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Fishful Thinking
Salmon on the Snake River could be saved without breaching dams, according to a draft federal report to be released today, but agencies and citizens in the Northwest would need to make some drastic and potentially painful changes. Stringent controls on fishing, development, logging, and grazing would be needed throughout the Columbia Basin to save […]
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Grime and No Punishment
Enforcement of the nation’s environmental laws under the Clinton administration has often been haphazard and lax, and many major polluters have been able to operate with little fear of punishment, according to a Boston Globe analysis of seven years of records. Larger companies, particularly those with political muscle, are often treated differently than smaller businesses, […]
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Grumping About Dumping
New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer (D) filed suit yesterday against General Electric for the company’s three decades of dumping PCBs into the Hudson River. The state’s suit does not address the environmental or health effects of GE’s pollution, which are the subject of an ongoing EPA inquiry, but rather pursues monetary damages against the […]
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Chris Baines, British freelance enviro
Chris Baines is a “freelance environmentalist” who lives in Wolverhampton, U.K., two hours north of London by train. He spends most of his time forging unholy alliances between nonprofit organizations, the corporate sector, the government, and local communities. He is planning a major Earth Day launch in the U.K. in 2000. Monday, 15 Nov 1999 […]
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Ugh of War
Federal agencies and the military have contaminated more than 60,000 sites across the U.S. and cleanup costs for the worst sites are expected to rise above $300 billion, dwarfing the cost of cleaning up contamination from private companies and making the U.S. government the nation’s worst polluter. Outside American borders, the U.S. military has contaminated […]
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Climate Change Campaign to Change Campaign Climate
The Sierra Club launched a campaign last week to make climate change a serious issue in the 2000 presidential race and to prod Pres. Clinton and other politicians to take action to address the problem. Kicking things off in New Hampshire, the site of the nation’s first primary, the group told residents that climate change […]
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Gore to Mine Environmental Vote
Promising to “put protection of the environment at the center of my presidency,” Vice Pres. Al Gore said yesterday that he would spend $2 billion over 10 years to combat urban sprawl and preserve open space if he were elected president. Gore, speaking at a fundraiser in Malibu, Calif., proposed offering $1 billion in tax […]
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Over Their Dead Bodies
Sometime this year, the dead bodies of three men who worked at a government uranium plant in Paducah, Ky., will be exhumed and tested for radiation from such deadly elements as plutonium and neptunium. The tests are part of a $10 billion class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of workers at the plant, which alleges that […]
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A Bunch of Bull
A group of rural Nevadans crusading against federal protection for the bull trout compared their rebellion to the Boston Tea Party during a congressional field hearing held on Saturday in Elko, Nev. The Nevadans, backed by Rep. Jim Gibbons (R-Nev.) and Rep. Helen Chenoweth-Hage (R-Idaho), want to rebuild a road that was washed out in […]
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This Gives "School Board" a New Meaning
A bill passed by the House this month that is intended to assure adequate funding for rural school districts may encourage more logging on public lands, say opponents. Under current law, communities near national forests get money for schools from federal timber sales in surrounding areas, and as timber cutting has declined in recent years, […]
