Despite outcries about deficits, Congress is debating a massive $318 billion highway bill. This is the same Congress that routinely attempts to defund Amtrak, which has absorbed a tiny fraction of road spending. Congress wouldn’t even think of passing such a budget buster in an election year were it not for the enormous highway construction contracts that land like fat golden goose eggs in lawmakers" districts.
Described as a "living theater of plants and people," the Eden Project is an international visitor attraction set in a former clay quarry in Cornwall, England. The focus of the 280,000-square-foot gardens is on the two giant greenhouses, which simulate Mediterranean and tropical climates for trees and plants. Once described as a "giant blanc-mange [pudding] […]
When Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972, the goal was to force industries to reduce the flow of pollution into the nation’s waterways. Thirty years later, new applications of the law are raising questions. For instance, what happens if the pipe from which the pollution flows is up in the air, attached to […]
Makers of food products containing hemp won a victory last week in federal appeals court. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco overturned a federal rule by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) that would have banned the sale of foods containing sterilized hemp seeds and oils containing tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), well-known as the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana.
The New York Times reports that critics of the U.S. Forest Service are calling for the agency to allow more wild fires in unpopulated areas to burn without intervention as an ecologically sound method of clearing downed timber and brush while preserving resources for more threatening blazes.
Punctuating a disturbing land-use trend across the country, the Denver Post reports on recently released census figures showing that Colorado has lost more than a million acres of farmland since 1997, among the most of any state in the nation.
A Radioactive Nightmare in Concord, Massachusetts The waitress at the ice cream shop in Concord, Massachusetts was surprised. "A Superfund site?" she asked, incredulous, "on Main Street?" Not just a Superfund site—a Superfund site that a cleanup contractor has dubbed "near the tip of the peak in terms of [cleanup] difficulty." A radioactive Superfund site. […]
Was Global Warming Responsible for the Deadly Heat? By the end of Europe’s staggering summer heat wave, Budapest’s ornate bridges were looking strange. They stood high above the water, their supporting foundations exposed, looking as if they were all standing on tiptoes. Rarely seen boulders jutted out from the brown surface of the Danube and […]
The Bush Administration Packs the Courts with Anti-Environmental Judges For more than 30 years, environmental laws ranging from the Clean Air Act to the Endangered Species Act have provided a formidable weapon for activists and ordinary citizens trying to protect the environment. While the environment does not always prevail in court, litigation has become an […]
Country Living May be Hazardous to Your Potency When epidemiologist Shanna Swan began comparing fertility in urban versus rural men, she thought she knew what she would find. Just as corn, sorghum and soybeans grow better in central Missouri’s hills and hollers than in a polluted parking lot in urban New York, Los Angeles or […]
