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 […]
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 […]
As a kid I was forced to go to Sunday school, where the second half of the hour was sometimes spent in church itself. My friends and I delighted in sitting in the balcony and making up our own silly words as we sang along to hymns like "Go Down Moses and Let My People Go." I was also once sent out into the hall for sketching a funny picture of a big-nosed, toothless man with a cleft chin when we were all asked to draw what we thought God looked like.
