Latest Articles

Welcome to the Club

The Sierra Club gave its formal endorsement to Al Gore today, with the group’s president, Robert Cox, saying that if Gore were elected, he would be “the most pro-environment president in our history.” Gore accepted the endorsement by saying, “It is an honor that I will seek to live up to every day.” The Gore […]

Hey, Hey, Where're the Monkeys?

Machine-gun-toting commercial poachers in Africa are killing apes and monkeys at such high rates that some scientists fear a number of primate species could be exterminated from central Africa’s jungles within 10 years. Biologists from several enviro groups, including Conservation International, estimate that African poachers kill some 1 million metric tons of game every year. […]

Han, Seoul, Oh!

The U.S. military offered an official apology to South Koreans today for dumping formaldehyde, a toxic chemical and suspected carcinogen, into the Han River, a main source of drinking water for Seoul’s 12 million citizens. The apology came after some 250 South Koreans held an anti-America protest in Seoul on Saturday, pelting an effigy of […]

Ill Will and Grace

The U.S. EPA is investigating why its officials ignored evidence for 18 years that W. R. Grace and Co. used vermiculite ore tainted with asbestos in its building products. An EPA study in 1982, during the Reagan administration, found high levels of asbestos in the company’s vermiculite, contrary to claims made by Grace, but the […]

Dams All in Distress

Since the precedent-setting breaching of the Edwards Dam in Maine last year, several other dams in New England have been removed or breached to help protect fish, and officials are considering the same fate for hundreds more. Unlike the huge dams in the West owned by the feds, the New England dams tend to be […]

Enviros worldwide call for release of two Mexican activists

Forty-five of the world’s most prominent environmentalists have called for the immediate release of Mexican colleagues Rodolfo Montiel Flores and Teodoro Cabrera Garcia, who have been jailed and tortured after blocking logging operations by the multinational Boise Cascade in the southern state of Guerrero. Rodolfo Montiel Flores. Urging that the “tragic stories” of murdered environmental […]

Statue of Limitations

The Ice, Man, Goeth

The Greenland ice sheet — which contains almost 10 percent of all the frozen water on the planet — is melting at a rate of approximately 12 cubic miles per year, according to research by NASA scientists published in the journal Science. If melting continues at this rate, it could cause a measurable rise in […]

Who Wants to Be a Billionaire?

Two months after India became the second nation in the world with a population greater than 1 billion, Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and other government leaders will meet tomorrow to develop a strategy for slowing the nation’s population growth. Since the birth of India’s symbolic billionth baby on May 11, another 3.5 million […]

Cod's Wallop

In one of the toughest judicial actions taken under the Endangered Species Act in the last decade, a federal judge yesterday banned trawl-net fishing for pollock, cod, and other bottom fish in large ocean areas off Alaska, citing a need to protect endangered Steller sea lions. The sea lions forage for the same fish chased […]