Articles by Yolanda Crous

Former vice president. Newly minted rock star.

By now, everyone's heard the news. Al Gore isn't the guy he was in 2000. He's the New Gore -- relaxed, charming, self-effacing, funny. Really funny. Who'd have thunk it?

The safety of your cosmetics

Ever since a friend of mine went to aesthetician school and started talking about the safety -- or lack thereof -- of many beauty product ingredients, I've been obsessed with purging my makeup drawer of any and all dangerous goodies.

Two out of three is pretty darn good

It's a banner day in celebrity "journalism," y'all. Two out of the three items in TMZ's Party Favors section were environment-related:

"Monster Garage" host Jesse James was slapped with a $271,250 fine by California air regulators, claiming his custom bikes didn't comply with the state's clean-air laws. The bikes were spewing 10 times the legal limits of hydrocarbons ... While traveling to the U.S. to receive an environmental award, Prince Charles opted to take a commercial plane instead of his private jet because he didn't want his visit to cause unnecessary pollution ... An escaped prisoner who stole singer Crystal Gayle's tour bus was arrested in Daytona Beach after a five-day manhunt.

OK, OK, the banner day was actually Sunday -- can I help it if I've been too busy going to class to keep up with my gossip blog reading? (And yes, that is the stale stench of martyrdom in the air.)

Reductionist science is killing us

In my grad program, we've spent a lot of time talking about Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren's IPAT equation. It's pretty simple:

Impact = Population x Environment

English translation: A society's environmental impact is proportional to its population, its wealth, and its technological capacity to mitigate the impacts of its population and its wealth.

So how do you reduce impact? Well, it's too ethically and politically dicey to do a whole lot about population -- at least beyond educating women. Affluence? Let's put it this way: How would you like to be the one to tell El Salvador or Namibia to stay poor because the world has all the rich countries it can take?