"Blueprint" Details Environmental Challenges Faced by New President: Document comprises over 700 recommendations on global warming, ozonem depletion, waste disposal, public-land stewardship, other issues

In an unprecedented effort called "Blueprint for the Environment," 30 major U.S. environmental groups have banded together to offer the incoming Bush Administration more than 700 recommendations on how to manage near-crisis proportion environmental problems affecting the U.S. and the world. According to Thomas B. Stoel Jr., a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, Presidentelect George Bush "faces environmental problems that rank with nuclear war" in their ability to wreak havoc. High on the list of potential environmental disasters is alteration of Earth's climate, the so-called greenhouse effect. "The crisis is so pressing and so forbidding," says Jay D. Hair, president of the National Wildlife Federation, "that the problems transcend political parties, indeed, even nations." But the saving grace, he says, is that the solutions to the problems are within grasp: "No new leaps in technological progress are needed." In addition, the coalition believes that many of the problems facing ...