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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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