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Mr. Watson, Come Here, I Don’t Want You

Robert Watson, one of the most outspoken and respected voices in the debate over global warming, was voted out of his position as chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Friday. IPCC member nations rejected Watson in favor of India’s Rajendra Pachauri, an engineer and economist as well as one of the […]

ANWR Sedate

In a major defeat for President Bush and a hard-won triumph for environmentalists, the Senate this morning effectively killed a proposal to allow oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Drilling advocates fell 14 votes short of the 60 needed to end a Democratic filibuster and force passage of the bill. All […]

Privates Exposed

The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, is coming under fire from environmentalists after the London Guardian published information from apparently secret E.C. documents describing efforts to liberalize trade by privatizing state-run services in poor nations. The market for such services is estimated at more than $1 trillion per year. Under the […]

Dunces With Wolves

The age-old conflict between wolves and livestock owners is erupting again. Last year, at least 40 farm animals in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming were killed by wolves, which were reintroduced to the American West in the mid-1990s. In response, a significant number of the predators have been killed this year as well (including all 10 […]

Cheshire Fat Cat

Here’s a whole new meaning for the phrase “company town”: The village of Cheshire, in southeastern Ohio, will be purchased for $20 million by American Electric Power Company. Last year, the town was plagued by clouds of sulfuric acid drifting in from a nearby AEP power plant, Ohio’s largest coal-burner. Notwithstanding a recent $175 million […]

Hopping Mad

Atrazine, the most popular herbicide in the U.S., appears to cause a wide range of sexual abnormalities in frogs, according to a study by biologist Tyrone Hayes published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Seventy-five million pounds of atrazine are used in the U.S. every year, and it is the most […]

Southern Inhospitality

U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham informed South Carolina yesterday that the federal government would ship plutonium to the state, over the objections of Gov. Jim Hodges (D). The announcement was the latest in the country’s ongoing debate about what to do with its surplus weapons-grade plutonium. The feds want to store some of it in […]

Free Bird

In happier news from the animal kingdom, a California condor hatched in the wild late last week, offering a rare moment of optimism for a species teetering on the edge of extinction. If the chick survives, it will mark the first time in 18 years that adult condors in the wild successfully conceived, hatched, and […]

True Grit

For the third year in a row, massive dust storms from China have blown into South Korea, closing schools, canceling flights, and creating a run on facemasks and respiratory medication. The storms are the result of severe desertification in China, where the Gobi Desert grew by 20,000 square miles from 1994 to 1999; the desertification […]

Penny Reyes-Velasco, Happy Earth

Penny Reyes-Velasco is a children’s book author and collage artist, as well as executive director of Happy Earth Organization, a nonprofit that produces literature-based eco-educational materials in the Philippines. Monday, 15 Apr 2002 QUEZON CITY, Philippines At the end of every day, I ask myself the same questions — and for the last year, I […]