The primary health and environmental drawbacks to swimming pools are water waste, energy waste and overuse of chlorine. Chlorine is very irritating to the eyes and skin, and can trigger breathing difficulties by also “stinging” the sensitive tissue of the lungs.
Langston Hughes wrote a very moving poem about rivers, later set to music by saxophonist Gary Bartz. Paraphrasing, it says, "I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins
I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers."
There is indeed a population shortfall trend developing in Western Europe, Russia and Japan. In Ireland, for instance, families have an average of 1.8 children today, slightly below the “replacement level” of two children per couple.
The head of Britain’s Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) last week issued a report stating that the Blair government is not changing fast enough to keep pace with the environmental problems facing that country and the world at large. Sir Jonathon Porritt, chairman of the SDC, said that Blair’s central objective remains conventional economic growth rather than the well-being of society and the planet as a whole.
With gasoline prices reaching new highs, analysts would expect Americans to limit consumption by reducing the number of miles driven. But overall growth in the economy means that people have more expendable income to pump into their cars" gas tanks, and as a result Americans are driving more miles than ever.
Despite the end of the Cold War, the Bush administration is spending 12 times more on nuclear weapons research and production than on nonproliferation efforts to retrieve, secure and dispose of nuclear weapons materials worldwide, according to an analysis of Department of Energy programs released last week by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
President Bush’s campaign chairperson, former Montana Governor Marc Racicot, said Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry is an environmental extremist whose policies would kill thousands of jobs.
Most conventional toothpastes use saccharin as a sweetener. Although it has not been proven that saccharin causes cancer in humans, many studies have linked it to cancer in laboratory animals, and some experts, including Dr. Samuel Epstein of the University of Illinois Medical Center and the Center for Science in the Public Interest, recommend that consumers avoid it.
The Ford Motor Company’s chairman, Bill Ford, great-grandson of founder Henry Ford, was celebrating a moment of rather personal triumph. Long the environmentalist-in-chief at the company, Ford had pushed for and won approval for a 35-40 mile-per gallon (mpg), <a href="http://auto.howstuffworks.com/hybrid-car.htm">gas-electric hybrid</a> version of the small <a href="http://www.fordvehicles.com/escapehybrid/index.asp?bhcp=1">Escape SUV</a>.
Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are various man-made mixtures of chlorinated compounds that were first made by the Swann Chemical Company back in 1880. PCBs were once considered a “miracle product” for manufacturers
