Environmental Justice

The issue is not growth or no growth, but a better world

Growing a better world 5
Posted 5 months, 1 week ago
Questioning growth has been the obsessive focus of many for decades. Questioners make important points. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been, at best, a very rough proxy for wellbeing, often not even that. For this and other reasons many liberals, progressives, and leftists consider a "steady state economy" part of building a good society. For all that critics of growth get right, they focus in the end on the wrong thing, on growth rather than waste.
Murder by breath

Goodbye to Cancer Valley: In remembrance of my friend John Soley 0
Posted 5 months, 1 week ago
After a long struggle with cancer, my friend Mr. John Soley died at his home in Carbon County, Pa. on Saturday, June 20. He was only 62, which is too young to die of natural causes. But then, neither John nor I believe he got sick from natural causes. We believe he and many of his neighbors were poisoned by pollution, and that the perpetrators should be held to account.
Joe Barton not interested in moral implications of climate change 15
Posted 5 months, 2 weeks ago
On Tuesday, I attended a hearing of the House Energy & Commerce Committee on "Allowance Allocation Policies in Climate Legislation." By and large, the testimony came from economists and executives from affected industries. But there was one exception: Rev. Dr. Maria Castellanos of the United Church of Christ.
Dispatch from Bonn: Population Action International

Powerful injustice at the Bonn climate talks 3
Posted 5 months, 3 weeks ago
Over the past few days at the Bonn climate negotiations, the issue of inequity has come up in many different contexts. Today, I am thinking about the ways that inequity rears its head in mundane but powerful ways.
Black Tide

Must-read new story on the Tennessee coal ash disaster and the myth of “clean coal” 4
Posted 5 months, 4 weeks ago
A blockbuster story in the new GQ takes a comprehensive look at the Tenn. coal ash disaster of last December and the mockery it makes of "clean coal." An early contender for Year's Best Journalism.
DUMPING IN DIXIE

Toxic waste from New York river cleanup headed to Texas 0
Posted 6 months, 2 weeks ago
Work got underway this week to clean up hazardous PCB pollution that General Electric dumped into New York's Upper Hudson River. But the toxic waste is being sent to a landfill that sits atop the Ogallala Aquifer, a key drinking-water source for West Texas.
Coal Ash Dumped on the Disadvantaged 0
Posted 6 months, 2 weeks ago
Hot potato

Pennsylvania rejected TVA coal ash that’s going to poor communities in Alabama and Georgia 2
Posted 6 months, 2 weeks ago
Some of the more than 1 billion gallons of toxic coal ash that spilled from an impoundment at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston power plant in eastern Tennessee last December is making its way to landfills in poor and black communities in Alabama and Georgia, as we reported last week at Facing South.

It turns out that TVA also looked into sending the waste to Pennsylvania for dumping into abandoned mines -- but that state's Department of Environmental Protection rejected the ash as substandard.
Letter from Europe

The Goldman Prize: True tales of bravery 3
Posted 7 months, 1 week ago
"Most environmental prizes go to worthy but well known figures, most of whose mantelpieces already groan under the burden of similar honors," writes Grist contributor and Goldman Prize juror Geoffrey Lean. "The Goldman Prize, by contrast, is for the unknowns and unrecognized, individuals who are fighting -- and winning -- desperate battles, often in obscure corners of the planet, almost always against overwhelming odds, and commonly at immense personal risk."
Diversity in the field, and at the table

A multicolored good food movement 0
Posted 7 months, 1 week ago
As the good food movement matures, its members have begun discussing its inclusiveness. This week, at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s ninth Food and Society Conference, speaker after speaker touched upon the topic of race and access to good food.
Our Work's Not Finished

Screw Earth Day? Not so fast 3
Posted 7 months, 1 week ago
Gaylord Nelson, the Wisconsin senator who founded Earth Day in 1970, wouldn't be surprised by some of the criticism leveled at the annual green celebration. But, says Nelson's biographer, there's a reason this holiday caught on -- and still matters.
That White People Stuff

Broadening the Earth Day tent 3
Posted 7 months, 2 weeks ago
How's Earth Day doing? Mike Cermak says environmentalists should be asking how Black History Month is doing instead.
A Nobel Effort

Wangari Maathai film shows Kenyan tree planting as political subversion 0
Posted 7 months, 2 weeks ago
Taking Root has more to say about social change than about forest ecology--I’m not sure it even mentions the types of trees being planted. But it makes abundantly clear the connections between environmental health, human rights, and democracy.
Injustice in Ecuador

Ecuadorian government shuts down leading environmental group 0
Posted 8 months, 2 weeks ago
The Ecuadorian government has shut down Acción Ecológica (Environmental Action), withdrawing the legal status of one of South America's best-known environmental groups. Acción Ecológica has in recent months supported indigenous-led, mass protests and highway blockades against President Rafael Correa's support for large-scale mining.
In industrial-tomato country, workers suffer squalid living conditions and even slavery 0
Posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago
Rumor has it Obama will tap Van Jones as his green jobs czar 3
Posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago
The human cost of industrial tomatoes 0
Posted 8 months, 4 weeks ago
Checking out the scene in the nation’s industrial-tomato capital 0
Posted 9 months ago
What percentage of auction revenue is rebated? 10
Posted 9 months ago
Cap-and-trade rebates to taxpayers favor efficiency over equity 10
Posted 9 months ago