Latest Articles
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William Faries, environmental journalist
Thanks to a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, William Faries is currently working as an environmental journalist for the Jakarta, Indonesia-based Tempo magazine. This week, he is reporting from Bali, site of the final preparatory meeting for the World Summit on Sustainable Development, to be held in South Africa this August. Tuesday, 28 May […]
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TRI a Little Tenderness
The amount of toxic chemicals released into the environment dropped 8 percent in 2000, continuing a decade-long trend of declining industrial pollution, according to a report released yesterday by the U.S. EPA. The Toxics Release Inventory compiles data from more than 23,000 factories, refineries, hard-rock mines, power plants, and chemical manufacturers, which together reported pumping […]
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Taipei Personalities
More than 200 former employees of an RCA television and semiconductor plant in northern Taiwan have died of cancer and at least 1,000 others are suffering from the disease, in what industry watchdogs are calling the worst cancer cluster in the history of high-tech. A group of former plant workers arrived in Silicon Valley yesterday […]
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Graceless Slick
Massive ships spilling sheets of oil across the sea might make for dramatic photo ops — yet the vast majority of oil pollution in North America comes not from leaking oil rigs or troubled tankers, but rather from thousands of small, diverse sources, most of them on the land, according to a new report by […]
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Blair Switch Project
In what some observers saw as a thinly-veiled attack on environmentalists and animal-rights activists, British Prime Minister Tony Blair warned that his nation risked being overtaken by other countries if it let public sentiment and vocal protesters stand in the way of scientific progress. Speaking yesterday to the Royal Society in London, Blair said Great […]
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Snoop Dog
Almost everyone’s been embarrassed at one time or another by an over-eager dog sniffing in the wrong places. Now car owners have to worry about the “smog dog,” designed to “sniff” tailpipes to detect air pollution. Formally called the AccuScan Remote Vehicle Emissions Testing System, the smog dog analyzes exhaust from cars as they pass […]
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Michelle Nijhuis reviews Water Wars by Vandana Shiva
I can see the source of the world's water problems from my office window. It's called the Fire Mountain Canal, and it winds its way past peach and apple orchards, through green horse pastures, and around the edge of the dry, juniper-covered mesa where I live. This fat, smooth snake of water seems like a generous thing; after all, it supports the work of local Colorado farmers, who stuff us with cherries, chilies, meat, and other goodies each year. But the canal cheats the river itself, sucking out so much water that the local swimming season ends in June. Thousands of other diversions, big and small, prey on other tributaries in our watershed, eventually shrinking the main stem of the Colorado River down to a ghost of itself.
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Give It to Me, Baby
As you are no doubt aware, Grist in the midst of its first-ever fundraising drive. Here’s the story: Grist consists of precisely four paid staff members. We send out information by email at no charge to 60,000 people a day, and we post top-notch environmental news, commentary, and features on our website. Plus we point […]
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Unkempt
We’re not sure whose job it is to go through all the thousands of pages of documents related to Vice President Dick Cheney’s formerly secretive energy task force, but they sure are having a grand old time. This week, the needle in the haystack was a memo sent to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham by Jane […]
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Stranger in a Familiar Land
If politics makes for strange bedfellows, sometimes it makes for strange enemies as well: Tensions are brewing between environmentalists and animal-rights activists over federal efforts to establish the health effects of industrial chemicals and pesticides by testing them on laboratory animals. Under pressure from environmentalists, who were concerned about humans being exposed to tens of […]
