Coastal Restoration

Everyone loves Kelly Slater. Everyone loves Will Ferrell. And everyone loves Robert Redford, especially your Mom. Ol' Sundance is trying to reconnect the

CaSochi — Just outside the Olympic Park in Sochi, where the Winter Games open on Friday, is a green space with benches, artificial ponds and a couple of hides. "Ornithological Park", the sign declares.

We take On Point to New Orleans to look at the state of America's battered coastlines.

It's only a concept, but gorgeous renderings show a possible UC research center near Ormond Beach recently inspired many at an Oxnard City Council meeting.

Kyle Graham, head of the state's coastal restoration authority, predicted some kind of settlement, some day, with the oil and gas industry. Tulane's Mark Davis said local government needs to set the right example in how it builds roads and deals with sinking land.

The goats have played a key role in a pioneering venture on the edge of San Francisco's Inner Richmond District: the transformation of a long-neglected little valley next to historic Mountain Lake into a model site for amphibious animals, and the plants and insects that sustain them. Over the years, the lake itself became filled with debris, toxic pollution, alien fish, pet shop turtles - even an alligator. Goats clear the ravineToday, the lake's East Arm is a shallow ravine, cleared by the goats from its thickets of French broom, Cape and English ivy, and a jungle of other invasive plants. The tiny Pacific chorus frog will also be reintroduced, and like so many other amphibians being brought back, will dine on a variety of spiders, beetles, flies and their ilk that inhabit the East Arm. Wild strawberries, cow parsnips, cinquefoil and the pink honeysuckle favored by hummingbirds are on Hildebiddle's list of 30 species of plants he intends for the low-lying ground that will soon be contoured by some 6,000 cubic yards of fresh earth. "Restoring the East Arm as protected wetland, with the plants and animals living their lives and thriving there, will give us a really unique way for the public to enjoy and understand the life cycles of everything," he said.

Before the bulldozers arrived last June, Malibu Lagoon was a fully grown habitat for egrets, voles and tidewater gobies, studded with sycamore trees and clusters of tule reeds. Today, the lagoon's...

Louisiana may have found an unusual source of money to help pay for restoring the state’s coastal wetlands: fees required of developers by the Army Corps of Engineers to compensate for damage they expect to do to wetlands. Developers in...