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REASON * May 2000 Earth Day, Then and Now The planet's future has never looked better. Here's why. By Ronald Bailey Thirty Years ago, 20 million Americans participated in the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Fifth Avenue in New York City was closed to automobiles as 100,000 people joined in concerts, lectures, and street theater. More than 2,000 colleges and universities across America paused their anti-war protests to rally instead against pollution and population growth. Even Congress recessed, acknowledging that the environment was now on a political par with motherhood. Since that first Earth Day, the celebrations...

WASHINGTON -- Feeling like the day is dragging? Blame global warming.Increased man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a global warming gas, is slowing the Earth's rotation, according to a new study by Belgian scientists published Tuesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.It's not much of a slowdown -- about 1.7 microsecond or 1.7 millionth of one second a year, according to co-author Michel Crucifix, a climate researcher at Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. The slowdown occurs because extra carbon dioxide expands the mass of the Earth's atmosphere from the Earth's surface. The change slows the Earth's rotation for the ...

Tropical Deforestation Monitored by Satellite COLLEGE PARK, Maryland, October 15, 2002 (ENS) - Satellite surveys show that less tropical forests were lost over the past two decades than previously estimated, but that the rate of loss is increasing. A research team led by the University of Maryland is the first to provide measures of how much tropical deforestation occurred during the past 20 years based on remote sensing data covering all the world's tropical forests. The team, whose research was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), evaluated weather satellite data using computer models they developed for...

By October of 1630 the tadpole-shaped peninsula called Boston had 150 English-speaking residents. Led by John Winthrop, the colony's first governor, these Puritan emigrants virtually began the historical process in which large numbers of recent European arrivals settled and subdued Massachusetts Bay and the North American environment during the next three-and-one-half centuries. With each austere-living family constructing a wooden home and fencing an adjacent garden, Bostonians by the 1640s already were traversing the Charles River to gather firewood and building materials as precious timber close at hand virtually had been erased. As early as the winter of 1637-38, Winthrop noted,...

Saving the Selva Maya Sunday, June 29, 2003, By JIM WRIGHT Editor's note: As part of his research for a book, Editorial Writer Jim Wright made several recent trips to the tropical forest in Belize, where until a few weeks ago a smoky haze often clouded the skies. WHAT IS THE SELVA MAYA?The Selva Maya consists of mostly contiguous jungle in three Central American nations: Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize. The three nations have created biosphere reserves, national parks, and other conservation areas to protect the jungle, conduct scientific research, and seek sustainable development. Guatemala has the 5-million-acre Maya Biosphere Reserve.Mexico's...