Currents

What are green and slimy and not in your refridgerator? If you said, "Frogs," you’re right. But increasingly, they’re not anywhere else, either.

The Land Made Famous by Noriega Needs to Protect Its Rainforests In the United States, the rainforest has become a floral fantasy land. But in Panama City, where the rainforest starts right in town, the mass mind drifts to other lands.

Preserve manager Bill Brown switched on the light on his coal miner helmet and waited his turn to slide down the steep snow-covered entrance to the abandoned Hague Mine in upstate New york. Already safely inside, his colleagues from the Adirondack Nature Conservancy & Land Trust (ANCLT), along with a team of journalists who were accompanying them that day, gave him the signal to go, and Brown descended into the mine, glad to trade the below-zero temperatures outside for the more than 120,000 hibernating little brown and big brown bats that awaited his arrival below.

Too Many People, Not Enough Money: The Population Conundrum Comes to Cairo To Americans weaned on visions from Soylent Green, a sci-fi film made in 1973, the specter of overpopulation calls forth images of city squares so crowded with people that giant scoopers must shovel them clear like dirt. Every night, Charlton Heston, the movie’s […]

In 1984, public concern over residential radon mounted when Stanley Watras set of radiation monitor alarms as he arrived for work at a Pennsylvania nuclear plant. When no explanation could be found at the pant, tests at the Watras home revealed radon levels about 800 times the federal standard. Three years later, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared indoor radon "the most deadly environmental hazard in the U.S." – responsible for more cancer deaths than any other pollutant under its jurisdiction. The agency maintain that position today.

In the mangrove forest, life abounds. Here live shorebirds, crab-eating monkeys and mudskipper fish that skim across exposed swamp mud to make their ways between water holes at low tide. The mangroves have been called the "rainforests of the sea." These trees have evolved in harsh environments of brackish waters and changing tides, establishing balanced, complex ecosystems along the tropical coasts of Africa, Australia, Asia and the Americas.

What has a red head, lives in old-growth forests in the Sioutheast and is closer to extinction than the much publicized spotted owl? If you guessed the red-cockaded woodpecker, you are a rare bird yourself! Indeed, while the controversy over logging spotted owl habitat in the Pacific northwest is well known, a quieter storm is brewing in southeastern states, where the red-cockaded woodpecker is in danger of being wiped out after decades of intensive forestry. Like the spotted owl, red-cockaded woodpeckers also need intact old-growth – in this case, longleaf pine forests.

To an outsider, environmentalists and animal rights advocates would appear natural allies. But one basic philosophical difference divides the two schools of thought: to the extent that environmental organizations work on animal issues, they tend to emphasize the health and viability of animal species, populations and habitat; animal rights advocates, on the other hand, concern themselves more with the well-being of individual animals and work on issues dealing with individual animal suffering and pain.

E Magazine talked to John Seager, the recently appointed president and CEO of Population Connection (formerly Zero Population Growth) a week after World Population Day July 11. Seager is a veteran population activist, having served at Population Connection for nearly a decade. He is also a former Environmental Protection Agency and Congressional aide, serving under seven-term U.S. Representative Peter Kostmayer, who he succeeds at the helm of the 90,000-member Population Connection.

For decades, sustainability gurus have been prattling on about the promise of solar power and other renewable energy sources. But in what is beginning to look like the "new, new thing" to technology analysts, solar power might be finally coming of age thanks to the next generation of tiny flexible solar panels–not to mention billions of dollars in backing from some of Silicon Valley’s biggest investors.