Organic food is firmly established as the fastest-growing market in the food industry, boasting annual growth of 20 to 24 percent for the past several years and sales projected to reach $32 billion by the year 2009. So it’s not surprising that we’re seeing a new trend: the organic frozen convenience meal. So how do five frozen lasagna entrees compare?
<B><U>Querido DiálogoEcológico:</U> ¿Si se removieran las presas en el Pacífico Noroeste volvería el salmón que abundaba en esa zona a su abundancia original?</B>
<B><U>Querido DiálogoEcológico:</U> ¿Es verdad que nada realmente puede biodegradarse en un basural?</B>
Tamsyn Jones’s very informative cover story this issue serves to remind us, among other things, that great civilizations of the past have prospered or withered depending upon their relationship with their natural environment. Vibrant, healthy economies survived where soils, because of sensible agricultural practices, remained rich and fertile enough to produce food—and fell when farming became unsustainable.
More than 90 percent of Ghanaians still rely on fuel wood or charcoal as their main source of energy. According to government estimates, every person in Ghana uses around 1,400 pounds of fuel wood annually—the bulk of it for cooking. Along with logging, agricultural practices and mining, reliance on fuel wood contributes to the depletion of two percent of Ghana’s forest annually. In an effort to curb this rapid decline, the United Nations, in partnership with the government and local groups, is promoting the use of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) — butane or propane—as an alternative to wood fuel.
For most visitors to the Big Island of Hawaii, the beautiful black sand beach at Punalu in the rural district of Kau is synonymous with one thing: giant sea turtles. But these awesomely beautiful marine reptiles may soon lose their visitation rights. Sea Mountain Five, a collaboration of California and Big Island investors, has recently proposed building a 2,000-unit resort complex on the site, which had previously hosted several failed hotel development plans. Environmentalists worry that the complex would put turtles, especially the critically endangered hawksbill, at risk.
Today, the 1.3 million-square-foot structure that once served as a Montgomery Ward warehouse and a rotting symbol of Baltimore’s decay is not only the city’s largest office building, but it also serves as the area’s most extensive use of green design and technology.
In El Portugues, a small fishing camp in Mexico’s Baja California Sur, moustachioed fishermen with tobacco-colored skin glide to shore in 21-foot panga boats and unload their modest catch of small sharks and devil rays. It seems innocuous enough, given that most of the sharks, skates and rays (a class known as elasmobranches) are being harvested via small-scale, non-industrialized methods. But according to a two-year survey led by Robert Hueter, director of the Center for Shark Research in Sarasota, Florida, there are 147 fishing camps along the Gulf of California supporting 4,000 to 5,500 active pangas targeting elasmobranches.
Long Island Sound is a celebrated estuary stretching from New London, Connecticut and Long Island to New York City. Its shores are home to nine million people and its watershed stretches 17,000 square miles.
With 3,700 stores in all 50 states, Wal-Mart is well known as the country’s top seller of diapers, toothpaste, DVDs, breakfast cereal and organic lettuce? It may not hold that honor yet, but it’s well on its way.
Relations between Israel and Jordan are strained, largely due to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the Arab world in general, study in Israel is verboten. But Jordanian students opt for environmental studies at the Albert Katz Institute in Israel because the school’s team of professors and researchers is renowned globally for its breakthrough environmental research, including drip irrigation, solar energy harnessing, algae cultivation and brackish water salmon farming. The Jordanians also come to experience a different culture and "see these people we’ve fought with and heard about all our lives with our own eyes," one student confides.
