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The End of the World As We Know It?
What will President Bush’s environmental policies mean to the American West? Observers say the Bush administration will be friendly to developers and the logging, grazing, and mining industries, and have a much lighter hand with environmental regulations. Bush has repeatedly said he will place much weight on local input into federal land management decisions. The […]
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Why hasn't the National Marine Fisheries Service called for Snake River dams?
Passions run high in the Pacific Northwest over whether to remove four large federal dams on the lower Snake River to recover the river’s imperiled wild salmon and steelhead (a.k.a. sea-run rainbow trout). The Snake once produced more salmon and steelhead than any other river in the vast Columbia River basin — over 2 million […]
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The Blues and the Graze
The U.S. government is calling for more timber harvesting and less grazing on 64 million acres in the eastern part of the Northwest as part of the largest federal land-use plan ever proposed. The plan, released yesterday by the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project, is a joint effort by the U.S. Forest Service and […]
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Yuck Is Mountin'
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson called yesterday for an investigation into allegations that federal contractors compromised a scientific study to determine whether Yucca Mountain in Nevada would be a safe place to store all the country’s high-level nuclear waste. The Las Vegas Sun last month obtained a 60-page draft report about the site and found a […]
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Blubber Clubbers
Canadian officials are denying they have decided to curb the annual seal hunt off of Newfoundland, by far the largest cull of marine mammals in the world. Based on an internal memo that it obtained, the International Fund for Animal Welfare said the country’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans had decided to pare back the […]
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Barnes Storming
Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes (D) is close to reaching a compromise with environmentalists who have sued state and federal agencies over air-quality concerns and kept metro Atlanta’s $36 billion transportation plan on hold. To improve air quality, Barnes has proposed speeding up a $4.5 million study of the health effects of the city’s air pollution, […]
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Sturgeons General Warning
Representatives from more than 150 nations are meeting this week in West Virginia to consider changes to a U.N. treaty protecting endangered species. One hot topic is likely to be the fate of sturgeon, whose populations have fallen between 50 and 70 percent over the last century, in part because of a black market in […]
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Peake-achu
As a first step toward reaching their goal of stopping all releases of chemical pollutants into Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia are signing an agreement today to clean up toxic “hot spots” in three tributaries of the bay and to curb the flow of chemicals running into the bay’s watershed. The […]
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Hi! My Beloved Country
South Africa announced this weekend that it has been selected to host the U.N. World Summit on Sustainable Development, a.k.a. the Earth Summit 2002. More than 40,000 delegates will likely attend the conference, which will mark the 10th anniversary of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, where world leaders agreed to an agenda for protecting the […]
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Bleach Blanket Bingo
U.S. Commerce Secretary Norman Mineta announced four initiatives to help preserve coral reefs yesterday, after a monitoring group released a report saying that 27 percent of the world’s reefs were gone and that 70 percent would be dead by 2050. Mineta’s plan includes creating several “no anchoring” zones for large ships near reefs in the […]
