The UN’s Prescription for Family Planning As Hillary Rodham Clinton opened her remarks at the Hague International Forum conference on population and women’s reproductive health last February, she turned to the woman who had introduced her, Dr. Nafis Sadik, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). “I believe that the world owes her […]
Native Rights and Water Fights in Albuquerque Sonny Weahkee, a young Navajo with long flowing hair and a very gentle manner, pointed to the faint painted image of a dancing man in the volcanic rock of West Mesa, in a quiet national monument that seemed worlds away from the bustle of nearby Albuquerque. The images, […]
Don Carlos Mendez: One Guatemalan’s Fight Against Slash-and-Burn Farming
As More Women Take Up Hunting, Is This Deadly Sport Becoming More "Ethical"? Is there such a thing as “ethical hunting”? A growing number of outdoor sportsmen (and, increasingly, women) say there is, and they decry the tendency to lump all hunters together as thrill killers motivated by bloodlust. “We’ve been tolerant of the negative […]
Can Britain’s Mad Cow Disease Come Here? At first, Doug McEwen forgot things—like, in the summer of 1998, his phone number and address. The symptoms got worse, but doctors still couldn’t find anything wrong. Finally, the otherwise healthy 30-year-old quit his job, since he felt he could no longer perform well. Six months later, when […]
Primetime TV Programs Educate Viewers on the Environment A carton of recycled copier paper sits on the counter of the ER nurses’ station. The cast of Friends pours milk out of a reusable glass bottle. Law and Order’s Detective Briscoe asks his lieutenant to guess what the blue fleece found at the crime scene is […]
Are Sterile Seeds a Threat to Small Farmers? They escaped from a laboratory in the dusty confines of Lubbock, Texas. But now they plan to colonize the world. If a newly-patented seed technology is on the market by 2005, many of the new millennium’s crops will carry an intentional genetic defect: the seed they produce […]
Why is it that we have so much trouble making the connection between runaway population growth and environmental degradation? It seems plain that the issues that matter most to us—biodiversity, urban sprawl, loss of rainforests and old-growth trees, air and water pollution—have their roots in the incredibly successful propagation of the human species. And yet […]
In October, World Population Will Reach Six Billion. Can the Earth Carry the Load?
Two Views Melanie Mitsue Okamoto, campaign organizer, Political Ecology Group: In the past decade, the anti-immigrant lobby, which includes groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Carrying Capacity Network, has jumped on the “green” bandwagon to invent a new form of scapegoating that targets immigrants as a cause of our environmental […]
