Thanks to Stoller for the tip.

I’m catching up on some of my feed reading (sorry John, open government is trumping science these days) and started checking the backlog of posts at Waterblogged. That led me to this article on China’s Three Gorges Damn. The plain language is striking: The Three Gorges Dam, then, lies at the uncomfortable center of China’s [...]

Do you shop online? More than likely, if you’re even reading this, you’re somebody who has made purchases on the Internet, and you’ll probaby continue doing so. And, if you’ve ever shopped at all, I’m sure you’re in the same situation I’m in: you check your mail every day, only to find the box stuffed [...]

From the Department of Been There Done That: In recent years, Coast Guard staff and institutional emphasis have been shifted more toward port and coastal protection duties than marine safety and environmental response. Meanwhile, important equipment used in spill response has aged, insiders say, and training drills — routine in the years after the 1989 [...]

Two weeks ago, in a post on biofuels, I mentioned the effects that increased corn production for ethanol is having on other crops, particularly wheat. Kevin Drum offers his own (much more concise) analysis of the situation: Let’s see: (a) environmentally speaking, corn ethanol is a pretty dodgy idea, (b) we’re subsidizing it anyway to [...]

My mail is still kinda funky (not forwarding correctly) so I’m a bit late in catching this, but The American Prospect has a great special report this month on the Amazon. A slew of articles, sidebars and graphs examine the commercial interests vying for access to the forest, the effect on the Amazon basin, and [...]

A couple of items today on biofuels. First, from Grist, is a report out from the U.S. Department of Agriculture showing that such fuels will remain firmly within the subsidized realm for quite some time: Then there’s this bit: The analyst doubts cellulosic can be “commercially economical” enough to get beyond 250 million gallons by [...]

Today in Salon, Amanda Griscom Little interviews Gov. Bill Richardson about his energy plan: Bill Richardson likes to play up his image as a horse-ridin’, gun-totin’ man of the Wild West, but don’t be distracted by the cowboy swagger — the Democratic governor of New Mexico also has a serious policy wonk side. That was [...]

Salon has an interesting article online today about the plastic shopping bag: The plastic bag is an icon of convenience culture, by some estimates the single most ubiquitous consumer item on Earth, numbering in the trillions. They’re made from petroleum or natural gas with all the attendant environmental impacts of harvesting fossil fuels. One recent [...]

I haven’t had time to even start poring over this document, but the New Mexico Environment Department in conjunction with Northern Arizona University recently released this report. Why? This Watershed Improvement Plan and Strategy (WIPS) is an inventory and data resource in support of a science-based approach to watershed resource planning. Watershed remediation work to [...]

I’ve mentioned em before (as has NewMexiKen) but Meredith sent along this article from the Washington City Paper. It’s been the best to date: But it’s not bananas making bees crazy on a global scale. The heart of the question seems to be: Is [Colony Collapse Disorder] something correctable—if we stop trucking bees cross-country and [...]

Borrowing a page from John’s playbook, here’s a bit of what’s going on with me right now1: Reading: I finished A Thousand Splendid Suns last night. Like Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini’s first novel, Suns is set in Afghanistan, and the author again does an incredible job of inserting the reader into the culture and setting. [...]