Latest Articles

Shaft!

The cost of closing and cleaning up old and abandoned mines around the world likely runs into the trillions of dollars, an amount that is far beyond anything mining companies can handle on their own, according to Robert Wilson, chair of the metals giant Rio Tinto. Wilson, who made his comments during a mining industry […]

The Hunt for Cold October

That’s all fine and dandy for panda bears, but the outlook is grimmer for their northern (non)cousins, polar bears. Polar bears face a number of threats — widespread habitat fragmentation, pollution, excessive hunting — but the most serious menace of all is climate change, according to a report issued yesterday by the World Wildlife Fund. […]

Barking Up the Right Tree

Apparently spooked by a recent history of devastating floods and blinding sandstorms, China has unveiled a plan to plant trees on almost 200,000 square miles of land in an effort to reverse rampant deforestation. The plan, which Chinese officials call the largest conservation effort ever attempted, will cost an estimated $12 billion over 10 years […]

Fresh Air

For the first time ever, California’s agriculture sector — the biggest industry in the state — will be required to comply with the federal Clean Air Act, following a settlement reached yesterday by the U.S. EPA and environmental and health advocates. Since 1976, the sector has enjoyed exemptions from some of the act’s most important […]

Smells Like Team Spirit

Imagine a Tupperware party, but for the tree-hugging set. That’s the vision, sort of, of Global Action Plan, a nonprofit organization that is promoting the formation of EcoTeams, grassroots groups dedicated to helping neighbors create sustainable lifestyles and livable communities. The teams, which are currently in eight cities around the country, meet every other week […]

Ec-static!

The newspapers aren’t covering it, but we just had to: An environmental organization has garnered second prize in a competition for the world’s best television ads. “Static Electricity House,” a public service announcement by the Alliance to Save Energy, features a family trying to deal with the, uh, shock of big electricity bills by powering […]

Gregory Gipson reviews Edward Abbey: A Life by James Cahalan

Writing a biography of an author can be a challenging task -- how much do you write about the subject's life, how much about the work? -- and reviewing such a biography even more so. That is especially the case when the subject of the biography is Edward Abbey, who wanted to be a novelist but wrote himself into several identities, among them wilderness Jeremiah and curmudgeonly cowboy. Abbey regularly complained that reviewers wrote too much about him and not enough about his books, a criticism that could be aptly applied to James Cahalan's new biography, Edward Abbey: A Life.

Blowing His Top

The Bush administration appealed a federal court decision yesterday that would limit mountaintop-removal mining and asked the judge to clarify that the ruling “should be read as not applying nationwide or to activities other than coal mining.” On May 8, U.S. District Judge Charles H. Haden II of West Virginia ruled that coal mining valley […]

Buying the Farm

There might be a severe drought facing much of the nation, but billions of dollars in subsidies is soon to rain down on the bread-basket states, thanks to a farm bill signed by President Bush yesterday. Notwithstanding a White House pledge to wean farmers off of government funding, the bill is expected to cost $190 […]

Rwandering Fools?

Tragically, education seems to have been insufficient to protect animals in Rwanda, where poachers last week killed two of the world’s last remaining mountain gorillas. The poachers were attempting to capture and sell baby gorillas. According to Rwandan wildlife conservation officials, two men killed two female gorillas and trapped one baby gorilla, in the first […]