Uncategorized

Who will control them if the Dems win

If, as widely expected, the Dems take the House tonight, it will represent a fundamental shift in power in D.C. A big part of that will be control over key committees. Here are the main green-related committees, and the House member who stands to take over in a Dem-controlled House:

Loses

... has officially lost.

Key races on the green front

In today's Senate showdowns, there's plenty to be anxious about on the enviro front. Muckraker's got the nitty gritty on key races here, but a quick rundown of races to watch out for:

We’re all going

So Texas Governor Rick Perry thinks all non-Christians are going to hell?

That's a bitter pill to swallow from someone who's doing everything he can to create hell on this earth.

Allen Johnson rallies Christians to fight against mountaintop-removal mining

Allen Johnson. As its not-at-all euphemistic name would indicate, mountaintop-removal mining makes no effort to disguise its impact. Coal-mining companies brazenly invade Appalachian communities, blow the tops off mountains, send massive coal trucks careening up and down narrow roads, spew coal dust into the air and mining waste into the water, and terrorize residents who […]

Seriously

You can find your polling place here. You can report (and find out about) voting problems here or here.

Who’s On First?

Officials in suburban Detroit point fingers over contaminated park You remember when Katrina hit, and officials spent their time blaming each other instead of helping people? This is sort of like that, only smaller, and with less wind. Unsuspecting families in a Detroit suburb have played in a contaminated county park for years while city, […]

Vote for Grist!

Our Election Day coverage offers hope and a blogging blitz Here at Grist, we love Election Day. There’s a certain buzz in the air, a feeling that all Americans face a united calling. Yeah, yeah, we know only 38.2 percent of Americans bother to vote — but we’re doing our dangedest to remain optimistic. So […]

College field program shows there’s more to citizenship than going to the polls.

Take a break from freaking out about the election and listen to this NPR audio clip about Whitman College's Semester in the West program. It's a biennial, semester-long environmental studies field course, with a heavy emphasis on public lands issues. If you have any passion about environmental issues, traveling, and/or camping, I guarantee this will make you want to go back to school.

(Grist featured Phil Brick, the professor in the story, as an InterActivist back in October 2005.)

I myself am an alumni of the program, and I'd say the audio clip is quite well done. It provides a good snapshot of what life is like during the semester and the kind of intellectual challenges students confront. As the narrator explains, students are "put face to face with people on all sides of complex issues. Students ask their own questions, and draw their own conclusions."

Endangered Rep. tones down committee website

It seems Richard Pombo has decided that using the House Resources Committee website as a dumping ground for anti-environmental talking points may be something of a liability. Or maybe he just thought the new techno design was nifty. You can still read about ANWR and the future of American energy, but some of the more propaganda-ish pages have come down.

I don't know if endangered species can truly "adapt" when their habitats are threatened, but they may try to shed skin.