Following an international plea by a coalition of 60 environmental groups concerned about the health of marine ecosystems, the Bush administration last week joined dozens of other countries in calling on the United Nations to institute an international moratorium on unregulated high seas bottom trawling. Scientists say the fishing practice is destroying some of the world’s rarest and most sensitive ocean habitats.

Frances Moore Lappé says her new book Democracy’s Edge (Jossey-Bass, 2006) "is about hope—not sappy, wishful thinking but hope grounded in a grasp of the root causes of spreading misery. I propose that we are in the midst of an extraordinary historical moment—one in which anti-democratic forces appear to be in ascendance while at the same time, invisible to most of us, a powerful current is stirring that may well take us to democracy’s next historical stage. I cast aside the gloomy view that Americans are hopelessly divided, left vs. right and secular vs. religious, and uncover widespread shared sentiment and common democratic innovation across these supposed barriers."

A much-anticipated and long-overdue study by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) released last week concludes that large wind energy projects can move forward as long as developers take precautions against interfering with military radar installations. A lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club in June accused DoD of instituting a near-moratorium on the construction of new wind power facilities by failing to complete the study, which Congress passed last year as part of the National Defense Authorization Act. Without the study, at least a dozen wind farm projects were stalled, encompassing more than 600 individual windmills and capable of producing 1,000 megawatts of power.

In the early 1970s, the "Project Tiger" conservation program launched in India resulted in tough laws to prevent Bengal tiger hunting and trade, and created a system of tiger reserves, now numbering 27. But now more than 30 years later, less than 6,000 tigers are estimated to be left in the wild. Environmentalists in India say the big cat will be extinct within a handful of years, due to unchecked poaching to serve the thriving black market for tiger body parts (used in traditional Chinese and Asian medicine). They’re calling for stricter prohibition and harsher enforcement, and have even suggested using the army to protect the tigers.