Latest Articles

Danny Kennedy, Project Underground

Danny Kennedy is the director of Project Underground, a Berkeley-based human rights and environmental organization which he helped to found in 1996. He is also a husband and a happy new father of a beautiful, bouncing baby girl. Monday, 17 Jul 2000 BERKELEY, Calif. Monday is a day I look forward to, not because I […]

Animal Dreams

The Father, the Sun, and the Holy Spirit

A number of churches and city governments in California and other spots around the U.S. are leading the push for clean energy by powering their houses of worship and city halls with solar, wind, and other renewable sources. Twenty-five Episcopal churches in California have switched to green power, as have Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant groups […]

The Perfect Ploy

Environmentalists are trying to parlay the box-office success of the “The Perfect Storm,” a movie that follows the ill-fated voyage of a commercial fishing boat, into increased awareness of the depleted swordfish population in the Atlantic. SeaWeb, a conservation group running a public education campaign centered on the film, says too many swordfish are being […]

Simply Grand

Thousands of Californians are embracing a new state program that gives residents $1,000 to junk cars and trucks that fail to meet emission standards. The program, launched July 7, aims to take 50,000 polluting clunkers off the roads over the next four years. Residents can alternatively get up to $500 to make repairs that will […]

Gobi, Gobi, Gone

High prices for cashmere made from the wool of goats is leading in part to overgrazing of the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. In the last decade, the number of livestock in Mongolia jumped more than 30 percent, and the number of herders rose by 300 percent, to about 440,000. Many of the newcomers to the […]

Rara Avis

Travelers to some U.S. cities can now rent eco-friendly cars. EV Rental Cars opened its first site at the Los Angeles airport in December 1998 and has since expanded to several other California airports. The company recently struck a long-term deal with Budget Rent-a-Car and has plans to open sites this year in Atlanta, Dallas, […]

Mall Rats

Days after the Clinton-Gore administration gave its endorsement last year to a controversial shopping complex to be built in a sensitive wetlands area in New Jersey, the development company’s executives and their relatives donated at least $31,000 to Al Gore’s presidential campaign. Enviros have long opposed the mall because it would require filling more than […]

Beat the Tom Tom

Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson (R) and a number of Republican state lawmakers asked a federal judge yesterday to suspend the EPA clean air regulations that require the use of smog-reducing reformulated gasoline in southern Wisconsin. They claim that the regulations are a big cause of high gas prices in the state, while the federal government […]

How we could save both forests and jobs

The “roadless” road show swept the nation last week as U.S. Forest Service officials collected public comment on President Clinton’s initiative to prohibit road building in national forests where no roads now exist. What’s missing from this picture? Photo: U.S. Forest Service. The policy would affect 43 million acres across the country, including about 5.8 […]