Before this spring, Yosemite visitors hopped out of their vehicles in a cloud of exhaust smoke and gazed up at the gossamer falls from the cracked asphalt, the smell of sequoias and the sound of cascading water barely discernible. That visitor experience has been relegated to park lore with the completion this spring of a new transit plan that includes reforestation of the old parking lot, a shuttle stop, and a fleet of 18 hybrid buses.
The U.S. auto industry has its own peculiar logic. The thinking goes like this: Big SUVs have sold really well for us in the past. They’re really cheap to make, but we can charge a lot for them. By relying on mammoth land yachts we don’t have to worry about making cars that can compete with what’s coming out of Europe and Japan.
With high-grade marijuana now bringing in even higher profits than methamphetamine, and post-9/11 border security tighter than ever, Mexican marijuana cartels are digging their heels deep into American soil, most notably in wilderness areas on public lands in California, according to Joe Robinson of the Los Angeles Times. "Parts of Sequoia [National Park]
are no-go zones for visitors and park rangers during the April-to-October growing season, when drug lords cultivate pot on an agribusiness-scale," writes Robinson.
After a speech last month in San Francisco, an audience member asked Collapse author Jared Diamond if the threat of global warming augured a renewed role for nuclear power–as has been suggested recently by such environmental luminaries as Stewart Brand and James Lovelock. To the surprise of the audience, Diamond said he agreed: "To deal with our energy problems we need everything available to us, including nuclear power." Echoing the concerns of others, Diamond added that it should be done carefully "like they do in France" so as to avoid accidents.
No doubt the age of commercial/industrial fishing, which dawned in the 1950s when large offshore trawlers and at-sea processing facilities first plied the open ocean, has taken its toll on a number of fish species. Atlantic Cod, for example, once teemed off the coast of New England and sustained millions of settlers and then immigrants.
Indeed, the Kyoto Protocol—an international accord signed by 141 countries agreeing to scale back carbon dioxide (CO2) and other “greenhouse” gas emissions—has gone into effect now despite non-involvement by the U.S.
Laurie Garrett, the only reporter to win all three of journalism’s big "P" awards (the Peabody, the Polk and the Pulitzer) is extraordinarily well positioned to tell the frightening and emerging story of avian flu. The author of two major public health books, Betrayal of Trust and The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World out of Balance, she was a science correspondent at National Public Radio before joining the science-writing staff of Newsday in 1988.
As analysts continue to pore over the details of the new omnibus energy bill Congress approved and President Bush signed last week, many are questioning the wisdom of providing numerous fossil fuel subsidies to industries that are making windfall profits. Indeed, Congress has asked for tens of billions of dollars to help nuclear, oil and coal companies that are hardly ailing as surging fuel prices throughout the U.S. and abroad generate record earnings.
"Biofuels" such as ethanol and biodiesel account for only about three percent of all transportation fuel sold in the U.S., but they are coming on strong, with domestic consumption doubling just since 2001. With a little extra help from Congress in the form of strong biofuel incentives in the new omnibus energy bill, ethanol and biodiesel could eventually emerge as key players in the high-stakes fuel wars.
One thing I’ve learned from all the inclement weather we’ve been experiencing of late is that there is no force more powerful in nature than nature itself. From Hurricane Andrew to New England’s Nor’Easters to huge snowstorms in the West, when Mother Nature speaks in these ways it serves to remind me that she will endure, with or without our inputs (be they positive or negative)–indeed with or without us, period.
