Monday, 27 Sep 2004

Take Two Tickets to the City and Call Me in the Morning

Suburban sprawl is bad for your health

Not only is suburban sprawl bad for the environment -- encouraging car use and overly large, energy-inefficient homes, paving paradise to put up a parking lot, etc. -- but it's bad for the folks who live there as well, according to a new study to be published in the journal Public Health. Based on data from more than 8,600 Americans in 38 metropolitan areas, researchers found that the higher the level of sprawl, the more likely residents were to report ailments from arthritis to asthma to heart disease, even when factors like age and economic status were taken into consideration. The study is largely in line with previous studies that found reduced physical activity and increased obesity in the 'burbs. "This is still a very new field of research, but every significant study that has come out so far has reached a similar conclusion," said Don Chen of Smart Growth America [who, it so happens, is a member of Grist's board of directors, but we cite him here based solely on the merit of his comments -- really]. Oddly, the study found no correlation between sprawl and mental-health issues, indicating that while suburbanites are getting fatter and sicker, they don't seem very upset about it.

Livin' La Vida Pura

Judy Logback, enterprising Amazonian activist, InterActivates

She travels around Ecuador, subsisting on a few dollars a week, helping indigenous people organize into a cooperative through which they sell crafts, cocoa, and coffee internationally while protecting their traditional ethnobiological knowledge and the integrity of the rainforest. Her greatest environmental sin is that she doesn't grow her own food. Really. Judy Logback of the Kallari Association answers our questions this week -- in InterActivist, only on the Grist Magazine website. Ask her a question of your own by noon PDT on Wednesday, Sept. 29.

Wild Gas Chase

Fear over chemical weapons -- the real ones -- grows

The Bush administration claimed that Iraq harbored up to 500 tons of chemical weapons, but teams of investigators came back empty-handed. Perhaps the U.S. should have invaded Australia -- or China, or Russia, or, heck, itself. These countries each possess a share of the world's estimated 8 million chemical weapons, often unaccounted for and stored in facilities of unknown safety, and environmentalists are among the many groups raising a red flag over the problem. The 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention gave signatories, which include the U.S., Russia, and India, 10 years to destroy their declared chemical munitions. How's that going? As of last year, the Russians had eliminated 1 percent, the U.S. 20 percent. Often the delays have to do with methods of disposal -- most pollute the surrounding environment and are opposed by local communities. The U.S. Army's initial cost estimate for destroying the weapons was $1.7 billion; two decades later, it's spent $25 billion and counting. Still, says Global Green USA's Paul Walker, "the cost of getting rid of them is a small fraction of what we're spending in Iraq."

Ay, There's the Stub

Umbra on what to do with your stubby pencils

Have you ever wondered what to do with your pencil stubs when they become too short to use? No? Well, people do. Okay, at least one person does. And our intrepid advice columnist Umbra Fisk disdains no question, no matter how, uh, idiosyncratic. So for all you draft artists, standardized test takers, and Luddites out there, overcome with a profusion of little yellow No. 2 stubbies, drop by and read the scribbles in Ask Umbra -- today on the Grist Magazine website.

Credit Where Credit is Overdue

Congress renews wind-energy tax credit for a year

A popular tax credit for companies generating wind energy will likely live on through 2005. Renewal of the wind-energy production tax credit was included in the monstrous Bush administration energy bill, but that bill is, to enviros' great relief, currently stuck in legislative limbo. However, lawmakers inserted the tax credit in a family tax-cut bill that passed last week, which Bush is expected to sign. According to Tom Gray of the American Wind Energy Association, this means that "about $3 billion in wind-energy investments forecast over the next several years are now back on track across the country." It's an open question whether the wind-energy industry could thrive absent the tax credit, but companies are loath to move forward in the face of uncertainty about its fate. The industry has long pushed for a longer-term tax credit, which would enable longer-term planning.