“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” –Margaret Mead

Weekly Mulch: White House Relents on Solar Panels; Why Congressional Inaction Hasn’t Stopped Green Building

Food sovereignty is an issue we will likely hear a lot about in coming years. Basically, it is the right a community has to determine where its food comes from. Outbreaks of food-borne illness receive great attention, but concerns about our food system are growing even when it is ‘working.’ We need to take a hard look at the system that stocks our grocery store shelves with products full of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and preservatives – and see if we can come up with a better way to feed a nation.

If you had a magic wand, and you could wave it and create a world full of light, love, justice and peace, when do you think you would choose to use it? Would you get around to it as soon as you were done with your education? Would you do it once you found the right job? Would you think about doing it “someday”? Of course not.

2010 has been a year of missed opportunities for the environment. From no progress or worse on the international climate action stage, to a clean energy bill in the U.S. Senate that is still on ice despite the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history, it’s enough to make you want to throw up your hands and buy beach-front property on the Bering Sea.

Despite disaster after disaster, Big Oil continues reckless drilling projects in the Arctic and around the globe. It’s time to move beyond oil once and for all. Here’s what we’re doing about it.

In the mythology of many of the native peoples on Earth, there is a prophesy that when the Earth is most in peril, a spider woman will weave a web connecting people with one another in order for them to do what has to be done to save the world.

Robert Jensen is a professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas. He is the author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity; The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege; and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity, among other works. He spoke to NLP’s Alex Doherty about the threat of environmental catastrophe. http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/a_world_in_collapse/

This is the first part in a two-part interview with Steve Osofsky, Director of Wildlife Health Policy for the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). In this first part of the interview, Osofsky discusses how his field work informs his policy work, as well as how farmers can both help, and benefit from, wildlife conservation. Crossposted from the Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet.

My letter to the White House this week:

Dear Ms. Browner,

During the week of August 4, 2010, you served as the administration’s principle spokesperson appearing on multiple national television programs, including NBC’s Meet the Press and ABC’s Good Morning America, to report findings from the interagency BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Budget. You stated repeatedly that “the vast majority of the oil appears to be gone.”

This week, multiple independent scientists have released calculations and investigations that show quite the opposite:

* from the University of Georgia that upwards of seventy nine percent of the spilled oil still remains in the Gulf

* from the University of South Florida oil found on the bottom of the ocean in a vast area of subsea canyons some 40 miles from the Florida panhandle

* and from the Wood’s Hole Oceanographic Institution, published today in Science, new mapping of the disputed massive underwater plumes of oil.