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In an attempt to increase domestic production of alternative fuel sources, the Bush administration has proposed allowing ethanol plants to send more hazardous air pollutants into the air.

Producers are scrapping use of antibiotics. Time to relax?

Millions of acres of Canada's lush green forests are turning red in spasms of death. A voracious beetle, whose population has exploded with the warming climate, is killing more trees than wildfires or logging.

China's National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the policy-maker and watchdog of China's economy, issued a circular recently, encouraging the development and production of timber substitutions to save timber resources.

Asia Pacific Resources International Holdings Ltd. has long been a pariah to environmental groups for clear-cutting trees in a tropical rainforest here. Friends of the Earth accused it of destroying tracts of "the most biodiverse lowland forest on the planet." Even one of the company's consultants has said it misled environmentalists about its logging practices.

Pygmy chief Mbomba Bokenu says he may soon let loggers cut his people's forests, and all he expects in return are soap and a few bags of salt. "The Pygmies are suffering, we accept what we are given," said Bokenu, draped in brown civet-cat skins and holding a slender carved-wooden shield. "Our children live in dirt, they suffer from disease. Soap and salt is a lot to our people."

Oregon could lose private forests at the rapid clip of other states, now that the state Supreme Court effectively ruled that Oregon's 30-year-old land use laws are - at least partially - invalid, the Oregon State University's Forestry Department dean said Thursday.