Climate Culture

Doo Process

Talkin’ Trash

What do you do with 11,000 tons of garbage per day? That’s the problem — well, one of the problems — plaguing New York City, whose trash disposal system is becoming a political, logistical, and financial headache for the beleaguered metropolis. A $6 billion long-term garbage-management plan devised by the Giuliani administration is stalled and […]

Gregory Gipson reviews Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray

"Beauty is so much in demand," A. R. Ammons writes in his magnificent poem, "Garbage," that "it's a wonder natural / selection hasn't thinned out anything not perfectly / beautiful." Nature, he adds, "likes a broad spectrum approaching disorder so / as to maintain the potential of change with / variety and environment."

Grants’ Tomb?

The U.S. EPA has awarded more than $2 billion in grants to nonprofit organizations since 1993 through a process that the agency’s internal watchdog says is seriously flawed. Many grants were awarded without competitive bids, and some groups may have received preferential treatment. Some of the awards went to organizations that subsequently sued the EPA […]

The Secret Life of a Telecommuter

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 […]

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 […]

Area 51

Fair-to-middling was the U.S. ranking in a new study, presented at the World Economic Forum last week in New York, that rated the environmental health of 142 countries. In the study, conducted by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University, the U.S. […]

Jonna Higgins-Freese reviews Having Faith by Sandra Steingraber

I am an environmental activist, and for almost a year, my husband and I have struggled to understand how our environmental commitments bear on our decision about whether to have children. So when I picked up Sandra Steingraber's new book Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood,, I was immediately drawn in by the opening sentence: "Every woman who becomes pregnant brings to the experience her various identities."

Strip-Trees