Latest Articles
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Corn at the Right Time
The activist-friendly town of Takoma Park, Md., unveiled an inspiring (albeit funny-looking) monument to the clean energy movement yesterday: A silo that holds 21 tons of organic corn. The corn will be used as an alternative fuel to heat a dozen homes in the town’s Save Our Sky Home-Heating Cooperative, keeping more than 100,000 pounds […]
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Life in the Fast Lane
Since early this month, environmental educator John Quigley has spent most of his time perched high in the leafy boughs of a 400-year-old oak tree that developers want removed to expand a local road in Santa Clarita, Calif. The proposed throughway would enable traffic to flow to a suburban community where more than 21,000 new […]
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Sound Off
Some 92,000 acres of mud and sand at the bottom of the Pacific Northwest’s Puget Sound is contaminated with dioxin, toxic metals, and PCBs (just for starters), all the result of industrial pollution. In turn, these nasties make their way into the sound’s critters. Crabs are poisoned, while orca whales, salmon, and even some herring […]
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merlin matthews, Re~Cycle
merlin matthews is founder and president of Re~Cycle, a U.K.-based nonprofit that collects and ships second-hand bikes and bike parts to developing countries. Monday, 18 Nov 2002 WEST MERSEA, Essex, U.K. Today was a bit of a nonstarter, as I was up till some crazy hour, coming tantalizingly close to fixing the wretched computers. Who […]
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Point. Click. Ignore.
One-click activism has been a one-click failure with the Bush administration thus far. The Interior Department, for example, received 360,000 public comments (the huge majority of them sent by email) about the future of snowmobiles in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks; 80 percent of the writers asked that the government ban the snowmobiles. Last […]
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Prairie Dogged
Faced with drought and plunging profits, Colorado farmers are under growing financial pressure to hawk their land to developers. Between 1993 and 2001, about 1.5 million acres of farmland in the state were put on the market and developed; 300,000 of the acres were sold in 2001 as a drought began to take hold. State […]
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The Rain in Spain Caused an Awful Lot of Pain
Thousands of tons of oil have begun to wash up on seaports and the beaches of Galicia, Spain, after the hull of a rusty oil tanker at sea cracked last week during a storm. The country has suspended fishing on parts of its northwestern coast and workers are trying desperately to limit any further damage […]
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Random Acts of Unkindness
The Earth Liberation Front is back in the news, after vandals went about their business and then etched the group’s initials on the windows of two McDonald’s and one Burger King in the Richmond, Va., area, as well as on the windows of 25 SUVs at a local dealership. Those incidents occurred this fall; earlier […]
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A Snowball’s Chance
Perhaps the clearest and most visible sign of climate change in America won’t be around for much longer: The glaciers of Glacier National Park in Montana are melting and will be gone within 30 years, scientists say. Dan Fagre, the 49-year-old leader of the U.S. Geological Survey team studying the problem, says, “It’s not just […]
