Parking Fees: Companies that run concessions in US National Parks make millions of dollars in profits each year but, as the General Accounting Office discovered, these private, for-profit companies only return, on average, 3.5 percent of their take to the cash-starved National Park Service. “In contrast,” the GAO notes, “concessionaires in non-land management agencies paid fees equal to about 9 percent of their gross revenues.”

Petal Pushers: Eat your heart out, Mother Nature. Scientists at Japan’s Suntory and Australia’s Florigene labs have been busy creating entirely new plants to pretty-up the planet. “Moondust” – the world’s first blue carnation – is now on sale in Tokyo’s cut flower shops. Moondust owes its hue to a gene borrowed from a petunia. (Maybe the result should have been named “Cartunia.”)

US to Pollute the Cosmos: NASA spacecraft are assembled in “clean rooms.” Spacecraft and astronauts returning from moonwalks first are quarantined and decontaminated. Houston-based Celestis Inc., is not interested in questions of cosmic sanitation, it’s more interested in making a profit. Celestis, the company that will blast mortal remains into orbit for a fee, now plans to make a fortune sending a rocket into deep space filled with the DNA samples of 4.5 million paying customers. Just what Alpha Centauri needs: an invasion of foreign DNA from a bunch of North Americans with an excess of money and ego.

No Margin for Air: In April 1981, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) moved into its new building in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Employees immediately began complaining about respiratory and other health problems. Exposure to formaldehyde fumes was identified as one of the problems. This March, some 17 years later, GAO investigators reported that NIEHS employees were still suffering the same health effects and the problem remains unsolved. According to the GAO, NIEHS “does research on environment-related diseases.”

Ex-Beatle Befriends Monkeys: In a letter to University of California Chancellor Michael Bishop, Sir Paul McCartney has protested the school’s plans to study hearing loss by subjecting captive monkeys to deafening blasts of sound. The animals would then be killed so their brains could be examined. “That the monkeys may be anesthetized before they awake to find themselves bafflingly deaf is no consolation,” McCartney wrote.

Say Cheeee-: Could there be anything worse than a disposable camera? Yes there is, and Fuji makes it. The Utsurun Desu camera “records a one-second scene in a series of eight frames.” The small camera can only carry enough film for two eight-frame shots. Total usable lifetime of the camera: less than two seconds.

I’ll Bet a Fin: Canada’s Global Intertainment Corporation, a publicly traded cyberspace gaming firm, wants to stage a real-life, high-stakes, two-day series of dolphin races in the Caribbean next February. Broadcasts and bets will be transmitted globally via the Internet. GIC hopes to line up airlines, cruise ships, hotel chains and corporations as sponsors. GIC says it wants “to raise international awareness of dolphins” but it mainly wants to raise its international profits.

Fearful in Fur: “After many years of incidents of violence against farmers, ranchers, logger, miners and others who make their living in concert with the earth, many are asking for hearings on animal rights/resource terrorism or ‘eco-terror.’” Actually, it’s Teresa Platt doing the asking on the website of Fur Commission USA. Platt wants to know “what causes the consumers in societies to attack the producers who feed, clothe and shelter them?” Platt wants Congressional action to hobble anyone who threatens “the right to consumptive use of the Earth’s bounty.” For starters, Platt suggests revoking the nonprofit status of any “groups involved in ‘direct action.’” In an earlier incarnation, Platt fought for the tuna industry’s right to kill dolphins in pursuit of that “consumptive use.” When Platt became the new Executive Director of Fur Commission USA in March, she praised fur for its “style, durability, beauty and low impact on the environment” (unless you happen to be a mink).

Hard of Hearing?: On June 9, Wise Use guru Ron Arnold and a pack of friends testified before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and cited a “coordinated campaign” of attacks against loggers, miners and cattle-ranchers. Witnesses cited everything from the Unabomber and alleged cases of cow-bombings to fur farmers who had “thousands of domesticated animals released from their cages.” Rep. Frank Riggs (R-CA) called on the committee to “widen the Organized Crime Statute to include environmental terrorism,” a move aimed to target “the Animal Liberation Front, the Earth Liberation Front, Earth First! and many others.”

The Hills Are Alive: Beverly Hills, California is considering placing “eco labels” on every piece of fur sold in the town’s posh shops to indicate how the animal was killed. “Who’s next on the animal rights agenda?” howls Keith Kaplan, president of Fur California. “Will each shop in Beverly Hills be forced to attach labels to leather, steak, silk, sushi, cotton, vegetables and medicines?” (Well, you’ve got to start somewhere. And, don’t worry, Keith, the FDA has already got medicines covered.)

Are We Having Fungus Yet?: The US is secretly funding development of a killer fungus in a “secure” lab at Uzbekistan’s state genetics institute. The London Times reports that the plan is to release Pleospora papaveracea in opium fields across Central Asia. The project is described as “hush-hush” since the US doesn’t want it known that it is planning to wage germ warfare in Asia.

Wayning Enthusiasm: There’s a lesson in the fact that the Washington Legal Foundation (WLF) calls itself the “effective advocate of free enterprise” but spends precious ad dollars advocating for a crack-down on the “evil of environmentalists.” In one New York Times ad, WLF Chairman Daniel J. Popeo warned that “environmental elitists” are attacking human society “in a holy war in which serial activists [Ralph Nader meets Ted Bundy?] have mastered the art of controlling our lives in the name of the environment.” Popeo opines that the “green militia also feels free to go to any extreme, like… mailing letter bombs to forestry association executives” (a reference to misfit Yale math professor Theodore Kaczinski). Popeo is also ticked off about eco-themes in Hollywood flicks. “Oh,” he rhapsodizes, “for the days when an action movie meant watching John Wayne roast some endangered species over an ozone-depleting campfire after a hard day of riding his methane-producing horse and filling the bad guys with lead!”

Mole Kiss: To former cattle rancher-turned-activist Howard Lyman, whose on-air revelations about the beef industry prompted TV host Oprah Winfrey to swear off hamburgers. Lyman [“The Trouble with Beef,” Spring ’93 EIJ] is out with a new book, Mad Cowboy: Plain Truth from the Cattle Rancher Who Won’t Eat Meat. Follow Howard’s crusade on the web at www.madcowboy.com.

Mole Nip: To Marlo Thomas for condoning a fund-raiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital that involved the “World’s Largest Coon Hunt.” The annual spectacle sets packs of hounds loose in the woods surrounding Parsons, Tennessee, leaving many adult raccoons dead and their babies orphaned. Suggestions for better fund-raising ideas may be sent to Ms. Marlo Thomas c/o St. Jude [332 N. Lauderdale St., Memphis, TN 38105, (901) 495-3306].

Mole Nip: An “Unclear on the Concept Award” goes to the hordes of sweltering Los Angelenos who drove to the desert town of Baker, California in 118-degree summertime heat to have their pictures taken standing next to the World’s Tallest Thermometer.