Friday, 05 Jan 2001

The Rules of the Roadless

Pres. Clinton today moved to put almost a third of the country's national forestland forever off-limits to road-building and commercial logging. The rule to protect 58.5 million acres of land will effectively prohibit oil and gas drilling as well, and could go a long way toward limiting off-road vehicle access. The road-building ban covers big pieces of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska that were exempted in a draft proposal of the rule. "This is a great moment in history," said Ken Rait, who as director of the Heritage Forests Campaign helped lead the enviro effort to get the rule enacted. But Alaska Republican Sens. Ted Stevens and Frank Murkowski said they would fight the rule, and Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne (R) vowed to sue over the issue. Proponents of the rule said that the incoming Bush administration would have to conduct extensive public hearings and find a strong reason to reverse the rule before it could do so.

What's Mine Is Theirs, What's Theirs Is Mine

A coalition of Canadian and U.S. environmental groups submitted a letter to U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt yesterday, asking him to help protect the Taku River watershed from mining. The groups want Babbitt to declare a proposed mining project a hazard to grizzly bears, caribou, and salmon that live in the watershed, which covers a huge swath of land in British Columbia and Alaska. They contend that the U.S. could impose trade sanctions on Canada because the project would violate international wildlife treaties. The U.S. State Department and Alaska Gov. Tony Knowles (D) have called for the mining plan to be reviewed by the International Joint Commission, which has the ability to reject environmentally harmful projects.

Kicking a Two-pack-a-day Habit

The air in Mexico City -- described by the U.N. in 1992 as the world's worst -- seems to be getting cleaner. Even as the number of cars and people picks up in the city, tougher environmental rules calling for cleaner fuels, catalytic converters on cars, emissions tests, and limits on industrial pollution have caused pollution numbers this winter to drop significantly. In the 1990s, simply breathing in the city was the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. An air quality index in 1996 reached 394 on a scale from zero to 500, with anything over 100 viewed as unsatisfactory; on Wednesday this week the index topped out at 69. Big challenges remain, but Nobel Laureate Mario Molina, who is helping to lead a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study on the issue, expressed hope that new technologies would offer solutions.

That Can-do Spirit

Industry experts say Brazil will recycle about 80 percent of the 9.5 billion aluminum cans sold in the country in 2000, putting it on pace to match Japan's trend-setting rate of 79 percent in 1999. By comparison, the U.S. recycled 63 percent of its cans in 1999 and Europe as a whole recycled 41 percent. The boom in Brazilian recycling is due in large part to enterprising Brazilians who collect carelessly littered cans in cities and towns throughout the country. Recycling cans has become a $110 million-a-year industry employing about 150,000 Brazilians, according to the Brazil Aluminum Association. Producing a ton of aluminum from scratch requires 16,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity, while using old cans requires only 750 kilowatt-hours.