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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 […]
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Seeking Closure
Enviros are calling on Texas to tighten shrimping restrictions on the Gulf Coast to protect sea turtles, including the endangered Kemp’s ridley turtle. In 1999, shrimp fishing was responsible for the stranding of 95 Kemp’s ridley turtles and 355 other turtles, and the vast majority of them died, according to members of the Sierra Club […]
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City Sickers
Air pollution is rampant in Russia, where about 120 cities have noxious gases in the air at more than five times acceptable limits, according to the head of the nation’s ecology committee. In all, 61 million people living in 185 cities — more than one-third of Russians — breathe air with high noxious gas levels. […]
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Go West, Old Man
The Clinton administration, which raised the ire of many Western Republicans last month by creating three new national monuments, is considering designating more monuments in Arizona, California, Colorado, and Oregon, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said Monday. Any new monuments would likely be administered by the Bureau of Land Management, which Babbitt says is becoming a […]
