Unearthed: In-Depth Reports on Wildlife, Pollution & Sustainability

Robert Glenn Ketchum has come to New york City to promote his new book, The Legacy of Wildness, a retrospective of 20 years of his work photographing American landscapes. At breakfast, amid the gray suits in a midtown hotel, he’s hard to miss in his velvety green dinner jacket, white ruffled shirt and black pony-tailed hair. His glassy blue eyes are obviously still on West Coast time where he spent a week teaching a photography workshop on the Olypic peninsula, leading students to the wrekcing yards of tree stumps as big as tables to that they, too, can begin to change the world through their art.

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 […]

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 […]

"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.

On a mind-swept plateau atop Wyoming’s 10,000 foot Medicine Mountain, lies and ancient "Medicine Wheel." At its center is a buffalo skull carefully placed within a rock mound. Twenty-eight spokes radiate out to a circle of limestone rocks about 80 feet in diameter.