Blogs

The people living in the Uinta Basin in eastern Utah are the unwitting participants in a massive scientific experiment.  What happens when you put more than 11,000 oil and gas wells in a geologic basin and then seal off the air for days or weeks on end?  And the initial results are alarming—smog pollution that exceeds the federal standard set to protect public health by a whopping 89 percent.

This is the third blog post in a weekly series of personal stories from farm and agricultural workers, illustrating the need for stronger worker and safety protections against pesticide exposure. To get beyond the statistics of 10,000–20,000 pesticide poisonings on farms a year in this country, we go to the frontlines, beginning in California.

Just two weeks after the election—after anti-environmental forces gained full control of Congress for the first time in eight years—the new leadership is already at odds with the values and hopes of the public.

I’m happy to report that we got a major, slam-dunk win for the environment down here in Florida in the mid-term elections.

A grassroots environmental initiative was the biggest winner on the statewide ballot, more popular than any other candidate or issue. By a whopping 75 percent majority, Floridians voted to add the Land and Water Conservation Amendment to our state Constitution. Florida now has what is believed to be the largest state-based conservation initiative in U.S. history.

We get some interesting mail at Earthjustice, but one letter we received this week was too good not to share. It came from Detective Christopher Derry of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Fraud & Cyber Crimes Bureau, which immediately got our attention and had us on the verge of changing all our passwords.

Victorino’s story is part two in a weekly series of personal narratives from farm and agricultural workers, illustrating the need for stronger worker and safety protections against pesticide exposure. To get beyond the statistics of 10,000 to 20,000 pesticide poisonings on farms a year in this country, we go to the frontlines, beginning in California.

This guest blog post is written by Joanne Cipolla-Dennis, a resident of Dryden, NY, and member of the Dryden Resource Awareness Coalition, which banned fracking in 2011. She offers these thoughts on an otherwise gloomy post-election day.

This guest blog post is written by Caroline Cox, research director at the Center for Environmental Health.

With the plight of the honeybee receiving much national attention lately, I checked up on an old friend of mine who is a beekeeper in Josephine County, Oregon. I intended to write about how her bees were faring, but once I heard her story, I quickly realized this post wasn’t going to be only about the perils of these bees.

My first introduction to America’s national heritage was camping with my family in Ocala National Forest in Florida, where I grew up. My grandfather was raised hunting and fishing in and around the forest, and even after he moved to a different part of the state he would make an effort to go back there often.