Winter 2002
Table of Contents
Biotech Briefing
To induce consumers to buy their products and farmers to test and grow them, biotechnology marketers often look to economically distressed, vulnerable populations, like India’s and Zimbabwe’s — or even Kentucky’s.
Human Rights
Call this the civil disobedience issue: Near Prescott Park in West Oakland, residents are pressing to shut down the carcinogen-producing Red Star Yeast factory with “all the tools at our disposal.”
Chainsaw George
George W. Bush, fresh off a brush-clearing operation at his Crawford ranch, vowed to fight forest fires by taking a chainsaw to the nation’s forests and the environmental laws that protect them.
Does the Public Own Yellowstone’s Microbes?
For decades, researchers have braved the simmering geothermal springs of Yellowstone National Park looking for heat-resistant microbes.
Shell Seeks Vallejo Foothold For Overseas Gas
A proposed liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility on Mare Island in San Pablo Bay would pose major health and safety threats while increasing California’s vulnerability to the natural gas market, say energy consultants.
Stockton’s Water “Not for Auction”
Residents of Stockton, California, have demanded the right to vote on a multimillion-dollar proposal to contract out operation of the city’s water system in what would be the largest water privatization on the West Coast.
Dairy Air
Tulare County has approved a key permit for one of California’s new generation of massive dairy farms, whose storage of manure in lagoons has raised concerns about air and water pollution.
Drilling the Wilderness
Los Padres National Forest officials are set to decide by January whether to allow oil and gas drilling in roadless areas targeted for protection in US Senator Barbara Boxer’s wilderness bill.
Hope for Renewables
A groundbreaking California law requires all investor-owned utilities to increase their renewable energy use by 1% per year, eventually to 20%.
PG&E’s “Jailbreak”
A little-noticed federal court ruling could mean that companies declaring bankruptcy can waive all state laws governing water quality, safety, or land use.
Medicine Lake
The US Department of the Interior is set to decide by November 1 whether to reverse a Clinton-era denial of geothermal development in the Medicine Lake Highlands, a caldera sacred to the Modoc, Shasta, Pit River and other Native American tribes.
Urban Ag Showdown
Student activists say they are ready to apply “political pressure,” including civil disobedience, to stop the University of California Berkeley from paving over Albany’s Gill Tract, the largest piece of undeveloped agricultural land in the urban San Francisco Bay Area.
The Last Stands
A little more than a year ago, “Remedy” — she uses a pseudonym to elude being served with a civil lawsuit for trespassing — was working in a bookstore in Olympia, Washington. That September, she took a nine-day vacation to California’s Humboldt County to raise her awareness about logging issues.
Life Among The Ruins
What happens when a catastrophe destroys your home? A fire, an earthquake, maybe even a war rips through your living room, tears your walls down and leaves a crumbled heap of drywall, rebar, and debris. If you survived, you’d probably move, find a new home and start over.
Song of the Elderberries
Environmentalists often talk in terms of “stewardship,” “protection,” and “defense” as if we are guardians of a child. Certainly there is a dire need to protect environments everywhere.
The Spirit Lover
What I am going to tell you happened in Nicasio, on the old rancheria, where many of us lived after the San Rafael Mission was secularized and before county marshals marched us over the hills to Tomales Bay.
Stranger in a Strange Lake
At the visitors’ center at Clear Lake State Park, past the diorama of Pomo village life and the cutaway diagram of Mount Konocti’s volcanic innards, there’s a wall- mounted aquarium displaying some of the lake’s fish.
O Pioneers!
A raw volcano in Hawai‘i will rearrange one’s ideas about Nature, deep and fast.
Big-Picture Choices
Is an ice cube tray with round holes more energy efficient than one with rectangular holes?
Winter on the Farm
In winter, our farmers take a breath, pick and sell in the rain, organize boxes, prune, weed, fix the plows — and plan and plant for spring, summer, and sometimes years ahead.
