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Quick Study

One week after a study by the U.S. Geological Survey showed that oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge could harm caribou, the agency has completed another study claiming that the drilling scenarios most likely to be approved by Congress would not affect the species. The two-page report was commissioned by Interior Secretary Gale […]

Timber Boom I

More than a decade after a car bomb injured two members of the radical environmental group Earth First!, a federal jury will decide whether the FBI and police in Oakland, Calif., violated the civil rights of the victims by ignoring evidence in the case. On May 24, 1990, Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were headed […]

Timber Boom II

The Bush administration has indicated that it will rewrite the Northwest Forest Plan, the nation’s first attempt to manage a broad ecosystem across an entire region of the U.S. In an development welcomed by timber interests, U.S. Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth has asked regional heads of the USFS, the Bureau of Land Management, and […]

Nuking It Out

  Re: Safety Dance, Part One Dear Editor: I have been religiously reading your spin on environmental news for about a year. I have gotten some good information from your mostly one-sided publication. You have a right to spread your information this way. It’s the American way. But I cannot sit here and allow you […]

The Finnish Line

From the department of creative activism: You’ve heard of hunger strikes, but what about baby strikes? Hundreds of Finnish women have signed a petition declaring that they will not bear children for the next four years unless the country’s Parliament scraps plans to build a fifth nuclear reactor in their homeland. The protest has a […]

Information Underload

So much for the information age: Some U.S. lawmakers are trying to limit access to data on the federal government’s farm subsidy program. Last fall, the nonprofit Environmental Working Group touched off a political firestorm by posting on the Internet a database of farm subsidy recipients from 1996 to 2000. Information on the site was […]

Dirty Duncing

The majority of the nation’s dirtiest power plants are getting even dirtier, according to a report released yesterday by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. The report was based on U.S. EPA data on smog, soot, and global warming emissions from power plants from 1995 to 2000. It found that greenhouse gas emissions increased 8 […]

Seam Stress

After Sept. 11, the folks in the White House found a favorite tune — the need to decrease U.S. reliance on foreign oil any which way but through conservation — and it seems they just can’t stop singing it. First it was used to promote drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; now, in a […]

Sitting By the Docket of the Bay

A five-year-old legal battle between San Francisco Baykeeper, a conservation organization, and Dow Chemical ended yesterday when the Contra Costa County Superior Court approved a settlement. Dow stood accused of unlawfully discharging contaminated water into the New York Slough, which empties into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Rivers and from there into the San Francisco Bay. Under […]

Nature Not Nurturing

In a move being described as unprecedented in recent history, the highly respected scientific journal Nature has said that it should not have published a controversial article last year about the discovery of genetically engineered corn growing in Mexico. The journal’s editors concluded that the article, which was welcomed by opponents of genetic modification, did […]