News Forum Archives: August 2006
By Felicity Barringer
The New York Times
August 31, 2006
WASHINGTON, Aug. 30 — Ending a yearlong debate over its management and guiding philosophy, the National Park Service is about to adopt a policy emphasizing conservation of natural and cultural resources over recreation when they are in conflict. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne is expected to announce the new policy on Thursday.
The new regulations on park management give barely a nod to most of the concerns of the recreation industry and its Congressional champion, Representative Steve Pearce, Republican of New Mexico.
Continue Reading Park Service to Emphasize Conservation in New Rules
Posted by Paul on August 31, 2006
By Peter N. Spotts
Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
OFF CAPE PERPETUA, ORE.
A half-dozen scientists huddle in a cramped lab aboard the research vessel Elakha, bracing themselves against the rolling swells. As they stare at a pair of TV monitors, images of an aquatic graveyard glide across the screens.
Some 150 feet below, a robotic submersible - looking more like a portable generator with thrusters than a svelte submarine - motors just above the bottom, capturing macabre images of Oregon’s newly minted and poorly understood “dead zone.”
Continue Reading In Oregon, a close-up look into a coastal dead zone
Posted by Paul on August 27, 2006
By David Suzuki
July 21, 2006
Al Gore once told me that to get politicians to listen, you have to engage the people first. The former vice president is attempting to do just that this summer with his critically acclaimed global warming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” But he’s up against some pretty powerful opponents.
His movie, by most standards, is pretty good. Rotten Tomatoes, a website that compiles movie reviews from newspapers, television and the internet, shows that 92 per cent of critics liked it. A story by the Associated Press on experts who critiqued the science behind the movie found that they too gave it a thumbs up for accuracy. Personally, I thought it was brilliant.
But shortly after the Associated Press article came out, other articles started popping up that said Mr. Gore’s science was shoddy. People claiming to be experts wrote opinion pieces in newspapers decrying the film, Mr. Gore, and the “theory” of global warming in general. Contrarians, it seemed, were coming out of the woodwork. What happened?
Continue Reading Hired guns aim to confuse
Posted by Paul on August 25, 2006
By Heather Timmons
The New York Times
August 3, 2006
NEWCASTLE, England — There is more riding the waves here than surfers, thanks to a growing number of scientists, engineers and investors.
A group of entrepreneurs is harnessing the perpetual motion of the ocean and turning it into a commodity in high demand: energy. Right now, machines of various shapes and sizes are being tested off shores from the North Sea to the Pacific — one may even be coming to the East River in New York State this fall — to see how they capture waves and tides and create marine energy.
Continue Reading Energy From the Restless Sea
Posted by Paul on August 23, 2006
By Melanie Warner
The New York Times
August 10, 2006
When General Motors introduced the three-ton, 11-miles-to-the-gallon Hummer H2 four years ago, it redefined American extravagance. But now, with gas prices hovering at $3 a gallon and threatening to go higher, sales of Hummers are declining as Americans become increasingly conscious of gas mileage.
McDonald’s, however, appears not to have gotten the message. This week, the restaurant chain started putting toy Hummers in children’s Happy Meal boxes, calling it the “Hummer of a Summer” promotion. Television and radio ads, which started running this week, feature a family riding in a Hummer on the way to a McDonald’s.
Continue Reading Would You Like a Gas Guzzler With That?
Posted by Paul on August 10, 2006
How replanting the way we do agriculture will save us from sucking the earth dry
By Wayne Roberts
NOW Magazine
July 27 - August 2, 2006
Raise a glass to your host, wet your whistle, then pause for a second to recall that the solid foods you’re about to dig into embody 1,000 times more water than is in your glass.
We could go further. Your dinner has sucked up about 10 times more H20 than was used all day at work, and 10 times more than you poured, showered, laundered, hosed and flushed to meet your daily household needs.
This is the world of “virtual water” that we, with our bodies that are 72 per cent water, live in. And by 2025, if UN experts have it right, two-thirds of the world’s people will lack a clean source of the life-sustaining liquid.
Continue Reading Saving the planet one drop at a time
Posted by Paul on August 05, 2006
A green technology guru heads to the dump in search of the stuff of dreams.
Andreas Froese is madly in love with trash, especially plastic soda bottles. To him, they are not only a thing of beauty but a means of solving some of the problems vexing Honduras, his adopted country. Over the past five years, Froese has built nearly a dozen houses with sand-filled soda bottles, creating humbler versions of tiled Mediterranean villas complete with bottle top mosaics.
Continue Reading Waste Into Walls: Building Casas Out of Sand
Posted by Paul on August 01, 2006