E Word

The numbers tell it all. In 1995, according to the Nexis data base, there were 24,142 U.S. newspaper stories about O.J. Simpson, and 1,592 about what is arguably a bigger threat to mankind-global warming.

I’m appalled at the NIMBY ("not-in-my-back-yard") opposition to wind power projects like Cape Wind in Massachusetts. How do these graceful wind turbines destroy our view? Are they worse than the endless power lines that stretch across the country, the coal plants and oil refineries, the offshore oil rigs and tankers (and their spills), and the ominous nuclear towers that have become symbols of another impending Chernobyl?

It’s called "conservation medicine," but perhaps a better name would be "conservation health." The science is complex, but most people would find the theory intuitive: Human health is fragile, and dependent upon the larger world around it. Yes, it is about AIDS, SARS, mad cow, West Nile, malaria and monkeypox, but it is also about the interconnectedness of all life and the fact that human behavior has consequences.

There’s hardly an issue where Bush’s rhetoric isn’t diametrically opposite to his actual policies. This is especially true in his doublespeak on women’s issues. While Bush proclaims, "the advance of liberty and the advance of women’s rights are ultimately inseparable," he pursues an ideologically motivated anti-choice agenda at the expense of women’s lives and the planet.

As with the highly questionable intelligence alleging Iraqi weapons of mass-destruction that led us into war, hunting continues on the strength of some long-debunked myths, thanks to leaders who kowtow to the gun industry, the National Rifle Association and others.

A recent University of California-Berkeley study found that information stored electronically grew by a whopping 80 percent between 1999 and 2002. And even though less than one tenth of one percent of that data was printed, the amount of printed matter still grew by 36 percent during that same period. Not surprisingly, the U.S. is the biggest paper muncher, accounting for 33 percent of all printed material.

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 […]

One thing’s for sure about us—the children of the late 60s and 70s known as Generation X—we hate being referred to as “slackers.” Sour on politics, and viewing elected officials as self-interested, wasteful bureaucrats who don’t truly represent our concerns, many “twentysomethings” are taking to the streets to improve our cities, put a stop to […]

It's pretty easy to get discouraged about the state of the world one year before the next millennium. Look at the headlines: World population is soaring (though the rate of increase has diminished somewhat), epidemics are devastating whole continents, the release of global warming gases has reached record highs, biodiversity is eroding everywhere as forest […]