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NY Times Casts Light on Lindytown, WV, Harms of MTR

Yesterday The New York Times featured a sublimely written story by Dan Barry on the effects of mountaintop removal mining on a small town in West Virginia called Lindytown. The story, called "As the Mountaintops Fall, a Coal Town Vanishes," traces the plummeting fall of an entire mountain and the town below it to the…

25,000 Lives Don't Matter Much to Them

Today, another indication comes that some members of Congress don’t breathe the same air as their constituents. Politico is reporting (subs. req’d) that House Republicans will soon introduce legislation to delay the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to reduce the amount of cancer-causing, asthma-inducing, premature death-dealing pollutants in the air we all breathe—some congresspersons excepted,…

Friday Finds: Highway to the Dementia Zone

Freeway pollution could make you forget you’re in traffic As if living next to the sound of constant honking wasn’t enough, a recent study has linked freeway air pollution with brain damage, a finding that has health implications for those living near the nation’s highways, reports the LA Times. The study’s authors found that exposing…

Gas Drilling Permits While-U-Wait

The Associated Press had a story today detailing how regulators in Pennsylvania spend as little as 35 minutes reviewing gas drilling permits, before giving companies approval to blast millions of gallons of chemically treated water into the earth to extract the gas – a controversial practice known as fracking. Across the country, gas production using…

Plugs for Two Excellent Websites

Forgive me if you already know all about these two sites, but for anyone who doesn’t I thought I’d take a minute to recommend both, without reservation. The first, and I daresay lesser-known, is Wildlands CPR. I came upon this fine institution when I was writing Roadless Rules about roadless areas in the national forests.…

Anti-Salmon Mood in Congress Worries Fishermen

The excitement for the return of wild king salmon to restaurants and stores this spring and summer is nearly matched by anxiety. People fear that this now-rebounding seafood mainstay and regional jobs powerhouse will be decimated by politically driven efforts in Congress to gut science-based protections for fish in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Basin. That hope…

Death by a Thousand (Budget) Cuts

We avoided a government shutdown with last minute deals that seemed to please both parties. But as they often say here in Washington, D.C. “the devil is in the details.” And in this case, it’s an awfully vicious budget slashing devil that has emerged in those details. According to the Wall Street Journal, (subscription required)…

Lawmakers Probe Impacts of Gas Drilling Boom

In a hearing, today, lawmakers on Capitol Hill probed the health and environmental impacts of a gas drilling boom fueled by the controversial gas extraction technique known as hydraulic fracturing or fracking. Using this technique, companies blast millions of gallons of chemically treated water into the earth to force natural gas from underground deposits. In…

Clean Air Crosses The Partisan Divide

Clean air isn’t a partisan issue, although that’s admittedly easy to forget if you’re following the ongoing congressional clash over clean air protections (which sometimes seems as wide as the gap between the Grand Canyon’s north and south rims). The American public certainly isn’t so divided. A large majority—which includes citizens who identify as Republican, Democrat…