The environmental movement is facing some pretty tough challenges. Not only has the shamelessly retrograde George W. Bush been re-elected to the Presidency of the United States, but Republicans, whose overall voting record is significantly less environment-friendly than that of the Democrats, have had their majorities increased in both the Senate and the House of Representatives.
The numbers say it all. Each year an average of 25 people across the world die as a result of a shark attack. You have one in 300 million chance of meeting your maker in the mouth of a shark. The sharks, on the other hand, wish they had our odds. While U.S. Department of Health mortality statistics show that Americans are more likely to be killed by lightning than by a shark, the Department of Commerce estimates that people kill 100 million sharks a year. In order to keep up with us, sharks would have to eat the entire combined population of Mexico and Texas every year.
When I met Sister Dorothy Stang, I knew I was encountering someone remarkable. I met her in Belém, the capital of Pará state in northern Brazil. Belém has more than a million people, and it was not the natural habitat for Dayton, Ohio native Dorothy Stang. She lived far from the city in a remote Amazonian jungle settlement populated by the landless peasants whose interests she tirelessly protected, along with the rainforest itself.
Alligators with undersized testicles may seem like a problem only for other alligators, but scientists at the University of Florida (UF) argue that what happens to gators today may well happen to humans tomorrow.In Fact, the alarming reproductive problems of Florida’s alligators may be surfacing in largemouth bass, a sign of widespread lake pollution
The White House budget proposal for 2006 is counting on income from opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil drilling, much to the dismay of many environmentalists. The White House is projecting that the federal government will take in up to $1.2 billion over the next two years from oil companies paying for the right to lease oil drilling permits within ANWR.
Much to the chagrin of conservationists hoping that the Bush administration would start considering its environmental legacy during its second term, the White House budget proposal for 2006 calls for a six percent cut in funding for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Several states have joined California in lobbying Congress to let states make their own rules regulating which automobiles get access to high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes. If Congress agrees, the upshot would be that drivers of gas-electric hybrids could access HOV lanes with or without passengers from coast to coast.
Last week, the state of California filed suit against the Bush administration contesting federal plans to significantly expand logging throughout national forests in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.
The House Resources Committee is expected to vote this week to revive the White House energy bill calling for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Something strange is going on in the mind of Michael Crichton. His new bestseller <I>State of Fear</I>, a bewildering piece of work unlike any of his previous novels, makes the case that climate change is nothing to worry about. The villains of this story are not the mad scientists and reckless corporations that usually populate the Crichton universe (see <I>Jurassic Park</I>, <I>Timeline</I> and <I>Prey</I>). This time the bad guys are a bunch of scare-mongering environmentalists.
