Fighting Fat
For health-consious travelers, or those just wanting to grab a quick meal, it’s never been easy to find something appetizing to eat at the fast food outlets that spring up like weeds along every major traffic artery.
E Magazine Categories
World’s Fish Stocks Dangerously Over-Exploited
According to a recently released report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 52 percent of the world’s fish stocks are "fully exploited" as compared with 47 percent just two years ago. FAO officials warned that the increased harvesting was unsustainable against the backdrop of rising consumption.
Enviros Hope Johnson Can Restore Scientific Focus at EPA
Environmentalists are optimistic that President Bush’s appointment of career scientist Steve Johnson to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) signals a renewed scientific focus for an agency bogged down in political skirmishes for the last five years.
Drawing A Green Line
On a sunny January afternoon, as a steady wind sweeps across Costa Rica’s Pacific slope, 18-year-old conservation worker Dunia Garcia settles down to sort the insects she has collected during the past week. From the porch of her two-room, wooden biological station perched on the shoulder of an idle volcano, Garcia has an astounding view – literally from the continental divide to the Pacific Ocean. Her view also defines the choices facing Costa Rica. Will the Central American country follow the path Garcia can see to the West – where dusty pastures stretch without relief to the Pacific shore, on land that was once dry tropical forest? Or will it choose the path she sees to the north and east, in the protected forests of the three national parks within the Guanacaste Conservation Area?
Bombing Bali Ha’i
"You always hurt the ones you love," goes the old Mills Brothers song. Perhaps this profound human paradox explains why we have chosen tropical islands, the embodient of an earthly paraside, as the staging grounds for hell on earth: war and weapons testing. Its been going on for 50 years, and shows no sings of ending any time soon.
Hydride Hurdles on the Hydrogen Highway
MALIBU, CALIFORNIA–Howard Hughes may have ended up nuttier than a fruitcake (<I>The Aviator</I> spares us most of the gory details), but he certainly did a lot for science. In the 1940s, the still-dynamic Hughes wanted to keep up on the latest developments in radar for his aircraft business and so set up the Hughes Research Labs.
Chopper Chopping: Risky Business
In their determination to remove big, lucrative trees from impossibly steep slopes, logging companies have turned to helicopters. The chopper hovers while the ground personnel wrap its "long line" around a log, or bundle of logs, on the hillside. Then the chopper lifts the logs down the moutain to a yard, where a truck awaits.
The O.J. Environmental Story
<I> One Friday night last June, 95 million Americans watched O.J. Simpson’s white Ford Bronco glide along the highway at 16 miles-per-gallon followed by a team of police cruisers on the most famous car chase this country has ever seen. A posse of newscopters hovered overhead as the sunset grew pinker in the Los Angeles haze. The ozone level reached .09 parts-per-million, just exceeding California’s air quality limits. Across the land millions of viewers wondered if O.J. would step out of the Bronco alive.</I>
Life after an Oil Spill
The Arthur Kill estuary runs for 15 miles between Staten Island and New Jersey, a shipping lane kept busier than the Panama Canal by garbage barges destined for the Fresh Kills landfill, tugboats pushing white mustaches of surf and oil tankers that dock at the refineries that fill the skyline with odd smokestacks. Some flare like cigarette lighters, while others have frets on their side like flutes. "If you blindfolded me, I could still tell you where we are on the Kill by the smell," says Carl Alderson, a restoration ecologist for the New York City parks department, giving a tour in his Boston whaler.
The Pit and the Plume
The Kennecott copper mine in Binham Canyon in the mountains southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah is a National Historic Landmark. And it should be. As the largest open-pit mine in the world, it gapes as if a giant pyramid were pulled from the gray-and-brown earth, a monument to our consumer civilization. Some 200,00 tourists a year drive up the winding canyon creek road, beneath the high ridges covered with waste rock from the pit as if sand dunes had spilled across the mountains. They park at the vista view on the rim and admire Kennecott’s answer to a volcano. Even through the public 25-cent binoculars, the heavy dump trucks on the spiralling road to the bottom look like matchbox toys and the drilling rills like penny nails.