Latest Articles

Faster, Pussycat! Krill! Krill!

Food web unraveling in Antarctic, thanks to global warming Krill, the shrimp-like crustaceans at the center of the Antarctic food chain, are rapidly disappearing, and scientists suspect global warming may be the culprit. In some key ocean regions, krill have declined by more than 80 percent in the last 25 years, according to a study […]

Windbalkers

Wind farms ignite controversy in Scotland and California A proposal to build the world’s biggest on-shore wind farm on Scotland’s rugged Isle of Lewis is triggering a pitched battle. Lewis Wind Power, a joint venture between British Energy and construction group AMEC, claims the project would create hundreds of jobs and generate enough electricity to […]

Mad Props, Yo

California approves measure to block citizen lawsuits against businesses By a significant margin, California voters on Tuesday approved Proposition 64, which curtails the right of private citizens and public-interest groups to bring legal action against companies under the state’s Unfair Business Competition Law — a move that could hamper efforts to protect the state’s environment. […]

Scrap Happy

San Francisco food-composting program is a hit In 1996, a company called Norcal Waste found that 19 percent of landfill matter in San Francisco consisted of discarded food scraps — and it sensed a market opportunity. Now the city boasts a popular and growing composting program, with discarded food collected and processed into organically certified […]

Cya-nara

State rejects attempt to repeal cyanide mining ban Voters in Montana decisively rejected Initiative 147, which would have repealed the state’s 1998 ban on open-pit cyanide leach mining, a highly destructive and polluting gold-mining technique that extracts small amounts of gold and silver diffused through large amounts of rock. Some 98 percent of the money […]

Sorry, No Vacancy

Washington initiative blocks further nuke-waste dumping at Hanford By a more than a 2-to-1 margin, Washington state voters passed Initiative 297, which blocks the U.S. Department of Energy from sending more nuclear waste to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in the southern part of the state until current waste at the former nuclear-weapons facility is fully […]

Colorado Rocky Mountain High

Colorado passes renewable-energy initiative Colorado voters approved Amendment 37 yesterday, marking the first statewide renewable-energy portfolio standard in the U.S. to come directly from a popular vote rather than through the legislature. The state’s largest utilities will now be required to generate 3 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2007, and 10 percent […]

Irrelevance: The New Relevance

How did the environment play in the election? Funny you should ask … Remember all that earnest debate about whether environmental issues would play a significant role in the presidential election? Well, as it turns out … not so much. And in the Senate races we’d been keeping an eye on, one would also be […]

Moral values

Perhaps the most galling thing about last night's catastrophe was the news that higher turnout ultimately benefited the right, and what drove the turnout, the top issue for a majority of Bush voters polled, was "moral values."

In this context, "moral values" is code for "being freaked out about gay people getting married," though most in the media don't have the balls to say it.  Nearly a dozen states had initiatives banning gay marriage on the ballot, and the social conservatives turned out in force.

In our current political world, "moral values" has come to mean homosexuality, abortion, and professions of religious faith.  In other words, when we talk about morality we talk almost exclusively about private behavior.  How did this happen?

Environmental leaders and thinkers on what comes next

What do we do now? That’s the question one early riser asked Grist in a letter to the editor right after the election results rolled in. Faced with another four years of the Bush administration — an administration that has been roundly denounced as the most environmentally destructive in the history of the nation — […]