While the Bush administration works feverishly to remove species like the grizzly bear, gray wolf and bald eagle from the federal endangered species list, an upstart environmental group is petitioning the federal government to add the beleaguered polar bear to the list.
The day after the Kyoto Protocol went into effect last week without U.S. participation, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels announced plans to lead a city-by-city effort to limit carbon dioxide emissions in accordance with the terms of the international treaty rejected by the Bush administration.
Thanks to an international network of local volunteers, now there’s a cheap and convenient place to dispose of useful junk while promoting re-use: the Internet. Freecycle.org is a website that links people who want to discard household belongings to people in their area who want or need them. The only rules: everything offered must be free, legal and appropriate for all ages—sorry, no bongs or porn.
Along with outlawing plastic bags and secondhand cars, Bhutan, the Himalayan kingdom nestled in the clouds between China and India, has become the first country in the world to completely ban tobacco sales.
Don’t even try trashing that half-eaten salad at the University of Oregon’s (UO) Annual Folk Festival, the University of Vermont’s (UVM) Orientation Picnic or Humboldt State University’s Spring Fair. The trash stations are manned, making sure you recycle everything from your food-smeared paper plate to soy sauce-soaked chopsticks.
Nearly a century after zoning was introduced to prevent the ravages of uncontrolled land development, the concept is moving offshore to protect ocean resources. From Canada’s Scotian Shelf to the state waters of Massachusetts and the entire ocean territory of New Zealand, ocean managers are increasingly looking to large-scale zoning as a way to manage emerging conflicts and plan for future uses of the sea.
In New Orleans, environmental justice activists lead bus tours into the heart of "cancer alley"—the riverside stretch of power plants, oil refineries and other industries that harms the health of so many Crescent City residents. They talk about the Bucket Brigades, a community organizing effort that’s gone global, defending neighborhoods worldwide from industrial pollution.
Scientists studying the aftermath of the Larsen-B ice shelf collapse in Antarctica say it will very likely have unpleasant implications for the rest of us. The collapse of the Larsen-B and its smaller northern neighbors, the Larsen-A and Wordie Ice shelves, in the face of warmer summer temperatures has caused the vast glaciers and ice sheets behind them to begin sliding into the sea at a remarkable pace.
A distant relative of the common domestic ferret, the wild black-footed ferret of North America is endangered, in large part because of the mass die-off of its main food source—prairie dogs—at the hands of poisoning, shootings and diseases (see "Open Season on Varmints," cover story, July/August 2004).
Twenty years after an Indian Union Carbide plant leaked poisonous gas and killed 20,000 people (see "Dumping on India," <I>In Brief</I>, September/October 1996), Bhopal residents continue to drink contaminated water, suffer from disease and bear children with birth defects.
