The Associated Press is reporting this week that federal regulators under President Obama are taking the first steps toward regulating drugs in the nation's drinking water supply -- a problem first reported by science writer Elizabeth Royte in "Drugging Our Waters" in OnEarth's Fall 2006 issue.

Royte tells the story of how this nation's aging population and increasing reliance on pharmaceuticals -- some elderly Americans take as many as 30 drugs a day, she writes, and prescription drug sales rose by an annual average of 11 percent between 2000 and 2005 -- leads to more drugs making their way into our lakes, rivers and groundwater. From the story:

Alarmed by data that showed trace levels of pharmaceuticals in European streams, researchers in the United States have begun to survey our nation's waterways. In 2002, the USGS published the results of its first-ever reconnaissance of man-made contaminants. Using highly sensitive assays, the agency found traces of 82 different organic contaminants -- fertilizers and flame retardants as well as pharmaceuticals -- in surface waters across the nation. These drugs included natural and synthetic hormones, antibiotics, antihypertensives, painkillers, and antidepressants.

Now that science has documented the presence of free-flowing pharmaceuticals, researchers are faced with another, far more difficult, pair of questions: What does this mean for the environment, and what does it mean for us? Early evidence of harm to aquatic organisms is giving researchers grounds for real concern.

The Associated Press followed up on Royte's reporting last year with a story that at least 51 million Americans are drinking water that contains prescription drugs -- everything from mood stabilizers to sex hormones to antibiotics. The AP report made the front pages of The Washington Post, The New York Times and many other news outlets and led to congressional hearings and investigations.

Now the AP says that government regulators are beginning to move toward dealing with pharmaceuticals as environmental pollutants. Among the signs reported by the news agency:

• For the first time, the EPA has listed some pharmaceuticals as candidates for regulation in drinking water. The agency also has launched a survey to check for scores of drugs at water treatment plants across the nation.
• The FDA has updated its list of waste drugs that should be flushed down the toilet, but the agency has also declared a goal of working toward the return of all unused medicines.
• The National Toxicology Program is conducting research to clarify how human health may be harmed by drugs at low environmental levels.

To understand more about why this is so important, check out Royte's original OnEarth story, republished here.

Reason No. 137 that I love commuting by bike in New York City: I get to watch baby hawks go to flight school.

Last year, I was fascinated and then heartbroken by a pair of red-tail hawks that built a precarious-looking nest over the West Side Highway, produced a trio of hatchlings, then lost their offspring before they got a chance to take flight, apparently to rat poison.

So I was happy -- but concerned -- this year when the hawks returned to Riverside Park and took up in a new tree, this time just off the West Side bike path that I frequently ride to work. (New York real estate experts would no doubt call this new nest an upgrade -- it has great views of the Hudson River.)

I didn't watch the pair as closely as I did last year, because I had a newborn of my own that took up most of my attention this spring. But I did check the updates occasionally at blogs that obsessively follow urban hawks, and I always looked up at the nest when I passed by their tree.

Riding home last week, I noticed more commotion than usual. Photographers -- call them hawkarazzi -- were pointing their lenses skyward, and parks employees were surrounding the hawks' tree with a temporary fence and signs warning dog walkers to keep their pooches at bay.

The baby hawks were learning to fly.

I pulled my bike over and craned my neck up with everyone else. I quickly spotted mom and dad high in the branches, watching as their new trio of youngsters tested out their wings. As a new father myself, I felt a shared sense of pride with the plucky birds who -- like me -- call Riverside Drive their home.

Much has been written about the connection that New Yorkers feel with their hawks -- particularly the famous Pale Male, who nested for years on a Fifth Avenue co-op overlooking Central Park that he shared with Mary Tyler Moore. (The Riverside Park hatchlings are likely his descendents.)

For my part, I think it's a sense of validation and connection to nature -- that even here on the island of Manhattan, one of the most densely packed cities in the world, I can see hawks building nests and raising their offspring, and I can do it from the back of my bicycle while riding alongside the majestic Hudson River.

It's one of those hidden treats, those shared experiences that make life in New York so rewarding and exhilarating, despite its daily hassles and challenges and the constant queries from non-New Yorkers along the lines of: "You've got a kid now. When are you going to move out of your tiny apartment and into a real house in the suburbs already?"

If the hawks can make it here, they can make it anywhere -- and so can the rest of us.

I think there's another appeal to hawk watching, as well: A sense that if nature survives and thrives in an environment like New York City, surrounded by all the concrete and chaos, then maybe things aren't as bad as we sometimes fear they are. Maybe the world as we know it will shrug off the pollution of our atmosphere, the changes in temperature, the loss of thousands of species, the massive shifts in climate that science tells us are coming. Maybe nature -- and we -- are tougher than we think.

Of course, that kind of hope can also bring disappointment.

I stopped by the nest again on my ride home last night and learned from my fellow hawk gawkers that one of the three fledglings had been hit by a car and killed. Reports say that it was flying low while carrying a dead rat in its talons -- probably the first meal it had caught on its own. Nature may be resilient, but there are dangers around every turn.

Still, the dead fledgling's siblings hadn't given up. There they were yesterday evening, up in the trees, taking short flights from limb to limb and following their father as he enticed them farther away from the nest with a dead squirrel in his grasp.

I wished the fledglings luck and continued home. Soon, if they survive, the young hawks will fly off for good, leaving an empty nest behind. Surely there are safer places for the adult hawks to raise a family than this busy spot on New York's Upper West Side, but selfishly, I hope they continue to return year after year.

I want to bring my own son here one day, to point up into the trees and hope that he shares my sense of wonder and inspiration at what's learning to soar just above our heads.

Photos: Courtesy D. Bruce Yolton

When I was growing up, my family lived in New Orleans for several years, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. One of my father's friends had a boat, and he liked to take it out shrimping. My dad and I would often join him and his son.

I loved those early morning boat trips (except for the time that I got very seasick -- probably my fault for snacking on Fritos -- and the trip that I'm about to tell you about). The lake was so big that you could barely see the shoreline.

On one occasion, our nets were coming up empty, so my dad's friend steered the boat toward the mouth of the lake where it meets the Gulf of Mexico and ventured into a cove where he hoped to find some shrimp. Soon, the boat started dragging. We feared that the net had gotten snagged on the bottom of the lake. But when they winched it in, the cause turned out to be quite a bit scarier for my 10-year-old self.

The boat had gone right over a school of stingrays, which had probably ventured into the lake from the Gulf, and our net was full of them. As the net came up, it looked like they were going to spill into the boat. My dad and his friend struggled to release them without damaging the boat or the fishing equipment, but eventually they had no choice but to cut the net away.

I watched from the prow as those ghostly stingrays spread out beneath us, silently gliding away from the hapless weekend fishermen who had inadvertently disturbed them.

Drawing food from the sea is one of the most fundamental interactions that we can have with the our oceans, and I'm glad that I have those early experiences in New Orleans to draw upon. The stingray incident taught me a respect for the ocean and its creatures -- and a concern for how we interact with them -- that sticks with me today.

The fish we choose to eat -- and the way we fish for them -- can have a tremendous impact on our oceans. As part of a personal goal to eat healthier, I'm trying to increase the amount of fish in my diet. It's a lean protein with great health benefits. But there are risks, as well: Some types of fish can be contaminated with mercury and PCBs, and sometimes seafood is harvested in a way that's bad for the oceans.

That's why NRDC created a new Sustainable Seafood Guide for consumers. It provides seven basic guidelines that you can follow when shopping for seafood or ordering at a restaurant, to help make the choice of what's healthy for you and the planet a little easier.

We also have specific advice about America's favorite types of seafood, from shrimp to tuna to fish sticks, and a handy list that shows what's OK to eat and what you should avoid. Once you've made your selection, we also have a collection of helpful recipes for serving healthy, feel-good seafood meals.

When working on the seafood guide with NRDC's oceans experts, I was a little disheartened to see that many of my favorite types of fish -- grouper, halibut, orange roughy, cod -- had landed on the recommended "avoid" list. (Pacific cod and halibut are OK, but the Atlantic varieties are badly depleted.) I was aware of the overfishing problems that many species face, but this put it in pretty stark terms.

Today is the first-ever World Oceans Day, designated by the United Nations as an occasion to celebrate and protect the world's oceans. And there are certainly a lot of problems facing our seas -- overfishing, habitat destruction, acidification, water pollution, jellyfish invasions, giant trash vortexes in the Pacific ... the list goes on.

We might not be able to tackle all of those big problems all at once. But as my colleague Laura Pagano suggests, one way that each of us can make a difference right now is to make smarter choices about the seafood we eat and understand its impact on the oceans. We hope that NRDC's Sustainable Seafood Guide will help. Please share it with other seafood lovers!

To learn more about the threats facing our oceans and other ways that you can help on World Oceans Day, visit nrdc.org/oceans.

New York magazine featured a great story last week on school overcrowding in Manhattan. What struck me -- aside from concerns about how my own kid might fare -- was this passage about the city's failure to anticipate that New York's success in retaining families over the last decade would result in the need for more classroom space:

Growth is not spontaneous; a city must build it before they will come. When Bloomberg promised to reinvent downtown, and by extension the rest of New York, after 9/11, he stoked residential development with an array of tax breaks. Unlike the towers of old, the buildings that sprang up weren't marketed as pieds-à-terre for Port Washington sophisticates or glam toeholds for junior execs. In a borough once synonymous with the studio apartment, the new Manhattan properties featured three and four bedrooms, plus the signature millennial amenity: the building playroom.

In 2007, the Department of Buildings issued permits for 31,918 units, a 35-year high-water mark. By the most conservative estimate, that year's activity alone brought hundreds of millions of dollars into the city coffers in closing taxes, much of it from buyers lured by strong public schools. But a disconnect yawned between development and the children it engendered. The crux of it, says Beveridge, is revealed in PlaNYC 2030, the mayor's blueprint for a livable city of 9 million people-who, it should be noted, will be making lots more kindergartners. The document called for parkland within ten minutes of each New Yorker and a local war on global warming, but spent less than a sentence on the DOE's capacity needs. "School construction is not part of the plan-full stop," Beveridge says. "They plan all the other infrastructure, but they don't worry about the schools."

When I covered growth and development for The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina earlier this decade, some city officials had exactly the same kind of blinders on. It seemed that the planning commission and the school board could never get on the same page.

Gigantic new subdivisions would be approved in former farm fields on country backroads without taking into account the need for school growth, and school district planners seemed to consistently underestimate the need for new classroom space. It was a recurring concern for neighborhood leaders and parents -- one that I wrote about several times in the paper.

I'm a big believer in the need for cities. Counterintuitive as it may seem, dense urban concentrations provide a lot of benefits to the environment (along with many challenges, of course). Life in big, dense cities allows reduced energy use per capita, greater transit ridership, fewer vehicle miles traveled, preservation of open space and more benefits that serve to reduce the overall carbon footprint of its residents. That's why New York frequently ranks among the "greenest" cities in the country, even though it's not what most people might consider eco-friendly.

But dense urban concentrations also require smart planning and provision of services for their tightly packed populations. New York does this well on so many fronts (troubles with the MTA notwithstanding). It would be a shame if an inability to provide adequate schools for its children were to drive people away.

It's strange that officials seem to have the same problems planning for new school buildings and classroom size, whether we're talking about suburban Charlotte or New York City Hall. My own son has five or six years before we enroll him in kindergarten. I hope the blinders have come off by then.

Tomorrow is National Bike to Work Day, which is part of National Bike Month, coinciding with Bike Month NYC here in the Big Apple, and I have to admit that it's all making me feel a bit guilty.

Last summer, after I started working at NRDC's midtown Manhattan offices, I reveled in the ability to ride my bike to work (even when I had a minor accident soon after my pedal commuting began). I felt healthier, happier, more in touch with myself and my city, and certainly more alert to speeding taxi cabs.

There are plenty of good reasons to bike to work:

• It's good for our health: An estimated two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese, increasing their risk of heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Simply riding 30 minutes to work provides the kind of exercise needed to reduce weight, improve fitness and relieve the burden on our health care system.
• It's good for our communities: If more commuters cycled, it would reduce the burden on taxpayers of road building, street maintenance, parking spaces and police services, while losses from car accidents, pollution and congestion would go down.
• It's good for our planet: If Americans who live within 5 miles of their office rode their bike to work once a week -- only once a week -- we could save nearly 5 million tons of global warming pollution every year. That would be like taking a million cars off the road.
• It's good for our wallets: Bicycle commuting saves on parking fees, parking tickets, fuel costs, auto maintenance costs and transit fares. In some large urban areas, the League of American Bicyclists says, it's possible to save more than $200 a month on parking alone. (In New York, I think that would be even higher.)

After getting off to a good start last summer, I kept riding right on through the fall, even braving bad weather and getting thoroughly soaked on more than one ride. Then came snow and the holidays and several nasty colds (all the usual excuses), and my bike pretty much stayed in the basement through the dead of winter.

By the time spring came around -- and it took its sweet time this year -- I had a newborn baby at home, and biking through New York traffic while exhausted from late-night feedings and diaper changings didn't seem like the best idea, so I mostly stuck to the subway.

I've biked a few times this spring, but nowhere near the regularity of last summer and fall. Bike Month is just what I've needed to get me motivated and back to my regular riding routine. (Whoever scheduled Bike Month for May knew what they were doing.)

I wonder, though, if the streets and bike paths will feel different this year. Last summer, high gas prices led to a surge in bike sales and commuting across the country. Biking has been on the rise for several years in New York City, but despite improvements to bike lanes and more bike racks, cycling still seems impractical to many.

I'm sure that a lot of those bikers who took up riding to work last year, around the same time that I did, also took the winter off. Will they be back this year? Do they still feel the lure of the spoke, or is the dip in gas prices enough to keep them in their cars?

Alex Marshall wrote a memorable column for Streetsblog last year asking if biking in the winter was like eating Spanish tortillas. He enjoyed them all the time when he was living in Spain, but stopped making them when he moved back to the U.S. -- even though he still loves the taste, they're easy to whip up and the ingredients are close at hand.

It's the same thing with winter biking, he postulated. In Amsterdam, for instance, people ride regardless of the weather. In New York, despite the brave and admirable few, most people stop riding in cold weather, and so did he. "Culture matters," Marshall wrote.

"I'm not shirking the fact of my own laziness; it's a real observation about how the world works. If my friends and family members were riding off to work in the cold, I likely would to, without complaint. But alone, when few other people are, it's easy to decline the invitation my bicycle offers me, or not even see it."

Then, of course, there's the safety-in-numbers argument. Plenty of studies show that as biking increases, accidents actually decrease. The theory is that drivers get more used to seeing bikers on the road and know how to deal with them. So it might actually be a smart strategy not to be out there by yourself.

Regardless, I'm glad for the extra push that Bike Month gives me to pump up my tires and start riding more regularly again. I'm lucky to live and work in a city where biking is more practical and accepted all the time, and I aim to enjoy it and all the benefits that bike commuting has to offer. Hope to see you out there!