Latest Articles
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Buddy, Can You Spare a Bear?
Canadian enviro groups are getting upset over a plan to remove a few dozen grizzly bears from British Columbia and reintroduce them to the Selway-Bitterroot wilderness of Idaho and Montana. This is just the latest effort to use Canadian wildlife to replenish depleted American populations; the U.S. government has already taken Canadian lynx and gray […]
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Why Be Normal?
House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) will oppose granting China permanent normal trade relations, arguing that a trade deal with the country needs to encompass greater protections for the environment, human rights, and organized labor. Gephardt’s decision, which he is set to announce tomorrow, is a big setback for the Clinton-Gore administration, which has made […]
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Captain's Courageous
Enviros and human rights activists are celebrating after Russia’s Supreme Court yesterday upheld a lower court’s acquittal of anti-nuclear activist Alexander Nikitin, who had been accused of revealing state secrets while working with a Norwegian environmental group. Nikitin, a former navy captain, was arrested in 1996 for writing a report about Soviet nuclear submarine accidents […]
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Ivory Illiquid
In a victory for conservation groups, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe yesterday withdrew controversial proposals to expand international trade in ivory. In a compromise deal reached at a meeting of the U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, delegates agreed that ivory sales will be delayed for at least two years, until a […]
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West Virginia, Mountain Maim-ah
The Clinton-Gore administration disappointed some enviros yesterday as it made official for the first time its position on mountaintop-removal mining, a controversial technique used in West Virginia. A federal judge ruled last year that the mining technique, in which the tops of mountains are blasted off to get at coal deposits and the debris is […]
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Stay Funky, Chunky Monkey
So Unilever has gobbled up Ben & Jerry’s. The $45 billion mega-company that rose from the British and Dutch colonial empires (turning palm and coconut oil into soap and margarine) has acquired Vermont’s outrageous little ice cream maker for $326 million. The American dream at work. A couple of hippies invent wild new ice cream […]
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I-M-Furious
Thousands of enviros and other demonstrators hit the streets of Washington, D.C., this weekend to protest corporate globalization, hoping to build on the momentum of last year’s demonstrations in Seattle against the World Trade Organization. They have been thwarted in their efforts to shut down meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank by […]
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No More Weepin' and A-Whalin'
Japan and Norway failed on Saturday in their controversial push to overturn an international ban on commercial trade in whales. Delegates from 150 nations at a meeting of the U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species rejected proposals that would have allowed trade in gray and minke whales. Whale defenders were heartened that Japan […]
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Sequoia and You Shall Find
Posed against a scenic background of giant sequoias in California’s Sierra Nevada, President Clinton on Saturday designated the nation’s newest national monument. Commercial logging, mining, and some recreational activities will be banned in the 328,000-acre Grand Sequoia National Monument, which encompasses 34 groves of the ancient, giant trees. Acting under the 1906 Antiquities Act, which […]
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Galluping Ahead
Some 80 percent of Americans surveyed this month for a new Gallup Poll said they agree with the goals of the environmental movement, and 16 percent said they are actively involved in the movement. Public support for the environmental cause is higher now than it was on the first Earth Day, nearly 30 years ago, […]
