Environment

Boise Cascade is one of the worst transnational logging companies in the world. Its many scandals include: involvement in false imprisonment of peasant environmentalists who opposed Boise's logging in Mexico; a huge proposed woodchipping scheme in Southern Chile; threats of lawsuits and harassment to environmentalists, including a recent threat to ECO's Cath Wallace; and involvement with the campaign to get the Rainforest Action Network's tax-deductibility status removed. Thanks to the World Wide Fund for Nature, however, the company just got a green makeover.

Contrary to the claims of the biotech lobby, Canadian researchers have found strong evidence that genetically modified (GM) crops can spread long distances from where they have been planted and spawn "superweeds."

Michael Betsch at the Cybercast News Service reports that "the conservative environmental group, Greening Earth Society" opposes the scientific consensus that global warming is a real problem. Betsch fails to point out that this "conservative environmental group" is actually a front group created by the coal industry. We examine the Greening Earth Society and the industry campaign to confuse the climate debate in our book, Trust Us, We're Experts.

In Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, we reported on the Environmental Protection Agency's PR campaign to rename sewage sludge as "biosolids" and use it as fertilizer. Now the Washington Post is finally reporting that there might be some problems with the practice. This story mentions complaints from people such as James Lear of Virginia, who woke up one morning last fall covered head to foot with mysterious boils that his doctor said might be connected to airborne bacteria from the treated sewage used as fertilizer on a nearby pasture.