A Death - and new life - in the family

For the time being, effective in April, we will be incorporating EI NEWS web stories into hard-copy issues of EI Compliance Report while continuing to publish EI NEWS updates on our website. We intend to upgrade EI NEWS in the very near future with feature articles of great and significant interest on Texas and worldwide environmental issues.

We apologize for any inconvenience that we are causing by this decision. All hard-copy subscribers to EI NEWS will receive EI Compliance Report - which will contain articles that have been posted in EI NEWS (as noted) plus all the information normally in EI Compliance Report at no extra charge during the remainder of your subscription period. Readers of both newsletters will now be able to find everything they have been getting all in one place.

In yet another attempt to be relevant and valuable, we are embarking on an effort to establish chapters of Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow on college campuses in Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. Our goal is to develop a whole new generation of environmental professionals who are steeped in the traditions of the free market and human ingenuity and who believe that the answers to today's, and tomorrow's, environmental challenges will more often come from expending positive energy to improve the human condition rather than from expending negative energy to lament just how wicked we have been to Mother Nature.

We recall the environmental science textbook story on how in certain parts of Africa people are running out of wood to burn as fuel and therefore need to develop alternative energy sources. While we may agree that other energy sources are part of the solution, we are shocked that such textbooks would fail to challenge students to go to Africa to teach people there how to be better arborists - tree planters and cultivators.

Similarly, we often hear about the evils of deforestation of the Amazon rain forest, yet we rarely hear about efforts to teach Brazilians and others how to improve crop yields without relying on slash and burn farming techniques. We realize that today's young people need to be challenged to seek positive solutions to environmental challenges. We believe it is in part our job to push the envelope toward that goal.

One hoped-for benefit of these labors should be to train a new generation of environmental journalists who can take over this work (and do far greater things, too) in our dotage. Our hope is also to inspire a new generation of scientists and engineers, as well as policy wonks and public servants, to catch the vision of bringing new energy to the environmental challenges we face today and to even newer challenges that will come upon us tomorrow.

[We might mention that Collegians is a 501[c][3] nonprofit organization that believes most consumer and environmental problems can best be met and overcome - not through excessive government regulation and bureaucracy - but rather, by better unleashing the power of the free enterprise system and the ingenuity of science and technology.]

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