“I tire of being asked what I think about something only to have the conversation derailed at the first ‘bump’ in my logic, at the first self-contradiction,” Pat says, of life in general.

My response: “I savor your contradictions. It is my desire to explore them with you and to experience the change that happens when you wrestle with them.”

“Yes, I think you get it. How refreshing.”

As you can see, Pat and I have a deeply meaningful relationship. Enviable, in fact. It is based on not knowing things that we want to know, and how to fix that. There is also an element of bringing unformed or poorly formed thoughts to the table, cutting them up like a fruit salad, and enjoying them. Our conversations are like a cold fruit salad on a dusty hot summer day. Yes, very, very refreshing.

But not everybody has the opportunity to interact that way. This is because all utterances are questionable, if you want them to be. All communications are subject to measurement against a standard that one can easily justify as “Teh Standard,” even though one has merely pulled it out of one orifice or another. In fact, there is a place where that kind of communication is favored, revered, honed and practiced, and imposed by force of will and repetition on those who do not come to the table oppositional in affect and armed with snark.

That place is known…as the blogosphere.

But, dear reader, that is a feature of the blogosphere that I generally don’t like, even though it can be amusing, it can be productive, and it can bring lots of page views to my hit-counter. I don’t like it even though I am as capable as the next person of doing damage with printed word, baiting the most wary of trolls, and turning and churning the most innocent of conversation until it becomes vile like ogre piss. I don’t like it because I find it inhumane. I find it not the way I want to interact, not the way I want to understand. It is bitter roots and rotten offal. It is not a refreshing fruit salad on a dusty, hot, summer day.

I want to understand you. I don’t want you to say things to me in a way that I am brought to the edge of understanding and left to wait there, as though it was my job to figure out what you meant. I want you to just tell me what you meant.

I want you to understand me. I don’t want you to find meaning that I did not intend and then use that unintended meaning to abuse either yourself or me.

I don’t want you to misunderstand me, willfully or otherwise, and then fetishize the false or manufactured meaning of that misunderstanding like it was some sort of trophy. Your misunderstanding of my words is not your shrunken head.

But it goes beyond that. I don’t want you to be thinking the same thing today that you were thinking last month. I want there to be a conflict between what you thought about some thing the first time we talked about it and what you think about it now. I want to be your Red Queen, so we can keep moving yet luxuriate under the same forbidden tree. I want you to giggle when I mix my metaphors like a Kitchen Aid in heat. I want to hear the full version of the story behind the allusion.

Expect me to contradict myself. Sometimes what I say now will contradict what I said when we first met. Sometimes the end of my sentence will contradict the beginning of my sentence. Be an interesting grownup. Be an interested grownup. Don’t be a winged monkey. Don’t make it your business to jump on my wrongness and howl like some four-winged, maned, scale-covered, drooling mythical creature from a Piers Anthony book.

My wrongness is a comfortable table for two at a coffee shop. Your wrongness is a long, lonely drive on a nice day.

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

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

‘Dirty Tricks’ Over Toxic Waste

London’s High Court will on Wednesday hear allegations of dirty tricks in the biggest class action ever brought before the British courts.

It arises from the dumping of toxic waste three years ago in Ivory Coast’s largest city, Abidjan.

In the aftermath, up to 100,000 people fell sick and 16 died.
Common Dreams

E-Waste Recovery Rates Increase

The National Center for Electronics Recycling (NCER) recently released its 2008 per capita collection index (PCCI) for electronics recycling, showing a 7 percent increase in recovered e-waste from 2007. The PPCI is designed to measure changes in the amount of recovered electronics collected in six representative electronics recycling programs across the U.S.

“We have been gathering these numbers from the same collection programs for the last three years in order to measure the overall trends,” says NCER Executive Director Jason Linnell. “As anyone who runs electronics collection programs will tell you, volumes are increasing.”
ENN

More Critically Endangered Birds On IUCN Red List Than Ever

The latest evaluation of the world’s birds reveals that more species than ever are threatened with extinction, according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™.

BirdLife International, which conducted the research for the IUCN Red List, found 1,227 species (12 percent) are classified as globally threatened with extinction. The good news is that when conservation action is put in place, species can be saved.
ScienceDaily

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