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Throw Momma From the Pontchartrain

Some post-Katrina floodwaters cleaner than expected Some of the floodwaters pumped out of New Orleans by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — about 250 billion gallons all told, dumped mostly into Lake Pontchartrain — may not have been as toxic as initially feared. Researchers at Louisiana State University took samples five to nine days […]

Helter Swelter

2005 shaping up to be the warmest year on record Is it warm in here? Readings from about 7,200 weather stations worldwide indicate that 2005 will probably be the hottest … year … ever — breaking 1998’s record by about one-tenth of a degree Fahrenheit. The Northern Hemisphere is heating faster, with the average 2005 […]

For Robert Hass, poetry is part of the eco-arsenal

Robert Hass. Photo: Jeff Kearns. Readers of Robert Hass’s poetry are familiar with his fine-tuned and tender attention to the natural world. What they may not know so well are his efforts to take that devotion off the page and into boardrooms and classrooms. As United States Poet Laureate from 1995 to 1997, Hass turned […]

Who’s there? A joke contest

So, I claimed a few days ago that environmentalism is never funny. Apparently, there's some dispute about this matter. So we're going to settle it once and for all. And we're going to start with the most basic unit of humor on the planet, the unit of humor that dragged itself up out of the primordial swamp and flopped onto land, causing the other protozoa to giggle and roll their eyes.

Yes: the knock-knock joke.

You think environmental matters can be funny? Prove it. Leave us a green knock-knock joke in the comments. We dare you.

Explosion at Texas plastics plant just the latest in a record of malfeasance

For being the self-proclaimed "Jewel of the Texas Gulf Coast," Formosa Plastics isn't doing so hot. Lucky for us, Hurricane Rita, initially packing 185 mph winds and headed straight for Formosa's ill-prepared and sprawling 1,800-acre PVC plant in Point Comfort, Texas, decided to turn north at the last minute. Formosa dodged a bullet.

No bullet-dodging last week: On October 6, at 3:30pm and after 30 minutes of obnoxious chemical fumes that drove Point Comfort citizens into the streets to wonder what ill wind was blowing their way, Formosa Plastics blew, sending a Nagasaki-style mushroom cloud and three, four, and five explosions thundering over the blistering Texas landscape. Formosa Plastics and neighboring Alcoa plant workers ran for their lives, many throwing themselves into nearby Lavaca Bay, host to one of the nation's largest underwater mercury Superfund sites. But for those workers, the mercury was the lesser of two evils. The worst was Formosa's explosion, which sent 11 workers to the hospital, two with serious burns.

The Senate ag chairman balks at Bush’s subsidy-cut hints

Yesterday, I reported that top Bush administration officials have been openly discussing deep cuts in farm commodity subsidies. But the program, a $14.5 billion per year cash cow, is also a sacred cow.

Farm-state politicians, and the agribusiness giants that love them, speciously portray farm subsidies as a "safety net for the family farm." In reality, the program helps push commodity prices down -- and arguably helps drive farms out of business. In 1935, around the time the program started, there were 7 million farms in the U.S. By 1997, the USDA reports, only 1.9 million remained. Some safety net.

Well yesterday, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R.-Ga.), a man who reveres the free market so long as it doesn't impede his state's beloved cotton trade, lashed back.

ABC’s Boston Legal tackles issue of fish farms

The Late Show with David Letterman was not the only television program last night to expose enviro themes to the late night crowd. Over on Boston Legal, something fishy was going on (and I'm not talking about their usual shenanigans).

Normally, I wouldn't watch the show, but I got a tip from a reliable source that it might be worthwhile last night. So after returning from a night of Green Drinks and dinner, I plopped down on the couch and hit play on my VCR. In short, I was pleasantly surprised.

Now, I had thought Boston Legal was one of those legal shows where a defendant chopped up his spouse and fed her to his pet tiger ... and the defense team knows he's guilty, but champions the case anyway ... and the lead attorney sleeps with him ... and the tiger escapes in court ... blah, blah, blah. I don't know about you, but I've had enough of reality shows. I prefer fantasy myself, which is why I tune in to The West Wing. Ah, if only ...

But I digress ... Boston Legal ... here's the synopsis of last night's episode:

Reeling over his break-up with Tara, Alan Shore [played by James Spader] heads to Nimmo Bay in British Columbia with Denny Crane [played by William Shatner] for some fly fishing and male bonding in an effort to cure his pain. When they learn that the salmon population is being threatened by sea lice produced by fish farms, Shore and Crane feel compelled to act.

Yes, you read that right. The Emmy Award-winning show tackled fish farming during primetime TV. And it was funny.

To create a truly sustainable food system, we’ll need to make some fundamental changes.

The sustainable-food movement has a class problem.

Slow Food, for example, is an essential organization, with its declaration of a universal "right to taste" and its mandate to ...

... oppose the standardisation of taste, defend the need for consumer information, protect cultural identities tied to food and gastronomic traditions, safeguard foods and cultivation and processing techniques inherited from tradition and defend domestic and wild animal and vegetable species.

The group has undeniably done important work internationally toward those goals; yet its U.S. branch tends to throw pricey events accessible only to an economic elite.

Examples like this abound.

Lucky Stiff

Asian men turning to Viagra over traditional animal cures for impotence Far East penises are getting an assist from the pharmaceutical industry, and that’s good news for the seahorses, green sea turtles, and other critters that have been used for years to get a rise out of reticent Asian members. According to a new study […]

No Word on the Mansions

Governors abandon gas-guzzling SUVs as they ask others to use less fuel As post-hurricane gas prices in the U.S. hover around $3 a gallon, several governors have dumped their state-funded, gas-hogging SUVs for more energy-conscious vehicles. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D) will be sidelining his Lincoln Navigator for a Ford Escape hybrid, and Florida […]