In which I stumble upon one of the most happenin’ environmental conferences in the country

Last weekend I abandoned my cot in the supply closet at the Grist office to get out of Seattle for a spell and see the world. Specifically, I went to help celebrate a friend's birthday down in Eugene, Oregon, and go to a Clumsy Lovers show in Corvallis.  Sadly, the band's bass player had strep, but I did discover that Corvallis' Sunnyside Up bakery makes a tasty and cleverly-named treat called the "you're doin' a heckuva job brownie (with raspberries)." Hopefully a portion of its hefty $2.25 price tag goes towards ameliorating the heckuva disaster response that continues in New Orleans today ...

The even more exciting part of last weekend's adventure, though, was the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference going on at the University of Oregon campus in Eugene.  Though my emergence from the dark grey raincloud known as Seattle had me sporting the classic President-Bush-squinting-into-the-sun look all weekend, I somehow managed to spot a flyer for the conference and showed up just in time to see excellent keynote addresses by two figures that Grist readers are familiar with:

Mountaintop-removal mining devastates Appalachia, but residents fight back

Most folks know coal mining is a dirty and dangerous business, triggering everything from miner’s lung to deadly accidents. But...

Always low toxics? Well, sometimes, at least

A while back I wrote about all the "fake news" -- really, just corporate P.R. -- that comes into my email inbox as a result of our work on flame retardants in people's bodies. Most of the news stories are really just press releases from companies touting the fact that they'd removed PBDEs and other hazardous substances from their products. Any single press release, by itself, is hardly worthy of notice. But viewed as a whole, the steady drumbeat of companies announcing that they'd managed to make their products less toxic seemed like an important, if unheralded, good news story.

EPA plan would give political officials more say over air-quality standards

Who should decide what level of air pollution is safe — scientists or political appointees? Plume and doom. Photo: iStockphoto....

A plan to spruce up D.C.’s Anacostia River has some residents anxious

In the southeast corner of Washington, D.C., the capital of the most powerful nation in history, lies a polluted, neglected...

Tirso Moreno, farmworker organizer, answers questions

Tirso Moreno. What’s your job title? General coordinator for the Farmworker Association of Florida. What does your organization do? We...

Hospitals and doctors’ offices look to cure their environmental ills

The irony is almost too obvious to state: tens of thousands of hospitals, doctors’ offices, medical laboratories, and assorted other...

An interview with jailed “eco-terrorist” Jeffrey Luers

In 2000, 21-year-old Jeff Luers and an accomplice set fire to three pickup trucks at a dealership in Eugene, Ore.,...

What’s sustainable?

Related to the soon-to-be-revised index-card manifesto, I have a question, raised by some of the feedback I got:

My assumption is that sooner or later all personal vehicles -- and eventually all vehicles, period -- will be powered solely with electricity from renewable sources: wind, solar, hydrokinetic, biothermal.

Here's my basic reasoning: Humanity's energy reserves (fossil fuels) are finite. We need to start living within the earth's solar budget. Consider the following three alternatives (and pardon my utter lack of technical sophistication):