Category: American Turmoil

Last February, when Elon Musk called the U.S. Agency for International Development “a criminal organization” that had outlived its usefulness, the full calamitous measure of closing the world’s most important human aid organization was not yet apparent overseas or in America. Seven months later it is brutally apparent. Across the planet a shameful retreat is occurring in the global work to secure clean water and safe sanitation for millions of people in Africa and Asia. …

Let’s all stand up and cheer our fellow Americans in the West for raising their voices and shutting down a Republican plan last month to sell millions of acres of the public domain. Even considering Earth Day demonstrations in April, it’s the first time any of the Trump administration’s irrational and dangerous initiatives to impede, weaken, and obliterate the nation’s protections for land, water, and air generated more than a peep of resistance. Where has …

One of the signature moments in contemporary American environmentalism occurred on October 6, 1967, in Suffolk County, New York, when nine scientists and a lawyer formally launched the Environmental Defense Fund. Now a $314-million-a-year global organization with 750 employees, EDF went on to influence pivotal environmental achievements, among them the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, and then helping the agency ban DDT and close the ozone hole. In January, Suffolk County bobbed …

In mid-December 2020, a month before he left office, President Donald Trump quietly signed the Save Our Seas Act to put the federal government’s shoulder to the work of developing alternatives to disposable plastic products, encouraging recycling, and limiting plastic debris in the world’s oceans. It took years of civic activism about the harm plastic causes to human health and the marine environment to convince Trump to sign the law, which helped prompt leaders of …