Latest Articles

Can You Recycle Me Now?

Cell phone users now have a way to recycle their old phones and support the Sierra Club in the process. About a million mobile phones are tossed out each week in the U.S. as consumers upgrade or switch to different phone service providers, and those old phones leak a bunch of toxic substances, including mercury, […]

Down Under Water

The folks down under will have a lot to be down about if climate change proceeds as projected. Rising temperatures could trigger a 164 percent increase in heat-related deaths in Australia by 2050 and an increase of up to 240 percent in injuries and deaths caused by flooding by 2020, according to a study commissioned […]

DNA-Ok

J. Craig Venter, leader of a team that successfully decoded the human genome, now has his sights set on reading the DNA of an entire ecosystem — the Sargasso Sea, a warm swath of water in the Atlantic around the Bermuda Triangle. Working with teams he’s assembled at private biotech institutes in Maryland, Venter believes […]

Dairy, Dairy, Quite Contrary

Two businessmen want to build a massive cow town in the Mojave Desert in Southern California, providing a home for 90,000 cattle and 600 dairy farmers and their families. Sounds like a recipe for environmental disaster, right? Maybe not: In this case, the plan is to make the development a model of eco-friendly large-scale farming. […]

Canada-Do Spirit

Societies tend to measure progress in narrow economic terms — gross domestic product, employment figures, trade deficits. Now an influential team in Canada is proposing that the country become the first in the world to measure its ecological health with the same care and precision. The National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy today […]

Sheep Trick

Angering environmentalists, Aboriginals, and regional government officials alike, the Australian government has announced that it will build a controversial nuclear waste dump at a sheep station in South Australia. Located near the desert town of Woomera, the dump will house low-level radioactive waste from medical, university, industrial, and research facilities around the country. In what […]

Tidal Wave of the Future

The San Francisco Bay could soon become more than just a beautiful backdrop to Fog Town: It could become the engine that powers the city itself. This week, San Francisco became the first major U.S. city to investigate commercial tidal power, when it signed on to a $2 million pilot project to generate electricity using […]

Radio-inactivity

The Pentagon dramatically underestimated the amount of radioactivity to which U.S. Armed Forces members were exposed during Cold War-era atomic testing and explosions, a National Academy of Sciences panel announced yesterday. However, the panel found that the “ionizing radiation” to which the majority of the veterans was exposed — either during testing or in the […]

Have a Cow, Man

The state of South Dakota is leading the nation in the Partners for Fish and Wildlife project, a federal conservation program designed to help farmers and ranchers reduce their negative impact on native prairie ecosystems. Conversion of wild grasslands to croplands is a major environmental problem in South Dakota and other prairies states. Under the […]

For Never Wild

A coalition of environmentalists has sued the U.S. Department of the Interior over its recent decision to prevent the Bureau of Land Management from considering any more Western land for wilderness designation. Areas set aside for protection under the 1964 Wilderness Act are protected from motorized recreation and most forms of development. In 1996, however, […]