World Watch articles from March 2002

World Watch archives from March 2002

The war on the right to know.(Brief Article)(Editorial)
March 1, 2002... In October 2001 a new international treaty, the Aarhus Convention, went into force. This far-reaching community right-to-know law, ratified by close to 20 European countries, mandates that signatory governments increase information sharing and...

Blood sugar. (Note from a Worldwatcher).(connection between physical and mental health)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Is there any strong link, either for individual humans or for whole societies, between physical health and mental health? Overwhelming evidence says yes. For one thing, as any psychopharmacologist can attest, mental illness is often associated...

On "How Economists Have Misjudged Global Warming". (From Readers).
March 1, 2002... My esteemed friend Robert Ayres's lucid dissection of economic climate models ("How Economists Have Misjudged Global Warming," September/October 2001) is such a valuable contribution that I hesitate to quibble; yet our residual point of...

Years of global fisheries decline masked by bad Chinese data. (Environmental Intelligence).(numbers falsely inflated disguising decline in fish harvest around world)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Inflated fish catch reports from China--the world's largest producer of fish--have hidden a decade-long decline in the amount of fish being harvested around the world, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. Scientists...

Environmental activists murdered in Brazil. (Environmental Intelligence).(Ademir Alfeu Federicci)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Between July and October, 2001, six rural environmental and labor activists were murdered in separate incidents in Brazil's northeast state of Para, and a number of their colleagues received death threats or found their names listed on an...

Coca eradication may harm Colombia's environment. (Environmental Intelligence).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has requested that the U.S. State Department halt its massive effort to eradicate illicit Colombian coca crops through aerial spraying of herbicides, which the group says "pose potentially serious risks to human...

U.S. hampers global anti-tobacco treaty. (Environmental Intelligence).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... During international negotiations in November 2001 to shape a treaty restricting the promotion of tobacco, the Bush administration opposed measures that would limit advertising, restrict labeling on products, invoke mandatory taxes, and ban...

Plastic outweighs plankton in the North Pacific. (Environmental Intelligence).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Researchers from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation tracking marine debris in the North Pacific found that plastic flotsam was more abundant than zooplankton, the tiny (often microscopic), marine animals near the bottom of the ocean food...

New U.N. treaty ensures farmers' rights to seeds. (Environmental Intelligence).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Member states of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization on November 3, 2001 adopted an international treaty that affirms the right of farmers to "save, use, exchange, and sell farm-saved seed," and limits the genetic materials of plants...

Media Sheep: How did The Skeptical Environmentalist pull the wool over the eyes of so many editors? (Commentary).
March 1, 2002... Last summer, a now-infamous book called The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World caused a great splash in the media. Written by a young Danish statistician, it was presented as a shocking reexamination of the...

Who speaks for Siberia?
March 1, 2002... Russia's resource-gouging kleptocracy is gorging itself on Siberian forests, fish, and minerals. It's opposed by a little army of nonprofits whose vision is, by local standards, revolutionary: They believe that siberia should be managed in the...

P Soup: It's green, but it's not good for you. That benign-looking pond scum signifies a far-reaching shift in the global phosphorus cycle.
March 1, 2002... Think of global environmental change, and you'll probably think most immediately of such sweeping atmospheric phenomena as global warming or ozone depletion. Many of the other environmental disruptions we're familiar with--toxic dumps,...

Energy in an insecure World. (Book Review).(Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage ; Tomorrow's Energy: Hydrogen, Fuel Cells, and the Prospects for a Cleaner Planet)
March 1, 2002... Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Peter Hoffmann, Tomorrow's Energy: Hydrogen, Fuel Cells, and the Prospects for a Cleaner Planet (Cambridge, MA: MIT...

Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health. (New and Noteworthy).
March 1, 2002... Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health, by Laurie Garrett (New York: Hyperion, 2000). International borders are increasingly permeable, open to the flow of ideas, goods, services--and life-threatening microbes. A jet plane can...

Mosquito: A Natural History of Our Most Persistent and Deadly Foe. (New and Noteworthy).
March 1, 2002... Mosquito: A Natural History of Our Most Persistent and Deadly Foe, by Andrew Spielman and Michael D'Antonio (New York: Hyperion, 2001). Disease expert Andrew Spielman and journalist Michael D'Antonio have teamed up to create a compelling and...

Lessons of Afghanistan: Understanding the conditions that give rise to extremism. (Essay).
March 1, 2002... How did Afghanistan become a "breeding ground" of terrorism and sanctuary for extremists? It is tempting to simply point to the Taliban as the cause. After all, the Taliban were nearly without parallel in their fanaticism, and were a willing...

Afghan Women.(Sonali Kolhatkar, Neesha Mirchandani)(Brief Article)(Interview)
March 1, 2002... Sonali Kolhatkar and Neesha Mirchandani work with the U.S.-based Afghan Women's Mission, which aims to support the efforts of the decades-old Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), an underground group of about 2,000...

Fit for Public Consumption. (Matters of Scale).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Fit for Public Consumption. Amount of money U.S. drug companies $14 billion spent on marketing in 1999 Amount of money the 12 largest drug $19 billion companies spent on research and development...

Father and Daughter.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Afghanistan, as depicted in the popular press, is a desolate place--a country of ruined farmland, rubble, and roving bands of armed men, and of callous disdain for females. Too easily overlooked is that this country, like all others, is still a...