Federal agents and environmental activists are working scared, thanks to physical threats from right-wing extremists backed up by sympathetic local officials. Over the past 18 months, anti-government vigilantes, from the militias to conservative "Wise Use" groups, have threatened and intimidated their perceived enemies in Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, Texas, and Idaho.
After Barbara Niehauser put new white siding on her Cincinnati, Ohio, home three years ago, it soon showed signs of blackening – again. "My Neighbor asked,’Whats wrong with your house?’" Niehauser recalls. "I told her, ‘It’s the buses.’" Belching diesel buses stopping and starting right in front of Niehauser’s house used to emit murky clouds of exhaust.
Amid the ultra-hip demimonde of New York City’s nightclub scene, Larry Bloch has established Wetland Preserve as a home for satisfying live rock and roll shows – and the only such venue for the environmentally-concerned. Dozens of activist flyers covering the walls and a VW bus full of eco-conscious paraphernalia top club-goers off to the nature of the place. Above the threshold, a sign reads, "We Labour to Birth Our Dance with the Earth."
Devestating bombs. Defoliating chemicals. Nuclear wase. Is a "green" military possible? Probably not, but from restoring sand dunes to "bioremediating" contamindated soils with turkey manure, the U.S. Department of Defense has started to make enviornmental conservation part of its mission.
Some believe you can tell a lot about a person by the bag they carry. Purses, messenger bags, backpacks and luggage made from recycled materials and sustainable fibers don’t just make a statement about their owners’ fashion sense.
Sure, you might know the origin of that organic muenster cheese you have in the fridge but do you know if the wooden cutting board you’ve been chopping it up on came from ethically harvested materials?
"It’s very, very hard working in developing countries," says Andrew Steer, director of the environment department of the World Bank, the international development fund that gives loans for reconstruction and infrastructure projects. Steer could have added that it’s no picnic at home either. With a Republican Congress to whom all foreign aid is at best a frivolity and at worst a creeping socialism – and with environmentalists not generally falling over themselves to give the bank the benefit of the doubt – Steer is in no doubt about the challanges ahead.
In a unique approach to land coservation, the citizens of Peninsula Township, Michigan voted to do something that most Americans would consider unthinkable:they raised their own taxes.
The 1988 murder of Francisco Alves Mendes Filho, better known as Chico Mendes, in Brazil’s Amazon River basin was a major international story. This all-but-invisible man who worked extracting latex from rubber trees and organized a union deep in the world’s biggest rainforest wound up influencing global environmental policy and made headlines around the world when he was gunned down.
If you don’t trust the environmentalists, you may want to listen to the doctors. Mount Sinai Medical School has just released a study that, in its scientific way, indicts the Bush administration’s mercury policy as not only harming children but (conservatives take note) damages the economy.
