Currents

When Frank Lloyd Wright and his associates were designing the famed Johnson Wax building in Racine, Wisconsin, in the early 1930s, he abruptly halted work on the project to fix a problem. A dam had broken on a pond on his Spring Green, Wisconsin estate. The resulting view outside the window upset him so much that he couldn’t continue on the project until it was fixed. The aesthetic of the pond was necessary for him to be productive. So he bid that all his associates stop working on the Johnson drawings to fix the dam. Although the buildings he designed were ultimately to be virtually windowless, the final interior mimicked a forest with light coming down through a canopy of tree-like pillars.

A Century of Navigation, Mineral Mining And Oil And Gas Activity Has Left The Louisiana Coast Cross-Cut By Canals and Spoil Banks, Threatening A Remerkable And Delicate Swamp Ecosystem.

Scrapping or breaking up ships is a labor-intensive business that for cost reasons is often carried out in Asia with little or no regard for the environment or worker safety. But that will change if the growing field of "green shipbreaking" bears fruit.

Finding Common Ground on Housing and the Environment Thanks to colleagues at the Coalition for a Livable Future, Tasha Harmon, a housing advocate in Portland, Oregon, doesn’t worry so much about missing regional planning meetings anymore. “If Mike Houck from Portland Audubon is there and housing comes up, he’s as likely as anyone to speak […]

Next month the National Audubon Society board will be answering to a new constituency – their own disgruntled members.

The Island’s New Environmentalism Faces Challenges The students of the escuela primeria in Los Tumbos, a village nestled deep within the rich agricultural province of Pinar Del Réo, constantly hover around the computer awarded to the school a year ago. Their computer runs off of two small solar panels that gleam in the sun when […]

The endangered African mountain gorillas are suffering in the aftermath of the Rwandan civil war. Ten gorillas have died within the last 18 months, and it was gunshots and spears–not natural causes–that led to their deaths.