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Is it only OK to talk about limiting population after it’s too late?

Sam Smith, inimitable editor of The Progressive Review, perhaps the world's first progressive blog (if you count its days as a print publication), reports that even he finds it difficult to bring up discussions of population.

I have experienced something like what Smith talks about, where even mentioning Bartlett (who has been campaigning against exponential population growth for decades) is enough to get you called nasty names by liberals and "anti-life" by church members.

Here's today's series of looks at the issue, with Smith's preface first:

Which circle of hell for illegal logging?

Sickening. Kevin John Moran of Camano Island, Wash., was just convicted of illegally cutting down 27 old-growth cedars on public land. They were between 400 and 700 years old. And they were dry-side trees, even rarer than the Northwest's west-slope titans.

But here's the worst that can happen to him:

Theft of government property is a Class C felony, which means a maximum sentence of 10 years or less, and a fine not to exceed $250,000.

Some of these trees were mature giants long before Europeans ever encountered the Pacific Northwest. They were protected on public land. They were our natural heritage.

But destroying them? That's just "theft of government property."

Sentencing is in February.

Senate OKs stripped-down energy bill, oil spills in North Sea, and more

Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: No Day at the Beach in Bali Glass Half Full? Letting Goad Clean Up That Oil, Stat! It’s a Christmas Miracle! O Me! O Life! Of the Questions of These Recurring Read the articles mentioned at the end of the podcast: It’s All About the […]

Seeking out ‘the new nature writing’

This weekend is looking to be a great one for reading, at least here in the northeastern U.S. where we're expecting lots (more) snow. I'm in the midst of David Gessner's new book, Soaring with Fidel, and it's excellent so far. The author physically follows his favorite bird, the osprey, during its annual migration from the North Atlantic to Cuba and beyond.

It's more than a book about a bird and its range, though. It's mostly about the osprey's human geography: the people Gessner meets along the way who love this particular creature and have fought to steward its recovery from the brink. Humorous and very human storytelling makes it a page-turner, and it's a fine example of what the editors of Orion magazine, with whom I work, call "the new nature writing."

So what's on your reading list these days, gentle Gristmill reader?

Billions of taxpayer dollars are helping destroy African waters

After exhausting commercial seafood stocks off their own shores decades ago, wealthy nations turned their bows toward the pristine populations off the coast of Africa. In the 1990s, the European Union took more than a million pounds of fish out of African waters annually; the former Soviet states took about 2.5 million pounds. The result has been predictable: a steep decline in biomass along the African coast.

Meanwhile, African nations took a sliver of their own fish. According to a 2002 report in Marine Policy, Guinea Bissau earned just 7 percent of the gross returns on fishing off its coast, while the E.U. got the other 93 percent.

Friday music blogging: Wussy

I only heard about this band, Wussy, a few weeks ago, but I’m enjoying the hell out of them. It’s a nice mix of alt country twang and fuzzy, Sonic Youthy drone rock. The song is called “Jonah” and the album’s called Left for Dead, but, er, looking now I see it doesn’t actually come […]

Pollution’s effects linger, long after compounds are banned

A new study by researchers at a British Columbia cancer agency stands as a stark reminder that, when it comes to pollution, an ounce of pollution prevention is worth a pound of cure:

Researchers found people with the highest levels of a certain type of insecticide in their blood had 2.7 times the risk of developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma as those with the lowest amounts ...

People with PCBs in their blood, meanwhile, had twice the risk of developing the disease as those with the lowest exposures. That's about the same level of increased risk as having a family history of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

The thing to remember is that these compounds were banned 30 years ago. But they're still hanging around, tainting the soil and the food chain, and causing all sorts of problems.

For some kinds of pollution, you just can't put the genie back in the bottle -- meaning that it's much better not to open the bottle in the first place.

War ain’t good for the planet, says new report

It’s the time of year for thinking about shopping peace on earth, and an aptly timed new report carries a reminder of the impact of war not just on people, but on the planet. Modern warfare tactics cause unprecedented damage to natural landscapes, says a new article from the Worldwatch Institute. Think spraying of Agent […]

Notable quotable

“You know, the Gore-leone crime family is now the number one crime family in the world, when you think about it. He’s about to pull off the biggest scam in the history of the world. It’s bigger than any bank heist, bigger than any drug deal. It’s bigger than any counterfeiting scheme, and he’s doing […]

The environmental health/justice nexus

Earlier this week, I was at a unique environmental justice event in Boston. It was a meeting of grantees of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, one of the most hopeful government agencies I've come across. One of its activities is to fund university researchers and grassroots groups which collaborate to study the environmental causes of asthma, cancers, lupus, lung disease (and more) in their home communities.

Environmental health research is critically needed, with diseases like breast cancer being increasingly recognized as environmental justice issues, as the director of grantee organization and event host Silent Spring Institute put it to me: