The candidate speaking at a Youth for Ron Paul event in Las Vegas. (Photo by Gage Skidmore.)

Justin Clements, a 21-year-old finance major at the University of Washington, believes “we are on an unsustainable path with regards to energy.” He thinks government subsidies to the oil and gas industry hold renewable energy back, and he's disgusted by the power corporations wield over elected officials.

But Clements doesn’t want the federal government to fix these problems. Cap-and-trade, he says, “is absolutely disastrous, and would not accomplish the goal of solving global climate change … [carbon] is not a tangible asset.”

Clements puts his faith in the power of a genuinely free market to set the real cost of resources. And, like a surprisingly large cohort of voters in his generation who have grown disillusioned with government, he also puts his faith in Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul -- the Texas congressman who has a libertarian answer to every political question.

Photo by tanakawho.

With Singles Appreciation Day just around the corner, you’re no doubt looking to Grist to guide you through it in the greenest way possible. Surveys indicate that over three-quarters of Americans find eco-mindedness an attractive quality in a partner, so if you’re not concerned yet about the PVC in your sex toys or the child slavery that produced your dark chocolate, it’s time to get conscious. Not to worry: We put together a last-minute Whitman’s sampler of our Valentine’s Day advice to make sure that whether you’re in lust, in love, or (happily!) alone, Mother Earth will always be your Valentine.

Rhiannon Tomtishen (left) and Madison Vorva.

It’s that time of year again -- time to weigh your love for Girl Scout cookies against your love for the rainforests. That’s right: As we’ve reported in the past, your Samoas are deforesting Sumatra and your Tagalongs are killing orangutans.

Girl Scout cookies are made with palm oil, which has seen a huge spike in demand as both a biofuel ingredient for Europeans and a trans fat-free ingredient in processed foods (like high-fructose corn syrup and similarly evil ingredients, palm oil is everywhere once you start looking for it). As a result, thousands of acres of rainforest -- mainly in Southeast Asia -- have been razed to plant palm fruit trees. In addition to destroying endangered species habitat and old-growth trees, many palm oil plantations have been known to employ children and treat their workers badly.

It’s actually two seasoned Girl Scouts who are putting the most pressure on the organization to stop using palm oil. Ironically, Madison Vorva and Rhiannon Tomtishen, 16-year-old Girl Scouts from Ann Arbor, Mich., first learned about the destructive effects of the palm oil industry five years ago, as part of a project to earn a Girl Scout Bronze Award. Last year, they gathered almost 70,000 signatures on a petition to Girl Scouts USA (GSUSA), asking the organization to stop using rainforest-destroying palm oil.

Luna craved human contact. (Photo by Mountainside Films.)

When husband-and-wife journalists Michael Parfit and Suzanne Chisholm first heard about a lone orca whale hanging out in Nootka Sound, a rugged inlet along Vancouver Island off British Columbia’s west coast, they thought attempts to reunite the creature with its pod would make “a very sweet, small story.” But as they spent the summer of 2004 learning how this young male (nicknamed Luna) showed up suddenly and mysteriously after getting separated from his pod three years before, they found themselves sucked into the action. By the time Parfit’s Smithsonian article about Luna came out in November of that year, attempts to move the whale out of Nootka Sound had failed, his future was uncertain, and Parfit and Chisholm knew they couldn’t let go of Luna or his story yet.

Last September, the couple released The Whale, a feature-length documentary narrated by Ryan Reynolds (a B.C. native) and produced by Scarlett Johansson. The buzzworthy film chronicles the controversy surrounding Luna, who captivated locals with his desire for social interaction and attention, but concerned scientists who worried that such contact would ultimately prove dangerous for both human and whale. To the Mowachaht-Muchalaht people living near Nootka Sound, Luna had special importance: They saw him as the incarnation of a past tribal leader, and made bold moves to block attempts to capture the whale and remove him from the area.

Beyond the narrative drama of The Whale’s plot, what so affected those involved in the story (and now touches viewers) is the evidence of an incredible interspecies bond that developed between Luna and those who knew him. It’s an experience that defies what we think we know about the potential of human-animal communication. We caught up with Parfit to talk more about The Whale and the fascinating issues it brings up.

This post is part of Protein Angst, a series on the environmental and nutritional complexities of high-protein foods. Our goal is to publish a range of perspectives on these very heated topics. Add your feedback and story suggestions here.

One way to make sure your veggie burgers are made with sustainable ingredients is to make them yourself. (Photo by Marni Molina.)

Like bikes, Birkenstocks, and buying local, soy products are a standard part of today’s stereotypical green lifestyle. But as many in the sustainable food world already know, we should proceed with caution when it comes to consuming processed soy products, as some are much more complicated than they seem.

To start with, it is much harder to find an organic soybean than, say, an organic carrot – only 0.2 percent of the soybean acreage in the U.S. is used to grow organic beans (compared with 13 percent of the carrot acreage). After corn, soy is the second-most-planted field crop in the U.S., and 92 percent of U.S. soybeans are genetically engineered to either withstand large amounts of pesticide or to produce it themselves.

“If you’re buying a non-organic soy product, I can pretty confidently say that [it] will have been grown on a large-scale monoculture farm,” said Charlotte Vallaeys of the Cornucopia Institute, which put out a report [PDF] in 2009 on the social, environmental, and health impacts of soy. “This is something people need to think about when they talk about soy as a good alternative protein source -- that soy has to be grown somewhere; something has to fertilize the soil.”

Photo: Pesticide Action Network North AmericaAnyone who's been stung by a bee knows they can inflict an outsized pain for such tiny insects. It makes a strange kind of sense, then, that their demise would create an outsized problem for the food system by placing the more than 70 crops they pollinate -- from almonds to apples to blueberries -- in peril.

Although news about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has died down, commercial beekeepers have seen average population losses of about 30 percent each year since 2006, said Paul Towers, of the Pesticide Action Network. Towers was one of the organizers of a conference that brought together beekeepers and environmental groups this week to tackle the challenges facing the beekeeping industry and the agricultural economy by proxy.

Seattle Schools hopes its new menu offerings will make students less skeptical of school lunch. (Photo by USDA.) School lunch in Seattle has come a long way since I was a public school student. In the '90s, lunch was only a dollar, and the cafeteria served up square, rubbery pizza, scoops of mushy spaghetti, and Belgian waffles (everyone's favorite!). Fast-forward more than a decade: Elementary school lunch now costs $2.75, and for several years the Seattle School District has inched toward healthier offerings. For most of public-school history, cafeteria food was something to be endured and then forgotten immediately upon …

A few years ago, back when she still had a job in the natural-foods industry, "my kids only got the best in terms of food," said Corbyn Hightower, a mother of three who now lives outside Sacramento. Then, she said, "we lost everything, and we really started having to compromise." Hightower signed up for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps. When she looked through the information pamphlet she received, she found out that SNAP benefits can be used to buy seeds and plants, not just food. So she went to Whole Foods, bought some seeds, and …

Erin Brockovich.In the decade or so since her life was immortalized in the Oscar-winning Julia Roberts flick, Erin Brockovich, the real Brockovich has continued her environmental crusade. (To refresh your memory: Brockovich is the working mom who, as a file clerk in a California law firm, stumbled upon records that eventually forced Pacific Gas and Electric to pay the largest toxic tort injury settlement in U.S. history, for poisoning the groundwater in the small town of Hinkley, Calif.) She's used her newfound status as everywoman environmental hero to help other communities kick corporate polluters out of their backyards, but she …