Rusted tin cans, rotting carpets, refrigerators, a playground set, coffee makers, toilet seats, paint cans, deer carcasses stuffed into garbage cans, tons of household garbage, thousands of tires—the list reads like a cross between a town dump inventory and a tag sale. But instead, these items were hauled from culverts, quarries, riverbanks, roadside turnarounds and […]
Loved to Death The large, flat shells of living abalone once carpeted the rocky waters along California’s coastline from Mexico to Oregon. Prior to European settlement, Native Americans feasted on the mollusk’s muscular foot and employed its shell as a colorful decoration. More recently, Californians have established a multi-million dollar industry harvesting abalone and delivering […]
November 28-29, 1999. Our delegation of journalists, winners of the annual Population Institute reporting awards, arrives in New Delhi in the middle of the night and drives through nearly deserted streets to our hotel. The 4 a.m. calm is deceptive: at first light, the streets fill with belching diesel taxis and two-stroke motorcycle-based rickshaws, colorfully […]
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 […]
