Latest Articles

Jonna Higgins-Freese reviews Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver

Several friends of mine, all of them environmentalists, have told me they picked up Small Wonder, Barbara Kingsolver's most recent collection of essays, but speedily put it down because the book just didn't pull them in. At first, I had the same reaction. And then I realized: small wonder. This book wasn't written for environmentalists. Yet because of Kingsolver's fame and her ability to talk about complex issues in a compelling way, Small Wonder may be more successful at communicating an environmental message to a lay audience than any other book published in recent years.

What About Tupperware?

Now that the U.S. Senate has given the go-ahead to store the nation’s most highly radioactive nuclear waste at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, new questions loom: What kind of containers can protect the waste for 10,000 years, and who will provide them? Those are high-stakes issues, given that the Department of Energy plans to buy about […]

Sound Science

In a triumph of the military over the environment, the U.S. Navy yesterday won approval to deploy two ships that use low-frequency sonar to detect distant submarines, despite ongoing fears that the system could injure whales and other marine mammals. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration granted the Navy an exemption from federal rules protecting […]

Cod Is Dead

In a development that scientists have predicted for years, cod have virtually vanished from the North Sea due to overfishing, according to a report by the U.K.-based Wildlife Trusts. The species is now commercially extinct, meaning it no longer makes economic sense to try to catch it. The report also chronicles the decline of other […]

Alcoa Can Wait

And now, some news from a place you seldom hear about: Iceland, which is forming the backdrop for the latest skirmish in the battle between conservationists and power companies. The country’s Vatnajokull Glacier is Europe’s second-largest wilderness, and is graced with mountains, lakes, canyons, rivers, and abundant wildlife. Iceland’s national power company wants to harness […]

Elizabeth Chin, anthropologist

Elizabeth Chin is associate professor of anthropology at Occidental College, where she also is director of the Multicultural Summer Institute. Her recently published book, Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture, has been named a finalist for the 2002 C. Wright Mills Award. My work as an anthropologist is aimed at enlarging our understanding […]

The Fund Formerly Known as the Superfund

Teaching Our Children Well

The three Rs could soon include “renewable” if Massachusetts has its way. Concerned about rising energy costs and student health, the state is offering financial incentives to districts to build environmentally friendly, health-conscious “green schools.” Through a partnership with the Renewable Energy Trust, districts are being encouraged to make use of technologies, such as solar […]

Bangladeath

Arsenic has a long and glorious history in the annals of crime fiction, but for the people of Bangladesh, poisoning by arsenic is all too real. With 35 million people drinking arsenic-tainted water, the country is in the midst of what the World Health Organization is calling the “largest mass poisoning of a population in […]

The Daily Load

The Bush administration could slash a key program of the Clean Water Act requiring federal oversight of states’ efforts to restore polluted bodies of water. About 300,000 miles of rivers and shorelines and 5 million acres of lakes in the U.S. are categorized as “impaired water bodies” in need of remediation, but for decades, some […]