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Liza Grandia, anthropologist

Liza Grandia is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. She serves on the board of ProPeten, a Guatemalan nongovernmental organization with which she founded Remedios, an integrated health, population, and environment program, in 1997. She is a fellow of the Environmental Leadership Program. Tuesday, 3 Sep 2002 JOHANNESBURG, South […]

Water Shipped Down

To the dismay of environmentalists, the U.S. Interior Department approved yesterday a $1 billion, 50-year project to store water beneath the Mojave Desert, in what would be one of California’s largest water storage facilities. Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District would store surplus Colorado River water in an aquifer under the desert; during dry years, the […]

Another Anderson Scandal

A court in India has rejected efforts to reduce the charges against Warren Anderson, the former chair of the U.S.-based company Union Carbide, which was responsible for a 1984 gas leak in Bhopal that killed 3,000 people and sickened tens of thousands more. The leak from a pesticide plant in the central Indian city was […]

Pigs’ Stymie

The U.S., Saudi Arabia, and other rich nations are deliberately stymieing international efforts to encourage increased clean energy use, according to sources at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, being held this week and next in Johannesburg, South Africa. The WSSD action plan, which will be approved by heads of state at the end of […]

Foster Care

Louisiana Gov. Mike Foster (R) kicked off a campaign to save his state’s coastline this week by bagging a $3 million, three-year grant from, of all places, Shell Oil. “America’s Wetland: Campaign to Save Coastal Louisiana” also earned the backing of several major national and state environmental and civic organizations, as well as a spot […]

On a Different Scale

A pair of bills aimed at regulating genetically altered fish in food and the environment are facing a bitter fight in the California legislature. One of the proposed laws, a consumer right-to-know bill requiring the labeling of unpackaged transgenic fish in retail stores, passed the state Senate on Monday, but it must be approved by […]

Northern Light

In a classic example of strange bedfellows, the Nature Conservancy has teamed up with Great Northern Paper, a pulp and paper mill company, to protect thousands of acres of wilderness in Maine — and over a thousand jobs for company employees. The conservancy, whose Maine chapter was founded by legendary environmentalist Rachel Carson, provided the […]

Salmon in the Can

Over the past two decades, U.S. federal agencies have pumped $3.3 billion into recovery efforts for endangered salmon in the Pacific Northwest — but there is no evidence that the money has paid off, according to a report issued yesterday by the U.S. General Accounting Office. The report is the government’s first comprehensive assessment of […]

Czech It Out

A “mini-Chernobyl” — that’s how a Czech investigating commission has described the potential threat posed by a chemical plant just north of Prague that was damaged in last week’s flooding in Central and Eastern Europe. The commission warned that the highly toxic chlorine released by the Spolana plant during the floods and again late last […]

Blame It on Rio

Just two days into the World Summit on Sustainable Development, being held this week and next in Johannesburg, South Africa, there is already a marked division between representatives of developed and developing nations. Rich and poor nations are having difficulty seeing eye-to-eye on nearly all the critical topics being discussed at the conference — aid […]