issues. In the United States, the media focus is often on air, water and land pollution--health issues-- and variations thereof such as water supply, Superfund, reauthorization of various environmental Acts, siting of nuclear waste repositories, incinerators, landfills. Occasionally we read about global warming and ozone depletion, overfishing and endangered species.
Outside the United States you're more likely to read about development, overfishing, deforestation, desertification, salinization, poverty and population. Finding WWW information on these and other topics can be challenging. There is no single place to start, but here are a few servers that index many other servers. You can go hunting two ways: use a search engine or visit a home page whose owners have already searched and hopefully selected the best and latest. Search engines, such as AltaVista, Webcrawler, Lycos, Infoseek and Excite produce random results that require a lot of opening of files to see what you've got. The result often is like opening somebody else's Christmas presents. Neat stuff but not what you really want. Dozens of search engines exist, stop and look at a websearch collection I made. Search Yahoo and elsewhere carefully by learning to use keywords and combinations of keywords appropriate to each search engine. Read their Help menus. Remember that whatever you think a good URL is today at Yahoo, won't be the same six months from now. Yahoo keeps reorganizing its index so you must search anew after a few months. Since search engines return unsorted and unevaluated lists, it may pay to become familiar with a sites whose owners do the cataloging for you. What you must do is find sites that catalog "your kind of information" and "bookmark" them for return visits. If you absolutely must know what's going on all the time, you may want to invest in one of the special web software programs that monitor your favorite sites and automatically alert you when there have been additions. Before you do, though, find your favorite sites. Try sites listed in the accompanying "Best of the Web" list, and some below. I'll add more links as time goes on. Go To Page: 1
The copyright of the article Where to Begin Looking for Environmental Information in Environment is owned by Kenneth Friedman. Permission to republish Where to Begin Looking for Environmental Information in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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