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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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Things are heating up all over. In Antarctica, global warming is causing chunks of ice the size of Long Island to break off the continent. In the Republican Party, disputes [...]

Oysters are hard-core--or, rather, hard-shell--environmentalists, obdurate in their demand for healthy, pollution-free living conditions. They are, in fact, constitutionally incapable of compromise; if bivalves had environmental slogans, theirs would be [...]

The only way members of the 104th Congress could be more accommodating to their corporate sponsors would be to let them sit in their laps and push the voting button. [...]

By law and custom, certain classes of communication in our society are confidential. These include discussions between attorney and client, doctor and patient, cleric and penitent, husband and wife. Now, [...]

As a hostile Congress rushes to judgment on the Endangered Species Act, truth and fairness are as much at risk as condors and manatees. At blatantly stacked 'hearings' held in [...]

Let's face it: organic produce is not made to be sold in supermarkets. Stacked up next to the perfectly uniform ranks of bioengineered, pesticide-protected, factory-farm produce, it often looks small, [...]

I magine the consternation at the United States Forest Service. For years, the agency has pretended that grazing is a 'benign' activity, not subject to the environmental review requirements of [...]

It was, perhaps, the data about shrinking penis size that finally got policymakers to seriously consider banning chlorinated chemicals. For the past half century, evidence has been piling up on [...]

It took David Long's south-central Wisconsin neighbors a long time to get used to looking at his bottomland and seeing trees and native grasses, because for as long as anyone [...]

Sometimes it's easy to take your best friends for granted. While few white environmentalists would guess it, the best environmental voting record of any interest group in the U.S. Congress [...]

Corporate raider Charles Hurwitz didn't get to be the multi-zillionaire bad boy of Wall Street through lack of chutzpah. Even though the belly flop of his Texas savings and loan [...]

Every noble attempt to formulate a rational, environmentally sound transportation policy eventually runs over the same skunk: in most suburban areas and in many cities, nothing seems as cheap and [...]

It was the Northern Rockies version of Arafat and shaking hands on the White House steps: an 'ecosystem protection summit' in Missoula, Montana, called last December 5 to broker a [...]

As taxpayers tighten their belts and join in mutual sacrifice to reduce the federal deficit, the United States Forest Service is writing multimillion-dollar checks to two large pulp mills in [...]

Teetering above the toxic sludge pits and open sewers of the U S./Mexican border, Bill Clinton faces the trickiest balancing act of his high-wire presidency. Believing it will help the [...]

If America's nature lovers want to save the country's natural resources from the ax, suggests Oregon-based forest economist Randal O'Toole, there's a sensible way to do it: open your wallets. [...]

Sinners, awake! 'We are being deluged by wave after wave of terrible atheistic errors in our schools,' Robert Simonds of Citizens for Excellence in Education (CEE) warns the faithful. 'Satan [...]

Where most of us see wilderness, the BLM sees a highway. The Moab Jeep Trail in Utah is in danger of becoming a memory,' warns the newsletter of the Sahara [...]

The art on this page is not meant to prevent forest fires. So sue us. The people call Smokey Bear.' An excited murmur ripples through the courtroom. Slowly, a hirsute [...]