Latest Articles

Taking Them to Tusk

An agency in Kenya is calling for a world boycott of South Africa’s proposed sale of ivory stockpiles. The South Africa government is planning to submit a proposal to the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species that would allow the country to sell off its ivory stockpiles, but Kenya Wildlife Services, as well […]

When the Latter Day Saints Go Marching in

Environmentalists are up against an unusual adversary in a fight over the sale of a national historic landmark in Wyoming: Mormons. Seven representatives in the U.S. House — all of them members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints — are cosponsoring a bill to sell Bureau of Land Management land to […]

Whoa, We’re Halfway There

While the U.S. still bandies about toothless plans to cut greenhouse gases, the European Union is almost halfway to achieving the emissions reductions mandated by the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. According to the European Environment Agency, the 15-nation bloc has successfully decreased emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to 3.5 percent below […]

Air Squawl-ity

We here at Grist have long since lost track of the score in the face-off between the snowmobile industry and people who like to be able to breathe in national parks, but at any rate, the latter earned a point yesterday when the U.S. EPA issued a report calling for a complete ban on snowmobiles […]

Andes Dandies

Re: Now You See Them, Now You Don’t Dear Editor: As an educator in a Canadian school, I was very interested in this article. I had the pleasure of traveling in South America in the early 1980s. The beauty of the Andes and the surrounding jungle has stayed with me in the years since my […]

Terrorfied at the Gym

Clear As Mud

President Bush rejected a U.S. EPA proposal that would have gone much further toward improving air quality than his pet Clean Skies Initiative, according to administration documents. To cite just one example, the EPA proposal would have limited sulfur dioxide emissions to 2 million tons per year by 2010; by contrast, the (so-called) Clear Skies […]

Nalini Nadkarni, Evergreen State College

Nalini Nadkarni is an ecosystem biologist at Evergreen State College. Monday, 29 Apr 2002 OLYMPIA, Wash. My day starts as most do: calling upstairs for my two children to rouse themselves for the beginning of the day. I then put on an egg to boil, a slice of toast to brown. I’ve been eating the […]

Ill Duce

It’s one thing for lobbyists to ply governmental officials with policy requests (that’s what they do); it’s another thing for government officials to actively seek input from lobbyists when crafting national policy. But apparently, in the Bush administration, that’s what officials do: According to Energy Department documents (released following a lawsuit by the Natural Resources […]

I’m Too Sexy for My Gills

Meanwhile, in other news about fish, a transgenic version of the North Atlantic salmon is the first genetically engineered animal up for review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use as food. The fish looks more or less like its natural cousin, but it grows seven times faster and is, we kid you […]