The Bucket Overflows
Volunteers in the Louisiana Bucket Brigade monitor air pollution in the neighborhoods adjoining ExxonMobil’s Chalmette Oil Refinery.
E Magazine Categories
Trashing the Greens
Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute, and Evans/McDonough pollster Ted Nordhaus wrote an essay last fall titled "The Death of Environmentalism," an incendiary bomb thrown at the green braintrust. But the bombastic report may have been less than meets the eye.
Climate For Change: England Gets Serious About Global Warming
Climate change has yet to make it onto the radar screens of most Americans. The opposite is true in England, where the science is hotly debated.
Medical Horse Stories
Sometimes medicine isn’t as glamorous as it sounds. Take Premarin, the leading estrogen replacement drug prescribed to about eight million women to prevent the "hot flashes" of menopause or the "dowager’s hump" of osteoporosis in old age. Wyeth-Averst Laboratories has made the drug for 50 years, but the basic ingredient remains a natural estrogen collected from the urine of pregnant mares.
For Love of Bats
Why become a bat rehabilitiator? Without exception, rehabilitators talk about their fascination with the small mammals. "Most people don’t realize how intelligent and valuable bats are," says rehabilitator Amanda Lollar. But according to Melinda Alvarado, a bat rehabber working out of San Luis Obispo, California, all you have to do is meet a bat to be hooked. "They look right at you with their bright little eyes," she says, "and you can see the intelligence and curiosity shining there."
Recycling the Bronx
Yolanda Rivera parks her rusty two-toned Cadillac Seville on the cracked concrete driveway at the site of her future factory in New York City’s South Bronx. She may not be your typical capitalist entrepreneur, but then the Bronx is not your typical park. Manufacturers have been abandoning the brick factories for decades, leaving only the giant Hunts Point wholesale food market, and Rivera now stands in the 90-acre Harlem rail yards which have done little but grow weeds since the early 70s.
Court Battle Brews Over EPA Role in Regulating CO2 Emissions
The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia heard preliminary arguments last week in a case in which a coalition of 12 states and a handful of environmental groups charge the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with neglecting its responsibility to protect public health by regulating tailpipe emissions that contribute to global warming.
Extreme Weather
Climate experts warn us that the first sign of a shifting climate will be turbulent, unpredictable weather. So when Hurricane Jeanne crashed ashore in Florida in September of 2004, environmentalists couldn’t help but wonder if this was it: climate change in action. It seems as though the past few years have been characterized by all sorts of weather extremes. We know that the planet has warmed 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 100 years, but is there really a link between our weather and climate change?
Gus the Neurotic Bear
During the dog days of last summer, when the New York City tabloids needed a breather from O.J. Simpson, <I>Newsday</I> discovered Gus the Neurotic Bear. He wasn’t too hard to find. A 700-pound polar bear, he lives in the Central Park Zoo, sharing a large slate-gray quarry of rock, both real and fake, with Lily and Ida. The females do what you might expect of bears in sticky 97-degree heat: roll on their backs to scratch fleas, pee in the stream, sit and watch the passing crowd in the windows of their habitat. But, in a deep pool, Gus swims short laps like a bear possessed. He surfaces with a neck like a giant fur buoy and falls into a back stroke to the other side, pauses, and dives back along the bottom with bubbles trailing by his whiskers. He repeats the same motions for hours on end, down to the way his tongue flicks across his back lips.
Green Life Support
Ben Franklin said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." "The Death Of Environmentalism?" has forced some dialog among green leaders as to why the environmental message isn’t resonating with the public. As I see it, we need to think "outside the green box" and press for serious media reform, profound electoral reform and a re-invented Democratic Party before we can expect to make any headway.