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Down for the count

Be sure to head over to Grist's Counter Culture section, where yours truly has compiled facts and figures about poverty in the United States.

Doom

According to The Independent, our goose is cooked.

Then again, I could have posted this exact thing pretty much any time in the last 10 years.

(via theWatt)

A virtual walking tour of Columbia, Miss.

Activist and evangelist Charlotte Keys founded Jesus People Against Pollution to help clean up her hometown of Columbia, Miss., site of a now-shuttered plant where Reichhold Chemical once manufactured Agent Orange. The company shut the factory down after an explosion in 1977 and abandoned or buried thousands of barrels of toxic waste near the water supply of the predominantly poor, African-American neighborhood where it had operated; flooding and leaks followed. In this virtual walking tour, Keys describes life near the plant and her fight to win justice for her community.

Steve Frillmann, community-garden guru, answers Grist’s questions

Steve Frillmann of community-gardening group Green Guerillas (try saying that five times fast!) helps his 8 million neighbors create and protect green spaces in New York City. As this week's InterActivist, Frillmann chats about how something as simple as giving away a few seedlings can make a big difference in helping a community grow. Send Frillmann a question of your own by noon PST on Wednesday; we'll publish his answers to selected questions on Friday.

More Pombo taint

The ethics (or, rather, the lack thereof) buzz around Rep. Richard "Dick" Pombo (R-Calif.) is getting louder. The latest has to do with over $6,000 in taxpayer money he used to rent an RV and drive his family around on a two-week vacation to various national parks, which he assures us was all official business. Several of the park officials he claimed to have met, however, are struggling to recall ever seeing him. Must have slipped their minds.

For more, see ThinkProgress and Environmental Action.

Some background and some thank-you’s

As the lead editor on Poverty & the Environment, I can say that the tough thing about putting together a series like this isn't what goes into it; it's what doesn't go in -- the great stories that wind up on the cutting room floor because you run out of time, or run out of money, or the journalist goes into labor a month early, or your awe-inspiring colleagues finally say, "we'd love to but we've already worked 96 hours this week."

This chronic editorial dilemma was particularly acute with the current series. Given the subject matter, "embarrassment of riches" is exactly the wrong phrase, but it is certainly (and sadly) the case that there's no shortage of important stories to be told about the relationship between environmental and economic injustice. (That's one reason I encourage all of you to use this discussion forum to share your own ideas and experiences, as well as your reactions to what you read here.)

We at Grist owe our familiarity with these issues to a great many people who took the time, early on in this process, to talk to us about their work and their vision for this series. That input was so valuable that I want to post some of it here; where we have not been able to incorporate it into the rest of the series, we can at least share it directly with our readers.

Herewith, then, a very abbreviated list of heartfelt thank-yous, helpful advisors, and important ideas:

Aw, Mom, Not Whaleloaf Again!

Japanese government trying to unload surplus whale meat Japan’s “research” whaling has led to a market glutted with whale meat. Burdened by 2,700 tons of whale heading for freezer burn, the Japanese government has launched a campaign to overcome an increasingly common sentiment: “To put it simply,” says one Japanese diner, “whale meat tastes horrible.” […]

What Doesn’t Krill Me Makes Me Stronger

Smaller number of gray whales migrating south to breed, says researcher Fewer gray whales are migrating from North Pacific feeding grounds to warm Mexican lagoons to breed this year. British whale researcher William Megill says only 90 whales made it to the San Ignacio lagoon on Mexico’s Baja Peninsula by February — down about 50 […]

Public Land Enemy No. 1

White House wants to auction off 300,000 acres of public land The Bush administration has proposed a sell-off of over $1 billon worth of public land over the next five to 10 years. Proceeds from the auctions of more than 300,000 acres of Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management holdings would largely go to […]

Poverty & the Environment

Grist launches a seven-week special series In much of popular and political culture, the environmental movement is dismissed as the pet cause of white, well-off Americans. And yet, the population most affected by environmental problems in the U.S. is the poor. Today we kick off a seven-week series that looks at the intersection of economic […]