World Watch articles from September 2006

World Watch archives from September 2006

One -, two +.(Letter to the editor)
September 1, 2006... Just a couple of short comments on the article by Karen Charman ["Brave Nuclear World?" July/August 2006]. With regard to the statement "it seems impossible to pin down exactly how carbon-intensive the nuclear fuel chain is," I call attention...

Dinosaurs don't get it.(Letter to the editor)
September 1, 2006... In his recent commentary [July/August 2006], Chris Flavin reasonably concluded that constructing new nuclear power plants will unlikely achieve more than simply replacing nuclear plants slated for closure. He then proposes that the answer to...

Cruise blues.(Letter to the editor)
September 1, 2006... In the July/August issue, P.W. McRandle said that typical ocean-going cruise ships dump more than 750,000 liters of raw sewage each week. Without comment on the reliability of that estimate, it occurred to me that these behemoths could without...

Wasted article.(Letter to the editor)
September 1, 2006... I was deeply disappointed that Elisabeth Jeffries ("E-Wasted," July/August) did not question her article's unspoken premise that planned obsolescence and its resulting torrent of electronic "waste" are acceptable. Solving the problem with...

Where do you get this stuff, anyway?(Letter to the editor)
September 1, 2006... I should say first of all that I have been subscribing to World Watch for over 10 years and on the whole I find it just simply the best overall environmental magazine I have seen. I work in international environmental affairs, and I have seen...

Another close call for the whaling moratorium.(International Whaling Commission)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... At the 58th annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in June, member countries voted 33 to 32 in favor of a resolution declaring the international ban on commercial whaling "no longer necessary." As in previous years,...

Water and sanitation "most neglected public health danger".(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... Between February and June, a cholera outbreak in the southern African country of Angola sickened 43,000 people and claimed more than 1,600 lives, according to a June New York Times article. The culprit: inadequate access to clean water and...

Atlantic bluefin tuna fishery at risk of collapse.(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... The illegal overfishing of bluefin tuna in the eastern Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea has put this fishery at risk of imminent collapse, reports a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) study released in early July. According to the study, the top...

Organic farms provide jobs, high yields.(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... Organic farming provides 32 percent more jobs per farm in the United Kingdom than conventional agriculture, according to a May study from the Soil Association. The study says that 93,000 new jobs could be created if all of Britain's farms were...

Dam resettlement speeds up.(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... See "Nam Theun Dam: The World Bank's Watershed Decision," May/June 2005, p. 27. The resettlement of villagers displaced by the Nam Theun 2 dam in Laos is being accelerated, according to project authorities. Six villages have been fully...

Nuclear revival?(new nuclear plants to be set up)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... See "Brave Nuclear World?" May/June 2006, p. 26, and July/August 2006, p. 12. In July, the U.K. government unveiled a pro-nuclear energy policy to address challenges of global warming and energy security. With all but one of Britain's 23...

Dell expands computer recycling.(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... See "E-Wasted," July/August2006, p. 21. Computer maker Dell has announced it will offer free recycling of its machines, regardless of whether their owners are buying replacements from Dell. Starting in September, U.S. consumers will be able...

Consumers demand eco-friendly PCs.(Survey)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... The vast majority of computer users would pay extra for IT equipment that doesn't damage the environment, according to a nine-country Greenpeace survey. Eighty-four percent of Thai users said they would pay up to $138 more, while 78 percent of...

Preparing for disasters.(planning of Civilian evacuation)
September 1, 2006... Most of us don't want to think about disasters, much less prepare for them. Over the long term, we'll need to protect ourselves by preserving wetlands, mangrove forests, and other natural shields against extreme weather. But in the short term,...

Katrina: the failures of success.
September 1, 2006... The fifth hurricane of the 2005 season, dubbed Katrina, roared ashore August 29 on the southeast Louisiana coast and brushed aside the corrupted defenses protecting New Orleans, leaving nearly 2,000 dead, a prostrate city, and many shattered...

Conspiracy of the levees: the latest battle of New Orleans.
September 1, 2006... Standing on St. Claude Avenue in New Orleans' Bywater neighborhood, a completely familiar place, on September 5, 2005, produced an utterly foreign experience. The levees that New Orleans relied on had failed on August 29, and the city swarmed...

Katrina's assault on New Orleans.
September 1, 2006... In mid-August 2005, a small tropical disturbance (a migratory cluster of powerful thunderstorms) formed over the Atlantic Ocean east of the Lesser Antilles. At the start, there was nothing much to distinguish it from three other such...

Hurricane Katrina in a human security perspective.
September 1, 2006... In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a joke circulated to the effect that had the people of New Orleans wanted the federal government to come to their rescue right away, they should have blamed the storm on Al Qaeda. Sometimes it takes...

Katrina's national security impacts: a hint of dreadful possibilities.
September 1, 2006... The Patriot Act of 2001 contains the U.S. government's most recent definition of critical infrastructure: "Systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and...

Black water rising: the growing global threat of rising seas and bigger hurricanes.
September 1, 2006... New Orleans is a sort of American Venice, built on a watery site ideal for commerce and surrounded by a huge delta assembled over millennia by the Mississippi River. Levees intended to contain the river's floods have coincidentally eliminated...

Hanging in the balance.(C.E. Sam artistic works on nature)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... Sometimes we need an escape from a world where environmental decline, cultural decay, and political inaction threaten to unravel human and planetary security. Artist and former New Orleans resident C.E. Sam-worth uses her characteristic...

New Orleans: only the beginning? Rest in peace; We need the delta more.
September 1, 2006... Katrina thundered into New Orleans on energy accumulated from a superheated Gulf of Mexico. The superheating was no surprise. It has been building for the last century as we have accelerated the accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the...

The (unreasonable) argument for our existence.(sinking of New Orleans)
September 1, 2006... The world's greatest cities shouldn't exist. Venice has been sinking for centuries. San Francisco straddles the San Andreas fault. New York is an irresistible multicultural target for haters of diversity and tolerance. Paris and Prague can be...

Exploring a climate of disaster: interview with Erik Assadourian.(Worldwatch Research Associate)(Interview)
September 1, 2006... Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars trilogy and The Years of Rice and Salt, is in the midst of writing a three-part series of novels about the near future--a time in which abrupt climate change has arrived, and the...

Race and the high ground in New Orleans.(african american statistics)
September 1, 2006... The night before Hurricane Katrina struck, New Orleans was a city of almost 500,000 people, two-thirds of whom were African-American (black). It was typical of many U.S. urban centers today, after years of government-is-the-problem governance:...

Exporting calamity: Katrinas for everyone; Coming soon to a coast near you.
September 1, 2006... When the malevolent waters of Hurricane Katrina destroyed most of New Orleans, Americans across the country began asking two basic questions. How in the world did this disaster happen? And, Can the same thing happen where I live? ...

Universe bounded.(evaluating second law of thermodynamics)(Column)
September 1, 2006... Normally we link Groundwork columns to specific articles using the icon at left, but this column and this special issue on Katrina are entirely about limits, so we have omitted the link this time. Here's a happy thought: the Second Law of...

The price of security.(Table)(Brief article)
September 1, 2006... Estimated cost of securing Gleneagles Hotel, Scotland, US$180,000,000 for the July 2005 Group of Eight (G8) summit Average yearly earnings per 100,000 people living in $180,000,000 the 18 poor countries pledged complete debt...