Latest Articles

Make your Thanksgiving and holiday meals go easy on the Earth

Sharpen your knives and hone your appetite — it’s that time of year again. Every fall, we stuff ourselves at Thanksgiving, take a quick break, then fill up again over the winter holidays, sometimes gorging at event after event to accommodate multiple sets of family and friends. But environmentalists, beware: The industry set up to […]

Forest Gumption

Scientists Call for Protection of Half of B.C. Rainforest Almost half of British Columbia’s coastal rainforest must be protected in order to maintain the health of its ecosystem, according to a team of independent scientists studying the 42,471-square-mile swath of forest on Canada’s western coast. The surprise advice to preserve between 44 and 50 percent […]

Crash Test Dummies

Energy Dept. Reviews Hazards Posed by Military Aircraft at Yucca Mtn. Increased military flights over Nellis Air Force Range and the Nevada Test Site will require revising hazard calculations about the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, the U.S. Department of Energy announced yesterday. Earlier this week, a military jet crashed on the Nellis range, […]

Do I Smell Bacon?

Congress Refuses to Interfere with California Clean-Air Regulations One trouble with pork-barrel politics: Sometimes your colleagues decide you’re acting like a pig. That may be what happened yesterday, when congressional negotiators tossed out Sen. Kit Bond’s (R-Mo.) spending-bill amendment, which would have prevented California from requiring catalytic converters on small engines, such as those found […]

Bush administration floats new plan that would gut wetland protections

It’s close to a nightmare scenario and at the very least it’s a very bad dream.” That’s how Jim Murphy, wetlands and water resources counsel at the National Wildlife Federation*, characterized a draft-stage rewrite of a Clean Water Act rule, which was leaked to The Los Angeles Times by a top government official earlier this […]

Warm Planet, Cold Shoulder

Bush Met in London by Environmental Protestors Protesting the U.S. government’s refusal to address the problem of global warming, environmental demonstrators gave President Bush a less-than-warm welcome yesterday as he arrived in London for a state visit. Up to 600 people noisily marched to the U.S. embassy to criticize Bush’s rejection of the Kyoto Protocol […]

Hasta La Vista, Regulations

Schwarzenegger Puts a Hold on Pending Environmental Regulations California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) was in office only a few hours before throwing a wrench into a number of environmental-protection efforts by placing a hold on all pending state regulations in order to review their potential impact on the state’s business climate. Affected rules include building […]

Fishing for Answers

Bush Administration Admits Role in Klamath Fish Die-Off The Bush administration has finally admitted to its role in last year’s die-off of more than 34,000 chinook and coho salmon in the Klamath River basin, which straddles the Oregon-California border: The massive fish kill was caused at least in part by the government’s diversion of water […]

The Wrath of Grapes

Ban on Biotech Crops Makes the Ballot in a California County Voters in Northern California’s Mendocino County will be the first in the nation with a chance to rebuff growers of genetically modified (GM) crops. Local anti-biotechnology activists gathered enough signatures to secure a spot on the March ballot for an initiative that would ban […]

Kathryn Schulz reviews Monster of God by David Quammen

What this world needs," opined the nature writer David Quammen in a 1984 column for Outside magazine, "is a good vicious 60-foot-long Amazon snake." He was kidding, thankfully; the rest of the column goes on to describe the human tendency to massively exaggerate the size of anacondas in the Amazon. Now, though, 19 years later, Quammen has written Monster of God, a book arguing that precisely what the world does need is very large, very predatory animals.