Publication archives

Sophia Murphy on U.S. food aid, David Korten on the "economic perfect storm" and Jim Kleinschmit on sustainable biofuels.

Demand for ethanol has led to the planting of the nation's largest corn crop ever. Corn prices are high, but so are costs How big are those 600,000 additional acres? More than half of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. Minnesota's total crop of shelled corn, the kind used for animal feed and ethanol, will fill the Metrodome. Twenty-six times. Call it the ethanol effect.

If the federal Food and Drug Administration moves ahead with a plan to approve a new, potent antibiotic for use in cattle, it will risk undermining the effectiveness of an entire class of powerful antibiotics to treat humans. That's too big a gamble - especially for people who already rely on one of those drugs to fight life-threatening infections.

After completing a two-year pilot phase, scientists at the Woods Hole Research Center are expanding the scope of the "National Biomass and Carbon Dataset" for the year 2000 (NBCD2000), the first ever inventory of its kind, by moving into the production phase.

The Carpenter St. Croix Valley Nature Center is a ways from the boulevards of Minneapolis, but both share a common heartache, the loss of the majestic American elm to Dutch Elm Disease. "We saw it in the cities, because that's where we live," Linda Haugen of the U.S. Forest Service reflected, "but there are photos out there of bottomland forests with stem after stem of dead tree."

Plum Creek Timber Co. introduced its latest plan on Friday for what would be northern Maine's largest development project.

Tree farmers must work just as fast as the wildfires racing across Southeast Georgia if they are to have any hope of salvaging timber burned by the massive infernos.

Ten volunteers braved one of the heaviest rainfalls of the year on Saturday, April 21 as they helped the Big River Stewards restore failed water bars on a steep "legacy" logging road at Big River as part of a special Earth Day weekend restoration project.