Climate Technology

Can You Spare a Square?

Polluting Wisconsin paper companies choose an odd mascot

No doubt you’re annoyed by the calendar-quality images of nature being used to pedal everything from SUVs to shampoo to batteries. Now a coalition of paper companies in the Fox River Valley, near Green Bay, Wis., has taken this advertising tactic to a new low, bringing a little dark comedy to a community engaged in […]

Flush With Success

Canadian plumbing supply stores near the U.S. border are doing a bustling business thanks to Americans who want old-fashioned 3.5-gallon-capacity toilets instead of the 1.6-gallon low-flush models required in the U.S. since 1994. Some political conservatives have been driving the trend, arguing that 1.6 gallons often aren’t enough to do the job and that the […]

How we could save both forests and jobs

The “roadless” road show swept the nation last week as U.S. Forest Service officials collected public comment on President Clinton’s initiative to prohibit road building in national forests where no roads now exist. What’s missing from this picture? Photo: U.S. Forest Service. The policy would affect 43 million acres across the country, including about 5.8 […]

Third Time's the Charm?

Three stories have hit the news lately concerning three corporations that have done — or may have done — serious environmental harm. They are coping with the situation in very different ways. Taken together, the stories suggest an odd combination of hope and cynicism. There are signs of honesty, good will, real learning. But the […]

The Catbox Guide to Running a Multinational Corporation

Half awake, with an early morning NPR broadcast in the background, I think I heard, though I hope I did not, the author of the latest business book telling CEOs the great lessons to be learned from kids playing in a sandbox. Is that frightening or what? Am I the only one who’s both amused […]

We Be Culture Jammin'

Maybe you’ve seen Adbusters magazine or the Adbusters website, with their takeoffs on common ads. “Joe Chemo,” the popular Joe Camel, sits sad, sick, and bald in a hospital bed. A sports utility vehicle surges through the wilderness under the slogan: NATURE — IT’LL GROW BACK. A slumped over vodka bottle proclaims ABSOLUTE IMPOTENCE. It […]

Zen and the Art of Fuel Efficiency

This column is not a Honda ad, though it will start off sounding like one. This is an ad for feedback. I’ve had a Honda Insight, a gas-electric hybrid car, for less than a month. It has taught me a whole new way of driving, thanks to feedback from its instrument panel. An Insight instrument […]

A conservative argument for Clinton's forest initiative

Ed Marston, publisher of High Country News, proclaims in his paper’s April 10, 2000 issue: “The war between extractive interests and the environmental movement for control of the Interior West’s public lands is drawing to a close. The timber era, the cattle era, the mainstem big-dam era, the wise-use era are ending. An immense landscape […]

Should campaign finance reform become the next big green issue?

"Politics," said Will Rogers, "has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get beat with." And that was in the 1930s.