The rock piles outside the Western Mineral Products plant were too good to pass up. "We all played over there," recalls Kevin Reich, who moved to the neighborhood as a sixth-grader in 1979. But the rock piles were the by-product of processing vermiculite ore mined by W.R. Grace & Company in Libby, Montana, and they’re now known to contain asbestos.
The interconnection between environmental awareness and better lives for poor women is clear. Women the world over, in developing nations on every continent, are working to protect the environment and improve their lives—and proving that the two are not mutually exclusive.
For modern American women, dealing with uniquely female environmental health issues can be overwhelming. Until recently, government regulators assumed chemicals affected men and women in the same way. But now scientists are challenging that assumption.
Wildlife corridors are crucial as they increase the total amount of habitat available for species while counteracting the fragmentation from human activity.
It seems patently unfair that Europeans are probably doing more than any people on Earth to reduce global warming emissions, and yet Europe is in the vanguard of feeling the heat. A report released by the European Environment Agency (EEA) August 18 said that the continent is warming more rapidly than the rest of the world, with the likely results heat waves (like the scorcher in France that killed 15,000 people last summer), floods and the loss of three quarters of the Swiss Alps’ glaciers by 2050.
In anticipation of a call from the Bush administration to take the grizzly bear off the threatened species list, the U.S. Forest Service has released a grizzly habitat management plan for the six national forests it operates surrounding Yellowstone National Park. Environmentalists say the plan does not protect enough habitat to ensure that the bear’s recovery takes hold.
Researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado released findings last week predicting that cities in the U.S. and Europe would likely suffer from more frequent and intense heat waves in years to come as a result of global warming.
Urban trees function as the lungs of the city, filtering out air pollution and carbon dioxide while also countering the urban heat island effect with shade.
While I love chocolate, I’ve heard that cocoa bean agriculture is environmentally destructive and exploits workers in tropical rainforests around the world. Is this true?
The singer-actress Eartha Kitt (TV"s Catwoman) was thankful for the solid construction of her Range Rover after it flipped over in Westport, Connecticut in early August. "Thank God for that car," she said. "I don’t think I’ll ever drive another."
