Modern Serenity

Throughout the northeast and mid-Atlantic regions of the country, communities are dealing with the many ramifications of flooding caused by Irene and exacerbated by Lee.  As my family attempts to drain a basement that seems likely to be inundated with more water at the next hint of rain, I began to wonder about the environmental [...]

In June of this year, Maryland became the first state to mandate “environmental literacy” as a requirement for graduation from high school.  Many states, including Maryland, had previously outlined standards for environmental education (EE) curriculum, but the graduation requirement recently imposed is a step forward from that. Maryland’s environmental literacy requirement will dictate that every [...]

As we enter the fall of 2011, the race for the presidency is well underway, and those of us in states that hold the first presidential primaries are still receiving the brunt of the attention.  The Republican candidates have swarmed New Hampshire and have made clear what is truly important to them and what they [...]

I recently moved to a small college town in upstate New York and was tickled to find t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Don’t Frack with My Water” at a local store.  The shirts are a cute way of addressing an issue that is anything but.  High-volume hydraulic fracturing – commonly known as “hydrofracking” or simply [...]

We are coming into an era of environmentalism in which the term no longer conjures radical ideas in most people’s minds. One can now be in favor of protecting the environment in the most elemental ways [...]

In my last article, I introduced the concept of environmental justice. Understanding environmental justice is to recognize that individuals in low-income, Black communities are systematically subjected to greater concentrations of environmental pollutants [...]

Environmentalism is the crusade of our generation, and communities have an obligation to advance it. There is currently a gap between what we ought to teach our children in order to foster responsible, global citizens and what is actually being taught in public schools [...]

Two weeks ago, President Obama tapped into the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve for the first time since 2008. This reserve, located along the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana, is currently quoted to contain 726.5 million barrels of crude oil, which are meant to allow us to meet our country’s immense demand for oil in [...]