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Lisa Goodman, River Alliance of Wisconsin

Lisa Goodman is the northern coordinator for local group assistance at the River Alliance of Wisconsin, a statewide nonprofit that advocates for the protection, enhancement, and restoration of Wisconsin’s rivers and watersheds. Tuesday, 27 May 2003 MADISON, Wis. Today began with a paddle. It is a short portage from house to river. Crossing a street […]

Into Thin Air, and Thick Refuse

In the 50 years since Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary first scaled Mt. Everest, so much refuse piled up on the world’s highest mountain that some took to calling it the world’s highest garbage dump. By the early 1990s, an estimated 50 tons of metal, glass, and plastic, including many hundreds of abandoned oxygen […]

Double Trouble

The number of animal species in Brazil known to be endangered has nearly doubled since 1989, reaching 398, according to a three-year study conducted by the Brazilian government and released last week. Tropical wolves, rare parrots, and exotic frogs and turtles are among the many threatened creatures. The comprehensive survey of animal and plant life […]

Famous Last Birds

The population of California condors is soaring back to relatively healthy numbers. Biologists have counted 222 of the birds, a tenfold increase from 1982, when the species hit its nadir with just 22 condors remaining. “This is the greatest the population has been probably since the 1950s,” said Bruce Palmer, coordinator of the California condor […]

Raising the Zanzibar

The island of Zanzibar, located just off the coast of Tanzania, is set to get its first national park. The island, which is independently governed, plans to convert the 12,355-acre Jozani Forest Reserve into a national park to promote better conservation, management, and natural-resource use, according to Mussa Ame Silima, Zanzibar’s minister of agriculture, natural […]

Donald Ducks

Setting the stage for a congressional standoff, the U.S. House and Senate handed in opposite votes yesterday on a Pentagon-backed measure to ease endangered-species protections on military land. Four Republican senators broke with their party for a 51-48 vote against the measure, while the House supported it 252-175. Both houses of Congress are expected to […]

They Can’t Strongarm Armstrong

A federal judge has issued an excoriating dismissal of a lawsuit filed by 22 Southern California inland cities that challenged rules requiring them to help prevent trash from reaching the ocean. The ruling, from U.S. District Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong, is significant because it dismisses the first of 13 legal challenges to new state and […]

Extra-Special Delivery

United Parcel Service, the world’s largest package-delivery company, announced yesterday that it will put a DaimlerChrysler fuel-cell car into service later this year in Ann Arbor, Mich., making UPS the first U.S. company to integrate fuel-cell technology into its commercial fleet. One or more fuel-cell vans will start delivering UPS packages in 2004. Not to […]

Turtle Wane

Having depleted their own nation’s once-plentiful turtle populations, Chinese buyers are now offering top dollar for turtles from the southern U.S. In the last three years, there’s been a dramatic upswing in the number of turtles exported to China, where the animals’ meat is considered a delicacy and their shells are ground up to make […]

A Shore Thing

Controversy is bubbling along the East Coast of the U.S. as a handful of companies press forward with plans to build offshore wind turbines — 858 off the Maryland shore, 221 off Virginia, and 130 off Cape Cod, Mass. There are now some 15,000 wind turbines on U.S. land, providing clean, renewable power and decreasing […]