Latest Articles

Road to Nowhere

To the dismay of environmentalists, state and local officials in Utah will be able to claim the rights to thousands of miles of dirt roads on federal lands, under the terms of an agreement announced yesterday by Interior Secretary Gale Norton and Utah Gov. Mark Leavitt (R). Leavitt and Norton said the deal would prevent […]

Diesel Mania

Move over disco music: Another ’70s trend is making a comeback — diesel fuel. During the oil embargo of 1973, the U.S. enjoyed a brief love affair with diesel because it gets better mileage than gasoline. However, its dirty emissions soon put a damper on the romance. Now, though, a cleaner-burning form of diesel is […]

Rewriting the book on economics

Joshua Farley, a researcher at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, didn’t get into economics to make money. In fact, he tells me, he almost quit the academy altogether to go back to carpentry — a far more lucrative career prospect. “When I graduated, there were virtually no jobs in ecological economics. I applied to […]

Hit the Bottle

Ever the leader on environmental issues, California is moving ahead with a bill that would give it the nation’s most stringent bottled-water quality standards. Under the terms of the bill, bottled-water companies would have to include greater detail about contaminants on bottle labels, issue water-quality reports much like those produced by public water agencies, and, […]

Pampas and Circumstances

The massive economic crisis in Argentina has had an unexpected silver lining for the environment: It has led to a surge in the use of compressed natural gas (CNG) in cars, a cleaner fuel than either diesel or gasoline. Argentina is home to the third-largest natural-gas reserves in Latin America and the world’s largest fleet […]

Gold Diggers

The California gold rush of 1849 sent would-be miners rushing to the hills and streams of the Sierra Nevada. But some of them never made it that far, stopping instead to mine gold from Death Valley. Now, a proposal by the Colorado-based Canyon Resources to expand its operations by opening a second open-pit gold mine […]

Alcoa-holics

Two of the nation’s corporate giants, Alcoa and Archer Daniels Midland, have agreed to settle charges of violating the New Source Review rules of the federal Clean Air Act by making upgrades ballparked at some $700 million, according to people familiar with the settlements. Alcoa, the world’s largest producer of aluminum, has 12 months to […]

Ecological economist Robert Costanza puts a price tag on nature

The idea of slapping a dollar value on to an alpine meadow or the dappled green shade of a forest strikes a chill into the very bones of most environmentalists. Like love, nature is the kind of thing that money just can’t buy. Or is it? A small but growing chorus of ecological economists are […]

A three-part series profiling ecological economists

In 1776, the year the Scottish economist Adam Smith invented free-market economics with his book The Wealth of Nations, the total population of the globe was less than 700 million people. The coal-hauling locomotives and steamships that were to drive the Industrial Revolution were still 30 years off. Free-market economic theory grew and flourished in […]

Wheat in the World?

South Dakota is home to the largest unbroken stretch of prime waterfowl nesting habitat in the nation — but if farmland continues to gobble up natural areas, the state’s wildlife, landscape, and water quality could all suffer. South Dakota has seen almost 1.1 million acres of rangeland and pasture disappear in the last 20 years, […]