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Burning in New Orleans

Don't miss Carl Pope on the decidedly brown clean-up techniques being used by the recipients of the no-bid contracts for New Orleans remediation. In particular: they're burning the debris, which is likely loaded with toxic chemicals.

This, of course is the same reckless approach to cleaning up after a disaster that the Bush administration adopted in its official disaster response plans for another terrorist attack after 9/11. A Sierra Club analysis discovered that the Administration had decided that in another terrorist attack it would "waive" cleanup standards otherwise required under federal law, and that devastated communities would be left contaminated forever. We protested at the time that it seemed clinically insane to say that, if terrorists attacked a community, it would not get the same kind of protection and cleanup that would follow a natural disaster. Now it turns out that we hadn't heard the sound of the second shoe dropping. The response to Katrina shows that our government has no intention of protecting communities after they suffer any disaster, whether natural or terrorist.

Naked Lunch

Naked Chef hits reality TV to press for healthy, green school lunches Every day, at thousands of schools across the U.S., kids eat crap — over-processed, nutrient-poor, canned, just-add-water, microwaved […]

How many kudos does Bush deserve for endorsing conservation?

George W. Bush recently endorsed energy conservation. How much credit does he deserve?

The other post-Katrina recommendations featured in yesterday's press conference include trimming back environmental regulation on oil refineries, giving the feds siting authority over said refineries, and trimming money from Medicare, Medicaid, and the food-stamp program to pay for hurricane cleanup. No military or homeland-security programs will be touched, nor will there be any pause in the serial tax cuts for the rich.

Oh, and in the event of an avian flu outbreak, U.S. military grunts may be used as quarantine-enforcing first responders. Throw ya hands up for the Posse Comitatus Act! No, seriously. Put your hands up.

How much credit? Not so much.

Why the environmentalists shouldn’t ignore the ground beneath their feet

"Common as dirt," goes the old insult. Despite its antique nature, the saying may sum up industrial (and post-industrial) society's take on soil: low, squalid, filthy, annoyingly abundant, beneath dignity and respect.

Consider the zeal to clean, to wash, to sterilize and scrub. Claudia Hemphill, a doctoral student in environmental science at the University of Idaho, has been doing some interesting work on the recent social history of soil. As U.S. society mutated from primarily rural to overwhelmingly urban and suburban in the span of less than a century -- today less than 3 percent of the population engages directly in agriculture -- dirt came to be demonized, Hemphill argues.

By the dawn of the 20th century, when immigrants (many of them former farmers) and our own displaced rural populations flocked to U.S. cities, they found themslves confronted with a stark public-health slogan: "Dirt, Disease and Death."

A society washing its hands of agriculture didn't want dirt clinging to its trousers. Hence the cult of detergent.

Calling all environmental journalists

Or at least you good ones. You might want to get your name in the running for a new annual prize for top-notch environmental reportage; the winner(s) of the Grantham Prize for Excellence in Reporting on the Environment will take home $75,000. Info here.

Small-scale microgrids are more efficient, cheaper, and work just as well

If I were the kind of person who really dug in and learned about subjects in depth instead of a quasi-pundit dilettante who knows just enough about a lot of subjects to be dangerous [takes breath] I would study distributed electrical grids. They are, after all, the new black.

Here's the take-home message: Smaller-scale, distributed electrical generation (solar, wind, etc.), built closer to consumers, run by intelligent grids, is cheaper and more efficient than the big, centralized kind, could be implemented with no loss of quality or service, and would sharply reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. It is, as Martha is wont to say, a good thing. The impediments are not only technical but political, since distributed electrical grids are by nature democratizing.

More below the fold.

Too much time on a bike can impair sexual performance, researchers say

Bummer news for cycling advocates. Word's long been around that spending too much time on a bike seat can impair your performance in the bedroom. Now, researchers in this arena are getting even more adamant in their admonitions.

A New York Times article -- the No. 1 most-emailed on their site for the second day running -- highlights mounting evidence that frequent cycling by men can lead to a damaged perineum, loss of libido, "small calcified masses inside the scrotum," and/or impotence. Women, though less studied than men in this area, are also thought to be at risk.

Dr. Steven Schrader, a reproductive health expert who studies cycling at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, said he believed that it was no longer a question of "whether or not bicycle riding on a saddle causes erectile dysfunction."

Instead, he said in an interview, "The question is, What are we going to do about it?"

... The link between bicycle saddles and impotence first received public attention in 1997 when a Boston urologist, Dr. Irwin Goldstein, who had studied the problem, asserted that "there are only two kinds of male cyclists -- those who are impotent and those who will be impotent."

The hope is that better-designed bicycle seats can save the day. Otherwise, all those new bike owners may soon lose their steel steeds, for fear of losing something they care about a whole lot more.

Nobel goes to green chemists

Via WC, check it out: The guys who just won the Nobel Prize for chemistry are green chemists:

It’s Energy Star Change-a-Light Day

So, um, change one.

Info here; feel-good pledge here. (And act quickly, before those cads in Congress eliminate Energy Star altogether.)

Gore on the marketplace of ideas

Do you wonder why public dialogue in the U.S. these days takes place in such an atmosphere of surreal trivia, despite the vitally important challenges facing us? Wonder why global warming, a catastrophe of Biblical proportions, can get on TV only if it's cast as the malevolent face behind a hurricane? Wonder why Americans are so bogglingly ignorant of basic current events?

Al Gore knows. Read his extraordinary speech.