If you are around on Sunday, check out the Blasphemer’s Brunch at Q. Cumbers. The old Radio Show is gone, but the Brunch Lives On. Details on this and other events at MN Atheists.

Analiese’s Facebook feed has three important and interesting stories linked by the theme of Global Climate Change: Visualizations by JPL “show how some of the key indicators of climate change, such as temperature, sea ice extent and carbon dioxide concentrations, have changed in Earth’s recent history,” two more glaciers at Glacier National Park have melted away, and severe aridification is happening in southern China.

There are times when it is helpful to understand why facts are not a function of one’s place on the political spectrum.  Helpful enough that I feel it counts as customer service.

There are two very dangerous forms of denialism that are gaining strength over the facts because of the absolute power of sound-bite propaganda to destroy the work of fact-based science communication.  I have been doing a bad thing in just trying to tell people where to go for information, I guess, when all they want to hear is affirmation that leaked e-mails and a severe cold spell disprove the facts of anthropogenic global warming.  I have been doing a bad thing by just trying to tell people where to go for real information on vaccinations.  They respond by telling me, as one woman did yesterday, “I guess we are just on the opposite sides of the political spectrum.”

I do need to be careful on how I approach the issue because when I am talking to a customer I am “Big Corporate” with an operator number and a first name.  All that the customer knows about me is that I have a friendly voice and that I can help them resolve a business-related issue. They don’t know my background in studying experimental design or how I know that there are ways to detect bullshit in bad science that nearly anyone can learn.  They don’t know I also understand that the economic cost of global warming denialism is as high as the environmental cost, and that the delays in trying to resolve it will further weaken our economy.

I deal with small business customers.  Our customer service protocol involves building “rapport” or making a connection with the customer so that they associate my employer with friendly customer service to build loyalty to a company whose fees are in some cases higher than those of our competitors.  (Don’t get me started on those sorts of complaints from people with high-end accounts yelling at me for a $3 photocopy fee.)  We need them to add on to their relationship with us by adding services, and one way to do that is to get them to feel comfortable that they are working with nice people.

We ask them how their business is doing, and I cringe to ask some people because I can see it is not doing well.  When I ask them, I do so in a sympathetic voice and prepare for an onslaught of sob story.  I truly sympathize with their plight, but I am dismayed at the level of “blaming” they toss at me.  The government is to blame for everything for some people.  Taxes and Regulations Are Destroying the Small Business Economy in America.  For far too many, there is conservative self-victimization going on, and I hear the name Obama used as a pejorative explanation for why business sucks.

It bugs me.  I had a chiropractor tell me business is really good, but he will probably go out of business if the socialists in Congress get their health bill passed.¹  I had an oil drill maintenance company owner tell me business is good, but if the government doesn’t start letting businesses drill he will be out of work.  I had a naturopath tell me business is good, but the FDA will ruin it for her if they start regulating her remedies.  I had a small church tell me business was dropping off because people are leaving for MegaChurches.  Oh, wait, they aren’t the government.

I have construction people telling me they can’t get work bidding on schools because they have to bid too low to get a job, and they can’t afford to take the work because of it.  I have real estate agents who are stuck because the market is making it hard to resell anything because their customers can’t afford to sell for the market price.  It’s the economy that the Democrats ruined, is what it is.

There’s a lot of blaming, and not much taking responsibility and adapting.  That’s what people need to do, rather than wait for Sarah Palin to come along and destroy the damage that Barack Obama is doing.  The world is changing, and livery stable owners need to start looking at making a go at the auto dealership business.

But no.  They don’t think they should need to adapt to a changing economy.  They want things the way they were when they were successful in the old days, when things were booming and the work and money fell at their door.

I try to make rapport with them and continue to provide a soothing voice and help them with their business-related problem, but occasionally I slip up and try to help them understand further what the consequences of denialism will be.  The problem is that they just don’t expect it from a customer service representative and are pretty sure they are just going to have a sympathetic ear for whatever they say.  When I try to gently correct them, they dismiss me or engage me with the propagandistic bullshit that is winning over explanation.

I talked to a woman yesterday, who told me how cold it is in Austin, Texas.  ”Good thing we got global warming!”  So I started to explain that the “global” in “global warming” means “not local” and reflects larger trends which seem small, but considered as a measure of additional energy in the atmosphere, cause very large effects. She cut me off and said that she believes that the Earth’s temperature always goes in cycles and that this is just another cycle.  I tried to explain to her that there are resources she can use if she wants to get more information, but again she cut me off and said, “Well, I guess we are just on opposite ends of the political spectrum.”

I dropped that particular subject and went on to the business matter at hand. I was frustrated to be dealing with yet another person who confuses science with political persuasion.  The science of global warming is settled, and the increasing level of concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is a major contributing factor.  That’s a fact, but denial of that fact has become a tenet of conservative thought.  In my experience, small business owners tend to be politically conservative and where they once saw innovation opportunities, now continue to cling to their ways even while they see their business tanking.

What I want to tell them is to take this opportunity to get into the nascent renewable energy fields.  What I want to tell them is to shake their ideas that Al Gore invented global warming so that he cold be more powerful and better-liked by the country that gave him an electoral majority in 2000.  What I want to tell them is that if painting contractors are not getting bids that can support them, it is time to learn how to apply materials that capture sunlight.  What I want to tell them is that there is money to be made.  Chiropractors I want to tell to find an honest line of work, and churches I want to tell to start looking at the possibility of converting their buildings to museums.

I can’t tell my customers this, of course, because I like my job.  My frustration builds because we are in a social setting that prevents me from having a conversation about an important issue.  I avoid the Big Three topics (religion, sex and politics) at work as much as possible.  I understand the reason that this is necessary and avoid it for the purposes of keeping the level of customer service professional. There are times, however, when I just want to yell at these people for avoiding the future and contributing to the dissemination of invalid information.  I want to yell at the naturopath who tells me that vaccination is dangerous and that she is selling cures that help people avoid sickness.  I want to tell them to stop it, to wake up and prepare for a new economy rather than allow themselves to lose out by hanging on to an old economy.

Denialism and customer service are two difficult bedfellows, but this is where I lay.

1. These are representative but not necessarily actual scenarios I’ve dealt with–as an additional service to my customers.

EPA Mining Decisions Favor Coal Industry

Despite renewed vows to protect Appalachian waterways from the ravages of mountaintop coal mining, the Environmental Protection Agency has recently authorized a number of pending mountaintop permits that will bury dozens of streams in the nation’s oldest mountain range. The move has left mining supporters cheering the federal endorsement of a popular extraction method, environmentalists wondering if the Obama administration truly intends to prioritize water quality concerns above those of the powerful coal industry, and both sides unsure what to expect of mountaintop permitting in the future.
Washington Independent

2008 U.S. Fossil Fuel CO2 Emissions See Biggest Drop in Nearly 30 Years

Sky-high fuel prices, declining energy use and a slumping economy gave the U.S. its largest annual decline in fossil fuel-based carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions since 1982, when emissions fell 5.3 percent.

Energy-related CO2 emissions in 2008 fell 2.8 percent compared to the year before, according to preliminary data released today by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).
GreenBiz

Ethanol lobby could kill climate bill

Ethanol producers, who hold sway with a raft of rural Democrats, are taking umbrage with the recent Environmental Protection Agency finding which said that the “indirect land use” involved in ethanol production must be taken into account when calculating the carbon footprint of the gasoline additive. The EPA finding, when indirect land use is taken into account, calls into question the utility of ethanol as a greenhouse-gas-reducing fuel.
The Raw Story

Surprising New Pathway For North Atlantic Circulation

Oceanographers have long known that the 20-year-old paradigm for describing the global ocean circulation- called the Great Ocean Conveyor – was an oversimplification. It’s a useful depiction, but it’s like describing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as a catchy tune.
Terra Daily

River restoration: Should we bring back Mississippi’s roaring white-water rapids?

For thousands of years, the Twin Cities had a white-water rapids roaring through it, tumbling and roiling over and around enormous limestone chunks that still litter the Mississippi River’s floor for eight miles from the St. Anthony Falls dam all the way down to Ft. Snelling.

If it were restored to its natural state, the “gorge” would be a kayaking and recreational wonder with hundreds of acres of new parkland, a photographer’s delight and a sportsman’s paradise. Scores of eagles would nest there, drawn by all the fish that would mass in oxygen-rich water and spawn in gravel beds under swirling eddies.
MinnPost

Researchers use remote-controlled sensors to track pollutant loads from storms

The next cup of stale coffee you pour down the drain may end up as evidence. Not in a courtroom, but in a study of how well Twin Cities sewers and waterways handle the loads of pollutants washed into them by storms.
MinnPost

Leaders vow to protect Coral Triangle and its people

Manado, Indonesia – Leaders of six Coral Triangle countries promised to take action to safeguard the world’s richest marine resource and some 100 million people depending on it.

The announcement followed a recent WWF report which found that without action on climate change, coral reefs will disappear from the Coral Triangle by the end of the century, the ability of the region’s coastal environments to feed people will decline by 80 per cent, and the livelihoods of around 120 million people will have been lost or severely impacted.
WWF

Coal, Electric Industries Big Winners in Climate Bill Deal

Even as House Democrats are celebrating their deal with conservative-leaning colleagues on climate change legislation, the real winners under the compromise have been the coal, electric and auto industries, who are largely the source of the nation’s carbon emissions to begin with.

Details of the compromise are still emerging, but already the chief sponsors of the measure — Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) — have been forced to lower carbon-reduction targets, cut renewable fuel standards and dole out billions of dollars in benefits to the nation’s largest polluting industries. Many environmentalists say the compromise comes at the too-high cost of undermining the bill’s very purpose, which is to slash emissions dramatically enough to prevent a warming planet from heating further. Some are asking Democrats either to bolster the environmental protections or to scrap the proposal altogether.

Washington Independent

US to Limit Greenhouse Gas Emissions From Autos

The Obama administration is expected to announce guidelines Tuesday that will toughen existing federal mileage standards. Automakers have signed off on the plan, sources say.

truthout

Consumer Reports Eco-Labeling Website

Consumer Reports has an awesome interaction Eco-label website that provides information on what different types of “green” labels mean (organic, natural, free trade, and so on) and how meaningful they are in terms of indicating that a product is more environmentally friendly than other brands. For instance, you can search the label “organic” and get really detailed information about different organizations that certify products as organic and what their standards are. Or you can search by product (food, household cleaners, and so on) and get more information about the types of labels you’ll often see on them.

Sociological Images

Climate Change Odds Much Worse Than Thought

The most comprehensive modeling yet carried out on the likelihood of how much hotter the Earth’s climate will get in this century shows that without rapid and massive action, the problem will be about twice as severe as previously estimated six years ago – and could be even worse than that.

Science Daily

Minnesota Legislature: It’s over — No deal

In an act of defiance in the final hour, DFLers passed a revised tax bill that faces a certain veto. Gov. Tim Pawlenty stayed firm in his decision to make $1.2 billion in budget cuts all by himself.

Star Tribune

Sheila Bair, Brooksley Born: JFK Award Recipients For Predicting Crisis

Two U.S. federal regulators who sounded early warnings on the financial crisis and a Liberian peace activist who helped end that nation’s civil war were honored for their efforts Monday at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston.

Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. chairwoman Sheila Bair, former chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Brooksley Born, and peace activist Leymah Gbowee (LAY’-mah BOH’-wee) were presented with Profile in Courage Awards, annual honors named for a 1957 Pulitzer Prize-winning book written by John F. Kennedy.

Huffington Post

FBI infiltrated Iowa anti-war group before GOP convention

An FBI informant and an undercover Minnesota sheriff’s deputy spied on political activists in Iowa City last year before the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn.

Confidential FBI documents obtained by The Des Moines Register show an FBI informant was planted among a group described as an “anarchist collective” that met regularly last year in Iowa City. One of the group’s goals was to organize street blockades to disrupt the Republican convention, held Sept. 1-4, 2008, where U.S. Sen. John McCain was nominated for president.

Des Moines Register

Supreme Court: Pregnancy discrimination A-OK!

Today our nation’s highest court ruled in AT&T v. Hulteen that women who took maternity leave and were discriminated against by AT&T are shit out of luck.

Before the Pregnancy Discrimination Act was passed, when women took leave from their AT&T jobs to have a baby, those days did not count toward their pensions — even though other types of leave, such as temporary disability, were not removed from the pension equation. So when the women went to retire, they had lower pensions than other employees who had worked there the same number of years, even those who had taken leave for other reasons.

Feministing

US to Limit Greenhouse Gas Emissions From Autos

The Obama administration is expected to announce guidelines Tuesday that will toughen existing federal mileage standards. Automakers have signed off on the plan, sources say.

Truthout

Primer on unallotment: How it works and why it’s done

Instead of a flurry of negotiations between Gov. Tim Pawlenty and lawmakers, Session 2009 might end without a deal, what with the governor’s announcement last Thursday that there would be no special session and that he would use his powers of unallotment to balance the state’s budget.

“The governor thinks he’s a dictator,” Rep. Tom Rukavina, DFL-Virginia, said at the Capitol Saturday. “He’s like George W. Bush. He’s ‘the decider.’ For him to abuse unallotment is unconscionable, especially for a guy who never got a majority of the vote.”

MinnPost

Obama Nominates Superfund Polluter Lawyer To Run DOJ Environment Division

President Barack Obama has nominated a lawyer for the nation’s largest toxic polluters to run the enforcement of the nation’s environmental laws. On Tuesday, Obama “announced his intent to nominate” Ignacia S. Moreno to be Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division in the Department of Justice. Moreno, general counsel for that department during the Clinton administration, is now the corporate environmental counsel for General Electric, “America’s #1 Superfund Polluter“
Think Progress

House OKs $6.4 billion to make schools greener

The House on Thursday passed a $6.4 billion school modernization bill that would commit funds for the construction and update of more energy-efficient school buildings.
CNN

The United States is Not Carbon Flat

Though pundits tend to throw around both terms as if they’re interchangeable, average and median are not the same thing. If you grabbed nine people off the street and put them in a room with Bill Gates, the average net worth would be in the billions. But (unless you made your selections from a very unusual street) the median worth — the value that would split the room into two groups of five — would be much much lower. We’ve all experienced the use of this difference to distort the tax debate, as Republicans use average income to make it seem as if Americans are much richer than the median income would indicate.
Daily Kos

Wind-Powered Drive-in Movie Theater – World’s First?

The movie industry has finally caught on to climate change and sustainability- from The Age of Stupid to An Inconvenient Truth, we are now not short of movies that set out the dire environmental straits we find ourselves in. Movie makers have also been going green on the production front – exploring carbon offsets and green energy to lessen their impact. But what about places to watch these movies? We’ve finally heard about a movie theater adopting green energy – and it’s not in California.
TreeHugger

Ice shelf about to break away from Antarctica

‘New rifts’ appeared this week along Wilkins; shelf holds back ice on land

MSNBC

Why global warming doesn’t pose a problem

…Because God doesn’t want it to. That’s what Illinois Rep. John Shimkus says:

MN Publius

US: Warming Gases Are Health Threat

Having received White House backing, the Environmental Protection Agency declared Friday that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are a significant threat to human health and thus will be listed as pollutants under the Clean Air Act – a policy the Bush administration rejected.

truthout

Science Chief Discusses Climate Strategy

The Obama administration might agree to auction only a portion of the emissions allowances granted at first under a cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse gas pollution, White House science adviser John P. Holdren said yesterday, a move that would please electric utilities and manufacturers but could anger environmentalists.

Washington Post

Report: Wind could supply enough power to meet US electricity needs

Wind turbines off US coastlines could potentially supply more than enough electricity to meet the country’s current electricity demand, the US interior department reported today.

Simply harnessing the wind in relatively shallow waters – the most accessible and technically feasible sites for offshore turbines – could produce at least 20% of the power demand for most coastal states, interior secretary Ken Salazar said, unveiling a report by the department’s minerals management service that details the potential for oil, gas and renewable development on the Outer Continental Shelf.

Guardian

Colombia’s desert war

I recently received a disturbing email from southern Colombia warning that the fragile Amazonian soil could “soon be turned to desert”. They were the words of a Catholic priest, so I rang a church worker whose parish lies deep in the Amazonian state of Caquetá. Military planes targeting coca farms, funded by the US, had been spraying mists of herbicides over food crops, grazing animals and even areas where children were playing, she said: locals were complaining of breathing problems and rashes; “strips of skin” have been peeling off cows, and chickens have died; and maize, yucca, plantain and cacao crops have wilted and shrivelled. “We fear there will soon be a very serious food shortage in the region,” she said.

The Guardian

India’s climate refugees forced to fight – here and now

The rising sea has drowned two of Jalaluddin Saha’s small homes and threatens a third. Last monsoon surging water ruined his crops and he and his family ran for their lives. His livestock drank the brine and died.

In eastern India, this 62-year-old retired schoolteacher is experiencing climate change first hand. So are the other 8,000-odd residents of Baliwara and other villages in the little island called Mousuni, facing the Bay of Bengal at one of the numerous mouths of the Ganga river that Indians consider sacred.

Thaindian News

1,500 farmers commit mass suicide in India

Over 1,500 farmers in an Indian state committed suicide after being driven to debt by crop failure, it was reported today.

The agricultural state of Chattisgarh was hit by falling water levels.

“The water level has gone down below 250 feet here. It used to be at 40 feet a few years ago,” Shatrughan Sahu, a villager in one of the districts, told Down To Earth magazine. “Most of the farmers here are indebted and only God can save the ones who do not have a bore well.”

The Independent

Concerns Raised About Coastal Levels of Flame-Retardant Chemicals

Flame-retardant chemicals that have been linked to reproductive and neurological problems in animals have seeped into coastal environments even in remote regions and have been found in high concentrations off populated areas such as Chicago and Southern California, a federal study revealed Tuesday.

“This is a wake-up call for Americans concerned about the health of our coastal waters and their personal health,” said John H. Dunnigan, assistant administrator of the National Ocean Service, a branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which released the report.

truthout

10-Year Study Uncovers Toxic Aspects of DBPs

University of Illinois geneticist Michael Plewa said that disinfection byproducts (DBPs) in water are the unintended consequence of water purification.

“The process of disinfecting water with chlorine and chloramines and other types of disinfectants generates a class of compounds in the water that are called disinfection byproducts. The disinfectant reacts with the organic material in the water and generates hundreds of different compounds. Some of these are toxic, some can cause birth defects, some are genotoxic, which damage DNA, and some we know are also carcinogenic.”

Environmental News Network

Leatherback Turtles Consuming Plastic

A new study looked at necropsy reports of more than 400 leatherbacks that have died since 1885 and found plastic in the digestive systems of more than a third of the animals. Besides plastic bags, the turtles had swallowed fishing lines, balloon fragments, spoons, candy wrappers and more.

Discovery Channel

Travel Unplugged: 15 Off-the-Grid Destinations

Visiting tourist sites “off-the-grid” usually means trekking to a geographically remote area with your bug spray, anti-malaria meds, and pith helmet in tow. In these secluded spots, going green is a necessity; there is simply no power supply to plug into. But even some of tourism’s urban sites are getting into the green game by creating cutting edge constructions or, sometimes, by simply changing the source of their electricity.

WebEcoist

A Paradise of Birds in Belize

Flamboyant feathered residents like emerald toucanets, scarlet macaws, pale-billed woodpeckers and hundreds of others can be spotted in the rain forests of western Belize in the Cayo District.

NY Times

Saving Madagascar

Current’s Adam Yamaguchi goes to otherworldly Madagascar, an island struggling to flourish after bouts with environmental suicide.

Current

Prize for ‘Sun in the box’ cooker

A cheap solar cooker has won first prize in a contest for green ideas. The Kyoto Box is made from cardboard and can be used for sterilising water or boiling or baking food. The Kenyan-based inventor hopes it can make solar cooking widespread in the developing world, supplanting the use of wood which is driving deforestation.

BBC News

Concrete Is Remixed With Environment in Mind

The bridge, built to replace one that collapsed in 2007, killing 13 people, is constructed almost entirely of concrete embedded with steel reinforcing bars, or rebar. But it is hardly a monolithic structure: the components are made from different concrete mixes, the recipes tweaked, as a chef would, for specific strength and durability requirements and to reduce the impact on the environment. One mix, incorporated in wavy sculptures at both ends of the bridge, is designed to stay gleaming white by scrubbing stain-causing pollutants from the air.

NY Times

Personal Care and Cleaning Products Safety Guide

Make a difference by avoiding 1,4-dioxane and supporting the companies who do!

The Organic Consumers Association (pdf)

15 Awesome Ways to Reuse Shipping Containers

Steel shipping containers outlive their usefulness as cargo carriers within 5 years, and they used to sit abandoned at shipyards for years. Now, they’re gaining increasing recognition for their durability, adaptability, light weight, low cost and ease of stacking, spurring a recycling trend that has resulted in shipping container sculpture, homes, hotels, museums and more. The possibilities are seemingly endless, as illustrated by these 15 amazing examples of cargo container reuse.

WebEcoist

Race and Toxic Release Facilities

Environmental sociologists have noted that environmental toxicity is most concentrated in communities that include a disproportionate proportion of poor, working class, and non-white people. The map below compares the locations of toxic release facilities (green) with the percentage of people of color in neighborhoods in and near Los Angeles (yellow = 0-40 percent people of color; red = 80-100 percent of color). The overlap is striking.

Sociological Images

Interactive Map of U.S. Factory Farms

Food & Water Watch has an interesting interactive map that allows you to click on states and see how many factory farms it has per county, broken down into cattle (meaning beef, I assume), hogs, dairy, broilers, and layers (the last two are both chickens). You can look at number of facilities or number of animals.

Sociological Images

Germany Bans Cultivation of GM Corn

Germany has banned the cultivation of GM corn, claiming that MON 810 is dangerous for the environment. But that argument might not stand up in court and Berlin could face fines totalling millions of euros if American multinational Monsanto decides to challenge the prohibition on its seed.

Spiegel Online

A cure for honey bee colony collapse?

For the first time, scientists have isolated the parasite Nosema ceranae (Microsporidia) from professional apiaries suffering from honey bee colony depopulation syndrome. They then went on to treat the infection with complete success.

Environmental News Network

10 Air Purifying Plants For Homes & Offices

Even in huge, busy cities, outdoor air is cleaner and preferable to indoor air. Why is that? One reason is that trees and plants are constantly cleaning the air outside. This suggests that the eco-minded homeowner or office dweller should go out and buy some plants – but which ones? With all the hype of “going green”, every plant on the market is being promoted as an air purifier! But not to worry – NASA has conducted an official study on the top 10 air purifying plants, assigning each one a score based on how well they remove chemical vapors, resist insects, and how easy they are to maintain.

WebEcoist

Unique Shapes of Caterpillars

In general, caterpillars are elongated and tubular in shape but there are a few that have peculiar and bizarre shapes.

Here are some of the most uniquely shaped caterpillars. Pick your own choice which one on the list you think is the weirdest-looking of them all.

Impact Lab

Teens capture images of space with £56 camera and balloon

Proving that you don’t need Google’s billions or the BBC weather centre’s resources, the four Spanish students managed to send a camera-operated weather balloon into the stratosphere.

Telegraph

Color Vision: How Our Eyes Reflect Primate Evolution

To our eyes, the world is arrayed in a seemingly infinite splendor of hues, from the sunny orange of a marigold flower to the gunmetal gray of an automobile chassis, from the buoyant blue of a midwinter sky to the sparkling green of an emerald. It is remarkable, then, that for most human beings any color can be reproduced by mixing together just three fixed wavelengths of light at certain intensities. This property of human vision, called trichromacy, arises because the retina the layer of nerve cells in the eye that captures light and transmits visual information to the brain uses only three types of light-absorbing pigments for color vision. One consequence of trichromacy is that computer and television displays can mix red, green and blue pixels to generate what we perceive as a full spectrum of color.

Scientific American

Illuminating Reuse: 15 Recycled Lights and Lamps

Egg cartons, Legos, ballpoint pens, blenders and plastic spoons: these are just a few of the items that have been transformed into awesome light fixtures by creative DIYers. Why buy new when you could have a stunning chandelier or lamp that puts junk to good use? These 15 examples of brilliant eco-illumination show just how stylish and fun recycled materials can be.

WebEcoist

Who Owns Organic Brands?

The Cornucopia Institute provides a link to Dr. Phil Howard’s webpage, which has all kinds of awesome graphics to illustrate concentration in the organic food sector. This one shows acquisitions by several major food corporations (sorry the images are small–there’s a link after each one that takes you to a bigger version, or you can easily see all of them at Dr. Howard’s website). For all but the third image, the color scheme is yellow = multinational processor, green = organic brand, blue = investment firms, and red = organic versions of mainstream brands.

Sociological Images

Amazon Defense Coalition: Chevron Lawyers Explode In Anger After More Oil Found at “Remediated” Sites In Ecuador Trial

After a frustrating week of setbacks in an environmental trial in Ecuador’s rainforest, two Chevron lawyers exploded in anger at representatives of the victims after a technical expert demonstrated for the third time in a week that oil was visible at a well site that the company claimed to have “remediated” a decade ago, said lawyers for the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Chevron.

Yahoo! Finance

Islands Disappear in India

As islands in eastern India disappear under rising seas, residents are losing land, homes, and farms. (video)

National Geographic

New Honda Takes on the Prius

The road is about to get a little more crowded for the Toyota Prius. Starting Tuesday, the Honda Motor Company will offer American consumers what it bills as “the world’s first affordable hybrid.”

Costing just shy of $20,000, the Honda Insight promises to let drivers respond to both of the leading crises of our day: the environment and the recession.

New York Times

Calling ‘em Out: The World’s 10 Worst Greenwashers

As the green movement sweeps the globe, companies, trade groups and government organizations are eager to get a piece of the pie. ‘Green’ can definitely translate into big profits if you do it right – but all too often, these money-hungry entities choose to fudge the facts in an attempt to make themselves seem more environmentally friendly and responsible than they really are. That’s called greenwashing, folks, and here are 10 of the world’s worst offenders.

WebEcoist

Photographing the Big Melt

For more than 30 years, photographer James Balog has been seeking new ways to visualize the natural world. His artistry has been featured in dozens of magazines, from National Geographic to The New Yorker. But his most recent project, the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), has a scientific goal. It seeks to document an unprecedented melting of the world’s glaciers, a phenomenon that many scientists agree is proof of human-caused global warming. As director of the EIS, Balog considers himself a modern hunter-gatherer, collecting vital information to feed a public hungry for real evidence of climate change. In this audio slide show, let Balog whet your appetite in his own words.

PBS

Unique Killer-Whale Pod Doomed by Exxon Valdez

Most of Prince William Sound’s animal populations will someday recover from the lingering effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. One, however, will not: a community of killer whales unlike any other in the world.

“It’s a separate population. Their genetics, their acoustics, are different from any other killer whales that we see in the North Pacific,” said Craig Matkin, director of the North Gulf Oceanic Society, who has studied the region’s whales for three decades.

Wired

Cape Cod sees rare large gathering of right whales

The number is about six times greater than last year and represents about 24 percent of the estimated 325 right whales left in the world, said officials at the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies, which is conducting aerial surveys of the whales, and the National Marine Fisheries Science Center.

Reuters

Congress approves landmark conservation bill

The Democratic-led U.S. Congress gave final approval on Wednesday to sweeping land and water conservation legislation that environmental groups praised as one of the most significant in U.S. history.

Reuters

Shampoo in the water supply triggers growth of deadly drug-resistant bugs

The warning has been made by Birmingham and Warwick university scientists, who say disinfectants and other products washed into sewers and rivers are triggering the growth of drug-resistant microbes. Soil samples from many areas have been found to contain high levels of bacteria with antibiotic-resistant genes, the scientists have discovered – raising fears that these may have already been picked up by humans.

Guardian

How Air Pollution Causes Heart Disease

We are used to thinking of heart disease as a product of genetic factors or lifestyle choices, such as what we eat and how much we exercise. There is another road to heart disease: breathing.

Accumulating evidence indicates that an increase in particulate air pollution is associated with an increase in heart attacks and deaths. Research has begun in the relatively new field of environmental cardiology – a field that examines the relationship between air pollution and heart disease.

TerraDaily

Solar Powered Revas Trek Across India

Trekking around India sounds like a great way to have an adventure. Trekking across India in three solar powered Reva vehicles is an incredible way to have an adventure while raising awareness for climate change. That was the goal of the Indian Youth Climate Network as they took three electric Reva vehicles and plowed through 3,500 kilometers of Indian landscape to show the world that the solution to global warming can be found even in the most remote of places.

Inhabitat

Oceanic Seesaw Links Northern And Southern Hemisphere During Abrupt Climate Change During Last Ice Age

Very large and abrupt changes in temperature recorded over Greenland and across the North Atlantic during the last Ice Age were actually global in extent, according to an international team of researchers led by Cardiff University.

New research, published in the journal Nature, supports the idea that changes in ocean circulation within the Atlantic played a central role in abrupt climate change on a global scale.

Environmental News Network

Analysis: Russia and Central Asian water

An integral element of the new Eurasian “great game” between Russia and the United States is a tussle for control of the Caspian’s hydrocarbon riches and those of former Soviet republics farther east. But Russia is making a diplomatic play on another key resource — water.

Terra Daily

Jordan’s Fossil Water Source Has High Radiation Levels

Ancient groundwater being tapped by Jordan, one of the 10 most water-deprived nations in the world, has been found to contain twenty times the radiation considered safe for drinking water in a new study by an international team of researchers.

Terra Daily

Study critiques corn-for-ethanol’s carbon footprint

To avoid creating greenhouse gases, it makes more sense using today’s technology to leave land unfarmed in conservation reserves than to plow it up for corn to make biofuel, according to a comprehensive Duke University-led study.

“Converting set-asides to corn-ethanol production is an inefficient and expensive greenhouse gas mitigation policy that should not be encouraged until ethanol-production technologies improve,” the study’s authors reported in the March edition of the research journal Ecological Applications.

Environmental News Network

Feds buying up land in south metro for refuge

A federal agency is quietly spending tens of millions of dollars to lengthen a swath of publicly owned natural areas up and down the Minnesota River.

Star Tribune

Beyond Green Roofs: 15 Vertically Vegetated Buildings

Vertical gardens bring lush, verdant life to even the coldest and barest of surfaces, both indoors and out. These ‘living walls’ increase interior humidity, purify the air and provide a much-needed touch of nature in spare, angular urban spaces like airports, museums and shopping centers. Here are 15 buildings with stunning vertical greenery, from 6-story elevator shafts to subterranean restaurants.

WebEcoist

A 12-Step Guide to Subversive Guerrilla Gardening

Guerilla gardeners scope out their communities, make a plan and then head out on covert operations to vandalize the cities with nature. There are a million different ways to guerilla garden, but whether you choose to do it solo or with a group, in a public space or in a neighboring junkyard, these 12 steps can help make sure your beautification efforts are a success.

WebEcoist