"All the news that’s fine to print on Canada’s ancient rainforest," read one of a cluster of placards hoisted by a small group of demonstrators huddled in front of the New York Times building in Manhattan one frigid day last winter. Beside them was a palette loaded with copies of the Times, festively strewn with Yuletide decorations.
Golf course architect Dr. Mike Hurdzan of Columbus, Ohio tells this story: It was 1984. Hurdzan and his collegaues had created a course on Cape Cod, Massachusetts called Dennis Highlands. It was designed with the enviornment in mind – planted with native, low-maintenance grasses that required less watering and fewer pesticides than the average course.
The ads feature cars perched on alpine peaks, on Old West plateaus and in remote deserts. Mud-caked cars are seen splashing through rainforest rivers and powering ovr bouldered trails. The cars are everywhere they shouldn’t be.
Spring has stealthily descended on the Ozarks. Mother Nature has fingerpainted the trees – oak, sycamore, pine, elm, hickory, maple and redbud – in varying shades of rich green life. A pleasant breeze holds the temperature around 72 degrees. The air smells sweet. And in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, a village named Little Switzerland, Victorian cottages perch tenaciously on the mountainside and local craftspeople produce folk art. What’s truly unique, however lies eight miles up the road – the Turpentine Creek Exotic Wildlife Ranch. Here the Jackson family cares for animals from around the country that have been mistreated or abandoned.
Environmentalists are winning the CD wars. THe first battle was over the "longbox," a thoroughly wasteful piece of cardboard and plastic packaging designed to deter theft, display graphics and make the CD more visible in music store bins originally designed for LP records. By 1992, environmental agitation had killed the longbox, and the standard for CD display became a shrinkwrapped plastic jewel box. But the skirmishes continue, with the main target now the design of the CD case itself.
Volvo, one of Sweden’s two carmakers (the other being Saab), takes its green commitment seriously – so much so that it started its recent international press tour in a junkyard. The Environmental Car Recycling in Scandinavia (ECRIS) yard is 20 percent owned by Volvo, which has worked hard to make it a showpiece of the recycler’s art.
She’s an unlikely video star, a 23-year-old primate with an 800-word vocabulary who weighs 280 pounds and eats more than 30 pounds of fruits and vegetables a day. Yet Koko, a lowlands Gorilla known throughout the world for her unusual ability to communicate with humans by sign language, recently made her first TV commercial. It’s a public service announcement (PSA) aimed at raising funds for the Gorilla Foundation, a nonprofit research organization that currently cares for Koko and two other gorillas in Woodside, California.
The ranks of the modern-day "hobo" are being thinned by pesticides. Train-hoppers break into freight cars filled with lima beans, wheat or rice in hopes of a comfortable ride. But because stowing away is illegal, most of it takes place at night, and the riders can’t read the posted warnings telling them that the loads have been treated with deadly pesticides.
Slender, genteel and white-haired, Elizabeth Hird is new to alternative energy trend-setting. She got into it unwittingly while trying to power her home on Outer Island, off the coast of Connecticut. Outer Island is more than a mile offshore, so running an underwater electrical cable from the mainland utlity is prohibitively expensive
Gone are the days when green goods could only be found in health food and specialty stores. Now they’re filling the shelves of local supermarkets and corner groceries. These new products promise to work "the natural way," and often splash attention-getting symbols on claims on their labels, such as "We Care," "Non-Toxic," "Biodegradable," "100 percent Recycled," and "Recyclable"
