Having trouble finding a Grinch this Christmas season? Try Cynthia Carroll, CEO of Anglo-American Mining Company. Carroll's company has teamed up with Northern Dynasty (like the television show Dynasty, only eviler) to build the world's biggest dam in Alaska so she can mine piles of gold, which will have the unfortunate impact of destroying the world's largest salmon fishery. Not only will the dam prevent the salmon from reaching their spawning grounds, the cyanide Carroll uses to extract gold from rock will likely seep into the river, ruining the salmon's sense of smell, which is vital to them finding their …

This post was co-written with Dorjee Sun, the head of Carbon Conservation, a company that works to protect forests in Indonesia from destruction. ----- Photo: http://www.viajar24h.com Bali, Indonesia, is the perfect backdrop for this week's climate summit. No country better embodies the immense peril of inaction -- and the immense opportunity this meeting has to make massive and immediate progress in stemming the climate crisis. Indonesia is the world's third largest global warming polluter, behind the United States and China, and just ahead of Brazil. But in Indonesia, like Brazil and the rest of the tropical world, pollution isn't coming …

In the lead-up to the international Bali Climate summit, Greenpeace has launched a major direct action in Sumatra, Indonesia, to stop the nefarious PT Duta Palma corporation from destroying a pristine tropical forest (and the habitat for highly endangered Sumatran rhinos, tigers, and oh-so-cute orangutans) and replacing it with a palm oil plantation. Click on the picture to the right to watch the extraordinary video of their action, including amazing helicopter footage of both the glorious and denuded Indonesian landscape. Torching tropical forests is bad enough, but this one lies atop a peat bog and the Duta Palma's henchmen are …

As Matt Stoller pointed out at Open Left, environmental groups haven't been very quick off the mark in responding to the California wildfires and framing them as a climate disaster. Whether it's Katrina, Rita, the 2003 wildfires, 2004 Florida hurricanes, or any of the numerous other climate disasters of recent years, environmental groups have been slow. It's true that you can't tie any particular climate disaster directly to global warming -- but it's easy enough to acknowledge that and then talk about how these kinds of disasters will become more frequent and more intense as the climate crisis worsens ... …

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced yesterday that he's going to just waive the Endangered Species Act, the Toxic Waste Disposal Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (among many others) in order to plough ahead with building a wall along the Arizona-Mexico border in the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area. He repeated his rationale that the wall could be good for the environment because migrants leave behind trash: But there are also environmental reasons to stop illegal crossings in the SPRNCA. Illegal entrants leave trash and high concentrations of human waste, which impact …

The world's 1,700 mountain caribou can chomp their lichens in peace -- Forest Ethics and a coalition of Canadian environmental groups announced an agreement with the British Columbia government to protect more than 5 million acres of their home habitat in British Columbia's forests. The victory came after a five-year campaign targeting corporations and the regional government that either logged mountain caribou habitat or used paper from the mountainous, old growth forests favored by the caribou, which are not only the southernmost population of caribou but also the only remaining caribou population in the world in mountainous terrain. This isn't …

A little tenderness Cartoon: Bob Englehart; Hartford Courant. I'm excited that Environmental Defense is now saying publicly, in response to criticism from Matt Stoller and me, that it "has not endorsed" the Lieberman-Warner bill and that it "will work to strengthen the bill, particularly to achieve the deeper long-term emissions reductions scientists tell us we need to avoid a climate catastrophe." That's great, but I must note it's a sentiment that was distinctly lacking from the statement ED put out in response to the bill, which mainly offered a passionate defense, or the fund-raising letter it sent out to activists …

Over at OpenLeft.com, the always devastating Matt Stoller writes that "the green civil wars need to begin." He's urging other environmental groups to go after Environmental Defense for offering a ringing endorsement of the latest Warner-Lieberman climate bill. Environmental Defense is justifying a large corporate giveaway under the rubric of environmentalism, and the rest of the green community is letting ED get away with it. In terms of the policy, Environmental Defense is alone here. The green groups are remarkably polite to each other, as most of them started in the 1970s convinced that protecting the environment was a value …

Yesterday, Grist published my investigation of why the environmental movement has been relatively slow and cautious in fighting the U.S.-Mexico border wall, one of the greatest manmade disasters to ever strike the Western landscape and Western wildlife. Of course, these articles have to be readable, so I wasn't able to delve into all the details of the politics of the border wall. But I wanted to share with Gristmill readers the part of the investigation that didn't make it into the article -- about how stopping the border wall could represent a major opportunity for environmental groups to build alliances …

The Bush administration, Costa Rica, Conservation International, and The Nature Conservancy will today announce a "debt-for-nature" swap that could herald something bigger in the future. The United States will write off $12.6 million in debt owed it by Costa Rica. In exchange, Costa Rica will protect some of the most valuable rainforest wildlife habitat in the world. Photo: obooble This follows the Bush administration's support for an even bigger swap with Guatemala. Of course, the sums involved and the area conserved are relatively puny compared to the global forest destruction caused by the Bush administration, especially through its support for …