In the worst river pollution incident ever to hit Brazil, a million-gallon oil spill is threatening drinking water, wildlife, and farmland along at least 25 miles of the Iguacu River in the southern part of the nation. The spill, which began Sunday afternoon, was caused by a ruptured pipe at a refinery of the government-owned Petrobras oil company. The company, which was also responsible for a January oil spill in a bay off Rio de Janeiro, will be fined at least $28 million. Dead, oil-covered fish, birds, and mammals have been washing up along the river's banks. Workers have been …

This Friday will be the first National Work at Home Day, aimed at encouraging employees to give telecommuting a try, for the sake of the planet and their own productivity. About 19.6 million Americans telecommuted to work in 1999, up from 4 million in 1990, and that number will continue to grow as technology and the Internet make it easier for many people to do their work from their own domiciles. Fewer folks trekking to offices means fewer cars clogging the roads and polluting the air. And word is that people who work at home, even just one day a …

In a victory for the Clinton administration, the U.S. Senate narrowly rejected an effort yesterday to block the president from designating more national monuments. By a 50 to 49 vote, the Senate defeated a budget bill rider proposed by Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.) that would have required the White House to get congressional approval for monument designations. Western Republicans are angry that Clinton has set aside nearly 2 million acres of land as national monuments so far this year, and they are upset by rumors that he may designate part or all of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as a …

The Clinton administration has decided it will not recommend that four dams on the lower Snake River in Washington be breached to help salmon recovery. George Frampton, head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, is testifying before Congress today that the feds will watch how other efforts to protect salmon proceed over the next five to 10 years before weighing again the possibility of breaching the dams. Dam advocates such as Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) have argued that breaching would raise electricity rates in the Northwest and hurt farmers who rely on irrigation and barge transportation. Environmentalists and …

The 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia, which will begin on Sept. 15, are expected to be the greenest ever. Most of the events will take place in Homebush Bay, once the polluted site of a slaughterhouse but now transformed by a big environmental cleanup. The Olympic Village, where 15,000 athletes and officials will live during the games, is being called the world's largest solar-powered suburb. Food waste generated during the games will be composted by worms, and extensive recycling plans are in place. (Of course, some critics charge that all Olympic Games are an extravagant waste of resources, but …

Enrique Penalosa, mayor of Bogota, Colombia, is championing the bicycle as the means to a cleaner environment and has directed the city to build nearly 125 miles of permanent bike paths. Penalosa instigated a car-less day in the city in June and a recent poll found that Bogota residents would support another car-less day, though they may be less enthusiastic about Penalosa's plans to call for a permanent ban on all cars in the city by 2015. But some enviros are critical of the mayor's efforts, pointing out that many trees have been chopped down to make room for the …

Some days the smog in the Great Smoky Mountains, the country's most-visited national park, is worse than the pollution in Atlanta. As the South's population has soared, the region has become home to more cars and SUVs and the demand for coal-fired energy to power amenities like air conditioning has skyrocketed. The governors of Tennessee and North Carolina are urging Georgia's governor to join a pact that would allow park officials to review pollution permits for industries. And an eight-state initiative is completing a $4 million study of how emissions across the eastern U.S. affect the Smokies. But some enviros …

Climate change could bring with it a wide variety of health problems, according to a study of possible effects in Washington state, released today by Physicians for Social Responsibility. For example, higher temperatures could increase concentrations of ground-level ozone and other air pollutants, aggravating asthma cases, and expand the habitat of ticks that carry Lyme disease. Meanwhile, separate research has found that while some plants may grow faster in a world with greater concentrations of carbon dioxide, the nutritional value of the plants' leaves might drop significantly.

Danny Kennedy is the director of Project Underground, a Berkeley-based human rights and environmental organization which he helped to found in 1996. He is also a husband and a happy new father of a beautiful, bouncing baby girl. Monday, 17 Jul 2000 BERKELEY, Calif. Monday is a day I look forward to, not because I want the weekend to end and want to leave my beautiful baby and partner, but because I like the work we do here at Project Underground. I am proud to do what I do. Walking to the office at 6:00 this morning, however, I was …