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Jury duty

Greetings from jury duty in miserable and blighted lovely Kent, Washington. I'm writing this on a dinky little laptop, using glacially slow (but free!) wi-fi here at the Regional Justice Center. I'm cut off from my usual workflow and, most importantly, my RSS feeds. So I have no idea what's going on out in the world.

To boot, at any moment my number could come up and I could be called away to determine some poor schlub's guilt or innocence.

So ... posting will be light today.

An internal audit exposes the USDA’s lax oversight of GM crop tests.

In a press release last June, the anti-GMO watchdog group Center for Food Safety questioned the USDA's oversight of tests involving genetically altered crops. The agency had just greenlighted a biotech company's proposal to grow test plots of rice containing human genes on 270 acres in North Carolina and Missouri, right in the middle of large-scale conventional rice production.

The press release quotes a CFS scientist thusly:

With this approval, USDA has signaled that it thinks it's okay to grow drug-producing crops near food crops of the same type, despite the threat of contamination ... There have already been numerous examples of contamination of food crops by biotech crops, including pharmaceutical crops. Over time, such contamination of our food is virtually inevitable under the conditions allowed by USDA.

The USDA brushed aside this complaint and plunged forward, asserting that it monitors such tests with all due care.

According to a recently released internal USDA audit, though, the CFS had a point.

Damn interesting

One site I've discovered lately that's damn interesting is Damn Interesting [high hat]. It is, as far as I can tell, exactly as advertised: Short articles on random, but always interesting, stuff.

A few that might be of interest to Gristmillians: A little piece on the Hindenburg disaster, which completely ended what was until then promising and safe development of air ships, and a bit on the latest developments in toilet technology.

And as someone who is highly allergic to cashew nuts, it was gratifying to learn that they are in fact highly toxic.

Coal country

While the Sago tragedy has coal on our minds -- too bad it's only tragedy that moves coal into the spotlight, and only briefly at that -- it's worth reading reporter Lucy Carrigan's short but evocative post about her visit to coal country.

Bush taps a GMO flack as his chief agricultural trade negotiator.

When Bush wants to kill a program or a department, he picks a clown to run it. Think of FEMA's disgraced "Brownie," who did such a "heck of a job" when disaster struck the Gulf Coast.

When the president sees something real at stake for his corporate clients, though, he tends to anoint an ultra-qualified pro: someone, typically, with direct ties to the industry in question. In surely the most spectacular example, Bush placed responsibility for creating energy policy in the crude-stained hands of Dick Cheney.

The world of agriculture presents its own examples. Over on Bitter Greens Journal last year, I documented how the president planted an industrial-corn man, with ties to corn-processing behemoth Archer-Daniels Midland, as deputy head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Now I present you with Richard Crowder: erstwhile president of the American Seed Trade Association, a 15-year veteran of Dekalb Genetics Corporation (now part of Monsanto), former exec at Conagra and Pillsbury -- and newly minted chief agricultural negotiator for U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman.

Peter Jackson campaigns to save gorillas.

Inspired by the plight of his film's über-gorilla, King Kong director Peter Jackson is backing efforts by the International Gorilla Conservation Programme to save Kong's smaller, less fictional friends. The Independent reports that Jackson's efforts include charity premieres of the film and plans for the King Kong DVD to include a documentary film about wild gorillas.

There are thought to be fewer than 1,000 gorillas left in the wild, and some folks predict that the species will become extinct within the next few decades. Also, according to Jackson:

Gorillas are truly amazing animals -- without them there wouldn't be entertainment like King Kong.

What? My entertainment is endangered? Where do I sign??

Rebuilding: Compare and contrast

The New York Times:

The city's official blueprint for redevelopment after Hurricane Katrina, to be released on Wednesday, will recommend that residents be allowed to return and rebuild anywhere they like, no matter how damaged or vulnerable the neighborhood, according to several members of the mayor's rebuilding commission.

Mike Tidwell:

To encourage people to return to New Orleans ... without funding the only plan that can save the city from the next Big One, is to commit an act of mass homicide.

(via The Poor Man)

Send it to the fishes.

I'm sure there are plenty of you out there who have not yet rid yourselves of your "holiday tree" because you're lazy ... I mean, because you're beset by qualms about the eco-consequences of tree disposal. Never fear! The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will take your old tree and send it to the fishes.

Cast-off trees are submerged in man-made lakes to create "natural" habitats for fish, including bass, crappie, bluegill, and catfish. Hee hee, crappie.

The fish are happy, the fisherpeople are happy, the tree-discarders are happy ... Awwwwwww. Group hug.

A quick search brought up tree-recycling programs that are still accepting donations in Pennsylvania (PDF), Georgia, Arkansas, and California, and a DNR-funded marsh-restoration program in Louisiana. Search for a tree-recycling program in your area, because c'mon, it's about time to be getting those Valentine's Day decorations up.

The Mod Quad

Green buildings, sustainability studies going mainstream on campus More than 110 colleges and universities around the U.S. have or are building eco-friendly structures, saving on energy costs and attracting students who want to go to a school that “gets” being green. At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, for example, students designed a green roof that […]

Northern Blights

Flame retardants are yet another toxic threat to polar bears New research confirms that polar bears — for years known to be victims of northward-spreading toxic substances — are accumulating in their bodies worrying levels of flame retardants called polybrominated diphenyl ethers. The effects of this PBDE contamination are unknown, but similar chemicals are believed […]