Green Options

My long held fantasy of a car-free Market Street became just a little closer to reality today. A transit improvement report was just approved by the San Francisco County Transportation Authority that encourages travel by bus, foot and bicycle along this busy thoroughfare. District 6 Supervisor Chris Daly, who requested the report, expressed his support for the positive changes being implemented that will limit

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That was one of the many probing questions that the visionary former mayor of Bogotá Colombia, Enrique Peñalosa, asked a packed auditorium in San Francisco last night. How do we define what makes a good city, what is our criteria? What makes an urban environment desirable and livable, and how do we judge the quality of life? What is socially and environmentally sustainable?

This month, as the results of data analyses come in, climate scientists are getting a more detailed, far clearer picture of the ‘State of the Poles’ and the effects of warming and climate change in these most extreme regions of our planet. Although this project is actually the culmination of two years work (encompassing 160 separate studies and costing 1.2 billion dollars) it has been officially deemed the ‘International Polar Year’ (IPY).

One of the most important findings of this project is a confirmation of what many climate scientists have suspected for a couple of years now–that the impact of climate change on our environment is happening at a much faster rate than previous computer models predicted. This is true even for the four major reports released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the last of which was released in 2007).

More people than ever are now using mass transit in the United States. Ridership on trains, buses, ferries and subways is at record levels, according to a survey just released by the American Public Transportation Association. Their study reports that, “despite falling gas prices and an economic recession, increasing numbers of Americans took 10.7 billion trips on public transportation in 2008, the highest level of ridership in 52 years and a modern ridership record”, and a 4% increase from [...]

More than fifteen thousand people have taken part in a mass protest in southern India, against the extension of a new reserve to protect tigers facing a very real threat of extinction.

The last count revealed that the number of Indian tigers has plummeted from around 40,000 at the beginning of last century to an all time low of just 1,411, largely due to dwindling habitats and the activities of poachers. Despite these depressing statistics, residents of India’s Chennai region are firmly against any further safeguards, fearing that they will lose their homes if an extension to the Mudumalai Wildlife sanctuary is given the green light.