Modern Serenity

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 [...]

According to an EPA report, over 5 billion pounds of herbicides and pesticides were used across the United States in 2007.  The majority of that staggering number was used in agriculture to produce food products for human and livestock consumption. A study done by a USDA program found that 40% of fresh fruits and vegetables had [...]

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 [...]

Ryland King, founder of Environmental Education for the Next Generation (EENG) won a $100,000 grant from Dockers, through an online contest on the clothing company’s Facebook page. The contest, officially coined Wear The Pants Project, allowed Facebook users to vote for one of 3,000 contestants to receive a monetary kick to jumpstart their dream-project. “We ended [...]

On July 19, 2011, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke wrote a letter to U.S. President Barack Obama that addressed Iceland’s continued whaling practices, forcing action by the US Federal Government. According to the letter, Iceland killed 273 endangered fin whales in 2009 and 2010. Iceland has not harvested any fin whales so far in 2011, [...]

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 [...]

Guner Tautrim, 37, sits casually in a wood adorned office in front of a microscope used to analyze compost for Orella Ranch, a sixth-generation farm along the Gaviota coast. Like the office, most the wood furniture at the ranch has a hint of Tautrim’s craftsmanship, from the tool shed near the market garden to the [...]

Last week the National Resource Defense Counsel released its annual survey of water quality. The National Resource Defense Counsel is an international non-profit organization that works to protect the world’s natural resources, public health and the environment. Each year they conduct a survey to evaluate water quality and the public notification system at beaches throughout [...]

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 [...]