The last most beautiful thing

by erratic

is back, and Your Faithful Diarist has lately been Wading in Beauty! He is currently queuing up a youtube playlist of his obsessive favorite songs, the ones he's listened to for hours on end, going back to the days when that required rewinding the cassette after each song. What are yours?

But that's not necessarily your Last Most Beautiful Thing, and it's not mine. Mine was a sweet environmental victory! I stood up at a government hearing and spoke in support of preserving some historic meadows, that were threatened with a plan to put in a 100 car parking lot, and 2 soccer fields. It was a terrible waste of one of the few remaining meadows in the area, and the days before this hearing, it seemed like the bulldozers were inevitable. But I've fought worse fights with stronger opponents, and I went into this hearing expecting to be one of the outnumbered few speaking in support of the meadows. I'd helped queue up some allies, had walked the site and met the current owners, and I knew that this place was worth fighting for.

continued at Daily Kos....

Senators Tester and Baucus Support Palin

by FoundingFatherDAR

  Senators Jon Tester and Max Baucus have introduced Sen. bill 3864, which would delete protections of wolves in Idaho and Montana, allowing Sarah Palin and her blood hungry wolf hunter pals to decimate those populations.
 Description of S 3864 -

To remove a portion of the distinct population segment of the Rocky Mountain gray wolf from the list of threatened species or the list of endangered species published under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and for other purposes.

 

continued at Daily Kos....

Blog Action Day: Water

by The Opportunity Agenda

Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking a global discussion and driving collective action.

This year's topic: water.

Right now, almost a billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. That’s one in eight of us who are subject to preventable disease and even death because of something that many of us take for granted.

continued at Daily Kos....

10/10/10/10/10/10: Where will you be?

by A Siegel

A simple question:  Where will you be at the

• 10th second of the
• 10th minute of the
• 10th hour of the
• 10th day of the
• 10th month of the
• 10th year?

As for me, in a little more than 10 hours, I will be in an attic, adding insulation to cut down power demands.  And, a few hours later, I will be with my children 1000s of others in front of the White House.

My action will be among the smallest of the Global Work Party.

A day to take action to reduce carbon emissions to make a simple statement to our political leadership -- around the world: we can do it, why can't you?

continued at Daily Kos....

Senate likely to GUT the EPA this week! Did BP's oil spill never happen? WTF?!?!

by MinistryOfTruth

Unreal! Time to contact your Senators, people! I know it's late in the day, but a few phone calls letting your Senators know that stopping corporate polluters from wrecking America is a GOOD THING doesn't hurt.

    Sources on and off Capitol Hill are expecting the Senate Appropriations Committee to vote on an amendment to undercut Environmental Protection Agency climate change regulations when it marks up the agency’s annual spending bill.

    Such an amendment has a serious chance of passing given widespread backing on the issue from Republicans and moderate Democrats — so much so that environmentalists were asking committee leaders to punt on the markup entirely.

politico.com

Bold text added by the diarist

More below the fold, and a call to action

continued at Daily Kos....

Unpublished Letters: Three from the Climate Change files ...

by A Siegel

WarrenS has taken on an admirable resolution: to send a letter to the editor (LTE) (or, well, a major politician) every single day, on the critical issues of climate change and energy.   This discusses his approach and here is an amusing 'template' to for rapid letter writing.

Now, I have always written letters and even had many published -- just not one every day.  WarrenS inspires me to do better.

Many newspapers state that they will reject letters that have been published elsewhere, thus I have not been blogging letters ... perhaps that should change. Thus, below is what might be the first in an "unpublished letters" series publishing some of those LTEs that don't get picked up by the editors.

continued at Daily Kos....

EcoAdvocates: A green model in the Gulf

by Meteor Blades

Five years ago, a natural disaster plus human callousness and ineptitude combined to kill more than 1800 people on the Gulf Coast and plunged an American city into a nightmare from which it has far from fully recovered. Thousands of New Orleanians still live in homesick exile. Four of the hospitals that once served the east side of the city remain permanently closed. Crime is out of control. We had a chance right then, as a nation, to make the catastrophe of 2005 into a flex moment, a window of opportunity not merely to rebuild but rather to go boldly in a new direction, a green trajectory that would restore greater New Orleans and the Katrina-obliterated towns of  Mississippi to ecological health with sustainable economies.

But, of course, the Cheney-Bush administration was in office and it had other fish to fry. Once it had completed the botch-job of its immediate response and handed out a few bucks and a few FEMA trailers, it more or less vanished from the scene. As for spurring a move down a green path in a big way, puhleez. Those were the days when the White House was still in its climate-change denier phase. Local politicians suffered their own form of myopia.

This year’s disaster along the Gulf Coast offers us another flex moment. But we can easily ignore this one, too, if we don’t wise up. And you can already taste that unwise attitude in the air. The attitude which says that the roiling gush of oil into the Gulf will probably never spew from that particular well again so we can just do a little more work with the mops and get back to business as usual. Whew! Sure, residual oil in unknown quantities clings to the sea floor, unknown long-term effects may afflict the Gulf’s water-dwelling creatures, unknown damage may be done to those who depend on those creatures for a living, and a hydrocarbons driller or two may screw up another high-tech puncture. But, every day, with the obvious crisis gone - the one with the camera focused on it - these and other problems will capture less and less attention.

We’re told, obviously so, that the immediate tasks in a disaster are to save lives, save livelihoods and prevent bad effects from becoming worse. Emergencies are no time to start rewriting the CPR manual. The problem with this is that emergencies instantly focus our intense attention but, afterward, when the societal adrenaline from the rescue effort ebbs, so does any thorough public pondering or accounting about how the way we live and consume and are organized contribute to creating these emergencies in the first place. What does get studied typically winds up as a 27-recommendation tome collecting dust somewhere, resurrected 10 or 20 years in the future as a curiosity for some columnist to highlight as what-could-have-been.

The possibilities emerging from flex moments such as Katrina and the BP gusher should be pounced on. “Don’t waste a crisis,” said Rahm Emanuel in the best sound bite I ever heard from him. Use this moment to do something big, something transformative for the Gulf, for the people, the ecology, the economy.

continued at Daily Kos....

Senate Climate Change inAction: Postmortem thoughts continued ...

by A Siegel

The abysmal failure for US Senate movement forward on climate change mitigation legislation has many fathers and mothers, many to blame. And, the blame game is moving around ... along with lots of CYA discussions.  To a certain extent, the pointing fingers and 'who me' exercises can get a bit exaggerated because while there is lots of blame to go around, there are people and interests and organizations that merit direct responsibility and many others who have some indirect play in the 'blame' game.    Thus, there is lots of blame to go around when it comes to the failure of the Senate to act

continued at Daily Kos...

Put Solar On It!

by A Siegel

The roof, that is ...

Received a phone call earlier today from my better 95+%

...

Dominion Virginia Power staff were at my home, at that moment, upgrading the meter to be able to handle net metering.  Fingers crossed ... with tomorrow's dawn, my roof will be part of the power generation system covering over 90 percent of my family's electricity usage.   A bit more investment (both in terms of sweat and some $s) in energy efficiency, continuing tightening of our own attention to energy use, and we might be soon covering 100% of our power requirements.

My rooftop has solar hot water and solar pv.

It is unique, on both accounts, in my neighborhood.

Being unique isn't always good ... it isn't good in this case.

continued at Daily Kos....

EcoJustice: "What I do" and What it Means to be Ruined.

by rb137

My interest is in conflict resolution, and when I can, I volunteer my skills as an analyst and writer to help bloody circumstances in Democratic Republic of Congo. I've been writing about it a lot lately, because conflict minerals are getting some action in congress.

This is an EcoJustice issue because mineral rights are at the root of this horrible violence. And it's more than a regional war. It is a looming climate threat. Many ecology groups work to stop the conflict; the Dian Fossey Foundation was one of the first. The heart of Africa's ecology lives in the Congo basin, and it is threatened by the instability. Our industry empowers the warlords that destablize the country. As we put wealth and technology into their hands, their power to plunder increases.

But the violence and suffering does not make the whole story. There is hope and grassroots action taking the country to a new place. One of the groups behind this excellent work is my favorite NGO, HEAL Africa.

continued at Daily Kos....

Tomorrow will be too late for the Bronx Zoo and New York Aquarium

by Eddie C

I've already written a diary called Save the Bronx Zoo Today. Now an email from the zoo points out that "Tomorrow will be too late for the Bronx Zoo and New York Aquarium." In the Bronx alone more than 800 teens are hired each year with more than 1,000 seasonal workers getting jobs at the zoo. Bloomberg who will bend over backwards to save every single job on Wall St. has already knocked city support down to $9 million last year and he thinks another 42% is feeling the bite? His answer to this threat to the Bronx economy can be seen at this NY1 report "every group has to feel the bite from budget cuts." With the proposed 50% cut from Albany that's far more than a bite. I covered as much as I could in Save the Bronx Zoo Today so now I will just copy and paste that letter below with some alternative actions.  

continued at Daily Kos....

24 Hours to Stop Cancer Causing Pesticide Approval - Act NOW

by Ellinorianne

I wrote about methyl iodide last night in eKos, which got very few eyeballs.  I think I buried the lede.  We need to do something about this and we have little time. You need to do something, even if you don't live in California, this needs to be stopped because California is the largest Strawberry producing State. So what's so awful about methyl bromide?  Well, it is a carcinogen, a neuro-toxin and anyone who studies it uses the utmost precautions, from gloves, to respirators and they want to spray this on the soil that we grow our food in!

continued at Daily Kos....

Action on BP Disaster: Calling all the great minds here

by zmom

I can no longer grieve without actually doing something.  I know this may be an excercise in futility, but I really needed to put the following outline down on paper, and would love for it to change, grow, expand, and get better.  The long term needs from this environmental catastrophe will be huge, and I am thinking there could be a way of creating an upswell of positive action from people all over this country.  

continued at Daily Kos....

What Are You Gonna Do With All That Rage?

by beach babe in fl

There is a diary on the rec list today and it's title includes All the Rage in the Known Universe is Inadequate. As you can see when you scroll through the diary (I was unable to look after the first couple of photos) it is photos of birds covered in oil from the BP caused oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico. The photos are horrible records of suffering and do bring increased feelings of rage, sadness and helplessness. We don't yet know if the oil gusher was caused by willful negligence, incompetence or a combination of the two, that will be determined by the Obama administration commission to investigate the oil gusher. We must know by now that it was caused by our addiction to oil and our reliance on oil to maintain our position atop the list of world's largest oil consumers.

continued at Daily Kos....

Save the Bronx Zoo Today

by Eddie C

What a difference a year makes. About a year ago in my extremely popular  The Animals are Getting the Pink Slip (A Bronx Zoo photo and action diary) this is what big sister Moxie looked like; Yesterday I took my camera to see the three new lion cubs at the Bronx Zoo. The diary is called Friday Evening Photo Blogging: Lion Cubs Today! I can hardly tell Moxie and her mama Sukari apart but I got some great photos of Moxie playing loving sister to three 25 pound cubs. Now the stars of the zoo are  Nala, Adamma and Shani; What hasn't changed is that both Bloomberg and Paterson are still screwing the zoo and many cultural institutions. This year much harder than last. See below for what actions we the people have left.

continued at Daily Kos....