Category Archives: Environment

The history of energy exploration, mining, and delivery is best understood in a range from benevolent exploitation to worker and public oppression. A company comes into an area, leases or buys land in rural and agricultural areas for mineral rights, increases employment, usually during a depressed economy, strips the land of its resources, creates health problems for its workers and those in the immediate area, and then leaves. Continue reading →

Only in science fiction can humans escape the consequences of destroying their own habitat. In Robert A. Heinlein’s Time Enough For Love, the “Great Diaspora of the Human Race” began “more than two millennia ago” and has spread to more than “two thousand colonized planets.” The once “lovely green planet” Earth is a slum planet barely able to support life where only the poorest live, Earth’s natural capital having been consumed over two thousand years ago. Humans have found the ability to rejuvenate themselves and to live almost endless lives, but they are unable to rejuvenate the planets whose natural capital they devour. Humans have not encountered “one race as mean, as nasty, as deadly as our own.” As homo sapiens use up the environments of colonized planets, “human intergalactic colony ships are already headed out into the Endless Deeps,” leaving their ruins behind them. Continue reading →

In Central Asia, the problem of the rational use of transboundary water resources is the key to the welfare of the population and to the possibility for sustainable development of the national economy in the region. Continue reading →

Politics continues to threaten the health and welfare of Pennsylvanians. Continue reading →

With her 1962 book, Silent Spring, Rachel Carson got DDT and other synthetic pesticides banned and saved bird life. Today it is humans who are directly threatened by technologies designed to extract the maximum profit at the lowest private cost and the maximum social cost from natural resources. Continue reading →

Recently, I spent three weeks in a Georgia beach community. Each morning, I’d run to the pier and, sometimes, on the beach. At dusk, I’d walk a street that dead-ended with a view of the majesty and immensity of all that water, thinking, in awe, “cradle of life.” Continue reading →

Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow last Thursday. Continue reading →

Who intentionally set off fireworks under a blackbird roost in Beebe, Arkansas, on New Year’s Eve killing at least 200 birds in some warped homage to last New Year’s, when at least 5,000 blackbirds perished? Continue reading →

Have you heard about the great brown cloud? No, it’s not a new nickname for Donald Trump (his cloud is more an intergalactic nimbus of Aqua Velva and Tang), or the ominous menace in a new Stephen King novel. It’s almost as nasty, though. Continue reading →

On the Friday before the 4th of July weekend, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) discreetly dropped a bombshell. They announced that their Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) would not regulate Scotts Miracle-Gro’s genetically engineered Kentucky bluegrass which is resistant to Roundup herbicide (Scotts is Monsanto’s exclusive agent for marketing and distribution of Roundup). Continue reading →

In a June 13 article in The Guardian of the UK, reporter John Vidal writes that the weather extremes our planet is now experiencing constitute a “new normal.” WMR has been citing planetary anomalies for a few years and now the so-called “main stream” media is beginning to take notice. Vidal calls the phenomenon “global weirding.” While Vidal does not add the increase in quakes and volcanic eruptions plaguing the Earth, the suggestion that something is radically wrong is being noticed. Continue reading →

As of April 11, the average price for a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. was $3.79. And I hear people complaining about it all the time. Continue reading →

Some years ago in New England, a group of environmentalists asked a corporate executive how his company (a paper mill) could justify dumping its raw industrial effluent into a nearby river. The river—which had taken Mother Nature centuries to create—was used for drinking water, fishing, boating, and swimming. In just a few years, the paper mill had turned it into a highly toxic open sewer. Continue reading →

Some years ago in New England, a group of environmentalists asked a corporate executive how his company (a paper mill) could justify dumping its raw industrial effluent into a nearby river. The river—which had taken Mother Nature centuries to create—was used for drinking water, fishing, boating, and swimming. In just a few years, the paper mill had turned it into a highly toxic open sewer. Continue reading →

WASHINGTON—Formal debate began today on House Republicans’ spending bill that would cripple many of our nation’s cornerstone laws protecting air, water, wildlife, public lands and public health. The continuing resolution would, among other things, halt the reduction of dangerous carbon dioxide pollution and remove Endangered Species Act protections for the iconic gray wolf and other imperiled species. It would loosen restrictions on toxic mercury pollution and mountaintop mining; open up public lands to harmful activities; and slow progress to curb climate change and protect U.S. citizens from dirty air and water. Continue reading →