Fourteen people were killed in renewed violent clashes on Sunday between Orma and Pokomo communities in Tana River District, eastern Kenya, bringing the death toll from fighting in the district to more than 50 in the last week.

There are currently two contrasting approaches to the issue of what the Environment is and how it is related to the human species, namely: the anthropocentric and the ecocentric. This article written in anticipation of the Earth Summit in South Africa in 2002 suggests a possible eco-concept synthesis based on the principles that humankind is part of the totality of planet Earth and can achieve eco-leadership by encouraging a sense of belonging with all other phenomena to the Earth's total community.

Ministers from 50 countries meeting in Bonn have been criticised for failing to set targets to reduce the number of poor people without access to adequate sanitation.

Delegates of African countries attending the conference on fresh waters in Bonn are agreed on inter-state management of water bodies running through their countries. They also agreed in plenary discussions that the concerted management of watercourses shared by many countries was the best way to avoid misunderstandings, which could sometimes lead to armed conflicts.

Two suspected poachers have been arrested in Mombasa and game trophy recovered. They were allegedly captured trafficking in rhino horns, barely a fortnight after four endangered rhinos were killed in the Tsavo East National Park bordering Tanzania.

Pollution produced by humans may be seriously weakening the Earth's water cycle - reducing rainfall and threatening fresh water supplies. A new study by researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography suggests that tiny particles of soot and other pollutants are having a far greater effect on the planet's hydrological cycle than previously realized.

Tanzanian police have raided the offices of the Lawyers' Environmental Action Team (LEAT) in Dar es Salaam and searched the homes of two LEAT attorneys, according to an international association of public interest attorneys based in Eugene.

The poor people of Butamira had for a moment thought that they could secure their future through exploiting the forest reserve but are now losing all hope. Government is determined to move them so Kakira Sugar Works could use the reserve to cultivate more sugarcane.

Police in Nigeria's southern Rivers State on Tuesday broke up a rally of the National Youth Council of Ogoni People (NYCOP) on grounds that they had not sought authorisation to hold the demonstration.

The intended de-gazettement of 170,000 acres of forest cover will be of an unprecedented magnitude since independence, a forest organisation has said.

Zimbabwe's Supreme Court has ruled that President Robert Mugabe's land reform programme complies with the constitution.

Recently released government land reform proposals, which prohibit the foreign ownership of land, have received a cautious welcome in Malawi.

The government of Kenya has signed an exploration treaty with a British firm in a move that will see the world's deepest oil wells drilled off the East African coast. The deal is an attempt to expand the country's fuel supply as Kenya's public power firm announced the biggest loss in its history.

Geoff Nyarota is the editor of The Daily News, Zimbabwe's only independent daily newspaper. Launched less than two years ago, the Harare-based paper has managed to become Zimbabwe's most influential voice despite repeated attempts by President Robert Mugabe's government to silence it, and Nyarota, has been awarded the 2002 Golden Pen of Freedom, the annual press freedom prize of the World Association of Newspapers.

Under a pilot scheme in drought-prone North Welo, farmers are turning away from the use of expensive and potentially dangerous chemical pesticides in favour of ancient methods of pest control to help their crops flourish.

Signifying a further breakdown in some of West Africa's environmental ecosystems, the last giraffe population in the region has shrunk from just 100 to a much smaller and endangered number found in Niger's Koure region, 60 km east of the capital Niamey.

The livelihoods - and perhaps even the lives - of many Kenyans are threatened by a government plan to excise, or remove, over 167,000 acres of the country’s forests, according to protesting environmental campaigners.

Environmental disaster looms if governments fail to take swift action to stop waste flows from land polluting the sea, officials from around the world will warn this week.

Today's consumption is undermining the environmental resource base. It is exacerbating inequalities. And the dynamics of the consumption-poverty-inequality-environment nexus are accelerating. If the trends continue without change - not redistributing from high-income to low-income consumers, not shifting from polluting to cleaner goods and production technologies, not promoting goods that empower poor producers, not shifting priority from consumption for conspicuous display to meeting basic needs - today's problems of consumption and human development will worsen.

Can industry be trusted to deliver sustainability? A quick glance back at the corporate track record gives sobering food for thought. Much of the past half century of economic development has come at the cost of havoc wrought on the life-support systems of the planet and its social fabric, while the twin drivers of growth and profit have repeatedly ridden roughshod over other considerations.