Latest Articles
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The key is learning to learn
During the weekend before Election Day, as midgets battled furiously on warped playing fields, two giants fell, both yielding their lives peacefully, knowingly, with dignity, to cancer. The better-known one was David Brower, the great outdoorsman and thunderer for the environment. Even in his 70s and 80s he was still shaking up the Sierra Club, […]
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The border patrol is threatening two endangered cats in Texas
The Texas-Mexico border has long been a setting for political skirmishes, a conflict zone where figures hide in shadows hoping to find a loophole in the paramilitary operations that attend the Rio Grande, the river that separates the U.S. from its southern neighbor. This ocelot doesn’t have nine lives.Photo: U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife. […]
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If They Could Just Harness All That Hot Air …
While government representatives in The Hague quibble over ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions, Germans are making some real progress in adopting clean energy. In the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, home to 2.8 million people and numerous heavy industries, about 19 percent of the electricity is generated by wind, and in some areas of the […]
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For the Crater Good
While George W. Bush and Al Gore continued to duke it out over the White House, President Clinton exercised his executive authority yesterday by creating a new national monument in northern Arizona and substantially expanding one in central Idaho. The Vermilion Cliffs National Monument in Arizona — 293,000 acres near the Colorado River north of […]
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A review of You Can't Eat GNP
"The more money we spend, according to the GNP ... the better off we are," explains Eric Davidson in You Can't Eat GNP. The Gross National Product, or GNP in common parlance, is the cumulative value of products and services created and traded by a nation, and the traditional measure of economic well-being. Yet in the past decade or so, the flaws in this measuring system have become increasingly clear to a growing number of economists, social scientists, and other observers. As Davidson learned during his time as a Peace Corps volunteer in Zaire, not only does the GNP fail to account for the state of a country's health-care, education, and welfare systems -- it also fails to recognize the overall and long-term costs, environmental and otherwise, of producing goods and services.
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The Green-ch Who Stole Christmas?
Some enviros and others who voted for Ralph Nader are now regretting their choice, fearing that it gave George W. Bush an advantage over Al Gore. In the chat room on Nader’s official website, John Ruth, who said he voted for Nader, wrote this to the Green Party candidate yesterday: “Mr. Gore (despite what you […]
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The Importance of Being Ernesto
In an effort to protect the winter nesting grounds of monarch butterflies, Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo expanded a forest reserve in central Mexico yesterday. Local residents and giant logging companies have been cutting down lots of trees in the area, and a recent study indicated that 44 percent of the monarchs’ winter habitat had been […]
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Dombeck Rules!
U.S. Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck officially instituted new rules yesterday requiring that ecosystem health be the No. 1 priority in managing national forests. The agency previously required its managers to weigh ecosystem health equally with other concerns such as logging and public access. The new rule prohibits cutting timber at unsustainable rates and eliminates […]
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Chair-ish the Thought
Much to the distress of environmentalists, Rep. Jim Hansen (R-Utah) is poised to become the next chair of the House Resources Committee, which deals with all bills related to wilderness, public lands, endangered species, and mineral resource extraction. The current chair, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), also widely disliked by enviros, will step down from the […]
