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Painting the Town Green
Southern California’s smog-fighting agency is cracking down on paint makers, requiring them to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to help clean the region’s air. The South Coast Air Quality Management District on Friday adopted tough new rules that will force manufacturers to make expensive reformulations to nearly half the industrial and household paints and […]
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Boat Flight at the Not-OK Coral
A shrimp boat plowed into a coral reef off Mexico’s coast this weekend, causing extensive damage to 1,290 square yards of coral, one of the worst cases of damage to a Mexican reef in years. Marine traffic is outlawed in the reef area near Cancun, but the boat moved into the area after its engines […]
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A review of 'The New Wolves' by Rick Bass
In The New Wolves: The Return of the Mexican Wolf to the American Southwest, Rick Bass ambles pensively and passionately through the controversial ground in Arizona's Blue Mountains where Mexican wolves are being reintroduced. He walks alongside a host of folks with divergent perspectives on the reintroduction effort: unflappable federal wildlife agents; bright-eyed students; newfangled "predator-friendly" ranchers; faithful volunteers; and a reintroduction foe who seems to have the wolves' best interests at heart. Bass takes in all their views and paints them with empathy and respect, while never letting go of his own deeply held belief that wolves simply belong on this land.
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A review of 'Totem Salmon' by Freeman House
In the wake of the federal government's much trumpeted decision in March to confer threatened and endangered status upon nine salmon runs in Washington and Oregon, Northwesterners will need to reevaluate their relationship with this once mighty species, a cultural icon as well as biological keystone. An ideal beginning would be to delve into Freeman House's Totem Salmon: Life Lessons from Another Species.
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TRI a Little Harder
Reported toxic chemical releases from industrial plants grew by 2.2 percent in 1997, following years of decline, the EPA announced yesterday. The increase was attributed largely to plants sending more metal wastes to landfills rather than recycling centers because metal recycling prices increased. Emissions have dropped almost 43 percent since the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) […]
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No Truth in Advertising
The Better Business Bureau is going after the nuclear power industry for running ads that the bureau says “have a strong potential to mislead customers.” The Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade association, has been paying for ads in national magazines and the New York Times that tout nuclear as the “clean air energy” and claim […]
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Kawasaki Lets the Good Times Roll
The Japanese government settled a 17-year legal battle yesterday with 500 citizens who have been made sick by air pollution. The plantiffs, who live along highways in Kawasaki, an industrial city just south of Tokyo, filed suit claiming that they suffered from asthma and other ailments caused by exhaust from passing cars and trucks. Last […]
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Go Blow It on the Mountain
A rider that would allow a mining company to blow a 900-foot hole in a mountain in Washington state and dump mining waste on federal land has so far remained attached to a large spending bill to fund the war in Kosovo. Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) authored the rider after the feds denied a permit […]
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Organic Farmers Cross over Pollination
Pollen from genetically engineered plants can travel significant distances and contaminate other crops, according to a report commissioned by the British government and leaked to the public this week. The report asserts that 1 percent of organic plants in any field could become genetically modified hybrids through cross-pollination, and it argues that “acceptable” levels of […]
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Step on the Gas, Ford
Ford Motor Co. Chair Bill Ford Jr. talked up the company’s commitment to the environment yesterday at its annual shareholders meeting. Several stockholders at the meeting charged that the company is not doing enough to curb emissions of greenhouse gases, but their proposal to require the company to disclose its emissions and its lobbying efforts […]
