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  • The Fall of the Collossus of Roads

    Some 62 percent of Americans surveyed favor a proposal to protect all roadless areas of at least 1,000 acres in national forests, according to a poll released earlier this week by the Heritage Forests Campaign, National Audubon Society, and Wilderness Society. More than 70 percent favored a ban on oil drilling, logging, and mining in […]

  • Absolut Advertising

    If you are like us (and we bet you are) you were sipping your coffee and peacefully perusing your New York Times Tuesday morning when POW! you were smacked upside the head by a clever full-page ad from the Environmental Working Group previewing its release of a study on the effects of the herbicide atrazine. […]

  • Down the Hatch

    Pres. Clinton nominated Ted Stewart, a conservative Utah Republican strongly disliked by enviros, to a federal judgeship yesterday, caving in to the wishes of Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). Hatch has been stalling the confirmation process for a number of Clinton’s judicial nominees, and the administration hopes that the nomination of Hatch’s chosen […]

  • Dental Damn!

    Baby teeth from children who live in the radiation paths of nuclear power plants in Connecticut and New Jersey contain alarmingly high levels of radioactive matter, scientists reported this week at the World Conference on Breast Cancer in Ottawa, Canada. Emissions from the two plants travel downwind through Long Island, N.Y., which has some of […]

  • Gorillas in the Midst (of War)

    The five-year-old war in Congo is taking a heavy toll on the nation’s wildlife. Officials in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park talk of “animal genocide” and estimate that about 100 of the 250 eastern lowland gorillas in the park have been killed since 1996, as well as about 300 of the 400 forest elephants alive before […]

  • They'll Finnish the Report Annan

    The head of a U.N. team investigating environmental damage in Yugoslavia said yesterday that the team has found no evidence that NATO bombing caused major ecological catastrophes. But Pekka Haavisto, the former Finnish environment minister who led the team’s 10-day tour of Serbia, called for urgent action to help clean up “hot spots” of war-related […]

  • Riders Knocked Out of Their Saddles

    Senate Democrats knocked four anti-environmental provisions out of an Interior Department spending bill yesterday, including riders that would have blocked new energy-efficiency rules for federal agencies and permitted lead mining in a Missouri national forest. But Democrats failed to remove language that would let mining companies dump large amounts of waste on public land, and […]

  • Carbon Sinking

    Worldwide emissions of carbon from the burning of fossil fuels fell by 0.5 percent last year, the first drop since 1993, according to new estimates from the Worldwatch Institute. This decline took place even as the world economy expanded by 2.5 percent last year, undermining the argument that reducing greenhouse gas emissions to combat climate […]

  • Boyz 'n the Oxygen Hood

    Children in poor, predominantly minority neighborhoods in New York City are as much as 21 times more likely than children from affluent parts of the city to be hospitalized for asthma, according to a new study. Doctors suspect that a number of environmental factors contribute to the nation’s urban asthma epidemic, including indoor and outdoor […]

  • Frown and Bear It

    Wild bear populations around the world are seriously threatened by poaching, pollution, and disappearing forests, according to a World Wildlife Fund report released yesterday. In Russia, home of the world’s largest brown bear population, poaching for hides and gallbladders has increased dramatically in the last decade, and poaching is rampant in China and southeast Asia. […]