Put it on paper: Blue Ridge permit comments due Area residents have until midnight this Friday, Feb. 9, to go on record about air emissions at Blue Ridge Paper Products in Canton. The facility is seeking a Title V air-emissions permit as required under federal standards for major emissions sources. Formerly owned by Champion International, […]

A different take: Human Rights Watch Film Festival A Chilean village displaced by a hydroelectric dam. An oil field’s crushing impact on a community in Azerbaijan. The scars of U.S. soldiers home from Iraq. Mass media may have made the world smaller, but somehow such human stories still fall by the wayside. The Human Rights […]

Design Science update: Bucky would be proud Last summer, more than 30 people from this area and around the globe hunkered down at UNCA for several days in search of practical ways to enrich education, conserve energy and protect the environment. The exercise, called the Design Science Lab, took problem-solving techniques developed by the famed […]

It’s a date: Local calendars make every day count When was the last time you got excited about a calendar? Really, truly excited? Take a minute and cast your mind back … Was it Celebrity Pugs 1999? Sashimi 2000? Bodies by Silicone 2004? It’s true that even as the personal computer takes over most every […]

Bears repeating photo by Amy Rowling Jene McGlamery is not the model of restraint, at least where panda bears are concerned. Her West Asheville home has grown into a preserve that currently holds 3,085 of them, primarily of the stuffed-animal variety. This year, she’s more or less abandoned plans to decorate her house — which […]

Extreme home makeover The city of Asheville will be forced to evict and relocate 41 families from a failed affordable-housing development near McCormick Field to make room for potential new development city staffers hope will be a success. McCormick Heights currently operates as an affordable-apartment complex owned by Asheville Mountainside, LLC, a corporation that includes […]

You have a right not to remain silent Doing your thing: Members of Asheville Theatre turn audience stories into drama. photo by Jonathan Welch International Human Rights Day is observed each Dec. 10 to focus attention on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The celebration dates back to 1950, when the United Nations General Assembly […]

In a carefully staged demonstration Nov. 21 outside Staples on Merrimon Avenue in Asheville, an unidentified chicken, a woman calling herself Tammy Banks (“President of the Poultry Defense League and Miss Asheville Speedway 1989”) and a flock of poultry partisans gathered to peck at the city’s lack of action on the office-supply store’s noncompliant red […]

The red-pen special There was a time when development “master plans” submitted to the Buncombe County Planning Department received consideration whether or not they merited a first glance from the department’s staff. With a shy grin and a shrug of the shoulders, a developer could hand over a blueprint for a project that failed to […]

Battered workers Domestic violence has a cost outside the home. The American Institute on Domestic Violence reports that “intimate partner violence victims lose nearly 8 million days of paid work each year — the equivalent of more than 32,000 full-time jobs and nearly 5.6 million days of household productivity.” The impact of domestic violence in […]

Business as if life mattered, Nov. 10 Not infrequently, environmental sensitivity and capitalist profitability are offered as mutually exclusive, even diametrically opposed strategies for business and society. Ecological ethics are cast as either unaffordable or as charitable endeavors for the comfortably equipped — and either way, not compatible with emphasis on the bottom line. Ray […]