Latest Articles

Don't Pave Paradise — Put Up a Parking Garage

Parking lots are coming under fire from environmentalists. The lots can’t absorb rain, so water runs off the pavement, carrying pollution and causing erosion. At the same time, the lots absorb heat from sunlight, releasing it at night and raising temperatures in urban areas from six to 12 degrees compared to nearby rural areas. The […]

Al "Soccer Mom" Gore

Suburban voters will be key in the 2000 presidential election, and candidates are courting the suburbs with different approaches. For example, Al Gore is pitching green-tinted issues that appeal almost exclusively to suburbanites — suburban sprawl, traffic congestion, open space preservation. But rather than framing the issues as environmental, he’s connecting them to families, speaking […]

NWF Offers to Foot Buffalo Bill

The National Wildlife Federation yesterday offered to foot the bill if ranchers near Yellowstone National Park will vaccinate their cattle against brucellosis. Bison are sometimes carriers of the disease, and when bison wander out of the park they are often shot out of fear that cattle will be infected. No case of Yellowstone bison infecting […]

News Flash: Climate Change Changes Climate

Climate change seems to be affecting the frequency of some established weather patterns, according to a new study published in the April 29 issue of the journal Nature. Researchers studying northern winters have found that a weather pattern favoring milder winters was two to three times more likely to arise in the mid-1990s than around […]

Mike Matz, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance

Mike Matz is executive director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, which is pushing to preserve 9.1 million acres of Utah canyon country as federally protected wilderness. Monday, 3 May 1999 SALT LAKE CITY This week should be interesting. Our grassroots activists strut their stuff in support of wilderness at public meetings hosted by the […]

The Great North American Carbon Sink — Maybe

“Aha! We knew it!” a number of conservative columnists have been crowing lately. “Greenhouse, schmeenhouse, go right on driving those sports utility vehicles.” The cause of their excitement is an article published in Science magazine, one of the most prestigious places a scientific article can be published, claiming that the North American continent is a […]

Occidental Deaths?

The 5,000 members of the U’wa Indian tribe in Columbia have threatened to jump off a cliff to their deaths if Occidental Petroleum Corp. drills for oil in their ancestral territory. During the past week, tribal leaders and hundreds of activists have demonstrated outside Occidental’s Los Angeles headquarters and its annual shareholders meeting in Santa […]

Delhi Order: Hold the Smog

India’s Supreme Court last week issued a landmark ruling requiring the government to crack down on auto pollution in New Delhi. New cars sold in the New Delhi area will have to meet European emission standards, and a strict limit on car sales will be put in place. Government officials say that more than half […]

Peking into a Cleaner Future

China will let as many as 14 large state-owned coal mines go bankrupt this year and 400,000 miners lose their jobs as part of a plan to reduce financial losses at coal mines and curb pollution caused by coal. China also has plans to shut down 25,800 small coal mines and reduce overall coal output […]

News Flash: Oil Industry Whines Again

Pres. Clinton proposed tough federal rules on Saturday to control pollution from cars and sport utility vehicles, ending an exemption that has allowed SUVs and light trucks to emit several times more smog-causing gases per mile than cars. The decision will force oil companies to slash sulfur content in fuel and automakers to design cleaner […]