Dissection’s Deadly Toll Hits Frogs Hardest For most high school students, dissecting a formaldehyde-soaked frog is an educational rite of passage. But the practice has decimated the population of frogs and other wild-caught animals, and more and more kids are refusing to do it. “I don’t think it’s right to kill animals,” says Amanda Swann, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Medicinal Trade in Animals and Plants Reaches Epidemic Proportions During a 1983 auction in South Korea, the bidding for an especially-prized black bear specimen grew incredibly intense, finally stopping at $55,000. The winning bidder didn't get a trophy for his den, but instead a small fleshy mass-the animal's gall bladder, believed in Asia to […]
Will Congress Reauthorize a 19th Century Giveaway? When President Clinton announced a deal last summer to prevent the New World gold mine from being developed next to Yellowstone National Park, it was widely hailed as an environmental victory. Environmentalists, though, were quick to point out that stopping the mine was only part of the battle. […]
The Prospect of Human Cloning Raises Environmental and Ethical Issues In the recent film Multiplicity, the condo contractor played by Michael Keaton discovers that having a clone of himself around to help with the heavy lifting is not quite the trouble-free experience he had imagined. So too, in real life, is the prospect of human […]
With Federal Help, Bike Paths Are Spreading Across America Picture the ecosystem of a truly sustainable community. You'll breathe air that's clean, and never hear the roar of a revved-up engine or smell the deadly fumes of a speeding semi. That's because-among other things—there's a network of bikable roads, paths and trails that will get […]
Captive breeding of an endangered species can make the difference between its success or failure. The black-footed ferret, the cheetah, the Wyoming toad and the peregrine falcon have all spent generations in captivity, where they eat, drink, sleep and mate at the direction of biologists. All four have teetered on the edge of extinction but, at least partly as a payoff for "doing time" in captivity, they’ve dodged the bullet for now.
