World Watch articles from January 2004

World Watch archives from January 2004

Possession.(Editorial)
January 1, 2004... The United States leads (if that's the word) the world in consuming things, and certain related factoids have become legendary: that the U.S. population, though only 4 percent of the global total, consumes 25 percent of the energy, for...

Have a good life. Just charge it on your Citibank card.(Note From A Worldwatcher)
January 1, 2004... Popular history tells us that the 1980s and 90s became an age of excess (the era of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, dot-com millionaires, booming sales of BMWs, Rolex watches, and trophy houses)--and that that age ended abruptly with...

Doing well by doing good.(From Readers)
January 1, 2004... I read with particular interest your Note From a Worldwatcher on the Quakers and social investing ("Doing Well by Doing Good," September/ October). I began some very modest social investing of my savings back around 1987. Currently, my IRAs are...

Close the borders?(From Readers)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2004... In "From Readers" (July/August), Derek Dexheimer commented on an article by Radhika Sarin in the May/June issue. Dexheimer suggested that World Watch prefers to avoid the problem of population growth, and Sarin responded. In the following...

Breaking the taboo.(From Readers)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2004... It was a great day that I read the letters ("Getting It Right About Population, September/October) regarding the one topic no one is supposed to address for fear of being called racist: "Population." In my opinion it is racist not to address...

Stabilizing population is no longer enough.(From Readers)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2004... In her best-selling book of 1984, The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman asked: "Why does American business insist on 'growth' when it is demonstrably using up the three basics of life on our planet--land, water, and unpolluted air?" Now, 20 years...

Joining the chorus.(From Readers)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2004... The letters on "Getting It Right About Population" (September/October) were very much to the point. I, too, miss the emphasis World Watch should give to the dangerous reality of overpopulation. HEINRICH O.E. SCHMID, M.D. New York, New...

A challenge to the letters on population.(From Readers)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2004... I'm surprised by the one-sided view expressed in various letters, that overpopulation is the issue and that World Watch avoids it. If we focused only on overpopulation, sheer numbers and their effect, wouldn't we be creating a larger and larger...

Don't bet the farm on alternative media.(From Readers)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2004... The Note From a Worldwatcher, "Let Them Eat "Cakewalk'" (November/ December) was right on target. But it stopped short. Ed Ayres suggests that it might be a good first step for serious media to establish professional standards. It might have...

Yes it is about oil, and yes it matters.(From Readers)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2004... I am writing in response to the following sequence of comments in World Watch: "It's Not About Oil!" (Note From a Worldwatcher, May/June '03); "It's Not About Oil, Really!" (Letter from Walter Youngquist, July/August '03); and "UN, Not...

Cheers from a septuagenarian pit bull.(From Readers)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2004... Re "What Is Sustainability, Anyway?" (September/October), thanks for finally getting to the bullet and biting it, even if ever so softly. Tom Prugh and Erik Assadourian perform a needed service, as so much mushy rhetoric and incredibly naive...

Ashcroft goes after Greenpeace.(Environmental Intelligence)
January 1, 2004... A routine protest, Greenpeace style, threatens to become an important test of free speech. The case stems from a protest the organization staged in April 2002, when Greenpeace activists boarded the container ship APL Jade, owned by the...

After Cancun, it's a new playing field.(Environmental Intelligence)
January 1, 2004... In a world where the gap between rich and poor has widened, the collapse of the World Trade Organization (WTO) talks in Cancun, Mexico, last September may have been foreordained. There are 140 WTO member nations, and more than 100 are...

Pesticides found in Indian soft drinks.(Environmental)
January 1, 2004... Many Indian sodas contain detectable amounts of pesticide residues, according to a report released in August by the New Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE). Following the organization's discovery in February of pesticide...

Perchlorates in California.(World Watch Updates)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2004... In one of his last acts before leaving office, California's deposed governor Gray Davis signed two new statutes in response to lest summer's disclosure that much of the state's groundwater had been contaminated by chemicals used in rocket fuel...

Cultivating rooftop gardens.(World Watch Updates)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2004... In 2003, Green Roofs for Healthy Cities held its first International Conference on Greening Rooftops for Sustainable Communities. The second annual conference and trade show, co-sponsored by the city of Portland, Oregon, will take place June...

More forest burning.(World Watch Updates)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2004... We noted in 1996 that the numbers of tires in the Amazon (most of them deliberately set) had risen throughout the early 1990s, reaching 40,000 fires in 1995. Now, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization warns that fires are increasingly...

Rising from the dead.(World Watch Updates)(Aral Sea)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2004... Between 1960 and 1990, the great Aral Sea of central Asia fell by more than 40 feet and lost two-thirds of its water, largely because the rivers that feed it were diverted upstream for irrigation. Now, the World Bank is financing a triage...

ChevronTexaco on trial.
January 1, 2004... Lago Agrio, Ecuador -- Huddled under the awning of the La Ganga appliance store, nearly a hundred indigenous men, women, and children and their campesino (peasant former) neighbors tried to keep their bodies warm and their headdresses dry. One...

The hidden shame of the global industrial economy: where do the raw materials to build our paneled offices, airplanes, and cell phones come from? Maybe you really don't want to know. A lot of them come from plunder, of a kind we'd like to think came to an end long ago.
January 1, 2004... Conquistadors In the 16th century, Hernando Cortez sailed to Mexico seeking gold for the Spanish empire. He found a lot of it, and seized it without compunction, killing any Aztecs who stood in his way. Today, that kind of plunder may seem...

Brominated fire retardants.(Green Guidance)(polybrominated diphenyl ethers)
January 1, 2004... For those unmotivated by the threat of obesity, there's a new reason to get up off the couch and eat less fatty foods: Fire retardants used in polyurethane foam furniture have been linked, in experiments with rodents, to endocrine disruption...

A plague on all our houses.(Six Modern Plagues and How We Are Causing Them)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Mark Jerome Walters, Six Modern Plagues and How We Are Causing Them (Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2003). We are not so much victims of nature as of our own actions. And these we have the power to change.--Mark Jerome...

Coal facts.(Matters Of Scale)
January 1, 2004... Number of late-model cars it takes to generate 10,000 tons of nitrogen oxide (N[O.sub.x]), the principal constituent of lung-inflaming smog, in one year 500,000 Number of average-sized coal-burning power...