Latest Articles

Litter of the Law

The Chicago-based Oil-Dri Corporation, which, as the maker of Cat’s Pride, is the world’s largest kitty litter company, wants to dig an open-pit clay mine on public land outside of Reno, Nev. But county commissioners have effectively thwarted that plan by refusing to issue a permit to operate a processing plant for the cat litter […]

U.N. Resolved

The Sixth U.N. Conference on Biodiversity opened in The Hague yesterday, with more than 2,000 delegates from 200 countries gathering to discuss the protection of the world’s plants and animals. The main agenda items for the two-week conference include encouraging governments to halt deforestation and designing a policy to share and protect global genetic resources. […]

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 […]