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The environmental case for integrated communities

The following passage is excerpted from The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream. (For more on this issue, read an interview with the author.) The growing concern with sprawl creates an interesting possibility for alignment of urban and suburban, white and minority, affluent and poor interests. Advocates for low-income […]

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.

Umbra on baby nurseries

Dear Umbra, I am pregnant and wondering if you know of any websites or resources for setting up a nursery — for green furniture, bedding, and mattresses. We’re painting the nursery with low-VOC paint and looking for low-VOC carpeting, and we gratefully accept used toys and clothes from friends and family. Janine OlsenPine Brook, N.J. […]

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.

Tirso Moreno, farmworker organizer, answers questions

Tirso Moreno. What’s your job title? General coordinator for the Farmworker Association of Florida. What does your organization do? We work to empower communities of farmworkers and the rural poor, focusing on a wide range of issues, from workplace and community organizing to disaster preparedness and response, from vocational rehabilitation to immigrants’ rights advocacy for […]

So 2003

Luxury SUVs are losing their cool The jerk-offs who drive enormous, fuel-hogging luxury SUVs between their gated McMansions, plastic surgeons, and corporate-whore jobs — not that there’s anything wrong with that — are slowly but surely realizing that they are, in fact, jerk-offs. Sales of all SUVs have dropped, but luxe behemoths like the Hummer […]

Yeah, Right, and Greenland Is Melting

Study confirms that rising ocean temps mean more intense hurricanes A major new study in Science confirms the findings of previous studies: rising ocean temperatures are the primary factor behind stronger, more intense hurricanes in the last few decades. Since 1970, global sea-surface temperatures have risen by 1 degree Fahrenheit, while the yearly number of […]

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 […]

The Humpty Dance

Bush attempts to weaken Clean Air Act are illegal, court rules Americans who breathe scored a big victory on Friday, when a federal appeals court declared illegal the Bush administration’s long-running effort to undermine pollution rules for coal-fired power plants and other pollution-belching industrial facilities. Judge Judith Rogers, writing for the court, castigated the U.S. […]

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.