Latest Articles

Don’t Cry, Wolf

The gray wolf, once nearly wiped out in the Lower 48 states, is flourishing in the northern Rocky Mountains thanks to a federal recovery effort that got underway in 1995 with the reintroduction of 14 Canadian wolves into Yellowstone National Park. Now there are nearly 700 wolves in 41 packs in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, […]

Refuge-nix

Six GOP senators are throwing a wrench in the Bush administration’s plan to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil drilling. The six — Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, John McCain of Arizona, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois, and Mike DeWine of Ohio — announced last […]

Bill Clinton Gathers No Moss

Former President Bill Clinton will take to the stage with the Rolling Stones this Thursday at an L.A. concert aimed at raising awareness about the looming problem of climate change. Clinton won’t be playing the sax, but he will be blowing his metaphorical horn in a speech about the need to tackle global warming, says […]

Blood Sugar Sex Toxic

Americans have lower levels of lead in their bodies than they did a decade ago, but there’s plenty of contamination from other toxic chemicals to worry about. In the broadest study of its kind, conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers tested blood and urine samples from more than 2,000 Americans, […]

L.A. Sob Story

Los Angeles gets plenty of sunshine, but the city government has dropped the ball on boosting solar power and other clean-energy sources. Almost four years after the launch of a $40 million initiative meant to shift the city toward renewable power sources, the L.A. Department of Power and Water has increased the amount of clean […]

An INS project threatens Southern California lands

On a sunny afternoon in Southern California, a Border Patrol agent watched as a man climbed the metal fence that divides the beach between the U.S. and Mexico. When the man dropped onto U.S. sand, the agent yelled, and the man’s friends hauled him back over to the other side of the fence. The fence […]

The Bye Sierras

The management of California’s public forests will change radically if U.S. Forest Service Regional Forester Jack Blackwell gets his way. This week, Blackwell proposed allowing timber companies to cut more medium-sized trees from 11 million acres of forestlands in the Sierra Nevadas. The Sierras were heavily logged throughout the 1980s, destroying crucial habitat for species. […]

Mass-ive Attack

Massachusetts, Maine, and Connecticut will sue the U.S. EPA for violating clean air laws and imperiling the health of citizens by failing to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, the states’ attorneys general announced yesterday. In a first-of-its-kind lawsuit, the attorneys general will argue that CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels should be regulated under the Clean […]

Taking a Smaller Bite Out of Grime

Polluting industries are getting off easy under the Bush administration, according to U.S. EPA data released yesterday by Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.). In the two years since President Bush took office, civil penalties for breaking environmental laws dropped by almost 50 percent, to $55 million, while criminal penalties dropped by more than one-third, to $62 […]

Sweet Home, Alabama

A federal appeals court has ruled that Alabama is failing to adequately enforce water-pollution laws, thereby paving the way for citizens of the state to sue under the national Clean Water Act. Under the terms of that act, citizens may go to court to enforce the law only if the state has failed to prosecute […]