At the Frontlines of the Global Transition
The United States has entered an era of political insurgency with grave consequences for the economy, the environment, our safety, and our way of life.
“On behalf of the United States we’d like to apologize for our behavior.” During four days of travel across Ontario and Quebec, that was our message to Canadians last week. Two Americans temporarily escaping the pressure of a seminal election by crossing the border to a democracy that is still sturdy. We talked to shopkeepers, a teacher, and various other people. Their responses in almost every instance: “Oh, no need,” they’d say. “We understand your …
Who knows how the November 3rd election turns out. Don’t pay the polls much mind. They’ve been wrong too many times. Don’t for a minute consider the White House is going to treat polling stations or the results with the necessary weight and respect. Try to do this: Understand that the United States is a very big, exceptionally complex, and quite sturdy nation. Americans have shown ourselves capable of making the right decisions at the …
Behold the “No Kings” protests last month. Millions of Americans in the streets opposing the Trump administration’s reckless governing principles. Thousands of communities expressing the solemn right to push back against a clear and present danger. At least for the time being. For real. As public attention is diverted by the daily diet of strategically outrageous presidential distractions, fossil fuel companies and their industrial allies have been quietly advancing a new form of corporate vigilantism. …
The practice of reporting on the environment starts with a working knowledge of a range of scientific disciplines. One of them is chemistry. To wit: since the 1960s, when Americans and visionary lawmakers voted to hold polluters accountable for their wastes, a specific chemical pollutant has emerged in each decade as the leading environmental and public health menace prompting legal and political action. The pollutants of primary interest in the 2020s, for instance, are PFAS, …
The U.S. Senate this week is poised to vote on a narrowly-cast resolution intended to clear a new pathway to eventually open a long-disputed copper mine close to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northeast Minnesota. There’s a lot more, though, riding on the Senate vote, and not just for a region of the American north country adored for its towering pines, and deep, clear waters. If it’s approved and signed by President Trump, …
No one I know, and few people outside my realm, consider their lives near the forests and clean waters of the upper Great Lakes as anything other than a blessing. Even though for two centuries residents here engaged in an ambitious campaign to achieve “progress” – wielding the axe on our trees and building facilities that discharge wastes into our waters – our landscape nevertheless is now a real-life demonstration of the hard-fought and virtuous …
What was the message in the No Kings protest yesterday in Benzonia, Michigan? A thousand people from a rural one-stoplight county had fun delivering it: Americans possess a stubborn resilience. It won’t be stomped out by a savagely authoritarian president, his aides, and the irresponsible cult of MAGA rubberstampers in Congress. The October 18 opposition event was by far the largest of the three protests held in Benzie County this year. Like the others, it …
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 …
