When navigating the sea of environmentally friendly paper choices, consumers have a lot of jargon to wade through. Here are some of the most common terms: Post-consumer waste: Paper that was printed on, used and recycled. Pre-consumer waste: Paper that wasn’t printed on or used by the consumer. Usually this is the trims from sheeting […]
The pages of the Canadian edition of the fifth Harry Potter book destroyed no forest at all–not even one tree. That’s because it was printed on 100 percent post-consumer recycled paper–saving not only trees but also water and energy and reducing pollution.
Sixty years after its last confirmed U.S. sighting, the ivory-billed woodpecker has shown up in an Arkansas swamp, much to the delight of birders and conservationists alike. Hot Springs, Arkansas resident Gene Sparling reported the first recent sighting of the bird in February 2004 after canoeing through a bald cypress swamp in the Big Woods Preserve, which is already owned and protected by the Nature Conservancy.
A popular fiction in South Dakota and elsewhere is that one nibble, one burrow, one high-pitched chirp at a time, the black-tailed prairie dog is invading and destroying grasslands for livestock. As Blaine Harden recently reported in <I>The Washington Post</I>, third-generation rancher Charles Kruze even compared South Dakota’s rodential downpour to a "prairie fire."
Greenpeace and the Basel Action Network have raised the alarm about the dangerous process of dismantling and recycling industrial ships, particularly by Norway, Japan and Greece (see "Ship Recycling," Currents, May/June 2003).
Echoing public sentiment, President Bush has been talking a lot about energy in his latest round of speeches. In order to deflect criticism over steadily rising fuel prices, Bush wants to build new oil refineries on decommissioned military bases, expand eligibility for a proposed tax credit on fuel-cell and hybrid vehicles to cars and trucks that burn "clean diesel" fuel, increase federal authority over the siting of onshore liquefied natural gas terminals, and renew a push to expand nuclear power capabilities.
In this era of climate change, lightning-fast global travel and ecotourism we are also seeing the rise of new diseases that spread with frightening virulence and speed. Environmental fluctuations enable diseases to evolve quickly and spread from species to species, while human beings transport them rapidly around the world.
Earth First has been declared dead many times. In 1987, it was founder Dave Foreman, whose years of grumbling became enshrined in movement music as "The Twelve Resignations," sung to the tune of "The Twelve Days of Christmas." More recently, the somewhat amorphous movement—which doesn’t agree on much, but achieves consensus on not harming people in its work—was hit with the incendiary "ecoterrorism" tag.
You’d need environmental blinders to believe the horsefeathers retailed in the "Index of Leading Environmental Indicators." Each year, the Pacific Research Institute (PRI) and author Steven F. Hayward present these pseudo-scientific "indicators" that claim all is well with the earth. People swallow this hokum because they are, in fact, starved for good green information, and the environmental illiteracy rate in the U.S. is very high.
When Roman Catholic cardinals chose Germany’s Joseph Ratzinger to succeed Pope John Paul II last week, they probably gave little thought to the implications for the environment. That said, though, the Pope, given his influence over the world’s billion Catholics, can play a significant role in environmental issues simply by interpreting Bible passages in one way or another.
