carapace – Not your father's america

http://www.epa.gov/ . . .

This report presents information on toxic chemical disposals and other releases into the air, land, and water, as well as information on waste management and pollution prevention activities in neighborhoods across the country. Total releases including disposals for the latest reporting year, 2010, are higher than the previous two years but lower than 2007 and prior year totals. Data show that 3.93 billion pounds of toxic chemicals were released into the environment nationwide, a 16% increase from 2009. The increase is mainly due to changes in the metal mining sector, which typically involves large facilities handling large volumes of material. In this sector, even a small change in the chemical composition of the ore being mined may lead to big changes in the amount of toxic chemicals reported nationally.

Book Description

Publication Date: October 18, 2010

Who controls our water resources and how much water do we have left? Can we enact meaningful changes in our personal lives, our policies and our laws to protect our remaining freshwater reserves? Can we learn to share water equitably with each other and the planet?

In this collection, some of the world’s leading writers, activists, photographers, and artists have come together to answer those questions and put us on a path for change. Water Matters: Why We Need to Act Now to Save Our Most Critical Resource is a call to action and a solution-focused guide to solving our global water crisis. Authors take on both the good and the bad—the impact of climate change on water resources, the threat of privatization, and the challenge of thirsty agriculture, as well as a growing grassroots water justice movement, tools for watershed literacy, and success stories in conservation and efficiency.

Water Matters is a book that will make you pause for a moment to remember the life-sustaining value of water in our daily lives, and then inspire you to do everything you can to preserve and protect our threatened water resources.

Contributors include: Maude Barlow, Cynthia Barnett, Jeff Conant, Brock Dolman, Paula Garcia, Wenonah Hauter, Barbara Kingsolver, Jacques Leslie, Tara Lohan, Kelle Louaillier, Bill McKibben, Sandra Postel, Christina Roessler, Tina Rosenberg, Elizabeth Royte, Eleanor Sterling, Erin Vintinner, and William Waterway

News release http://www.bayercropscience.com/ : "Bayer CropScience will pay up to $750 million to U.S. rice farmers to resolve claims that the company’s experimental LibertyLink rice contaminated crops, making them unfit for export. The agreement ends several lawsuits representing more than 11,000 long grain rice farmers in Texas, Louisiana, Missouri, Arkansas, and Mississippi. The LibertyLink rice traits were originally developed by AgrEvo, which was bought by Aventis CropScience. Bayer acquired Aventis CropScience in 2001. The rice was genetically modified to be tolerant to glufosinate, the active ingredient in Liberty herbicide. Tests of the rice were conducted at Louisiana State University. In 2006, Bayer CropScience alerted USDA that LibertyLink rice had contaminated the U.S. rice supply. At the time, there were no genetically modified rice varieties being grown commercially in the U.S. In response to the contamination, Japan and Russia banned imports of long grain rice from the U.S., while Mexico and the European Union required that U.S.-grown rice be tested and proven free of genetically-modified traits."

By Jill Richardson / AlterNet

It turns out that Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide might not be nearly as safe as people have thought, but the media is staying mum on the revelation.

READ MORE http://www.alternet.org/ …

News release: "A report issued today by key environmental and scientific federal agencies assesses the increasing prevalence of low-oxygen “dead zones” in U.S. coastal waters and outlines a series of research and policy steps that could help reverse the decades-long trend. The interagency report notes that incidents of hypoxia—a condition in which oxygen levels drop so low that fish and other animals are stressed or killed––have increased nearly 30-fold since 1960. Incidents of hypoxia were documented in nearly 50 percent of the 647 waterways assessed for the new report, including the Gulf of Mexico, home to one of the largest such zones in the world. The impact of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill on oxygen levels in the Gulf of Mexico was not considered in this report because the spill had not yet occurred at the time the report was completed. Only additional research will reveal how the presence of oil in the gulf is affecting the large dead zone that forms every summer to the west of the Mississippi delta (see fact sheet), the more than 100 other independent sites along the Gulf of Mexico coast that experience low-oxygen problems, and areas of naturally-occurring deepwater oxygen depletion."

http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/ …

The report is the final of five reports mandated by Congress in the Harmful Algal Bloom and Hypoxia Amendments Act of 2004. See: Scientific Assessment of Hypoxia in U.S. Coastal Waters, Interagency Working Group on Harmful Algal Blooms, Hypoxia, and Human Health, September 2010 http://www.whitehouse.gov/ …

Friday, August 13, 2010

AP reported earlier this week: "The Texas-based oil companies that are the primary backers of a November ballot effort to suspend California’s global warming law are among the state’s biggest polluters, according to a report issued Tuesday by two groups advocating for inner-city residents.

"Valero Energy Corp. and Tesoro Corp. have contributed more than $4.5 million to Proposition 23, which seeks to suspend a 2006 law intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Their contributions represent nearly 75 percent of the funding for the initiative."

http://is.gd/efj1N

IAN KIM, via Abel Habtegeorgis, abel@ellabakercenter.org

Kim is green-collar jobs campaign director for the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, one of the groups that released the new report, "Toxic Twins."

http://www.ellabakercenter.org/index.php?p=gcjc_prop23_toxic_twins

From: the Institute for Public Accuracy