The Global War Against Animals

While scientists are warning that the glaciers in Antarctica are getting thinner and in the last ten years have lost up to 45 meters of their thickness, Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa may lose its snowcap by 2015, and parts of the Greenland icecap are melting by up to 45 centimeters per year, phenomena […]

Eye of the Whale Review

Eye of the Whale: Epic Passage from Baja to Siberia Dick Russell. Simon & Schuster, New York, 2001 The whale is Eschrichtius robustus, the gray whale of the Eastern Pacific, which makes “a twice-annual migration that must be regarded as one of the most spectacular achievements on the planet.” Swimming close to the shore, some […]

Whaling

Shimonoseki, Japan – As delegates from 45 member nations gathered here in May for the 54th annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), grim portents were in the air. In Tokyo, a crowd estimated at 600 people had marched through the government district, waving banners and shouting “We’ll eat whale!” In Shimonoseki, a port […]

Report on Sea Turtle Conference

(This article was originally published in the Journal of Environment and Development, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2002). How do you gauge the successfulness of an environmental conference? If it is based on numbers of attendees, it would be hard to dispute the success of the 4th Annual Meeting of the Sea Turtle Conservation Network of […]

Review of Eyes to See Otherwise (Ojos de otro mirar): Selected Poems 1960-2000

Selected and edited by Betty Ferber and George McWhirter (Carcanet Press Ltd., Manchester, 2001, 312 pg.) Reviewed by Dick Russell in The Ecologist, 2002 “The task of poets, and of holy men,” Homero Aridjis has said, “is to tell this planet’s stories – and to articulate an ecological cosmology that does not separate nature from […]