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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 […]
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Fringe Benefits
The federal government will pay a fringe religious group $13 million for 9,300 acres of land surrounding Yellowstone National Park. The area will provide additional grazing grounds for herds of American bison from the park, and migration corridors for grizzly bears, elk, antelope, bighorn sheep, and other wildlife. Enviros had feared that the religious group’s […]
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Refined Tastes
Construction is slated to begin next year on a “bio-refinery” in California that will convert thousands of tons of orchard prunings, rice straw, and other agricultural wastes into ethanol, which could be used as a gasoline additive in place of MTBE. In other clean energy news, sales of geothermal heat pumps jumped 20 percent in […]
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Mediterranean Sea-ing Stars
The Mediterranean Sea is facing an ecological disaster if the nations along its shores don’t curb their polluting ways, according to a Greenpeace report released last Thursday. Greenpeace is pushing countries to ratify the Barcelona Convention, an agreement on protection of the sea, before the biannual Mediterranean Ministerial Meeting to be held this October. The […]
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Farmers in Sheep's Clothing
Two farmers and two counties in eastern North Carolina are suing the federal government, seeking to nullify endangered species rules that provided for the reintroduction of the red wolf into the area a dozen years ago. As the wolf population grows, farmers say the rules keep them from protecting their livestock against wolf attacks. The […]
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Green Berets
Greens in the French coalition government warned yesterday that they would quit the coalition if the cabinet proceeds with plans to replace aging nuclear plants with new reactors. The Greens regularly campaign for the elimination of nuclear energy, which provides 80 percent of France’s power, but this latest threat highlights their discontent with Socialist leadership. […]
