Latest Articles

Umbra on mercury in compact fluorescent lights

Dear Umbra, Here in Texas, where it is very hot in the summer (granted, we deserve to be in hell for having produced George Bush), some of us have been enthusiastically switching our light bulbs to cooler compact fluorescents. Is this a bad thing due to the mercury they contain? Lisa Smithville, Texas Dearest Lisa, […]

Umbra on turning off fluorescent lights

Dear Umbra, You’d be so proud of us! We just had an hour-long meeting about conservation and environmentalism here in our office. In the course of our discussion, the topic of leaving the lights on came up. I am a religious light-switcher, meaning I turn lights off in the bathroom or wherever they’re left on. […]

Range Bedfellows

Energy exploration has been part of Western landscape and culture for decades — but it seems the thrill of the drill may finally be wearing off. As the Bush administration pushes for further exploitation of Western resources (such as coal-bed methane mining in Wyoming and Montana and oil and natural gas drilling in the Rocky […]

You’re in the Army Now

Environmentalists and the Pentagon have never been the best of friends — in fact, the folks at the Department of Defense are currently trying to wiggle out of complying with as many environmental regulations as possible in the name of national security — but it would seem that military leaders can think green when it […]

Dolorous Haze

Emissions that contribute to smog in the Los Angeles area are drastically worse than previously estimated, air-quality officials admitted yesterday. The announcement marked a reversal of the usual optimistic rhetoric about California air quality, which has been steadily improving since the late 1980s. Now it seems that progress in eliminating the two most common pollutants […]

Great Build

It’s not clear if the problem is one of economics or one of spin, but either way, environmentally conscious building design is a concept that hasn’t quite caught on. The technology and expertise to build “green” structures have been around for decades; now, a movement is underway to sell developers on the economic benefits of […]

Oil and Accuracy Don’t Mix

The public owes much of its knowledge about the environment to journalists on the green beat — but what happens when those journalists get it systematically wrong? That’s what has happened with reporting on Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, according to a new study funded by the U.S. EPA and published in the journal Annual […]

Mexico City’s mayor plans to reduce pollution by building more roads

Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has come a long way in the last decade — too far, some environmentalists would argue. O, brador. Photo: Gobierno del Distrito Federal. In February 1996, AMLO (as the Mexican press calls him) was arguably the country’s most prominent environmentalist, organizing a string of high-profile protests in his […]

Park and Writhe

The National Parks Conservation Association has released its annual list of endangered parks — and, sadly, it includes some of the most treasured wild areas in the U.S.: Yellowstone, Denali, and the Great Smoky Mountains, among others. The unlucky parks made the list because they are plagued by problems such as air pollution, excessive motor […]

Glow Worms

It’s been a busy week when it comes to nuclear security. Here in the U.S., the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has agreed to overhaul its management of the nation’s atomic power plants in response to concern that it failed to rapidly detect potentially disastrous damage to a reactor in Ohio. Yesterday, the NRC adopted almost all […]