Uncategorized Archives

Brown Republicans

A good case could be made that the most important U.S. federal environmental laws are the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act. And what do they have in common? They were enacted (amended since in some cases) in the early 1970s and signed into…

A Communist Plot

Remember the John Birch Society? The virulent right-wing McCarthyist outfit born in Indianapolis in 1958? I hadn’t heard of it for years, would have guessed it had passed quietly back into the fourteenth century, but low and behold it’s still alive, kicking, screaming, and denying the fact of global warming and climate change. A quick…

Bedfellows

The Alabama-based environmental law firm Wildlaw has just announced the hiring of Mark Rey as a part-time lobbyist to work on national forest restoration projects in the Southeast and to help with land acquisition efforts. Here’s a little backstory. Wildlaw is headed by an attorney named Ray Vaughan, and it has done much good work…

It's Not Trash, It's Compost

San Francisco approves nation's strongest composting/recycling plan

Supreme Indifference

Two long and thoughtful pieces today, one from the Daily Journal, the other from Greenwire, discuss in painful detail the thumping environmental cases suffered at the hands of the Supreme Court this term. In each case, the court overturned a pro-environment ruling from a court of appeals. The first case involved whether the Navy must…

Mountaintop Removal Mining in the Senate, Part 3

Dr. Margaret Palmer is a world renowned water biologist who works at the university of Maryland, but has a home in West Virginia and family from the Appalachia region. "Headwater streams are exponentially more important than their size would suggest," said Dr. Palmer in testimony before the Senate. She compared headwater streams to the small…

More from the U.S. Senate Hearing on Mountaintop Removal

The first witness, an EPA official, was questioned extensively about the impacts both locally and globally of destroying entire forests, flattening mountains, and increasing flooding as a result of mountaintop removal mining. In the second witness panel are: Paul Sloan, Deputy Commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation; Randy Huffman, Cabinet Secretary of…

Senate Kicks Off Hearing on Mountaintop Removal Mining

The hearing started promptly at 3:30 pm with Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), a cosponsor of the Appalachia Restoration Act, stating that mountaintop removal mining "adversely effects the economies of the region." Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), also a cosponsor of the Appalachia Restoration Act, offered opening remarks including, "it’s not necessary to destroy our mountaintops in…

Getting Closer to Clean Water for All

Last week the U.S. Senate moved forward on important legislation that ensures our streams, lakes, rivers and wetlands remain clean and safe. By a vote of 12-7, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee advanced a compromise version of the Clean Water Restoration Act, important legislation that reinforces the scope of the Clean Water Act…