The Small Gas Engine Is an Environmental Nightmare Most summer weekends, a few million people use them to mow lawns, trim hedges, blow leaves or cut up firewood. Millions more use them to buzz over waterways and lakes in jet skis or motorboats. In the winter, people in the colder climates roar along snow-clogged residential […]
General Motors’ investment of vast amounts of capital and energy in manipulating public opinion and state law (see main story) may seem unprecedented, but this is, after all, a company’s whose executives could proudly proclaim, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.” Indeed, GM’s campaign against electric cars has an eerily similar precedent. […]
Big Oil Goes Hunting for Electric Cars in California. If It Wins, We All Lose It was 8 a.m., September 16, 1996, and the red light was on in the studio of KSFO-AM in San Francisco. “Hot Talk” host Lee Rogers was doing his best to get his drivetime listeners (who, then as now, breathe […]
There is nothing like a consensus on caring for the American environment, and given the impressive array of competing interests, there probably never will be. But if there's one issue on which we thought everyone agreed-from Earth First! activists in northern California to Manhattan power brokers-it's the importance of recycling. Last summer, however, The New […]
Undersea Noise Experiments Threaten the Sensitive Hearing-And Communications-Of Marine Mammals Finned marine mammals like these dolphins are especially sensitive to sonic disruptions. Anyone who has ducked beneath the surface of the ocean is familiar with the sensation. The screech of gulls, the laughter of children in the surf, even the distant whine of pleasure craft […]
With GIS Environmental Software, the Proof is in the Plotting This GIS map treates the Pacific Northwest as an ecosystem of varying rainforest environments. At the front lines of environmentalism, often the first and biggest challenge is proving that there is a problem. The systematic environmental poisoning Rachel Carson described in Silent Spring made headlines […]
The Pentagon Uses Radioactive Waste as Armor and Bullets As many as 700,000 American soldiers served in the 1991 Persian Gulf war, but it wasn’t until last year that the Pentagon finally admitted that some of those servicemen and women may have been exposed to chemical weapons. During the Gulf War, depleted uranium was used […]
E Magazine interviews NRDC environmentalist Allen Hershkowitz.
How can restaurants serve bison meat if there are so few of the majestic animals left in the wild? Aren’t bison endangered? —Pat Henderson, Columbus, OH The American bison, which is commonly called a buffalo, is not on the U.S. Endangered Species List. According to the National Bison Association, there are approximately 350,000 of the […]
What threats would oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge pose to wildlife? —Alexander Brower, Jefferson, WI The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service calls Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) "among the most complete, pristine, and undisturbed ecosystems on Earth." ANWR’s Area 1002, the coastal plain where oil drilling is proposed, is home to […]
