Although light rail trains are favored by many forward-thinking transportation agencies, buses carry far more commuters. The public transportation fleet in the U.S. consists of 129,000 vehicles; 58 percent of them are buses, and only one percent are light rail cars. Sixty-one percent of all public transportation employees work for bus services. Of the 8.7 […]
Photo Network The coastal waters north of Boston have become markedly cleaner over the past decade, mostly because of the construction of sewage treatment plants in Lynn and Salem—but the outcome has lobstermen fuming. Although the sustainability of marine life in Massachusetts has been a recurring regional news story this year, Boston Harbor’s polluted waters […]
WIC, A Federal Food Program, Gets Supplemental Common Sense.
It’s not just in places like India or Zimbabwe that endangered plant and animal species are battling it out with growing numbers of people for the few remaining parcels of habitat. In the United States, too, population growth is the single greatest threat to endangered species. Each day huge tracts of land are being gobbled […]
Is There Life After 2000 for America’s Biggest Third Party? When Ralph Nader announced he would run for President in 2000, few people thought he would register very high on the political Richter scale. Now, in the wake of an election so close that some Gore supporters blame the Presidency of George W. Bush on […]
The Paper Industry Moves South Flying over the 500,000-acre Great Smoky Mountains National Park last year in a Cessna 180 operated by the nonprofit group Southwings, writer Chris Camuto could clearly see evidence of the park’s enormous and breathtaking biodiversity, home to an estimated 100,000 species. The scenery changed when the plane crossed the Tennessee […]
With tap water quality increasingly under fire in the court of public opinion, the market for home water filter systems has surged. Co-op America says consumers who are still concerned about their tap water, or who don’t like its taste, should consider filters over bottled water, since they are less ecologically harmful (and considerably cheaper per serving). Filters are reusable and result in less waste and transportation than bottled water.
According to the United States Census Bureau, the population gains a new American every 11 seconds, and 2.5 million a year. Of that total, more than a million were born somewhere else. Between 1901 and 1990, 37 million immigrants arrived on American shores, an epic movement of people looking for a better life. Why do […]
The Fight to Save the ESA Wildlife protection is headed for a showdown, but it may not come in the current Congress. The main players are Senator Dirk Kempthorne (R-ID) and Representative George Miller (D-CA); both have sponsored bills which, if passed, would dramatically change the face of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Senate bill […]
By cleaning up your diet to get rid of all the nasty stuff—persistent organic pollutants (POPs), saturated fats, additives and food colorings—you may be cutting out the iodine that you need. That doesn’t mean you should go back to eating unhealthy foods, but you need to make sure you have good sources of iodine, since […]
