Currents

After years of bickering and delays, local officials in Syracuse, New York have finally given the green light to the world’s first green megamall. Developers have promised that the proposed multi-billion dollar entertainment and shopping complex, dubbed DestiNY USA, would run entirely on wind turbines, solar panels, fuel cells and biofuels while serving as a model for clean living and green shopping. The new mall would be the largest green real estate development in the world to date.

Publishing heavyweight Random House announced last week that it intends to increase the proportion of recycled paper in the majority of its books to at least 30 percent by 2010. Currently less than three percent of the paper used by the company is recycled. Company officials said that the change would cost several million dollars but would lead to the preservation of more than half a million trees a year.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released some troubling findings last week from a four-year study on the condition of America’s streams. The agency concluded that 42 percent of the nation’s shallow or "wadeable" streams were in poor environmental condition. Another 25 percent were considered only fair, leaving just 28 percent of streams in good condition.

At the beginning of the 21st century, a new phenomenon was added to popular American culture: the Starbucks juggle. This act involves a tall paper cup of coffee and possibly other items on the way to the morning’s destination. More advanced jugglers try to manage the coffee cup, a cell phone, purse and brief case as well. Most of us "Starbuckers" buy the java to go, for we are a people on the go. The Starbucks phenomenon, though it requires some juggling, fits into our on-the-go-fast-food-and-drink culture.

Customers told they would have to wait between two weeks and four months, depending on where they live, to get a gasoline-electric hybrid Honda Civic or Toyota Prius are frustrated that automakers can’t meet demand. Not that the automakers are happy about it either. Sales of both vehicles fell in April as Toyota and Honda could not keep up with surging demand accompanying skyrocketing gasoline prices.

Paul Stamets says we’re all descended from mushrooms, and if that’s true, he’s one spore who hasn’t fallen too far from his fungus of origin. That’s a compliment, and anyone who reads his colorful 2005 book Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World (Ten Speed Press) will probably agree. Like the sentient networks of mushroom mycelium he champions for environmental remediation, natural pesticides and improved immune response in people, Stamets is on a mission to help save the world through his research, writing, teaching and company Fungi Perfecti, LLC, a source for all things fungus.

When the National Park Service floated the idea last year of naming various rooms, benches and bricks throughout the nation’s park system after corporate and individual philanthropists, many purists were aghast, claiming that such a move would open the door to increased commercialization and a corporate takeover of America’s natural and cultural treasures. Those same purists breathed a sigh of relief last week, however, when Park Service director Fran Mainella told reporters his agency would drop the contentious proposal in favor of preserving the status quo.

The environmental justice community lost a leading light last week when activist Damu Smith succumbed to colon cancer at the age of 53. Smith had worked tirelessly as a toxics campaigner for Greenpeace throughout the 1990s, and in 2001 formed the nonprofit Black Voices for Peace in order to mobilize African Americans against U.S. military aggression in Iraq and for better education, housing, jobs and healthcare on the homefront.

Dr. Deborah Brosnan is a marine scientist who brims with passion for learning about and protecting the oceans. In recent years, she has also turned her considerable scientific expertise to helping people and ecosystems cope with the destruction wrought by natural disasters. Her work has taken her into typhoons, under erupting volcanoes, through a terrifying plane crash and at ground zero of the Asian tsunami. Her experiences in Southeast Asia led her to found the Tsunami Reef Action Fund, which is working to restore human and natural systems severely battered by Mother Nature’s fury.

As part of an attempt to ease the run-up of gas prices across the United States in recent months, the Bush administration is allowing certain regions to waive environmental rules mandating switching over from one fuel additive, the widely available MTBE, to the less polluting and more costly ethanol. The White House hopes the move will avert the regional fuel shortages already starting to crop up this spring.