Category Archives: Online

Nov 6, 2006

Mary Brune looked worried. “I don’t know what the problem is,” she said, peering at the generator in the grass. Attached to it was a blower that was, in turn, attached to a puddle of yellow nylon. The next morning, that puddle was supposed to inflate to become a giant rubber ducky, the centerpiece of a protest Brune was leading at a Target store near her home in the San Francisco Bay area.

For Brune, the golden ducky represented much more than a call to remove PVC from Target’s shelves. It was her coming out as an environmental activist.

Eighteen months earlier, Brune was home nursing her newborn daughter and watching the news when a story came on about perchlorate, describing how this toxic component of rocket fuel had been found in human breast milk. “I didn’t have any idea what perchlorate was,” Brune says, “but I was really scared. Then I was outraged.” By the time her husband got home from work, she had made up her mind: “We’ve got to do something about this,” she told him.

Read it on Grist…

Nov 1, 2006

The Great Bear Rainforest, stretching from Vancouver Island to the Alaska Panhandle on the wild, rugged coast of British Columbia, is that rarest of things: an unvarnished environmental victory. But as the groundbreaking agreement signed to protect it comes into force, new challenges are surfacing.

The numbers are stunning: at 15.5 million acres, this rainforest is the size of Switzerland. A third of it, about the size of New Jersey, is now entirely protected from logging (selective cutting is permitted on the rest). The Great Bear is home to only about 25,000 people — and also a fifth of all the wild salmon on the planet. It is a rugged coast of narrow fjords that reach so far in from the sea, the water becomes glassy, as though in a lake. That water reflects steep mountainsides and glacier-smoothed peaks, their flanks cloaked in untouched coastal rainforest marked here and there by lighter patches of alder where rockslides have churned the landscape. Humpback whales breach in the shadow of ancient cedars and rare spirit bears — a local variety of black bear with fine, white fur — scoop salmon from pristine rivers.

Read it on Grist…

Frank Scura’s green ideas are sick

17 Aug 2006

With the recent profusion of green takes on everything from diapers to caskets, Frank Scura’s proposition might sound like more of the same: “We’re about greening the planet, one skateboard at a time.” But Scura, founder of the Bay Area-based Action Sports Environmental Coalition, isn’t your average environmentalist. And action sports — that heavily marketed package of adrenaline-infused competition undertaken on oceans of plywood — is a little different too. (more…)