Archive

Ellen Miller interview: Show Me the Money, elections 2003-Ellen Miller is currently publisher of the online opinion journal TomPaine.com. She was the founder and former director of both the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks electoral spending, and Public Campaign, which pushes for campaign finance reform. She has given careful attention to the role of money in the political process—what she calls "the elephant in the living room"—for nearly 20 years. As she puts it, "Money is access. Money is political power. Those who give money get more than good government in return."

Investigating a Food Supply Gone Haywire Like a lot of other Americans, journalist Nicols Fox, a former editor at the Washington Journalism Review and a correspondent for The Economist, first heard about the deadly E. coli O157:H7 bacteria in 1993. That was the year it attacked a group of Northwestern children, all of whom had […]

Okay, okay, we’re interested in exploring the world out there, but does that mean we have to receive 17 America Online trial discs in a week, each in its own unique shrink-wrapped plastic-and-cardboard package?

If ever there was an environmentalist perfectly comfortable with technology, it is Stewart Brand, the founding editor of the legendary Whole Earth Catalog and later, The Whole Earth Review. Sympathetic with the plight of the plundered Earth since studying biology at Stanford University in the late ’50s, Brand has always been an enthusiastic proponent of putting tools into the hands of worthy users. Anyone who’s gotten their hands on those catalogs–whether they’re from the ’60s or the ’90s–knows Brand believes wholeheartedly that putting the right tools in the right hands can change the world for the better. "We are as Gods and might as well get good at it," he wrote in the 1968 edition of the catalog.

In his role as Refuge Program Manager for Defenders of Wildlife, Noah Matson has been both a vocal critic of and enthusiastic cheerleader for the national wildlife refuge system.

A Kinship With Chimps © Jane Goodall Institute Primatologist Jane Goodall, Ph.D., CBE and UN Messenger of Peace, needs little introduction, because her work with chimps in Tanzania is known throughout the world. Fifty years of intimate contact with these close human relatives gives her authority to speak on everything from their value systems to […]

Hydrogen’s True Believer Amory B. Lovins is research director and co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), a diverse think tank founded in Snowmass, Colorado in 1982 that works with industry to pursue what it calls “soft” or sustainable energy paths. In a highly prescient 1995 article in The Atlantic Monthly, Lovins sketched out the […]

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 […]

Defending America's Wilder Ways Dr. Rodger Schlickeisen, at the helm of the 50-year-old Defenders of Wildlife since 1991, has by now grown accustomed to controversy in his work defending some of America's biggest predators—including grizzly bears, wolves and mountain lions. In 1995 and 1996, Defenders scored a triumph by negotiating legal entanglements and vociferous local […]