Latest Articles

Flexing Their Muscles

The car-sharing company Flexcar is planning to expand beyond its Northwest roots and enter the Washington, D.C., market this fall, where it will compete with Boston-based Zipcar. Both companies work to reduce the number of cars on the road by enticing customers to share vehicles and avoid the hassles of car ownership. Customers pay for […]

Tusk, Tusk

Decades of war, poaching, and habitat destruction have decimated Vietnam’s Asian elephant population, a trend the Vietnamese government is belatedly trying to reverse. Following a September agreement between Vietnam and Cambodia to cooperate on elephant conservation, a herd of elephants in Vietnam will be moved by truck from the southern coastal province of Binh Thuan […]

Wading to Exhale

In a heretofore undocumented ecological process, the Great Lakes are purifying themselves by “exhaling” decades-old toxic chemicals, according to a study released on Friday by the Integrated Atmospheric Deposition Network. Lake Ontario alone released nearly two tons of now-banned PCBs between 1992 and 1996; together, the five lakes eliminated 10 tons of PCBs and close […]

Golly G.E.

Environmental groups and officials in New York state are concerned that General Electric may be making headway in its campaign to scuttle a federal plan forcing it to dredge the Hudson River for pollution. U.S. EPA Administrator Christie Whitman announced in August that she would proceed with a $500 million, Clinton-era plan to order G.E. […]

Frank-enstein

U.S. Sen. Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska) is threatening to delay all action in the Senate unless Democratic leaders agree to let an energy bill that would open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling reach the Senate floor. A Murkowski ally, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), has proposed to tack the entire GOP energy bill onto a […]

Organophos-fate

To the dismay of pesticide-makers, a federal judge on Wednesday approved a settlement between enviros and the U.S. EPA that will speed up a review of the safety of pesticides in the food supply. The agency now has until next August to assess the risks of 39 commonly used organophosphates, a class of highly toxic […]

Hello, Newmont!

Hundreds of demonstrators blocked a major highway in northern Peru this week, demanding that the largest gold mine in Latin America be shut down because it was contaminating local water supplies with mercury. Peru’s energy and mines minister, Jaime Quijandria, said it was “simply and totally impossible” for the water to have been contaminated by […]

Momentum grows for greener ways of farming

Rice as rice can be. In the humid hills of China’s Yunnan province, rice farmers make their living from plots of land smaller than many American yards. High, cool, and wet, the country here is rich, yielding almost a thousand pounds of rice per acre. But farmers face a perennial scourge: rice blast. Rice blast […]

The Bus Stops Here

India’s Supreme Court today postponed a Sunday deadline for all buses in Delhi to convert from diesel fuel to compressed natural gas, saying that commuters would be inconvenienced if diesel buses were taken off the road because the city has done little to comply with a court order to improve air quality. About 9,000 of […]

Chilly Con Carnage

As an alternative to traditional funerals, Swedish ecologist Susanne Wiigh-Masak is recommending a greener way to go — freeze-dried cadavers that work well as fertilizer. She recommends plunging dead bodies into liquid nitrogen, blasting them with ultrasound waves, and then turning them into dust with the tap of a hammer. The remains would then be […]