Latest Articles

Nominate one for a prize

Want to help a small conservation organization? Know an exceptional individual making a difference on the ground? Nominate them for one of the annual Whitley Awards, a UK-based award given by the Whitley Fund for Nature that goes to six conservationists making a difference, most often in the developing world. The prizes range from $40,000-$80,000.

You can read short profiles of past winners here and get the application here.

Some of Washington’s government-owned forest areas aren’t friendly to hikers

Yes, those are bullet holes from an automatic weapon, and no, this picture was not taken in a war zone. I took it just a few days ago along the shore of an undeveloped lake located near Washington State's Tahuya forest. This now bullet-riddled outhouse had been placed beside the lake as a public service and is designed like a concrete bomb shelter specifically to take the abuse the public was going to dish out. Instead of providing inexpensive and easily replaced facilities, someone had decided to build an outhouse version of the Maginot line. I cannot imagine what it must have cost to put there.

Animal hows

OK, possibly the best part of this story about a proposed House bill requiring that pets be considered as part of storm evacuation plans is the response from Sara Spaulding of the American Humane Association. She said the legislation, put forth by reps from California, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, doesn't "have any real meat in it."

Seriously, that's sick.

Mountaineering teams organize to clean up the world’s highest mountain peaks

A few months ago, gutsy French test pilot Didier Delsalle landed a helicopter on top of Mount Everest in 75 mph hour winds -- no, not crashed -- quite obviously the highest landing place on earth. He was the first to successfully summit Everest by copter.

And just to make sure it wasn't a fluke, he did it twice.

The previous highest helicopter landing was some 9,035 feet lower, at about 20,000 feet, the record set in 1996 by Nepalese pilot Madan Khatri Chhetri while rescuing climbers. And that's one of the great things about this: the tangible -- though still amazingly dangerous -- possibility of being able to rescue mountaineers on some of the world's highest, harshest peaks.

Delsalle's feat also raises the prospect (and could significantly lower the cost) of cleaning up what many call the "world's highest garbage dump."

In recent years, international teams of eco-conscious mountaineers have organized enormously expensive expeditions to clean up some of Everest's over-50-year legacy of trash, augmenting infrequent government Sherpa-led garbage-retrieval expeditions.

But now another team aims to clean up, at the very least, parts of the Himalayas' 14 peaks above 8,000 meters (about 26,200 feet). This week it's off to the earth's 10th highest mountain, Mt. Annapurna. The high-altitude sanitation engineers also have plans in place to launch a cleanup of their own on Mt. Everest next spring.

If there was ever a job in the trash business I envied, it's this one.

Fear, Kitty Kitty Kitty

Humans struggle to live peacefully with beasties Large carnivores have made impressive comebacks in some parts of the U.S. Now the question is how humans can live with them in harmony. In Oregon, after cougars were hunted to near-extinction, voters banned the practice of hunting with radio-collared dogs. The state’s big-cat population has since jumped […]

Central Dark

New York City dims skyscraper lights to help save birds Love cities? Love birds? Wish the former would stop killing the latter? Audubon wants to help. Its “Lights Out New York” effort is encouraging Big Apple building owners to turn lights down or off above the 40th floor, from midnight to daylight, during spring and […]

Acquittin’ Time

Judge dismisses murder charges against Mexican peasant ecologist Mexican forest activist Felipe Arreaga was freed last week after 10 months in jail, acquitted by a judge on murder charges stemming from the 1998 death of rancher and landowner Bernardino Bautista’s son. Arreaga is a leader in the peasant-ecologist movement of Mexico’s Petatlan Sierra, which gained […]

The Weak in Review

New Orleans floodwalls should have stood up to Katrina’s storm surge Why did the floodwalls on Lake Pontchartrain fail to protect New Orleans? The official explanation from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been that the key 17th Street and London Avenue floodwalls were built to protect against a Category 3 hurricane — a […]

The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow

The defeat of Cali’s solar initiative isn’t the end of the fight California’s Million Solar Roofs initiative crashed and burned, thanks to a malodorous combination of parochial politics and interest-group stubbornness. But hope is not lost, says David Hochschild, director of policy at Vote Solar Initiative. The California Public Utilities Commission is authorized to implement […]

California’s Million Solar Roofs moving ahead, and setting pace for national climate action

The defeat in the California legislature of the bipartisan Million Solar Roofs bill earlier this month was a big blow, but the initiative -- and the broader spirit behind it -- are carrying on, says David Hochschild, director of policy at Vote Solar Initiative, a nonprofit working to bring solar energy into the mainstream. Here, Hochschild shares his take in an op-ed written for Grist: