United States
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Pounding the Pavement
3 million — number of acres of open space developed each year in the U.S. 40 — percentage increase in acreage of developed land in the U.S. between 1982 and 1997 1891 — year in which the first road was paved in the U.S. 2.4 million — number of miles of paved public roads in […]
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A record pace of extinction threatens American flora and fauna
"The last quarter of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th has been called the most destructive period in the history of American wildlife," writes David Wilcove, senior ecologist with Environmental Defense, in his perspicacious book, The Condor's Shadow. But he makes the case that the fin de siècle era has a daunting rival in our current age, thanks to the booming economy and rising human population in the U.S. "At stake this time is a far greater number of species, facing a more diverse and powerful set of threats," Wilcove warns.
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Yanking His Cheney
Environmentalists are wasting no time in aiming their fire at former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, who this morning became George W. Bush‘s running mate on the GOP presidential ticket. Enviros are criticizing Cheney’s voting record in the House — he got only a 13 percent career approval rating from the League of Conservation Voters […]
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I saw the best wolves of my generation destroyed by madness
Gray days for wolves. Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Protection for the gray wolf, totem animal for the Clinton administration’s conservation legacy, is likely to be ratcheted down from endangered to threatened, thanks to a proposal unveiled last week by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Its announcement was a fitting coda to eight […]
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Should campaign finance reform become the next big green issue?
"Politics," said Will Rogers, "has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get beat with." And that was in the 1930s.
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Higher prices at the pumps are a good thing — really
That whining sound you hear is American consumers (formerly known as American citizens) fretting over the rising cost of gasoline. Pump and circumstance. The current national average price of gas — $1.41 per gallon — is a full 25 cents higher than it was merely four months ago, and analysts predict that the price could […]
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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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Do you know where your salmon comes from?
Thirty percent of the world's salmon now come from hatcheries, but wild fish account for only another twenty to thirty percent. Almost all of those wild fish come from waters around Alaska and British Columbia, northern waters where runs are mostly intact. These are the waters from which we harvest volumes comparable to those native people caught for thousands of years, that is, in those places largely unmanaged. The biggest share of the world's salmon consumption, however -- now forty to fifty percent -- comes from farmed fish, salmon raised and fed artificially in net pens their entire lives.
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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, […]
