World population as of this post: 6,527,742,659. And rising quickly. This year, the World Population Day focus is on yoots. Factoids from the U.N. Population Fund: Half of the world's people are under the age of 25. Some 3 billion children and young people are, or will soon be, of reproductive age. In 57 developing countries, over 40 percent of the population is under 15. The number of youth in the world surviving on less than a dollar a day in 2000 was an estimated 238 million, almost a quarter (22.5 per cent) of the world's total youth population. Despite …

With demand for organic milk soaring, the stakes are high in the debate over what exactly "organic milk" is -- and that debate will soon be settled, at least from a legal standpoint, by the USDA's National Organic Program. As Samuel Fromartz writes in The Rocky Mountain News, the NOP is now considering a proposed regulation that would require all organic dairy farms to meet a certain standard for letting their cows out into pasture. Current USDA regulations only require that organic cows have "access to pasture," which, says Fromartz, "is akin to requiring a gym membership without mandating regular …

Earth Day is this coming Saturday, April 22, and green goings-on will be plentiful all this week. Looking for a rally or beach cleanup or edifying lecture or "Lorax" screening in your 'hood? Check out Earth Day Network's searchable database of activities across the U.S. and around the globe.

While American environmentalists have been pondering their alleged demise and/or plotting their resurrection, Canadian activists are confronting a whole 'nother set of challenges. Matt Price of Conservation Voters of B.C. tackles many of them in a new paper, "Greening the Beaver: Power, Profit, and the Canadian Dream" [PDF]. He starts off by arguing that Canada's new conservative PM Stephen Harper could be just what the nation's green movement needs to shake it into action. He also says eco-activists need to get over their ambivalence about power, learn to make markets work for the betterment of the environment, and ensure that …

Cape Wind Associates' plan to build a big wind-power farm off the coast of Cape Cod has been dividing enviros for years, but the disagreement got a lot more heated last month when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ran a high-profile op-ed railing against the project in The New York Times. An excerpt: These turbines are less than six miles from shore and would be seen from Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. Hundreds of flashing lights to warn airplanes away from the turbines will steal the stars and nighttime views. The noise of the turbines will be audible onshore. A …

Early this morning, the House passed a highly contentious budget reconciliation bill; it remained stripped of provisions that would allow drilling in the Arctic Refuge and new oil exploration in offshore areas, but it still contained the much-fretted-over "mining reform" provision that would sell off millions of acres of public land at fire-sale prices, as described in detail by Amanda Griscom Little yesterday. The Senate passed its version of the bill earlier this month -- it does call for drilling the refuge and offshore areas, but doesn't call for a sell-off of mining lands. Now we'll have to wait and …

So go recycle something.  

From Tim Iacono, some delightful on-the-ground investigative blogging about a Hummer dealership in Southern California trying to hide massive amounts of overstock.   Tim and his pals got a tip about a nervous dealer who "had begun storing his Hummer inventory at an undisclosed location, far from the dealer showroom so as not to spook jittery, prospective buyers with the mounting number of unsold H2s and H3s." They started snooping around and ended up snapping photos of row upon row upon row of unwanted gas-guzzling Dweeb-mobiles. Quite amusing.

Plans to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge were dropped from the House budget reconcilation bill tonight. Credit goes to GOP Rep. Charles Bass of New Hampshire and 24 fellow Republicans who threatened to vote against the bill unless the drilling provisions was dropped. It's not the end of the battle -- efforts are surely underway already to get the language back in -- but it's a surprising show of strength by refuge defenders. And yet another blow to poor, beleaguered Bush.

Or so argues a new book by Stephenie Hendricks -- Divine Destruction: Wise Use, Dominion Theology, and the Making of American Environmental Policy, excerpted in the latest Seattle Weekly. Nut 'graph from the excerpt: [T]he widespread acceptance of anti-environmental thinking in the guise of Wise Use is made more troubling in that there are increasingly close ties between those who subscribe to the ideas of Wise Use and members of fundamentalist Christian churches and organizations. The Wise Use movement's influence over religious conservatives thus mirrors the traditional relationship between religious and political conservatives in that Wise Use advocates are increasingly …