Federal involvement in soil conservation began with a very passionate and motivated soil scientist by the name of Hugh Hammond Bennett, whose career as an agronomist began in 1903 when he joined the Bureau of Soils in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Andy Hargadon is director of the University of California at Davis" Energy Efficiency Center, which works, he says, to "commercialize existing technologies." As he points out, the trick isn’t to invent new clean technology, but to get people to use it.
Mayor Richard Daly might be determined to transform Chicago into the greenest city in America (see main story), but his tree-planting initiatives, building improvements and promises to secure 20 percent of the city’s electricity from renewable sources might not be enough to outshine cities such as Seattle and San Francisco.
The wine industry is seeing a lot of green these days—green energy. Several wineries in California’s Napa Valley are taking advantage of the state’s high quotient of sunny days by installing solar panels to mitigate their electricity costs.
As this issue goes to press, the Paramount Classics/Participant Productions film An Inconvenient Truth, starring former Vice President Al Gore and directed by Davis Guggenheim, was opening widely in theaters around the country, and receiving an excellent critical reception.
It’s no big surprise that the environmentally friendly Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington is buying renewably generated "green power," but the appearance on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) annual top 10 list of schools like the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois is more eye-opening.
The fight over America’s three remaining horse slaughterhouses has developed into back-and-forth, high-stakes brinksmanship, featuring name calling, Congressional action, outraged city halls and last-minute judicial rulings. Although public opinion and the organized might of the animal welfare and animal rights communities oppose them, the plants—two in Texas, one in Illinois—were still open for business at presstime.
Horse slaughter plants in Texas and Illinois killed 88,000 horses last year. The future for this lucrative export business remains uncertain, however, as a high-stakes battle over the future of the three remaining plants plays out in courtrooms and the Congress.
In the Ecuadorian rainforest, Chevron is charged as a major environmental polluter. The company denies responsibility, but big oil has left a significant legacy.
Susan Cowsill, a singer-songwriter (and member of the famous 1960s singing family) says the culture of New Orleans is a big part of her music. But it was with some trepidation that she and her family recently returned home after a nomadic post-Katrina existence in Austin and Houston. "I want to believe what the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is saying, that it is safe," she says.
