Anne Holmblad of Chelsea, Vermont has used a wheelchair for all her life, but that didn’t stop her from joining a religious boat trip around the Thousand Islands area of South Florida. "In a canoe I’m as mobile as everyone else," she says. "I’m able to touch my environment in a way I rarely can. The highlight was sneaking into narrow inlets, pulling myself through the mangroves, never knowing if I’d get stuck."
Pilots have long soared the firmament for respite from life’s little problems.
Still , distance improves perspective-both good and bad. So, though littered streets fade, bigger problems, like clear cutting, strip mining and air pollution become more dramatic aloft. The result: Aviators are trading pleasure flights for environmental missions.
With military costs mushrooming, the Bush administration has had little cash to tend to the ailing national wildlife refuge system (see "Seeking Sanctuary," features, March/April 2003), according to a new report by Defenders of Wildlife. "The threats to the system are larger in scope, more difficult to control, more damaging and more costly than ever […]
While the Bush administration considers the recent completion of toxic waste clean-up efforts in Niagara, New York’s Love Canal neighborhood to be an environmental success story, Lois Gibbs (see "Be Safe! Lois Gibbs" New Campaign Urges Caution on Toxic Chemicals," Currents, July/August 2003) begs to differ. Gibbs, the mom-turned-activist who unearthed the pollution at Love […]
The fate of that symbol of the plains states, the prairie dog, still hangs in the balance (see "Open Season on Varmints," cover story, July/August 2004). Last August the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) removed the black-tailed prairie dog from the Endangered Species Act official candidate list, where it had sat awaiting funds for protection.
A Norwegian environmental group is defying mainstream environmental thinking by supporting the controversial process known as carbon sequestration as a short-term way of tackling climate change.
Hawthorne Valley Farm is home to dairy cows, some piglets and a team of biodynamic farmers. There’s also a high-energy bunch of nine-to-15-year-old urbanites cheerfully turning the compost, helping bake sourdough bread in the bakery, milking dairy cows and rising at six a.m. to feed the animals.
San Francisco Bay-area municipal governments are working to grow sustainable communities, by passing green building ordinances, requiring energy-efficient designs, recycled content and a host of "green" strategies for public projects.
While ethanol is cleaner and more efficient to produce than gas, environmentalists often give this alternative fuel the cold shoulder. The ethanol source of the future, some say, should be not the corn kernel but the stalk, cob and other portions of the plant that are currently fed to livestock or left lying on the field.
For years the killer stalked Detroit and its suburbs undetected. Now it has unleashed an epidemic that will kill millions. The killer is an insect, the emerald ash borer, and the victims are ash trees. "The emerald ash borer is one of the most challenging and difficult plant pests that any state has ever had to deal with," says Sara Linsmeier-Wurfel of the Michigan Department of Agriculture.
