The Wrack

Here is a checklist of actions that will help you to reduce your carbon footprint and contribute toward meeting climate goals.

Remembering Tony Amos, who dedicated nearly 40 years to understanding, protecting, and kindling appreciation for marine life along the Gulf Coast.

If you’re a clean water junkie like me, this week’s response by the EPA to the mine wastewater spill into Colorado’s Animas River — that their own contractors inadvertently caused — is a fascinating and sad event to watch from the sidelines.

The daily updates on the EPA’s website are quite good and informative — nice transparency and responsiveness by the agency so far. (I wonder if there was a pre-written Disaster Response Plan.)

Critics are legion, however, particularly on the anti-government / right-wing side.

I think this is a great example of people seeing what they want to see and how opposing camps deliver their storytelling in real time.

The following was originally published in the Biddeford-Saco Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 8/11/13:

You may have heard the story of the birth of the modern American environmental movement: Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring in 1962, the Cuyahoga River catches fire in 1969, tens of thousands of Americans join together to celebrate the first Earth Day in 1970, and then, over the next three years, a Republican president saves the planet. Mr. Nixon creates the EPA; extends, with Maine’s Senator Muskie, the Clean Air Act; signs the Clean Water, Safe Drinking Water, and Endangered Species Acts; and even sets in motion the legislation that eventually establishes the local Wells National Estuarine Research Reserve.

Never mind that the Cuyahoga had been catching fire regularly since the mid-1800s, or that Mr. Nixon actually vetoed the Clean Water Act, or that “Republican” meant something different forty years ago. What’s important is the story: an empowering fable of scientists and the citizenry teaming up to overcome the odds and force government to turn around a country before it disappeared beneath smudge and sludge.

For the most part, it’s a true story. It’s just not the whole story.

Danger seeps from your garden.

Fertilizer causes tomatoes to ripen larger and plants to grow taller. But applying more than your plants need can have a devastating effect.

The rain washes your excess fertilizer, either manure or chemical, down the road and into the nearest water source. There, it mixes with water traveling from other gardens, farms, and power plants to create a stream of nitrogen and phosphorus. The stream pours directly into the marsh.