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Gift Rap

So far, the first-ever Grist fundraising drive has been an unprecedented success. (eGrants.org, the organization that’s making it possible to do fancy things like process your online credit card donations safely and securely, wants to know what the heck we’ve done to inspire such a love-in among our readers.) Donors have sent enthusiastic notes saying […]

William Faries, environmental journalist

Thanks to a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, William Faries is currently working as an environmental journalist for the Jakarta, Indonesia-based Tempo magazine. This week, he is reporting from Bali, site of the final preparatory meeting for the World Summit on Sustainable Development, to be held in South Africa this August. Tuesday, 28 May […]

Graceless Slick

Massive ships spilling sheets of oil across the sea might make for dramatic photo ops — yet the vast majority of oil pollution in North America comes not from leaking oil rigs or troubled tankers, but rather from thousands of small, diverse sources, most of them on the land, according to a new report by […]

Blair Switch Project

In what some observers saw as a thinly-veiled attack on environmentalists and animal-rights activists, British Prime Minister Tony Blair warned that his nation risked being overtaken by other countries if it let public sentiment and vocal protesters stand in the way of scientific progress. Speaking yesterday to the Royal Society in London, Blair said Great […]

Give It to Me, Baby

As you are no doubt aware, Grist in the midst of its first-ever fundraising drive. Here’s the story: Grist consists of precisely four paid staff members. We send out information by email at no charge to 60,000 people a day, and we post top-notch environmental news, commentary, and features on our website. Plus we point […]

Stranger in a Familiar Land

If politics makes for strange bedfellows, sometimes it makes for strange enemies as well: Tensions are brewing between environmentalists and animal-rights activists over federal efforts to establish the health effects of industrial chemicals and pesticides by testing them on laboratory animals. Under pressure from environmentalists, who were concerned about humans being exposed to tens of […]

Get With the Programme

Despite some bright spots, the outlook for the global environment in the next generation is largely bleak, according to a report published yesterday by the U.N. Environment Programme. The report is the work of more than 1,000 authors and attempts to provide a comprehensive overview of how the environment has changed since UNEP was established […]

Schoolhouses Rock!

Is the Ivory Tower built from sustainable materials? Increasingly, the answer is yes. College campuses, long regarded as bastions of left-leaning life, are becoming promoters of sustainable development. Oberlin College recently completed a comprehensive study of how to reduce pollution from its operations, the State University of New York at Buffalo spent $17 million to […]

Catch a Taiga By the Toe

No one needs to tell the Amur tiger that species worldwide are endangered. A resident of Russia’s far-eastern taiga forests, the tigers are severely threatened by insatiable and generally illegal logging in the region. In theory, Russia has some of the world’s strictest logging laws, but the taiga’s old-growth trees (such as Manchurian oak and […]

Mammal-mia!

Nearly 25 percent of the world’s mammals — more than 1,000 species in total — are in danger of going extinct within 30 years, according to a report by the United Nations Environment Programme on the state of the global environment. In total, the report identifies more than 11,000 endangered species, including one in eight […]