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 much more than a call to remove PVC from Target's …

It took 10 years of work to protect British Columbia's Great Bear Rainforest. Photos: Gregory Dicum The 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 rainforest is the size of Switzerland. A third of it, about the size of New Jersey, is now entirely protected from logging (selective cutting is permitted on the rest). The …

This weekend the eco/new-agey/NoCal faithful gathered in Marin for the annual Bioneers conference. I've gone several times in the past, and it's always an interesting experience, and not for the obvious reasons ... Rather than describe Bioneers in detail here, allow me to point you to something I wrote about last year's conference. The basic gist is that it's a forum that draws together leading thinkers and actors in a number of different disciplines that are profoundly related, and yet aren't always thought of in that way. Hard-core anti-corporate, local-sovereignty litigation of the sort pursued by Thomas Linzey, for example, …

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. Today, the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice is launching a campaign to get Target to remove PVC from their stores. The background is, Target (apt name, eh?) has been dragging their heels, while others -- even Wal*Mart -- are actually beginning to …

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 mercilessly, and …

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 thing, it has a cool factor so appealing that mass-marketers can't keep their TV …

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 director of the Green Burial Council, it's his job. The …

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 ... Q: So you're working in prison? A: I'm a clerk. I do inventory for the prison food warehouse. But I don't even get paid by the hour. I get paid by what they call a "point scale." I think right now I make like 50 bucks a …

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 Environmental Leadership …

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 banner. That's why Sierra Club leaders recently turned to …