Environmental problems used to be strictly local. You polluted your well. You fished out your lake. You logged your forest.
Now mobility, technology, energy choices and trade have changed all of that. Carbon dioxide - whether from coal burned in a Beijing power plant or petroleum burned in a Boston taxicab or a forest burned in Rondonia, Brazil - adds to the natural heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere. Comb jellyfish from American waters transform the Black Sea, as I wrote in Science Times this week. Plastic trash blown into a harbor in Tokyo or Long Beach can drift hundreds of miles into the Pacific, snagging on a reef or ending up stuck in the gullet of a suffocating sea turtle.

Thursday night I filed a story about a newly realized long-distance connection -between logging deep in the Congo River basin and the nesting grounds of one of the rarest reptilian denizens of the sea, the leatherback turtle.

Thousands of stray logs, broken away from rafts of timber heading to mills abroad, end up washing onto turtle beaches in Gabon, forming barricades blocking the path of female turtles coming ashore to lay eggs above the tide line. Some details are online here.

It's a small impact, over all. The researchers estimated that just 8 to 14 percent of the arriving turtles failed to build viable nests because of the blockades and only 1 or 2 out of 100 perish amid the logs. But for a critically endangered species, every failed attempt at reproduction matters.

The logs are valuable. But Gabonese law says they are state property, so no scavenging is allowed. The scientists, writing in the journal Oryx, proposed changes in laws and policies to encourage harvesting of the runaway logs. Let's see what happens.
When I was reporting the broader story on the altered oceans, I called James L. Connaughton, President Bush's top aide on environmental issues. He¡¯s been a frequent target of environmental groups, particularly on climate policy. But he was largely credited by many such organizations for helping push some decisions Mr. Bush made recently on ocean conservation. Mr. Connaughton is a longtime scuba diver as well.