World Watch articles from January 1999

World Watch archives from January 1999

Sen and sensibility.(1999 Nobel Prize for Economics awardee Amartya Sen)(Editorial)
January 1, 1999... In October 1998, Hurricane Mitch slammed into the Atlantic coast of Central America, leaving an estimated 18,000 people dead. Honduran President Carlos Flores called it the "disaster of the century." But with a vigor that rivaled the force of...

New missions for the military.
January 1, 1999... In late October, on a Russian steppe near the Kazakhstan border, a 10-year-old girl named Rakhmat Zukieva talked to a reporter about the extreme difficulty her family was having either growing or buying food. The girl was by then subsisting on...

Antarctic ice shelves see another big breakup.
January 1, 1999... While government positions remained virtually frozen before the latest round of international climate talks in Buenos Aires, the icy continent of Antarctica continued its accelerated thaw - adding to concern over the region's potential to lift...

Unintended effects of Bt crops.(Bacillus thuringiensis)
January 1, 1999... Reinforcing a number of concerns voiced by entomologists, crop scientists, and environmentalists, several recent studies suggest that the risks posed by crops genetically engineered to produce their own pesticides may in fact be greater than...

Atlantic salmon face perilous waters.
January 1, 1999... Although Canada's west coast is well known for disputes over the beleaguered Pacific salmon, it was the country's East Coast salmon fisheries - wild salmon in the north Atlantic Ocean and farm-raised salmon in New Brunswick - that made...

Ozone hole is largest ever.
January 1, 1999... The seasonal hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica reached record proportions in September, according to a report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Covering an area of 25 million square kilometers, or about 2.5 times the area of...

Virtual ecology: a brief environmental history of Silicon Valley.(Cover Story)
January 1, 1999... This place in sunny California, so famous for its high technology, high salaries, and campus-like office parks, is not what it seems. "Dutch" Hamann, City Manager of San Jose, California, from 1950 to 1970, liked to say that he put Silicon...

Crawling out of the pipe: the hazardous waste that makes more of itself.(includes related articles)
January 1, 1999... The hazardous waste that makes more of itself The convulsions have ebbed away but left a low-grade infection, incurable and subject to flare-up. This is the victim: the Black Sea, where Ovid passed his exile, where the Byzantine Empire rose...

An unfinished revolution.(Indonesian economy)
January 1, 1999... The mountainous landscape of the central Indonesian islands is heavily used. Little brick homes with corrugated tin roofs, sprawling schools with heavily used soccer fields, and white-washed mosques with chrome spires dot the countryside....