Latest Articles
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Umbra on ecological footprints
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 […]
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Roof Positive
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 […]
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The Wicked Switch
Automakers Rapped for Pollution From Mercury Switches With recent revelations that just about all freshwater fish in the U.S. are contaminated with mercury, concern over the heavy-metal pollutant has regulators carefully examining every source. The fourth largest, as it happens, is automobiles, specifically the mercury switches in auto lights and brakes. Last year a record […]
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A Bunch of Debunk
Debate Over Benefits of Organic Food Heats Up The market for organic food is exploding, and as any star of teen movies can tell you, with success comes backlash. Some of the organic-food industry’s more enthusiastic backers have made lofty claims about the health benefits the foods confer, and now some scientists (and some industry-backed […]
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Manhattan Transference
Feds Have Not Fully Studied Twin Tower Air Pollution or Treated Victims As the third anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks approaches, the federal government has still not comprehensively studied the health effects of the dust and debris that filled the air around Ground Zero in the days following the attacks, and there is still […]
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Mine Kampf
Newmont Mining Corp. Blamed for Sickness and Fish Kills in Indonesia For nearly a decade, Denver-based Newmont Mining Corp., the world’s biggest gold producer, has dumped treated mine waste directly into Bayat Bay in Indonesia. Fish populations, upon which locals depend economically, have been decimated, and villagers around the bay have suffered a panoply of […]
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Taint Misbehavin’
Pollution Causes Animals to Act All Freaky It seems to some folks that humans behave in more and more bizarre fashion these days, but animals have tended to go about their animal business in a generally ordinary fashion. No more: Ubiquitous chemical pollutants known as endocrine disruptors — everything from heavy metals to PCBs — […]
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Igloom and Doom
Arctic Feeling the Heat From Climate Change Global warming is messing with the Arctic more and faster than any other part of the world, to the detriment of the indigenous peoples and animals who call the region their home. Inuit living around the Arctic Circle have seen their ecosystems transformed. Shrinking ice cover means the […]
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Vengeance Is Mine
Mining Company Funds Campaign to Repeal Cyanide-Mining Ban in Montana In 1998, Montana voters approved a ban on cyanide open-pit gold mining, which for years had defaced the state’s landscape and polluted its groundwater. That ban could be repealed by an initiative set to appear on the November ballot, funded almost exclusively by Canyon Resources […]
