E Word

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.

This is a very special issue of E Magazine. In the magazine’s 10-year history, we have on only one other occasion devoted the entire feature section to a single story. That piece, a cross-country exploration of environmental racism, appeared in 1998. Now we’re doing it again, with an international tour of global warming “hot spots.” […]

In 1992, the kids at Brookside Elementary School in San Anselmo, California began a project to restore habitat for an endangered California freshwater shrimp. Since then, they’ve restored miles of coastline in Marin and Sonoma counties, lobbied Congress on behalf of threatened species, and even appeared on CNN. The shrimp are one beneficiary; the others are the children themselves, who’ve learned an environmental lesson that they won’t soon forget.

When the great naturalist Aldo Leopold first set eyes on the Colorado River delta in 1922, he saw what he called “a milk and honey wilderness” full of “a hundred green lagoons.” Leopold would find that landscape utterly changed today. The mighty Colorado no longer flows this far south; as Sandra Postel, director of the […]

“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” […]