The White House has declined to appeal a U.S. federal court ruling that would provide water to the agriculture industry in California's Central Valley potentially at the expense of Northern California's fish and wildlife -- a move that has provoked anger among environmentalists. In the earlier court case, the Westlands Water District, a 600,000-acre irrigation district in the western San Joaquin Valley, successfully challenged the 1992 Central Valley Water Project Improvement Act. That act provided 800,000 acre-feet of water for fish and wildlife in the San Francisco Bay/ Sacramento River and San Joaquin River Delta system. Rather than appealing the …

In the first of what the Bush administration hopes will be a series of public-private partnerships to create national wildlife refuges without using taxpayer dollars, the utility company Entergy is donating 600 acres of land along Louisiana's Red River to the government. The Entergy donation could be the first parcel of a 50,000-acre Red River National Wildlife Refuge, which was authorized by Congress in 2000 but never funded. Interior Secretary Gale Norton said her department was actively looking for other contributors to buy and donate land for the planned refuge, which will be managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife …

The plan unveiled by President Bush earlier this week to make it easier to thin forests in the name of fire prevention has touched off a firestorm of its own, enraging environmentalists who see it as a giveaway for the timber industry and a backdoor out of environmental protection measures. Moreover, environmentalists see the Bush plan as a Trojan horse for sneaking a highly controversial timber practice into American forests -- salvage logging, or the selling of trees in fire-damaged forests. Advocates of salvage logging say it is a way for the U.S. Forest Service to make money off of …

If there had been any doubt that the U.S. would play the role of pariah at the upcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development, it was banished yesterday when White House officials announced their goals and strategies for the meeting, which begins next week in Johannesburg, South Africa. The U.S. delegation's plan is, essentially, to stonewall: It will resist any changes to international agreements on trade and development and oppose any new targets or specific aid figures -- and although it is offering an aid package worth nearly $4.5 billion, most of the money is just a reshuffling of preexisting programs. …

Citing the need to reduce fire danger after a season of devastating wildfires, President Bush is planning to propose more extensive thinning of Western forests and support legislation to streamline environmental rules that have slowed down some logging projects in the region. Most Western governors back the plan to thin forests, but environmental groups say the president is simply leveraging fears raised by this season's fires to push through forest management legislation that is favored by the timber industry. Enviros say cutting would most likely target larger trees, which are more commercially valuable, rather than smaller trees, which pose the …

Native residents of the rainforests of Ecuador and Peru were dealt a blow late last week when the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied their petition to reopen litigation against the oil giant ChevronTexaco for devastating their environment and exposing them to carcinogenic pollutants. The court upheld an earlier ruling, which found that two class-action lawsuits should be heard in Ecuador, rather than in the U.S. The plaintiffs say that a Texaco subsidiary dumped an estimated 30 billion gallons of toxic waste into rivers, landfills, and roads in the Oriente region of Ecuador between 1964 and 1992; the waste …

The environmental situation is not looking up in the land down under, according to a new report commissioned by a consortium of conservation organizations. Noting such environmental problems as loss of species and their habitats, degradation of inland waters, and high pollution levels from the burning of fossil fuels, the report calls Australia "a continent in reverse" and says government inaction is to blame. Written by Peter Christoff of Melbourne University, the report is designed to counter one the government will present at the World Summit on Sustainable Development next week in Johannesburg. Christoff said the official report overstates claims …

Climate change was the leading concern at the annual Pacific Island Forum this week, where leaders of small island nations chastised the United States for abandoning the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. The islands have an unusually vested interest in the protocol because they face a high risk of being swallowed up by seas swollen from melting ice caps and thermal expansion of ocean waters. The leaders of the Cook Islands, Kiribati, Nauru, Niue, the Marshall Islands, and Tuvalu released a statement at the forum noting their "profound disappointment at the decision of the U.S." The consortium stopped short of …

By all appearance, President Bush will not be attending the World Summit on Sustainable Development, to be held in Johannesburg, South Africa, at the end of the month -- much to the delight of his conservative allies. "We applaud your decision not to attend the summit," read a letter signed by more than 30 conservative activists and sent to the president this week. The letter went on to warn that, "Your presence would only help to publicize and make more credible [attendees'] various anti-freedom, anti-people, anti-globalization, and anti-Western agendas." The signers of the letter also called for the president to …

In addition to scorching millions of acres of habitat and killing wildlife, the fires that have raged throughout the western U.S. this summer have taken another toll on the environment -- a financial one. The federal government expects to spend more than $1.5 billion battling wildfires this year, and millions of those dollars will come from sources that would otherwise be used to pay for environmental activities on public lands. Already, field offices of the U.S. Forest Service are suspending road and trail maintenance projects, land purchases, fish and wildlife habitat work, replanting of logged and burned areas, and other …