Consumers already outraged at high gas prices this summer have one more reason to fume. Last week’s announcement by UK-based BP that it was shutting down Alaska’s largest North Slope oil field after discovering dangerous corrosion along its feeder pipeline has driven prices at the pump to new record highs in some parts of the U.S. The oil field in question accounts for about eight percent of all domestic oil production.
Environmentalists are calling the new campaign to remove Yosemite National Park’s O"Shaughnessy Dam and restore the majestic canyon of the Hetch Hetchy Valley "a piece of unfinished work that John Muir left to his heirs." The battle over whether to dam Hetch Hetchy for drinking water and hydropower a century ago transformed Muir’s Sierra Club into a political force to be reckoned with, even though dam proponents won out.
You just can’t win with "progressives" who sometimes seem to want to fight each other because they can’t win very many of the real battles. We have a world to win, and they want to get all lathered up about "junk" mail and "spam?"
In the wake of peace accords signed last year, the remote and wildlife-rich rainforests of Indonesia are being felled faster than ever as former rebels trade their guns for chainsaws and an already booming timber black market goes gangbusters. Only the Congo basin and Amazon have more tropical forest than the islands that make up Indonesia, which have lost about 40 percent of their rainforests in the last 50 years.
Last week, U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman announced that his department plans to invest as much as $250 million in alternative energy over the next five years. The idea, he said, is to spur American companies and universities to find more efficient methods of creating automotive fuels such as ethanol derived from renewable sources, including soybeans, wood chips and agricultural waste.
In the latest bad news related to human-induced climate change, scientists last week reported bottom fish and crabs washing up dead on Oregon beaches are the latest victims of global warming, which is reportedly causing oxygen-deprived "dead zones" along a 70-mile stretch of Oregon’s Pacific coast.
A federal judge last week temporarily halted construction on a $320 million irrigation project by the Army Corps of Engineers in a region of Arkansas where birders recently reported sightings of the ivory-billed woodpecker long thought to be extinct. Responding to a lawsuit filed by concerned environmental groups, U.S. District Judge William Wilson ruled that credible accounts of the bird’s presence in Arkansas’ Big Woods Preserve in 2004 called into question the environmental impact assessments used to greenlight the irrigation project.
In some places, gold is hardly worth a nickel. Places like Oracle, Arizona, where tall tales still root deep. Because, in the West, land is gold–land is why the people come. The Sonoran Desert shrivels year by year as parcels are cashed in for top dollar. But with an annual population influx of 200,000, as 19,000 new roofs are raised, the land simply cannot keep up with the Joneses.
Surprisingly enough, the newest frontline in the campaign to protect America’s homeland is the battle against invasive species. Researchers at Carnegie Melon University and the Smithsonian Institution are spearheading consulting projects for the Office of Homeland Security (OHS) analyzing the contents of insect traps set around America’s largest ports of entry in order to determine how threatening some of the creepy crawlies coming into the U.S. just might be.
In a surprise to many environmentalists, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a proposed bilateral treaty between the U.S. and Russia to protect dwindling populations of polar bears in the far north. The treaty, first conceived in 2000, sets quotas on polar bear hunting by native peoples and calls for the establishment of an international commission to suggest ways to protect habitat for the massive mammals.
