Publication archives

It's hard to know what to say about President-elect Barack Obama's selection of Ron Kirk as the next U.S. Trade Representative. He has relatively little international experience and really no international trade experience to speak of.

Without question, one of the major challenges for President-elect Barack Obama will be to improve relations with the rest of the world after a disastrous eight years. At this point, we don't have a choice. Too many of the crises facing the U.S. domestically (the economy, climate, agriculture and food) are actually global in nature and will require global cooperation.

Steve Suppan discusses the connection between agricultural market speculation and food security, Mark Muller talks about sustainable agriculture and fluctuating markets, and Cecilia Martinez explains IATP's new Center for Earth, Energy and Democracy program.

More than 2 million acres of Wisconsin's privately owned forest lands enrolled in the Managed Forest Law (MFL) Program have been awarded Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) accreditation by the SmartWood Program of the Rainforest Alliance.

The whitebark pine, a tree found in the high elevations of the western U.S. and Canada, is being killed as a consequence of global warming and should be protected as an endangered species, an environmental group formally told the Interior Department Tuesday.

The idea seemed too crazy to Rod Simmons, a measured, careful field botanist. Naturalists in Arlington County couldn't find any acorns. None. No hickory nuts, either. Then he went out to look for himself. He came up with nothing. Nothing crunched underfoot. Nothing hit him on the head.

Washington forest regulators are going to allow logging in certain spotted owl habitat where it had been banned. The state Forest Practices Board on Tuesday adopted an emergency rule for 2009 that allows forest landowners to log in owl habitat under certain conditions. The rule replaces a statewide moratorium on logging in certain owl sites that ends Dec. 31.

Now, 2008 has ended without agreement on the Doha round of trade negotiations. Today, the World Trade Organization held its last "Trade Negotiations Committee" (TNC) of the year.