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Dead in the Water
Here’s a story of the global economy at its worst and maybe also at its best. Early this month a cry of alarm came over email from my friend Zoltan Lontay in Hungary. The Hungarian news had just announced an enormous fish kill in the Szamos river on that country’s eastern border. A wave of […]
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A Turner for the Better
Billionaire and media magnate Ted Turner, already the largest individual landholder in the U.S., has bought a big chunk of land in Florida’s panhandle that he says he’ll leave undisturbed as habitat for the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker. The 3,620 acres, which Turner purchased for $11.6 million from a homebuilder and developer, abuts another large Turner […]
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Swapping Spat
Enviros are planning to lobby against a proposal in President Clinton’s new budget plan that would give the U.S. Forest Service wide authority to sell public lands. White House officials say the language is intended to help the government swap public tracts for more desirable private ones, but enviros say that if a conservative administration […]
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He Who Smelt It Dealt It
A cyanide spill from a Romanian gold smelter hit Serbia yesterday, after traveling downriver through Hungary for 10 days, devastating fish stocks and threatening the water supplies of 2.5 million people. The Serbian government is warning citizens not to use water from the Tisza River for any purpose and not to catch the river’s fish. […]
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Yucky Mountain
Despite a fierce fight from Nevada’s two senators, the Senate voted yesterday to have thousands of tons of nuclear waste shipped from power plants across the U.S. to a repository in the Nevada desert. But President Clinton has promised to veto the bill, and the bill’s supporters fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to […]
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A Pain in Harass
U.S. Forest Service employees in Nevada say they’ve been harassed, intimidated, and threatened by locals who are hostile toward federal land-use policies, and some say they fear for their safety. The USFS sent an investigative team to Nevada in December to interview more than 100 workers after the regional supervisor for the agency, Gloria Flora, […]
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In Deep Doo Doo
A federal judge yesterday threw out a lawsuit filed by loggers who claimed that the U.S. Forest Service was under the sway of a nature-based religion. A coalition of loggers filed suit last fall against the USFS and two environmental groups, claiming that the agency was curtailing logging because its policy was being dictated by […]
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Crime Doesn't Pay — But Criminals Do
The European Commission endorsed plans yesterday to make polluting companies and individuals legally responsible for the cost of the damage they cause. The commission will now draft a new “polluter pays” directive for the European Union, intended to end the notion that society as a whole must bear the cost of human-caused environmental disasters. Individual […]
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Green Apple
The Battery Park City Authority in New York City is holding a competition asking developers to submit plans for the nation’s first eco-friendly residential high-rise. The building must incorporate such features as solar panels, fuel cells, non-toxic and recycled building materials, roof-top gardens, and gray-water systems, which reuse water collected from sinks, showers, and laundry […]
