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Gentle Persuasion
As a candidate, Barack Obama promised to "uphold and defend" the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which set out to protect nearly 60 million acres of pristine national forest lands across the country. Not long ago, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who has responsibility for the Forest Service among many things, announced that he will personally review…
Read MoreLong Live Savage Rapids
The pictures are not what you’d generally call beautiful, but they’re stirring nonetheless: the early stages of the demolition of the Savage Rapids Dam on the Rogue River in Oregon, which has been killing salmon for decades. The demolition is the result of yeoman (yeowoman too) efforts by a cast of hundreds, including Earthjustice’s Mike…
Read MoreEPA Puts Kansas Power Plant on Hold
The federal Environmental Protection Agency has thrown a wrench into the expansion of Sunflower coal-fired power plant in Kansas. It’s the first hopeful sign out of that state since its new governor cooked up a deal allowing the expansion in May. In a letter this week, the EPA told the state and Sunflower Electric that…
Read MoreHow Many Presidents Does It Take to Change a Light Bulb?
How many Presidents of the United States does it take to change a light bulb? Just one. It’s no joke. Millions of Americans have already changed their light bulbs to save energy and fight global warming. New lighting standards announced Monday will help all our homes and businesses make the switch, and as a result,…
Read MoreBrown 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…
Read MoreA 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…
Read MoreBedfellows
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…
Read MoreIt's Not Trash, It's Compost
San Francisco approves nation's strongest composting/recycling plan
Read MoreSenate 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…
Read MoreGetting 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…
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