Latest Articles

Soothe the Salvage Beast

Ecologists Warn Against Salvage Logging Salvage logging — harvesting burnt trees from the site of a fire — is not, contrary to public perception and federal practice, an environmentally benign method of gathering timber, write a group of forest ecologists in an article in the journal Science. Dead wood, they say, plays an important ecological […]

Federal agencies at odds over salvage-logging proposal in Oregon

Siskiyou-hoo! Photo: BLM. A U.S. Forest Service proposal to conduct a massive salvage-logging operation in Oregon’s Siskiyou National Forest has come up against a surprising critic — the U.S. EPA. While the Bush administration has advertised the plan as a necessary measure to protect the future health of the forest — which was hit by […]

There’s Coal in Them Thar Hills

New Coal-Fired Power Plants on the Horizon Coal, for decades the reviled stepchild of the U.S. energy family, is about to become the prodigal son. Stoked by easy availability, the rising costs of other fuels, and a growing desire to reduce dependence on foreign oil and gas, coal is roaring back: Plans are in the […]

Every Which Way but Laos

Laos’ Natural Resources Are Rapidly Disappearing A perfect storm of widespread poverty, corrupt and inefficient communist leadership, and international indifference has made the Southeast Asian nation of Laos a virtual case study in environmental decline. Although it is one of the world’s poorest and least developed nations, Laos is rich with natural resources, which represent […]

Buy Winslow, Sell High

Green Investment Fund Doubles Returns The Winslow Green Growth Fund, established in 1994 and run by Matthew Patsky, has doubled its worth in the last 12 months — and outperformed stock benchmarks like the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index — by investing in environmentally and socially responsible companies. Winslow targets such companies as Quantum Fuel […]

Getting the Vapors

Concerns About Hanford Worker Safety Grow Concerns over the safety of workers cleaning up the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in southwestern Washington state — site of the largest nuclear waste dump in the Western Hemisphere — continue to escalate. Yesterday, the Department of Energy announced a formal investigation of the private contractor that monitors worker health, […]

Umbra on SUVs

Dear Umbra, Please help; my friend Kathryn Schulz, Grist’s managing editor, is sick of hearing about my guilt. I own an SUV. In my defense, I got it almost six years ago, when I was moving to the mountains and needed a big car with four-wheel drive to support my rugged, transient lifestyle, and it’s […]

Advice on heating tiny urban dwellings

OK, Umbra, I live in a building in Brooklyn where, in typical Brooklyn style, we do not control our own heat. That is, there is no thermostat in our apartment. Thus, our only options for regulating the temperature in the winter are turning off the radiators or opening the windows. Obviously the latter is an […]

Umbra on packaging peanuts

Dear Umbra, I was wondering whether you could provide me with advice about packaging materials. You see, I was recently married and my wife and I now find ourselves buried under packaging peanuts, Styrofoam, and other such materials, much as we tried to avoid the fate (of receiving loads of store-bought gifts, that is, not […]

Apocalyptic Pentagon report on global warming could spur action on Capitol Hill

We’re having a heat wave … Image: NOAA. A hair-raising Pentagon report [PDF] on the potentially imminent and colossal national security threat posed by climate change has been making its way around the Internet since its release in late January, and this week it picked up considerable speed. Fortune magazine was the first major news […]