Environment and Health
A Deceptive Win on Plan B for Women
Good news for advocates of sensible birth control policy: The Obama administration announced that it's dropping the fight to impose an age restriction on sales of Plan B One-Step, the emergency contraception pill. Reproductive rights advocates are celebrating this...
A More Sustainable Future for Us All
Like many great Americans, Sierra Club founder John Muir was an immigrant. It's only because the Scottish-born environmentalist visionary, who arrived in the United States at the age of 11 after a six-week sea voyage from Glasgow, was able to take advantage of the...
Cleaning Up Our Portfolios
Climate change may one day cause us to run low on food. Scientists don't like to talk about it, but there's a chance that the disruption we've caused by burning fossil fuels may even render life on Earth no longer viable for the human race. Sure, that sounds grim. To...
Screwballism vs. Science
When asked what the world needs, people tend to go all gushy and offer up such fuzzy stuff as "world peace" and "more kindness." Yeah, yeah — but get real. Let's talk practicality here. What the world needs is something tangible, a new whiz-bang product that will...
Neglecting Mother Nature
Wealth and power Bring this curse, Air and water Ever worse. Whether a country's capitalist or communist, a dictatorship or a democracy, it makes no difference to Mother Nature. Regardless of the dominant economic philosophy or form of government, the environment is...
Oklahoma’s Silly Goose
License to Kill
Regulations stink, right? Lots of politicians run on promises that they'll get rid of them to make way for an economic boom. Well, have you ever considered what our world would look like without regulations? In the early 20th century, almost all paint contained lead....
Don’t Mourn the Planet’s Destruction, Organize!
Should we weep or cheer on Earth Day? Both. The first step toward any recovery is admitting that we have a problem. In fact, beaucoup problems. For example, despite the squawking of profiteering polluters and professional deniers, our very atmosphere — without which...
ExxonMobil’s Mayflower Mess
Several weeks after ExxonMobil's Pegasus pipeline gushed at least 500,000 gallons of tar sands crude and water into the Arkansas community of Mayflower, many of the evacuated families still can't return to their homes. Sierra Club organizer Glen Hooks, who grew up...
The Army Goes Off the Grid
Do you know about "net zero"? That's the wonky phrase attached to an elegant idea: converting communities to total renewable energy, complete recycling, and a culture of conservation to bring humankind's carbon footprint into a sustainable balance with a healthy...
