The Amicus Journal articles from June 1993

The Amicus Journal archives from June 1993

The enforcers.
June 22, 1993... In the space of a few months, NRDC's Citizen Enforcement Project has gained two seven-figure wins for the environment--a $1.68 million penalty against a Texaco refinery for polluting the Delaware River (see Amicus, Winter 1993, page 54) and a...

Draw it. Build it. Show sustain "Ability." (Editorial)
June 22, 1993... Many are the conferences, loud the talk, and long the hours dedicated to articulating the meaning of "sustainable development," which the World Commission on Environment and Development defined as "meeting the needs of the present without...

Not-so-clearcut choices ahead. (Clinton's forest plan)
June 22, 1993... The Clinton administration's plan to resolve the Northwest's forest crisis has brought the full weight of White House brass--including the president, vice president, and seven cabinet chiefs--into a debate over how to turn the words...

Taming the dragon. (efforts to persuade China to stop construction of the world's biggest dam)
June 22, 1993... On its 3,500-mile journey from Tibet to Shanghai, the Yangtze river carves its way through the Three Gorges, a mystical 120-mile long gallery of fog-enshrouded peaks, sheer cliffs, and huge whirlpools. Three Gorges, which has inspired Chinese...

Exiled from their homes.
June 22, 1993... Most of the 500,000 residents of Wanxian, which could soon be submerged under the 350-mile-long reservoir behind the Three Gorges dam, are unsentimental about losing their gritty, penitentiary style apartments and factories to the rising...

A garden of earthly designs. (progress of ecologically sound architecture)
June 22, 1993... Standing beside the new aviary that he designed for the Kansas City Zoo to house its Australian bird life, Bob Berkebile pointed out one of the least exotic aspects of the project--the waste marble and salvaged lumber used in the building....

Sense and sustainability, through history.
June 22, 1993... It may be surprising to discover, at the end of the twentieth century, that today's green architecture advocates look for inspiration to sustainable design models created thousands of years ago. For centuries, the Greeks, Romans, Chinese,...

A workplace that works.
June 22, 1993... The headquarters of Natural Resources Defense Council occupies the top two and a half floors of a twelve-story building in lower Manhattan. Located on 20th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, the neighborhood of midrise buildings appears...

Architecture in the age of ecology.
June 22, 1993... The initial triumph of the Modern Age and its architecture was inspired by the industrial dream. From the turn of the century to the 1930s, architects passionately believed there was a direct equation between the combustion engine and a...

Art for earth's sake. (exhibition of activist art)
June 22, 1993... Artists have paid homage to the earth since the beginning of recorded time. The cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira, the Nazca lines and figures on the pampa of Peru, Stonehenge in the English countryside, and the pyramids of the Egyptian...

Making art as if the world mattered.
June 22, 1993... In 1969, the same year that he poured a truckload of asphalt down the side of a hill, Robert Smithson was prevented from dropping broken glass on an island in Vancouver by environmentalists fearful that it would harm the bird life of that...

Currents of controversy. (cancer risks of power lines )
June 22, 1993... "A side effect," the biologist Garrett Hardin once observed, "is a surprise result, the existence of which you will deny for as long as possible." Some hazards of modern life are widely acknowledged, but others--even cigarette...

The scene of the crime. (waterfowl dies from selenium poisoning)
June 22, 1993... It is an environmental whodunit of the first order. There are corpses, tens of thousands of them, strewn all over the western landscape, in and out of water. Sleuthing scientists have pieced together threads of incriminating evidence, which...

Mighty MITI. (Japan's new industrial policy to become world leader in environmental technology)
June 22, 1993... From the Shinkansen, the famous Japanese bullet train, it is hard to see much besides the urban and industrial sprawl of twentieth-century Japan. As the train speeds out of Tokyo, it passes miles of undistinguished houses on narrow, drab...

Rodale's All-New Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening.
June 22, 1993... I grew up on Long Island on a block called Garden Place. Sounds like a perfect name for a horticultural soap opera, and in a way it was. Grandma grew tomatoes. Every Saturday Dad mowed the lawn. Every Mother's Day Mom got another pink azalea,...

The National Wildflower Research Center's Wildflower Handbook, 2nd ed.
June 22, 1993... I grew up on Long Island on a block called Garden Place. Sounds like a perfect name for a horticultural soap opera, and in a way it was. Grandma grew tomatoes. Every Saturday Dad mowed the lawn. Every Mother's Day Mom got another pink azalea,...

Taylor's Guide to Natural Gardening.
June 22, 1993... I grew up on Long Island on a block called Garden Place. Sounds like a perfect name for a horticultural soap opera, and in a way it was. Grandma grew tomatoes. Every Saturday Dad mowed the lawn. Every Mother's Day Mom got another pink azalea,...

The Gardener's Guide to Plant Conservation.
June 22, 1993... I grew up on Long Island on a block called Garden Place. Sounds like a perfect name for a horticultural soap opera, and in a way it was. Grandma grew tomatoes. Every Saturday Dad mowed the lawn. Every Mother's Day Mom got another pink azalea,...

Visions Upon the Land: Man and Nature on the Western Range.
June 22, 1993... The Clinton administration's vision for reforming the management of Western public lands has brought the usually remote problem of "man and nature on the Western range" into sharper focus recently. Proposed reforms--increased fees for cattle...

A Fierce Green Fire.
June 22, 1993... Environmentalists, it seems, do not have a very good sense of their history. At least that is the word from scholar Donald Snow, whose recent survey found that only 13 percent of newly hired staff at U.S. environmental groups had "excellent"...