Legal Eagle
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wears many hats, including president of the Waterkeeper Alliance and senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
Cover Story
The Hole in the Sky
Think the Ozone Layer is Yesterday’s Issue? Think Again In early August, Bert Ammons of Stuart, Florida pleaded guilty to violating the Clean Air Act when he attempted to smuggle ninety 30-pound cylinders of CFC-12, also known by its trade name, Freon, in false compartments on his 41-foot boat, Sierra. According to Environmental Protection Agency […]
Real Wealth
The Genuine Progress Indicator Could Provide an Environmental Measure of the Planet’s Health On October 17, 1995, Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) asked his colleagues in the Senate to rethink sacred notions of economic progress. “We are told daily that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in America is up, our economy is moving forward and we […]
The Case Against Meat
Evidence shows that our meat-based diet is bad for the environment, aggravates global hunger, brutalizes animals and compromises our health…
Seeking Sanctuary
Environmentalists worry that modern threats are too much for our fragile national wildlife refuge system and its wild inhabitants to handle…
The Biotech Century
Playing Ecological Roulette with Mother Nature’s Designs We are in the midst of a great historic transition into the Biotech Age. The ability to isolate, identify and recombine genes is making the gene pool available, for the first time, as the primary raw resource for future economic activity on Earth. After thousands of years of […]
The Trouble With Meat
In 1992, when he was 11 years old, Damion Heersink of the southeastern Alabama town of Dothan attended a Boy Scout campout, and unwittingly ate a quarter-sized piece of uncooked hamburger. It’s certainly not unusual for kids to eat hamburgers:
Marketing Madness
A few years ago, a company called Space Marketing, Inc. (SMI) came up with a plan to send a mile-long billboard into space. Coated with reflective plastic, the billboard would beam down a corporate logo that appeared as large as the moon, and as it orbited the Earth, would be visible to every single person on the planet.
The Virtual Environment
In his office at WebWorld in Seattle, Roger Adams is working on the United Nations Environment Programme’s on-line action guide for community organizations. He e-mails drafts to the working groups, and is told that the guide needs more material on sustainable agriculture. Adams writes a quick query on his Macintosh and "uplinks" it into a "listserve," which automatically sends it on to 2,000 environmentalists around the world. He goes back to working on his document, with the e-mail program working in the background. Within an hour, a listserve subscriber in South Africa has sent him the material he needs. Adams copies the material into his document, attributes it, and completes a new draft, which he immediately e-mails back to the working group.
Rights from Wrongs
Do animals have legal rights or are they just property? A movement to grant protections under the law is gathering force, propelled by new findings on animal intelligence.