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Katie Alvord, author

Katie Alvord is the author of Divorce Your Car! Ending the Love Affair with the Automobile. She lives in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Monday, 11 Feb 2002 UPPER PENINSULA, Mich. It’s Monday morning and I’ve just completed my regular commute: strolling from bedroom to office, a journey of 22 steps, in my slippers. I […]

Big. Yellow. Different. Worse.

The wheels on the bus go round and round, and the diesel fumes from the bus go far and wide. That’s the bad news from a study released yesterday by the Union of Concerned Scientists analyzing emissions from the nation’s 454,000 school buses. Nine out of 10 of those buses are powered by diesel fuel, […]

Bitter Sweet

Two years of wrangling and two days of intensive, closed-door negotiations ended in compromise yesterday when the U.S. Forest Service and environmentalists agreed to allow limited logging of burned timber in Montana’s Bitterroot National Forest. Under the terms of the agreement, the USFS will begin logging about 14,770 burned acres; in exchange, it will not […]

War and Peas

War is hell — and not just for human beings. A team of researchers from the U.N. Environment Programme is headed to Afghanistan to measure the ecological damage of decades of war, drought, famine, and more war. The study, which is part of a relatively new trend of analyzing the effects of human conflict on […]

Rhode Island Lead

A Superior Court judge in Rhode Island paved the way for a landmark lawsuit earlier this week when he gave state Attorney Gen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D) permission to sue manufacturers of lead-based paint. The paint industry had attempted to derail the trial by calling for every one of an estimated 300,000 owners of lead-painted homes […]

Kenya Opener

Even though Kenya is a major food exporter, it hasn’t reaped much benefit from the $20 billion-per-year global market in organic foods. Now some farmers and nonprofits in the African nation are trying to change that. Many Kenyans already grow their crops without chemical inputs, but up till now, not a single one has been […]

Taking on the erosive cycle of contemporary politics

Every day I try to protect my children from problems I didn’t create and cannot solve alone. I spread cream on their skin to shield them from the ultraviolet radiation that sneaks through our thinning ozone layer. I try to feed them food free of pesticides and hormones, but I know their bodies are exposed […]

If It Weren’t for Those Medal-ing Kids

The 2002 Winter Olympics open tomorrow in Salt Lake City, and not everybody’s thrilled about it. Environmentalists say developers took advantage of the games to permanently damage the pristine Rocky Mountain environment, even though protecting the natural world is now the third precept — after sports and culture — of the Olympics. The Salt Lake […]

Bada Bing!

In a potentially significant breakthrough for the environmental justice movement, New Jersey has become the first state to propose environmental-equity regulations for companies looking to move into minority or low-income communities. The rules, which were drafted by the state Department of Environmental Protection, would feed companies’ plans into a computer model comparing census information and […]

Cano Worms

The Bush administration has asked for $98 million to help protect Colombia’s Cano Limon oil pipeline from attacks by leftist guerrillas. The pipeline, which is owned by Occidental Petroleum, supplies crude oil to the U.S. and has the capacity to pump 240,000 barrels a day. But constant attacks — 13 so far this year — […]