In Europe high-speed trains are the norm for travel around the continent. Yes, there are challenges to connect sprawling, suburbanized America to train transit and rebuild the system we once had, but with traffic congestion increasing 400 percent since 1985 it’s time we prioritized fast trains as a national goal. The average commuter spends five years stuck in traffic when he or she could be sitting back and enjoying the ride.
The Exxon Valdez civil case, like the spill itself, is unprecedented. It began in 1990, when hundreds of fishers and Native Americans whose subsistence lifestyle had forever been altered and, in some cases, destroyed by the spill, filed lawsuits against Exxon.
There’s shooters over there," Kim says suddenly. Immediately, the rest of us look east, where she is pointing, across the flat open land of the Montana prairie, dotted with sage brush and cacti, toward rolling hills and a stand of cottonwood trees.
Slob marksmen decimate a prairie dog colony. A first-hand account.
Prairie dogs once occupied 700 million acres throughout the Great Plains, but their range is now just two percent of that. Prairie dogs are in great danger of extinction, but that hasn’t stopped hunters from using them for target practice.
The same environmentalists and biologists who have cheered the comeback of the wolf to Yellowstone National Park are cringing at a Bush administration plan proposing to give state officials in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming the authority to move or shoot wolves that have wandered beyond park boundaries into zones where prey populations of grazing animals are diminishing. Whether or not wolves are playing any role in herds" low numbers, state officials — with the blessing of the Bush administration — are hungry to take out Canis lupus.
Last week’s Supreme Court ruling allowing Mexican trucks to enter U.S. roads has invoked the ire of clean air advocates. The Court ruled that under the auspices of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the U.S. had no right to exclude Mexican trucks — many of which are older and do not meet more stringent emissions standards — from plying American roads.
At a conference last week in Bonn, Germany, senior officials from 154 nations including the United States signed onto a communiqué committing to a substantial increase "with a sense of urgency" in the percentage of renewable sources in meeting global energy needs.
In response to Bush administration intentions to open up nearly 60 million acres of national forest land to extractive industries, a trade group representing 4,000 guiding and outdoor equipment companies has launched a campaign to educate consumers about the benefits of saving public land for recreational purposes.
I was thrilled to learn that Margie Richard of Louisiana was a winner of the 2004 Goldman Environmental Prize. This was a richly deserved award. I was warmly welcomed into Richard’s home in Norco, Louisiana in 1998, and had the opportunity to meet her again last year when the Society of Environmental Journalists’ conference came to New Orleans.
