San Jose Mercury News

Hired tree-sitter is camped out in the branches of a 400-year old tree in an attempt to halt development of a highway in Santa Clarita. His protest has attracted supporters and the media.

The H2, the newest model of the massive military Hummer is a surprise hit at $50,000, outselling SUVs from BMW, Cadillac, Lincoln and Lexus.

Gobal warming may cause the polar ice cap to disappear for a few months during summer opening up shipping passages and cutting travel distances between Asia and Europe.

Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, founder of the Congress for New Urbanism, will lead a charrette in San Jose, CA.

An unprecendented project to photograph the entire California coastline and make it available on the Web is aimed at helping efforts to fight coastal threats like seawalls and development.

Nearly 300,000 property owners in Santa Clara County, CA will pay a an extra $20 for the preservation of open space.

Freemont, CA, is considering a new policy that aims for more affordable and high-density housing.

Five opinions on how to control sprawl and make housing affordable in the Bay Area.

How land prices drive the housing market.

Owners of several California mobile home parks want to boost monthly rents, and are suing cities for the right to do so.

A regional approach to battle congestion calls for adding toll lanes to major highways, extending BART and building a bridge across the bay.

Sales of $8,500 Segway Human Transporter, have been very slow, but could skyrocket when the device becomes available to the general public next year.

Santa Clara and San Francisco transit boards approve a historic $3.7 billion rail extension into downtown San Jose.

The collapse of the dot-coms in the Bay Area has eased traffic on the area's freeways. It is the biggest one-year decline in nearly a decade.

An estimated 50 to 80 percent of all electronic waste "recycled" in the U.S. ends up in Asia.

A unique conservation deal for 3,000 acres in San Mateo County, CA will result in an experiment in "conservation grazing."

A Sierra Club reportgave the Bay Area a C-minus grade for its efforts to reducesmog through public transit spending. The report found thatresidents of the nine-county Bay Area created as muchpollution per person as did residents of perennially smo

San Jose has become California's only large city to achieve a tough 10-year recycling goal of diverting half its trash from landfills.

Caltrain is working on an overhaul plan and construction schedule for a high-speed train service between San Jose and San Francisco.

In a slowing economy, a majority of voters in 20 states agreed to taxes and bonds to preserve open space, creating $1.15 billion in new funding for land conservation.