Latest Articles

I Didn’t Realize That England Had Food

England’s food production and farming needs to take a radical turn for the greener, according to a new report by the Policy Commission on the Future of Farming and Food. The commission, which was convened following devastating outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease in the U.K., calls for some farm subsidies to be based on conserving the […]

Frisco Ain’t Kidding

San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown proposed yesterday that his city pledge to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. Brown said the goal “is as much about protecting our national security as it is about protecting our environmental quality of life.” If the city’s Board of Supervisors passes Brown’s […]

No Doubt Aboot It

Canadian Natural Resources Minister Herb Dhaliwal said yesterday that his country would continue to back the Kyoto treaty on climate change. He said the same thing last Thursday. What’s the fuss? Canada has come under increasing pressure from the Bush administration to abandon the treaty. With only the best interests of our northern neighbors in […]

Leavitt, Eager Beaver

After kvetching for years about the national monuments set aside by former President Clinton across the West, Utah Gov. Michael Leavitt (R) called yesterday for President Bush to designate a 620,000-acre national monument protecting a red canyons area in the central part of the state. Enviros have long fought to protect the San Rafael Swell […]

Italian Nice

The president of northern Italy’s Lombardy region, Roberto Formigoni, proposed on Sunday that only eco-friendly vehicles be sold in the region by as early as 2005. He hopes gas-electric hybrid vehicles and, later, hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles can help eliminate the region’s pollution woes. Smog levels in Lombardy have recently surged to five times the legally […]

Basin and Strange

The Bush administration gave the first indication yesterday of how it would work to resolve the water wars in the Klamath Basin on the Oregon-California border — and enviros immediately warned that the administration was kowtowing to farmers while giving short shrift to endangered fish. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has proposed that area farmers […]

Peak: A Boo

Heading to the mountains used to mean getting away from civilization and its discontents — but increasingly, mountains are a showcase for global problems instead. That was the conclusion of a report released yesterday by the United Nations, which found that wars, pollution, and logging are threatening the world’s mountain ranges. Mountains supply water to […]

New Canaan

By wedding commerce to conservation, a pending land deal in West Virginia’s Canaan Valley could signal a radical shift in land preservation strategy. Allegheny Energy, Inc., plans to sell 12,000 acres to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which will incorporate the land into the Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge. The twist? Allegheny had the […]

Mess Transit

As perhaps the most famous national park in the United States, the Grand Canyon occupies an equally vast space in our national psyche as in our national landscape. Unfortunately, it is also our national bottleneck. Each year, 5 million people flock to the park, leaving 6,000 cars to battle for 2,400 parking spaces every day […]

Famous-er Potatoes

Organic foods, long associated with the crunchy West Coast and the yuppie East, have made dramatic inroads into more conservative places — so dramatic, in fact, that Idaho, home to many rabid anti-enviros, has become one of the top five states in the nation for total organic acreage. Part of the new popularity of organics […]