Washington
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Gregg Small, director of the Washington Toxics Coalition, answers questions
Gregg Small. What’s your job title? Executive director of the Washington Toxics Coalition. What does your organization do? WTC works to protect human health and the environment from the impacts of toxic pollution. What are you working on at the moment? Photo: iStockphoto A top priority right now is our Pollution in People Project. For […]
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The barnstorming band that’s changing the world, one campus at a time
Singing a new song: Guster rocks out for eco-awareness. Photo: Ian B. Johnson. After welcoming some 1,500 fans to a concert at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash., last week, Ryan Miller — the curly haired front man of pop/rock band Guster — asked the audience if they had noticed that he […]
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Hazel Wolf Environmental Film Festival
Are you an aspiring filmmaker hoping to have your work reviewed by Grist one day? Or perhaps you love watching movies about your favorite subject: the environment! If so, the 8th Annual Hazel Wolf Environmental Film Festival will be taking place March 23 - 26 in Leavenworth, WA.
For a sense of what this year's event will be like, you can watch a video, consisting of footage from previous festivals.
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Despite a recent crackdown, Washington State’s raw-milk policy might point way forward.
In a nation riddled with diet-related maladies like obesity and diabetes, the official fear that greets raw milk is impressive.
You can waltz into any convenience store and snap up foods pumped liberally with government-subsidized high-fructose corn sweetener, deep-fried in government-subsidized partially hydrogenated soybean oil. Yet in many states, teams of bureaucrats devote themselves to "protecting" us from raw milk -- and imposing onerous fines on farmers who dare sell it.
Some states ban raw milk outright; others have erected elaborate barriers between farmer and consumer. Here in North Carolina, for example, I have to pretend I'm buying animal fodder when I visit a nearby dairy farm to pick up a gallon or two of raw milk.
Even so, consumers are increasingly demanding it, banding together with farmers to form Prohibition-like cells from New York City to Portland. To me, it tastes better, more alive, than even the best pasteurized milk; and I tend to believe the health claims made for it.
According to this AP article, Washington State is stepping up enforcement of its raw-milk restrictions, which are actually relatively enlightened.
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An interview with Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels on his pro-Kyoto cities initiative
A Nickels’ worth of free advice … Meet the pied piper of one of the most exciting green grassroots uprisings to hit the U.S. in years: Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels (D). He’s managed to get roughly 300 mayors nationwide — from the Northwest to the deep South and everywhere in between — to agree that […]
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Buoys in the Hood
Hood Canal One of Growing Number of Dead Zones Hood Canal is dying in slow motion, victim of a growing oxygen-deprived “dead zone,” and there is little political will or means to save it. The misleadingly named body of water — it’s actually a fjord, closed on one end — is the deep-water arm of […]
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The Little Solar Station That Could
The Columbia Generating Station, a nuclear power plant at Washington state’s Hanford nuclear reservation, sits just one mile from the White Bluffs Solar Station. For the past three weeks, Energy Northwest, the Pacific Northwest’s nuclear power producer, has been generating a tiny amount of electricity from solar panels at White Bluffs and selling it to […]
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The Shipping News
Salmon and other imperiled species would not be damaged by a proposed deepening of the Columbia River channel, federal scientists announced yesterday. Those findings — biological opinions required under the Endangered Species Act — will enable the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to proceed with the next steps in a $196 million project to deepen […]
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The Persistence of Mercury
Anyone who’s ever broken an old-style thermometer knows it’s tough to clean up mercury, but the state of Washington is undeterred. The state’s Ecology Department has created the nation’s only program to battle persistent bioaccumulative toxins, or PBTs, and mercury will be the first target. Found in substances ranging from eye makeup to industrial waste […]