Latest Articles
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Going Ape
Wildlife got a break in the Republic of Congo yesterday when the government quadrupled the size of Odzala National Park to 3.2 million acres, about half the size of Vermont. Much of the land had been slated for logging. Conservation International is helping to fund the expansion of the park, which provides habitat for 15,000 […]
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In the Forest, the Mighty Forest, the Lyons Speaks Tonight
“It would be a feather in the cap” of the logging industry if it stopped cutting down old-growth trees, Undersecretary of Agriculture Jim Lyons said earlier this week. Lyons, who oversees the U.S. Forest Service, predicted the end of old-growth logging on private and public land within 10 years, in response to strong public sentiment. […]
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Hold the Anchovies
Hake, cod, and anchovy populations are being driven towards extinction in European waters and fisheries ministers are meeting today to debate whether to cut catch quotas by up to 74 percent next year to save the most threatened stocks. During their annual meeting, the ministers usually talk about raising quotas to help fishers, but this […]
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Vex and the City
Dust and soot in the air contribute to between 20 and 200 early deaths a day across 20 of the largest cities in the U.S., according to a new study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The new report, the largest coast-to-coast study of the problem, found […]
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The End of the World As We Know It?
What will President Bush’s environmental policies mean to the American West? Observers say the Bush administration will be friendly to developers and the logging, grazing, and mining industries, and have a much lighter hand with environmental regulations. Bush has repeatedly said he will place much weight on local input into federal land management decisions. The […]
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Why hasn't the National Marine Fisheries Service called for Snake River dams?
Passions run high in the Pacific Northwest over whether to remove four large federal dams on the lower Snake River to recover the river’s imperiled wild salmon and steelhead (a.k.a. sea-run rainbow trout). The Snake once produced more salmon and steelhead than any other river in the vast Columbia River basin — over 2 million […]
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The Blues and the Graze
The U.S. government is calling for more timber harvesting and less grazing on 64 million acres in the eastern part of the Northwest as part of the largest federal land-use plan ever proposed. The plan, released yesterday by the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project, is a joint effort by the U.S. Forest Service and […]
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Yuck Is Mountin'
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson called yesterday for an investigation into allegations that federal contractors compromised a scientific study to determine whether Yucca Mountain in Nevada would be a safe place to store all the country’s high-level nuclear waste. The Las Vegas Sun last month obtained a 60-page draft report about the site and found a […]
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Blubber Clubbers
Canadian officials are denying they have decided to curb the annual seal hunt off of Newfoundland, by far the largest cull of marine mammals in the world. Based on an internal memo that it obtained, the International Fund for Animal Welfare said the country’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans had decided to pare back the […]
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Barnes Storming
Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes (D) is close to reaching a compromise with environmentalists who have sued state and federal agencies over air-quality concerns and kept metro Atlanta’s $36 billion transportation plan on hold. To improve air quality, Barnes has proposed speeding up a $4.5 million study of the health effects of the city’s air pollution, […]
