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Allen Johnson rallies Christians to fight against mountaintop-removal mining

Allen Johnson. As its not-at-all euphemistic name would indicate, mountaintop-removal mining makes no effort to disguise its impact. Coal-mining companies brazenly invade Appalachian communities, blow the tops off mountains, send […]

Seriously

You can find your polling place here. You can report (and find out about) voting problems here or here.

Who’s On First?

Officials in suburban Detroit point fingers over contaminated park You remember when Katrina hit, and officials spent their time blaming each other instead of helping people? This is sort of […]

Vote for Grist!

Our Election Day coverage offers hope and a blogging blitz Here at Grist, we love Election Day. There’s a certain buzz in the air, a feeling that all Americans face […]

College field program shows there’s more to citizenship than going to the polls.

Take a break from freaking out about the election and listen to this NPR audio clip about Whitman College's Semester in the West program. It's a biennial, semester-long environmental studies field course, with a heavy emphasis on public lands issues. If you have any passion about environmental issues, traveling, and/or camping, I guarantee this will make you want to go back to school.

(Grist featured Phil Brick, the professor in the story, as an InterActivist back in October 2005.)

I myself am an alumni of the program, and I'd say the audio clip is quite well done. It provides a good snapshot of what life is like during the semester and the kind of intellectual challenges students confront. As the narrator explains, students are "put face to face with people on all sides of complex issues. Students ask their own questions, and draw their own conclusions."

Endangered Rep. tones down committee website

It seems Richard Pombo has decided that using the House Resources Committee website as a dumping ground for anti-environmental talking points may be something of a liability. Or maybe he just thought the new techno design was nifty. You can still read about ANWR and the future of American energy, but some of the more propaganda-ish pages have come down.

I don't know if endangered species can truly "adapt" when their habitats are threatened, but they may try to shed skin.

So says a dumb article

I used this picture in an earlier article -- forgive me. It is just so appropriate to this topic. Anyway, that particular Homo sapiens hugging the dolphin carries my genes into the future.

Speaking of genes, researchers have caught a dolphin with residual back legs. I chose this particular article over the others because it is, well, asinine. I am not particularly empathetic with the excesses of the animals rights movement, but this article makes abso-fricken-lutely no sense. The author lost me immediately when she suggested that these fins will somehow "prove mammals know more than animal rights activists about the Animal Kingdom." Correct me if I am wrong, but animal rights activists also give birth to live young and then nourish them with breast milk. If you send her an email, please, be nice. Don't reinforce her warped image with aggressive and rude diatribes (like this one). God help her, she obviously just isn't that bright.

Looks like she might make it

It looks like Jennifer "alternative fuels" Granholm is going to pull it out in Michigan.

Just may be going down

Larry J. Sabato's crystal ball:

November 6, 2006 Update:

Jerry McNerney (D) will unseat Rep. Richard Pombo (R). Our sources on the ground tell us that momentum is firmly in McNerney's court and that late campaign help from Bill Clinton and scores of environmental groups is giving Resources Committee Chair Pombo a run for his money. Schwarzenegger's get-out-the-vote operation may yet save Pombo, but we will go out on a limb and tap McNerney to win in an upset.

Not green

Virginia's George Allen, better known for other offenses, also has Senate's worst lifetime voting record (PDF) on green affairs, as measured by the League of Conservation Voters. Watch out for that tree.