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Omission Accomplished

Environment Invisible at GOP Convention Attendees at the Republican National Convention, which wrapped up last night, would have been hard-pressed to discern the party’s positions on environmental issues. Other than a video touting the Bush administration’s efforts to avert wildfires in national forests (by, um, logging), green themes were markedly absent from the gathering. “I […]

Take a Walk on the Wild Side

The Wilderness Act Turns 40 Today marks the 40th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and signed by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Some 9 million acres were designated wilderness upon passage; 106 million acres are protected under the act today. Jimmy Carter signed the most land into wilderness, with 66.3 million […]

Pebbles: Bam, Bam!

China Gears Up to Build New, Smaller Nuke Plants China’s economy is expanding faster than Bruce Banner with road rage, straining against the limits of its current capacity for creating or importing energy — and pumping out some of the world’s worst air pollution. The plan? Go nuclear. This year China announced its intention to […]

If We Weren’t Already Fireproof, This Would Burn Us Up

Flame Retardants Found in Many Grocery-Store Foods A new study of grocery items like fish, meat, and dairy products revealed that virtually all of them contain detectable levels of PBDEs, human-made chemical fire retardants used in carpeting, electronics, and furniture that may or may not cause cancer. (We’ll get to the “may or may not” […]

Too Many Cooks Oil the Broth

ChevronTexaco Heavily Influenced California Restructuring California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s (R) recently announced plan to comprehensively reorganize state government brought grumbles from some enviros, who were piqued by the proposed consolidation of various boards and commissions from which many of the state’s groundbreaking environmental initiatives have emerged. This latest news isn’t going to mollify them. The […]

24 Hour Party People

Energy Industry Funnels Millions into Unregulated Convention Parties The energy industry is treating Republicans to a gay old time in New York City this week, hosting a plethora of parties for favored politicians and others attending the GOP convention: a ball, a concert, a trap shoot, a honky-tonk salute, even a soiree with scantily clad […]

The Windshield Beneath My Wings

Splatometers Reveal Possible Insect Decline in U.K. Many bird populations in the U.K. have declined precipitously in recent years — for instance, house sparrows have dropped by 65 percent since 1973 — and some scientists suspect that a cause is a possible corresponding decline in the insect populations upon which the birds depend. To test […]

Bush admin move may keep Kerry and other candidates from stumping on federal property

John Kerry at the Grand Canyon. Photo: Kerry-Edwards 2004, Inc. from Sharon Farmer. The Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, NASA headquarters, and the Washington Monument are among the many federal properties that may be off-limits to presidential and congressional candidates for campaign photo ops this election season, thanks to a guidance recently released by the […]

Losing Our Marbleds

Bush Team Aims to Revoke Protections from Threatened Seabird The Bush administration took a big step yesterday toward removing the marbled murrelet, a Northwest seabird, from the list of threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, a move enviros say will lead to further logging of old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. The ruling from […]

He Said, She Said — Except He’s Right

Study Shows Systematic Deficiency in Climate-Change Reporting An analysis of climate-change coverage in four major U.S. newspapers from 1988 to 2002 confirms what many enviros have long charged: Media coverage of global warming is woefully deficient. A growing chorus of media critics says that the journalistic convention of “balance,” which dictates that in order to […]