Currents

Louisiana wetlands are disappearing fast, and the oil and gas industries responsible for much of the destruction have not been asked to help stem the tide.

Forty years after construction began on the visionary Arizona desert eco-village, Arcosanti, the project has yet to be completed. But new eco-villages are emerging, from Los Angeles to Cleveland to Detroit, as communities look for cleaner ways to live together.

Ironic as it may seem, state and regional efforts to limit the emission of greenhouse gases might delay the passage of federal regulations mandating reductions.

Just in time for the holiday shopping season, a coalition of public interest groups led by the Ecology Center has made public a database showing how some 1,200 popular children’s toys stack up in terms of lead content and other harmful chemicals.

It is hard to shock journalists and at the same time leave them in awe of the power of nature. A group returning from a helicopter trip flying over, then landing on, the Greenland ice cap at the time of maximum ice melt last month were shaken. One shrugged and said, "It is too late already."

The world’s major palm oil producers last week announced that they have created a new certification process to ensure ongoing sustainable production and the protection of the world’s remaining tropical rainforests.

Canada’s federal government last week announced that it is setting aside some 25.5 million acres of boreal forest and tundra in its remote Northwest Territories province as conservation land off-limits to development and resource extraction.

"A market for low-carbon fuels can produce a rare convergence of business, agricultural, and environmental interests that, if pursued wisely, could represent a "win-win-win" opportunity," promises the report Biofuels: An Important Part of a Low-Carbon Diet, released this month by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

It’s official, the Chevrolet Tahoe Hybrid has been named 2008 "Green Car of the Year" by Green Car Journal‘s team of judges (including several respected environmentalists, among them Carl Pope of the Sierra Club, Christopher Flavin of Worldwatch Institute, Jonathan Lash of World Resources Institute and Jean-Michel Cousteau of the Ocean Futures Society).

We are standing on a balcony outside Iceland’s Hellisheidi geothermal power plant, newly built on the side of an active volcanic mountain in Hengill. It’s pretty cold, but we are wreathed in warm steam that started out in the center of the Earth. Some of the turbines have been humming since 2006, but the plant is still under construction, on its way to producing 300 megawatts of electricity and (beginning in 2009) 400 megawatts of heat energy to warm factories and households.