Latest Articles

Earth, Wind, Less Fire

Germany increased its wind power production by 1,668 megawatts last year, maintaining its big lead as the top wind power powerhouse in the world. Germany now has the capacity to put out 6,113 MW of wind power, compared to about 2,500 MW by the U.S., the world’s second largest wind producer. Germany’s wind units now […]

Slim-Budget Whitman

New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman (R), President-elect Bush’s choice to head the U.S. EPA, was warmly received by both Democrats and Republicans during a Senate hearing on her nomination today. Sen. Bob Torricelli (D-NJ), who introduced Whitman before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, called her nomination “a very wise selection.” National environmental […]

Everglades Airport: Just Plane Wrong

In a big victory for environmentalists, the Clinton administration rejected a proposal yesterday to convert a former U.S. Air Force base near the Florida Everglades into a commercial airport. Enviros argued that an airport at the Homestead base would create significant pollution and threaten the ecosystems of two nearby parks, the Everglades, 10 miles away, […]

Habitat's Where Ujjal Dosanjh's At

British Columbia tomorrow will announce a new provincial park, helping to complete the largest contiguous body of protected land on the Canada-U.S. border. One of 49 new protected areas that will be introduced by B.C. Premier Ujjal Dosanjh, Snowy Provincial Park will encompass 65,000 acres just north of the Pasayten Wilderness Area and Loomis State […]

Habitat's Where Babbitt's At

President Clinton created seven new national monuments this morning, protecting about 1 million more acres of federal land. The new monuments, all recommended by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, include 377,000 acres along the Upper Missouri Breaks in Montana; 204,000 acres of grassland in Central California; and 486,000 acres of the Sonoran Desert; as well as […]

Should locals be more involved in public lands decisions?

Roadless and fancy-free. Photo: U.S. Forest Service. As the Clinton administration rushes to complete its lands legacy agenda in the American West, two methods of resolving public land issues have clashed head-on. The first is embodied in President Clinton’s move earlier this month to protect 58.5 million acres of roadless national forest — a quick, […]

Time to Get the Lead Out

Governments and the press have paid a lot of attention this year to the question of whether depleted uranium weapons used by NATO in the Balkans may be causing illnesses — but the region is facing other environmental problems whose deadly consequences are more clear, even if less publicized. The situation is especially dire in […]

Drill Team

President-elect Bush says he plans to review and possibly roll back President Clinton’s regulation to ban road-building and logging on 58.5 million acres of national forest land. Bush, in a New York Times interview, said, “What I would seek to do is to make sure that our bureaucracies were not trampling the interest of the […]

L.A. Likers

For the second year in a row, no first-stage ozone pollution alerts were reported in the greater Los Angles area last year. Many of the 16 million people who live in the four-county area are now breathing air that meets all of the U.S. EPA health standards. Unhealthful days have dropped 75 percent over the […]

Of Course It's Tireless. It's a Sub.

Greenpeace activists from Spain, Germany, Austria, and Italy boarded a nuclear-powered submarine from Britain today to protest its presence in Gibraltar, a British colony on Spain’s southern tip. The activists evaded Spanish police and British troops to reach the submarine, the Tireless, which has been docked in Gibraltar for nine months for repairs after a […]