Don Carlos Mendez and the Culture of Fire
Don Carlos Mendez: One Guatemalan’s Fight Against Slash-and-Burn Farming
Fair Game
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 […]
Brain Drain
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 […]
Subliminal Messages
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 […]
Terminator III
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 […]
Countdown to Six Billion
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 […]
Now We Are Six
In October, World Population Will Reach Six Billion. Can the Earth Carry the Load?
Immigration
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 […]
Population and the Press
Read Nothing About It From the viewpoint of the American press, last February’s Hague Forum on population, a follow-up to the landmark Cairo conference five years ago, was largely a stage set for Hillary Rodham Clinton to look senatorial. Very few U.S. media outlets, with the notable exception of CNN (Turner Broadcasting is also producing […]
Uprooted
The Worldwide Plant Crisis is Accelerating Janet Marinelli trekked more than 13 miles a day along the ocean beaches of Long Island in search of the wild amaranth, a plant everyone assumed had been extinct for 40 years until, out of the blue, news reports started coming in that the plant had reappeared in, of […]