Earth Island Journal articles from December 2000

Earth Island Journal archives from December 2000

Dear Journal.
December 22, 2000... Duopoly by Design A private corporation now directs the televised presidential debates. The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), a joint creation of the Democratic and Republican parties, has created rules that shut out third-party or...

Ebb & Flow.(News Briefs)
December 22, 2000... A Miner Adjustment US -- Everyone remembers how Ronald Reagan stripped Jimmy Carter's solar panels off the White House, but few people realize that the US Capitol draws its heat from an ancient coal-burning powerplant -- one of the worst...

Eco-Mole.
December 22, 2000... Jungle Jive American Investigators (AI), a contrarian TV newsmag hosted by former CBS reporter Reid Collins, claims that the "disappearing Amazon" is a hoax cooked up by "Hollywood celebrities" in an effort to "keep Brazilians in poverty's...

Positive Notes.
December 22, 2000... The Mouse that Roars Simply by visiting a website [www.EcologyFund.com] and clicking a button, you can preserve South American and Asian rainforest and US parkland from development and exploitation (at a rate of 235-square-feet-per-day if you...

Anti-Whaling Efforts Harpooned.(Brief Article)
December 22, 2000... Intrigue rocks International Whaling Commission ADELAIDE, AUSTRALIA -- The annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in July was dominated by a move to expedite a resumption of commercial whaling and by Japan's attempted...

From Thailand to the Maldives.(Brief Article)
December 22, 2000... Defending dolphins -- from Bangkok to Washington BANGKOK -- In late May, I flew to Bangkok to represent Earth Island at Infofish, the sixth annual international tuna trade conference. More than 220 representatives from the world's major...

Dolphins in Decline.(Abstract)
December 22, 2000... Despite new research indicating that dolphin populations in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Ocean (ETP) continue to decline sharply, the Clinton administration has gone to court to overturn Earth Island's landmark court victory, which maintained...

Keiko Makes Contact.(Brief Article)
December 22, 2000... ICELAND -- Keiko, the captive orca who starred in the hit movie "Free Willy," is coming closer to turning a Hollywood fairytale into a real -- life miracle. In August, an Earth Island observer, flying in a super-silent research helicopter,...

Stacked Decks: Trading Air Quality for Global Trade.
December 22, 2000... Global trade threatens the oceans, the climate, and public health Standing on the docks of almost any major harbor in the US today, one is struck by the astounding profusion of vessels large and small making their way across our waters....

The Hole in the Headwaters.
December 22, 2000... I recently experienced the bittersweet joy of returning to Luna, the ancient redwood tree in which I lived for two years. This time, I embraced her wide trunk rather than her outstretched limbs. Together with my colleagues from Circle of Life...

Helping Disadvantaged Youth See the Stars.
December 22, 2000... Instead of putting computers in our elementary school classrooms, we should take children into nature, away from those virtual worlds in which they spend unconscionable hours.... Let them know that nothing... they will find in the virtual...

"Survivors".
December 22, 2000... For Borneo's People, It's Not Just a TV Show BORNEO -- The journey from San Francisco to the village of Keluan in northeastern Borneo was an arduous one. More than 20 hours of flying time, with stops in Tokyo, Bangkok, and Brunei. Then four...

Battling AIDS in Africa.
December 22, 2000... I recently returned from a five week trip to Kenya -- my eighth trip there since 1994. Global Service Corps (GSC) has been sending volunteer program participants to Kenya to assist with HIV/AIDS prevention education since 1997. But I returned...

Earth Island Staff and Projects.
December 22, 2000... Aral Sea Environmental Alliance Heather Carlisle.(*) (aralsea@earthisland.org) Baikal Watch gary cook,(*) Erika Rosenthal. (baikalwatch@earthisland.org) Bay Area Wilderness Training Kyle Macdonald,(*) Alicia Gray, BJ Atanasio....

Making Waves.
December 22, 2000... Earth Island in the News Mangrove Action Project (MAP) and the coastal conservation group Fundacion Cimas del Ecuador are sponsoring a volunteer work/study tour to reforest mangroves in Ecuador's Esmeraldas province. Participants will help...

Bio Watch.
December 22, 2000... Trees Totaled THAILAND -- Trees are dying along the route of the Yadana gas pipeline, a project sponsored by oil companies Unocal, Total, and Premier. Local environmentalists report that the dead and dying trees stretch for about three...

UNITED NATIONS.
December 22, 2000... We're Number Three! UNITED NATIONS -- Thanks to the wonders of the global economy, 200 residents of the planet Earth have amassed a combined wealth of more than $1 trillion, while 100 million children are Living on the streets. The UN's...

NORTH AMERICA.
December 22, 2000... Stamping out Roads US -- More than 500,000 citizens responded to the Clinton Administration's proposal to ban roads in 43 million acres of national forests. The deluge of Letters was the Largest response in history, surpassing even the...

EUROPE.
December 22, 2000... Radioactive Dumping via Pipe FRANCE -- Greenpeace activists, scouring the waters of the Hurd Deep off Cap de La Hauge in France, have come up with shocking photos of "corroding, broken, and disintegrated barrels of radioactive waste" Lying...

SOUTH AMERICA.(Brief Article)
December 22, 2000... Pipeline Dreams BRAZIL -- The $2 billion Bolivia-Brazil pipeline is one of the single largest private sector investments in Latin America. The 1,800-mite (3,000-kilometer) pipeline already traverses the Pantanal wetlands of Bolivia and...

ASIA.(Brief Article)
December 22, 2000... WHO's on Tobacco's Hit List? THAILAND -- Last May, World Health Organization (WHO) head Gro Harlem Brundtland condemned the "tobacco epidemic" that kills 11,000 people a day and called for a global ban on cigarette ads. Brundtland noted...

AFRICA.
December 22, 2000... Oil Wells Cause War SUDAN -- Amnesty International and The Society for Threatened Peoples have linked the operations of multinational oil companies in the Sudan to human fights violations by security forces and pro-government militia. The...

Humans are Eating Africa Alive.
December 22, 2000... CENTRAL AFRICA -- Conservation International estimates that commercial poachers armed with high-powered rifles are killing more than a million metric tons of African animals a year. The continent's primates are especially at risk. ...

The Mindo Pipeline.
December 22, 2000... In Ecuador, a group of conservationists is scrambling to save a fragile habitat from destruction at the hands of foreign oil companies. The area is the Mindo-Nambillo Protected Forest, which Birdlife International recently designated as South...

Pollution Did Kill JFK, Jr.
December 22, 2000... US -- In our Winter 1999-2000 issue, the Journal raised the possibility that the July 1999 plane crash that killed John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife Carolyn Bessett Kennedy, and her sister Lauren Bessett, might have been caused by air pollution....

World Oil Protests.
December 22, 2000... In June, more than 1,000 people peacefully protested in the streets of Calgary, Canada as the World Petroleum Congress (WPC) met behind a six-foot fence inside a $71 million conference center built especially for the oil industry gathering. ...

Gulf War Syndrome? DUh!
December 22, 2000... On September 7, the US Institute of Medicine announced that, despite a comprehensive investigation, it was unable to identify a "single cause" for the Gulf War Syndrome that plagues 90,000 veterans. Meanwhile, a little-noticed report in...

US Bombs Korean Village.
December 22, 2000... SOUTH KOREA -- While residents of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques continue to risk arrest for protesting the US Navy's renewed bombing of their homeland, a similar struggle is being waged half a world away in the Korean village of...

California Snubs Detroit: Backs ZEVs.
December 22, 2000... In 1990, California passed a historic taw requiring that ten percent of vehicles sold in .the state by the year 2003 must be zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs). US automakers and oil companies have been fighting the Law ever since. On September...

Goodbye North Pole?
December 22, 2000... In August, the New York Times stunned the world with the news that part of the North Pole had melted -- for the first time in 50 million years. The discovery of a mile-wide stretch of open water at the top of the world, arguably the...

Radio Waves: Invisible Danger.
December 22, 2000... "Our family, neighbors and children are plagued with headaches, eye discomfort, facial redness, ringing or high-pitch sounds, fatigue, dizziness, sleep disturbances, irregular heartbeat, high blood-pressure, nausea, pain in the joints and...

Financing Global Destruction.
December 22, 2000... As more people join the campaign against the World Trade Organization (WTO) and other agents of corporate globalization, they should be aware of equally destructive entities that lurk practically unnoticed in their own countries. Like the...

Airports' Poison Circles.
December 22, 2000... If you live within six miles of an airport, you are at heightened risk of dying prematurely from pollution spewing from jet aircraft, ground vehicles and airport maintenance operations. The situation is about to get worse. On April 5,...

Economics on a Human Scale.
December 22, 2000... Charles Hurwitz is one of America's most notorious corporate raiders. He only clearcuts California's ancient redwoods, but also locked out 2,900 steelworkers when he became the owner of Kaiser Aluminum -- the largest lock-out in US labor...

Confronting California's "Logzilla".
December 22, 2000... Between 1992 and 1999, Sierra Pacific increased the amount of land it clearcut by 2,426 percent For the past decade, Texas billionaire Charles Hurwitz and his Pacific Lumber Company have been virtually synonymous with forest destruction in...

The Flame Game.
December 22, 2000... The summer wildfires that burned throughout Montana and much of the western US offered the timber industry and its supporters an opportunity to advance their agenda of increased logging and roadbuilding in America's national forests -- by...

Fighting Fire ... With Pollutants.
December 22, 2000... In 1999, more than 27 million gallons of fire-retardants were dropped on forest fires in the US. The figure for the 2000 fire season will easily top that. But just what is in those red-tinted sprays? An Earth Island Journal investigation...

The Economic Impact of National Forest Roadless Areas.
December 22, 2000... After Thomas Michael Power's book Lost Landscapes was quoted in a US Forest Service proposal to limit logging roads in national forests, pro-logging forces in Montana publicly burned the book. What did Power say that so outraged the timber...

Sacred Peaks and Stone-washed Jeans.
December 22, 2000... Mountain peaks sacred to 13 Native tribes are being mined to produce stone-washed jeans Burning a church. Spraypainting swastikas on the wall of a synagogue. Vandalizing a mosque. Stripmining land that is sacred to American Indians. All of...

Stripmining the Trail of Dreams.
December 22, 2000... "Why don't they just line us up and shoot us, like back then?" asks Lorey Cachora, the Archeology and Cultural Consultant to the Quechan Indian Tribe. "Lots of Indian leaders lost their lives over that law," he says, referring to the...

The Internet, the Grid, and the New Energy Era.
December 22, 2000... In June, heat from the Sahara Desert stormed across the Mediterranean, unleashing an inferno that raked southern Europe with 113 [degrees] F temperatures and triggered heat-stroke deaths and forest fires in Greece, France, and Italy In Rumania,...

Auckland: City of Darkness.
December 22, 2000... NEW ZEALAND -- At 5:45 PM Friday, February 20, 1998, as most Auckland commuters headed home after another hot week at work, the lights suddenly went out. So did the computers, the air conditioning, the freezers, and the elevators. Drivers were...

Cut Kilowatts, Not Trees.(Brief Article)
December 22, 2000... Michael Zammit Cutajar, executive secretary of the UN Climate Change Convention, has warned that "the urgency of global warming is not being reflected in the pace of [international] talks." In a clear reference to the US, Cutajar declared that...

Return to the Village: Planning for Urban Catastrophe.(Brief Article)
December 22, 2000... Many of Auckland's problems arise from its scare. Cities suffer from the effects of simply being too big. Communities of the future can be better designed on a smatter urban village scale. We can also revitalize existing rural towns that have...

Oakland, California: The World's Largest Green-Powered City.
December 22, 2000... Over the last ten years, the amount of electricity generated by nonpolluting windpower has jumped from 1,700 megawatts (MW) to 11,000 MW. Wind-powered generators are now the fastest-growing source of electricity in the world. A study by...

Space Cowboys.
December 22, 2000... A bunch of former NASA employees plan to blast rockets into space from the heart of the American Southwest. An intrepid band of former NASA employees has embarked on an ambitious private-sector plan to launch commercial satellites into...

`No Significant Impact'?
December 22, 2000... On April 4, the Federal Aviation Administration published a Draft Environmental Assessment that declared that an inland spaceport would have "Little impact on the environment." The assessment proposed issuing a Finding of No Significant Impact...

That Sinking Feeling.
December 22, 2000... The February 2000 issue of Scientific American tells of a new technology that makes me both rejoice and worry. It looks so great, so likely to relieve a massive environmental problem that there's no way I could oppose it. But on second, third...

THE KYOTO CRISIS AND THE GAS-ROOTS REBELLION.
December 22, 2000... NETHERLANDS -- A critical 11-day global climate summit is set for The Hague beginning November 13. Key decisions will be made to clarify the vague language of the Kyoto Protocol, a global treaty that commits the world's industrial nations to...

Bow Saws vs. Armageddon.
December 22, 2000... A Simple Act... They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. -- Isaiah, 2:4 Conscience and an obligation to prevent the crime of nuclear genocide and defend the health and safety of residents in and...

Because I Should ...(Brief Article)
December 22, 2000... There is in neither customary nor conventional international law any specific authorization of the threat or use of nuclear weapons. -- Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice, July 8, 1996 I received an invitation to...