by Gregory Dicum
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Mother Knows Best
Fed up with breast-milk contamination, mothers form a national activist group 2
Posted 3 years ago Mary Brune looked worried. "I don't know what the problem is," she said, peering at the generator in the grass. Attached to it was a blower that was, in turn, attached to a puddle of yellow nylon. The next morning, that puddle was supposed to inflate to become a giant rubber ducky, the centerpiece of a protest Brune was leading at a Target store near her home in the San Francisco Bay area.
Mary Brune speaks up for concerned
mothers everywhere.Photos: Gregory Dicum
For Brune, the golden ducky represented… Read More
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Not Your Average Bear
In B.C., a landmark rainforest-protection agreement was just the beginning 3
Posted 3 years ago
It took 10 years of work to protect British Columbia's Great Bear Rainforest.Photos: Gregory DicumThe Great Bear Rainforest, stretching from Vancouver Island to the Alaska Panhandle on the wild, rugged coast of British Columbia, is that rarest of things: an unvarnished environmental victory. But as the groundbreaking agreement signed to protect it comes into force, new challenges are surfacing.
The numbers are stunning: at 15.5 million acres, this… Read More
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It's all connected ...
A weekend at Bioneers 0
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Rubber duckie, you're the one ...
Polluting my bathroom 3
Posted 3 years, 1 month ago
You know that little rubber duckie in your bathroom? I always thought the little fella was sorta cute, nestled there between the shampoo and the loofa.
Well, it turns out the little ducky's not so rubber after all -- it's plastic, namely the dreaded PVC. And it further turns out the bathroom is full of the stuff. Read More
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Sea-ing climate change for yourself
San Francisco visualizes rising seas 2
Posted 3 years, 2 months ago I love living in San Francisco, where not only do we have a City Department of the Environment, but it's teamed up with the Sierra Club on an environmental art/advocacy project that is all at once simple, creative, thought-provoking, cheap, and replicable.Today, they launched FutureSeaLevel.org to bring the climate crisis home. It's an ingeniously simple idea: Participants tape up public spaces with a line of blue tape that marks the new sea level after unchecked global warming.
In a coastal city like San Francsico, it's a disturbing sight indeed -- the blue line cuts the urban landscape… Read More
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Last Action-Sports Hero
Frank Scura’s green ideas are sick 0
Posted 3 years, 3 months ago
Xtremely green demo at a Whole Foods in San Mateo, Calif.
Photo: Courtesy ASEC
With the recent profusion of green takes on everything from diapers to caskets, Frank Scura's proposition might sound like more of the same: "We're about greening the planet, one skateboard at a time." But Scura, founder of the Bay Area-based Action Sports Environmental Coalition, isn't your average environmentalist. And action sports -- that heavily marketed package of adrenaline-infused competition undertaken on oceans of plywood -- is a little different too.For one… Read More
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Green Is the New Dead
Green-burial movement gets more ambitious 14
Posted 3 years, 4 months ago
Resting in peace at Ramsey
Creek.Photo: Memorial Ecosystems.
"I'd prefer to be put in the ground, under a tree," says Joe Sehee, contemplating his inevitable demise. "But I don't want to go in the ground with anything, I just want to be buried in a simple pine box or shroud, and that's it."
If Sehee has given his preferences a lot of thought lately, it's not that he's planning to shuffle off this mortal coil any more imminently than the rest of us -- it's just that, as executive… Read More
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Free as a jailbird 1
Posted 3 years, 6 months ago When I spoke to Jeff Luers by phone from Oregon State Prison, our wide-ranging talk covered more than just his political views. Having never spent time in prison -- and hoping never to do so -- I was curious about what his day-to-day life is like there.Here's part of that discussion ... Read More
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Justice in Time
Meet Robert Bullard, the father of environmental justice 0
Posted 3 years, 8 months ago Robert Bullard says he was "drafted" into environmental justice while working as an environmental sociologist in Houston in the late 1970s. His work there on the siting of garbage dumps in black neighborhoods identified systematic patterns of injustice. The book that Bullard eventually wrote about that work, 1990's Dumping in Dixie, is widely regarded as the first to fully articulate the concept of environmental justice.Since then, Bullard, who is as much activist as academic, has been one of the leading voices of environmental-justice advocacy. He was one of the planners of the First National People of Color… Read More
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A Second Ganz
Enviros need to get social, says activist-turned-sociologist Marshall Ganz 1
Posted 3 years, 11 months ago Most of us can probably name a grandfather or great-aunt who was active in a chapter of a national association. My own uncle was a member of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. Yet how many of us can say the same about ourselves?
Marshall Ganz.
Photo: Harvard University/Justin Ide.
As voluntary associations fade from our cultural landscape, political participation is threatened, especially on the left, says sociologist Marshall Ganz. And, he says, that trend is undermining the environmental movement, which has long depended on engaged members to carry its… Read More
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