The personal care industry has long demanded stricter standards for products labeled “natural,” and in February, the Natural Products Association (NPA), the group representing retailers and manufacturers including Whole Foods and Clorox Co., has released new standards for home-care products. These include household cleaners for bathrooms and kitchen countertops and laundry detergents. Up until now,…

Portuguese rescue workers using bulldozers searched on Sunday for more bodies under debris after violent floods and mudslides killed at least 40 people on the resort island of Madeira. Authorities flew more rescue teams and military engineers from the mainland to help the Atlantic island where a heavy rainstorm on Saturday unleashed floods and mudslides,…

Does Fair Trade Coffee Lift Growers Out of Poverty or Simply Ease Our Guilty Conscience? Is the Fair Trade movement just a marketing scheme or does it truly provide a living wage for coffee growers? How many times a day do you consume a food produced by a subsistence farmer on the other side of…

Fishermen are furious a pesticide normally used for agriculture ended up in the Bay of Fundy and may have contributed to the death of hundreds of lobsters. Dead lobsters first appeared last November in Grand Manan’s Seal Cove, and five days later a fisherman 50 kilometres away in Pocologan found more dead lobsters in his…

Yvo de Boer, the head of the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat, has formally announced he’ll be leaving the post this July. The decision is widely thought to come from de Boer’s deep disappointment with the results of the Copenhagen climate talks, and the nonbinding Accord forged there. An energetic and often “sharp-tongued” man, many…

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has set Japan a November deadline to stop Southern Ocean whaling or face an international legal challenge to its yearly cull, launched by his government. Australia preferred to find a diplomatic solution to its standoff with Tokyo over the annual whale cull near Antarctica, Rudd said, but was serious about…

Yemeni water trader Mohammed al-Tawwa runs his diesel pumps day and night, but gets less and less from his well in Sanaa, which experts say could become the world’s first capital city to run dry. “My well is now 400 meters (1,300 feet) deep and I don’t think I can drill any deeper here,” said…

Less than two months after it was hastily drafted to stave off a fiasco, the Copenhagen Accord on climate change is in a bad way, and some are already saying it has no future. The deal was crafted amid chaos by a small group of countries, led by the United States and China, to avert…

An examination of mineral deposits in a coastal cave on the Spanish island of Mallorca shows evidence of rapid rises and declines in sea level as the planet warmed and cooled. Reporting in the journal Science, University of Iowa researchers said that studies of the mineral, calcite — deposited by sea water on the inside…

Gold medals are not handed out for architectural design, but the environmentally friendly speed skating arena built for the Vancouver Olympics is being called a winner by the bladed athletes who will compete there this month. The Richmond Olympic Oval, considered the signature building of the Games, contains salvaged wood damaged by a pine-beetle infestation…