Uncategorized

Zap Dingbats?

The Montes Azules jungle in Mexico, near the Guatemala border, is one of the largest remaining pockets of tropical rainforest in North America — and the battle to save it has created unusual political bedfellows, to say the least. The Lacandon people, who have lived in Montes Azules for centuries and legally own much of […]

Re-tired

In other news about trash, the U.S. is making significant strides in the reuse and recycling of rubber tires. Last year, Americans got rid of about 281 million tires — some 5.7 million tons worth. In 1990, just one out of every 10 discarded tires was reused; now, that number has risen to nearly eight […]

Whistleblow While You Work

Citing laws designed to protect institutional whistleblowers, the Labor Department has ordered the U.S. EPA to reinstate a former investigator to “ombudsman-related duties.” The department concluded that EPA policy analyst Hugh Kaufman was removed from those duties in retaliation for complaining about the agency — in other words, for doing his job too well. As […]

What About Tupperware?

Now that the U.S. Senate has given the go-ahead to store the nation’s most highly radioactive nuclear waste at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, new questions loom: What kind of containers can protect the waste for 10,000 years, and who will provide them? Those are high-stakes issues, given that the Department of Energy plans to buy about […]

Sound Science

In a triumph of the military over the environment, the U.S. Navy yesterday won approval to deploy two ships that use low-frequency sonar to detect distant submarines, despite ongoing fears that the system could injure whales and other marine mammals. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration granted the Navy an exemption from federal rules protecting […]

Cod Is Dead

In a development that scientists have predicted for years, cod have virtually vanished from the North Sea due to overfishing, according to a report by the U.K.-based Wildlife Trusts. The species is now commercially extinct, meaning it no longer makes economic sense to try to catch it. The report also chronicles the decline of other […]

Elizabeth Chin, anthropologist

Elizabeth Chin is associate professor of anthropology at Occidental College, where she also is director of the Multicultural Summer Institute. Her recently published book, Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture, has been named a finalist for the 2002 C. Wright Mills Award. My work as an anthropologist is aimed at enlarging our understanding […]

The Fund Formerly Known as the Superfund

Bangladeath

Arsenic has a long and glorious history in the annals of crime fiction, but for the people of Bangladesh, poisoning by arsenic is all too real. With 35 million people drinking arsenic-tainted water, the country is in the midst of what the World Health Organization is calling the “largest mass poisoning of a population in […]

I’ll Do the Thinning Around Here, Baba Looey

Fanning a different kind of flame, Republican lawmakers are blaming environmental groups for contributing to the fires that destroyed more than 3.1 million acres of U.S. forests this year by blocking federal projects to thin undergrowth. Thinning removes brush and dead trees from the forest understory, thereby eliminating some of the dry matter and reducing […]