Environment United States

Endangered species are so concentrated in Southern California and a few other hot spots that conservation efforts should be targeted there to help stem the country's loss of biodiversity, researchers will report today. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, in an article that accompanied the report in the journal Science, said the new data will help revise federal policies to save animals and plants at risk of extinction.

For weeks, President Bush and Democratic leaders have framed the energy legislation pending in Congress this week as a form of homeland defense: a way to reduce America's reliance on oil from the turbulent Middle East. But now, the Senate appears poised to reject the principal ideas of each side for maximizing America's energy independence. In a form of mutually assured destruction, the central proposals for increasing both domestic energy production and conservation look doomed.

Perched beside a lazy bend of the Colorado River, between a national park and a wildlife preserve, 10 million tons of uranium mill waste are slowly and steadily leaking contaminants into one of the nation's most valuable waterways. If the company that owns it has its way--and it appears likely that it will--this radioactive legacy of the Cold War era of nuclear bomb building won't go away soon.

The Bush administration weakened federal protections for wetlands on Monday, making it easier for developers to build on land where streams flow part of the year. This was one of several changes the Army Corps of Engineers made to wetland regulations that specify when developers can seek "nationwide permits," which are shortcuts that enable them to begin their projects more quickly and with fewer restrictions.

For the next month, more than a million monarch butterflies will fly from inland California to roost at winter nesting grounds at hundreds of sites from Santa Cruz to Baja California. East of the Rocky Mountains, an estimated 300 million more monarchs are thought to be passing through Texas in a trek from Canada and the U.S. Midwest to wintering sites in Mexico. Both migrations, says a conservationist from the Sacramento office of the U.S.

U.S. authorities said Tuesday they have fined a Mexican factory for improperly disposing of its hazardous wastes north of the border--the first time a Mexican business has been sanctioned for violating U.S. environmental law. Maquiladora Chambers de Mexico, a leather belt manufacturer in Pitiquito, 75 miles south of the Arizona border in the Mexican state of Sonora, agreed to pay a $3,164 fine and train personnel in neighboring factories on waste disposal laws in the United States and Mexico.

President Bush's roster of nominees for key environmental policy jobs is brimming with lawyers and lobbyists for the very industries these officials will oversee in their government posts. Not surprisingly, Bush's lineup differs greatly from former President Clinton's senior regulatory team, which featured a number of prominent environmentalists. As a result, many of Bush's choices have been greeted warmly by conservative activists but eyed warily by environmental organizations.

The nation's first auction in rights to emit air pollution brought more bidders to the table than expected. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Chicago Board of Trade announced Tuesday that 171 bids--from electric utilities, brokerage firms, environmental groups and private investors--competed for more than 150,000 allowances that were sold by sealed bid, bringing in $21 million. Each allowance permits utilities to emit one ton of sulfur dioxide over one year.

The Council on Economic Priorities, a nonprofit group that publishes the popular consumer guide "Shopping for a Better World," has named some of America's best-known companies to a list of the nation's eight worst corporate environmental offenders. Rockwell International, General Electric, General Motors, Maxxam Group, Du Pont, Georgia-Pacific, USX and Cargill make up the council's list of environmental culprits.

Lenient miles-per-gallon standards for sport-utility vehicles and minivans cost Americans an extra $13.6 billion at the gas pump last year while causing a significant increase in air pollution, a public interest research group reported Wednesday. SUVs and other so-called light trucks, which accounted for 45% of all vehicles sold in the United States last year, long have been targeted by environmentalists as primary factors in Americans' increasing gasoline consumption. But the new study by U.S.

President Bush signed into law Friday a bill that offers new incentives, including $200 million in aid, for communities and developers to clean up abandoned industrial sites and turn them into commercial, residential and recreational spaces. The law also provides expanded liability protection for those willing to develop such "brownfields." That provision, Bush said, plus the new funding--a doubling of current federal spending for brownfields cleanup--should hasten the restoration of such sites.

With the nation's attention squarely on war and terrorism, the Bush administration has ruled this fall in business' favor on a range of long-disputed environmental matters. It allowed oil drilling in the red rocks of Utah and canyons of Colorado. It permitted an open-pit gold mine on a California desert site that the Quechan tribe considers sacred. And it signaled to developers across the country that they can, in many cases, build on wetlands without creating ones to replace them.

Environmentalists sued the Bush administration Thursday to block the president's efforts to accelerate energy exploration on federal land. The lawsuit claims the Bureau of Land Management and its parent agency, the Interior Department, broke the law by not consulting with Indian tribes nor assessing the environmental and cultural damage that could be done before opening a dozen parcels in southern Utah to oil and gas exploration. The environmental groups that filed the suit in U.S.

High in an alpine meadow, John Gatchell, investigative hiker, spots the tracks. Fat tires have carved deep gashes in a mountain stream bed, leaving a muddy morass and puddles tainted with the telltale iridescence of gasoline. Gatchell pulls out his tape measure and wades knee-deep into the muck. He announces with an edge to his voice the width of the damaged area: 15 feet across.

A bipartisan effort to forge a major change in federal farm funding for the sake of the environment failed narrowly in the House on Thursday, but support in the Senate and the Bush administration for conservation programs gave sponsors hope that their struggle is not lost. The House voted 226 to 220 to reject an amendment that would have shifted $1.

President Bush on Friday rued his administration's handling of a decision to reconsider arsenic levels in drinking water, suggesting that the flap unfairly tainted his administration as being anti-environment. "I think we could have handled the environmental issue a little better," Bush conceded during an interview on ABC-TV's "20-20," which aired Friday night. "My administration's made a lot of very thoughtful and environmentally sensitive decisions, but you get no credit for it," he said.

It's Friday night in the Rio Grande Valley, and a weekend bucket brigade is lining up to get drinking water from the coin-operated spigot at Watermill Express. With its cute windmill and 25-cent-a-gallon charge, Watermill is one of several commercial outlets serving thousands of U.S. border residents who do not have potable tap water or, in many cases, tap water at all.

In a departure from its usual fare of public lands, pollution and endangered species, the Sierra Club is about to enter a potentially divisive debate about immigration, the outcome of which could alter the way people think and talk about the issue. Members of America's largest and most prestigious environmental organization will vote in March whether to reverse the club's neutral policy and endorse a drastic reduction in immigration as a way to slow U.S. population growth.

The Bush administration on Monday signaled its intention to soften a Clinton administration plan for cleaning up America's waterways by controlling runoff from farms, cities and other sources of water pollution. Environmentalists denounced the decision as another in a string of rollbacks of major Clinton administration efforts to fight pollution and protect public lands.

The views from the top of Little Baldy should be stupendous. The 8,044-foot granite dome, in Sequoia National Park, is surrounded by California's High Sierra, the mountains John Muir dubbed "the range of light." On most summer days, the views leave visitors gasping--but for all the wrong reasons. To the west, the Sierra foothills usually are covered by a thick brown blanket of smog. Looking east, the haze stains the skies above some of the Sierra's tallest, most majestic peaks.