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Vengeance Is Mine

Mining Company Funds Campaign to Repeal Cyanide-Mining Ban in Montana In 1998, Montana voters approved a ban on cyanide open-pit gold mining, which for years had defaced the state’s landscape and polluted its groundwater. That ban could be repealed by an initiative set to appear on the November ballot, funded almost exclusively by Canyon Resources […]

Luisa Colasimone, wind power advocate, answers questions

Luisa Colasimone. With what environmental organization are you affiliated? I’m communications director for the European Wind Energy Association. What does your organization do? What, in a perfect world, would constitute “mission accomplished”? EWEA is the voice of the wind industry, actively promoting wind power in Europe and worldwide. Our members include 200 companies, organizations, and […]

Take a Walk on the Wild Side

The Wilderness Act Turns 40 Today marks the 40th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and signed by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Some 9 million acres were designated wilderness upon passage; 106 million acres are protected under the act today. Jimmy Carter signed the most land into wilderness, with 66.3 million […]

Pebbles: Bam, Bam!

China Gears Up to Build New, Smaller Nuke Plants China’s economy is expanding faster than Bruce Banner with road rage, straining against the limits of its current capacity for creating or importing energy — and pumping out some of the world’s worst air pollution. The plan? Go nuclear. This year China announced its intention to […]

The Windshield Beneath My Wings

Splatometers Reveal Possible Insect Decline in U.K. Many bird populations in the U.K. have declined precipitously in recent years — for instance, house sparrows have dropped by 65 percent since 1973 — and some scientists suspect that a cause is a possible corresponding decline in the insect populations upon which the birds depend. To test […]

Losing Our Marbleds

Bush Team Aims to Revoke Protections from Threatened Seabird The Bush administration took a big step yesterday toward removing the marbled murrelet, a Northwest seabird, from the list of threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, a move enviros say will lead to further logging of old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. The ruling from […]

Good Vote Hunting

More Wildlife Refuges Opened to Hunting and Fishing Yesterday, just as the Republican National Convention was getting underway, the Bush administration announced that it will open an additional 243,500 acres of land in 17 national wildlife refuges and wetlands to recreational hunting and fishing. Much of the 95-million-acre national refuge system, with its 544 wildlife […]

Water Foul

Bush Administration Proposes Lower Standards for Toxic Metal Selenium Even while the Bush administration publicly courts hunters and fishers, it’s taking quiet steps that those outdoorsfolks likely wouldn’t approve of. Over the objections of many federal scientists, the U.S. EPA is poised to establish a more lax standard for selenium, a toxic metal that builds […]

Smells Like Ship

Concern Rises Over Air Pollution from Ships Tough regulations and technological advances have made power plants, cars, and other common sources of air pollution cleaner over past decades, and as they get cleaner another common source comes into sharper relief: ships. In some port cities like Los Angeles, ships — including oil tankers, container ships, […]

Limp Biscuit

Judge Lifts Injunctions on Biscuit Salvage Logging The legal battle over logging at the site of 2002’s devastating Biscuit wildfire in southwestern Oregon continues. A federal judge has lifted the temporary injunctions that barred the U.S. Forest Service from logging in the forest, rejecting an appeal from Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. The group […]