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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 […]

Comment Tally Voodoo

Environmental organizations had just 48 hours to submit policy proposals for consideration by Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force, according to the latest batch of documents released by the Energy Department. Shortly after midday on Wednesday, March 21, 2001, Margot Anderson, a senior department official, sent an email message to a colleague instructing him […]

Basin Is No Sink

The network of waterways in the Amazon River Basin emits three times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as previously thought, according to a study appearing in the current edition of Nature. The finding suggests that tropical forest regions are not carbon “sinks” that help cleanse the world of excess CO2 emissions. Rather, the […]

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 […]