Latest Articles

Umbra on bicycle commuting, again

Dear Umbra, So what about bike commuting? Is it safe? Is it good? Is it encouraged? P.K. BorzoSt. Paul, Minn. Dearest P.K., Yes, yes, yes. Lungwise, biking is at least as safe as driving, if not more so. It’s true, as many readers pointed out after my previous column, that we breathe more heavily when […]

Brazil/Seattle

One easy way to get rid of a tire is to toss it over a bridge. In Costa Rica, crocodiles can be seen sunning themselves amid thousands of discarded tires. Not an option here in Seattle where stopping on a bridge long enough to hurl a tire will cause a traffic jam.

I took a load of junk to Seattle's north end transfer station the other day. An employee was standing at the entrance to brief clientele on Seattle's new recycling ordinance. Apparently, it is no longer adequate to voluntarily point-sort our trash and laboriously drag multiple containers to the curb every week to protect our environment and lower the cost of waste disposal. Our wise leaders have decided it's time to take it to another level and make it illegal not to recycle. Why? According to the official site, this ordinance "aims" to save residents and businesses as much as $2 million a year, enforcement "with consequences" beginning January 1, 2006. Contractors will not pick up garbage cans that have "significant" amounts of recyclables.

Mayor on a Vespa

Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper has gone one better than those governors who've been feeling so smug about giving up their SUVs. He's tooling around town on a Vespa.

Help the oil companies spend their lucre, won’t you?

At a press conference this afternoon, Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton came up with another creative reason to open the Arctic Refuge to drilling: The oil companies need some place to invest their record profits!

(Or so I'm inferring from this E&ENews PM headline "ANWR: Oil industry needs places to invest profits, Norton says." I can't get the full story because I have no subscription.)

Why not spend the rest of Friday afternoon thinking of better ways for the oil companies to spend their profits? Leave your bright ideas in comments or send them to Sec. Norton.

From Pombo to Playhouse

Pomboo! Never mind turning children into toads — how about turning toad habitat into oil wells? This Halloween, scare the bejesus out of your friends with the Pombo mask, a tribute to the California congressman who recently proposed — seriously — selling off 15 national monuments and preserves. Trick or … eco-cide! Click to enlarge. […]

Readers talk back about synthetics in organic food, gay jokes, and snottiness

  Re: O Brother, Where Artificial Thou? Dear Editor: I am skeptical of the sturm und drang surrounding the 38 “synthetic ingredients” that the National Organic Standards Board allows in processed foods that wear the “USDA Certified Organic” label. Of the three examples cited in your article [xanthan gum, ammonium bicarbonate, and ethylene], none is […]

Put a Turkey in Your Tank

Biofuels from odd sources gain new fans Just about anything organic, from turkey entrails to cow dung, can be used to make biofuel, and with oil over $60 a barrel, just about everything is. Changing World Technologies’ refinery uses the feathers, bones, fat, and other bits from a nearby turkey-processing plant to make up to […]

Night of the Inexpensive Dead

EPA chief Johnson resurrects Bush’s “Clear Skies” plan The Bush administration’s “Clear Skies” air-pollution plan, seven months after its seeming death in Congress, has clawed its way out of the ground and lumbered back to life, moaning and twitching, bits of rotted flesh dropping from its desiccated corpse. (Hey, it’s almost Halloween — sue us.) […]

Won’t Take N.O. for an Answer

Final batch of brains weighs in on rebuilding New Orleans Should New Orleans be rebuilt on floating barges? Or on elevated platforms? Should old, drowned neighborhoods be turned into new, green parks? How can the wetlands surrounding the city be revitalized? How can materials from wrecked buildings be reused? How can the citizens who are […]

Better Lucky Than Hapless

Study predicts major shifts in European climate during next century Europe’s mountain and Mediterranean regions will be dramatically altered by 21st century climate change, and suffice to say they will not improve as vacation destinations. In a new study in the journal Science, researchers modeled the impacts of a heating planet — and human responses […]