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Battle Dreary

Kashmir, once renowned for its lush landscape and abundant wildlife, has for decades served as a battle zone between India and Pakistan, and all the turmoil has taken a heavy toll on the region’s environment as well as its people. “Cross-border bombardment is damaging the forests and wildlife beyond imagination,” said Farooq A. Niazi, head […]

Crop Rotation

Iowa may soon play host to the world’s largest wind farm, after Gov. Tom Vilsack (D) on Friday signed a measure that removes regulatory hurdles to clear the way for the project. MidAmerican Energy Co. expects to start construction in September of a 200-turbine facility in northern Iowa that would pump out 310 megawatts of […]

Brand New Mexico

And in very good news for enviros in New Mexico, Gov. Bill Richardson signed into law yesterday a measure designed to increase the amount of open space in the state. The Land Conservation Incentives Act will allow taxpayers — whether individuals or corporations — to deduct from state taxes half of the value of any […]

Haunted House

The U.S. House of Representatives gave environmentalists plenty of headaches yesterday. First, House members backed oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, as part of broad legislation designed to increase domestic energy production and provide tax incentives to the oil and power industries. Some see the move as beating a dead horse, since the […]

Drinking Too Much Damages Your River

The conservation organization American Rivers has released its annual ranking of the 10 most endangered rivers in the nation, and Mississippi’s Big Sunflower has the dubious distinction of topping the list. The waterways on the list are not necessarily the most polluted in the U.S; rather, they face the gravest risks of water shortages and […]

We’ll Si

Once upon a time, the Dominican Republic’s Parque Nacional del Este was the poster child for Parks in Peril, a joint program of the Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Agency for International Development to support land-preservation efforts in the Caribbean and Latin America. Today, though, the park has become a symbol of the difficulties such […]

Diesel Mania

Move over disco music: Another ’70s trend is making a comeback — diesel fuel. During the oil embargo of 1973, the U.S. enjoyed a brief love affair with diesel because it gets better mileage than gasoline. However, its dirty emissions soon put a damper on the romance. Now, though, a cleaner-burning form of diesel is […]

Hit the Bottle

Ever the leader on environmental issues, California is moving ahead with a bill that would give it the nation’s most stringent bottled-water quality standards. Under the terms of the bill, bottled-water companies would have to include greater detail about contaminants on bottle labels, issue water-quality reports much like those produced by public water agencies, and, […]

Gold Diggers

The California gold rush of 1849 sent would-be miners rushing to the hills and streams of the Sierra Nevada. But some of them never made it that far, stopping instead to mine gold from Death Valley. Now, a proposal by the Colorado-based Canyon Resources to expand its operations by opening a second open-pit gold mine […]

A three-part series profiling ecological economists

In 1776, the year the Scottish economist Adam Smith invented free-market economics with his book The Wealth of Nations, the total population of the globe was less than 700 million people. The coal-hauling locomotives and steamships that were to drive the Industrial Revolution were still 30 years off. Free-market economic theory grew and flourished in […]