The Greenies Are Coming

I’ve been seeing the terms "greenies" and "greenie rhetoric" quite a bit lately, most notably in the business press where one can sometimes find considerable verse seeking to trivialize the concerns of environmentalists (which, not coincidentally, often relate to irresponsible corporate behavior). The subtle jabs come in forms something like this (to wax poetic): "Business will save the environment, making moey at it too, we don’t need the greenies telling us what to do."

Undersea Grass: Not Always Greener

Tall sea grasses reach the surface of Chincoteague Bay, filling the water like a sunken forest. To many boaters, these beds of grass would be a nuisance. But to Bill Denison, they are a marvel. "You’re looking at one of the most productive areas in the world," he said, as his boat skims the stops of the grasses which provide important food and habitat for waterfowl, fish and shellfish.

People Who Live in Clay Houses

When Robert Laporte and his family moved from a log cabin in rural Canada to a house in Iowa, they soon noticed a marked downturn in their health. They traced their symptoms to the toxic chemicals routinely used in construction materials.

Road Busters

In the 1970s, Jan Lundberg was a rising star in the oil industry, lunching at yacht clubs and crusing California freeways in a Mercedes. For 14 years, he built his family’s business, Lundberg Survey, Inc., into the highly respected publisher of the Lundberg Letter, a newsletter which forecasts oil industry trends. In 1986, Lundberg left the family business and went through a transformation–selling his car, fouding the non profit Fossil Fuels Policy Action Institute (FFPAI) and joining forces with environmentalists in Washington, DC. Today, in his work to end our society’s petroleum dependency, not only does Lundberg no longer drive a Mercedes, he no longer drives a car at all.

No Place Like Home

"What’s the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?" Thoreau once asked. His quote adorns the brochure for EcoVillage–a planned community coming to life in Ithaca, New York. At their forum last fall, 60 earthy people slogged through sodden paths and armpit-high brambles on the 176-acre site–recently purchased for $400,000–that many hope to someday call home. They drew smeary-inked circles and arrows on map handouts. They debated whether the site proposed for the village center would be better suited for a water tank, and whether to plant the asparagus patch over the proposed playing field. "The land will let us know what goes where," reassured architect Steve Blais, one of the many professionals donating their services to the nonprofit project.

Cambodian Land Mines: Vietnam’s Shattering Legacy

Six weeks after her wedding, 20-year-old Nean Pok was gathering firewood at the edge of a forest near the Cambodian village of Phrum Prey Kpors when she stepped on a land mine. nean was more fortunate than some of her fellow villagers. Her husband, who heard the explosion, was nearby. He quckly tied a tourniquet around Nean’s lower left leg.

The Elusive Marbled Murrelet

A slight, chocolate-brown seabird that darts through the forests of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest at speeds topping 50 miles per hour, the marbled murrelet bewildered long-ago orinthologists. They wondered why they saw murrelets in forests 40 miles inland, but couldn’t find any when they honed their binoculars on the sea.

Sorcerers’ Apprentices

As the modern world encroaches upon indigenous cultures around the world, native young people, sept up in the tide of seductive media and consumer goods, are increasingly trading in traditional lifestyles for modern ones. Unfortunately, in casting aside their rich heritage, they may also be losing stores of valuable undocumented knowledge. No wonder–all the while the WEstern world has been labelling them primitve while quietly appropriating their knowledge, particularly about medicinal plants, offering neither acknowledgement nor compensation.

Noise Annoys

The ear-shattering sounds of New York City–blaring car horns, piercing ambulance sirens, thundering subway trains, roaring pneumatic drills, and the noise generated by millions of people huddled together in limited spaces–have become legendary. Visitors are stunned by this cacophony and wonder how residents tolerate it. "We can’t and we won’t remain silent and longer," said Carmins SantaMaria, founder of Big Screechers, a New York anti-noise group credited with forcingthe City’s Transit Authority to lower its din.

A Crisis of Complacency

Environmentally speaking, the test of the new Clinton Administration may well lie in how it handles a crisis of both national and global proportions that, ironically, has an Arkansas connection.

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