Uncategorized
All Stories
-
Dune Messiah
It’s a rare moment when ranchers and environmentalists see eye-to-eye — and yet a collaboration between the two parties is leading to the creation of the nation’s 57th national park. The unlikely relationship began when enviros and ranchers realized they had something in common: a need to protect the water resources in Colorado’s San Luis […]
-
By the Hair of Our Chinny Chin Chin
As building materials go, straw generally gets a bad rap: A straw man is something that can be knocked over easily, and, as everyone knows, any decent wolf can blow down a straw house. But people have been building homes in the U.S. from straw bales encased in plaster or drywall since at least the […]
-
Made in China
China’s Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric project, has already come under fire from environmental and social activists for the massive ecological and demographic changes it will cause. Now there’s a new reason to be concerned: A government meteorologist predicted today that the reservoir created by the dam would raise local temperatures, thereby changing […]
-
On Acid
Dealing a major setback to New York’s efforts to reduce acid rain in the Adirondacks, a federal judge yesterday overturned a law penalizing power plants in the state for trading pollution credits to plants in 14 other states. According to U.S. District Court Judge David Hurd, the state’s 2000 Air Pollution Mitigation Law conflicted with […]
-
Sludge Hammer
After highway infrastructure, the U.S. water and sewage system is the single biggest public works network in the country — and it is in trouble. Annual spending on the system falls tens of billions of dollars short of what is needed to maintain and expand it enough to keep up with population growth and stricter […]
-
Russian to the Brink
Russian environmentalists announced yesterday that they would take their government to court over its decision to accept spent nuclear waste from foreign countries for storage and reprocessing. The law allowing the country to import such waste was signed by President Vladimir Putin last summer. Proponents say it could generate up to $20 billion over 10 […]
-
Burning Desires
Concerned about air quality and human health, community delegates to a four-day meeting in Durban, South Africa, yesterday called on the governments of South Africa, Mozambique, and Swaziland to ban all waste incinerators and tighten controls over medical waste disposal by 2006. The three governments haven’t yet responded to the call, although South Africa is […]
-
Sea Ya!
Central Asia’s Aral Sea, which used to be the world’s fourth-largest lake, has shrunk so dramatically that it has split into two separate bodies of water. The two rivers that feed it were diverted in the 1960s to water cotton fields; now just a trickle reaches the sea, and much of that is contaminated by […]
-
Peter Altman, Campaign ExxonMobil
Peter Altman is the national coordinator of Campaign ExxonMobil and executive director of the Sustainable Energy and Economic Development Coalition. Monday, 8 Apr 2002 AUSTIN, Texas The irony of being an environmental activist is that I spend much of my day sedentary, staying in my office and talking on the phone as I dial-in from […]
-
U.N. Resolved
The Sixth U.N. Conference on Biodiversity opened in The Hague yesterday, with more than 2,000 delegates from 200 countries gathering to discuss the protection of the world’s plants and animals. The main agenda items for the two-week conference include encouraging governments to halt deforestation and designing a policy to share and protect global genetic resources. […]
