Frankly Green

Everyday Chemicals May Be Harming Kids, Panel Told

In this day and age, it is baffling to me that we actually need to INTRODUCE legislation "that would require chemical manufacturers to prove the safety of their products before they're released into the market." Should this not be the de facto standard? Unfortunately not!!

Newark, New Jersey (CNN) -- Of the 84,000 chemicals on the market today -- many of which are in objects that people come into contact with every day -- only about 1 percent of them have been studied for safety, Sen. Frank Lautenberg said Tuesday. Lautenberg, D-New Jersey, told a hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Superfund, Toxics and Environmental Health that such little oversight means that children in the United States are virtual "guinea pigs in an uncontrolled experiment."

Greens Turn to Small-Scale Issues

By: Coral Davenport
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Climate change wasn’t the only environmental issue on Congress’s agenda over the past three years — it just seemed that way.

With the cap-and-trade bill dead in the Senate, lawmakers and environmental groups are looking to shine the spotlight on a slew of problems that received almost no attention in recent years, such as acid rain, overfishing, polluted drinking water and toxic chemicals in consumer products.

Strawberries Are About to Get More Toxic

Yet another example of corporate interests influencing decision-makers to make bad decisions. How can anyone honestly say that using methyl iodide, a chemical used to CREATE cancer in laboratory rats, is a good thing? It's not! Make your voice heard! There is a link at the end of the article where you can send your comments. More to come..........

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Caveat eater: Strawberries are about to get more toxic 

Link to Article

Ever wondered exactly how powerful the biggest corporate lobbies are? In Washington, note that Republicans support suspected terrorists' "right" to purchase guns, even while maintaining that no other part of the U.S. Constitution or the Geneva Conventions apply to them. And in Sacramento, a pesticide so cancer-causing that it's often used specifically to create cancer in rats for medical experiments was just proposed for approval for use on the state's strawberry crop.

The state's own Department of Pesticide Regulation had advised in a report against approving the gas, methyl iodide. And several Nobel prize winners asked the U.S. EPA not to approve it. (It did.) According to farmers, there are a number of alternatives to the stuff, including solarization, anaerobic soil disinfestation and natural pesticides. And it's especially important to use safe materials only in strawberries, which hold the chemicals they're treated with. (More background in this TGL post.)

Lobbying for methyl iodide, we have a single company, the largest pesticide manufacturer in the world, Arysta LifeScience. The Strawberry Growers Commission — the people who employ the people who'd be breathing the stuff in — had weakly declined to take a position.

The state is accepting public comment through June 14. Let them know that people trump profits.

Correction: Approval of methyl iodide has been proposed but not yet finalized, pending public comment.

 

Tapped - A Film About Bottled Water

Worth a Watch!!! Tapped is a film that examines the role of the bottled water industry and its effects on our health, climate change, pollution, and our reliance on oil. By 2030 the United Nations estimates two-thirds of the world will lack access to clean drinking water. Tapped will illustrate the impact of the global water crisis on America and what we can do as individuals to enact change sooner rather than later.

Video: The End of the Line

The makers of The End of the Line were kind enough to send me a couple copies of this new film. It is very well done and I highly recommend taking the time to see it. You can check out the trailer below.

This extraordinary documentary is a wake-up call to the world about the global issues surrounding overfishing.  If we continue to fish the way we do there may be no fish left in the ocean by 2048.  Narrated by Ted Danson (an active member of Oceana) and endorsed by National Geographic and Greenpeace, the documentary educates us about this growing issue and what we can do in our everyday lives to combat the problem (support restaurants that only serve sustainable seafood, etc.).  

As a special treat to our readers, I have a brand new copy to send to the reader with best comment on this post. Simply post your reply using the link below.

Pacific Garbage Patch Expitition Finds Plastic, Plastic Everywhere

Thanks to Eleanor P. for this article!

By Paul Rogers, San Jose Mercury News
Link to Article

Scientists who returned to the Bay Area this week after an expedition to the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" brought piles of plastic debris they pulled out of the ocean — soda bottles, cracked patio chairs, Styrofoam chunks, old toys, discarded fishing floats and tangled nets.

But what alarmed them most, they said Tuesday, was the nearly inconceivable amount of tiny, confetti like pieces of broken plastic. They took hundreds of water samples between the Farallon Islands near San Francisco and the notorious garbage patch 1,000 miles west of California, and every one had tiny bits of plastic floating in it. And the closer they sailed to the garbage patch, which some researchers have estimated to be twice the size of Texas, the more plastic pieces per gallon they found.

Ship of Plastic Bottles to Send Eco-Message

Trek across Pacific will be atop 10,000 empties and dome with shower
Link to Article

SAN FRANCISCO - You've heard of a ship in a bottle. How about a ship made of plastic bottles? That would be the Plastiki, designed to sail the Pacific on an 11,000-mile voyage highlighting the dangers of living in a throwaway world.

"Waste is fundamentally a design flaw. We wanted to design a vessel that would epitomize waste being used as a resource," said expedition leader David de Rothschild.

The boat is named in honor of the 1947 Kon-Tiki raft sailed across the Pacific by explorer Thor Heyerdahl, an ocean adventure that inspired de Rothschild.

There's a bit more of a tie-in. One of the Plastiki team members is Josian Heyerdahl, the explorer's granddaughter.

The World Without Us

by Sharman Apt Russell
Link to Article

Imagine an earth without humans. The how or why doesn't matter -- just poof . We die from disease or simply wink out. The premise of science writer Alan Weisman's The World Without Us is frankly delicious. Okay, sorry, I meant disturbing. Illuminating? Humbling? Insidious? In truth, I am not sure how I feel -- except completely hooked.

Much of the book is concerned with the things we leave behind. What, for example, happens to New York City? Without humans to pump the subways dry, the city floods. Sewer lines plug, pipes burst, streets become rivers. Even skyscrapers topple in this waterlogged mess. In about 300 years, all the bridges have collapsed. Moose and bear swim over to explore a forest of oak and beech. Rats and roaches, which relied on people for food and shelter in the bitter New York winters, are long gone. In New York, as elsewhere in the world, most domesticated animals and plants fail to survive in our absence. Feral cats, however, do just fine.

GrayisGreen.org - The National Senior Conservation Corps

I had the good fortune of meeting Robert E. Lane when my friend Robert Lane (no "E" and no relation to the former) introduced us. They met by chance and by virtue of sharing the same name. When I first met Robert E. Lane, he had the idea for GrayisGreen.org and now, through his efforts and the efforts of others, it has come to reality.

Below is a description of the National Senior Conservation Corps. I love the energy and attitude that they, and their entire generation for that matter, bring to tackling tough problems (and they have tackled a few!).

So congratulations Robert E. Lane and thank you Robert Lane for the introduction.

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GrayisGreen.org is a product of the elderly residents of Whitney Center, a retirement home in Hamden, Connecticut. While the generation born in the 1930s may be called seniors, we elderly were born in the 1910s and 1920s. With one exception, ours is an honorable history. We grew up in – and survived – the depression, defeated Fascism, Nazism, and Japanese imperialism, created the United Nations, held steady in the Cold War and, along with our children, defeated the tyrannical Communist system. We have been called the “Civic Generation” because, more than earlier and later generations, we took an interest in public affairs, turned out to vote, organized civic groups to fight for civil rights, civil liberties, and the relief of illness and poverty.

Imagine Earth Without People

The human impact on earth

by Bob Holmes

Link to Article

Humans are undoubtedly the most dominant species the Earth has ever known. In just a few thousand years we have swallowed up more than a third of the planet's land for our cities, farmland and pastures. By some estimates, we now commandeer 40 per cent of all its productivity. And we're leaving quite a mess behind: ploughed-up prairies, razed forests, drained aquifers, nuclear waste, chemical pollution, invasive species, mass extinctions and now the looming spectre of climate change. If they could, the other species we share Earth with would surely vote us off the planet.

15,589 Number of species threatened with extinction

Now just suppose they got their wish. Imagine that all the people on Earth - all 6.5 billion of us and counting - could be spirited away tomorrow, transported to a re-education camp in a far-off galaxy. (Let's not invoke the mother of all plagues to wipe us out, if only to avoid complications from all the corpses). Left once more to its own devices, Nature would begin to reclaim the planet, as fields and pastures reverted to prairies and forest, the air and water cleansed themselves of pollutants, and roads and cities crumbled back to dust.