Latest Articles
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A Hard Act to Follow
Report Finds Endangered Species Act Failing Over the first two decades the U.S. Endangered Species Act was in effect, from 1973 to 1994, 114 species went extinct or missing, “sacrificed to bureaucratic inertia, political meddling, and lack of leadership,” said Kieran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity, which released a report on the ESA […]
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All Wet
Bush Wetlands Initiative Less Ambitious Than It Appears Attempting to neutralize John Kerry’s criticisms of his environmental record, President Bush traveled on Earth Day to Maine, a crucial swing state, and announced a wetlands initiative that aims to restore or protect some 3 million acres of wetlands over the next five years. Enviros, though, knocked […]
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Libia Grueso advocates for Afro-Colombians and their land
The Pacific Coast of Colombia, a narrow slice of jungle between the Andes and the ocean, is rich with plant and animal life. It’s also home to about a third of Colombia’s 10.6 million Afro-Colombians, descendants of black slaves emancipated in the mid-1800s. In recent years, this isolated area has been hit hard by logging, […]
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Happy Earth Day! Anybody Got a Life Vest?
U.K. Report Warns of Rising Flood Dangers and Costs The U.K. government marked Earth Day with characteristic British cheer, releasing a report warning that much of the country is going to experience flooding in coming decades. According to an expert government panel, the cost of physical and psychological damage from floods in the U.K. is […]
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Earth to Public: Come In, Public …
Earth Day Prompts Flurry of Electoral Rhetoric; Public Yawns Earth Day during a big election year inevitably prompts a flurry of earnest talk about the environment and which candidate is better for it, and today is no exception. President Bush touted his love of wetlands in Maine; John Kerry blasted Bush’s environmental record in Houston, […]
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Action Heroes
How You Can Make a Difference for the Planet With today’s environmental problems so large, abstract, and intractable — see warming, global — you’re probably wondering what you, one individual, can do on Earth Day to help. (If you’re one of the people surveyed by Gallup — see above — perhaps you don’t care, but […]
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Join the Club
Sierra Club Members Reject Immigration-Focused Candidates A record number of Sierra Club members voted in the group’s just-concluded board election and decisively rejected a controversial slate of candidates who had called for curbs on immigration as part of a population-control strategy. With nearly 23 percent of the club’s 757,000 members voting, candidates backed by the […]
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Demetrio do Amaral de Carvalho champions East Timor’s environment
De Carvalho. Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize. East Timor is the world’s newest country. Once a Portuguese colony, the tiny Southeast Asian nation covers half of a 300-mile-long coral island. When Portugal withdrew from the island in the mid-1970s, East Timor became a disputed territory, and for decades it was devastated by civil war and Indonesian […]
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Study finds mandatory caps work better than voluntary programs to limit pollution
Smokestacking the deck? Photo: USGS. This just in, from the Department of Near-Tautologies: Mandatory emissions caps rein in power-plant pollution more effectively than voluntary programs. That’s the conclusion being drawn from a report on the environmental records of the 100 largest electricity companies in the U.S., released last week by an alliance of bottom-liners and […]
