Like four of his five brothers, my grandfather was a family dentist, and in his semi-retired years he practiced out of his home in New Bedford, Massachusetts. As a child, his office fascinated me, with its old-fashioned porcelain dental chair that weighed a ton, and the vintage wooden instrument cabinets that were fitted with little […]
We’ve written about overpopulation many times in these pages because we think it is a profoundly important environmental issue. Yet it’s one that the green movement largely ignores, primarily for fear of alienating a public that may associate family planning with abortion or see attempts to curb immigration as racist.
"I’ve known rivers," wrote the great African-American poet Langston Hughes, "ancient, dusky rivers." He "heard the singing of the Mississippi" and watched "its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset." Jerry Russell Illustration Today, the Mississippi is the most polluted river in the U.S., and its song is a cry for help. The river’s […]
Could someone please tell me: When on Earth did water go from being an essential liquid upon which all life depends
to a commercial "beverage?"
The process by which well-defined towns and cities get transformed into corridors of strip malls and fast-food outlets, linked by smog-choked highways, now has a name: urban sprawl. Since World War II, American cities have been developing as low-density, land-intensive settlements. Many-tentacled Gothams like Los Angeles and Washington stretch endlessly, crosshatched with a myriad of […]
It’s a no-brainer, really: You get the big guys—governments, hospitals, universities, big corporations, everyone who buys in volume—to demand green products and attributes. As a result, suppliers are forced to green up their products if they want the business. Thus they invest in doing so, and the resulting sales volume creates a large-enough production of […]
“The combination of rampant poaching…and unabated habitat loss…has intensified the threats to the survival of healthy wild populations.” The quote is from a report on saving the tiger, but it could just as easily have referred to rhinos, giant pandas, or a variety of other endangered species. These two factors have put a long list […]
I have two daughters, ages four and seven, and the girls were on my mind as I was editing this issue’s comprehensive package on children’s environmental health. I think my wife and I do a reasonable job of protecting them from harm: We walk them to the school bus, make sure they look both ways […]
Alongside re-making big buildings, we ought to be laying the foundation for a clean energy future, one that will end our oil dependency that so profoundly figures into world tensions and the continued destruction of the global environment.
“Free speech not only lives, it rocks!” exulted Oprah Winfrey February 26 upon hearing that an Amarilllo jury had dismissed the “mad cow” case against her and co-defendant Howard Lyman of the Humane Society of the United States. The resounding victory came in the first test case of one of the nation’s 13 “food disparagement” […]
