Who walks the walk, who's nothing but talk

CARROT TO

Nalini Nadkarni, PhD, of Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, for her work in developing a farm-grown alternative to the commercial harvesting of forest mosses, sold in nurseries, craft stores and floral shops. Up to 40 million pounds of moss are gathered from US woodlands each year and sold for as much as $165 million. Scientists worry about the ecological damage done by removing mosses, home to 300 species of tiny animals. Nadkarni's unlikely partners in the project: inmates at Washington's Cedar Creek Corrections Center.

TV's Bob Barker for donating $1 million to Duke University's law school for teaching animal-rights law. Duke is the most recent beneficiary of Barker's animal-protective instincts. Since 2001, Barker has funded similar programs at Harvard, Stanford, Columbia and the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1995, Barker also established the DJ&T Foundation, which finances clinics that spay and neuter pets.

John Krochta, PhD, a University of California, Davis, food scientist for inventing an edible food coating from whey, the low-fat, protein-packed dairy product. The coating helps keep foods from spoiling. Although Krochta says it is "very difficult" to predict how soon his coatings will be used on commercially available products, many less appetizing wax coatings already appear on fruits and vegetables. Some candies are coated with "confectioners' glaze," which is made from beetle by-products.

STICK TO

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., for buying more than 70 percent of its products from China rather than from the United States. The total value of such imports, the world's largest retailer says, is about $18 billion a year. "If Wal-Mart were an individual economy," a company executive boasts, "it would rank as China's eighth biggest trading partner, ahead of Russia, Australia and Canada."

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for reversing its 1998 decision requiring makers of rat poison to include safety measures for their pastel-colored pellets. The EPA had ordered manufacturers to give the poisons a bitter flavor, but chemical industry officials said that it made the products less effective. The EPA agreed with the industry and, in 2003 alone, more than 50,000 children needed medical attention after eating the pellets-three times as many as in the year that including the bitter flavor was required. In November 2004, West Harlem Environmental Action, a New York City neighborhood group, sued the EPA to re-instate the requirement for bitter flavor, but the agency still sides with the manufacturers that the need for effective poisons outweighs the risks to "nontarget species"--meaning children.

The US Navy for locating a new landing strip for fighter jets within 3.5 miles of North Carolina's Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge. More than 100,000 wintering waterfowl live at the refuge, and environmentalists fear that the noise of the jets will cause the birds to abandon the area.

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