Monday, 10 Jun 2002

Dropping the Bali

Negotiations at a two-week meeting in Bali, Indonesia, to establish the agenda for the upcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development ended in stalemate on Friday. Delegates could not agree on several key issues and were ultimately forced to admit defeat; former Indonesian Environment Minister Emil Salim, who chaired the meeting, blamed the failure on a lack of good faith among the negotiators. The contentious issues included a demand by the U.S. that development aid be contingent on efforts to fight corruption, as well as developing countries' call for richer nations to commit to widening their markets to trade and the transfer of technology. The WSSD, to be held in Johannesburg, South Africa, at the end of August, is supposed to establish clear targets and timetables for protecting the environment, ensuring sustainable economic development, and eradicating poverty. But the disintegration of the Bali talks places all of those goals in jeopardy.

Pret-a-Poor Taste

The U.S. has a new action plan for global climate change, and it goes like this: Get used to it. To help you do just that, Grist is proud to offer on its website a copy of the all-new U.S. Climate Report and Fashion Guide. New weather patterns will be emerging throughout the country, so what better time to update your wardrobe? From bikinis in Idaho to great crop yields in Alaska, global warming is nothing but good news. Come celebrate the inevitable with Mark Fiore's animated cartoon, only on the Grist Magazine website.

Short Changed

Bolstering environmentalists' accusations of favoritism in Florida, the Bush administration rejected on Friday a request by California Gov. Gray Davis (D) that it buy back offshore drilling rights. On May 29, President Bush announced a $235 million dollar buy-back of Florida drilling rights, a move that was widely viewed as a favor (and campaign contribution) to First Brother and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R). The administration defended its decisions in part by claiming that, "Florida opposes coastal drilling and California does not." Golden State residents are scratching their heads over that statement, since in fact public sentiment in California has been dead set against offshore drilling ever since a 1969 blowout of an oil platform killed birds and marine life and despoiled beaches -- an event that helped inspire the nation's first Earth Day and launch the environmental movement. Californians feel pretty much the same way now that they did then, so "It's fair to say that [Interior] Secretary [Gale] Norton is a half-century behind the times," said Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope.

Boy, You're Gonna Carry That Weight

What if you spent an entire week carrying around all the garbage you produced -- every apple core, every paper napkin, every glossy piece of junk mail? By the end of the week, the bag would be pretty heavy. As a result, you'd be aware of your own waste production, and its burden on you -- and on the Earth. Of course, it's not practical to carry our waste around with us all the time, but in this month's Global Citizen column, that weighty bag becomes a potent metaphor for living responsibly. Vermont writer and activist Elizabeth Sawin counsels us to uncover ways to make ourselves and those around us accountable for the environmental and social impact of our actions, only on the Grist Magazine website.

A Shot in the Dark

For the obsessive ornithologists among our readers, some tragicomic news: Once-buoyant hopes for the survival of the ivory-billed woodpecker have faded after sounds thought to be the bird's distinctive double-rap on a dead tree proved to be distant gunshots. Earlier this year, the ivory-billed woodpecker, which has not been confirmed to exist since shortly after World War II, was the subject of a month-long search in the Louisiana swamplands by a team of internationally recognized birders. That search was prompted by an apparently credible sighting of the bird in 1999; the team that went out this January didn't see so much as a feather, but it did record a series of raps that the scientists agreed was a woodpecker. Alas, researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology who did a computer analysis of the sounds begged to differ. The ivory-billed woodpecker was (or maybe is) the largest North American woodpecker, standing 20 inches tall and boasting a 30-inch wingspan. Its decline corresponded to the cutting of its habitat, the hardwood forests of the southern U.S.