Latest Articles
-
Von Hernandez sparked a mass movement to keep trash incinerators out of the Philippines
The industrialized world is fond of exporting its problems: its toxic waste, its low-paying jobs, its most incorrigible mining and logging companies. Von Hernandez, the coordinator of Greenpeace International’s Toxics Campaign in Asia, says “dirty technology” — especially large-scale waste incineration — is also being shipped away to developing countries. On April 14, Hernandez was […]
-
Fishy Business
For the second time this year, congressional Republicans have used behind-the-scenes trickery to weaken organic-labeling standards. Powerful Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, tacked a measure onto the recently passed $79 million war-spending bill that directs the U.S. Department of Agriculture to come up with a plan for certifying and labeling […]
-
Mining Gets the Shaft
The pay dirt has run out for gold miners in California. Last week the state mining board okayed the nation’s toughest regulations on open-pit metallic mining, requiring companies to refill mining pits and flatten waste piles in order to restore the landscape to at least some semblance of its pre-mining state. The industry complains that […]
-
Earth Angelina
Actress Angelina Jolie, who played a tough-chick adventurer in the movie “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” is taking on a new role: eco-crusader. She has pledged to donate at least $1.3 million over the next few years to establish a wildlife sanctuary in northwest Cambodia, a region that until five years ago was controlled by remnants […]
-
Aroma, but No Therapy
You don’t know smelly until you’ve been in the vicinity of a massive factory farm, or, as they say in the biz, a “concentrated animal-feeding operation.” State and local air-quality officials fear that the stench and, more importantly, the accompanying air pollution from such facilities won’t get under control anytime soon because the U.S. EPA […]
-
West Virginia activist Julia Bonds takes on mountaintop-removal mining
The ancient mountains of Appalachia are corrugated with deep, narrow valleys, some of them no wider than a football field. Coal-mining families, who have lived in these valleys for generations, are now being driven out of their homes by the latest innovation of the very industry that has sustained them for so many years. That […]
-
Nigerian activist Odigha Odigha fights to halt illegal logging
In southeastern Nigeria, private logging companies are felling the country’s last remaining rainforests. These hardwood forests shelter the highest diversity of primates in the world and some 20 percent of the planet’s butterfly species. Odigha Odigha. Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize. Odigha Odigha grew up in and around these forests, in the Ijagham community of Cross […]
-
Interviews with the 2003 winners of environmentalism’s greatest honor
These are dark times for grassroots activists. Just weeks ago, President Bush dismissed millions of anti-war protesters as little more than a “focus group” — a group whose opinions he was determined to ignore, and did. But the indifference of the world’s sole superpower is only one of the obstacles facing activists. Today’s problems are […]
-
Joel Sisolak, Friends of the Cedar River Watershed
Joel Sisolak is executive director of Friends of the Cedar River Watershed in Seattle, Wash. Monday, 14 Apr 2003 SEATTLE, Wash. This past weekend was relatively quiet. I had time to avoid my spring cleaning, relax with a book, and play ultimate Frisbee. I did make one trip out to North Bend, Wash., to speak […]
