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The Placer's All Mine

Placer Dome, a Canadian gold mining company that has been on the defensive ever since a devastating waste spill at one of its mines in the Philippines in 1996, is trying to clean up its image with a “sustainability initiative.” In a meeting in Sydney last month, the company negotiated a draft agreement with environmental […]

Matt Zencey, Alaska Rainforest Campaign

Matt Zencey is campaign manager of the Alaska Rainforest Campaign. A 19-year resident of Anchorage, Alaska, Matt temporarily moved to Washington, D.C., last fall to expand the campaign’s national operation. He will be glad to leave behind the chaos and congestion of the Washington area in June, when he will return to the campaign’s Alaska […]

Certifiably Sane

Consumers and businesses will soon be able to buy a number of products and services that don’t cause any net greenhouse gases to be released into the environment, thanks to a program launched by the Climate Neutral Network in Underwood, Wash. The network certifies companies that reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions as much as possible and […]

Have a Coke and a Frown

Residents of a number of Colombian villages say their health, crops, and farm animals are being threatened by an American-sponsored program intended to wipe out heroin poppy and coca cultivation, and they fear that problems are likely to get worse with a Clinton administration proposal to intensify its anti-drug efforts in Colombia. Government planes and […]

Leaf Me Alone

Reacting to mounting consumer unease about genetically modified (GM) foods, McDonald’s and other fast-food chains are quietly telling their french-fry suppliers to stop using Monsanto’s GM “New Leaf” potato, which has been designed to produce a toxin that repels a potato pest. Many farmers are finding that the market for the GM potatoes is shrinking […]

Fly in the Ointment

Friends of the Earth UK is urging vacationers to travel closer to home and to take trains rather than planes. A planeload of passengers flying from Britain to Florida and back produces as much carbon dioxide as does the average British driver in one year. The world’s 16,000 jet airplanes pump out more than 600 […]

That's Not Cool

Four dams on the lower Snake River in Washington state harm water quality and threaten endangered salmon, and breaching the dams may be the best way to comply with the Clean Water Act, the U.S. EPA told the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers last week. In a letter to the Corps, the EPA called the […]

Banging Their Erasers

Contractors that operate U.S. government uranium processing plants in Kentucky and Ohio erased hundreds of environmental and safety problems from computer records in 1993 without government approval, according to court documents and other papers obtained by the Louisville Courier-Journal. After a three-year investigation that ended in 1996, the Department of Energy reconstructed the erased items […]

Alternatives to Elephant Poaching

You Ottawa Be Ashamed

A coalition of environmental groups yesterday accused Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. of holding secret talks that could weaken environmental protection under the North American Free Trade Agreement. The enviros accuse Canada of leading a charge to weaken the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, an environmental watchdog set up under NAFTA to make sure the three […]