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TODAY Wednesday 31 December 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: The Top Twelve Environment Stories of 1997

1. CLIMATE. From Orange County homeowners fretting about El Nino to world diplomats wrangling over the Kyoto text, this was the year that climate change / global warming / weird weather became a truly popular issue.

2. FIRES. The massive fires on Borneo and Sumatra darkened and fouled the skies over Southeast Asia, dramatized the lack of effective forest-protection policies, linked the drive for commodity exports and the loss of natural resources, and made vivid the consequences of unexpected shifts in weather patterns.

3. BETTER CARS. People got to see tactile examples of a new generation of automobiles. Toyota marketed a hybrid gasoline/electric car in Japan, Daimler Benz rolled out a fuel cell prototype, and GM and Ford announced impressive plans for high-efficiency models (while they lobbied hard in Washington against any new regs).

4. BIOTECH BLASTS OFF. Monsanto sells its industrial chemical past to concentrate on its agro-tech future. Dolly is cloned in Scotland. European greens lose fight to ban imports of American food grown from genetically-altered seeds. Houston, we have lift-off.

5. FROGS AND REEFS. Something seems terribly wrong with freshwater amphibians and saltwater corals. Their numbers are way down, and there's evidence of a rise in disfiguring mutations. What's going on? What's natural and what's human? What do these things portend?

6. CHINA. This was a year in which some Chinese officials started worrying in public about the environment (planners gave a respectful hearing to Lester Brown's grim forecasts on the need for grain imports) while other Chinese officials (and US Senators) let the world know that China holds some strong cards in the poker game of global greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, Hong Kong reverts and a billion people set about the task of getting as rich as they can as soon as they can.

7. OIL. Prices of crude oil reached their cheapest level in years, gasoline use skyrockets around the planet, and the big oil companies dramatically expand their control of the next big fossil fuel: natural gas. As sales of Ford Explorers attest, few Americans bother much about the price of gasoline at the pump, now much cheaper than bottled water. Will this stuff ever get expensive? If not, renewables stay problematic.

8. BIODIVERSITY BUFFERS. Evidence accumulates that many species require wider buffer strips between their habitats and human developments than had been estimated previously. Many species seem to thrive on the edges between natural zones and human zones -- this is the Golden Age of the Blue Jay -- but others need a lot more distance from us than we had thought. Big potential effects on sizes and configurations of conservation purchases and on attempts at win/win settlements under the Endangered Species Act.

9. DECLINE OF THE ZEALOTS. A bad year for both Greenpeace and the Wise Use movement. Earth Day virtually ignored.

10. CLEAN AIR REGULATIONS. Carol Browner pleases enviros, irks the White House, and infuriates industry by hanging tough on new federal regulations to enforce the Clean Air Act. Bill Clinton makes sure the toughest strictures take force after he leaves office, but the big news is that Congressional opponents can't muster enough votes to overrule the EPA. Enviros now seem recovered from their battle wounds of early 1995 and anti-enviros go back to the political drawing board.

11. HORMONES. Endocrine disruption not the public issue it was in 1996, on publication of Our Stolen Future, but increasingly big deal in the scientific journals. Deucedly complicated, often contentious. Big study affirms that yes, indeed, sperm counts are declining in industrialized countries.

12. NATIONAL FORESTS. Proposals from the so-called Quincy Library Group in California highlight hard-to-answer questions of who gets to decide about timbering practices in the National Forests. Should local communities get a little say or a very big say? Enviros are split.

13. AH-OOOOO! The wolves reintroduced to Yellowstone are thriving and (to relief of ranchers) killing off more coyotes than livestock. A federal judge issues a baffling order to remove them, partly, it seems, because of tactical blunder by some litigating national environmental groups.

Happy New Year.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

Got your own list? Disagree with one or two or seven of ours? Let us know, and we'll run (many of) your submissions right here.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

12/30: Bad Eating and Not Eating
12/29: Owning the Public Health Issue
12/23: Good Year for Vintage Climate
12/22: Save the Reefs
12/19: Mousemobile
12/18: Year of Fire
12/17: Ramblin' Man (Ramblin' Woman)
12/16: Big News on the Margins
12/15: The Hybrid As Savior
12/12: Good Week for the Dragon
12/11: Help Wanted: Unreasonable Extremists
12/10: Oh Boy! A Fight!
12/9: Running Away From It All
12/8: "What I Wouldn't Give for This War to End."
12/5: Feisty Euros at Kyoto
12/4: Beauty in the Bronx
12/3: God from Machine
12/2: Gentlemen's Bet
12/1: Public Opinion
11/26: Sperm
11/25: Sound Sound-Bite Science
11/24: Home Sweet Storage Locker
11/21: Tim Wirth's Inscrutable Adventure
11/20: Better to Receive than to Give
11/19: Wes Jackson's Problem with Agriculture
11/18: "Stay Home and Be Decent"

To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.