When you go to the grocery store and you buy a bag of chips, a chocolate bar, crackers, ice-cream, doughnuts, frozen snacks or other candy, you may see a label on the products saying ‘RSPO Certified Sustainable Palm Oil’ or ‘Green Palm Sustainability.’ Such labeling makes it is easy to think that the product you [...]
Continue reading...Tuesday, December 18, 2012
As Bank of America Co-Chief Operating Officer, David Darnell, and outgoing Duke Energy CEO, Jim Rogers, met behind closed doors to forecast 2013′s corporate profits—a storm was brewing in Charlotte. Immediately before the heavily guarded economic summit was set to begin, an inconvenient visitor arrived and demanded to be let into the meeting: Hurricane Sandy. Buoyed [...]
Continue reading...Wednesday, November 28, 2012
“This dusty old dust is a-gettin’ my home, And I got to be driftin’ along.” -Woody Guthrie, “So Long, It’s Been Good To Know Yuh” This past weekend I watched Ken Burns’ new PBS documentary, “The Dust Bowl,” a great, insightful documentary drawing parallels to the dust bowl of the 1930’s and today’s environmental and [...]
Continue reading...Wednesday, August 22, 2012
It has been an extreme summer. Droughts. Wildfires. Crop failures. Heat waves. Melting ice caps. We’ve seen these words so much this summer you may not feel any shock at the sight of them now. It is clear that we are no longer talking about climate change as a fearful phenomenon in the future; we [...]
Continue reading...Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Canada’s Boreal forest is part of the world’s largest land-based carbon storehouse. It is also the world’s greatest reservoir of fresh water, and is among the largest unlogged forests left on the planet. But the Boreal has been under threat for years, and, as is often the case, local Indigenous peoples who live in and [...]
Continue reading...Monday, August 13, 2012
At around 9:30 this morning, one hundred strong gathered in Helena, Montana for the first day of the Coal Export Action. Today’s rally spread across the steps of the capitol building, kicking off a week of action against coal exports organized by the Blue Skies Campaign, a Montana-based, volunteer grassroots organization. Lowell Chandler, who is [...]
Continue reading...Tuesday, July 10, 2012
The U.S. is getting hit by extreme weather this summer: heatwaves across the eastern seaboard, droughts in the Midwest, forest fires raging in the Rockies. Check out this spine-chilling video compilation by Peter Sinclair (of the Climate Denial Crock of the Week blog), which places these events into the context of climate change. It’s titled [...]
Continue reading...Friday, April 20, 2012
If there was ever a time for Bank of America to address the outcry over its ecological rampage, this was it. Environmental organizations in Charlotte, North Carolina received a surprising invitation: Bank of America was organizing an “Earth Day expo” to “promote environmentally friendly issues and causes.” Had Bank of America seen the light on [...]
Continue reading...Friday, April 20, 2012
Through our Protect-an-Acre program, RAN recently provided a small grant to Caura Futures. This lean, innovative organization supports the conservation of the 45,300 km² Caura River Basin in Venezuela, one of the few pristine tropical watersheds on Earth, by working with local Indigenous communities and providing training and tools to improve human health and promote [...]
Continue reading...Thursday, February 2, 2012
Before I started doing environmental work, I’d assumed that biofuel use would have a positive effect on the climate. It turns out the truth about biofuels is much more complex than I’d originally thought. Not every biofuel on the market today has a positive impact on the environment, and some actually pose a major threat. [...]
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Thursday, April 25, 2013
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