Oceans in Peril

Since the beginning of life on EArth, the oceans have been the ecological keel of the biosphere. The marine environment, from the brackish waters where rivers flow into the sea to the deepest depths, constitutes roughly 90 percent of the world’s inhabitated space. The oceans cover nearly 71 percent of the Earth’s surface, and their deepest trenches plunge lower below sea level than Mount Everest climbs above it. They hold 97 percent of the water on Earth, more than 10,000 times as much water as all the world’s freshwater lakes and rivers combined.

Cement: Hazardous to Your Health?

It sounds implausible: foreign-owned companies bruning hazardous waste in the United States, some of it imported, generating millions of dollars while poisoning citizens. And yet, at about 30 sites nationwide, cement is being made by burning hundreds of thousands of tons of liquid hazardous waste per year in unpermitted cement kilns. The waste, which originates, from the plastic petrochemical, pesticide and other industries, can contain arsenic, lead, cadmium, mercury and a host of other toxins which, when burned, send heavy metals and dioxins up into the air, down into unlined pits, and even out into bags of cement sold to unsuspecting consumers.

Crude Awakening in Ecuador

Delfin Payaguajo of the Sekoya tribe in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador says his family’s health and traditional way of life have been ruined by Texaco. The U.S. oild giant has pumped a billion barrels of crude oil out of the Ecuadoran rainforest–one of the world’s most biologicially diverse–and left behin and ecological horror show.

Texas Air Wars

From the air, Gibraltar Chemical Resources, Inc. resembles a ballfield clearing in the yellow pine forests of east Texas, scraped down to red dirt and crowded with steel sheds and smooth white cannister tanks. It lies in rural Winona, where many people raise cows or rose bushes for a living. Started in 1982, Gibraltar now handles 25 million gallons of hazardous waste a year from such sources as Fortune 500 electronics companies, small paint shops and U.S. military bases. It recycles solvents, mixe other chemicals as fuel for cement kilns, and pumps fluid wastes almost a mile down and injection well. Government agencies approve of Gibraltar’s work, but some townspeople accuse the company of chemical warfare.

Selling Seals For Sex

In the early 1970s, "Save the Seals" became the anthem of the nascent environmental movement, and the harp seal pup, with its bottomless black eyes and snow white innocence, became the movement’s mascot. Environmentalists succeeded in virtually shutting down the commercial baby seal hunt in Canada, but now older harp seals have a new price on their heads–and possibly their penises–as the next target for the Asian aphrodisiac market.

Matthew R. Simmons: A Diminished Future for Saudi Oil

When Matt Simmons hears someone describe him as a "Bush energy advisor," he winces. Yes, he talks to President Bush about oil sometimes, but what he has to say isn’t colored by partisan politics. Simmons wants everyone to realize the energy crunch we’re in, and that’s why he wrote Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy</I> (Wiley, $24.95), which will be published in July.

One-Fifth of Bird Species Flying Toward Extinction

Following its annual survey of avian life around the world, the conservation organization BirdLife International says that one-fifth of all bird species are facing extinction in the short term as a result of habitat loss and introduced pests.

World’s Mayors Sign Global Warming Mitigation Plan

Mayors from 70 of the world’s largest cities gathered in San Francisco last week to sign onto the Urban Environmental Accords–a municipal version of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change–in the latest example of municipalities working to tackle global warming to counter inaction by the United States, the world’s largest emitter of the so-called "greenhouse gas" carbon dioxide.

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