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Gov. Jim Douglas was talking the talk at last Thursday’s kickoff of the 2008 “Way to Go! Commuter Challenge.” The annual springtime event is meant to encourage Vermonters to incorporate more eco-friendly travel alternatives into their daily commute, such as bicycling, walking, carpooling and public transportation.... Read more

Champlain College has spent a lot of time lately trying to sell its neighbors and the Burlington City Council on a plan to buy property near the heart of downtown, tear down a building, and construct new apartments for 200 students.... Read more

Green building is hardly black and white. The national protocols — the so-called LEED standards, for “Leadership in Energy and Design” — don’t account for regional nuance.... Read more

Tim Riddle knew a large housing project was planned for the woods behind his house when he moved to Malletts Bay Avenue a couple years ago. What he didn’t know was that the developer would sell the project to a nonprofit housing group, or that the $240,000 condominiums planned for the site would be replaced by rental housing for low- and moderate-income residents.... Read more

The Arabic translation of Al Jazeera is “the island.” But now, that island is about to be deep-sixed off the West Coast of New England.... Read more

"Facing Facts" is a new feature that appears each week in Local Matters, the local news section of Seven Days.

In the fall of 2006, Rusty Gould landed on Church Street and requested a bed at the Committee on Temporary Shelter (COTS) Waystation. When the weather turned, he threw a tent in his bike trailer, pedaled out of town and set up camp in the woods.

Gould was planning to do the same this year — until a Nissan sedan jumped the curb and smashed his rig, which was chained to a fence, outside of COTS’ King Street Daystation.... Read more

Behold the truck. As if you have a choice. Behind an 18-wheeler struggling uphill on a country two-lane, or in front of one barreling down the Interstate, you will behold it, like it or not.

In 2002, there were 1.28 million trucks with at least five-axles and 18 wheels in the United States, and they logged more than 82.3 billion miles. About $10 billion of the estimated $13.2 billion of consumer and manufacturing goods on sale in America — everything in every store and warehouse — reached its destination by truck.... Read more

Chances are, when you think about gasoline, it crosses your mind in an abstract way — as if where it comes from and how much of it exists is someone else’s problem. Thanks to “peak oil” expert Richard Heinberg, Americans’ naive attitude toward fossil fuels may be changing.... Read more

Last week, Sue Clark-Johnson, soon-to-be-retired president of the Newspaper Division of Gannett Co., Inc., told a gathering of industry executives something they already knew: “It’s a hellish time for newspapering.”... Read more