Latest Articles

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 […]

Carol Cox, Personal Responsibility in a Desirable Environment

Carol Cox is the grant compliance specialist at PRIDE, which works to clean up rivers and stop illegal dumping of trash in Kentucky. Monday, 27 Nov 2000 SOMERSET, Ky. Today, I want to give you some background information about Personal Responsibility In a Desirable Environment (PRIDE). Rep. Harold “Hal” Rogers (R-Ky.) and James Bickford, the […]

That Sinking Feeling

International climate talks in The Hague, Netherlands, collapsed on Saturday, with U.S. and European negotiators unable to agree on a plan for reducing emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Two weeks of negotiations were intended to flesh out the details of the Kyoto climate change treaty, but in the end the Europeans rejected a plan that […]