The short answer is maybe. Critics of the health care industry postulate that our society’s quickness to test for disease may in fact be causing more of it, especially in the case of medical scans. To wit, the radiation dose from a typical CT scan (short for computed tomography and commonly known as a “cat scan”) is 600 times more powerful than the average chest x-ray.
Hydroelectric dams are among the cleanest sources of electrical power in the world, but they also take a heavy environmental toll by destroying landscapes and nearby ecosystems and preventing salmon and other fish from swimming upstream
Dear EarthTalk: Is the dairy industry really trying to stop soy milk makers from calling their products "milk?" They must feel very threatened by the preponderance of soy milks now available in supermarkets.
Dear EarthTalk: Many people oppose dams because they change the flow of rivers and affect the migrating patterns of fish and other species, but aren’t they also a great renewable energy source?
No matter how green your office may be already, there is surely room for improvement somewhere.
There’s a lot “bad” about conventionally grown cotton—cotton grown with the aid of synthetic chemicals, that is. The Organic Trade Association (OTA), a nonprofit trade group representing America’s burgeoning organic cotton industry, considers cotton “the world’s dirtiest crop” due to its heavy use of insecticides.
By the early 1900s, only 30,000 wild turkeys roamed the continental U.S., having been exterminated across almost half their former range. Today, as many as seven million roam the countryside across every U.S. state except Alaska . Pictured: Wild turkeys photographed near Little River, Georgia.
By eating locally sourced foods, we strengthen the bond between local farmers and our communities, stay connected to the seasons in our part of the world, promote crop diversity, and minimize the energy intensive, greenhouse-gas-emitting transportation of food from one part of the world to another.
EWG’s “Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides” makes it easy for consumer’s to know which foods they should definitely buy organic.
It’s hard to pin specific year-to-year weather-variations on global warming, but wildflowers do seem to be blooming earlier.
I heard that some wind farms use fossil fuels to power their generators when the wind won’t. Doesn’t that defeat their whole renewable energy purpose?
