Unearthed

For musician Skip La Plante, heaps of grabage are nothing more that great opportunities to make music.

There are only about 20,000 orangutans left in the world, and their numbers are dwindling rapidly. The Sumatran Orangutan Society suggests that the animals may be extinct in the wild within 10 years. The "man of the woods" once spread across Southeast Asia, but is now limited to the islands of Borneo and Sumatra. The […]

A study conducted for the New York Times last March found that six of the eight New York City fish vendors tested were falsely selling farm-raised salmon as wild. The story unfolded when the Times realized that many of the stores were selling "fresh" wild Pacific salmon in the fish’s off-season. People covet wild salmon […]

Wildlife officials are becoming increasingly worried about chronic wasting disease (CWD), a/k/a "mad deer disease," which has been detected in wild and captive deer and elk in 12 states (see "What About Mad Deer Disease?," Features, July/August 2001). First detected in 1967 in Colorado, the fatal neurological disease causes weight loss, stumbling and tremors. CWD […]

"Six thousand kids die each day because of water-related diseases. That’s like 12 full 747s crashing every day." The speaker was Ryan Hreljac, age 13, addressing a room full of adults gathered for the launch of the Water Culture Network (WCN) at the Chelsea Piers in New York City. Despite his youth, Hreljac was speaking as a dedicated campaigner in the water wars.

With their elegant profiles, mute swans are the stars of many a fairy tale, but in real life they have become creatures of controversy. Some environmental groups and wildlife managers want to rid North America of the birds, which are native to Eurasia. Animal rights groups and some swan enthusiasts want to protect them.

The widespread dissatisfaction among campus activists after President Bush’s reelection prompted student liberals to create the Roosevelt Institute (RI), the first student-run progressive think-tank, guided by the principles of Teddy, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. These young thinkers are adopting a strategy most often used by the right—incubating student opinion and creating a new generation of leaders.

In 1993, the U.S. government passed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) promising it would promote jobs. In reality, according to Sarah Massey of the AFL-CIO Americas Union Movement, it lowered wages, heightened unemployment and increased pollution. Massey argues that the proposed Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) is "going to be a failure just like NAFTA."

Working out of a corner of a sunny Manhattan apartment, 49-year-old Kristin Bergfeld runs an innovative housecleaning and estate clearance business whose unwavering adherence to ecological principles might seem odd in New York, a city better known for its litter-strewn sidewalks and discarded automobile tires floating in the East River.

Animal Damage Control (ADC), a controversial federal program initiated in the 1930s, has over 60 years of killing wild animals under its belt. Using leghold traps, ariel gunning, denning (killing coyote and fox pups still in their den) and sodium cyanide bait, ADC was responsible for the death of over 2.5 million wild animals in 1991–all, they say, to protect livestock.