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Drip. Drip. Drip. Drop by drop, global warming is melting the world's ice. While the Bush administration proposes yet more studies, world climate is changing in front of our eyes. [...]

When Thomas Jefferson sent young Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the Corps of Discovery to survey the lands beyond the Mississippi, the West was terra incognita. Some believed the explorers [...]

When my friends learned that I would be traveling to Baffin Island in far northern Canada, they had no end of advice. Michelle knew someone who had once fallen through [...]

The North Rim of the Grand Canyon is best visited by early fall because of the spectacular interplay of light along the ridges. Its geologic make-up may be better appreciated by hiking some miles down the North Kaibab Trail but visitors need adequate water for a deeper descent.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, it starts to get hotter. The increase in average temperatures is gradual; what we notice are the scorching spikes, as heat records fall one after another. Winters [...]

He's the most knowledgeable environmentalist ever to reach such a high office. But is that enough? Vice Presidents Albert Gore may be the first national leader for whom Saturday Night [...]

My friend David, a writer and zealous cyclist, was bitter: I was going on a weeklong mountain-bike trip across southern Utah's remote Kaiparowits Plateau, and he was not. Mutual friends [...]

The state of California boats some of the most spectacular natural scenery to be found in the country. Nature lovers can enjoy attractions ranging from the stark beauty of the Mojave desert to the quiet tranquility of Mono Lake.

On the face of it, environmental voters do not have a very difficult choice in this year's residential election. Consumer hero Ralph Nader is running on the Green Party ticket [...]

As the first atomic bomb exploded in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer recalled the words of Krishna from the Bhagavad Gita: 'I am [...]

Here's a problem for the twilight years of the 20th century: What is left to steal from our children? In the 1980s, we pilfered their financial future by running up [...]

Like a sleeper wave tossing dead fish far up on the shore, last November's electoral tsunami deposited a spectacular collection of stinkers in high places throughout the halls of Capitol [...]

The United States Forest Service is the steward of more than 8 percent of the country's landmass: 191 million acres in 156 national forests. The nature of its stewardship was [...]

It was a stroke of genius to choose the tomato as the first commercial bioengineered product. The sad, pale baseballs passing for tomatoes in the supermarket are so loathed--especially by [...]

In the blackness of a freezing morning in December 1991, a driver lost control of her car on an isolated road in upstate New York and slammed into an electric-utility [...]

Let's say you're in court. The judge walks in; all rise. The opposing attorney approaches the bench and hands his honor a fat wad of bills. The judge stuffs them [...]

It's remarkable how candidly people talk when they forget you're listening. In the February issue of the trade newsletter O'Dwyer's PR Services Report, the public-relations industry frankly assesses the failure [...]

Wise Use cowboys try to rewrite the Constitution. Since frontier days, the business of local government in the rural West has been resource extraction. County governments were--and to a large [...]

We tied up our horses and followed Reynaldo up the last rocky slope to the lip of Paricutin, the volcano that erupted in a Mexican cornfield in 1943 and covered [...]

MAYBE IT HAS SOMETHING TO DOWITH THE APPROACHING MILLENNIUM: the lion will lie down with the lamb, and toxic polluters will drink herbal tea with environmental activists. The wonderful new [...]

Like approaching sirens, the wails of corporate executives herald the start of debate on the reauthorization of Superfund, the country's program for cleaning up abandoned toxic-waste dumps. From the op-ed [...]

On June 5, a great white shark killed 35-year-old Therese Cartwright as she was scuba diving off the coast of Tasmania while her quadruplets looked on from a nearby boat. [...]

As though delivered by the Invisible Hand itself, strangely similar pieces of legislation are deluging statehouses across the country. They all have apple-pie names like 'The Private Property Rights Act' [...]

The problem with U.S. environmental policy these days, the nation's newspaper of record has concluded, is that it spends too darn much to save too few human lives. In an [...]

Like a mewling babe, the issue of population growth in the United States squalls on the doorstep, increasingly difficult to ignore. After a long period of decline, the U.S. birthrate [...]

There is not a lot to do in the dreary Yukon town of Whitehorse--so named after the prancing rapids of the Yukon River, submerged behind the Schwatka Dam since 1959. [...]

'Science should never be adjusted to fit policy' was the prim credo of the eminent Expert Panel on the Role of Science, convened last year by EPA Administrator William Reilly [...]

'Just between you and me,' World Bank chief economist Lawrence Summers wrote to his colleagues late last year, 'shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries [...]

Bog-trotting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with martinis, false idols, and chili bombs--while back on Capitol Hill, grassroots power proves itself again. Having never flown over the Arctic in a [...]

There are more ways to kill a cat,' said the English philosopher J. L. Austin, 'than drowning it in butter.' While most people now realize that burning fossil fuel is [...]

What makes people most nervous about Republican control of Congress? According to a post-election poll, the biggest reservation of 24 percent of respondents was the party's approach to the environment. [...]

Now that the 20th century is on its way out, maybe us cityfolk can get back to normal. For urban dwellers prior to this screwy century, 'normal' meant that most [...]

Some people apparently don't have enough to worry about. Like Michael Coffman, president of a misleadingly named outfit in Maine called Environmental Perspectives, Inc.: 'There is a well-funded, well-organized plan [...]