LA Weekly

My friend Coco Conn shot some great footage, photos and short videos, of Saturday's protest march against the House bill that would, among other things, make it a criminal offense to provide health care to an undocumented worker. People have been asking: Why can't we get this many people out for an anti-war march? I guess because immigrants' rights are more clear-cut. We don't know what we should do in Iraq. We do know you can't deny a significant portion of the American workforce basic dignities.

I'm becoming increasingly obsessed with how civil rights and a healthy environment are all tied up together. Grist has an excellent series going on poverty and the environment (the pertinent farmworker story is here). I've been talking to people in this city who are about to be held responsible for air pollution but don't have the resources to solve anything. And would a less beleaguered workforce object more strenuously to being exposed to pesticides and fertilitzers that make them ill? (See that Grist piece)

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I haven't blogged much lately because I've been out in the world, talking to people and haven't spent so much time at the computer. This is a good thing.

But I've also not been blogging because, after a certain point, you get depressed. You start to want to write about nice things, local things: like the man who runs the bike shop down the street, or my friends who go to great lengths to free their lives of petroleum.

Listening to this speech by Hodding Carter (you remember: Carter was Carter's State Department spokesman), however, which came over the transom on the Society of Environmental Journalists Watchdog list, I got religion again. "Are we in the press too sophisticated to rage?" he asks. "Do we think it unseemly for well-educated men and women in business suits to behave like a revolutionary rabble?"

Okay. So here are the things that have pissed me off in the last month:

On March 8th, the house passed H.R. 4167, the National Uniformity in Food Act, which would effectively nullify California's Proposition 65 by making it illegal for state's to establish their own food-labeling rules. I believe there's an amendment in it so we can still warn about mercury in fish, but if it gets through the Senate, the legislation will make it more difficult for people in California to make decisions about their food.

Halibut live to be 100 years, and we're fishing them out faster than they can reproduce.

A company funded 95 percent by ExxonMobil, Public Interest Watch, lobbied for an IRS audit of Greenpeace (in the Wall Street Journal and on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!)

The U.S. Court of Appeals on Thursday ruled March 7, in NRDC v. EPA, et al., that environmental groups cannot bring cases against the rules of regulatory agencies unless they can prove that one of their members will be harmed by the rule. The case was about the EPA allowing big agricultural exemptions to the ban on the pesticide methyl bromide (had your house tented lately?) which depletes ozone faster than you can say chrlorofluorocarbon. As the NRDC could not prove that one of their members would be harmed by the exemption, the judge through the case out. It sets an evil precedent.

There's more but I've run out of time -- the other problem with blogging.

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This just in:

BENTONVILLE, Ark. - Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is throwing its weight behind organic products, a move that experts say could have the same lasting effect on environmental practices that Wal-Mart has had on prices by forcing suppliers and competitors to keep up. Putting new items on the shelf this year, from organic cotton baby clothes to ocean fish caught in ways that don't harm the environment, is part of a broader green policy launched last year to meet consumer demand, cut costs for things like energy and packaging and burnish a battered reputation.

I don't . . . even . . . know . . . what to say.

(Except that if good environmental practices don't come hand-in-hand with human rights and good labor practices, they don't mean crap.)

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Idaho Governor Dirk Kempthorne once hired industry lobbyists to summarize public comments on whether to preserve roadless wilderness areas. The biggest contributor to his 2002 campaign for governor was the Potlatch Corp., one of the worst polluters not only in Idaho but in my home state, Minnesota, where it was fined close to a million this winter for pollution violations. Kempthorne's second biggest contributor was Coeur D'Alene Mines, which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently blocked -- at the last minute -- from dumping toxic gold mining waste into a pristine Alaskan lake.

Now Kempthorne has replaced the Abramoff-tainted Wise-User Gale Norton as Secretary of Interior. Predictable, yes. Tolerable, no.

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