Year: 2008

Published on Wednesday, August 20, 2008 by Environmental News Service (ENS)
World Water Crisis Underlies World Food Crisis

STOCKHOLM, Sweden – The world’s supplies of clean, fresh water cannot sustain
today’s “profligate” use and inadequate management, which have brought shrinking
food supplies and rising food costs to most countries, WWF Director General James
Leape told the opening session of World Water Week in Stockholm [on Monday].

“Behind the world food crisis is a global freshwater crisis, expected to rapidly
worsen as climate change impacts intensify,” Leape said. “Irrigation-fed agriculture
provides 45 percent of the world’s food supplies, and without it, we could not feed
our planet’s population of six billion people.”

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In what’s left of roadless areas of the nation’s National Forests,  wildlife species
get some security from human disturbance, harassment  and killing. It goes without
saying that wildlife can sure use the  security, with or without the pressures
exerted by our new climate.  But homeland security for wildlife isn’t the only good
reason to keep  the remnant roadless roadless.

What’s left of the nation’s roadless areas also serve the creatures  we all know
best — people. It’s no secret that many Americans like  to get out of their cars
and away from roadside crowds to enjoy the  singular freedom of a walk in the wild
quiet of roadless woods. I’m  one. For me, homeland security means security for the
roadless forests too.
Lance
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“Last year, more than 140 House members and 19 senators introduced  the National
Forest RoadlessArea Conservation Act. It is past time to provide permanent
protection for the forests by turning the Clinton rule into firm law.”
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The New York Times
August 21, 2008

Editorial
There Ought to Be a Roadless Law

Among President Bill Clinton’s signature environmental achievements  was a
regulation that prohibited new roads – and by extension, new  commercial activity –
in nearly 60 million largely undeveloped acres  of the national forests. For seven
years, the Bush administration,  egged on by its friends in the timber and
oil-and-gas industries, has  worked tirelessly to kill the roadless rule.
Conservationists have  worked just as hard to preserve it.

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Climate, Development, Biodiversity, and Glacier National Park
Glacier Park: The next century – Threats from all sides
By MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian

WEST GLACIER – One hundred years ago, when Glacier National Park first became a
park, grizzly bears roamed along the spine of the Rocky
Mountains, north into Canada, south into Sun River country, west to the Cabinets and
east onto lowland plains. Wolves wandered, too, and
wolverines and big bull elk.

They had no idea someone had drawn a new political boundary onto their landscape.
They still don’t. “These critters move,” said park biologist Steve Gniadek. “It’s
critical they be able to cross in and out of the park.” But often they can’t, and
Gniadek has come to see Glacier as something of an island, an increasingly isolated
refugium surrounded by a growing moat of development.

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