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Beware of Oil Slicks on the Road to the Lincoln Bedroom
Vice Pres. Al Gore doesn’t like to talk up his family’s close ties to Occidental Petroleum, a company that has raised the ire of enviros — most recently by attempting to drill for oil on the ancestral lands of the U’wa Indian tribe in Colombia. Gore inherited more than $500,000 in Occidental stock from his […]
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Dripping Them the Bird
Some rare seabird species have been pushed closer to extinction by a big oil spill off the French Atlantic coast last month, the French environment ministry said yesterday. An estimated 300,000 birds were killed or injured when a tanker broke in half and leaked about 15,000 tons of oil into the sea. In the wake […]
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Barking Up the Right Tree
U.S. Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck said in a speech yesterday that the era of extensive road-building in national forests is over and that the administration would release a new proposal to close forest roads within a few weeks. Roads have gone from being a capital improvement to a liability, Dombeck told the Commonwealth Club […]
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If at First You Don't Succeed, Try, Tribe, Again
Leaders of four Northwest tribes met with top Clinton administration officials yesterday to talk salmon. The tribes, which have treaty fishing rights, requested the meeting to discuss efforts to revive the 13 threatened and endangered salmon and steelhead trout runs in the Columbia River Basin. Participants were tight-lipped after yesterday’s gathering, which was the most […]
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A Bunch of Buttin-skis
A number of the environmental and social activists who helped sink the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle last month are now heading to the ski resort town of Davos, Switzerland, to protest a meeting that starts tomorrow of the World Economic Forum, an elite group that includes representatives from 1,000 of the world’s largest […]
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Aw, Shoot!
Controversy has erupted over the plan of a poverty-stricken black community living north of South Africa’s Kruger National Park to allow wealthy foreigners a shot at hunting the park’s elephants. The Makuleke community jointly manages 30,000 hectares of park land with the government, an arrangement reached two years ago to compensate the Makuleke because they […]
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Compost-a-Roni, the San Francisco Treat
San Francisco this year is becoming the first major U.S. city to offer curbside recycling for food waste, one sign of a growing nationwide trend toward composting. Communities across the U.S. are finding it difficult to meet the recycling goals they set in the early 1990s, and some are now pushing composting as a way […]
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Ashes, Ashes, the Forests Fall Down
Indonesia’s forests are disappearing even faster than expected, according to the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry and Estate Crops, which used satellite imagery to produce new forest cover maps. The Ministry now estimates that the deforestation rate is 1.5 million hectares per year, nearly twice what the World Bank estimated in 1994. Since 1985, at least […]
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Desperate Times Call for Giant Styrofoam Islands
Desperate to find a way to combat climate change, some scientists are proposing off-the-wall fixes, like making a Styrofoam continent about the size of North America that would float in the South Pacific and counteract global warming by reflecting sunlight into space. The idea is ludicrous, of course, says Michael MacCracken of the U.S. Global […]
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Poached Aches
Poachers are pushing tigers in India toward extinction, feeding a growing demand at pharmacies and fur shops in China and Japan for illicit products derived from endangered animals. A few weeks ago, park rangers in India’s Madhya Pradesh state recovered a carcass tentatively identified as Sita, a famous tiger that had been featured on the […]
