Anne Parker, a retired school teacher, lives in what should be a pleasant middle-class neigborhood in Rahway, New Jersey. The curbs hold orange jack-o-latern leaf bags, the sidewalks have cracked from the roots of stately sycamore trees, the brick or ranch-style house have tricycles or basketball hoops in the driveways. There is even a pair of that famous suburban species, the plastic pink lawn flamingo.
Environmentalists were aghast last week upon discovering that the Bush administration’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) had weakened otherwise stringent new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) guidelines on assessing the cancer risk of various chemicals. In essence, the added OMB requirements allow for unlimited industry challenges on cancer risk rulings, meaning chemical companies will be able to at least slow down phase-outs of products already known to increase childhood cancer rates.
Shocked by their own conclusions, researchers from the University of California released a study last week showing that exhaust fumes from school buses were leaking inside the passenger cabins, exposing schoolchildren to significantly higher levels of pollutants than passersby on the streets below.
Pressure-treated wood contains the preservative chromated copper arsenate (CCA), an arsenic derivative that is used to protect the wood and prolong its life. Also used commercially as a pesticide, CCA is regarded by many homeowners and construction professionals as a godsend for preserving outdoor wood structures against harsh weather and termites.
Do we teach our children <I>too</I> well about the environment evils threatening the Earth? It’s easy for them to succumb to dispair, but there’s a lot to be positive about, too.
Slowly but surely, our best natural places are being taken over by Walt Disney, Wayne Huizenga and the other titans of corporate recreation. Even Civil War battlefields are under attack. Will we soon be paying admission to see a tree?
What the world’s automakers refused to do in California they readily agreed to in Canada. On April 5, a who’s who of big carmakers signed a voluntary agreement to build much cleaner automobiles for the Canadian market, avoiding the emission of more than 5.3 megatons of greenhouse gases by 2010. When faced with the same prospect in California, they called their lawyers.
For 50 years, banjo player Pete Seeger has been a singer with a conscience. Here he talks about green politics, the Hudson River and the Clearwater sloop he launched in 1968 to clean it up.
It’s become a cliche to say, as those of us who are trying to save the world invariably do, that we’re "doing it for the children." The aim, of course, is a stance of noble self-sacrifice. But what, after all, is wrong with self-interest when working to make the planet a better place to live?
Some old-timers still remember the Pacific Northwest in its glory. They say the salmon were so numerous you could walk across their backs as they swam upstream to spawn every year. That was before the dams stopped the stream flows, and logging and cattle grazing denuded the stream sides. In those days, the old-growth forests seemed limitless and everlasting. That’s a faded memory now, as we struggle to save the last of the Northwest’s big trees and the species, like the spotted owl, that depend upon them.
