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We're Not Out of the Woods Yet
Governments around the world are failing to protect forests, and drastic action must be taken to curb commercial logging, according to a new report produced by a coalition of major international environmental groups. Logging threatens wildlife, exacerbates climate change, and causes flooding, soil erosion, and fire, the report says. Even selective logging, it says, causes […]
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Orangu-Tangle
Two enviro groups are launching a major campaign today to halt illegal logging that is threatening endangered orangutans in Indonesian national parks. About 80 percent of the orangutans’ forest habitat has been destroyed in the last 20 years, and the animals’ numbers have been halved in the last decade to no more than 25,000, according […]
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A Project Worth Its Salt
Pressure from environmentalists has led a major company in Mexico to modify a planned salt-mining operation along the Baja California coast, the first time a company in Mexico has modified a project because of public input. But a number of enviro groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, are still protesting the salt works operation, […]
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Oldman River Doesn't Just Keep Rolling Along
NAFTA’s environmental watchdog, the Montreal-based Commission for Environmental Cooperation, has recommended that Canada be investigated to see whether the nation is adequately enforcing its environmental laws and protecting fish habitat. The recommendation stems from a 1996 complaint filed by the Alberta-based enviro group Friends of the Oldman River, which claimed that the Canadian government was […]
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What's Next, a Swarm of Locusts?
Survivors of Turkey’s massive earthquake last week now face the prospect of acid rain caused by pollution from a large oil refinery fire, according to Turkey’s health minister. A five-day blaze at the nation’s largest oil refinery, caused by the quake, spewed flames and dense smoke into the air until it was finally extinguished on […]
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Green and Pleasant Land?
The U.K. lags far behind many nations in the proportion of its land set aside for wildlife protection, according to a new report by Friends of the Earth U.K. Using World Conservation Union (IUCN) standards for protected nature areas, FoE compared the percentage of land set aside in the G8 industrialized nations and in certain […]
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Raul Alvarez, PODER and Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter
Raul Alvarez is transportation coordinator for People Organized in Defense of Earth and her Resources (PODER), an environmental justice group based in East Austin, Texas. He is also environmental justice director for the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter in Texas. Monday, 23 Aug 1999 AUSTIN, Texas I am happy to report that I had a […]
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No Frankenbeer in My Stein
Demand in Britain for organic products, including organic beer, is on the rise, spurred in part by consumer fears over the safety of genetically modified foods. Sales of organic foods in the U.K. have grown by nearly 30 percent in the last five years, and sales in the rest of Europe have grown by 14.5 […]
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Doing a Double Take
The timber wars are flaring up again after an announcement on Friday that the U.S. Forest Service plans to roughly double logging on some 2.5 million acres of national forest land in Northern California. The decision is the final step in carrying out a congressionally approved compromise logging plan that was forged by locals, known […]
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Oooo, Ahhh, Good News for Tribe
The U’wa Indian tribe in Colombia, which had threatened to commit mass suicide if oil exploration was conducted on its ancestral lands, has been granted a large new reservation in a region believed to have significant oil reserves. Occidental Petroleum was granted exploration rights in a 500,000-acre block in 1992, and more than half of […]
