The EPA on the Loose
A trip to ancient Indian ruins yields some bitter truths from past and present administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency, which is both politically embattled and stuck in bureaucratic inertia.
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New Wine from Old Bottles
Milk and soda producers are finding out that reuseable bottles make good economic sense. And satisfied customers agree.
Brushing Up on Business
Tom Chappell, the Tom of Tom’s of Maine, set out 22 years ago to make environmentally friendly products and he’s still at it.
Gas Guzzling
For six years, the plucky little Geo Metro XFi hatchback was the most fuel-efficient car on the market, with an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) milage rating of 53 miles per gallon (mpg) in the city and 58 on the highway. But for 1995, this American milage champ – the little engine that could – got the ax, having accounted for only less than 10 percent or less of overall Metro Sales.
Waste Not
Authors Nikki and David Goldbeck, who live in Woodstock, New York, run Ceres Press, a home-based cottage industry that turns out environmental books on subjects like "clean and green" housekeeping. Their new book, Choose to Reuses, is a 450-page guide to living well while reducing one’s load on the Earth. It’s a step-by-step, very specific source material on reusing everything from computer printer ribbons to upholstered sofas.
Fighting for the Fields
Poland is usually thought of as a kind of environmental house of horrors. Belching smokestacks, coal-darkened buildings and mammoth industrial complexes are dismal and grimy images that leap at us from reports about Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, wholesale despoliation is not a pervasive condition. In spite of the gray renderings, much of Poland is still surprisingly lush. Unfortunately, few get to see past the cheerless Orwellian viage to the other Poland – the green Poland.
Sweet Home Alabama
Even by the free-wheeling standards of Alabama politics, John M. Smith seemed an unlikely choice for the post of the state’s top environmental watchdog. In the early 1980s, he served as spokesman for an abortive scheme to export hazardous waste abroad from the Birmingham area. A few years ago, state and auditors questioned his computer company’s performance in fulfilling state contracts.
Toxic Shock: The Environment-Cancer Connection
Cancer is the number two killer of Americans, but scientists are still denying that environmental factors – from car exhaust to carcinogenic chemicals in our food – are largely responsible
Cohousing’s New Cachet
The scene one sunny January Sunday at the Nyland Cohousing Community near Boulder, Colorado, could have been a commercial for communal living. Here was ample proof of what members of the 150 or so U.S. "cohousing" groups believe: that shared communities – which typically feature a "common house" where residents can share meals, childcare, tools, laundry facilities and other services, surrounded by single-family homes designed for maximum environmental impact – are the best antidote to the isolated, consumption-intensive nature at most American housing
Seriously Green
These families don’t just talk about recycling – they live it, every day, even if it means unplugging from the grid.