In 1969, Gaylord Nelson, seven years out of the U.S. Senate, called on Denis Hayes to organize what Nelson envisioned as a national teach-in on the environment. The result was the first Earth Day, conceived of by the former Democratic senator and realized by Hayes and a staff of 85. Today Hayes is head […]

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  I grew up as an oil geologist, worked in Mississippi and Alabama for several years, so it’s not with the sometimes-reflexive reaction of a typical treehugger that I report from Montana with the news that the future of the world may well depend upon obscure and little-known events that are taking place in wild […]

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  Bellingham, Washington   At dusk on a warm Wednesday afternoon in September, a Lummi couple in their sixties had just finished picking kelp out of a gill net they had stretched out into Bellingham Bay. The wind was calm and the water so clear that every stone on the bottom was visible. The incoming […]

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As the battle over the Keystone XL pipeline has worn on—and it’s now well over two years old—it has illuminated the Obama presidency like no other issue. It offers the president not just a choice of policies, but a choice of friends, worldviews, styles. It’s become an X-ray for a flagging presidency. The stakes are […]

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West, Texas It has been six months since the fertilizer plant here exploded, killing 15, injuring more than 200 and leveling a swath of this small town 70 miles south of Fort Worth. The debris has been hauled off, rebuilding is underway, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration this month handed down $118,300 in […]

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