Latest Articles
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Umbra on green reasons to quit smoking
Dear Umbra, I want to quit smoking. As if the risks to my health weren’t enough, could you help out by twisting that knife of guilt into my tree-hugging heart and give me some environmental reasons to stop supporting the tobacco industry? Cough, wheeze, ElaineSaint John, New Brunswick, Canada Dearest Elaine, I don’t care whether […]
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Umbra on engineered soy products
Dear Umbra, I don’t know if you’ll have time to answer this question, but while purchasing 8th Continent soymilk my husband noticed that there was Solae in it. After some research on the Internet, we discovered that Solae is made by DuPont and is a genetically engineered soybean, but we were unable to find anything […]
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And other words from readers
Re: Administrophic Dear Editor: Thanks for the link [to a log of the Bush administration’s environment-related activities], and I really mean that, even though I am a registered Republican. The only thing I did not like about this column was that a hated Democrat was using your forum to dig up dirt on Republicans. […]
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Umbra on milk cartons
Hi Umbra, I don’t know if the same thing has happened in the U.S, but here in Canada the milk industry has undergone a massive shift to using different containers. Once, you could get plastic jugs or cardboard cartons with fold-back lids or plastic bags. But now, the most commonly available container is a revised […]
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The Evidence Is Thin
A new report by the federal government has found that very few forest-thinning projects have been stalled by appeals from environmentalists, giving the lie to allegations to the contrary by the Bush administration. The General Accounting Office reported yesterday that the U.S. Forest Service was able to proceed with 95 percent of thinning projects within […]
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There’s Other Fish in the Sea. But Not Many.
Ninety percent of the world’s largest and most economically important fish have disappeared due to a half-century of industrial fishing, according to a groundbreaking study published in today’s issue of the journal Nature. The study found that modern fishing has become so efficient that it can decimate 80 percent or more of a given species […]
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Pay Dirt
The “polluter pays” principle may be languishing in the U.S. under the business-friendly Bush administration, but it’s alive and well in Europe, where the European parliament voted this week to strengthen rules to make companies pay for the environmental problems they cause. Spurred on by the recent Prestige disaster, in which a tanker spilled tens […]
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William Shutkin reviews Bronx Ecology and Tilting at Mills
These are tough times for environmentalists, what with the Bush administration’s frontal assault on environmental policy, drastic funding cuts and layoffs in state environmental programs, and the aftermath of a war in Iraq fought, in the opinion of many, over our nation’s undying addiction to oil. It’s thus fitting, if somewhat disheartening, that along come […]
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Ban Rollover
Starting up what’s likely to be an ugly trade tussle, the Bush administration yesterday filed suit at the World Trade Organization against the European Union, challenging E.U. policies that severely restrict the import of genetically modified (GM) crops. U.S. trade representative Robert Zoellick contends that the E.U. has in effect instituted a ban on GM […]
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The Food Less Traveled
A fledgling “buy local” movement is inspiring a growing number of Americans to get more of their food from local sources and resist an increasingly globalized agriculture industry. Today produce travels an average of 1,500 to 2,500 miles to reach Americans’ plates, 25 percent farther than in 1980. Grapes, for example, make an average trek […]
