Divorce is hard on everyone involved, including planet Earth. A recent study by researchers at Michigan State University’s Department of Fisheries and Wildlife asserts, basically, “divorce is bad for the planet.”
Researchers Jianguo Liu and Eunice Yu really didn’t reveal anything that is too surprising once considered objectively.

Basically, the report notes that as families transition from one home to two households following divorce, more resources are sapped from the natural environment. In other words, divorces require the building of more homes, the use of more land, and the need for more building materials. Moreover, after a divorce, households do not consume resources as efficiently. With fewer people living in a home following divorce and other family members transplanted somewhere else, more electricity and water is used, more goods consumed, and more greenhouse gases emitted on a per capita basis.

Liu and Yu conclude that six million more homes existed in the United States circa 2000 because of divorce. Assuming that the “resource-use efficiency” of divorced households was comparable to that of married households, Liu and Yu found that divorced households could have saved 38 million rooms, 73 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water in 2005 alone.

While it is hard to imagine a soon-to-be divorced person thinking about how his divorce is going to affect the planet when he or she may already be worrying about issues, this message still has much relevance.
While divorce may not always be ideal, it can be necessary in some instances. And while divorces drain more resources, they can also bring on much-needed, positive changes in the lives of those directly involved. It’s unfortunate how this “divorce is bad for the planet” assertion seemed to be what most media took from this report when the message that families need to do a better job of conserving resources following divorce could have been a great starting point to explain how they could actually do so.

A Maryland judge, in what is believed to be a first (and what may be an indication of things to come in family court) – has awarded
joint custody of a dog to its owners in a divorce case. Craig and Gayle Myers will now spend six months each with Lucky, a Shih Tzu mix they adopted during their eight-year, childless marriage. The couple considers Lucky to be the closest thing to children, and retired Maryland Circuit Judge Graydon S. McKee II apparently agrees.

Judge McKee said that even though dogs are considered property in Maryland, like every other state in the U.S., “I really don’t think a dog is like a couch.”

According to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, pet custody disputes are steadily increasing. AAML president Marlene Eskind Moses says this trend could add to the congestion in the country’s family law courts, but she understands how important pets are to people, especially when they are experiencing so many other feelings of loss during a divorce.

A California-based animal rights group, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, is petitioning Congress for federal legislation to protect animal rights, including the right to have their interests represented in court and protected by law.

The main reason for divorce among 1,000 over-50 United Kingdom residents is a lack of intimacy. One-third of the men claimed their spouses were no longer interested in sex, and a little more than a quarter of the woman said their partner become emotionally cold.

The survey also found that 14 percent say that nagging was responsible For their divorce, and 10 percent said they no longer had anything in common with their partners. Five percent of those surveyed said they had waited until later in life to divorce because of their children.

Researchers believe that older couples divorce for different reasons than younger couples. Once their children have left home and they are nearing the age of retirement, intimacy becomes a more important attribute in their choice of partner for their later years. In addition, women begin to see more opportunities for themselves that may not have been there when they were first married or occupied with raising children.

Relationship experts said that couples over-50 need to work harder at rebuilding their relationships after the children have left home to minimize the risk of divorce.

The Sunshine State, with one of the highest foreclosure and mortgage delinquency rates in the nation, now finds that many divorcing Floridians no longer argue about who gets to keep the house, but rather about who has to keep the house.

Many divorcing Florida homeowners now face the possibility of being tied together not because of the children but because of the negative equity in their houses. Married or not, from a lender’s perspective, both spouses are still responsible for the loan they made during the happier times. Many homeowners now find they cannot qualify for a mortgage modification or refinance on his or her own.

Spouses should remember that signing over the property via a quitclaim is not enough to absolve them of the responsibility for the mortgage and the note. And even if there is some equity still remaining, divorcing spouses will likely find it difficult to get at it when dividing assets. One spouse may find it necessary to “reimburse” the other over time as part of a divorce agreement.

Nevada leads the nation in divorces per capita, and the divorce Mecca of the Silver State is Las Vegas, Clark County. Nevada’s liberal divorce laws – particularly its six-week residency law – have made divorce a growth industry in the sin, sun and sand of the desert.

A spouse can establish a legal residency in Nevada and six weeks later file for a no fault divorce based on incompatibility or living separate and apart. The action can be filed in the county in which either spouse resides or the county in which both spouses lived together prior to separation or the county in which the cause of the divorce took place.

Nevada requires a divorce petitioner to have been a resident of Clark County for at least six weeks, a change makes it impossible for residents outside of Clark County to come to Las Vegas for a quick divorce, as was once the case. After filing, the petitioner needs to wait six additional weeks in addition to the six weeks to establish residency — a “cooling-off period.”



Most jurisdictions have longer residency requirements, usually 90 days to six months or longer. In Nevada, spouses who are willing and ready to move on, uncontested, can divorce less expensively and more rapidly.
Of course, the least expensive divorces occur when both parties want to end the marriage and agree on all issues.