Cornell’s Natural Air Conditioning Plan–And Its Critics You can’t see the 42-inch, high-density plastic pipes from the top of Cornell University’s McGraw Tower, but they’re there, snaking up Ithaca’s trademark gorges to “the campus on the hill.” Filled with water drawn from the icy depths of Cayuga Lake, the pipes make Cornell’s experimental air conditioning […]
Biodiversity in Chicago Will Chicago become the world’s first urban bioreserve? It’s beginning to look that way. In a major breakthrough for the environmental movement, the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, which helps local government units with land planning, has put biodiversity recovery at the center of its development policy. The Commission now asks local planners […]
Too Much Of A Good Thing The first evidence of a troubled lake is blue-green algae and a foul smell. The next: dead fish littering the shore. The culprit in this crime against nature is phosphorus pollution, a growing danger to delicate lake ecosystems. Although sewage treatment plants and the elimination years ago of phosphates […]
It sounds improbable: derelict south London land transformed into fields of lavender. But you can see and smell the two and a half acres planted on abandoned local council property by the visionary BioRegional Development Group (BDG). The group was founded in suburban Sutton five years ago on the green idea of sustainably producing local […]
In 1998, the former tribal council authorized the operation in a deal that supplied free land, roads, water and electricity to Sun Prairie in exchange for five percent of the profits and up to 250 jobs for one of the poorest counties in the nation. But when local residents found out that the plan was […]
Rusted tin cans, rotting carpets, refrigerators, a playground set, coffee makers, toilet seats, paint cans, deer carcasses stuffed into garbage cans, tons of household garbage, thousands of tires—the list reads like a cross between a town dump inventory and a tag sale. But instead, these items were hauled from culverts, quarries, riverbanks, roadside turnarounds and […]
Loved to Death The large, flat shells of living abalone once carpeted the rocky waters along California’s coastline from Mexico to Oregon. Prior to European settlement, Native Americans feasted on the mollusk’s muscular foot and employed its shell as a colorful decoration. More recently, Californians have established a multi-million dollar industry harvesting abalone and delivering […]
Esprit founder Douglas Tompkins is on a conservation rampage in Latin America.
Reddy the grrl squirrel replaces Smokey the Bear and advocates for letting forest fires burn, not suppression.
Ritu Primlani, founder of Thimmakka’s Resources for Environmental Education, is on a remarkable mission. Through her brainchild, Greening Ethnic Restaurants (GER), Primlani reaches out to Indian and other Asian eateries with little environmental knowledge and transforms them into "green" enterprises. That’s no easy feat, considering that restaurants consume more energy per square foot than any other industry, gobbling water and producing huge amounts of solid waste. Add in the difficulty of approaching overworked restaurant owners who rarely speak fluent English, and the task seems nearly impossible.
