Essay

Seven Billion Dreams. One Planet. Consume with Care – Today is World Environment Day, or WED. Every June 5th WED serves as a platform for the United Nations Environmental Programme to focus world attention on humanity’s relationship with our environment. Every day, as sunrise moves across the Earth, 7 billion people awake to face another day. For many of those 7 billion, just finding enough clean …

Our efforts must be informed by science if we are to seriously address the threat of climate change. However, there are a significant number of people, corporations and governments that are resistant to scientific discourse. Science is at the heart of environmentalism. On a wide range of issues, it is the work of scientists that has brought important issues to light. Scientific research not …

For most chroniclers of recent history, April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day, marks the beginning of the modern environmental movement. It was a different time in so many ways. Instead of SUVs and hybrids, muscle cars and big sedans dominated the roads, guzzling leaded gas at an average cost of 35 cents per gallon. The exhaust spewed out their tailpipes mixed with industrial emissions that buried many American …

All around the world, people who are on the front lines of efforts to protect our planet are murdered for their eco-advocacy. They put their lives on the line, and they are being slaughtered while the world does not appear to notice. Many other environmentalists are subject to intimidation, violence, stigmatization and criminalization. As revealed in a Global Warming is Real article, environmentalists are …

Earlier this week the White House released the latest National Climate Assessment Report, causing the rare flurry of attention in the mainstream press. The report summarized what anyone paying attention already knows; that climate change is happening now and impacting all parts of the country (and world), and those impacts can only get worse in a “business-as-usual” future. As the introduction to the Report …

As we continue to hope for the birth of a new era of environmental responsibility, we can draw inspiration from those who have gone before us and done so much to move us forward.  Here are the abbreviated biographies of six environmentalists who invested their lives into the noblest of noble causes. Judy Bonds The anti-mountaintop removal mining activist, Judy Bonds, died in 2011 at the age of 58. Judy was …

I’m not eager to spoil the party of Earth Day. For the environmentalist crowd, a group to which I pledge my philosophical, if not always explicit, allegiance, Earth Day is a time for celebration and renewal. But there’s something in “Earth Day” that seems a little like New Years’ Eve, at least to me. Which is to say a disappointment. Even for me the connection …