Latest Articles

Clinton's Ditch

Pres. Clinton signed a bill yesterday designating the nation’s 55th national park, the Black Canyon of the Gunnison River in western Colorado, the first national park created in five years. The 30,000-acre area, most of which has been a national monument since 1933, features a canyon just 40 feet across at its narrowest point and […]

Y2 Chaos?

The CIA told Congress yesterday that there’s cause for concern about the Y2K bug compromising the safety of aging Soviet-era nuclear power plants in Russia and Ukraine. The risk of an accident is low, said Lawrence Gershwin of the CIA, but still higher that usual because computer problems could be aggravated by power failures. A […]

A former stock trader learns how to really pick 'em

It’s an overcast day outside of Stoughton, Wis., the village that claims to have invented the “kaffee break.” But a warm cup of java seems far, far away from Pleasant Hill Market Garden, where farmer Rob Baratz fights off the early morning, chilled wind with gritted teeth and a hand-rolled cigarette. Baratz, up on the […]

Ho Chi Minh-imizing Pollution

Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, plagued by pollution but determined not to be consumed by it like Bangkok, is about to approve a five-year cleanup plan. Some 1,500 large industrial firms and more than 32,000 small industries are based in this city of 7 million, and they don’t filter their emissions. The new plan […]

Oil's Not Well With Gore

Vice Pres. Al Gore today plans to announce that he will ban any new offshore oil and gas drilling along the California and Florida coasts if he is elected, a controversial move that would surely anger oil companies, some of which have already paid $1.2 billion for drilling rights off California’s coast that would be […]

Bark Lacks Bite

Planting vast numbers of trees may stall the process of climate change for a few years but will not help solve the problem, according to research conducted by scientists for the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and published in New Scientist magazine. Forests absorb carbon dioxide, the most prevalent greenhouse gas, but the new […]

Hill's Angel

In a landmark decision, a federal judge ruled yesterday that controversial mountaintop-removal mining operations cannot bury streams under tons of waste rock and earth. Valley fills caused by such mining violate the federal Clean Water Act as well as federal and West Virginia mining rules, the judge ruled. In mountaintop removal, operators use explosives to […]

The Rich Don't Just Get Richer — They Get Cancer, Too

Environmental factors may be partially responsible for elevated breast cancer rates in Newton, Mass., a Boston suburb, according to a new study funded by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Women living in areas of Newton where breast cancer rates were higher than usual were more likely to be affluent and well-educated, and they reported […]

Brown and Browner

Clinton administration officials who held a “town meeting” in Seattle yesterday with the intent of assuaging environmentalists’ concerns and anger over global trade issues met with little success. EPA chief Carol Browner, Frank Loy, undersecretary of state for global affairs, Ian Bowles of the White House Council on Economic Quality, and Dorothy Dwoskin, assistant U.S. […]

Bruce on the Loose

Americans can expect to see more areas in the western U.S. protected as national monuments in the coming year, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said yesterday. Such designations can be made without congressional approval; Pres. Clinton angered western politicians in 1996 by creating the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah. Babbitt spoke at a congressional hearing […]