April 14, 2012
The Greene Report is a compilation of environmental stories written by Linda Greene for the Alternative and WFHB Community Radio's EcoReport. This week's edition includes:
- AK Steel nation’s premier toxic water polluter
- Dangerous levels of air pollution in Evansville
- USDA acknowledges exterminating birds, crops and bees
- Capitalizing on climate change destruction with the world’s longest fiber-optic link
- Low doses of some chemicals tied to ill health
- Conservatives’ trust in science has plummeted
- Six finalists vie for Indianapolis Prize
- Beware of what you’re putting in your gas tank
- Indiana water quality the focus of Earth Month
- Appalachian bears buried alive by mountaintop-removal mining
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Read The Greene Report archive on The Bloomington Alternative.
April 14, 2012
The first time I went to Costa Rica, my daughter and I did what most tourists do: we ran around the tourist track, stayed in hostels and rode in tourist vans. We enjoyed it all -- the giant turtles on the Tortuguero beach, snorkeling at Manuel Antonio, the lava at Arenal, the night hike at Monteverde.
My next trip to Costa Rica, I went alone, and I did something different: I studied and lived with a Costa Rican family.
April 14, 2012
The Rockport coal gasification plant is the second recent Indiana energy project boondoggle. Vectren was right to withdraw from the first one in 2007, and it is right to oppose Rockport now.
The first project is the coal gasification plant at Edwardsport, where the construction costs are out of control, and the plant is shrouded in scandal. Duke Energy Indiana ratepayers are already paying hundreds of millions of dollars for the plant -- although it’s not running and won’t be completed for months.
Environment | Politics | Economic Justice | Social Justice | Social Activism | Education | Health Care | Occupy!
April 9, 2012
Occupy Wall Street groups across the nation are joining forces for a Spring of Discontent despite skeptics’ expectations that the cold winter months would diminish the movement’s passion and momentum. Occupy Chicago organized a day of action on April 7, the official kickoff of Chicago Spring, including rallies, marches and other events intended to educate, inspire, unite and mobilize the 99 percent.
Despite persistent pressure from the city and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s efforts to impose tighter fines and restrictions to scatter Occupy Chicago protesters from the downtown area, the movement has only grown stronger, Calumet College of St. Joseph Assistant Professor of English Mark Cassello wrote in an April 5 Huffington Post article. In fact, he said the mayor’s actions have “helped forge a highly organized and nimble agent of social protest.”
"It's important to let the 1 percent know we have gone nowhere and gotten stronger (since) the winter," Occupy Chicago protester Mike Ehenreich said in a April 7 ABC7 article.
Anonymous activists' banner drop protests coal plant
April 9, 2012
News Release
Anonymous IU Students
Early Monday morning, several anonymous IU students concerned about the climate-related death toll of their campus’ coal-fired heating plant dropped a massive 30-foot-x20-foot banner over the two-story bridge of the Kelley School of Business on Fee Lane. The banner, which was dropped intentionally within eyeshot of the campus’ coal plant, read as follows: “CLIMATE CHANGE KILLED 315,000 PEOPLE LAST YEAR ALONE. IU HAS BLOOD ON ITS HANDS.”
The students responsible for the banner cited this alarming figure from a study released in 2009 by the Global Humanitarian Forum, a non-profit foundation presided over by former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan. This landmark publication, entitled “The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis,” found that every year approximately 315,000 people die prematurely due to weather-related disasters and environmental degradation (such as deterioration of arable land) associated with anthropogenic climate change and that by the year 2030, “the lives of 660 million people are expected to be seriously affected.”
Former Obama advisor outlines grassroots strategies in Fox News era
April 7, 2012
Anyone whom Glenn Beck considers an anarchist radical, a black liberation theologian, a black nationalist and an avowed communist is clearly someone with a story worth hearing. And former Barack Obama advisor Van Jones, whom Beck drove from the White House with relentless, racist, red-baiting attacks in 2009, is telling his now.
Obama's former "green jobs czar" has written a new book titled Rebuild the Dream and took his message to MoveOn and Democracy Now! audiences on April 3, the day before the book's release, the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.
"Ultimately, this book is just the prologue to what comes next," he wrote in an email to MoveOn members. "… America is not broke. We are a rich nation, and we can do much better than we are doing. We need a game plan for victories now and in the years to come."
City councilman says honest reckoning needed for transition to future
April 7, 2012
Peak oil production is at a crisis point but also is an opportunity to better the planet, Bloomington City Councilman David Rollo said in a talk, "Evidence and Consequences of Peak Oil," sponsored by Green Drinks at the Upland Brewery banquet hall on March 28.
Rollo is well-qualified to speak on the subject. A Bloomington City Council member, he has sought to bring sustainability policies to local government in his nine years in office. His policy initiatives include creation of the Bloomington Commission on Sustainability in 2005, a green building ordinance in '09 and the Platinum Bicycle Task Force in '11, which was created by a council resolution co-sponsored by Isabel Piedmont-Smith, Andy Ruff and Rollo.
March 31, 2012
The Greene Report is a compilation of environmental stories written by Linda Greene for the Alternative and WFHB Community Radio's EcoReport. This week's edition includes:
- Environmental movement losing due to strategic failings
- Westinghouse pushes nukes, despite acknowledged hurdles
- Monsanto voted biggest 'Corporate Fool'
- Pesticides responsible for killing bees
- Salmon dying off in Lake Huron, Lake Michigan
- 1,000 antinuclear activists march in Vermont
- Six finalists vie for Indianapolis Prize
- Indiana Recycling Coalition holds 23rd annual meeting
- Former treatment plant operator plea bargains for polluting
- EPA administrator in Paris for OECD meeting
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Read The Greene Report archive on The Bloomington Alternative.
March 31, 2012
On a sunny and unseasonably warm Wednesday afternoon, March 21, some 100 people gathered at the Bloomington Courthouse Square to honor Iraq on the ninth anniversary of the U.S. invasion and occupation and to express their demand for diplomacy, not war, with Iran.
The rally was sponsored by the Bloomington Peace Action Coalition, the Just Peace Task Force of Bloomington's Unitarian Universalist Church and the Bloomington chapter of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.
March 31, 2012
Evidence that Occupy Wall Street (OWS) has reshaped the discourse in the national financial sector is ample, as working groups continue to organize events to recreate a new kind of banking system.
Most executive directors at major financial services firms say that OWS has made a mark on their businesses, according to a study conducted by a financial services research firm Echo Research and Makovsky.
"Banks and financial services firms have now shifted their focus from liquidity and financial performance to customer satisfaction and their own employees," Makovsky executive Scott Tangney said in a March 27 Huffington Post article. "The Occupy Wall Street Movement has indicated to firms where they need to be focusing."