Latest Articles

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Get With the Programme

Despite some bright spots, the outlook for the global environment in the next generation is largely bleak, according to a report published yesterday by the U.N. Environment Programme. The report is the work of more than 1,000 authors and attempts to provide a comprehensive overview of how the environment has changed since UNEP was established […]

East of Eden

After years of foreign control, East Timor became the world’s newest nation this week. Now the country must rise from the ashes wrought by years of brutal domination by Indonesia — and it hopes to do so in part by capitalizing on its abundant natural beauty to attract eco-tourists. Currently, East Timor is the poorest […]

Fatwa Alberta

Canada’s already-tense internal battle over whether to ratify the Kyoto Treaty on climate change heated up further yesterday, when the province of Alberta withdrew from negotiations after its alternative emissions-cutting plan was rejected by the other provinces and territories. In response, Alberta resigned as co-chair of the commission formed to negotiate climate issues and refused […]

Sign of the TIMOs

A major shift is taking place in U.S. timber ownership, and it could have significant consequences not just for the industry but also for ecosystems across the country. Traditionally, the major private owners of forestlands in the U.S. have been forest product companies, but increasingly, such land is being bought by investment groups hoping to […]

New Sue Review

Oral arguments were heard yesterday in the U.S. EPA’s lawsuit against the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest public power provider. Lawyers for the EPA argued that the TVA violated the New Source Review rule of the Clean Air Act by failing to install state-of-the-art pollution-control equipment when upgrading its older coal-burning power plants. Lawyers […]

Miner Threat

The Bush administration canceled yesterday a two-year ban on new mining claims in roughly 1.2 million acres in and around southern Oregon’s Siskiyou National Forest. The ban was imposed by the Clinton administration in response to lobbying efforts by conservationists, who wanted the area declared a national monument. Instead, former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt imposed […]

Schoolhouses Rock!

Is the Ivory Tower built from sustainable materials? Increasingly, the answer is yes. College campuses, long regarded as bastions of left-leaning life, are becoming promoters of sustainable development. Oberlin College recently completed a comprehensive study of how to reduce pollution from its operations, the State University of New York at Buffalo spent $17 million to […]