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I heart Seth Borenstein

When it comes to the environment (and foreign policy, incidentally), scrappy little Knight Ridder kicks Reuters' and AP's ass.  How?  By telling it like it is, without a flabby layer of "balance" obscuring the truth.  The mainstream media is increasingly crippled by its own conventions.  No matter how outrageous the charge, or clear the facts, the media feels duty bound to present every issue as "he said, she said."  This practice, as many folks have suggested, benefits the people who lie.  Every lie is presented on equal footing with the truth.  It gives readers the impression that nothing is a plain matter of fact, that everything -- the temperature of our atmosphere, the condition of Iraq, the beneficiaries of the tax cut -- is simply a matter of partisan spin.  But of course, with all due respect to Derrida (R.I.P.), there are facts, and real journalists should not be afraid simply to state them.

With that said, I give you Seth Borenstein of Knight Ridder.

Ban Ban

Federal judge repeals Clinton snowmobile ban The latest chapter has opened in what has become a sort of mini-Iliad for our times: the battle over snowmobiles in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. On Friday, a federal judge in Wyoming, Clarence Brimmer, struck down the ban on snowmobiles in the parks put in place toward […]

Grateful Deadlock

Congressional paralysis dooms environmental legislation Partisan bickering and electioneering in Washington, D.C., have led to an impasse on nearly all environmental legislation in Congress the past two years — bills that enviros love as well as ones they hate. Other than the “Healthy Forests” initiative and a piece of brownfields funding, Congress has been deadlocked […]

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Airlines start cutting emissions and raising efficiency Once considered burdensome headaches, techniques to cut pollution and increase efficiency are now being embraced by many large airlines. Why? “It turns out that good environmental behavior is also cost-effective,” said Bengt-Olov Nas of Norway’s Scandinavian Airlines System. The principal driver is rising fuel costs: The price of […]

We Feel Pretty, Oh So Pretty

Grist unveils new site and blog, acts like it’s not seeking compliments Regular readers will no doubt have noticed that Grist recently unveiled an all-new website design, with a better search engine, better navigation, and lots of pretty colors. We worked long and hard on it and hope you like it as much as we […]

Pegeen Hanrahan, mayor of Gainesville, Fla., answers questions

Pegeen Hanrahan What work do you do? Earlier this year I was elected to serve as mayor of Gainesville, Fla., for the next three years. Gainesville is a beautiful and diverse city of about 117,000, often called “the city in the forest” because of our heavy tree cover. Gainesville is the home of the University […]

MDGs: You make the call

Now is your chance to have a say at the U.N.

Jeff Sachs' Millennium Project has produced a draft report of its Global Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals and it is open for public comment until Nov. 1.  U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and U.N. Development Programme chief Mark Mallach Brown asked Sachs to honcho ten task forces with 250 experts to formulate a game plan for achieving the eight ambitious MDGs by 2015.  The final report is to be delivered to the SG in January.

Although the MDGs have gained little political traction in Washington, many outside the United States are utilizing the education, health, environment, poverty, hunger, and governance targets to set agendas, leverage resources, and in the case of some NGOs, hold national governments accountable for the targets they signed up for at the 2000 Millennium Summit.  Not many are optimistic about meeting goals like halving the proportion of people without access to clean water by 2015.  But we lose nothing by trying, so bring it on.

Umbra on lead pipes and drinking water

Dear Umbra, I live in New York City, which is reputed to have some of the best drinking water in the U.S. But I also happen to live in an old building that probably has lead pipes, so I buy Poland Spring water in five-gallon jugs each month. I’d prefer to drink tap water, but […]

Geoff Dabelko

It was fitting that recognition of environment's links to conflict and security came out of Norway last week when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Wangari Maathai of Kenya for her decades-long work through her Green Belt Movement.  We often count on the Norwegians, and the Nordics in general, to get it right early and for the rest of us to catch up.

In fact it was nearly twenty years ago when Gro Harlem Brundtland, then Prime Minister of Norway, chaired the World Commission on Environment and Development, a group of international bigwigs that authored the influential volume Our Common Future.  We remember that 1987 book that set the agenda for the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio for its widely accepted definition of sustainable development (meeting the needs of current generations without jeopardizing the ability of future generations to meet their own). But often forgotten is the chapter where the Brundtland Commission explicitly traced the destructive links between environment, conflict, and security.

So it was doubly disappointing to read in The New York Times the disparaging quotes from officials of both right and left-leaning parties in Norway in the wake of the announcement.

All the mus(ing) that’s fit to print

In its Sunday endorsement of Kerry and scathing critique of Bush, The New York Times spends more time on the environment than the candidates did in their three debates. (To whom does such an endorsement speak -- do any undecideds read The Times?) Amidst the many many paragraphs that lay out an argument against a second Bush administration, the patient greenie finds this one:

If Mr. Bush had wanted to make a mark on an issue on which Republicans and Democrats have long made common cause, he could have picked the environment. Christie Whitman, the former New Jersey governor chosen to run the Environmental Protection Agency, came from that bipartisan tradition. Yet she left after three years of futile struggle against the ideologues and industry lobbyists Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had installed in every other important environmental post. The result has been a systematic weakening of regulatory safeguards across the entire spectrum of environmental issues, from clean air to wilderness protection.

The editorial spends more time condemning Bush's record than building a case for a Kerry presidency. Yet, the editorial board found space among the relatively few sentences allocated to praising Kerry to call attention to this environmental matter: