Four researchers from government and academia told a panel of U.S. senators on Aug. 3 that exposures to environmental toxins are a likely cause of autism in genetically predisposed individuals.

"ASDs [Autism Spectrum Disorders] could result from a variety of factors, including combinations of genes, environmental exposures and gene-environment interactions," EPA's Assistant Administrator for Research and Development and Science Advisor Paul Anastas said in a written version of his remarks to the Senate Environment and Public Works' Subcommittee on Children's Health.

On July 13 Clarke Kahlo said in a letter to Sarah McKeown, Army Corps of Engineers (ACE), Louisville District, "In 1996, I attended a '2016 bicentennial visioning conference' sponsored by the Indiana Environmental Institute among Indiana regulators, educators and environmental activists. Dr. James Gammon of DePauw University (now retired) called for 'greenbelts along every stream' as a partial solution to Indiana's relatively poor condition/performance in terms of greenspace and water quality. His succinct prescription stuck with me, and I repeat it wherever it might be useful to encourage riparian preservation and restoration."

A Indianapolis grassroots environmentalist, Kahlo requested that ACE hold a public hearing to discuss the work the Johnson County surveyor intends to do on Canary Creek, which runs through city of Franklin about 25 miles south of Indianapolis.

Editor's note: The Bloomington Alternative videotaped CAFO fighter Rick Dove's "Crimes Against Nature" presentation at the Indiana CAFO Watch Conference and posted it in seven short segments on the Alternative Videos page. Links to each segment, with extended excerpts from them, are published below.

MUNCIE -- Watching Rick Dove's multimedia presentation "Crimes Against Nature" conjured up memories of Indiana's feisty old Republican Gordon Durnill, a former GOP state party chair who wrote the 1995 book The Making of a Conservative Environmentalist. In addition to calling for the jailing of corporate executives who knowingly poison the environment with harmful toxins, Durnil debunked the environmentalist caricatures that persist in the American media today. Almost without exception, he said, environmentalists are environmental victims.

"I feel there are some strong elements in Sen. Lugar's bill but that it falls well short of the comprehensive plan that we really need to address climate change and to move the nation into a clean energy economy."

That's the message that Ron Burke asked people to convey to Senators Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) in the next few days when he spoke to an audience of about 25 on July 21 at Bloomington's Unitarian Universalist Church.

ROCKPORT, IND. -- Rex Winchell would satisfy just about any conceivable interpretation of the Hoosier colloquialism tough old bird. The 84-year-old Rockport citizen speaks proudly of the decade he spent in the military and working with military outfits in North America and Europe. When relating a story about an unpleasant conversation he recently had with a local public official, he says he's glad it was on the telephone and not in person.

"I probably would have spent a little time in the pokey," he says, "because I would have made a change in his face or some other portion of his anatomy."

Winchell is similarly blunt when talking about those who sanction and operate the 17 coal-fired power plants in what he calls Indiana's "Polluted Triangle," from Terre Haute to Tell City to Evansville and back to Terre Haute.

"If I walked out here on the streets of Rockport, Ind., and blew away as many as 15 people," he says, "... I'd end up either having my hide fried or a term of life in prison. But, to have people poison slowly the entire population of an area." His voice trails off at the notion.

On Thursday, July 1, 10 grassroots environmentalists met with Anne Carey, Hoosier National Forest acting supervisor, at the Hoosier's office in Bedford to convey their vision for the future of the national forest.

The activists represented Heartwood, the Sierra Club, Concerned Citizens of Crawford County, Concerned Citizens of Scott County, the Indiana Forest Alliance and Citizens Action Coalition. State Senator Richard Young, D-Milltown, was among them.

The first item on the agenda was biomass incineration.

When Rick Dove began his crusade against concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in his home of North Carolina in the early 1990s, he was a pioneer in this particular field of citizen activism. When the Vietnam veteran and retired Judge Adjutant General first became alarmed about water quality in the Neuse River that flows past his home in New Bern, few outside the agriculture industry even knew what the term meant.

Among those who did know was Robert Kennedy Jr.'s Riverkeeper Alliance, which in 1993 licensed Dove as a "Riverkeeper" to protect the Neuse and other troubled North Carolina waters threatened and degraded by industrial mega-farm operations and other forces. Since then, his efforts have helped achieve a state-imposed moratorium on new CAFOs and manure-storage lagoons and landed him a starring role in a new book on the subject called Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment by David Kirby.

On July 17, Dove will bring his story, which these days he calls "Crimes Against Nature," to the 2010 Indiana CAFO Watch Conference in Muncie, where he will be among the featured speakers.

Editor's note: Bloomington Alternative contributor Linda Greene participated in last month's U.S. Social Forum in Detroit. What follows are some of her observations from the experience.

"This is what democracy looks like!" is a familiar chant at progressive marches and rallies. The second U.S. Social Forum (USSF), held in Detroit on June 22-26, put the chant into practice. Some 15,000 activists of all colors and kinds gathered for what the USSF Web site billed as a "U.S. movement-building process."

"It is not a conference but it is a space to come up with the peoples' solutions to the economic and ecological crisis," the Web site says. "The USSF is the next most important step in our struggle to build a powerful, multi-racial, multi-sectoral, inter-generational, diverse, inclusive, internationalist movement that transforms this country and changes history."

ROCKPORT, IND. -- Crossing the Ohio River into Indiana from Owensboro, Ky., travelers are greeted with an image far more symbolic of Hoosier life than the tiny little "Indiana Welcomes You" sign that greets them now, or the billboards that dot Southwest Indiana highways featuring Abraham Lincoln, who spent part of his childhood just a few miles to the west of the William H. Natcher Bridge.

Indeed, the Hoosier state's howdy dominates the horizon a couple hazy miles before the bridge, when fat plumes of opaque-white air pollution from the Rockport Power Plant first appear. The coal-fired plant's twin cooling towers greet passing motorists with a hearty, "Welcome to Indiana, Land of Pollution." Minutes up U.S. 231, the box-like AK Steel plant rises just off the roadway to the east, adding an exclamation point to the greeting.

Between them, these two industrial facilities told the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that they released nearly 26 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the air, water and land in 2008. In their Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) reports to EPA, AK Steel reported 19.1 million pounds, American Electric Power's Rockport plant 6.7 million.

For all of our concern with safety and security -- in our homes, at the airport, and on the border -- our way of life is threatened as never before.

According to national security experts, the threat comes from Islamic extremists, and, to a lesser extent, popular democratic movements in Latin America. For the Tea Party movement, Big Government threatens traditional American values and individual liberties. White supremacist and anti-immigration groups perceive undocumented workers from south of the border as threats to American national identity and culture. Meanwhile, U.S. business interests point to labor and environmental regulations that threaten our competitive advantage in the global marketplace.

And that's just the short list -- the one that plays out on a regular basis in the American news media.