Articles by Emily Gertz

Gale Norton resigns

The Denver Post, Associated Press, and other news services are reporting that Gale Norton is stepping down after five years at the helm of the Department of the Interior.

Norton's taking her leave to "catch my breath, then set my sights on new goals to achieve in the private sector," according her letter to President Bush. While MSNBC.com primly notes that her "name came up" in connection with the Jack Abramoff inquiry, ThinkProgress is more assertive. Under the headline "Another Abramoff Casualty?" TP notes that Norton received $50,000 from the defrocked lobbyist, who also channeled half a million dollars to her former aide Italia Federici to gain access to Norton and another Interior top official.

Whatever the reason or not-reason, Norton is leaving the Bush cabinet without having achieved her goal of opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

Update [2006-3-10 12:7:8 by Emily Gertz]: The folks at ThinkProgress elided the specifics slightly in the post I linked to above (although they're clearer about them elsewhere on the site). According to indianz.com, this $50K from the Meskwakis Tribe of Iowa actually went to a Norton-founded group, the greenwashy Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy ... as did many thousands more from other tribes that employed Abramoff.

CREA's president? Italia Federici.

But the paper makes him look more pessimistic than he really is

The UK's Independent has positively wallowed in a week's worth of journalistic eco-doomsaying -- see Sarah's woe over the possible fate of plankton or Dave's dissection of James Lovelock's apocophilia, plus a few more dismal items we never even got around to Gristmilling.

Frankly, I think The Independent has been yanking our chains, because the only thing that sells as well as sex is death and destruction. And today it supplied chaos and old night courtesy of author Jeremy Leggett, who like Lovelock has a book coming out: Half Gone: Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy Crisis.

Leggett is an "early topper" -- a person who's "worked in the heart of the oil industry, the majority of them geologists, many of them members of an umbrella organisation called the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO). They are joined by a small but growing number of analysts and journalists. The early toppers reckon that 1 trillion barrels of oil, or less, are left." As compared to "late toppers," who think there are at least 2 trillion barrels of oil left. It's not a minor point:

Eco-media Gawker-ing

As most any enviro-news junkie with a modem knows, Tidepool has been a great online resource for the better part of the past decade. Tidepool was aggregating the daily eco-news out of the Northwest before the term "aggregator" was even a gleam in the eye of the internets.

With every day's thematic compilation of news and views from California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia and Alaska, Tidepool constructs the Northwest's identity as the unified region of Cascadia.

Tidepool split from founding group Ecotrust a couple years ago, and the uptick in requests for donations had me a little worried that the service might disappear. So here's hoping Tidepool's made a soft landing into a great new situation, now that the project's been taken over by Northwest Environment Watch:

Turn off the computer …

... and go watch some TV. Tonight, cable channel Turner Classic Movies is featuring a classic -- and visually gorgeous -- eco-manga by Japan's master animator, Hayao Miyazaki, 1984's Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. In a distant future, humans struggle to survive on a disastrously polluted Earth, constantly at odds with a toxic forest and rather horrible giant insects called Ohmu. But a princess, Nausicaa, suspects there may be a way to live more peacefully with nature -- and the other remnants of humanity threatening her valley people.

It's good, really.