Climate Politics
All Stories
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How Will the West Be Won?
In our last column, we promised to put the presidential campaign on the back burner and take a look at some of the key House and Senate races likely to decide control of the 107th Congress, as well some of the competitive gubernatorial contests. Instead of attempting to cover the entire country in one column […]
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Primary Colors
The presidential primary contests came thundering to a halt this week and, on the Republican side, the environment appears to have played a major role in helping George W. Bush beat back John McCain. The height of the GOP battle was marked by bitter acrimony over a television ad paid for by Bush supporters that […]
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New Mexico ranchers are howling over reintroduction efforts
Two years after the first 11 Mexican gray wolves were released to much fanfare in the Apache National Forest of southeastern Arizona, and a year after an additional 22 wolves were freed in 1998, only seven remain in the wild. A lone wolf. Photo: J. & K. Hollingsworth, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The problems […]
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Greenslinging
The environment — oh-so-neglected for much of the presidential campaign (as we noted in past columns) — has bubbled up to the top of the issue mix in recent days. While the Republican battle royale between Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Arizona Sen. John McCain still steals most of the ink and gets the […]
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Why we need to push livestock off public lands
Whatever might be said of the arid West, it “ain’t no cow country.” That’s what Henry Fonda, playing Wyatt Earp, said of Arizona in John Ford’s 1946 film My Darling Clementine. That’s also the bottom line of a book I’ve written, The Western Range Revisited: Removing Livestock from Public Lands to Conserve Native Biodiversity. In […]
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Marching to a Different Beat
Enviros of different stripes disagree on a lot of issues, but many have lamented in unison the recent absence of a full-time environmental writer at the New York Times. Got a hot story in need of some serious national ink? Whom do you call? USA Today? The news mags? The networks? Sure — you call […]
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Playing Chicken in Kiev
Ukraine plans this year to shut down the Chernobyl nuclear plant, site of the world’s worst nuclear accident, Ukranian Pres. Leonid Kuchma said Saturday. But Kuchma told U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, who was in Ukraine for a two-day visit, that the plant will close only after the U.S. and other industrialized nations hammer out […]
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McCain Is on the Money
I’ve had the fun of voting in six New Hampshire primaries, but this one I had to sit out. I’ve just moved three miles across the river and become a Vermonter. It was strange to watch all the foofuraw from across the state boundary. I still bumped into the candidates as they cruised the valley, […]
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On With the No-Show
Arizona Sen. John McCain (R) may have said it best at a rally Sunday afternoon in the postcard-perfect New Hampshire town of Peterborough. Asked what he planned to do to improve the environment, McCain mused briefly about convening a panel of scientists to figure out once and for all whether global warming exists, and then […]
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Bill's Bad Week
One of the headlines in the Des Moines Register’s “Life” section on Saturday read: “Muckraker Comes to Town.” Well, they got the headline right, anyway. The story referred to filmmaker Michael Moore, not this reporter, who is also in town following the presidential candidates around as they madly scour Iowa in search of votes in […]
