Tuesday, 18 Mar 2003

The Thrill of No Drill

With a quarter of a million troops amassing outside Iraq and the city of Baghdad preparing for Armageddon, it's tough to find anything resembling a silver lining in the headlines. But there was some good news yesterday in the environmental sector: Senate Republicans said they had probably come up short in their efforts to secure enough votes to open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, the highly controversial cornerstone of President Bush's energy plan. The Senate will vote on the plan late this week or early next, and by all indicators, the pro-drilling faction is about two votes shy of a success. The expected failure is sure to be an embarrassment for Bush, who vowed while campaigning to undo President Clinton's refusal to drill in the refuge. Environmentalists said they were cautiously optimistic about the lay of the land, but weren't going to exhale until after the vote.

Good, Clean Fun

Ah, springtime: Get ready for tank tops, crocuses, picnics -- and spring cleaning. But be careful: According to the U.S. EPA, indoor air can be anywhere from two to more than 100 times more polluted than outdoor air, largely due to toxic chemicals from home decorating and cleaning products. In this month's Earthly Possessions, get tips on how to clean your house without dirtying the environment. From dish detergent to laundry soap, stain removers to oven cleaners, find out how to wash green, without getting taken in by greenwashing -- only on the Grist Magazine website.

Come Down From There Right Now!

Two of 18 environmental activists who have been sitting in redwoods in California's Humboldt County for almost a year were forcibly removed yesterday by Pacific Lumber Company, raising the longstanding conflict between the two groups to a new level. After the Humboldt County Superior Court issued the tree sitters a temporary restraining order last week, the company warned that it would resort to physically removing them; now, it says the remaining 16 tree sitters will be brought down as quickly as is safely possible. The activists are protesting what they say is the company's record of ignoring endangered-species and water-quality protections, leading to landslides and the silting of critical salmon spawning areas. The tree sitters have severely impeded Pacific Lumber's operations, preventing the company from cutting hundreds of thousands of boardfeet of redwood.

Off Balance

Earning kudos from environmentalists, the Michigan Department of Agriculture has banned the use of Balance Pro on the state's 2.2 million acres of corn fields. Balance Pro is a powerful herbicide and a possible carcinogen that has contaminated surface and groundwater in other states, in some cases lingering in waterways 10 months after a single application. The Michigan decision marks another blow by the Great Lakes states to the pesticide and its maker, Bayer CropScience; last year, Wisconsin approved Balance Pro, but with so many restrictions Bayer decided it wasn't worth selling it there. Dave Dempsey, policy advisor for the Michigan Environmental Council, praised the move, calling it "one of the few times I've seen the Ag Department act in a precautionary way."

Wolf Downed

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today proposed changing the status of wolves in the Western U.S. from endangered to threatened, a move that could signal the eventual delisting of the species. Management of the wolves would then be turned over to Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. The wolf was nearly extinct a half-century ago and was declared endangered in 47 of the lower 48 states in 1974. Recovery efforts picked up speed in the 1990s, when wolves were transplanted into central Idaho and Yellowstone National Park, and the population has been increasing rapidly in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming ever since. Nonetheless, conservationists and some state officials are unhappy that today's announcement covers all Western states -- even though wolves are still nonexistent in the rest of the West. Fish and Wildlife officials defended the move, saying the Endangered Species Act does not require a species to be returned to its entire historic range before federal protections can be removed.