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Your Name Is Smud

The Sacramento Municipal Utility District’s internationally known solar power program is in shambles, having exceeded its budget and lost its long-term leader. The utility district had planned to spend $3.2 million in 2002 to help homeowners, businesses, government offices, and nonprofits install photovoltaic panels, to reach a goal of producing an additional 2 megawatts of […]

Nothing Doing

After 10 days of bargaining, debate, protests, speeches, presentations, negotiations, renegotiations, and etcetera, the World Summit on Sustainable Development is over. What remains behind is a 70-page non-binding plan and a burning question: Was anything achieved? Well — the plan does include a relatively strong stance on improving sanitation and protecting fish stocks, leading one […]

Cleveland Greens?

Cleveland, Ohio — a city that earned ecological infamy when the Cuyahoga River caught on fire in 1969 — is hoping to make environmental and automotive history by becoming home to the nation’s first public hydrogen fueling station. The station, which will open off the Ohio Turnpike in about two years, is one of four […]

Like a Virgin

In better forestry news, a heretofore-unknown pocket of virgin forest has been discovered in Massachusetts and is believed to be the largest in the state. The area, which somehow escaped more than three centuries of logging and development, consists of up to 1,000 acres on the 2,608-foot Mount Everett, near the Connecticut and New York […]

Rhode Island Lead

Rhode Island has taken eight paint manufacturers to court in a first-ever attempt by a state to hold companies accountable for decades of child lead poisoning. Rhode Island, which has one of the highest rates of such poisoning in the country, is claiming the manufacturers created a public nuisance by selling the paint. The paint […]

Thomas Brendler, National Network of Forest Practitioners

Thomas Brendler coordinates the National Network of Forest Practitioners, a grassroots alliance of ruralpeople advocating for environmental protection and social justice in the woods. He is a fellow of the Environmental Leadership Program. Tuesday, 3 Sep 2002 JOHANNESBURG, South Africa The poet John Ashbery wrote that all stories begin in the middle. So here I […]

Liza Grandia, anthropologist

Liza Grandia is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. She serves on the board of ProPeten, a Guatemalan nongovernmental organization with which she founded Remedios, an integrated health, population, and environment program, in 1997. She is a fellow of the Environmental Leadership Program. Tuesday, 3 Sep 2002 JOHANNESBURG, South […]

Water Shipped Down

To the dismay of environmentalists, the U.S. Interior Department approved yesterday a $1 billion, 50-year project to store water beneath the Mojave Desert, in what would be one of California’s largest water storage facilities. Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District would store surplus Colorado River water in an aquifer under the desert; during dry years, the […]

Another Anderson Scandal

A court in India has rejected efforts to reduce the charges against Warren Anderson, the former chair of the U.S.-based company Union Carbide, which was responsible for a 1984 gas leak in Bhopal that killed 3,000 people and sickened tens of thousands more. The leak from a pesticide plant in the central Indian city was […]

Pigs’ Stymie

The U.S., Saudi Arabia, and other rich nations are deliberately stymieing international efforts to encourage increased clean energy use, according to sources at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, being held this week and next in Johannesburg, South Africa. The WSSD action plan, which will be approved by heads of state at the end of […]