Eve's Garden Organic Bed & Breakfast and Ecology Resource Center

EPA Rule Loosened After Oil Chief’s Letter to Rove

The White House says the executive’s appeal had no role in changing a measure to protect groundwater. Critics call it a political payoff.

By Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
June 13, 2006

WASHINGTON — A rule designed by the Environmental Protection Agency to keep groundwater clean near oil drilling sites and other construction zones was loosened after White House officials rejected it amid complaints by energy companies that it was too restrictive and after a well-connected Texas oil executive appealed to White House senior advisor Karl Rove.

Continue Reading EPA Rule Loosened After Oil Chief’s Letter to Rove

The Not So Good Earth

By David Barboza
The New York Times
June 23, 2006

SHANGMA HUANGTOU, China — When Wei Yong returned home to his ancestral village last year to visit his 77-year-old mother, he heard about the tremors. Late one night, the residents told him, the village was rocked by what everyone thought was an earthquake. The ground shook. The houses trembled. And the earth cracked open.

“Liu Run told me her walls were about to cave in,” Mr. Wei said. “My sister says everywhere is sinking. She won’t even let the dog roam free at night.”

There was no earthquake, however. Instead, here in this small village in the central province of Shanxi, three large coal mining operations had been burrowing underground for coal — day and night, sometimes with dynamite. And from far below, they had cracked the earth.

Continue Reading The Not So Good Earth

Building Green — Sustainable structures can save on utility, maintenance costs

Kate Lohnes
Monitor Staff Writer
The Monitor — McAllen Texas
June 03, 2006

Kermit the Frog got it all wrong: it is easy to be green.

While Kermit meant his froggy complexion, today “green” encompasses a variety of eco-friendly materials and products. Current products on the market are green clothing, green cleaning products and green furniture, which use sustainable, non-toxic materials to make them easy on the environment. Green building and construction (also called sustainable building) is growing in popularity and availability within the general public.

Continue Reading Building Green — Sustainable structures can save on utility, maintenance costs

Border ‘green wall’ aims to discourage migrants

Mexico is working on a 600-mile-long nature corridor along the Rio Grande River that it hopes will curb illegal migration and smugglers.

By Mark Stevenson
Associated Press
Jun. 10, 2006

MEXICO CITY - Mexico is creating an environmental reserve about 30 feet wide and 600 miles long on the Texas border, a “green wall” to protect the Rio Grande from the roads and staging areas that smugglers use to ferry drugs and migrants across the frontier.

Much of this border zone is remote and inhospitable — generally too rough to hike through unless you’re a black bear or a pronghorn sheep, species that have flourished in the area’s deserts and mountains.

And that’s the way Mexico wants to keep it.

Continue Reading Border ‘green wall’ aims to discourage migrants

A Greener Way to Cut the Grass Runs Afoul of a Powerful Lobby

By Felicity Barringer
The New York Times
April 24, 2006

ALPHARETTA, Ga. — Some have automatic transmissions. Drink holders. Electrical outlets. That staple of the American suburb, the lawn mower, now has many features of a late-model car. But not a catalytic converter, a muscular piece of antipollution engineering. At least not yet.

So when Heidi Ramaekers mows her yard here in lush exurban Atlanta, she inhales the competing scents of spring: the damp sweetness of grass cuttings and an acrid chaser of hydrocarbons. Mix in some of the nitrogen oxides from her push mower’s exhaust and cook it in the sun for a bit. Presto, she has made smog.

Continue Reading A Greener Way to Cut the Grass Runs Afoul of a Powerful Lobby

One Farm Town’s Drive for Energy Independence

By Monica Davey
The New York Times
June 4, 2006

REYNOLDS, Ind. — This corn and soybean and hog farming town, which pops up out of nowhere at a crossroads and disappears as fast, has only 533 residents left. As in many withering rural communities, worries here lean toward keeping the school open, persuading sons and daughters to stay and finding a role for small farms in a changed economy. But a different worry has risen here, too.

Continue Reading One Farm Town’s Drive for Energy Independence

Ethanol dazzles Wall Street, White House

By Libby Quaid
AP Food and Farm Writer
June 3, 2006

A tractor trailer rig rumbles into the Tall Corn Ethanol plant. Corn pours from openings in its belly to bins underground, where conveyor belts and buckets haul it to gleaming steel silos rising 13 stories above the Iowa plains. p>The 40-acre distillery turns corn into alcohol in quantities that would make a moonshiner drool. Instead of white lightnin’, the brew is converted to ethanol, a fuel that makes money for farmers and is seen as a possible solution to today’s high oil and gas prices.

#?-:nbsp;

Continue Reading Ethanol dazzles Wall Street, White House