Articles by Christina Larson

Global warming wedding-crashers?

I was thinking a bit more about a point David raised yesterday: While it's dandy that groups outside the fold of the mainstream environmental movement, from sportsmen to evangelicals, are expressing concern about global warming, how do we know wily conservatives won't be able to dance their way out of ambitious and necessary reforms with toothless rhetoric, more industry subsidies, and "fake solutions"?

It's a hugely important question, and I won't pretend to have a crystal ball in my cubicle. But I strongly believe it's a question that greens and progressives must find a way to answer -- otherwise our best-laid plans and proposals will remain just that.

The Bush administration has mastered the art of Orwellian naming ("Healthy Forests," etc.) and bait-and-switch rhetoric (we're "addicted to oil" -- let's reshuffle research budgets without committing to advancing the ball). That we know. The question is: How's the sales job going? Better or worse than last year, or four years ago?

Environmentalism is dead? Long live environmentalism.

Thanks to David Roberts for highlighting an article in the current Washington Monthly, "The Emerging Environmental Majority" (by yours truly).

Here's the quick version: Each time in American history that environmental concerns rose to the top of the national agenda, support for ambitious government action came from a broad array of groups responding to an impending sense of crisis.

Having spoken to activists, historians, and politicians of the 1960s and 1970s, I believe there are parallels between today's mounting public concern over global warming and the prelude to our nation's last great era of environmental reform. In the decade before "Earth Day," city-based citizen groups across America worked to control pollution, union chapters focused on mining safety, sportsmen's groups worried about watersheds, and women's organizations highlighted the connection between pollutants and fetal health. These groups had diverse focuses, but the broad chorus for reform made green concerns impossible to ignore. In the early 1970s, Washington produced the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Endangered Species Act, among other landmark laws.

Today public concern about global warming is approaching another tipping point. Climate-change campaigns are taking root among a widening spectrum of groups, from environmentalists to evangelicals, hunters to insurance companies, farmers to politicians. For ambitious measures to pass muster in Washington, global warming has to be seen, not as an issue for partisans, but as an issue affecting everyone.

Now, my original point was that David is one smart cookie (don't you agree?), and he raises some pertinent questions that I take a whirl at answering below.

Fair trade palms

Loving thy palm grower as thyself, a growing number of churches opted last Sunday to celebrate Palm Sunday with palm fronds grown in conditions deemed both worker-friendly and environmentally sustainable.

As Brenda Meier, parish projects coordinator for Lutheran World Relief, told Religion News Service:

To have in our hand on Palm Sunday a palm that we know has been harvested in an ecologically friendly way, in a way that's going to benefit the communities and the people who harvested them, adds that much more depth to our celebration of Palm Sunday.

Amen, sister.

Ask the feds

Via The Washington Post, the Department of Energy wants to block Montana's attempts to regulate the impacts of coalbed methane extraction on local water supplies.

The state's Board of Environmental Review has voted in favor of requiring extraction companies -- which use large quantities of water to retrieve natural gas from coal seams -- to replenish those groundwater supplies in their original, nonpolluted state. But federal officials and Wyoming's congressional delegation object that the move could slow down the pace of energy development in Montana and neighboring states.

As Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer told the Post:

We want to develop energy in Montana, but we want to do it right. Here's the bottom line with the federal government: They're usually not helpful, and they weren't this time, either.

How's an honest man to do his job?