toxics

The environmental health/justice nexus

Earlier this week, I was at a unique environmental justice event in Boston. It was a meeting of grantees of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, one of the most hopeful government agencies I've come across. One of its activities is to fund university researchers and grassroots groups which collaborate to study the environmental causes of asthma, cancers, lupus, lung disease (and more) in their home communities.

Environmental health research is critically needed, with diseases like breast cancer being increasingly recognized as environmental justice issues, as the director of grantee organization and event host Silent Spring Institute put it to me:

California yanks kids’ jewelry from stores

Bangles and baubles may make fun stocking stuffers, but beware: the California Department of Toxic Substances Control has yanked a dozen types of kids’ jewelry from 11 retailers — including Macy’s, Marshalls, and the Gap — after finding lead levels measuring approximately in the skazillions. “The problem is much more pervasive than we would like […]

Umbra on a safe return

Dearest Readers, I am back. My captors released me early this morning, and I have never been happier to walk somewhere in my life. All that driving gets one down, doesn’t it? Big thanks to the more than 2,000 of you who donated to Grist to help secure my release. I am in your debt, […]

Umbra on bleach

Greetings, I recently was infected with MRSA. It got better. As part of my treatment I’m supposed to use bleach in my laundry and around the house to help kill the bacteria. While I’m brunette, I feel like the stereotypical blonde about bleach. What are the environmental impacts of this chemical? Thanks, Emily Indiana Editor’s […]

Ignorance isn’t bliss, it’s just better than knowing

It's well known in environmental advocacy that people can easily be overwhelmed by problems. They wind up feeling paralyzed rather than motivated. I've always treated this as a theoretical point about communications, but I've had to admit that I'm an example. Here's how.

Mountain Equipment Co-op, (aka "the REI of Canada"), just pulled from shelves a batch of polycarbonate plastics, including those ubiquitous Nalgene bottles. According to an article in the Globe and Mail:

An EPA-approved pesticide is worse than the one it’s replacing

“The soil is, as a matter of fact, full of live organisms. It is essential to conceive of it as something pulsating with life, not as a dead or inert mass.” — Albert Howard, The Soil and Health, 1947 Strawberry fields poisoned forever? Photo: iStockphoto In October, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency granted temporary approval […]

A review of The Host

What is an environmental movie? Is it a movie that uses the beauty of wilderness to make us fall in love with the earth, as for example Into the Wild, or Brokeback Mountain? Is it a movie that explicitly tackles an environmental issue, such as Erin Brockovich, or The China Syndrome?

Or is it a picture that exploits the power of raw film to open up an environmental theme -- such as the risk of radiation -- with sheer imagination, such as (the original) Godzilla?

It's a rhetorical question, but one with an inescapable answer: all of the above count as environmental movies, each in its own way, some better than others. And if this is true, as it surely is, than the best environmental movie of the year may turn out to be an unlikely candidate: the mesmerizing -- and funny -- Korean movie released internationally this year, The Host.

Though essentially a cheesy horror movie, it's phenomenally well-directed, and to date has been the best-reviewed foreign film of the year.

Mercury pollution is driving loons crazy

This year I spent some lazy late-summer days watching loons patrol a wilderness area lake I'd backpacked to. I should have been totally relaxed and enjoying this gorgeous and remote spot in the Adirondacks, but I couldn't help wondering if these birds had succeeded in hatching a brood, with no sign of little ones about. A friend at the Biodiversity Research Institute had told me of a paper they were soon publishing, which demonstrated the negative impacts of methyl mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants in the Midwest on loon behavior, physiology, survival, and reproductive success in the Northeast. The most impacted pairs David et al studied showed signs of lethargy and aberrant behavior (crazy loons), and they also "fledged" 41 percent fewer young. The birds' body burden of mercury increased 8.4 percent each year during the study. Sobering and awful.

So I cheered this month when I heard that New Source Review rules had been used by my state and seven others to successfully sue an Ohio company for acid rain impacts on wildlife, ecosystems, and structures in the Northeast. While acid rain is only peripherally related to the mercury problem we have from those same plants, it's a step in the right direction, and as this article points out, it's really good news for two reasons.

Will antiquated mining law’s reform export devastation?

Update [2007-10-28 9:18:56 by Erik Hoffner]: Looks like Jason and I were on the same page when we submitted our nearly identical posts on this the other day: his is below. I'll pare mine down to just this:

In part, the law's rewrite would raise taxes and fees to clean up an estimated 500,000 abandoned mines that leak cyanide, lead, mercury, etc., into watersheds. But the big question is whether this reform can survive the inevitable challenge from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Reid is from the hard rock mining state of Nevada, and is the son of a gold miner, but surely he can see that we need to stop giving away our natural resources, right?

The wrinkle, though, is encapsulated here in a Casper-Tribune article on the topic: