Some believe you can tell a lot about a person by the bag they carry. Purses, messenger bags, backpacks and luggage made from recycled materials and sustainable fibers don’t just make a statement about their owners’ fashion sense.
Sure, you might know the origin of that organic muenster cheese you have in the fridge but do you know if the wooden cutting board you’ve been chopping it up on came from ethically harvested materials?
"It’s very, very hard working in developing countries," says Andrew Steer, director of the environment department of the World Bank, the international development fund that gives loans for reconstruction and infrastructure projects. Steer could have added that it’s no picnic at home either. With a Republican Congress to whom all foreign aid is at best a frivolity and at worst a creeping socialism – and with environmentalists not generally falling over themselves to give the bank the benefit of the doubt – Steer is in no doubt about the challanges ahead.
In a unique approach to land coservation, the citizens of Peninsula Township, Michigan voted to do something that most Americans would consider unthinkable:they raised their own taxes.
The 1988 murder of Francisco Alves Mendes Filho, better known as Chico Mendes, in Brazil’s Amazon River basin was a major international story. This all-but-invisible man who worked extracting latex from rubber trees and organized a union deep in the world’s biggest rainforest wound up influencing global environmental policy and made headlines around the world when he was gunned down.
If you don’t trust the environmentalists, you may want to listen to the doctors. Mount Sinai Medical School has just released a study that, in its scientific way, indicts the Bush administration’s mercury policy as not only harming children but (conservatives take note) damages the economy.
While the Bush administration works feverishly to remove species like the grizzly bear, gray wolf and bald eagle from the federal endangered species list, an upstart environmental group is petitioning the federal government to add the beleaguered polar bear to the list.
The day after the Kyoto Protocol went into effect last week without U.S. participation, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels announced plans to lead a city-by-city effort to limit carbon dioxide emissions in accordance with the terms of the international treaty rejected by the Bush administration.
Thanks to an international network of local volunteers, now there’s a cheap and convenient place to dispose of useful junk while promoting re-use: the Internet. Freecycle.org is a website that links people who want to discard household belongings to people in their area who want or need them. The only rules: everything offered must be free, legal and appropriate for all ages—sorry, no bongs or porn.
Along with outlawing plastic bags and secondhand cars, Bhutan, the Himalayan kingdom nestled in the clouds between China and India, has become the first country in the world to completely ban tobacco sales.
