Latest Articles

Into Thin Air, and Thick Refuse

In the 50 years since Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary first scaled Mt. Everest, so much refuse piled up on the world’s highest mountain that some took to calling it the world’s highest garbage dump. By the early 1990s, an estimated 50 tons of metal, glass, and plastic, including many hundreds of abandoned oxygen […]

Data Dumping

Think the U.S. EPA is keeping tabs on water pollution around the country? Think again. The agency’s computer system for tracking and controlling water pollution is outmoded, riddled with bad data, and lacks information on thousands of sources of serious pollution, according to a report released last week by the EPA’s inspector general. Efforts to […]

Double Trouble

The number of animal species in Brazil known to be endangered has nearly doubled since 1989, reaching 398, according to a three-year study conducted by the Brazilian government and released last week. Tropical wolves, rare parrots, and exotic frogs and turtles are among the many threatened creatures. The comprehensive survey of animal and plant life […]

Self-Destructive Behavior

It sounds like a bad movie. Wait, it IS a bad movie. A bad DVD, to be precise — at least from an environmental standpoint. A division of Walt Disney this August will begin selling DVDs that self-destruct after 48 hours, dubbed EZ-Ds. After an EZ-D’s plastic packaging is opened and it’s exposed to oxygen, […]

Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut …

Macadamia-nut shells will soon be the source of electricity for more than 1,200 Australian homes. Construction began this week on a biomass cogeneration plant in the northern Australian state of Queensland that will produce renewable energy by burning more than 5,000 tons of shells generated by the nation’s native macadamia nut industry. “This project … […]

Famous Last Birds

The population of California condors is soaring back to relatively healthy numbers. Biologists have counted 222 of the birds, a tenfold increase from 1982, when the species hit its nadir with just 22 condors remaining. “This is the greatest the population has been probably since the 1950s,” said Bruce Palmer, coordinator of the California condor […]

The Anti-Pepsi Generation

Leaders of two rural communities in Kerala, a state in southwestern India, are going head-to-head with Coca-Cola and Pepsi, accusing the companies’ local bottling plants of depleting groundwater and triggering shortages. One village government revoked the water-use permit of a Pepsi plant last week, and another village denied a license renewal to a Coke plant […]

Wisconsin anglers band together to protect an elusive fish

Every winter, on the outskirts of Appleton, Wis., the world’s strangest subdivision suddenly appears. Thousands of shacks, each about the size of a two-hole outhouse, proliferate on the frozen expanse of Lake Winnebago. Dick Koerner in his shack on Lake Winnebago. Photo: Erik Ness. Early in the morning on Feb. 8, Dick Koerner jockeyed his […]

Raising the Zanzibar

The island of Zanzibar, located just off the coast of Tanzania, is set to get its first national park. The island, which is independently governed, plans to convert the 12,355-acre Jozani Forest Reserve into a national park to promote better conservation, management, and natural-resource use, according to Mussa Ame Silima, Zanzibar’s minister of agriculture, natural […]

Crop Dustup

Speaking before the United States Coast Guard Academy yesterday, President Bush accused the European Union of undermining efforts to end widespread hunger in Africa by banning genetically modified (GM) food. Bush praised “high-yield bio-crops” as key to increasing productivity and ameliorating hunger in developing nations, and claimed the E.U. ban was based on “unfounded, unscientific […]