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A Lulu for Lula

Brazilian enviros are up in arms over a federal move last week that will allow genetically modified (GM) soybeans to be sold in the country temporarily, through January 2004. GM crops are officially banned in Brazil, but so many farmers flout the prohibition that an estimated 12 percent of the nation’s soy crop is genetically […]

I Could Have Had a C8

Nothing sticks to Teflon, they say — but a key ingredient in Teflon could be sticking to you. A chemical manufactured by Dupont and used to make Teflon and other products may pose health risks for women of childbearing age and young girls, according to an internal U.S. EPA document. The chemical, ammonium perfluorooctanoate, known […]

Flexing Their Mussels

Roughly 1,000 miles of rivers and streams in Alabama could be protected as critical habitat for endangered species, under a new proposal by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The proposal, which is designed to protect eight endangered and three threatened species of mussels, was great news for environmentalists and bad news for backers of […]

Older Europe

Population growth in Europe is slowing down — so much so that the absolute number of people on the continent could begin to decline in the near future, according to an article published in the current issue of the journal Science. The report authors say the turning point came in 2000, when the number of […]

Someone Set Up Us the Bomb

U.S. EPA Administrator Christie Whitman announced this week that she is “very comfortable” with the Pentagon’s proposals to exempt the military from a broad swath of environmental regulations. In response to the war in Iraq, the Defense Department has stepped up its longstanding efforts to obtain military waivers for rules ranging from endangered species protections […]

No Exit

A plan by the California Public Utilities Commission to levy an “exit fee” against anyone who stops drawing electricity from the state’s grid — read: alternative energy users — has come under fire by lawmakers, renewable energy producers, and consumers. The proposed exit fee is a holdover from the state’s 2000-2001 energy crisis, when the […]

Virgin Rebirth

Meanwhile, wetlands are also a matter of concern in a place that could scarcely be more different from Iraq: the island of St. Croix in the Virgin Islands. The Virgin Islands Indigenous and Endangered Species Act of 1990 specifies that the policy of the territory is to “prevent a net loss of wetlands to the […]

The Ides of Marsh

Verdant marshes and wetlands were much of what helped put the “fertile” in the Fertile Crescent, that swath of land between the Tigris and Euphrates that is considered the birthplace of Western civilization. But in the last few decades, those marshes have been all but destroyed by dam-building and civil strife in Iraq. Those marshes […]

Cleaner Smoke Stacki Thanks to Pataki

New York state now boasts the nation’s strictest pollution controls on power plants, thanks to measures approved yesterday by Gov. George Pataki (R). The announcement was met with joy by environmentalists, who had been pushing for the tougher rules for upwards of three years, but the electricity industry said the move would cost custumers while […]

Giving the Devil His DU

As many people wonder about the long-term environmental effects of the war in Iraq, the U.N. has issued a report documenting the ongoing pollution problems posed by depleted uranium (DU) ammunition used by NATO forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the mid-1990s. The report, published by the U.N. Environment Programme, found DU contamination in groundwater and drinking […]