Latest Articles

Supremely Bad Judgement

The Florida Supreme Court dealt a blow to environmentalists and landowners yesterday by ruling that property owners in the state must continue to foot most of the bill for Everglades restoration, despite overwhelming support for a 1996 amendment to the state constitution that would have made polluters pay instead. The court determined that the amendment, […]

Boxer Takes Off Her Gloves

Senate Democrats accused the Bush administration yesterday of slowing the pace of toxic waste cleanups under the Superfund program as a favor to industry, which historically has picked up most of the tab for the costly cleanups. A Senate Environment and Public Works subcommittee asked Superfund officials to explain why the administration dropped 25 sites […]

Logan’s Heroes

Here’s a stellar example of your tax dollars at work: Last week, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers published an Anna Karenina-sized draft study of a proposal by Arch Coal to strip mine 3,100 acres of West Virginia. The strip mine would be the largest ever in the state, and the company has been seeking […]

Thinking beyond the bottom link

My four-year-old daughter spent the afternoon at a local science museum the other day, exploring an exhibit on biodiversity. She returned home full of determination, found a pencil and paper, and composed a letter. Now she distributes copies to friends and strangers alike. The letter begins:   From Jenna to the world:Please stop making all […]

Hop on POPs

The good news: President Bush will ask Congress to support a global treaty to phase out 12 highly toxic chemicals. The bad news: He will not back a provision of the treaty that would make it easier to eliminate other toxics as well. If ratified by at least 50 nations, the treaty on persistent organic […]

Comment Tally Voodoo

Environmental organizations had just 48 hours to submit policy proposals for consideration by Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force, according to the latest batch of documents released by the Energy Department. Shortly after midday on Wednesday, March 21, 2001, Margot Anderson, a senior department official, sent an email message to a colleague instructing him […]

Basin Is No Sink

The network of waterways in the Amazon River Basin emits three times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as previously thought, according to a study appearing in the current edition of Nature. The finding suggests that tropical forest regions are not carbon “sinks” that help cleanse the world of excess CO2 emissions. Rather, the […]

Dune Messiah

It’s a rare moment when ranchers and environmentalists see eye-to-eye — and yet a collaboration between the two parties is leading to the creation of the nation’s 57th national park. The unlikely relationship began when enviros and ranchers realized they had something in common: a need to protect the water resources in Colorado’s San Luis […]

By the Hair of Our Chinny Chin Chin

As building materials go, straw generally gets a bad rap: A straw man is something that can be knocked over easily, and, as everyone knows, any decent wolf can blow down a straw house. But people have been building homes in the U.S. from straw bales encased in plaster or drywall since at least the […]

Made in China

China’s Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric project, has already come under fire from environmental and social activists for the massive ecological and demographic changes it will cause. Now there’s a new reason to be concerned: A government meteorologist predicted today that the reservoir created by the dam would raise local temperatures, thereby changing […]