World Watch articles from January 2000

World Watch archives from January 2000

What Goes Down the Drain Must Come Up.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2000... Cities do not exist without water. People have known this since the world's earliest civilizations arose in the valleys of great rivers several thousand years ago. The Roman architect Vitruvius wrote in the first century B.C., for instance,...

Blinded.
January 1, 2000... The information age is so dazzling that it is blinding. One sign is the runup of high-tech stocks involving the Internet; almost anything with a dot-com attached seems to have become a kind of Midas gold. Initial public offerings of startup...

FROM READERS.
January 1, 2000... Car Sharing in Japan I found "Why Share?" by Gary Gardner (July/August 1999) very interesting and would like to introduce your readers to car-sharing experiments currently being carried out in Japan. They use small electric vehicles (EVs)...

Biodiversity projections look grim.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2000... One- to two-thirds of all plants, animals, and other species could be lost by the end of the next century if current rates of extinction continue, according to a report presented to the International Botanical Congress in August 1999 by...

Monsanto drops the terminator.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2000... Responding to nearly two years of protest from farmers, environmental groups, and development agencies, the Monsanto Corporation announced in October 1999 that it will not commercialize the so-called "terminator" technology--which would prevent...

Colombia opts for oil over indigenous rights.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2000... The Colombian government in September 1999 granted Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum a license to drill for oil near the lands of the indigenous U'wa people, who in 1997 threatened to commit mass suicide if companies were allowed to drill...

Groundwater Shock The Polluting of the World's Major Freshwater Stores.
January 1, 2000... Scientists have shown that the world deep beneath our fret is essential to the life above. Ancient myths depicted the Underworld as a place of damnation and death. Now, the spreading contamination of major aquifers threatens to turn the myth...

COMING TO TERMS WITH THE ARCTIC.
January 1, 2000... By melding ancient hunting traditions with modern political technique, Arctic indigenous peoples present a baffling challenge to environmental diplomacy. As the Arctic ecology itself begins to change, the need for a common understanding is...

How the Prospects for World Peace Have Grown Brighter.
January 1, 2000... In May 1999, the global media were filled with reports of the war in Kosovo--an event that in some ways seemed discouragingly remindful of World War II, with its reports of horrific slaughters of civilians, bombings from the air, and torching...