Latest Articles

Don't Let Clinton Succumb to Senioritis

Enviros are crossing their fingers — as well as waging letter-writing campaigns and purchasing newspaper ads — in hopes that President Clinton will declare a few more national monuments before he leaves office. Top on their list is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, but not far down are about half a dozen more, […]

What a Long, Range Trip It's Been

Some 100 environmentalists convened in Reno, Nev., yesterday to push for an end to all livestock grazing on federal lands in the U.S., a notion once considered radical but now gaining more mainstream support. The activists argue that grazing causes serious environmental damage in the West, particularly soil erosion and deterioration of streamside areas. They […]

Ouch of Africa

Nations throughout Africa, with their populations soaring, are facing dilemmas as they try to grow their economies and stem poverty without destroying their unique wildlife and landscapes. In Cameroon, 90 percent of virgin forests have been decimated, and hunters are following the logging industry into the forests to kill large mammals for the growing bush-meat […]

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Facing hundreds of millions of dollars in hazardous-waste cleanup costs, General Electric asked a U.S. federal court yesterday to declare the Superfund law unconstitutional. In its lawsuit, the company contends that the law gives the U.S. EPA “uncontrolled authority to order intrusive” cleanups of “unlimited scope.” It also claims the law violates the Constitution’s due-process […]

Monsanto: We Should Have Been More Honest About Misleading You

Monsanto announced yesterday that it will restrict sales next year of one variety of genetically modified corn and delay until 2002 the introduction of another in order to avoid disrupting U.S. grain exports. American corns sales to Japan and other countries have fallen markedly this fall after the StarLink biotech corn variety, which was not […]

Any Way You Slice It, This Sucks

Someone recently used a chainsaw to slice into Luna, the 1,000-year-old redwood made famous by Julia "Butterfly" Hill. Hill lived in the tree in Northern California for two years to protest old-growth logging, and only came down from her perch last December after striking a deal with Pacific Lumber Co. to spare the tree and […]

Close Line

A cold snap and resulting power-line failures forced the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine to shut down yesterday, three weeks before it is due to be closed for good. While there were no reported radiation leaks, operators are considering simply keeping the plant turned off from here on out, rather than powering it up […]

To Drink Perchlorate Is Human

In what may be the first large-scale study to use volunteers to test the effect of a water pollutant on humans, the aerospace behemoth Lockheed Martin is funding research in which 100 people are paid $1,000 each to take a pill containing the industrial chemical perchlorate every day for six months. The study, conducted by […]

I'm Going to Pop You One

More than 120 countries are slated to meet in December in South Africa for a final meeting to draft a global treaty restricting the production of 12 persistent organic pollutants (POPs). At high doses, POPs — which include pesticides, many industrial pollutants, and PCBs — are deadly toxic, and at low exposures, they have caused […]

Climate talks collapse over carbon sinks, and Americans just don't see the problem

Bill McKibben reports from The Hague: Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Depending on how you spin it, the collapse of the climate negotiations in The Hague, Netherlands, could leave you confident that much progress has been made, despairing that a Bush presidency dooms the future of new talks, or convinced […]