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Preaching the gospel of ecotourism

Costas Christ has a knack for handling sticky situations. I got a glimpse of this as I was making my way home from an ecotourism conference in Senegal in the early 1990s. Along with a number of other conference participants, I was stuck in the airport in the capital city of Dakar. For some unknown […]

One Big Ol' Whale of a Victory

Enviros are rejoicing after winning a tough five-year battle against a proposal to build a giant salt plant on the pristine shores of a gray-whale breeding ground on Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. Mitsubishi Corp. and the Mexican government announced yesterday that they are scrapping their joint plan for the $100 million facility. The salt plant, which […]

Didn't Inhale, but Still Pro-Reefer

The Clinton administration yesterday proposed new protections for one-fifth of America’s coral reefs, including bans on fishing and other activities. Less than 3 percent of the 8,600 square miles of reefs in the nation’s waters are currently protected, though environmentalists say that two-thirds of them are at risk from pollution, overfishing, and other commercial activities. […]

A Bad Case of Gas

Drivers of sport utility vehicles in the U.S. are being hit hard in their wallets with the average price for a gallon of gas at $1.42 per gallon, a 56 percent increase from one year ago. With some of the biggest SUVs getting as little as 10 miles to the gallon in the city, the […]

Woe, Canada

U.S. companies are sending increasing amounts of hazardous waste to Ontario, Canada, to circumvent strong and costly disposal rules in the U.S., says a Canadian enviro group. The Canadian Institute for Environmental Law and Policy this week called on Environment Minister David Anderson to review Ontario’s hazardous waste regulations, and, if he found them insufficient, […]

Republicans Putting on Airs

A mysterious group calling itself Republicans for Clean Air is spending nearly $2 million to run a TV ad in big primary states that blasts Sen. John McCain’s environmental record and claims that Texas Gov. George W. Bush has notable green achievements. The organization is unknown to political professionals, environmentalists, and the Federal Elections Commission. […]

Green Beans

An increasing number of coffee growers in Latin America are going green, abandoning chemical fertilizers and pesticides and growing their coffee in the shade of native trees that provide habitat for migrating songbirds. Several hundred small-scale coffee growers in southern Mexico recently formed a cooperative and adopted green growing methods after finding that they could […]

Burying the Corps

The National Wildlife Federation and Taxpayers for Common Sense are teaming up today to release a report that criticizes 25 Army Corps of Engineers projects as environmentally destructive and a waste of more than $6 billion. One of the projects blasted in the report is a billion-dollar expansion of barge locks on the upper Mississippi […]

A Sock in the Eye

About 50 orcas from two pods that live in the waters near Washington state’s San Juan Islands have migrated to California’s Monterey Bay, 1,000 miles farther south than they’ve ever been seen before, most likely because salmon in Washington are in such short supply. In the past, the orcas could count on a year-round supply […]

My Sediments Exactly

The U.S. Forest Service is sure to stir up controversy today when it proposes a new policy that would make it more difficult to construct roads in the 155 national forests in the U.S. Most such roads are built for logging, and many of them are eroding and dumping sediment into waterways, endangering fish. Under […]