Hot and cold

On the heels of the warmest winter on record, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest climate-change assessment on April 6. The report, which draws heavily on data provided by the Asheville-based National Climatic Data Center, summarizes climate-change impacts that have already been observed and projects future increases in drought, hunger, thirst, floods […]

The Green Scene

Miles to go before I hike What if you could traverse the whole French Broad River Basin—by bike, on horseback or in hiking shoes—without ever running into a four-lane road? That’s the big idea behind a fledgling regional effort to design create a system of trails linking Buncombe, Haywood, Henderson, Madison and Transylvania counties. Across […]

‘Punk kids’ on tour to talk about about climate change

The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol could feed one person for a year, and widespread production of the alternative fuel could exacerbate hunger in developing nations. Carbon trading concentrates pollution in poor communities, and as nuclear energy moves in to replace fossil fuels, radioactive contamination will intensify in low-income areas.

Enviro triumph or Dirty Bird?

Every day, the Blue Ridge Paper mill in Canton, one of Haywood County’s biggest employers, discharges more than 20 million gallons of treated industrial wastewater into the Pigeon River—which critics say is much too small a waterway to accommodate that much effluent. Trials and tributaries: The Canton paper mill has discharged industrial wastewater into the […]

The Green Scene

Getting the lay of the land Tracking development in Asheville just got a whole lot easier. A new online tool unveiled recently by Asheville’s Information Technology Services Department enables anyone to quickly find out about new local construction projects. The Web-based program, called the mapAsheville Development Mapper, uses geographic-information-systems technology to retrieve detailed data about […]

The Green Scene

Office Max goes “green” Office Max, one of the nation’s largest office-supply companies, announced a new environmental policy Feb. 19 in the wake of negotiations with The Dogwood Alliance, an Asheville-based nonprofit. The company has agreed to avoid purchasing from paper suppliers that log endangered areas or convert natural forests to industrial pine plantations, and […]