Dear EarthTalk: What is the “Roadless Rule” and why are environmentalists in favor of it? —Eliza Carmody, Marysville, WA The U.S. Forest Service manages America”s national forests for “multiple uses,” not just recreation and preservation. And over the past 50 years, one of those primary “uses” has been resource extraction, whereby taxpayer-subsidized leases have been […]
It hasn’t been an easy road for the <a href="http://www.capewind.org/"> Cape Wind Project</a>, an ambitious privately funded (with public subsidies) attempt to build a large, 130-turbine wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod, in Nantucket Sound. But the latest attempt to scuttle the project—an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act introduced by Senator John Warner (R-VA) has been <A HREF="http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2004/10/08/tough_language_dropped_in_cape_wind_farm_plan/">withdrawn</A>.
With the Russian government finally agreeing to sign on, the Kyoto Protocol on Global Warming will likely go into effect next year, despite lack of participation by the United States. The as-yet unimplemented 1997 United Nations treaty regulates the emissions of greenhouse gases by signatory nations.
For now, environmentalists have declared victory in a campaign to prevent natural gas drilling along a hotly contested 100-mile stretch of Montana’s Rocky Mountain Front south of Glacier National Park. Last week, the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) suspended work on an environmental impact study for the Front’s Blackleaf region, where a Canadian company has applied for a gas-drilling lease.
As mercury pollution from industrial facilities becomes more pervasive in both ocean and freshwater environments, consumers need to limit their intake of both freshwater fish and seafood, whether they catch it themselves or buy it in a supermarket or restaurant.
Paper usage is at an all-time high around the world, and the average office worker prints and copies through some 10,000 pages every year. Hopes that the advent of electronic communications would drastically cut paper consumption
When the Bush administration issued an important change in policy recently, virtually acknowledging that global warming is real, it was news to President George W. Bush, who was unaware that any new program had been announced. Earlier, he had dismissed another global warming report from his own administration as "from the bureaucracy."
Office buildings are indeed the top energy guzzlers among commercial buildings in the United States, head and shoulders above retail and service establishments and even manufacturing facilities.
Seven to 10 million koalas inhabited Australia at the time of white settlement two centuries ago. Today only about 100,000 remain. Native to the eucalyptus forests of Australia’s eastern seaboard, koalas were hunted extensively by the continent’s first European settlers
Death on the modern factory farm assembly line is not as neat and clean as it should be. "They blink. They make noises," Ramon Moreno <a href="http://www.hfa.org/hot_topic/wash_post.html">told</a> the Washington Post. "The head moves, the eyes are wide and looking around." Moreno, a slaughterhouse worker in Washington State, says that on a bad day, many of the cows that reach him are still alive and even conscious, even after having gone through the "tail cutter," the "belly ripper" or the "hide puller." As Moreno puts it, "They die piece by piece."
