Microcredit Benefits Small Businesses, the Environment, And Your Bank Account, Too Socially responsible investing has traditionally meant keeping your money away from negative investments, like tobacco companies and large polluters. But what if your money could turn a profit while actually having a positive impact? What if you lent part of your nest-egg to a […]
Salvaged Building Materials are Catching On In 1976, Dr. Dan Knapp quit his teaching job and started hanging around the dump in Lane County, Oregon. On a mission to rescue reusable items, he rooted through tons of trash, undaunted by the landfill's “No Salvage” signs. “I thought that [prohibition] was kind of silly,” he says, […]
Are Medicated Baby Powders Doing More Harm Than Good? Lead has been identified by the federal government as the foremost environmental health threat to American children. Nearly one million children still have elevated blood lead levels, over four percent of the population. Now, according to San Francisco's Center for Environmental Health (CEH), infants may be […]
Organic Cereals Start the Day Off Right Gradually over the last century, the American idea of a healthy breakfast evolved from eggs and sausage to Cheerios. In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, American consumption of breakfast cereal increased dramatically between 1980 and 1997—by over 40 percent to 17 pounds per person, per […]
Environmental Tax Crusader Until the mid-1990s, Alan Thein Durning was a senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, D.C., where he chronicled global ills and looked at macro-solutions. In 1995, as chronicled in his book This Place on Earth: Home and the Practice of Permanence, he moved his family across the country to establish […]
The Green Group For Busy People Shana Milkie was always an activist at heart, but the demands of fulltime motherhood kept her out of the loop. The Ann Arbor, Michigan resident says she “wanted to get involved, but I was nervous about it. I’d never written to a congressman, and I didn’t know how ordinary […]
Learning About the Planet at the Reborn Biosphere 2 While most college students were hanging out in the Student Union or cramming for exams, environmental science major Shannon Glynn was taking coral reef samples at the bottom of a 900,000-gallon ocean. A junior at Notre Dame in Indiana, Glynn was one of 50 college students […]
The Family Behind Hip Clothier The Gap Logs the Redwoods Founded in ultra-hip 1969 San Francisco and named for the generational split that was then ravaging America, The Gap Inc. clothing empire has made billions selling once-egalitarian blue jeans as fashion items. Now some charge that The Gap’s founder/owners, the Fisher family, are selling out […]
Tobacco Growers Look Elsewhere to Save the Family Farm Dorothy Robertson has a friend who says “the best fertilizer in the world is the shadow of the farmer.” But the shadow falling over Robertson's farm, and those of 124,000 other tobacco farmers in the U.S., is that of Big Tobacco, and it's certainly not helping […]
Toxic Trains May Be Rumbling Through Your Town * ITEM: In the pre-dawn hours of April 11, 1996, along railroad tracks one mile west of the rural Montana community of Alberton, four Montana Rail Link tank cars suddenly derail. The largest mixed chemical release in railroad history—and the second biggest chlorine spill—sends a plume of […]
