Category: Toxic Terrain

President Donald Trump’s campaign to carve up federal environmental agencies and paralyze statutes that cleared the air, cleaned U.S. waters, and protected wildlands marks the opening of MAPA, the new era to make America polluted again.  With uncanny speed and premeditated precision, Trump and his Cabinet are cutting budgets, slicing protections from statutes, and pushing thousands of seasoned scientists and resource managers out of the federal government’s principal environmental agencies: the Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric …

SUNNYSIDE, Washington – Waters from the snowpack of the Cascade Mountains support orchards, vineyards and dairies here in the Yakima Valley of eastern Washington State, boosting a flourishing farm economy and helping to stock store grocery shelves nationwide. But as the waters flow, so do a host of dangerous farm pollutants, contaminating drinking water wells in the valley and through the adjacent Lower Umatilla Basin across the state line in Oregon. Regulators and citizen groups …

WEST BEND, Iowa – People who think seriously about how to limit the toll industrialized American agriculture takes on communities, land, and water ought to visit the Fehr family’s organic Clear Creek Acres in northern Iowa. With just shy of 800 residents, West Bend is barely a blip on a prairie landscape, but it has become home base for an uncommonly large expanse of organically grown crops- operations that have found success in challenging the …

On July 31, 2024 the Michigan Supreme Court issued one of the most significant decisions in decades to strengthen safeguards for the state’s natural environment and especially its clean water. With a 5-2 majority, the court ruled that the state Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) had full authority to “take all necessary steps” to protect Michigan waters from agricultural pollution. The import of the decision cannot be overstated. It reverses decades of …

EDON, OH — For 60 years, this one stoplight Ohio town has been known as a place where time appears to stand still. With more than 400 Amish residents settled in and around the rural community that straddles the Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan state lines, it is common to see large families traveling by horse-drawn black buggies to and from farms where they milk dairy cows and grow corn. Adhering to a strict religious doctrine …

FREMONT, MI. – Anticipating a surge of funding for building manure biodigesters that capture methane for electricity and transportation fuels from millions of tons of farm animal wastes Michigan’s environmental agency last year drafted more rigorous operating rules to protect state waters from a new tide of farm-based pollution. The action by the Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy gained powerful legal justification in late July when the Michigan Supreme Court decided that EGLE …

For the third time in two decades the Environmental Protection Agency appeared in federal Appellate Court this week to defend its admittedly flawed approach to regulating the billions of pounds of manure running off into the nation’s waters from large industrial animal feeding operations. But unlike the previous Appellate Court cases in 2005 and 2011, when the plaintiffs were the major agricultural trade organizations seeking to weaken or eliminate agency regulations, this time the case …