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Pombo and Pombo-er

Anti-Enviro California Rep Blocks Wilderness Designation For years, citizens, enviro groups, and Washington state lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have worked together to craft compromise legislation to create the Wild Sky Wilderness Area, a 106,000-acre swath of Washington’s Cascade Mountains. The resulting bill has passed the U.S. Senate twice, unanimously. It now appears, […]

Bagger Advance

International Pressure Against Plastic Bags Grows Somewhere between 500 billion and 1 trillion plastic bags are used worldwide every year. They’re made of petroleum products, and they end up in landfills, adorning the landscape, or choking marine creatures — about 100,000 a year, according to the environmental group Planet Ark. Several countries have enacted measures […]

Lung Disease

Deforestation in Brazil Leads to Massive CO2 Emissions Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil has made that country one of the world’s top 10 sources of atmospheric carbon dioxide pollution. Often called the “lungs of the world,” the Amazon is bigger than the continental U.S., and loses an area bigger than New Jersey every […]

Refiner-Ease

EPA Goes Easy on Oil Refineries The Fort Worth Star-Telegram is running an investigatory series (remember investigatory journalism?) on the EPA and its relationship to the nation’s 145 oil refineries. During the Bush administration, there’s been a precipitous drop in clean-air enforcement actions against refineries, which are some of the nation’s top polluters. They spew […]

Social Lite

More Businesses Flock to U.N.’s Social-Responsibility Compact The five-year-old United Nations Global Compact, which held its first summit in New York City last month, is the world’s biggest corporate social-responsibility initiative, with some 1,700 signatories. And what business wouldn’t want to sign on? In exchange for endorsing principles — principles with no mechanism for enforcement […]

Bhopal-Bearer

Judge Orders Payments to Bhopal Victims Released Yesterday, the Supreme Court of India ordered the government to release the remaining compensation owed the victims of the 1984 Bhopal gas leak, the world’s worst industrial disaster, which left some 20,000 people dead, 120,000 chronically ill, and groundwater poisoned to this day. The original compensation paid by […]

Train Has Left the Station

Republican Ex-EPA Chief Criticizes Bush “It’s almost as if the motto of the administration in power today in Washington is not environmental protection, but polluter protection.” Why, what sort of pinko environmental extremist would say such a thing? Meet Russell Train, a Republican, chief of the U.S. EPA under Nixon and Ford, co-chair of Conservationists […]

It’s Only a Model

Chesapeake Bay Progress Systematically Overstated Since the Chesapeake Bay Program — an alliance of the feds and several states — signed an agreement in 1987 to revitalize the ailing bay, it has been reporting steady progress, sapping local outrage and deferring lawsuits from enviros. Turns out, while the computer model that program scientists use to […]

Welsh Gambit

Welsh Village Adopts Long Name to Protest Wind Development Wind turbines are controversial in the U.K., where some people object to what they claim is the damage — both environmental and aesthetic — the turbines do to the landscape. When Gamesa Energy notified citizens of Llanfynydd in Carmarthenshire, Wales, of their plans to build a […]

Livin’ la Vida L’oppie

Trend Alert: Organic Professionals As everyone knows, a social movement is nothing until it is given a silly name, treated as a fad, trivialized, commodified, and ultimately destroyed by ravenous media. The latest trend to receive this dubious honor: organic professionals, or “oppies.” Modeled after the young urban professionals — or “yuppies” — we all […]