World Watch articles from March 2007

World Watch archives from March 2007

Diapers.(LIFE-CYCLE STUDIES)
March 1, 2007... Overview Humans are the only animals to diaper their young (and not all humans do so), and such an unnatural custom ought to invite more comment--yet the first literary reference to the diaper dates only to the 10th century and it had...

Carbon crimes.(emissions and global warming)(Editorial)
March 1, 2007... In the January/February issue of World Watch, writer Susan Moran ("Rush to Coal") detailed the frenzied efforts of U.S. utilities to build more than 150 "new" pulverized-coal power plants before the imposition of increasingly likely federal...

Green electricity.(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2007... Paul McRandle's treatment of "Green Energy" [Green Guidance column, January/February 2007] is a missed opportunity. Most consumers don't understand green power options, and McRandle perpetuates the confusion. Here's what everyone should...

Rents and sustainability.(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2007... A century ago, political economists tragically abandoned the most important investigative component of their science, namely, whether the laws of production and distribution of wealth described a closed system with ethical values at their base....

Trick shot?(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2007... I'm puzzled and a bit worried by the use of the power plant photo on page 1 of the January/February 2007 issue. Perhaps I'm overly suspicious, but was this quite excellent photo selected because of the prominence of the discharges? This used to...

Correction.(Correction notice)
March 1, 2007... In the article "Portraits in Carbon" (Jan/Feb 2007), we incorrectly translated "carbon" into Japanese as "sekitan." The correct word is "tanso."

Hormone-altering chemicals in everyday products.(endocrine-disrupting chemicals)
March 1, 2007... Androgyny on the fashion runway is one thing, but in the Arctic no one wants to see gender-confused polar bears. Yet according to scientists, one in 67 female polar bears in Svalbard, Norway, has developed a stunted penis. The suspected cause...

New solar cell breaks 40-percent barrier.(EYE ON EARTH)(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... Scientists have produced a photovoltaic (PV) cell with an energy conversion efficiency of 40.7 percent, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) reported in December. The collaboration of DOE and Spectrolab, Inc. (a subsidiary of Boeing) led to the...

Botswana Bushmen win legal rights to land.(EYE ON EARTH)(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... The San people of Botswana, a hunter-gatherer group also known as the Bushmen, have won a historic court case granting them rights to ancestral lands from which they were driven in 2002. In December, Botswana's High Court ruled that it was...

Oil exploration threatens Belize's protected areas.(EYE ON EARTH)
March 1, 2007... The government of Belize is violating international human rights law and possibly other global treaties by permitting oil exploration on indigenous lands, according to the environmental advocacy group Global Response. The group says Belize's...

Urban agriculture provides Cubans with food, jobs.(EYE ON EARTH)(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... Residents of Cuban cities grew more than 1 million tons of vegetables and spices between January and March of 2006, according to a report in Latin America Press. Peppered throughout Havana and Cuba's other urban areas are more than 35,500...

Food from cloned animals receives preliminary approval.(EYE ON EARTH)
March 1, 2007... In December, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a draft risk assessment declaring that the meat and milk of cloned cattle, pigs, goats, and their offspring is "as safe to eat as food from conventionally bred animals." The...

White river dolphin declared extinct after river search.(EYE ON EARTH)
March 1, 2007... After scouring China's Yangtze River for six weeks, a team of international experts declared the baiji, a rare white river dolphin, "functionally extinct" in mid-December. August Pfluger, head of the Swiss-based baiji.org Foundation and a...

Complementary currency helps local communities.(community programs)
March 1, 2007... Over the past 10 years, more than 5,300 school children from underprivileged Chicago neighborhoods have tutored their peers and earned free computers. Five parks in Calgary, Canada, have become pesticide free, and a formerly homeless...

More ice loss.(ice sheets melting)(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... See "Living with Climate Change in the Arctic," September/October 2005, p. 18 Satellite imagery recently revealed that an ice mass the size of Manhattan broke free from Canada's Ellesmere Island in August 2005, leaving behind a trail of...

Another Katrina?(sea walls proposed in Gulf Coast)(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... See "Katrina: The Failures of Success," Special Issue, September/October 2006 U.S. scientists are criticizing a proposal by the Army Corps of Engineers to construct elaborate sea walls to defend the Gulf Coast against future hurricanes....

Jakarta bird ban.(avian flu )(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... See "A Fowl Plague," January/February 2007, p. 24 Following an outbreak of avian flu that resulted in four deaths, Indonesian officials have banned all backyard poultry in Jakarta in an effort to stem the spread of the disease. Many...

No more interference!(political interference in scientific research)(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... See "Swiftboating, Stealth Budgeting, and Unitary Executives," November/December 2006, p. 26 Some 10,000 U.S. scientists--including 52 Nobel laureates and advisers to both Republican and Democratic administrations--have signed a statement...

Our biopolitical future: four scenarios; Emerging genetic technologies could radically reshape the world, for good or ill.
March 1, 2007... Most of us would enjoy being healthier, smarter, more attractive, and longer-lived. But we also know there can be too much of a good thing. If we're overweight it makes sense to reduce, but anorexia can be lethal. A nice haircut can make us...

Office paper.(TALKING PICTURES)(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... 30,000 reams of it--15 million sheets--the quantity of office paper consumed in the United States every five minutes. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Photograph by Chris Jordan, nwww.chrisjordan.com.

Grounding learning in place: three case studies show how to grow passionate local leaders and activists.(Providing Resolutions with Integrity for a Sustainable Molokai)(Program for Academic and Cultural Excellence in Rural Schools)
March 1, 2007... In Coffeeville, Oakman, and 19 other communities in rural Alabama, secondary school students have taken on the task of publishing community newspapers in towns where local journalists closed up shop decades ago. With the support of PACERS...

Snapshots of our Urban Future.
March 1, 2007... Sometime in 2008, the United Nations predicts, we'll reach the point at which over half of the world's people live in urban areas. More than at any time in history, the fate of humanity, our economy, and the planet will be influenced by cities....

A commodity of good names.(fees for use of names)(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... A Commodity of Good Names* Fee paid by entertainment mogul David Geffen to $200 million the University of California/Los Angeles to name its new medical school after him Fee paid by Las Vegas casino GoldenPalace.com for...