Latest Articles
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Fire on the Mountain
Enviros in Washington are apoplectic over what they fear will be a pre-Earth Day cave-in by the Clinton administration over mountaintop-removal mining in West Virginia. This used to be a mountain. Photo: David Miller, www.mountaintopmining.org. Readers may recall this battle from last year’s appropriations season, when powerful Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) introduced a rider that […]
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Fire on the Mountain
Enviros are upset over what they fear may be an impending cave-in by the Clinton-Gore administration on the issue of mountaintop-removal mining in West Virginia. A federal judge ruled last year that the destructive practice, in which mining companies blast off the tops of mountains to get at coal and then bury nearby streams with […]
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Giving Pandas a Leg Up
Some captive male pandas in China will soon be given the anti-impotence drug Viagra to boost their sex drive in an attempt to save the species from extinction. Scientists have tried a number of other methods to lift the animals’ sagging libidos, including traditional Chinese medicine, but most efforts to breed the animals in captivity […]
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Biking the Hand That Feeds You
Pedal Express, a bicycle delivery company in Berkeley, Calif., has teamed up with a local nonprofit youth group to run a program that delivers fresh organic produce to Berkeley residents. Teenagers in Berkeley Youth Alternatives work part-time growing veggies on a half-acre community garden, earning money and school credit. Once a week, the produce is […]
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Toad Kill
Frogs, toads, and other amphibians throughout the world are disappearing at an alarming rate, according to the biggest statistical study of the topic ever completed, published in today’s issue of the journal Nature. Researchers found that the overall numbers of amphibians dropped 15 percent a year from 1960 to 1966, and continued to decline about […]
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That Leaves Plenty of Room for a Disney Rainforest Theme Park
Illegal logging and farming in Brazil’s Amazon last year destroyed 6,347 square miles of rainforest, an area bigger than Hawaii, according to a report released this week by the Brazilian government. The report found that despite increased policing of threatened areas, the pace of deforestation in the world’s largest rainforest remained as high in 1999 […]
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Atlantic salmon are even worse off than their Pacific cousins
To catch an Atlantic salmon in the Machias River back in the 1940s — and we’re talking a legitimate salmon here, maybe 30 or 40 pounds — didn’t require a knack with rod and reel, nor even the wily patience of the angler. Mostly what you needed was decent aim with a rifle or pitchfork […]
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Putin Their Mouth Where Their Money Is
Russia’s Ministry of Atomic Energy announced yesterday that it would like to import and reprocess 20,000 tons of nuclear waste, a proposal that could bring in some $21 billion over 10 years and help boost the nation’s economy. The ministry anticipates that most of the waste would be spent fuel rods from civilian nuclear power […]
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Big Trees From the Big Guy
President Clinton has scheduled a trip for this Saturday to California’s Sierra Nevada, where he is expected to announce the creation of a new national monument to protect groves of giant sequoias. The monument, which Clinton can designate without approval from Congress, could encompass as much as 355,000 acres of land now in the Sequoia […]
