A "Green" Gas Additive May be Causing More Problems Than It’s Solving When Freda and Jim Kubas bought their Glenville, California home, they thought they would be spending the rest of their lives there. In 1993, they began using their private well and noticed a turpentine-like odor and peculiar taste, so they installed a $4,000-water […]
Has Online Retail Spawned a New Orgy of Consumer Spending? Shopnow.com captures the lure of e-commerce in its motto, “The shopping is 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” Indeed, online revenues, which last year totaled $4.5 billion globally, are expected to jump to $14.8 billion by next January. Two years after that, according […]
An Exercise in Democracy Pits Conservation Against Animal Rights On the parched outskirts of Hwange National Park in western Zimbabwe, Mabale villagers were screaming epithets, flailing arms and legs, and beating drums and pots, creating an unearthly din. This wasn’t some ritualistic African dance—the villagers were trying to intimidate a herd of elephants. The same […]
For many people, camping involves buying the lightest, most waterproof synthetic materials available—gear which taxes the environment with toxic solvents, volatile organic pollutants and factory waste.
The UN’s Prescription for Family Planning As Hillary Rodham Clinton opened her remarks at the Hague International Forum conference on population and women’s reproductive health last February, she turned to the woman who had introduced her, Dr. Nafis Sadik, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). “I believe that the world owes her […]
Dissection’s Deadly Toll Hits Frogs Hardest For most high school students, dissecting a formaldehyde-soaked frog is an educational rite of passage. But the practice has decimated the population of frogs and other wild-caught animals, and more and more kids are refusing to do it. “I don’t think it’s right to kill animals,” says Amanda Swann, […]
Some People Don’t Have ‘The Complexion for Protection’ When, in 1979, Dr. Robert Bullard wrote a study called Solid Waste Sites and the Black Houston Community, nobody had heard of environmental racism (see the special report in this issue). It would be three more years before anyone used that phrase, but Dr. Bullard had plainly […]
Are We Threatening Our Intelligence with Chemical Pollution? The 101st Congress declared the 1990s the “Decade of the Brain” to focus attention on the most vulnerable of human organs. But after 10 years of intensive research focusing on chemical threats to mental development, have we learned anything? Yes. Although average IQ scores have continued to […]
Our Seafood Is Increasingly Contaminated With Toxins If, like Oprah Winfrey, mad cow disease has made you swear off hamburgers, you might be eating more fish instead. Fish are touted as a low-fat, healthy food that can help prevent heart disease and other illnesses. But recent reports saying that as little as a half can […]
In sizing up a prospective house, more and more homebuyers are asking themselves how the property rates on the green scale…
