Latest Articles

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 […]

Montreal Expose

The Montreal Protocol, the international treaty to protect the ozone layer, has been hailed as the most effective environmental agreement ever signed. Now, though, it’s efficacy could be jeopardized, because the Bush administration is calling for some exemptions to a part of the treaty that calls for a global ban on the pesticide methyl bromide […]

Haden Go Seek

In a blow to environmentalists, a federal appeals court has overturned a ruling preventing the U.S. government from issuing permits to mountaintop-mining operations. The operations access coal seams by shearing off huge slabs of mountains; the increasingly common process has resulted in tons of rock and dirt being dumped into valleys and streams. Last year, […]

Where Raindrops Fall Like Lemon Drops

Lakes and streams in New England have been slow to recover from the ill effects of acid rain, according to a report released yesterday by the U.S. EPA. The regional reduction in acid rain lagged 10 percent behind the national rate of 40 percent in the 1990s; more worrisome, the number of “acidic systems” in […]