Homemade Music
For musician Skip La Plante, heaps of grabage are nothing more that great opportunities to make music.
Guatemala: Trading the Rainforest for Oil?
The tropical forests of Guatemala’s largest and northernmost state, the Peten, cover nearly two million hectares (nearly 5 million acres). They contain numerous rare and endangered animal species, and more than 400 species of trees. But the Peten is also rich in oil. And like other Latin American rainforest countries, Guatemala needs oil.
Chicago Students Green Their habitat
Years ago, Chicago’s Lincoln park Casting Club members would gather to thread flies and swap lies in a tree-sheltered brick building near Lake Michigan. But for the past 12 years their fieldhouse sat vacant, collecting red algae and huge heating bills.
A Banner Coalition
Lillian Robinson doesn’t want a waste wood incinerator built across the street from the local elementary school. But it’s hard to persuade her Flint, Michigan neighbors. "The word ‘incinerator’ means nothing to them," she says. "They’ve never seen one."
Breathe Free
Unlike most people, Linda Moneyhun Miano can watch her health pass by in the sky outside her window. She lives on a hillside farm overlooking the Clinch River in the Appalachian ridges of western Virginia. She and her husband Craig, a coal miner, moved here in 1980 as refugees from the petro-chemical alley in southern Louisiana where Linda, who is asthmatic and chemically sensitive, couldn’t breathe. If these remote mountains were safe enough for moonshiners, she said, they were safe enough for her.
Photography and Politics
Robert Glenn Ketchum has come to New york City to promote his new book, The Legacy of Wildness, a retrospective of 20 years of his work photographing American landscapes. At breakfast, amid the gray suits in a midtown hotel, he’s hard to miss in his velvety green dinner jacket, white ruffled shirt and black pony-tailed hair. His glassy blue eyes are obviously still on West Coast time where he spent a week teaching a photography workshop on the Olypic peninsula, leading students to the wrekcing yards of tree stumps as big as tables to that they, too, can begin to change the world through their art.
John Seager: Straight Talk about Population
E Magazine talked to John Seager, the recently appointed president and CEO of Population Connection (formerly Zero Population Growth) a week after World Population Day July 11. Seager is a veteran population activist, having served at Population Connection for nearly a decade. He is also a former Environmental Protection Agency and Congressional aide, serving under seven-term U.S. Representative Peter Kostmayer, who he succeeds at the helm of the 90,000-member Population Connection.
Green Groups Launch ExxonMobil Boycott
A group of environmental and social justice organizations have launched a coordinated campaign in protest of petroleum giant ExxonMobil’s efforts to cast doubts on the science of global warming and attempts to lobby for opening the still-pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil drilling.
Solar Nanotech Coming of Age
For decades, sustainability gurus have been prattling on about the promise of solar power and other renewable energy sources. But in what is beginning to look like the "new, new thing" to technology analysts, solar power might be finally coming of age thanks to the next generation of tiny flexible solar panels–not to mention billions of dollars in backing from some of Silicon Valley’s biggest investors.
I’ve heard that some European countries require cars to be recycled. Is this true?
Back in February 2000, in response to the realization that discarded autos accounted for a tenth of the hazardous waste spilling out of Europe”s landfills, the European Union (EU) decided to shift the burden of environmental responsibility squarely onto the carmakers themselves.