Monday, 04 Apr 2005

A new-to-the-movement greenie wonders how enviro sage Umbra Fisk is able to keep well-informed on the major issues. Fisk suggests some great green resources and asks readers for their own faves. Head on over to Gristmill, Grist's zippy li'l blog, and submit your recommendations as comments. Tell Umbra and other readers what enviro history books you like and what you read to keep up with green happenings the world over.

Easy Encomium, Easy Go

EPA earns enviro praise by updating cancer guidelines to protect kids

Here's a rarity: Enviros actually praised a Bush administration move last week. The U.S. EPA earned the plaudits by announcing that it will update its nearly 20-year-old chemical-assessment approach for evaluating potential human carcinogens, to account for differences between adults and children and between lab animals and humans. The new guidelines will influence agency rules on everything from clean air and water to pesticide regulation and old Superfund sites. Recent studies have shown that kids from age 2 to 16 may be at three times greater risk than adults of getting cancer from chemicals, and kids younger than 2 at 10 times greater risk, something the new approach finally takes into account. Most environmental groups praised the new guidelines, though a few were skeptical of the language, courtesy of the Office of Management and Budget, that lets outside groups -- say, industry -- challenge the science before it becomes part of the guidelines.


Norris McDonald of the African American Environmentalist Association is an avid proponent of stringent clean-air standards. Perhaps that's because he's an asthmatic who's had two near-death experiences. As this week's InterActivist, he explains why the issue of smog gets him all choked up, offers his thoughts on how the environmental movement could improve race relations, and expresses his disgust at the green movement's "opposition dogma." Send McDonald a question of your own by noon PDT on Wednesday, April 6; we'll publish his responses to selected questions on Friday.

Ballast Off

Judge rules EPA must regulate ballast water, control invasive species

In a court decision called "a slam dunk for healthy oceans" by the Ocean Conservancy's Sarah Newkirk, a federal judge ruled last week that the U.S. EPA must regulate ballast water carried by ships entering U.S. waters. The ruling reverses the agency's exemption of ballast water under the Clean Water Act and labels the water -- carried from a ship's port of origin to maintain stability and then released after it reaches its destination, often along with foreign species -- a pollutant. Green groups, including the Ocean Conservancy and four others that petitioned the EPA in 1999 to reverse the exemption and then sued in 2003 when the agency refused, praised the decision, saying it would help promote technology and programs aimed at controlling invasive species, a threat that costs coastal areas billions of dollars in damage every year.


If the critics claiming that environmentalism is dead or dying had been plying their trade in the 1850s, they would have blamed failure to abolish slavery on the abolition movement rather than the slaveholders and the economic interests tied to them, argues Martin S. Kaplan, an adviser to environmental funders, in Soapbox. Meanwhile, four green funders chatting amongst themselves on the pages of Grist see a movement that's alive and kicking, if not exactly kicking butt. The four -- Hooper Brooks of the Surdna Foundation, Stuart Clarke of the Town Creek Foundation, Enrique Salmon of the Christensen Fund, and Rhea Suh of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation -- hatch ideas for bolstering environmental activism and getting green folks to talk constructively instead of kvetch pointlessly.