Town without Pity
In a unique approach to land coservation, the citizens of Peninsula Township, Michigan voted to do something that most Americans would consider unthinkable:they raised their own taxes.
E Magazine Categories
Clear Skies, Healthy Forests: Why Language Matters
If you don’t trust the environmentalists, you may want to listen to the doctors. Mount Sinai Medical School has just released a study that, in its scientific way, indicts the Bush administration’s mercury policy as not only harming children but (conservatives take note) damages the economy.
Wolrd Bank: New and Improved?
"It’s very, very hard working in developing countries," says Andrew Steer, director of the environment department of the World Bank, the international development fund that gives loans for reconstruction and infrastructure projects. Steer could have added that it’s no picnic at home either. With a Republican Congress to whom all foreign aid is at best a frivolity and at worst a creeping socialism – and with environmentalists not generally falling over themselves to give the bank the benefit of the doubt – Steer is in no doubt about the challanges ahead.
Remembering Chico Mendes
The 1988 murder of Francisco Alves Mendes Filho, better known as Chico Mendes, in Brazil’s Amazon River basin was a major international story. This all-but-invisible man who worked extracting latex from rubber trees and organized a union deep in the world’s biggest rainforest wound up influencing global environmental policy and made headlines around the world when he was gunned down.
Freecycling: Waste Not, Want Not
Thanks to an international network of local volunteers, now there’s a cheap and convenient place to dispose of useful junk while promoting re-use: the Internet. Freecycle.org is a website that links people who want to discard household belongings to people in their area who want or need them. The only rules: everything offered must be free, legal and appropriate for all ages—sorry, no bongs or porn.
New Lessons from the Old World
What explains the fact that most European cities gracefully end at some point, giving way to green countryside at their edges, unlike the endless miles of sprawl in America? How is it that public life and street culture feel so much richer?
The Natural Way
Americans spend billions of dollars a year on holistic healers, for both the services they provide and the remedies they prescribe. There’s clearly a cultural shift in the way we perceive healthcare and medicine. While more medical doctors are educating themselves regarding natural methods, it is still often the patient who must request these types of treatment.
Denmark’s Green Keys
Denmark is so eco-conscious that the arriving traveler doesn’t have to seek out green oases: examples of sustainable development are all around.
Stalking Fuel-Cell Stocks
A mere four years ago, fuel-cell stocks were the toast of NASDAQ, with millions of individual and institutional investors driving share prices through the roof. But cut to the present and Ballard’s stock is down from an all-time high of $140 per share in 2001 to just $6 and change these days.
Suing Over Wal-Mart
The controversial Wal-Mart Supercenter is now open for business in the heart of New Orleans" historic Lower Garden District (see "Urban Wal-Marts: No Big Easy," <I>In Brief</I>, November/December 2003), but it’s still not out of the courts.