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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. […]

Timber Boom I

More than a decade after a car bomb injured two members of the radical environmental group Earth First!, a federal jury will decide whether the FBI and police in Oakland, Calif., violated the civil rights of the victims by ignoring evidence in the case. On May 24, 1990, Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were headed […]

Nuking It Out

  Re: Safety Dance, Part One Dear Editor: I have been religiously reading your spin on environmental news for about a year. I have gotten some good information from your mostly one-sided publication. You have a right to spread your information this way. It’s the American way. But I cannot sit here and allow you […]

The Finnish Line

From the department of creative activism: You’ve heard of hunger strikes, but what about baby strikes? Hundreds of Finnish women have signed a petition declaring that they will not bear children for the next four years unless the country’s Parliament scraps plans to build a fifth nuclear reactor in their homeland. The protest has a […]

Sitting By the Docket of the Bay

A five-year-old legal battle between San Francisco Baykeeper, a conservation organization, and Dow Chemical ended yesterday when the Contra Costa County Superior Court approved a settlement. Dow stood accused of unlawfully discharging contaminated water into the New York Slough, which empties into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Rivers and from there into the San Francisco Bay. Under […]

Nature Not Nurturing

In a move being described as unprecedented in recent history, the highly respected scientific journal Nature has said that it should not have published a controversial article last year about the discovery of genetically engineered corn growing in Mexico. The journal’s editors concluded that the article, which was welcomed by opponents of genetic modification, did […]

Furious George

A two-and-a-half year escalation of acts of so-called eco-terrorism began to slow down last summer — but inquiries into the acts have sped up, as federal lawmakers have used Sept. 11 as a reason to go after eco-terrorists with unprecedented energy. Last month, you could have been forgiven for confusing a congressional hearing on eco-terrorism […]