Entering its second week, the inspiring Washington University sit-in against Peabody Energy has already gone beyond its goals to cut school ties with the St. Louis-based coal giant, and forced the rest of the nation to ask themselves an urgent question in an age of climate change and reckless strip mining ruin: Which side are you on? Photo credit: […]
Last week, I joined a panel at the Global Agribusiness Forum in São Paolo (Brazil) to talk about the impacts of climate change on agriculture and food production. You might be surprised that Greenpeace was at an agribusiness conference. The room was full of agri-business people, who are not the crowd we normally engage with; they are […]
While Peabody Energy may have hired a notorious public relations firm to hawk its international ad campaign, a village trustee and her rural farming community have exposed the devastating legacy of the world’s largest coal company near its historic Illinois beginnings. Meet Judy Kellen and the courageous community of Rocky Branch in Saline County, IL, whose battle to save their […]
When it comes to oil spills, there’s no substitute for prevention. The trouble is, 25 years after the Exxon Valdez spill fouled Alaska’s Prince William Sound and four years after the horrific events in the Gulf brought on by the Deepwater Horizon blowout, we can’t seem to stop spewing oil into our waterways. This NPR […]
People always ask me how I stay optimistic in the face of so much bad news about the environment. Easy: I stop and look around me at all the people who are working to make the situation better. Two of those people are college students Alex Freid and Amira Odeh. Amira Odeh fosters sustainable water consumption […]
As food supplies have tightened, a new geopolitics of food has emerged—a world in which the global competition for land and water is intensifying and each country is fending for itself. We cannot claim that we are unaware of the trends that are undermining our food supply and thus our civilization. We know what we need to […]
For four years, Waterkeeper Alliance and our North Carolina Riverkeepers have been locked in a pitched battle with Duke Energy to force the irresponsible company to clean up its dangerous, illegally polluting ash ponds which we call toxic ash holes. In 2009, I traveled to Raleigh to meet with the Aquifer Protection Section of the North Carolina […]
Governments, media and much of the public are preoccupied with the economy. That means demands such as those for recognition of First Nations treaty rights and environmental protection are often seen as impediments to the goal of maintaining economic growth. The gross domestic product has become a sacred indicator of well-being. Ask corporate CEOs and […]
Each year, food poisoning from contaminants like salmonella results in 48 million illnesses, 128,000 hospitalizations and 3,000 deaths in the U.S. Food inspections in our highly consolidated food system are vital, because once a problem gets into the food supply, it can be weeks before it’s detected. So why do some in Congress support a new […]