Tag Archives: toxic
Dear Scott Pruitt: Is this Atrazine’s DDT moment?
Dear Mr. Pruitt, I imagine there must be some angst these days about Atrazine. With the 2016 EPA reevaluation concluding that the herbicide isn’t as safe as we all once thought, I am sure growers and consumers are anxious about which way the agency will swing: to ban or not to ban. Admittedly, back in […]
Dear Mr. Pruitt: On this we can agree (I think.)
Dear Mr. Pruitt, With Trump’s proposed budget, looks like you could use some support. We disagree about climate change so I won’t go there, but you have said that cleanup of contaminated sites was a priority, and it looks like hundreds of millions of dollars for haz-waste cleanup could be axed. So, since I’ve been […]
Dear Mr. Pruitt, let’s talk about lead.
Dear Mr. Pruitt, Last week I wrote to you about DDT. This week let’s consider lead. Like DDT, another jaw-dropper for my environmental toxicology undergrads. You may not remember leaded gasoline. It was phasing out just as you were probably hitting the road. But I do, and I remember feeling good about asking for “unleaded” at […]
Make America Great Again?
Somewhere during the 2016 election night I read that voters wanted to turn back the clock to the days when they imagined our country was great. Greater than they consider it to be today; a 1950’s America. You know, the pre-Civil Rights America when a woman’s place was in the kitchen and the bedroom. The […]
In science we trust?
My first response to the recent NYT article about the sugar industry’s complicity in making fat, rather than sugar the focus of our nutritional ire is duh. My second is again? This is why people distrust science. Read the article. It’s sadly nothing new or surprising.
Unnatural Interview with Salon.Com
Recently had the opportunity to chat with Lindsey Abrams of Salon.com about Unnatural Selection book. Here is an excerpt from that interview: Abrams: How much time passed between the time when humans began to have this outsized effect on other organisms, and when we began to really understand the implications of that, or even that […]
Life in the Wake of Nuclear Disaster
(Cross posted from Island Press Field Notes.) Chernobyl’s explosion in 1986 was the largest nuclear accident ever. In terms of radiation release, it exceeded Hiroshima by a long shot. And although the hulking ruin continues to threaten today, still hot under its cement and lead cap, nature is reclaiming what was once hers—before humans stripped […]
