Noteworthy items from around the Web:

* The Christian Science Monitor has a diverting piece on how the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North Korea and South Korea has inadvertently turned into one of the world's most important wildlife preserves—home to one-third of the world's rare red-crowned cranes. The buffer zones are now being encroached by urban sprawl from the south, and now some conservationists are wondering if it's feasible to turn the whole thing into an official preserve.

* Brian Baskin of The Wall Street Journal has a meaty Q&A with an over-the-counter commodities trader and sheds a little on how this unregulated energy market works.

* The number of environmental and conservation non-profits has exploded since 1995, according to a brand-new Urban Institute study, proliferating at nearly twice the rate of other NGOs. Not only that, but green groups have been increasingly prone to cooperation—we're seeing more "coalitions" and "alliances" and "networks."

* Gar Lipow thinks big on green stimulus. Really big. 

* Jon Luoma assesses some of the latest ideas in wave power, from mechanical serpents to bobbing buoys. Alas, "the technologies remain largely unproven and—unless subsidized by governments—expensive." But the ocean could provide a clean, dependable, and fairly hefty source of energy, if only those waves could be harnessed…

* Lastly, since who can resist ending on a gloomy note, read Kevin Drum and Joe Romm, who tally up evidence that IPCC climate forecasts are likely understating how quickly the planet is warming, and how devastating the effects have been. The latest dark omen: Glaciers in the Himalayas are melting much faster than anyone predicted, putting a heavy strain on a critical source of water for roughly 500 million people.

--Bradford Plumer