Climate Cities

This Land Is My Land, This Land Is Your Land

Last week the Vermont Environmental Board denied a permit to a developer for a project in Hartland. It was a typical interstate-exit gas-and-food stop — the kind of place no one likes to look at but we’re all glad to find when we’re on a long trip and running low on fuel. Hartland’s I-91 exit […]

Crabby Cabbie

There Goes the Neighborhood

Car Talk

70 million motor vehicles were on the world’s roads in 1950 630 million motor vehicles were on the world’s roads in 1994 1 billion motor vehicles are expected to be on the world’s roads by 2025, if the current growth rate continues 12,000 pounds of carbon dioxide are emitted by the average car each year […]

Twenty

• percentage of all endangered and threatened species in the U.S. that are harmed by grazing • number of plant species that provide 90 percent of the world’s food supply • percent by which wind power production has grown per year since 1990 • percentage of Earth’s original forests that remain pristine and undisturbed • […]

Who Consumes the Most?

Singapore, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, United States, Norway. Those are the world’s five top nations, in descending order, in — well, what category would you guess? If you say income per capita, you’re close, but no cigar. Since the 1985 oil price crash, the Middle East no longer dominates the list of the world’s richest […]

New Mexican gives new definition to ranch home

Ask any rancher — these days, desperation is a lot more plentiful than grass on the western range. Beset by a lousy beef market and increasing costs, it is virtually impossible to make a cattle ranch pay. Jim Winder in ranch dressing. Jim Winder knows this very well. So this fourth-generation New Mexico rancher has […]

Clustering — Good Idea, Hard to Do

“Our city is considering cluster zoning. Is this a good idea or isn’t it?” came a question from a friend the other day. I think clustering is a good idea. I’m about to live in a housing cluster myself. But, like many good ideas, it’s easier to say than do. Let me back off a […]

A Peppy New Car

The Intermountain West becomes a California suburb

One does not expect enlightenment from a barber shop conversation, but there it was. I’d always had hunches about the nature of demographic change in Western mountain towns, nasty hunches, hunches counter to the conventional wisdom that immigration was motivated by the newcomers’ love of the land, so the newcomers would become allies in environmental […]