Balancing Act
Our finite planet welcomed its six billionth citizen last year, and 10 billion will probably appear right around 2038.
Coming to America
According to the United States Census Bureau, the population gains a new American every 11 seconds, and 2.5 million a year. Of that total, more than a million were born somewhere else. Between 1901 and 1990, 37 million immigrants arrived on American shores, an epic movement of people looking for a better life. Why do […]
The Hole in the Sky
Think the Ozone Layer is Yesterday’s Issue? Think Again In early August, Bert Ammons of Stuart, Florida pleaded guilty to violating the Clean Air Act when he attempted to smuggle ninety 30-pound cylinders of CFC-12, also known by its trade name, Freon, in false compartments on his 41-foot boat, Sierra. According to Environmental Protection Agency […]
Ozone
The Good, the Bad, the Ugly Even though it’s made of only three little molecules of oxygen, ozone can be a pretty big topic. Newspaper headlines are confusing: One day ozone is good, the next day it’s bad. In fact, both scenarios are true. Two types of ozone exist, stratospheric and tropospheric, and they differ […]
Wrapping It Up
Creative Ways to Give Your Holiday Paper Use the Cut There’s nothing like the holidays to really crank up the paper frenzy. And a frenzy it is: 20 years after the advent of the computer age, Americans use more paper than ever. Though we constitute only five percent of the global population, we consume 30 […]
Rewriting the Recipe
Modern Kitchens Try Their Hand at Dairy-less Desserts On the holiday dinner table, a delectable bounty of homemade goodies greets your eye—a veritable sea of fudge, cookies, meringues and mousse stretching out to the horizon of red-and-green tablecloth. Most people would slip into a sublime coma at the very first pass, but if you’re in […]
Animals on Drugs
Antibiotic-Pumped Livestock May Be Breeding Superbugs Lisa Blackshear Slowly, but surely, bacteria are winning. Though they replicate as often as dozens of times a day, bacteria face only about 150 types of antibiotics approved for human use in the past 60 years. Misuse of antibiotics in treating human infections has clearly contributed to the rise […]
The Inside Scoop
Most people link air pollution with industrial smokestacks or trucks belching clouds of diesel exhaust. But the air we breathe while indoors, where most of us spend 80 to 90 percent of our time, is filled with chemicals and particles that can deliver even higher levels of chemical exposure.
Screened IRAs and 401Ks
Saving Up for a Green Retirement Putting money aside for retirement is an important part of planning for your future. Like most people, you probably want to make sure there’s enough to live comfortably after you’ve stopped working. By choosing an IRA or 401K from the growing field of socially responsible investments, you can not […]
Buying Vermont
Bill Adams’ tractor goes putt, putt, putt. It’s a 1957 John Deere, the last of the two-cylinder models, and just one of the many venerable pieces of agricultural equipment around the Adams Farm in southern Vermont, which has been under one family’s ownership since 1865. Adams’ tractor has been used for maple sugaring, for sheep […]