My six years of in-depth, investigative coverage for Mountain Xpress of Western North Carolina's air-quality issues (consistently ranked as residents' top political and health concern) has helped environmentalists, business owners, and politicians forge a consensus on cleaning up the region's air. I've also covered broader environmental issues -- for example, I revealed how fake-grassroots corporate front groups stirred up anti-U.N. paranoia to sabotage a federally funded program that would have benefited a local river, and my article on a local fuel-cell inventor doubles as a clear and fascinating intro to this alternative energy source. And for about a year, I published "Eco Shorts," an innovative roundup of environmental-news briefs (categorized as Fire, Air, Water or Earth) that Xpress readers still stop me on the street to tell me they miss.
(Clips are listed in reverse chronological order, with lead paragraphs. Follow links for full text.)
BRIEF: Asheville's a "Cool City" -- officially
Mountain Xpress, Nov. 23, 2005
When President George W. Bush pulled the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement to curb global warming by reducing fossil-fuel emissions, a grassroots movement sprung up in municipalities across the country to commit cities to the international agreement's pollution-reduction goals.
Now, Asheville's outgoing mayor, Charles Worley, has become the 188th city leader to sign the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection agreement.BRIEF: Clean the air, go to college
Mountain Xpress, June 22, 2005
Seven $1,000 scholarships are waiting for college-bound high-school seniors who research and suggest potential solutions to Buncombe County's air-pollution problems. The funds are part of a $35,000 grant that the Western North Carolina Air Quality Agency awarded June 7 to the Clean Air Community Trust (CACT).BRIEF: Clean-air activists stop rule relaxation -- for now
Mountain Xpress, May 25, 2005
Letters of objection some 80 citizens sent to Raleigh have put on hold a change in state rules that would weaken clean-up requirements for grandfathered power plants.BRIEF: Air agency honored for protecting children
Mountain Xpress, May 11, 2005
After medical experts linked a sharp regional rise in childhood asthma and other lung disorders to Western North Carolina's polluted air, the WNC Regional Air Quality Agency launched a program in 2003 to reduce kids' exposure to harmful diesel emissions from their schoolbuses.BRIEF: That's steam, not smoke
Mountain Xpress, May 4, 2005
Drivers on Interstate 26 are often alarmed by the plume pouring out of the smokestack on Progress Energy's coal-burning Skyland power plant. It just looks so bad for our air. And soon, the company warns, it's going to look a lot worse.
But hold the cell phone, Martha. That plume will be more visible because it will actually be much cleaner.BRIEF: How to meet live, local carpoolers
Mountain Xpress, May 4, 2005
Lonely singles hook up on the Internet -- so why not lone commuters? A new Web site is designed to help you find someone near you who shares your commute and work hours, and maybe even your interests -- in saving gas money and reducing air pollution, at any rate.Biodiesel blooms in Asheville
Green alternative to petroleum starts to make transportation inroads
Mountain Xpress, March 30, 2005
If Blue Ridge Biofuels has anything to say about it, every hippie bus in West Asheville should be able to dose on homemade biodiesel fuel this summer. By July, the group plans to open a publicly accessible pump in a part of town "where a lot of alternative people are," says spokesperson Matt Siegel -- either on a Roberts Street lot adjacent to the West Asheville RiverLink Bridge or at a gas station on Haywood Road, according to director Brian Winslett.Blowin' in the wind
State recommends letting grandfathered power plants continue to pollute
Mountain Xpress, March 9, 2005
Less than three years after North Carolina passed the groundbreaking Clean Smokestacks Act, the state now appears to be moving in the opposite direction when it comes to regulating air pollution from old, grandfathered power plants. But a grassroots environmental group based in Sylva is determined to hold North Carolina's feet to the fire.Squeezing in more open space
City proposes broader but more flexible requirements for developers
Mountain Xpress, Jan. 26, 2005
A proposed retooling of the open-space requirements in Asheville's Unified Development Ordinance could lead to more parks, more greenways, maybe even more sidewalk cafés surrounding denser housing and commercial developments in the city. That's the hoped-for result of a proposal Planning and Development Director Scott Shuford presented to a wary audience of local developers at a Jan. 7 meeting of the Council of Independent Business Owners at the Corner Stone Restaurant.A Standing Ovation for cleaner air
Agency applauds local antipollution efforts
Mountain Xpress, Jan. 19, 2005
As any good manager knows, the carrot is often as important as the stick. And for the second straight year, the agency that regulates Buncombe County's air polluters put that precept into practice by handing out awards to businesses and organizations that have gone above and beyond what the law requires in reducing their contributions to local air pollution.The coming flood of traffic
State traffic study shows laying more pavement in Asheville can't prevent gridlock by 2030
Mountain Xpress, Dec. 15, 2004
In the end, whether Interstate 26 has six lanes or eight may not matter. No amount of road-widening or road-building is going to save Asheville from the coming deluge of traffic, according to a new, long-range regional traffic model commissioned by the state Department of Transportation.BRIEF: Put that PC to sleep
Mountain Xpress, Nov. 10, 2004
A personal computer seems so clean. No gas-guzzling engine spins its hard drive; no trees need to die to produce its paperless documents -- just plug it in and play in the stream of electrons.
But when the source of those streams is a coal-fired electric power plant, your computer can indirectly produce a surprising amount of dirty air.BRIEF: New Woodfin water board obtains conservation easement
Mountain Xpress, Nov.3 , 2004
A crowd of state and local officials and citizens turned out on Oct. 15 to help the Woodfin Water District's new board of trustees celebrate a conservation easement on the 2,000 acres of watershed it manages. The easement will forever protect the pristine sources of Reems Creek, Laurel Fork and Sugar Camp Fork from logging and development.Running against the smog
Relay for Clean Air highlights local air-quality problems
Mountain Xpress, Sept. 8, 2004
It wasn't gold, silver and bronze but asthma and acid rain that motivated more than a dozen Western North Carolinians to run, walk and bike through 100 miles of fog and rain, steep mountain slopes, nighttime gloom and traffic perils to relay a flag from downtown Asheville to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.Smell? What smell?
Air board appointees get a whiff of pollution politics
Mountain Xpress, July 21, 2004
"Keep an open mind; be fair; realize that you stand at the intersection of the public and our industry ... [and] keep politics as far away from this place as you can."
Those were Nelda Holder's parting words of wisdom to the two new appointees replacing her and Lew Patrie on the Western North Carolina Air Quality Agency's board.
Sidebar: APAC under attack
APAC-Atlantic Inc. has been taking its lumps in North Carolina lately. The nation's largest asphalt-and-concrete paving contractor, with more than $2 billion in revenue in 2002, APAC has been in the news:BRIEF: Beacon blaze left mammoth mess
Mountain Xpress, April 7, 2004
It was the biggest fire in Western North Carolina's history. Now, seven months later, about all that's left of the Beacon Manufacturing plant in Swannanoa is 57,000 tons of still-smoldering debris. And someone's got to clean it up.Threat or promise?
Local governments opt to continue clean-air plan
Mountain Xpress, March 17, 2004
Mountain residents and visitors can breathe a more-or-less clean sigh of relief: Unexpectedly low ozone-pollution levels let Western North Carolina off the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's nonattainment hook (for now, anyway). Nonetheless, local government leaders still want to continue with their now-voluntary Mountain Area Compact to work on cleaning up the region's air.BRIEF: A family Air Fair
Mountain Xpress, Sept. 17, 2003
You might as well run a freeway through your lawn.
No, we're not talking about the I-26 connector. It's that lawn mower you wake up your trying-to-sleep-in teenager with every Saturday morning.
But noise pollution isn't the only thing the old grassbuster emits: After one hour of operation, a typical two-cycle, gas-powered mower can produce more air pollution than 40 late-model automobiles, say air-quality experts.Fueling the future
Fuel cells spark local enthusiasm
Mountain Xpress, July 23, 2003
It's more than 200 years since the Industrial Revolution launched its machine-based retooling of human societies, yet our high-tech gadgetry is still mostly dependent on the steam engine. That's right -- whether your local power plant splits atoms or burns fossil fuel, all it's really doing is making heat that boils water to create steam, which sets a big magnet spinning in a copper coil to generate electricity. In the process, however, it wastes more energy than it produces, it devours whole mountains to get at a few months' worth of coal or uranium, and its toxic excretions pollute the air or taint the earth with radioactive wastes.
Sidebar: What's a fuel cell?
A cross between a battery and a generator, the fuel cell uses a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen to create a current of electricity. Its only waste products are water (pure enough to drink, when straight hydrogen is the fuel), carbon dioxide, and a small amount of heat.BRIEF: A toast to the fuel-cell future
Mountain Xpress, June 18, 2003
The combination keeps many a stressed-out CEO running. So it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that scotch and Maalox can run a motor, too -- if it's powered by a fuel cell.No resolution in sight
Toxic threat to WNC rivers still looms at Ecusta
Mountain Xpress, March 5, 2003
Wrapped tighter than ever in an intricate financial web that so far has defied all attempts to unravel it, RFS Ecusta may never again spin out the fine flax paper it has produced since 1939 in Transylvania County, near the banks of the French Broad River.Choose clean air -- or Uncle Sam will do it for us
EPA compact offers alternative to stricter regulation
Mountain Xpress, Dec. 11, 2002
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is offering five counties in Western North Carolina a chance to take a fast track to cleaner air. The catch is, it's a one-time-only deal, and they have just three weeks to think it over. If city and county elected officials in Buncombe, Henderson, Madison, Transylvania and Haywood counties can all agree by Dec. 31 to sign onto an "early action compact" -- a voluntary commitment to creating a serious regional plan to reduce air pollution -- WNC can avoid the dreaded stigma of "nonattainment," the EPA's designation for an area whose air has become so unhealthy that the federal government has to step in and tell its residents how to clean up their mess. But if even one of these counties refuses to go along, the fix-it-yourself scenario will cease to be an option for all of them.Paraquat for breakfast?
Proposed change OKs spraying pesticides over homes, schools
Mountain Xpress, Dec. 4, 2002
Faced with an outpouring of protest against its proposal to loosen restrictions on aerial spraying of pesticides near homes, schools, hospitals and nursing homes, the North Carolina Pesticide Board has extended its deadline for accepting public comment on the rule change. The proposal, which was drafted at the request of the crop-dusting industry, would lift the current no-spray buffer zones around homes, schools, hospitals, day-care centers and nursing homes, allowing up to 6 parts per million of any aerial pesticide to be deposited on them.Local group wins environmental victory
Dogwood Alliance persuades Staples to switch to recycled paper
Mountain Xpress, Nov. 20, 2002
An Asheville-based environmental group has helped persuade America's biggest office-supply retailer to switch to selling paper products with an average of 30 percent recycled content. Vice Chairman Joe Vassalluzzo of Staples joined the Dogwood Alliance's Danna Smith and Todd Paglia of the San Francisco-based group ForestEthics in a Nov. 12 press conference to make the groundbreaking announcement. The $11-billion-a-year corporation also pledged to stop buying paper products made using timber from old-growth and endangered forests and to appoint an environmental-affairs executive who will report annually on the company's progress.Astroturf organizing (Part 2 of 2)
How corporate front groups use unwitting citizens to advance corporate agendas
Mountain Xpress, Nov. 13, 2002
How does a giant mining, timber, ranching or other natural-resource-exploiting corporation that sees environmental regulation as a threat to profits fight a nimble, decentralized, increasingly popular and influential foe like the environmental movement?
Answer: Use environmentalists' own tactics against them.
Over the past two decades, scores of faux "grassroots" groups have sprung up that are actually heavily financed industry front groups.
Sidebar: From the source
Contrary to the claims being spread by "wise-use" corporate-front groups, the U.N.'s Global Biodiversity Assessment characterized as "simple and perhaps over-ambitious" the Project's "controversial" 1992 proposal to "expand natural habitats and corridors to cover as much as 30% of the U.S. land area."On the waterfront (Part 1 of 2)
Did property-rights paranoia deprive local communities of much-needed federal funding?
Mountain Xpress, Sept. 25, 2002
Supporters promised it would pull in millions of federal dollars to revitalize riverfronts in WNC and East Tennessee. Opponents warned it would lead to United Nations troops invading America in black helicopters to seize private property. Nearly five years ago, the campaign to win federal American Heritage River designation for the French Broad sparked a bizarre debate that ended when U.S. Rep. Charles Taylor of Brevard scotched the river's nomination at the 11th hour.BRIEF: 99 bottles of beer in the bin
Mountain Xpress, May 22, 2002
The next time you're in a local restaurant or bar, when you ask your server to bring you another glass of wine or beer or soda, the members of Better Asheville Recycling Coalition would like you to ask another question, too: "Do you recycle?" In most downtown eateries, they say, the answer will be "No."
Eco shorts
Mountain Xpress, March 2001 through April 2002
It's not just some romantic fancy that leads us to classify these environmental-news briefs by the four ancient elements: Earth, Water, Air and Fire. Modern physicists say four states of matter exist -- solid, liquid, gas and plasma and four layers of the planet (geosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere and magnetosphere). Whatever terms you use, that's four basic ways we can foul our environment ... or fix it.From spuds to sustainable fuel
AFVs could help rescue region's troubled air
Mountain Xpress, March 20, 2002
It seems fairly certain now that at least half of the air pollution that gets trapped in the inversion-prone French Broad River Valley originates from the tailpipes of our own cars, trucks, lawn mowers, backhoes and tractors. (See "SAMI says we're all to blame for ozone and haze," Jan. 23 Xpress). And as our sprawled-out suburbs and strip malls multiply, so too does the average daily number of vehicle miles we travel -- up 44.1 percent statewide between 1985 and 1994 (during the same period, the state's population increased by 14.5 percent, according to the Land-of-Sky Council) -- as well as the number of days when the state's children, asthmatics and elderly folks are threatened by dangerously high levels of ozone, a chemical byproduct of fossil-fuel combustion.SAMI study says we're all to blame for haze and ozone
Preliminary results blame local, not distant emissions
Mountain Xpress, Jan. 23, 2002
New Asheville City Council member Carl Mumpower was introduced to new findings that will likely surprise many of his constituents: The source of most of Asheville's ozone pollution is apparently not the TVA plants in Tennessee but Asheville's own tailpipes and smokestacks.Everything's not all roses at Azalea
Road neighbors object to city's "beneficial fill" proposal
Mountain Xpress, Feb. 7, 2001
The Swannanoa River has borne the brunt of human activity for many generations -- particularly in the stretch that runs along Azalea Road in east Asheville. Before 1900, people dammed up the river not far from what is now the WNC Nature Center, in order to create Lake Craig. By the middle of the 20th century, however, the lake -- the pride of a little community called Azalea -- was gone, silted up by a sand-and-gravel mining operation upstream.Settling the settlement question
How far should regulators go in striking deals with air-pollution
violators?
Mountain Xpress, Dec. 6, 2000
Put away your checkbooks, polluters: The Air Quality Agency will not take a cash settlement in exchange for dropping a citation. At its Nov. 13 meeting, the agency board unanimously agreed that it will not negotiate pollution violations -- although the door will remain open for settlements of penalty amounts.Wire fires and friable tiles
Contractors appeal air-pollution citations
Mountain Xpress, Oct. 18, 2000
What if somebody sneaked onto your property early one morning, built a smoky, smelly bonfire out of leftover scraps of insulated wire, and then disappeared before the authorities showed up -- leaving you stuck with a hefty fine for illegal open burning? Are you liable for the air pollution, just because the property and the wire scraps were yours?
No, says the WNC Air Quality Agency board -- but you are partly to blame if you don't at least try to put the fire out.A change in the air?
Citizens, Gov. Hunt confront sources of WNC's ozone pollution
Mountain Xpress, Aug. 16, 2000
Skies in the Asheville area have become so poisoned with smog that state regulators considered our air healthy to breathe only one out of four days last summer. Between 1982 and 1994, the incidence of asthma in WNC's children shot up by 72 percent, according to the American Lung Association. Conservation experts say the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is now the country's most polluted national park. And scientific surveys reveal that more than three-fourths of the trees at elevations over 4,500 feet are dying or dead from acid rain.New hands to helm a new air-quality agency
Mountain Xpress, July 5, 2000
When the Western North Carolina Regional Air Quality Agency rises from the ashes of the old WNC Regional Air Pollution Control Agency this month, at least one new person will serve on the agency's five-member board, which is charged with managing WNC's deteriorating air quality. Asheville and Buncombe County created the new multigovernmental agency after Haywood County's sudden withdrawal from the old agency earlier this year.Just a little cloud still hanging over us
Air agency narrowly approves financial audit
Mountain Xpress, Jan. 19, 2000
After a heated duel between two of its members -- and a dramatic change of heart by a third -- the board of the Air Pollution Control Agency voted at its Jan. 10 meeting to continue seeking an in-depth, multi-year financial audit. A lingering public perception of corruption in the agency's recent past was the crucial factor that swayed the split vote 3-2 in favor of an independent audit going back four fiscal years.Audit debate rattles air agency
Mountain Xpress, Jan. 5, 2000
What skeletons in whose closets might be rattled by an extensive financial audit of the WNC Regional Air Pollution Control Agency? Would an impartial investigation into the agency's sketchily kept records from past years turn up evidence of greed and corruption, or merely of carelessness and lack of competent administration? Answers to these questions remained elusive after the agency's board announced, at its Dec. 13, 1999 meeting, that the Office of the State Auditor had turned down the board's request for a financial audit. But a heated discussion about whether the board should pursue an audit on its own made it clear that some board members have strong feelings about the APCA's fiscal past -- and Buncombe County's role as the agency's accountant.Beyond permits
Air-pollution agency considers expanding its role
Mountain Xpress, Oct. 20, 1999
Donate to flood victims in eastern North Carolina? Establish a program to reduce car and truck emissions here at home? These and other ideas for spending excess funds evoked heated discussion at the Western North Carolina Regional Air Pollution Control Agency's Oct. 11 board meeting.Breaking old habits
Air-pollution agency confronts major change
Mountain Xpress, Sept. 22, 1999
Under the continuing glare of public scrutiny, the board of the Western North Carolina Regional Air Pollution Control Agency met on Sept. 13 to consider the first fruits of its recent reforms.