Currents

Julie MacDonald, a senior Interior Department official criticized by environmentalists for revising scientific reports to minimize protection of endangered species, resigned her post last week. Critics charge that MacDonald, a civil engineer by training, repeatedly instructed federal biologists to change their recommendations on identifying "critical habitats" for threatened wildlife in order to favor development and resource extraction interests.

Two leading environmental groups, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Earthjustice joined the state of Massachusetts last week in filing a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The suit charged the DOE with failing to update energy-efficiency criterion for commercial heating and cooling equipment when it released new standards this past March.

Biking in Beijing is downright unhealthy. With more than 1,000 new cars on the roads every day and drastic construction underway for the 2008 Olympics, fewer people are biking to get around. Dust and particulate matter from construction and industry together with the toxic emissions of 2.6 million vehicles have transformed a practical exercise and enjoyable commuting option into a gamble with respiratory disease. Add the danger of crowded traffic and novice drivers, and biking in China quickly loses its appeal.

Two summers ago, I hiked from my front porch in Missoula, Montana to Waterton, Alberta. During this eight-week, 800-mile backpack trip, I traveled through some of the wildest, most unique and precious country left in the United States, providing the last strongholds for rare, threatened and endangered species. But even here, in such remote places, I witnessed evidence of what scientists and wildlife biologists have been warning us about for years.

PepsiCo made history last week when it announced it would become the nation’s largest corporate purchaser of green power. The company will work with Sterling Planet, a renewable energy provider, to find and buy the certificates to account for the electricity used for all of its U.S.-based manufacturing facilities, distribution centers, regional offices and headquarters.

Nonprofit environmental groups say that populations of pronghorn antelope, mule deer, elk and sage grouse are already starting to suffer as a result of the federal government doubling the amount of drilling allowed on federal lands across Wyoming, Utah, Montana, Colorado and New Mexico over the past decade.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg used the occasion of Earth Day to unveil 127 new environmental initiatives aimed at greening Gotham over the next two decades. With the city likely to take on an additional million residents by 2030—up from 8.2 million now—Bloomberg thinks that addressing environmental issues now may be the only way to deal with the inevitable future strain on infrastructure and natural resources.

This year’s recipients of the coveted Goldman Environmental Prize include a Vietnam vet fighting Pentagon nerve gas incineration, a champion of native forest dwellers terrorized in Liberia’s civil war, a researcher whose reports are helping China reconsider the socioeconomic and environmental impacts of dam construction, and an activist who helped stem the tide of illegal logging to establish the world’s largest area of protected tropical forest in northern Brazil.

Deirdre Imus (not to be confused with the Imus she’s married to) may not do her own house cleaning, but she knows the chemical makeup of name-brand cleaning products and the environmental and public health dangers they can cause. And her new book: Green This! Volume One: Greening Your Cleaning (Simon and Schuster, $15.95), is a readable, practical how-to book on ridding your home of toxins.