Builders, architects, environmental organizations and forward-thinking governments around the world are working on a host of innovative ideas aimed at greening the built environment—from giant factories and public spaces to housing developments and single-family homes.
Senator Gaylord Nelson—who just passed away in July—founded the first Earth Day back in 1970 in order to celebrate and raise awareness about protecting the planet. With rivers catching fire from the dumping of combustible toxins, and cities buried under blankets of auto exhaust smog
The next time you veer into a mall boutique you never considered entering before, take a whiff. Smell a faint fragrance? It could be one of those nearly subliminal scents that retailers are using in increasing numbers to entice you inside–and spend bigger bucks. Call it the odor of money. alan Hirsch, director of Chicago’s smell and Taste Treatment Foundation (STTF), hopes it will become as prevalent as Muzak.
A barrage of 12-gauge shotguns shatters the quiet of the May dawn. Another three-month killing season at New York City’s JFK airport has begun. The marksmen work for the .S. Department of Agriculture’s controversial Animal Damage Control (ADC) program, which kills 2.5 million birds and animals each year, with public money and often on public land–but, as at JFK, without public input.
Ninety-four year old Hazel Wolf of Seattle, Washington, one of the planet’s oldest environmentalists, has some theories about why she’s been blessed with an extended life and exuberant energy. "I once told a television interviewer, ‘I’ve lived so long because I don’t have a television.’ I dared him to put it on the air, and he did." A former smoker, she now eats steamed vegetables, lives simply and stays relaxed. " I only run to catch buses. I tell the bus driver, ‘If I’d kept going, I would have beat you downtown,’" she says. "I even outlived my car."
A visit to most modern hair salons would have anyone believing that the road to beauty is paved with noxious chemicals. But two West Coast hairdressers, Jennifer Archbold and Kristin Kilian, are leading their profession down a more ecological path. In 1991 they set up shop in Albany, California and launched Elemental, one of the nation’s first "environmentally concerned" hair salons.
Animal rights activists around the country say they are under the microscope of federal grand juries and law enforcement agencies. Officials say they are simply trying to solve six break-ins at universities doing animal research during which laboratory animals were removed and research equipment destroyed. But, "The investigative tactics are represive and go beyond the scope of routine investigations," says Cres Bellucci of the Activists Legal Defense Project (ALDP). "It seems federal authorities want to pressure activists into abandoning their cause."
Shaded by hemlocks 80 feet tall, East Rock Park is a cool summer refuge for New Have, Connecticut residents who prefer quiet woods to mobbed beaches. In winter, the trees lend the city a touch of green, a reminder that spring will eventually come. But like Eastern hemlocks throughout the region, the ones here are dying, turning from green to yellow to brown. In the summer, East Rock could eventually become a sweltering, impenetrable thicket if the cool shade provided by the hemlocks disappears. In winter it could take on the same dull gray as the rest of New Haven.
The cargo handlerat Don Muang Airport in Bangkok, Thailand didn’t think much of three small wooden crates that had just arrived from Singapore until he heard cries that sounded frighteningly like human babies. Stamped "live birds," the crates were X-rayed and the contents were revealed. One box held two rare siamang gibbons, and the others had six baby orangutans stuffed inside small cells like coffins. When the boxes were pried open, all six animals appeared grey in color and desperately ill. Their stomachs bloated, the orangutans had been drugged and three shipped upside down. The discovery of "the Bangkok Six" on February 20, 1990 offered a glimpse inside the shadowy world of the international trade in endangered species.
On the Isle of Palms, a beach community near Charleston, South Carolina, sit rows of expensive new homes. The Isle is one of many ‘barrier" islands" along the nation’s coastlines–islands which absorb the brunt of winds and waves when hurricanes hit. Not surprisingly, in 1989, when Hurricane Hugo swept into South Carolina, dozens of homes on the Isle were destroyed, leaving behind only rubble. Yet within a couple of years, property owners rebuilt structures in the same vulnerable places. Such practices along our nation’s coastlines have placed enormous demands on our beaches, estuaries and saltmarshes.
