Articles by Grist staff

Oooo, Ahhh, Good News for Tribe

The U’wa Indian tribe in Colombia, which had threatened to commit mass suicide if oil exploration was conducted on its ancestral lands, has been granted a large new reservation in a region believed to have significant oil reserves. Occidental Petroleum was granted exploration rights in a 500,000-acre block in 1992, and more than half of […]

Fringe Benefits

The federal government will pay a fringe religious group $13 million for 9,300 acres of land surrounding Yellowstone National Park. The area will provide additional grazing grounds for herds of American bison from the park, and migration corridors for grizzly bears, elk, antelope, bighorn sheep, and other wildlife. Enviros had feared that the religious group’s […]

Refined Tastes

Construction is slated to begin next year on a “bio-refinery” in California that will convert thousands of tons of orchard prunings, rice straw, and other agricultural wastes into ethanol, which could be used as a gasoline additive in place of MTBE. In other clean energy news, sales of geothermal heat pumps jumped 20 percent in […]

Mediterranean Sea-ing Stars

The Mediterranean Sea is facing an ecological disaster if the nations along its shores don’t curb their polluting ways, according to a Greenpeace report released last Thursday. Greenpeace is pushing countries to ratify the Barcelona Convention, an agreement on protection of the sea, before the biannual Mediterranean Ministerial Meeting to be held this October. The […]