At the Frontlines of the Global Transition
How many ways can a good man’s life be measured? By the joy he holds for his family, his friends, his work, his community, and himself. By the people he encounters and the way they greet him — with a smile, with an embrace, with unabridged delight. By the visible evidence of his success. The people he employed. The people he helped. The community that, for decades, admired his way of conducting his life. All …
Residents of Boone County, Indiana, had a lot to be anxious about in 2023 when state authorities revealed the scope of a nearly 10,000-acre innovation and high-tech manufacturing park they were developing outside Lebanon, a half-hour drive northwest of Indianapolis. One concern was the public taxpayer cost of the LEAP project – short for Limitless Exploration/Advanced Pace – now nearing $1 billion. Another was the way authorities made big decisions for the “mega site with …
Let’s all stand up and cheer our fellow Americans in the West for raising their voices and shutting down a Republican plan last month to sell millions of acres of the public domain. Even considering Earth Day demonstrations in April, it’s the first time any of the Trump administration’s irrational and dangerous initiatives to impede, weaken, and obliterate the nation’s protections for land, water, and air generated more than a peep of resistance. Where has …
Back in 2003, when researchers began predicting with excellent accuracy how much of western Lake Erie would be coated with the green slime of a toxic algae bloom, there were important points to be made. The annual forecasts, largely funded with $20 million annually from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, provided water quality regulators and public health authorities in the U.S. and Canada real-time assessments on where the poisonous algae, which is capable of …
President Donald Trump’s campaign to carve up federal environmental agencies and paralyze statutes that cleared the air, cleaned U.S. waters, and protected wildlands marks the opening of MAPA, the new era to make America polluted again. With uncanny speed and premeditated precision, Trump and his Cabinet are cutting budgets, slicing protections from statutes, and pushing thousands of seasoned scientists and resource managers out of the federal government’s principal environmental agencies: the Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric …
Not so terribly long ago the International Energy Agency issued one of the early century’s most optimistic projections for the environment, human health, and water quality. It declared 2013 the year the world’s operating coal mines had reached peak production of 8 billion metric tons. From that year forward, the agency predicted, the use of the dirtiest fuel to generate electricity would steadily decline, carrying with it planet-healing reductions in climate-changing air emissions and water-polluting …
In January, executives at Constellation Energy startled the world with their plan to restart the closed and cold 840-megawatt Unit 1 reactor at Three Mile Island nuclear power station, site of one of the most dangerous meltdowns in atomic history. Not so long ago such news, like the specter of the ruined Unit 2 reactor core that remained after the 1979 accident in southern Pennsylvania, would have attracted more than surprise. It would have generated …
In the years during and immediately following the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009, the Texas Business Association and other like-minded chambers of commerce noted how America’s second most populous state had come through the ordeal with unrivaled economic vitality. Texas attracted more direct foreign investment, was the nation’s largest exporter, and was home to more than 50 Fortune 500 companies. The state also attracted new residents, businesses, and jobs at a faster pace than …
Atop one of the world’s tallest freshwater sand dunes in northern Michigan’s Benzie County there’s a place to marvel–dawn or dusk–at the magnificence of the Lake Michigan shoreline. The view encompasses Betsie Bay, where the state-protected natural river of the same name empties into the sparkling clean shallows between Frankfort and Elberta. A wide sand beach stretches for miles north and south, a dun-colored threshold defining the space between the big lake’s crystal-clear blue waters …
WHETHER they pulled tires out of the Bronx River in White Plains, set up recycling booths in Chicago or marched in San Francisco, the millions of Americans who celebrated the first Earth Day in 1970 were bound by two principles: the environment was a mess, and the Government needed to do something about it. This week, America marks Earth Day’s 25th anniversary. But that cracking sound heard across the country is more than the breaking …
