Articles by Grist staff

Radio-inactivity

The Pentagon dramatically underestimated the amount of radioactivity to which U.S. Armed Forces members were exposed during Cold War-era atomic testing and explosions, a National Academy of Sciences panel announced yesterday. However, the panel found that the “ionizing radiation” to which the majority of the veterans was exposed — either during testing or in the […]

Have a Cow, Man

The state of South Dakota is leading the nation in the Partners for Fish and Wildlife project, a federal conservation program designed to help farmers and ranchers reduce their negative impact on native prairie ecosystems. Conversion of wild grasslands to croplands is a major environmental problem in South Dakota and other prairies states. Under the […]

For Never Wild

A coalition of environmentalists has sued the U.S. Department of the Interior over its recent decision to prevent the Bureau of Land Management from considering any more Western land for wilderness designation. Areas set aside for protection under the 1964 Wilderness Act are protected from motorized recreation and most forms of development. In 1996, however, […]

Respect Your Elders

U.S. EPA Administrator Christie Whitman announced yesterday that the Bush administration put the “citizen” back in “senior citizen” by ending its practice of devaluing the lives of older people when calculating the costs and benefits of environmental regulations. Nicknamed the “senior discount,” the highly controversial computational method involved valuing the lives of those older than […]