Shopping Less and Enjoying Life More
WIC, A Federal Food Program, Gets Supplemental Common Sense.
Currents
Dust to Dust? Green Burial in Great Britain
Oak Grove International’s “Summerfield” line is fairly typical of the caskets American funeral directors sell. Available in nine rich colors, it’s lined with plush velvet trim. And because it’s made of thick, reinforced fiberglass, it’s not biodegradable, “thereby protecting the body from the environment, and the environment from the body, for countless tomorrows,” as the […]
Animal Rights Legal Activists Fight for Endangered Species
In 1991, environmental activist Kieran Suckling was living in a tiny New Mexico town in the heart of timber and grazing country. His nascent group, then called the Greater Gila Biodiversity Project, finally had a budget—$5,000 for the year to cover all the work of a tiny handful of friends committed to keeping species from […]
Seafood Industry and Presidential Panel at Odds over Total Allowable Catch Designations
A presidential panel next month will urge Congress and the White House to separate the commercial fishing industry from deliberations to set limits on fishing harvests in American and international waters.
Second-Class Transit? Los Angeles Bus Riders Union Fights for Equal Treatment
Although light rail trains are favored by many forward-thinking transportation agencies, buses carry far more commuters. The public transportation fleet in the U.S. consists of 129,000 vehicles; 58 percent of them are buses, and only one percent are light rail cars. Sixty-one percent of all public transportation employees work for bus services. Of the 8.7 […]
Clean Kills? Will Boston Harbor’s Once-Rich Fisheries be Ruined by a $5 Billion Sewage Plant?
Photo Network The coastal waters north of Boston have become markedly cleaner over the past decade, mostly because of the construction of sewage treatment plants in Lynn and Salem—but the outcome has lobstermen fuming. Although the sustainability of marine life in Massachusetts has been a recurring regional news story this year, Boston Harbor’s polluted waters […]
Saving the Chesapeake
WIC, A Federal Food Program, Gets Supplemental Common Sense.
Turf Wars: Swelling Human Populations Are Crowding Out Other Species
It’s not just in places like India or Zimbabwe that endangered plant and animal species are battling it out with growing numbers of people for the few remaining parcels of habitat. In the United States, too, population growth is the single greatest threat to endangered species. Each day huge tracts of land are being gobbled […]
Growing the Greens
Is There Life After 2000 for America’s Biggest Third Party? When Ralph Nader announced he would run for President in 2000, few people thought he would register very high on the political Richter scale. Now, in the wake of an election so close that some Gore supporters blame the Presidency of George W. Bush on […]
Global Decline of Sharks Underscores Poor Health of World’s Oceans
In yet another example of the dire state of the world’s oceans, the World Conservation Union announced last week that it will be adding 10 species of sharks and rays to its global "Red List" of endangered species. Researchers cite overfishing throughout the world’s oceans as well as soaring demand for shark fin in Asia as the primary culprits in the global decline of shark populations.