Latest Articles
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Fred Munson, Cascades Conservation Partnership
Fred Munson is the campaign director for the Cascades Conservation Partnership, an effort just being launched that aims to purchase 75,000 acres of forest to maintain and enhance a wildlife corridor between the north and central Cascade Mountains of Washington state. He just finished up a successful effort that raised $17 million to purchase and […]
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It's Report-Card Time
The timing is unbearable. Here on my desk in the middle of the blooming, buzzing month of May is the best report yet on the state of the world’s ecosystems. Best not because it contains good news — it doesn’t — but because it’s short and clear and blunt. The report evaluates the health of […]
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Making Degrade
Nearly 40 percent of the world’s agricultural land is seriously degraded due to erosion, nutrient depletion, salinization, and other problems, according to a study released yesterday by the International Food Policy Research Institute. The degradation has already significantly lowered the productivity of 16 percent of the world’s farmland, including 75 percent of farmland in Central […]
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The Chat's Meow
A group of Oregon timber executives forked over $100,000 each to the Republican Party last week in exchange for a 45-minute chat session with GOP presidential candidate George W. Bush. The executives, who have been unhappy with the Clinton-Gore administration’s forest policy, sought assurances that Bush would listen to their concerns if he becomes president. […]
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Insane Freeze
The U.S. House of Representatives on Friday approved a transportation spending bill that would continue the freeze on vehicle fuel-economy standards, a blow to environmentalists who argue that the current standards, set in 1975, are far too low. Enviros had not expected the House to vote in favor of lifting the freeze, which has been […]
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Too Much to Bear?
The Sierra Club has suggested that the U.S. government more than triple the number of acres designated as recovery areas for grizzly bear populations in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, up from 5.9 million acres to 19.9 million. A Sierra Club study indicates that grizzly bears need areas of more than 1,000 square miles in order […]
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Reinventing the Wheels
After more than a century of causing horrendous pollution, the auto industry is undergoing a green revolution, writes Jim Motavalli in Grist. Spurred by air pollution laws, the specter of global warming, and animated competition, automakers are starting to design and produce a whole new generation of clean cars, including fuel-cell and hybrid gas-electric vehicles. […]
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Baked Alaska
The polar ice cap has thinned by 40 percent in the last 30 years, according to preliminary findings presented this week at a conference of the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States. Other research presented at the conference documents how dramatic climate changes are making it difficult for Alaska natives to maintain subsistence lifestyles. […]
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How far can clean cars take us?
I loved cars long before I knew there was any reason to worry about their effect on the environment or be concerned about the smoke that poured from their tailpipes. In the 1960s, ignorance like mine was widespread in the United States, maintained by a powerful automotive lobby and a complacent federal government. Highway congestion, though already bad, was somewhat masked by an expanding national highway grid, and most people celebrated the migration to the suburbs that the new roads aided and abetted. Cars were equated with freedom, and ads of the period showed happy vacationing families riding in roomy sedans, with the uncrowded interstate stretching out in front of them.
