Latest Articles

Did the top U.S. negotiator at The Hague climate talks drop the ball?

Lots of grumbling lately from environmental insiders displeased with the way Frank Loy handled negotiating duties for the U.S. during the fruitless climate change talks at The Hague, Netherlands. The main complaint: Bad clock management. Pretty boy Loy. Photo: Courtesy of IISD. Without getting too mired in bad sports metaphors, the knock on Loy, the […]

The Protocol of the Elders of Ozone

The ozone hole will likely close within 50 years, according to scientists who just ended a major conference on the issue in Buenos Aires. They said that the international ban on ozone-depleting chlorofluorcarbons, which resulted from the 1987 Montreal Protocol, is beginning to have an effect, but that the ozone recovery is not likely to […]

Bye, Bye Birdwatchers

For perhaps the first time, an environmental group, the Nature Conservancy, has landed among the top 10 of U.S charities ranked by income. The conservancy sat at No. 9 on a listing by the NonProfit Times, with a total income in 1999 of $704 million. The group claims it devoted more than 93 percent of […]

The Fisher Is King

Fearful that a lawsuit filed by enviros might lead to a court-ordered logging injunction in the Sierra Nevada in California, the U.S. Forest Service next week will initiate its own three-month logging ban on 11 million acres in the region. Three enviro groups, including the Earth Island Institute, sued the Forest Service in October for […]

Americans dragged their heels at The Hague, but others are acting to stop climate change

The most earth-shaking event of the past two weeks had to do with leadership, or lack thereof, but it did not unfold in Florida. It happened in the Netherlands. The stunning lack of leadership came from the Clinton-Gore administration. The meeting in The Hague was the sixth attempt since the Kyoto conference of 1997 to […]

Kris Williams is saving sea turtles in Georgia

Kris Williams is the “Turtle Babe” of Wassaw Island. At 33, the attractive, square-jawed blonde heads the oldest volunteer-based sea turtle conservation project in North America. What a babe. Optimism comes as naturally to Williams as the tide comes to the beach. It has to, because sea turtle conservation in Georgia isn’t easy. “Awareness is […]

Well Hello, Dolly

Making a U-tern

Stoking the fires of the Midwest’s most contentious environmental issue, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Army Corps of Engineers agreed yesterday that the flow of water in the Missouri River should be increased in the spring to save fish and birds from extinction. Gen. Carl Strock became the first Corps official to […]

You Picked a Fine Time to Fund Me, Lucille

Halfway through a five-year effort to preserve wildlife habitat and farmland in Central California, the David and Lucille Packard Foundation issued a report yesterday saying that it could not go it alone and that the land preservation movement needed long-term support from the state government to be successful. The foundation is funding a $175 million […]

Panda-monium

Two decades into the effort to save giant pandas in China from extinction, the greatest remaining threat to pandas may be poor farmers. Chinese authorities estimate that only about 1,000 pandas continue to live in the wild after logging and poaching decimated the animal’s ranks. In recent years, the country has introduced stiff fines to […]