OnEarth magazine

  Today OnEarth: A Toxic Explosion Rocks Texas, Don’t Mess with Nebraska, Eat the Fish Eating the Atlantic

Just got chilly in here: Following last month’s announcement that British curriculum guidelines for elementary-school-aged children would essentially be skipping over the topic of climate change, public outcry has been fervid. Now Sir David Attenborough — the Gandalf of British environmentalism — is adding his remarkable voice to the fray. Guardian

Plans to drop climate debate from national curriculum ‘unacceptable’ | The Guardian

This bottle redeemable for $150,000: A Colombian activist who helped organize the work of Bogota’s 5,000 impoverished waste-pickers and recyclers has been honored for her efforts with a Goldman Environmental Prize, awarded by the eponymous San Francisco-based foundation that annually recognizes one “grassroots warrior” from each of the globe’s six inhabited continents. Nohra Padilla grew up poor, picking through the trash in Bogota dumps before becoming an organizer and recycling activist. Now, in addition to the $150,000 prize, she can enjoy a new degree of social acceptance for waste-picking — which, thanks to her efforts, has resulted in 1,500 tons of recyclable material collected daily that gets resold in international markets, and in city-issued paychecks for the people picking it all up. Los Angeles Times:  Colombian activist’s work earns environmental prize

More of the day’s best environmental news and #greenreads from around the web at Today OnEarth.

Fee suggested for industries that extract, permanently remove water from Pa. environment →

Stop, thieves: You can’t just walk into the corner store and take a bottle of water without paying for it, right? Well the same goes for industries that remove water from the ground beneath Pennsylvania, says the head of that state’s Fish and Boat Commission, who’s considering imposing a fee on water “extracted by industry and permanently removed from the environment.” The Pennsylvania Constitution makes explicit that Pennsylvania’s water is owned by Pennsylvanians, he says — and they should be paid a fair price for its removal. But “the bottled water industry, for instance, pays nothing to remove the water that it treats, packages and mostly ships out of the state. The Marcellus Shale natural gas industry also extracts water for free, since the process of hydraulic fracturing pumps water so far below the water table it is rendered unusable.” Associated Press

More of the day’s best environmental news and #greenreads from around the web at Today OnEarth.

It’s official: EPA delays climate rule for new power plants →

Press pause: Last Friday was the deadline for the EPA’s decision to begin imposing greenhouse-gas limits on all new power plants. Last Friday was also — as was expected — the day that the EPA gave itself an extension, citing the need to review more of the 2 million comments that the proposal has generated: a delay widely seen as a necessary measure for making the strongest case possible. Washington Post

More of the day’s best environmental news and #greenreads from around the web at Today OnEarth.

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Saving desert for last: What, so pumping your filthy tar-sands oil through the middle of the American Grain Belt isn’t enough for you, Canada? Now you want to dig up and ruin our national forests, too? A Canadian speculative mining outfit is planning “to blast a mile-wide, half-mile deep copper mine on 4,000 acres of the [Santa Rita] mountains, 50 miles southeast of Tucson,” in Arizona’s Coronado National Forest. The battle over the mine — which is opposed by farmers, ranchers, environmentalists, and Tucson’s mayor — has highligted the urgent “need to reform a 141-year-old law that governs hard rock mining on federal lands.”  Proposed Copper Mine in Arizona Highlights Weakness of Federal Mining Laws |Earth Island Journal

More of the day’s best environmental news and #greenreads from around the web at Today OnEarth.

  Today OnEarth: Canada Digs (up) Arizona, Recognizing a Recycling Hero, Sir David Speaks Out

Put on a happy face: Given how dire lots of our current problems are (see above), can environmentalists look on the bright side? One of our fellow nonprofit enviro publications is going to give it a try … for a whole month (or, well, the amount of April they’ve got left, considering they’re off to a bit of a late start). Good luck there, guys. Let us know how it goes. Grist: April is Happiness Month at Grist

More of the day’s best environmental news and #greenreads from around the web at Today OnEarth.

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Drought denial?: A new study says that last year’s Midwestern drought was a freak occurrence not caused by climate change. Not so fast, says the climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who contends that the study didn’t take into account lots of global warming-related factors, including the dearth of snowfall in the Rocky Mountains, which affects the overall moisture in the atmosphere and thus rainfall during the summer months. We suspect lots of people are going to be arguing about this one for a while to come. Associated Press: Report: Global warming didn’t cause big US drought

More of the day’s best environmental news and #greenreads from around the web at Today OnEarth.

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You so crazy: Does believing that NASA faked the Apollo moon landing or that the Queen killed Princess Di make you more like to buy the idea that scientists the world over are making up global warming as a way to gin up more research grants (or something)? New research suggests yes — climate denial goes hand in hand with the acceptance of other paranoid conspiracy theories. New Yorker: New Research: The Psychology of Conspiracy Theorists and Climate Change Deniers

More of the day’s best environmental news and #greenreads from around the web at Today OnEarth.