Environmental News: OnEarth Magazine
Ribbon for a lone ranger. Mike McGrath, Montana's attorney general, didn't need a white steed to take a stand. McGrath filed a brief with a federal appeals court supporting President Clinton's rule protecting roadless areas of national forests, and in the process took on an entire posse of Western state officials who object to the plan-including his own governor.
OnEarth: Fall 2001: Departments
BRIEFINGS
Ribbons & Rebukes
Anthony Russo
Ribbon for doing diaper duty (in a big way). Santa Clarita, California, put up $250,000 toward the country's first-ever disposable-diaper recycling plant. If a diaper-collection pilot program set to begin by next summer is successful, the plant will keep 6,700 tons of the most regrettable aspect of parenting out of landfills each year.
Rebuke for plane speaking. Responding to criticism that his company's new sub-supersonic passenger plane is environmentally insensitive -- because it will guzzle 35 percent more fuel than its peers -- Boeing vice-chairman Harry Stonecipher was quite blunt. "There's plenty of fossil fuel still around," he said, leaving listeners to wonder if he, himself, was one of those fossils.
Rebuke for kowtowing to the bottom line. Two days after Wall Street Journal employees received a memo telling them to turn off their computers at night to save energy, they received another one instructing them to keep their PCs running. Why the sudden flip-flop? Insiders say the financial paper had conducted one of its beloved cost-benefit analyses-and determined that saving electricity wasn't worth the two minutes of work time each employee would lose waiting for the morning boot-up.
-- Jason Best
Briefings: Parking Lawns | Poached Salmon, Anyone? | Ribbons & Rebukes
OnEarth. Fall 2001
Copyright 2001 by the Natural Resources Defense Council
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