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Eat, Drink, and Be Merry

After a decade of debate, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released final standards for labeling organic foods last month, siding with environmentalists and the organic farming industry on nearly every contentious issue. The standards, which will become fully effective in 2002, ban the use of irradiation, biotechnology, and sewer-sludge fertilizer for any food labeled organic. […]

Not Watt! Nit Whit!

In a move that has environmentalists up in arms, President-elect George W. Bush nominated former Colorado Attorney General Gale Norton for Interior secretary on Friday. Norton, a protege of James Watt, Ronald Reagan’s first Interior secretary, was part of an effort under Watt to try to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to […]

A New Year's Pollution-Solution Resolution

Sweden takes big steps to ban chemicals

However environmentally permissive a Republican-controlled U.S. may be, other parts of the world are pioneering attitudes, technologies, and laws that could carry us safely through the 21st century. As this week’s happy example, I offer the new global agreement on POPs, plus Sweden’s even better policy on the same topic. All-natural breast milk — now […]

Hi, Ho, Quicksilver

After more than six years of debate, the U.S. EPA yesterday said it would draft standards to require coal-fired power plants to reduce their emissions of mercury. The National Academy of Sciences has determined that as many as 60,000 babies may be exposed to unhealthy levels of mercury each year because either they or their […]

Gone Fission

The Chernobyl nuclear power plant, where a reactor melted down and spewed radiation 14 years ago in the world’s worst nuclear accident, was shut down with a simple flip of a switch today in Ukraine. Ukraine President Leonid Kuchma said, “The world will become a safer place. People will sleep in peace.” Since the 1986 […]

Going Ape

Wildlife got a break in the Republic of Congo yesterday when the government quadrupled the size of Odzala National Park to 3.2 million acres, about half the size of Vermont. Much of the land had been slated for logging. Conservation International is helping to fund the expansion of the park, which provides habitat for 15,000 […]

In the Forest, the Mighty Forest, the Lyons Speaks Tonight

“It would be a feather in the cap” of the logging industry if it stopped cutting down old-growth trees, Undersecretary of Agriculture Jim Lyons said earlier this week. Lyons, who oversees the U.S. Forest Service, predicted the end of old-growth logging on private and public land within 10 years, in response to strong public sentiment. […]

Hold the Anchovies

Hake, cod, and anchovy populations are being driven towards extinction in European waters and fisheries ministers are meeting today to debate whether to cut catch quotas by up to 74 percent next year to save the most threatened stocks. During their annual meeting, the ministers usually talk about raising quotas to help fishers, but this […]

Vex and the City

Dust and soot in the air contribute to between 20 and 200 early deaths a day across 20 of the largest cities in the U.S., according to a new study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The new report, the largest coast-to-coast study of the problem, found […]