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Wild Thing, I Think I Lost You

In a major blow to wilderness advocates in Utah and around the country, the Bush administration on Friday announced its intention to suspend new wilderness reviews of federal lands in the West and to remove protections from nearly 3 million acres in Utah that had been under consideration for wilderness status. The Interior Department, in […]

Battle Dreary

Kashmir, once renowned for its lush landscape and abundant wildlife, has for decades served as a battle zone between India and Pakistan, and all the turmoil has taken a heavy toll on the region’s environment as well as its people. “Cross-border bombardment is damaging the forests and wildlife beyond imagination,” said Farooq A. Niazi, head […]

Crop Rotation

Iowa may soon play host to the world’s largest wind farm, after Gov. Tom Vilsack (D) on Friday signed a measure that removes regulatory hurdles to clear the way for the project. MidAmerican Energy Co. expects to start construction in September of a 200-turbine facility in northern Iowa that would pump out 310 megawatts of […]

Brand New Mexico

And in very good news for enviros in New Mexico, Gov. Bill Richardson signed into law yesterday a measure designed to increase the amount of open space in the state. The Land Conservation Incentives Act will allow taxpayers — whether individuals or corporations — to deduct from state taxes half of the value of any […]

Haunted House

The U.S. House of Representatives gave environmentalists plenty of headaches yesterday. First, House members backed oil drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, as part of broad legislation designed to increase domestic energy production and provide tax incentives to the oil and power industries. Some see the move as beating a dead horse, since the […]

Earth Island of the Blue Dolphin

In better news for enviros, a federal judge has upheld the existing definition of “dolphin-safe” tuna, thwarting an effort by the Bush administration to relax the term to include tuna caught by methods that can harm marine mammals. U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson noted in his ruling yesterday that the administration’s efforts to change the […]

Bangladesh Slowly

Life could get even worse in already disaster-prone Bangladesh if global warming continues unchecked, scientists say. Flooding, which already affects about one-fifth of the country, could increase by 40 percent as heavier rainfall triggered by climate change swamps riverbanks, according to a report in the current issue of New Scientist. Low-lying Bangladesh sits at the […]

Drinking Too Much Damages Your River

The conservation organization American Rivers has released its annual ranking of the 10 most endangered rivers in the nation, and Mississippi’s Big Sunflower has the dubious distinction of topping the list. The waterways on the list are not necessarily the most polluted in the U.S; rather, they face the gravest risks of water shortages and […]

The economic heresy of Herman Daly

If economics is a religion, the World Bank is perhaps its grandest church. For the last half century, the venerable institution at 1818 H Street in Washington, D.C., has been dispatching its missionaries around the globe, spreading the theology of the free market to the heathens. And if economics is a religion, Herman Daly is […]

We’ll Si

Once upon a time, the Dominican Republic’s Parque Nacional del Este was the poster child for Parks in Peril, a joint program of the Nature Conservancy and the U.S. Agency for International Development to support land-preservation efforts in the Caribbean and Latin America. Today, though, the park has become a symbol of the difficulties such […]