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Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Ream the Competition

Businesses that seek out ways to reuse and recycle products and cut their emissions save money, in addition to helping save the environment, according to a new economic study conducted in the Pacific Northwest. Over the last seven years, 137 Northwest businesses polled saved a total of $42 million by reusing and recycling items. The […]

Deride 'Em, Cowboys

Ranchers and enviros in nine Western states are teaming up to file suit today against the Defense Department to halt low-level military training flights that they say harm livestock, fish, and wildlife. The Air Force flies planes over more than 1 million square miles, most of it public land in the West, and some of […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]