Navistar Introduces the Commercial Extreme Truck For the driver who enjoys his or her Hummer H2 pickup but just wishes it were a little bigger, a little less fuel-efficient, and a little more obnoxious, the answer has arrived: This week Navistar International introduces the CXT, short for commercial extreme truck. The CXT is 21.5 feet long (4.5 feet longer than the Hummer!) and nine feet tall (more than two feet taller than the Hummer!). It weighs seven tons empty, gets six to 10 miles per gallon of diesel gas, and will cost between $93,000 and $115,000. "We can see it …

Dear Umbra, I just took the Ecological Footprint Quiz, feeling rather confident that I've been doing my part to minimize my personal impact on environmental despoliation. But my results weren't reassuring. My ecological footprint is nine acres, which is much better than the U.S. national average of 24 acres per person, but still twice what the planet could sustain. In short, the quiz tells me, if everyone lived like me, we would need two planets. I'm not sure I can make any more big changes -- I take public transportation when I can, I've kept my 10-year-old Honda, which still …

Green Roofs Are Hot New Design Feature in London In London, the latest rage in building design is green roofing: Roofs covered in soil and foliage that can provide habitat for insects, lizards, and birds. The trend first took off as part of a government effort to protect the black redstart, a black-and-orange songbird that nests in urban areas and has come to be something of an icon for Brit urban enviros. In some parts of the U.K., local governments are starting to require that some buildings feature rooftop gardens. The roofs -- first developed in Switzerland -- help prevent …

Some may cry nepotism when they see Andre Heinz, the middle son of Teresa Heinz Kerry, take to the podium as one of the leading spokespeople on the environment for John Kerry's presidential campaign, but his ascent is hardly without merit. True, he has deliberately steered clear of a career inside the Beltway, so in some senses he is new to the political scene. But having grown up in Washington, D.C., the son of former senator John Heinz (R-Penn.) and now the stepson of Kerry, he is as conversant on the inner workings of Capitol Hill as he is on …

Dave Matthews Band Tour Bus Dumps Doo-Doo on Boat Passengers An alleged environmental infraction by a Dave Matthews Band tour bus left passengers on a Chicago River sightseeing tour boat with a bad taste in their mouths -- literally. While on a bridge over the river, the driver apparently emptied the bus's waste tank with the intent of sending its contents -- up to 800 pounds of raw human waste -- into the water below. Unfortunately, the tour boat got in the way. The drenched, nauseated, and totally grossed-out boat passengers were promptly ferried back to shore and reimbursed for …

Dumped Electronics Poisoning Poor in Asia Computers and other electronics discarded in the West frequently end up in poor villages in China and India, where they are stripped for residues of valuable metals in primitive procedures that poison local communities. Enviro activists report that Chinese villagers cook circuit boards over open charcoal burners to strip chips, capacitors, and condensers, burn off PVC casing from wires, and dip the components in vats of warm acid to recover traces of precious metals. Needless to say, breathing molten lead and PVC fumes and working with acid have no salutary effect on the health …

You know the grill. It's hot out there: Time to empty the kitchen of cutlery and condiments and wander into the backyard to do what our ancient ancestors did: Barbecue something! Of course, people have been gleefully grilling, giving no thought to the environment, for centuries. Linguists tell us that the word barbecue likely stemmed from a coinage of the Taino Indians of Haiti, and was appropriated -- oddly enough -- by proper Bostonians as early as 1733, with raucous Texans seizing upon it by the mid-1800s. Long thought of as one of life's simple summer pleasures, barbecuing is, of …

Dear Umbra, When I see the Energy Star rating on an appliance, can I trust that some government or consumer group is monitoring the ratings, or is that just a commercial ploy? Who profits from the Energy Star thing? Not Starry-EyedBridgewater, N.J. Dearest Not Starry-Eyed, A green screen. Photo: EnergyStar.gov. Energy Star is a project of our very own U.S. EPA, with assistance from the Department of Energy. Products that meet Energy Star standards are permitted to carry a flier that displays the Energy Star logo and compares the energy use of the product against other similar products, usually in …

Dear Umbra, A lot of the questions people ask you ultimately involve pretty negligible results. When you are talking about the balance sheet of the world, does it really matter if I use a more or less environmentally responsible solution to wash my fruit? I'm wondering what three major concrete changes you'd recommend that people make, which might be more difficult to implement than using lower-energy lightbulbs but would really let us rest easy at night knowing we'd contributed? Cate New York, N.Y. Dearest Cate, Take a ride on the clean air bus. Photo: King County Metro Transit. How did …