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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 […]

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 […]