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  • Don't buy their official version of Tuesday's events

    SEATTLE, Wash. An eerie half-calm, enforced by marching columns of police and troops in full-body armor, settled over downtown Seattle today. Street corners that had been scenes of dramatic confrontation yesterday saw small-scale, unthreatening protests this morning and early afternoon, as demonstrators, trade delegates, journalists, and everyone else in this stunned city got down to […]

  • What a Riot, What a Gas

    Tens of thousands of protestors, including many environmentalists, took to the streets of Seattle yesterday and succeeded in disrupting talks of the World Trade Organization. While a small minority of the protestors damaged some property, most were resolutely nonviolent as they tried to make their point that the WTO places corporate profits above human rights, […]

  • A Man, a Plan, a Canal, a Liar?

    Al Gore claimed yesterday that he was the person who had first drawn attention to the contamination at Love Canal, after receiving a letter from a worried high school student about another contaminated site in Tennessee. “I found a little place in upstate New York called Love Canal. I had the first hearing on that […]

  • Come, Sea the Turtles

    The Surinamese Foundation for Nature Preservation (STINASU) has hatched a plan that is giving indigenous people a reason to protect endangered leatherback turtles. More than half of the world’s population of leatherback turtles come to the beaches of Surinam to lay their eggs, but their numbers have fallen dramatically in recent years, primarily because of […]

  • Waiting with Rebated Breath

    Maine residents who buy low-polluting, high-mileage cars would be eligible for rebates of up to $3,000 under a bill that will go before the state legislature in January. And under a separate new program in the state, cars that meet particular green criteria will be marked at dealerships with stickers that read “Cleaner Cars for […]

  • Biting the Hand that Feeds Them

    Several officials in the Food and Drug Administration have disagreed with the agency’s conclusion that genetically modified foods should be regulated the same way as conventional foods and accused the FDA of siding with industry at the expense of consumers, according to internal agency memorandums read yesterday at a public hearing. The documents are part […]

  • Wood Finnishing

    Sustainable logging can prove more profitable than traditional logging, according to two reports released by the World Wildlife Fund. One report compares the performance of four Swedish forestry companies that had obtained certification from the Forest Stewardship Council, which promotes sustainable forest management, to the performance of four similar Finnish companies that had not. The […]

  • Protesters make themselves heard in Seattle

    SEATTLE, Wash. The metaphor is irresistible. Between 8 and 10 this morning in downtown Seattle, the protesters owned the streets. Later in the day, they vied with police, back and forth; but as the day began the cops were back inside their perimeters, and the few thousand drumming, singing demonstrators were firmly in control. And […]

  • Dead in the Water

    Scientists fear that an ecological disaster may be unfolding off the coast of North Carolina, following in the wake of Hurricanes Dennis and Floyd, which dumped some three feet of rain on the eastern third of the state in September. Flooding from the hurricanes washed loads of pollution and organic matter out to sea — […]

  • God Help Us

    A coalition of loggers in Minnesota is pursuing a novel legal strategy to open up national forests for timber cutting, claiming in a lawsuit filed last month that the U.S. Forest Service is foisting the “religion” of the Deep Ecology movement on all Americans by adopting it as a guiding principle for forest management. The […]