Millions of Americans were shocked to find out last Wednesday that their Senators had approved oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) by a vote of 51-49. Knowing they didn’t have the 60 votes needed to prevent a filibuster, pro-drilling Senators tacked the drilling provision onto the filibuster-proof budget resolution proposal for 2006.
A magnificent natural phenomenon is slowly vanishing right above our heads. The great North-South bird migration, which stitches the skies each autumn and spring, is steadily subsiding. Scientists blame the decline of migratory birds on habitat loss throughout the Americas.
Canada’s British Columbia is a region of stunning national beauty. The Pacific Northwest city of Vancouver, nestled between coastal mountains, the calm waters of English Bay, and the Burrard Inlet, is in many ways an ideal place to settle. Vancouverites are always ready to extol the virtues of their home – its gentle climate and its wealth of recreational options: You can ski, you can sunbathe, you can take a walk on the seawall around Stanley Park, or you can simply enjoy breathtaking views from any number of spots in and around the city.
You’re sitting at your desk, slightly stiff from a long session starting at the comptuer screen. It’s 4 p.m. and that headache is back. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if your weren’t so unusually fatigued and didn’ t have that tinge of nausea and slight dizziness – and that terrible stuffy nose.
<I> One Friday night last June, 95 million Americans watched O.J. Simpson’s white Ford Bronco glide along the highway at 16 miles-per-gallon followed by a team of police cruisers on the most famous car chase this country has ever seen. A posse of newscopters hovered overhead as the sunset grew pinker in the Los Angeles haze. The ozone level reached .09 parts-per-million, just exceeding California’s air quality limits. Across the land millions of viewers wondered if O.J. would step out of the Bronco alive.</I>
According to a recently released report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 52 percent of the world’s fish stocks are "fully exploited" as compared with 47 percent just two years ago. FAO officials warned that the increased harvesting was unsustainable against the backdrop of rising consumption.
Environmentalists are optimistic that President Bush’s appointment of career scientist Steve Johnson to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) signals a renewed scientific focus for an agency bogged down in political skirmishes for the last five years.
On a sunny January afternoon, as a steady wind sweeps across Costa Rica’s Pacific slope, 18-year-old conservation worker Dunia Garcia settles down to sort the insects she has collected during the past week. From the porch of her two-room, wooden biological station perched on the shoulder of an idle volcano, Garcia has an astounding view – literally from the continental divide to the Pacific Ocean. Her view also defines the choices facing Costa Rica. Will the Central American country follow the path Garcia can see to the West – where dusty pastures stretch without relief to the Pacific shore, on land that was once dry tropical forest? Or will it choose the path she sees to the north and east, in the protected forests of the three national parks within the Guanacaste Conservation Area?
"You always hurt the ones you love," goes the old Mills Brothers song. Perhaps this profound human paradox explains why we have chosen tropical islands, the embodient of an earthly paraside, as the staging grounds for hell on earth: war and weapons testing. Its been going on for 50 years, and shows no sings of ending any time soon.
MALIBU, CALIFORNIA–Howard Hughes may have ended up nuttier than a fruitcake (<I>The Aviator</I> spares us most of the gory details), but he certainly did a lot for science. In the 1940s, the still-dynamic Hughes wanted to keep up on the latest developments in radar for his aircraft business and so set up the Hughes Research Labs.
