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Bureau of Land Manglement

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management granted permission yesterday to the Marine Corps to conduct two weeks of military exercises in the Arizona desert in late April and early May. Environmentalists are worried that tortoises and rare desert plants might be casualties of the Marine exercises. Known as Desert Scimitar ’02, the mission will test […]

Paper Late

Last night, the U.S. Energy Department released 11,000 pages of documents pertaining to the drafting of the Bush administration’s energy policy, just hours before a court-ordered deadline to turn over the papers. An initial review of the documents confirmed the suspicion of environmental organizations and Democrats that the Bush administration relied almost entirely on meetings […]

Up in Second-Hand Smoke

Park and Writhe

Air pollution, development, and funding cuts are just some of the problems facing the U.S. national parks system, according to the National Parks Conservation Association’s annual report on the country’s 10 most endangered parks. The diversion of water from the Rio Grande and air pollution from Mexico are threatening Big Bend National Park in Texas, […]

Sally Bingham, The Regeneration Project

Sally Bingham is the director of The Regeneration Project. She is a priest in the Episcopal Diocese of California and the environmental minister at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Monday, 25 Mar 2002 SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. When you are an active priest in the Episcopal Diocese of California and the director of a not-for-profit business, […]

Problems Swept Under the Afghan

Soviet-era chemical agents; a pond full of sewage that children use as a play area; highly radioactive material — these are just a few of the environmental and health hazards found so far in Kabul, Afghanistan, by U.N. peacekeepers and a team of U.N. scientists that began an environmental assessment of the country last week. […]

Who’s That Breathin’ That Nastri Air? Nastri Boys!

Ever since President Bush took office, the war against air pollution hasn’t been going well — but environmentalists do win the occasional battle. Case in point: The U.S. EPA’s Pacific Southwest region chief, Wayne Hector Nastri, recently succeeded in convincing one of the biggest polluters in the Southwest to clean up its act. Tucson Electric […]

Get Along Little Dogies

Yippee-ai-ay. After years of studies and legal actions, ranchers in California’s Mojave Desert are being forced to remove cattle herds from almost half a million acres of federal land during the spring and fall, when threatened desert tortoises mate and forage in the area. Grazing cattle can crush tortoises or their burrows, eat their food, […]

Dis Solutia

The U.S. EPA and the Department of Justice plan to file a cleanup consent decree today with Solutia and Pharmacia (the company that owns Monsanto), in a move that could overrule any court-ordered cleanup of PCBs from a former Monsanto chemical plant in Anniston, Ala. Under the decree, the two companies would investigate the scope […]

Track Stars

U.S. Democratic Sens. Hillary Clinton (N.Y.) and Harry Reid (Nev.) yesterday proposed creating a national tracking system to monitor both chronic diseases and environmental pollution so that any correlations between the two could be more easily identified and studied. Last year, the two senators held hearings in Fallon, Nev., which is home to a cluster […]