Uncategorized

Don’t Call It a Comeback

The nuclear industry is swinging into comeback mode. A bill expected to pass the U.S. Senate in the next few weeks would provide federal loan guarantees for as much as 50 percent of the cost of constructing up to six new nuclear power plants. Sponsored by Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), the legislation also would earmark […]

We Don’t Cotton to This Idea

Farmers in India are harvesting the nation’s first approved biotech cotton crop, a development that has environmentalists and some nationalists nervous. About 55,000 growers, an estimated 2 percent of India’s cotton farmers, have planted Monsanto’s Bollgard cotton seed, genetically engineered with the Bt bacterium to be resistant to the bollworm, a troublesome cotton pest. The […]

Snake Oil

Federal dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers in the Northwest have been spilling oil directly into the waterways on which they sit, in amounts ranging from a trickle to, in one case, 1,000 gallons. Oregon and Washington state authorities have been trying to get a handle on the problem, but the U.S. Army Corps […]

Con-servancy?

The Nature Conservancy, based in Arlington, Va., has become the world’s wealthiest environmental group, with assets of $3 billion, but according to an extensive investigative series by the Washington Post, that money is not all going to the environmental good. The conservancy is known for purchasing and protecting ecologically valuable land, using donations from both […]

Bighorn Blown

The U.S. Forest Service has settled a lawsuit with eight former and current workers from Bighorn National Forest who suffered on-the-job retaliation after complaining about hostile working conditions and questionable forest-management practices. The $200,000 settlement will be divided among the whistleblowers, but the USFS will not discipline the managers who were responsible for the retaliatory […]

Texa-cojones

In 1992, Texaco called an end to almost three decades of oil drilling in Ecuador — and left behind a legacy of miles of pipelines and 20 billion gallons of toxic waste that destroyed the rainforest, fouled waterways, and exposed residents to cancer-causing pollutants. Now, 30,000 jungle residents of Ecuador and Peru whose environment was […]

No Art-ic Refuge

Sometimes art gets political — and sometimes it’s the artist who suffers. Just ask Subhankar Banerjee, who spent his life savings to photograph Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. For a while, things were going swimmingly for Banerjee; he found a publisher for his photo collection and earned an exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of […]

Dry Idea Rolls on

The U.S. Interior Department has identified areas around the county that are likely to face conflicts over water shortages in the next 25 years, including the usual suspects (Los Angeles, Calif., Denver, Colo., and Phoenix, Ariz.) as well as some new hotspots: the Gulf Coast of Texas, North Dakota’s Red River Valley, and Western cities […]

And other words from readers

  Re: Fishy Business Dear Editor: I’m shocked that you would choose to criticize Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) for tacking a measure onto the recently passed $79 million war-spending bill that directs the U.S. Department of Agriculture to come up with a plan for certifying and labeling wild seafood as organic. This measure will do […]

Why-oming

In a much-anticipated decision, the Wyoming Bureau of Land Management announced yesterday that it would approve the development of as many as 51,000 coalbed methane wells in Wyoming and Montana’s Powder River Basin. Although the BLM also called for a team of government representatives to monitor the air- and water-quality effects of the wells, environmentalists […]