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On Hollywood’s downtrodden eco-chicks, and how they’ve changed
“A working-class hero is something to be,” said John Lennon. But for Hollywood, it’s more likely to be a working-class heroine — at least when environmental issues enter the picture. Charlize Theron in North Country. Photo: 78th Academy Awards® This year, Charlize Theron’s crusading miner-activist in North Country garnered an Oscar nomination, following in the […]
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A virtual walking tour through Wisconsin’s Sokaogon Chippewa community with Tina Van Zile
Like many tribal lands across North America, the Sokaogon Chippewa reservation in Northern Wisconsin faces environmental perils that threaten not only the land, but also the livelihood and culture of the people who live on it. The Sokaogon spent close to three decades battling one of those perils: the proposed reopening of a nearby zinc […]
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At Long Last: More of the Same
Bush administration backs industry-friendly chemical-security rules After years of foot dragging, the Bush administration is now backing federal security regulations to protect the nation’s chemical plants from terrorist attacks — but critics say the new rules may as well have been written by the industry itself. Speaking Tuesday at a forum organized by chemical-industry spokesflacks, […]
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Barack Obama chats with Grist about energy independence and ethanol
The weight of much hope and expectation rests on the narrow shoulders of Barack Obama, the first-term Democratic senator from Illinois. Barack Obama. His eventual presidential run is seen as inevitable (some pundits even hype a 2008 bid). He’s a phenomenon, and everyone wants to see him up close. That’s fundraising manna for the Democrats: […]
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An interview with integration advocate Sheryll Cashin
Space is the place where race, poverty, and the environment get sorted out, for better or worse. And the spaces where we live, work, learn, and play are the places where integration succeeds or fails, argues Sheryll Cashin. The Georgetown University law professor wrote 2004’s The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining […]
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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 […]
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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. […]
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Bush Sticks Dirk in Interior
Enviros decry Bush’s nomination of Kempthorne to lead Interior He’s a mountain-bike enthusiast, two-term governor, and object of fear and loathing among conservationists. And he just picked another one. Mere days after the resignation of Gale Norton as secretary of the interior, President Bush nominated as her replacement Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne (R), saying he […]
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Flame! I Wanna Log Forever
Congress debates measure that would speed up salvage logging We interrupt our ongoing coverage of global-warming doom and gloom to update you on logging doom and gloom. A bill in the U.S. House would force the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and other agencies to issue decisions on timber sales on public lands […]
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Kempthorne leads list of possible replacements for Norton at Interior
The rumor mill is churning fast as Interior Secretary Gale Norton prepares to bid adieu to the Bush administration, and two names on the short list of possible replacements are leading the pack: for an outside-the-Beltway pick, Dirk Kempthorne, Republican governor of Idaho; for an inside-the-agency pick, Lynn Scarlett, currently Norton’s No. 2, who will […]
