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Hunting and fishing groups worried about climate change’s effects on wildlife

Photo: iStockphoto The hook and bullet crowd, traditionally quite a conservative bunch, is worrying more openly about climate change, particularly its forecasted effects on wildlife crucial to their sports. The Wildlife Management Institute, a sportsperson’s organization, released a report recently highlighting climate change’s possible detrimental effects to oft-hunted species. Disappearing wetlands could contribute to a […]

Adam Werbach follows up ‘Death of Environmentalism’ with ‘Birth of Blue’

In 2004, former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach made by a splash by asking, "Is environmentalism dead?" In a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, he critiqued his own work as an environmentalist and suggested that the environmental movement was ill-suited to solve the challenge of global warming. Much lively debate and serious reflection ensued.

On the evening of April 10, Werbach will give a follow-up speech, entitled "Birth of Blue," to the Commonwealth Club's INFORUM Program. He'll argue that a new movement is emerging that goes beyond the green movement to incorporate a broad range of human aspirations. [UPDATE: Here's a preview of the speech in the San Francisco Chronicle.] [ANOTHER UPDATE: Here's a PDF of the final speech.] [STILL ONE MORE UPDATE: Here's the speech reprinted in a blog post, with lots of comments below, including a couple from Werbach himself. He's also joined the discussion below.] [FINAL UPDATE (REALLY!): Here's video of the speech.]

We'll post text and video of the speech when it's available, so check back here. In the meantime, Werbach gives the basic rundown on BLUE:

Gore should run!

Part XXXVI

House gives thumbs-up to conservation program

Some 27 million acres of federal land in the U.S. West and Alaska would be formally recognized as conservation-worthy under legislation passed Wednesday by the House of Representatives. The National Landscape Conservation System has been in place since 2000 to “conserve, protect, and restore these nationally significant landscapes,” and the House legislation would make the […]

Here come da judges

Leslie Carothers makes the important point that the next president’s judicial appointments will do as much to determine his environmental legacy as the bills he signs. (A point Joe Romm made a while back in a piece on McCain in Salon.)

A roundup of news snippets

• BP and ConocoPhillips join forces to build a liquefied natural gas pipeline from Alaska to Canada and the Lower 48. • Apple may eco-update its MacBook design. • A German state defies the norm and adopts a speed limit. • Water scarcity is an issue for mining companies. • A House bill seeks to […]

A high-resolution map of U.S. CO2 emissions

Check out the Vulcan Project out of Purdue University (with funding from NASA and DOE). It’s an attempt to quantify and visually represent U.S. CO2 emissions over time: Here’s a nifty video introduction: (via Dot Earth)

GOOD magazine’s profile on the black green activist

What Grist readers might have predicted over a year ago, when David interviewed Van Jones, is quickly becoming reality. In October, Thomas Friedman, in a gushing editorial, called Jones a "rare bird" who "exudes enough energy to light a few buildings on his own." Now he's appeared on the Colbert Report where, despite the always-awkward position of Stephen's interviewees, he managed to land "green jobs" in the mental dictionary of millions of young viewers.

I had the privilege of speaking to Jones last month as he cabbed it from Capitol Hill back to the airport. The profile appears in this month's issue of GOOD magazine, and is now online here. Despite seeming a bit exhausted, he was patient, articulate, and just plain kind. Something I wasn't able to include in the piece, but which he took great joy in telling, was how his grandfather, a bishop in the Methodist Church, was a huge inspiration to him, as were the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr. When asked if celebrity, and schmoozing with the big dogs in Washington, might divert his attention from grassroots activity, he responded, "On any given day, I might be in a public high school or in a prison, in D.C. or at a funeral. My life has a lot of sunshine and a lot of shit." On the other hand, he added, "That's what it takes to make a strong plant -- a lot of sunshine and a lot of fertilizer."

Student charges that textbook downplays climate change

“[S]cience doesn’t know whether we are experiencing a dangerous level of global warming or how bad the greenhouse effect is, if it exists at all,” says a random climate skeptic the widely used 2005 version of Advanced Placement high school textbook American Government. The text, written by two prominent conservatives, goes on to imply that […]

VBS.tv sails out to witness the garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean

This is the first episode of 12 from VBS.tv on the vast, Texas-sized stew of plastic and garbage floating in the North Pacific Gyre. They sailed out to see it with their own eyes.