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I Can Feel It Cleaning in the Air Tonight

Clean up air and death rate drops, study finds Ah, science. It never fails to dazzle and delight. Consider this wildly counterintuitive result: When air pollution falls in a city, fewer people in that city die. Jump back! In a new study, researchers tracked particulate pollution concentrations in six U.S. metropolitan areas from 1974 through […]

Maybe I’ll Be There to Take Your Land

As private forests in U.S. go for sale, enviros are pit against developers Privately owned forests make up nearly 20 percent of U.S. land, and they’re changing hands at a blistering pace. A U.S. Forest Service study predicts that 44 million acres of private forestland will be sold over the next 25 years — an […]

Freeport Your Mine, and Unrest Will Follow

Mining companies dig up trouble in Indonesia Two U.S.-based mining companies are digging up trouble in Indonesia. A protest last week demanding closure of a Freeport-McMoRan gold and copper mine in the Papua province led to the deaths of at least three police officers and one soldier, then to the military seizing control of the […]

Pombo set up to take over House Agriculture Committee

Following on Tom's post below: I think Rep. Richard "Dick" Pombo's appointment as vice-chairman of the House Agriculture Committee -- setting him up to take over in 2008 -- should clear our agricultural problems right up:

Humans spur worst extinctions since dinosaurs

Humans are responsible for the worst spate of extinctions since the dinosaurs and must make unprecedented extra efforts to reach a goal of slowing losses by 2010, a U.N. report said on Monday.

Habitats ranging from coral reefs to tropical rainforests face mounting threats, the Secretariat of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity said in the report, issued at the start of a March 20-31 U.N. meeting in Curitiba, Brazil.

"In effect, we are currently responsible for the sixth major extinction event in the history of earth, and the greatest since the dinosaurs disappeared, 65 million years ago," said the 92-page Global Biodiversity Outlook 2 report.

Keep reading (if you can). Or go straight to the report.

In absentia

Posting will be light today -- I'm hip-deep in other things. (Watch for the Obama interview later today.) Should be back on the job tomorrow.

If At First You Don’t Succeed, Tritium Again

Illinois nuke-plant operator sued for tritium spills it tried to hide Boy, we can’t wait for that “safe, clean nuclear power” President Bush is always talking about, ’cause this stuff we have now is kind of nasty. The Braidwood nuclear power plant in Illinois, owned by Exelon Corp., has been leaking millions of gallons of […]

Sierra Club Chronicles

Turns out, we're not the only game in town paying attention to the intersection of economic and environmental issues (thankfully). So are the folks over at the Sierra Club Chronicles, a monthly TV series featuring community efforts to protect environmental health.

This month, the series focuses on the fate of DeLisle, Mississippi, home to a Dupont chemical plant. When the plant was first built, it was welcomed by DeLisle's residents, who were hungry for steady work. Twenty-five years later, more than 2,000 current and former residents and employees are suing the company, blaming dioxin and other heavy metals from the plant for the cancer clusters and high illness rates in the area.

The 30-minute film, "Dioxin, Duplicity, and Dupont," will air this Thursday (March 23) at 8:30 PM Eastern and Pacific on Link TV (DIRECTV channel 375 and Dish Network channel 9410). You can also download the film to Video iPod.

Using TV to illumininate and inspire

Last night I watched the film Good Night, And Good Luck. If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend it. It is currently available on DVD.

The movie is about the 1953 CBS News team (led by Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly) that successfully went head-to-head with the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy. How closely the situation in 1953 mirrors today is disturbing, but CBS's success gives us hope.

Boehlert over and out

Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) -- a frequent ally of environmentalists -- announced today that he won't seek re-election in November.