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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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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, […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • Well Hello, Dalai

    Ten days into the year 2000, as the media were abuzz with the merger of America Online and Time Warner, the Internet wafted to me the Dalai Lama’s millennium address. It’s a strange global info-world that brings those two pieces of information to one’s attention on the same day. The Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama […]

  • Sierra Club Can't Take a Leak

    A memo circulated recently around the Sierra Club‘s offices highlighted the “Top Ten” reasons the group should not endorse Vice Pres. Al Gore. The memo, written by Sierra Club board member Michael Dorsey and unearthed by the Washington Times last week, says: “Does Vice President Gore really care about nature? Does he care about protecting […]

  • A Republican berates his party for abandoning the environment

    Republicans are handing Democrats a green Y2K. So far, GOP presidential contenders have all but conceded the environmental issue to Al Gore and Bill Bradley. Rather than fight for the conservation mantle that was once the GOP’s, they seem content to not ask and not tell when it comes to the nation’s land, air, water, […]