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That's bad news for the pronghorn, considered the world's second-fastest land mammal. Populations of the shy antelope have plummeted by nearly 80 percent in recent years. Environmentalists are taking note-but that's about all they can do. Recent antiterrorist laws exempt the Department of Homeland Security from virtually all laws, including environmental legislation, leaving open the question of whether there will be a border left to defend.

Wooden It Be Nice?

Two programs in the northeastern United States are finding uses for waste wood. CitiLog, a New Jersey-based company, salvages urban and suburban trees that are being cut because of age or disease, or to make room for development, and ships them to Amish carpenters in Pennsylvania, according to AMC Outdoors (March 2006). The woodworkers turn the trees, which would otherwise be chipped or burned, into lumber and furniture. The magazine reports in its April issue that a higher-tech solution comes from SUNY-Syracuse researchers, who have discovered a way to turn the sugars produced (and tossed out) by paper mills into fuel-grade ethanol-a source that could meet 80 percent of current demand for the fuel. A for-profit refinery is now under construction in upstate New York.

Working Mothers

Quick: What do Papua New Guinea, Swaziland, Lesotho, Australia, and the United States have in common? According to Harvard researcher Jody Heymann, they are the only five countries that offer no paid leave to new mothers. As is increasingly the case, the states are stepping in where the federal government fails: According to the Christian Science Monitor (May 15, 2006), 26 states last year considered legislation that would make some form of paid leave a requirement. But that piecemeal action would still leave us well behind the 27 countries that offer at least three months paid leave for new fathers.

Easy Riders

If you pine for the days when kids rode their bikes to school, try fixing the sidewalks. That's the conclusion of a California study described in Landscape Architecture (May 2006). Overall, not even 16 percent of U.S. students ages 5 to 15 hoof it to school-one-third the percentage who biked three decades ago. In areas where municipalities installed curb cuts, traffic lights, and other pedestrian-friendly changes, however, researchers saw a 15 percent increase in walking or biking among schoolchildren.

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