Uncategorized

Coral-ations

98,572 — square miles of coral reef in the world 1 97,100 — square miles of the state of Wyoming 2 58 — percentage of the world’s reefs that are potentially threatened by human activities 1 34 — percentage of the world’s reefs that are off the shores of Southeast Asia 3 88 — percentage […]

Double-blind Test

The threat of nuclear war between India and Pakistan seems to have abated slightly — for the moment — but what about the consequences of India’s nuclear testing? Four years after the country exploded nuclear devices in underground tests in the Thar desert near the Pakistan border, villagers are questioning the government’s pat assurance that […]

And other words from readers

  Re: Whale Killers Dear Editor: As people who live near the sea and watch both orca whales and their watchers several times each week during the summer months, we were waiting for this to happen. As we suspected, big-money interests are trying to push the little guys out of the whale-watching business. But let […]

Crayne Horton, Fish Brewing Company

In 1993, Crayne Horton founded Fish Brewing Company, brewer of Fish Tale Ales in Olympia, Wash. For the last nine years, he has helped build the company into a leading environmental brewery with one of the world’s best-selling lines of certified organic beers. Today, he serves as vice president of marketing and sales. Monday, 17 […]

Does the World Cup hold the key to climate policy?

The Maritim Hotel. Photo: IISD. The Maritim Hotel in Bonn, Germany is the regular site of the bureaucrat-level United Nations climate change meetings that take place between the ministerial sessions known as Conferences of the Parties. The building has the air of the showpiece hotel in an impoverished third-world capital: a chandelier and mirror quotient […]

The Look, the Feel of “Cotton”

Wrecklamation

One hundred years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Reclamation Act, creating a new government agency charged with making the desert bloom. The goal of the act, which gave birth to the Bureau of Reclamation, was to bring water to family farms in the West and lift the region out of the depression of the […]

Mush, Mush

In Alaska, some 4,000 miles from Capitol Hill, global warming is neither an abstraction nor up for debate. It’s simply a reality — and not, generally speaking, a pleasant one. High water is eating away houses and buildings, mosquitoes are invading where once they were unheard of, hunters are getting trapped on breakaway ice, permafrost […]

Hodging His Bets

The U.S. government could begin moving radioactive plutonium from Colorado into South Carolina’s Savannah River nuclear complex as soon as this weekend, following a federal judge’s refusal yesterday afternoon to block the shipments. Gov. Jim Hodges (D) has vowed to appeal the ruling, and maintains that he won’t allow the plutonium into South Carolina until […]

Amazon Grace

Here’s a little bit of welcome news from the Southern Hemisphere: The rate of deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest has fallen sharply, according to Brazilian environmental officials. Between 2000 and 2001, the rate of logging and set forest fires fell by 13 percent, from roughly 7,000 square miles of forest destroyed in 2000 to about […]