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Biophilia
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The Commons and the Tragedy
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Dominionism
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Storm Warning: Are Left and Right Obsolete?
Hay foot, straw foot
by Stephanie Mills
Whole Earth, Summer 2000
George W. Bush, quoted in
Without a Doubt
. (Or here)
by Ron Suskind
New York Times,
17 OCT 2004
(It is September of 2005 as I type this.)
"The latest punchline from the EPA gag writers involves a proposed rule change that would for the first time allow the nuclear industry to put radioactive materials in ordinary landfills and hazardous waste sites that were not designed for that purpose.
That's right -- radioactive nuclear waste, such as cesium, strontium, cobalt and plutonium, elements used in nuclear power facilities and bomb-making plants. But don't worry; the EPA promises this material would be "low-activity" and only stored in teeny-tiny amounts."
"You may have recently received a memorandum entitled "The Death of Environmentalism" by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus.Emphasis is mine -- ed.
I was one of the twenty-five people interviewed for this piece. While I personally was treated fairly, I am still deeply disappointed and angered by it. ...
S&N assert, "'the environment' is a category that reinforces the notions that a) the environment is a separate "thing" and b) human beings are separate from and superior to the "natural world". The two major ethical streams in modern environmentalism are deep ecology and environmental justice. Neither accepts either of these notions. Who were they thinking of when they made these statements? They offer not a single quote to suggest that anyone they interviewed believes that human beings are "separate from and superior to the natural world." Not one."
"The nation's biggest polluter isn't a corporation. It's the Pentagon. Every year the Department of Defense churns out more than 750,000 tons of hazardous waste -- more than the top three chemical companies combined.
Yet the military remains largely exempt from compliance with most federal and state environmental laws, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Pentagon's partner in crime, is working hard to keep it that way. ...
In 2001 the EPA estimated that the total liability for the cleanup of toxic military sites would exceed $350 billion, or five times the Superfund Act liability of private industry. ...
These military sites, which total more than 50 million acres, are among the most insidious and dangerous legacies left by the Pentagon. They are strewn with toxic bomb fragments, unexploded munitions, buried hazardous waste, fuel dumps, open pits filled with debris, burn piles and yes, rocket fuel. An internal EPA memo from 1998 warned of the looming problem: 'As measured by acres, and probably as measured by number of sites, ranges and buried munitions represent the largest cleanup program in the United States.' (Since then, the GW Bush administration has of course been frequently criticized for lack of interest in environmental issues, and overall military spending has greatly expanded. Not sure whether this would definitely mean that the problem has worsened, but that would seem to be the way to bet.)"