Currents

The Rio Grande River has dried up along the US-Mexico border.

Twenty-five years after pregnant women and children were evacuated from the neighborhood bordering the Love Canal toxic waste site, environmental health pioneer Lois Gibbs is poised to launch a national campaign aimed at redirecting the way government and industry regulate environmental hazards in the United States.

Wangari Maathai’s Movement is Built on the Power of Trees On a winter day in 1999, Kenyan environmental activist Wangari Maathai was doing what comes naturally to her: planting trees. As in Thailand, where a Buddhist monk who protected trees by ordaining them was thrown in jail, Maathai’s activities made the authorities uneasy. The seedlings […]

America’s Parks are the Scene of the Crime for Plant Theft Park biologist Mike Owen had been on the job only two months when he got a startling phone call. It was the park manager. Come to the parking lot, he said. What happened next would inspire a book and, coming this fall, a movie […]

Global Climate Change Threatens the Insurance Industry When winds reach 120 miles per hour, houses begin to crumble, walls break and roofs fly away. With global climate change, winds like this are coming more often. In the U.S. during the last three decades, the number of weather-related natural disasters has increased five-fold. Last year was […]

A Toxic Trail Leads to the Now-Closed Defense Depot The United States military produces nearly a ton of hazardous wastes every minute, an amount that surpasses even the biggest multinational corporations. More than 120 military sites have been placed on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Superfund National Priority List. Locating toxin-laden military installations near many […]

DaimlerChrysler and Ford Launch Sustainability ProjectsThe northern Brazilian state of Par?, set in the largest contiguous tropical rainforest in the world, is four times the size of Germany but has a tiny fraction of that industrialized country’s economic activity. That’s why defenders of the rainforest say it’s important to build a sustainable economy in Brazil’s […]

Laurel Hill Offers Biodiversity in the Shadow of the New Jersey Turnpike With more than 600,000 drivers each day, the northern half of the New Jersey Turnpike is among the most widely traveled roads in America. For the most part, it’s not a pretty sight. The industrial wastelands, abandoned factories and former landfills that pass […]

Arriving in Copenhagen by sea, the first thing travelers see of Denmark is a row of 20 enormous wind turbines gently spinning above the waves nearly two miles from shore. Completed last December, the Middelgrunden Wind Farm is the world’s largest offshore wind power facility. Its wind machines, each with blades 100 feet long, together […]

Virginia Tries to Duck Responsibility for Protecting Horseshoe Crabs Horseshoe crabs—actually more related to spiders than crabs—have gotten along fine, without help from human beings, for 300 million years or so, paleontologists estimate, predating even the dinosaurs. But the twentieth century has been a rough one for the horseshoe crab. It began with their existence […]