Currents

With high-grade marijuana now bringing in even higher profits than methamphetamine, and post-9/11 border security tighter than ever, Mexican marijuana cartels are digging their heels deep into American soil, most notably in wilderness areas on public lands in California, according to Joe Robinson of the Los Angeles Times. "Parts of Sequoia [National Park]
are no-go zones for visitors and park rangers during the April-to-October growing season, when drug lords cultivate pot on an agribusiness-scale," writes Robinson.

The U.S. auto industry has its own peculiar logic. The thinking goes like this: Big SUVs have sold really well for us in the past. They’re really cheap to make, but we can charge a lot for them. By relying on mammoth land yachts we don’t have to worry about making cars that can compete with what’s coming out of Europe and Japan.

"Biofuels" such as ethanol and biodiesel account for only about three percent of all transportation fuel sold in the U.S., but they are coming on strong, with domestic consumption doubling just since 2001. With a little extra help from Congress in the form of strong biofuel incentives in the new omnibus energy bill, ethanol and biodiesel could eventually emerge as key players in the high-stakes fuel wars.

As analysts continue to pore over the details of the new omnibus energy bill Congress approved and President Bush signed last week, many are questioning the wisdom of providing numerous fossil fuel subsidies to industries that are making windfall profits. Indeed, Congress has asked for tens of billions of dollars to help nuclear, oil and coal companies that are hardly ailing as surging fuel prices throughout the U.S. and abroad generate record earnings.

Laurie Garrett, the only reporter to win all three of journalism’s big "P" awards (the Peabody, the Polk and the Pulitzer) is extraordinarily well positioned to tell the frightening and emerging story of avian flu. The author of two major public health books, Betrayal of Trust and The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World out of Balance, she was a science correspondent at National Public Radio before joining the science-writing staff of Newsday in 1988.

Imagine walking into a store an not having to stand dumbfounded in front of rows of laudry detergents trying to figure out which brands are best for the environment, let alone your wallet. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could grab any product off the shelf and not have to wonder whether its recycled, recyclable or contains phosphates?

Environmentally speaking, the test of the new Clinton Administration may well lie in how it handles a crisis of both national and global proportions that, ironically, has an Arkansas connection.

The ear-shattering sounds of New York City–blaring car horns, piercing ambulance sirens, thundering subway trains, roaring pneumatic drills, and the noise generated by millions of people huddled together in limited spaces–have become legendary. Visitors are stunned by this cacophony and wonder how residents tolerate it. "We can’t and we won’t remain silent and longer," said Carmins SantaMaria, founder of Big Screechers, a New York anti-noise group credited with forcingthe City’s Transit Authority to lower its din.

As the modern world encroaches upon indigenous cultures around the world, native young people, sept up in the tide of seductive media and consumer goods, are increasingly trading in traditional lifestyles for modern ones. Unfortunately, in casting aside their rich heritage, they may also be losing stores of valuable undocumented knowledge. No wonder–all the while the WEstern world has been labelling them primitve while quietly appropriating their knowledge, particularly about medicinal plants, offering neither acknowledgement nor compensation.

Environmentalists in the United States, in collaboration with former Soviets, are working to develop economically sustainable agriculture and tourism enterprises in Siberia’s vast Lake Baikal region. If they are successful, the world’s oldest, deepest and largest lake could become a prototype of environmentally sound development for the rest of the former Soviet Union.