Articles by David Roberts

New foody blogs

I recently stumbled on a couple of nice new blogs. Life Begins at 30 revolves around the challenges and joys of eating local -- start with this nice, tidy list of reasons to eat local food. Then there's Bitter Greens Journal, a blog about the evils of industrial agriculture that recently attracted the attention of the mighty Monsanto. Enjoy.

A first-hand account from the Gulf Coast

Good God. Read this first-hand account of the Gulf Coast rescue and cleanup operations from a contractor who works with the EPA. Here's a tidbit:

This contractor has been organizing reverse osmosis (RO) water purification units from all over the country since last Tuesday. He has over 100 units of various sizes available to move into the region, but no one will give the go ahead. No one will sign their name to a piece of paper for fear of recriminations later. He says that over 80 million pint bottles of water have been purchased at $0.75 each. The RO units can produce a gallon of water from contaminated water for $0.01 and they can produce thousands of gallons a day. Two are staged near the zone and these alone can produce 250,000 gallons per day. The Army has RO units, but every functional one, and every operator trained to use them, is in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Interview with Treehugger’s Graham Hill

Via TriplePundit, a short interview with Graham Hill, founder and proprietor of Treehugger.

In which your author finally breaks down

This (via Tapped) nails, like nothing else I've read, why I take Bush's reaction to Katrina personally.

And it's not just Bush, it's Brown, Chertoff, any number of politicians, a substantial portion of the commentariat. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) said that those who stayed (got stuck) behind in New Orleans should be punished:

There may be a need to look at tougher penalties on those who decide to ride it out and understand that there are consequences to not leaving.

I don't really consider myself a bleeding heart, but for god's sake, thousands of our fellow citizens are sitting in their own filth, old people and babies, dying of sickness, dehydration, illness, suicide ... Why isn't everyone, at every level of government, in a fucking panic about this? Where's the humanity? How can I be a part of the same species as these people? I just don't get it.

Time for me to take a valium and stop reading the news.