Generation Green: Waging a Stylish Battle | Newsweek Leadership and the Environment

BY THE NUMBERS
The 9 Unhealthiest Summer Vacation Destinations
5/7/2008 12:00:00 AM
Your summer vacation should be a chance to escape the stresses of everyday life. But how much can you relax, really, if you're in an area that's unhealthy, unsafe or uncomfortably hot or humid? No place is perfect, of course, or entirely immune to crime, pollution and bad weather. But statistically speaking, there's a higher risk that you'll encounter one or more of those summer vacation spoilers in one of these nine destinations:
Blowhard in Chief
David G. Victor 5/1/2008 12:00:00 AM
Leadership matters when it comes to greenery because solving most environmental issues requires a change in direction. Leaders can send signals and forge new paths. But in the area where the world thinks a single leader towers above all—namely the choice of the next American president—leadership actually matters a lot less. America's president is powerful, to be sure, but American politics has been fragmenting over the last few decades. Alone, the president often has a weak impact on real American policies that affect the environment.
BORDER POLITICS
Brownsville’s Bad Lie
Arian Campo-Flores
For five generations, the Benavidez family has lived on a seven-acre plot of serene farmland near the U.S.-Mexico border west of Brownsville, Texas. They've harvested cotton and squash and raised goats and pigs. They've helped sculpt the levee that snakes across the rear of the property. They've given birth there, married there and died there. Their connection to the land runs so deep that they can't imagine parting with even a piece of it. So two weeks ago, when federal employees arrived asking to purchase a rectangular slice abutting the levee for $4,100 to make way for a border fence aimed at deterring illegal immigrants, they refused. "I don't want to scare you," Idalia Benavidez, 77, says one of the employees told her, "but whether you agree or not, the government's going to make the fence." If the Feds get their way, an 18-foot-high barrier will soon traverse the Benavidez property, cutting off their cows from a pasture south of the fence's proposed path. "It's going to be ugly," says Benavidez. Worse still, she predicts, "it's not going to work."
ENVIRONMENT AND LEADERSHIP
The New Green Leaders
Barrett Sheridan
With less than a year left in office, President George W. Bush will probably never win the Greenpeace seal of approval. He is, after all, the leader who, in one of his first official acts back in 2001, rejected the Kyoto Protocol, keeping the United States from participating in the effort to curb carbon emissions. He also told a skeptical Congress that opening Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling was essential to national security. Lately, however, Bush is turning … well, if not green, then at least lime or chartreuse. In mid-April he announced that the United States would be willing to commit to binding emissions targets. He has also signed into law the first increase in auto-efficiency requirements in three decades and embraced alternative fuels. What is behind Bush's late-term epiphany about the environment?
THE FUTURE OF ENERGY
A Renegade Against Greenpeace
Fareed Zakaria
Patrick Moore is a critic of the environmental movement—an unlikely one at that. He was one of the cofounders of Greenpeace, and sailed into the Aleutian Islands on the organization's inaugural mission in 1971, to protest U.S. nuclear tests taking place there. After leading the group for 15 years he left abruptly, and, in a controversial reversal, has become an outspoken advocate of some of the environmental movement's most detested causes, chief among them nuclear energy. NEWSWEEK's Fareed Zakaria spoke to Moore about his sparring with the green movement, and why he thinks nuclear power is the energy of the future. Excerpts:
BUSINESS
Stronger Than Steel

For the opening race of the Eastern U.S. collegiate cycling season, Nick Frey, a junior at Princeton, had a brand-new bike. Frey, currently the under-23 national time-trial champion and a recent hire of the Time Pro Cycling Team, had left his state-of-the-art, $13,000 carbon-fiber team bike at home. What he brought instead—and what was drawing a steady crowd of disbelieving collegiate cyclists on that chilly March morning—was an even more recent model: a racing bike he and friends had made out of bamboo.