High Marks for Lowe's
The world's second-largest home-improvement retailer, with revenues last year of nearly
$16 billion, has added planet improvement to its corporate strategy. The North
Carolina-based Lowe's Companies Incorporated has adopted a procurement policy for its
stores that includes an "aggressive phaseout" of wood products from endangered
forests.
The company will also give preference to products that are certified by the
Forest Stewardship Council as coming from well-managed forests. Following in the footsteps
of a successful campaign by the Rainforest Action Network to get Home Depot to stop
selling old-growth wood, Lowe's is now working with the World Resources Institute to help
protect forests worldwide.
Nothing Like the Sun
Shakespeare has gone solar. The Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, is reaping the
benefits of investing in the Northwest's newest and largest solar photovoltaic project,
which generates 25 kilowatts-enough to fully power the festival, the Ashland police
station, and parts of Southern Oregon University. Surplus energy from the project is being
distributed to up to 250 Ashland residential and business customers who want the solar
service.
Riders of the World, Unite!
That bicycling is a pleasant way to get around is not news to the majority of the planet:
Worldwide, bicycles outnumber automobiles almost two to one and are by far the most widely
used mode of transport. But in urban areas, especially in industrialized nations, cyclists
have been pushed to the margins by the ubiquitous car culture. Increasingly, they're
pushing back.
In South America, they're called the Movimiento Furiosos Ciclistas. On the first
Tuesday of each month, thousands of hot and bothered Chileans in Santiago take to the
streets on their bikes in protest of the city's foul air-the eighth most polluted in the
world. The Furiosos have been championing pedal power since 1993. And with the election of
a sympathetic socialist president last year, they are finally getting the government's ear
in their call for bike paths, bike racks on buses, and a more bike-friendly city in
general. The founder of the Furiosos is now an advisor to the head of Chile's environment
office.
In San Francisco, the "organized coincidence" of a lot of cyclists coming
together in one place, usually downtown on the last Friday of the month, is called
Critical Mass. This grassroots gathering, which began in 1992 with 45 fed-up cyclists and
which now numbers in the thousands, has inspired Critical Mass groups to take root in more
than 100 cities worldwide, including Melbourne, Berlin, Chicago, Toronto, and London.
According to Chris Carlsson, one of the original San Francisco cyclists, Critical Mass
deliberately eschews formal leaders or agendas. If it's "about" anything, it's
an invitation to resist the disruption and damage created by auto-dependency and to
inspire questions about what kind of life we'd like to live, what kinds of roads we'd like
to travel on and in what manner, and whether the technologies that drive us are really
necessary.
With typical European flair, the EU has named a day to honor the growing anti-auto
sentiment: Last year on September 22, residents in 800 European towns and cities in 27
countries participated in the annual "car-free" day, in which automobiles are
banned from city centers. In a show of support, President Jorge Sampaio of Portugal took
the bus to the presidential palace, telling reporters, "There is another way to
live."
