Latest Articles

Reinventing the Wheels

After more than a century of causing horrendous pollution, the auto industry is undergoing a green revolution, writes Jim Motavalli in Grist. Spurred by air pollution laws, the specter of global warming, and animated competition, automakers are starting to design and produce a whole new generation of clean cars, including fuel-cell and hybrid gas-electric vehicles. […]

Baked Alaska

The polar ice cap has thinned by 40 percent in the last 30 years, according to preliminary findings presented this week at a conference of the Arctic Research Consortium of the United States. Other research presented at the conference documents how dramatic climate changes are making it difficult for Alaska natives to maintain subsistence lifestyles. […]

How far can clean cars take us?

I loved cars long before I knew there was any reason to worry about their effect on the environment or be concerned about the smoke that poured from their tailpipes. In the 1960s, ignorance like mine was widespread in the United States, maintained by a powerful automotive lobby and a complacent federal government. Highway congestion, though already bad, was somewhat masked by an expanding national highway grid, and most people celebrated the migration to the suburbs that the new roads aided and abetted. Cars were equated with freedom, and ads of the period showed happy vacationing families riding in roomy sedans, with the uncrowded interstate stretching out in front of them.

Menopause and Green Power

Revenge of the Nerds

A coalition of enviros and high-tech philanthropists in Washington state is launching a three-year campaign to raise at least $25 million in private donations and leverage at least $100 million in federal funds so the government can buy 75,000 acres of privately owned land in the state’s Cascade Mountains to create a wilderness corridor. Organizers […]

The Sweat of Our Brower

Pioneering environmental activist David Brower resigned from the board of the Sierra Club yesterday, complaining that the group has become too bureaucratic and its leadership has lost its sense of urgency. He accused the club’s board of inadequate action on such issues as wilderness protection and mass transit, and criticized it for refusing to take […]

Bush Whiffs on Another Enviro Issue

Weak environmental regulations in Texas have led to a big influx of industrial livestock operations that are hazards to public health and the environment, says a report issued yesterday by local offices of the Sierra Club and Consumers Union. Although other states have strengthened such regulations or even placed moratoriums on the construction of new […]

Seedy Dealings

Tempers are flaring in Europe this week as hundreds of farmers in England, France, Germany, and Sweden have found out that they unwittingly planted genetically modified (GM) rapeseed oil crops, after a seed company accidentally included a small amount of GM seeds in bags sold to the farmers over the past two years. Many Europeans […]

Ford Better or Ford Worse?

Ford Motor Co. announced yesterday that it would make a 25 percent cut in production of its gas-guzzling Ford Excursion for the 2001 model year, but pinned the decision to poor consumer demand for the vehicle, not the company’s concerns about its environmental and safety problems. In a “corporate citizenship report” released last Thursday, Ford […]

There Was Something in the Air That Night, the Stars Were Bright, Fernando

In a victory for enviros, leaders in the Brazilian Congress yesterday dropped a bill that would have cut the protected portion of the nation’s Amazon region from 80 percent down to 50 percent. The move came after Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso pledged to fight the bill, which enviros had warned would dramatically escalate destruction […]