Latest Articles

The Fur Is Flying — Off the Shelves

Fur Fashions Drive Slaughter of Endangered Species Fur is making a comeback on fashion runways — and that means trouble for a number of endangered animals, according to an official with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. In the 1980s and ’90s, fur was largely out of vogue and thus the animal skin […]

Tara Wesely, Rivers for Life meeting

Tara Wesely is attending the Rivers for Life meeting in Thailand. She is assistant manager of environmental sustainability at Aveda Corp. and a fellow with the Environmental Leadership Program. Monday, 1 Dec 2003 RASI SALAI, Thailand Bamboo amazes me. You can eat it, cook with it, build with it, even decorate with it. I slept […]

Meeting His Waterloo?

House Tells Bush to Leave Clean Water Act Rules Alone More than half of the members of the U.S. House of Representatives last week told President Bush to back off from proposed changes that would reduce protections for wetlands and streams under the Clean Water Act. In a letter sent to Bush, 218 representatives, including […]

Eat Lots, Buy Little, and Try Not to Miss Us Too Much

Grist Takes Publishing Hiatus Until Dec. 1 In honor of Thanksgiving and Buy Nothing Day, Grist will be taking a three-day publishing break beginning tomorrow. But fret not — we’ll be back, wiser and wittier than ever, on Monday, Dec. 1. Happy holidays!

NRDC’s new Santa Monica building may be the most eco-friendly in the U.S.

Do you realize we are gathered in what must be the greenest building in the United States?” Natural Resources Defense Council Executive Director Frances Beinecke asked a crowd of well-scrubbed Californians gathered for the opening ceremony of the organization’s new SoCal headquarters in Santa Monica. Swilling mimosas and nibbling croissants on the building’s sunny, plant-strewn […]

Bloody Appalling

Britons’ Bodies Contaminated with a Stew of Chemicals A cocktail of toxic chemicals was found in the bodies of every person tested as part of a British study commissioned by the World Wildlife Fund. In one of the most comprehensive such surveys to date, 155 people from around the U.K. had their blood analyzed for […]

I’m Just a Bill, and I’m Still Sitting Here on Capitol Hill

Energy Bill Is Doomed for This Year Republican Senate leaders threw in the towel on the big energy bill last night, admitting that they couldn’t muster the two additional votes needed to pass the controversial legislative package before Congress takes its holiday recess. The failure to pass the bill this year represents a stinging defeat […]

Going Steady

Methane Levels in Atmosphere Stabilize Here’s a rarity: a possible climate-change success story. Atmospheric levels of methane, the second most important greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, have stabilized following 200 years of growth caused primarily by human activities, according to new research by Dutch and American scientists published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Though […]

How to streamline your life and still enjoy the heck out of it

Editor’s note: Ever wonder when We the People stopped being called citizens and started being called consumers? Take back your real identity, and take the consumption-crazy days from Thanksgiving to New Year’s in stride — with Umbra Fisk’s guide to graceful (and limited) consuming. Consumption is one of life’s great pleasures. Buying things we crave, […]

Hubris on the Yangtze

555 — height, in feet, of the Washington Monument, the tallest structure in Washington, D.C. 575 — height, in feet, of the new Three Gorges Dam in China (which is also wider than 100 Washington Monuments standing edge to edge) 4.3 million — cubic meters of concrete needed to build the Panama Canal 26.4 million […]