Latest Articles

Soothing the Savage Breasts

We’ve been derelict in our duties: Only now are we telling you that the largest known environmental striptease in the history of the world took place last Friday. Nine bare-breasted women briefly halted logging near Northern California’s Headwaters Forest, at a stand of second-growth redwood trees that didn’t make it into the 1999 forest protection […]

Round, Round, Get Around, I Get a Round

The latest round of World Trade Organization negotiations concluded yesterday with delegates from 142 nations agreeing to an agenda for the next round of trade talks and glossing over environmental disagreements for the moment. The agenda, which includes cutting tariffs on industrial goods, phasing out farm subsidies, reducing foreign investment barriers, and limiting anti-dumping laws, […]

You're Not Doing Fine Oklahoma

Demonstrators paraded around the annual Governor’s Water Conference in Oklahoma City yesterday to protest a deal struck behind closed doors to sell millions of gallons of water from southeastern Oklahoma to drought-stricken Texas. The deal, which is subject to approval by the Oklahoma legislature, has the backing of state officials and the Chickasaw and Choctaw […]

Oil in a Day's Work

Capitol Hill hosted competing demonstrations yesterday over proposed oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Unions reps, black and Latino business leaders, Orthodox Jews, industry bigwigs, and war veterans gathered on the Capitol lawn in Washington, D.C., to hear U.S. Sen. Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska) argue that drilling in the refuge would be […]

All's Quiet on the Rocky Mountain Front

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear an industry appeal of a 1997 U.S. Forest Service decision to ban oil and gas exploration on Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front, a 1.8 million-acre swath of land where the plains meet the Rocky Mountains. The area, which is home to grizzlies, wolves, and bighorn sheep, also […]

Trunk Driving

A plan to save one of the last remaining wild herds of elephants in Vietnam got off to an inauspicious start earlier this week, with the deaths of two elephants. A team of elephant experts spotted the two on Monday and shot them with tranquilizer darts, hoping to sedate them for the long trip from […]

Start Spreading the News

Finally, some good news for New York: The Big Apple beat out 49 other U.S. cities in a Sierra Club analysis of spending on mass transit and programs to reduce vehicle-generated smog. According to the group’s air pollution report card issued yesterday, New York is the only big city in the country to spend more […]

Polar Opposition

Last month, the leader of an Eskimo village in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge filed a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service claiming that the Alaska Wilderness League, which works to prevent oil drilling in the refuge, misrepresented itself to obtain nonprofit 501(c)(3) tax status. The complaint alleges that the AWL is a lobbying group […]

Sunny Dispositions

San Francisco may be making headlines with its innovative plan to radically expand solar power generation, but other places deserve kudos as well, according to a study released last week by Greenpeace. The study, produced before the San Francisco plan was approved by voters last week, compared both planned and installed solar energy systems in […]

Double Tall, Hold the Pesticides

Starbucks announced this week that it will pay an extra 10 cents per pound for coffee beans that are grown on environmentally and socially responsible farms. The announcement, which was made at a growers conference in Costa Rica, comes at a time when a world coffee surplus has depressed wholesale prices to 40 cents per […]