Latest Articles

Compassionate Conservation?

In the first of what the Bush administration hopes will be a series of public-private partnerships to create national wildlife refuges without using taxpayer dollars, the utility company Entergy is donating 600 acres of land along Louisiana’s Red River to the government. The Entergy donation could be the first parcel of a 50,000-acre Red River […]

Money Doesn’t Grow on Tree Cutting

Money talks. At least, that’s the hope of environmentalists in Texas, who are appealing to taxpayers’ economic self-interest in an effort to stop commercial logging in the state’s four national forests. After 15 years of failed efforts to stop the logging through legal action, the Sierra Club turned to a different tactic, commissioning and going […]

Up a Tree

When Julia Butterfly Hill did it, it was a novelty. Now, it seems, it’s becoming a trend: young people taking to the trees to fend off logging companies. From Santa Cruz, Calif., to the Pacific Northwest, dozens of tree-sitters are living in the canopy to protect old-growth forests from the axe — so many that […]

And other words from readers

  Re: Coolant Dear Editor: I am a big fan of Ask Umbra. I used to do a column like this for USA Today, and yours is much more interesting than mine was. (Of course, I was handicapped by being limited to one-syllable words.) But Umbra goofed a couple times in her first answer in […]

Knowing the Cost of Every Thin and the Value of Nothing

The plan unveiled by President Bush earlier this week to make it easier to thin forests in the name of fire prevention has touched off a firestorm of its own, enraging environmentalists who see it as a giveaway for the timber industry and a backdoor out of environmental protection measures. Moreover, environmentalists see the Bush […]

Tumucumaque and Stomachache

There’s good news and bad news from the Amazon. Good news first: The Brazilian government has announced the creation of the world’s largest tropical forest reserve — the 9,562,770-acre Tumucumaque National Park, in the northern Amazonian state of Amapa. The bad news is that even such a large park seems like a Band-Aid effort for […]

Chinese Checkmate

In a move that could further isolate the United States on environmental issues, China announced yesterday that its State Council is on the verge of approving the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. The Chinese parliament would also need to ratify the treaty, but that body generally rubber-stamps decisions made by the State Council, where the […]

A Ticket to Not Ride

Tree-huggers, time-wasters, socialists, elitists, leftists, losers, homosexuals, Democrats — those are just a few of the more printable epithets that have been directed at the members of Earth on Empty, an environmental organization dedicated to improving air quality and reversing global warming. What has Earth on Empty done to earn such malice? It has launched […]

Hitting the Sack

In Ireland, the question “paper or plastic?” has become all but obsolete after the introduction last March of a tax on supermarket bags. Irish Environment Minister Martin Cullen announced this week that the tax has been highly successful, with the amount of plastic bags provided by grocery stores dropping 90 percent after the tax was […]

Is biodiesel the fuel of the future?

The Granola Ayatollah of Canola, aka Charris Ford, slides behind the wheel of his 1980 International Scout truck and turns the key. The truck burbles to life and off we go, cruising down the gravel roads that divide the aspen groves of southwestern Colorado’s Horsefly Mesa. It would be just a standard evening joyride, except […]