By John DeFore

The world is scrutinizing every shred of news from the Obama camp these days, trying to guess who’ll have an office in the West Wing. But a group of gardeners based in Maine are more focused on what’s going to happen just outside the White House — on the lawn, in fact.

Eat the View is the name of a petition encouraging the Obamas to plant an organic garden on the White House lawn, using the produce both for the residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and to feed the hungry at area food pantries.

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By Barbara Kessler

The cork is off the champagne on the presidential election - and many environmentalists who’ve felt stifled by the Bush Administration’s indifference, hostility or lukewarm interest in ecological issues, including global warming, are giddy with new possibilities.

Frances Beinecke, head of the non-profit Natural Resources Defense Council, sounded buoyant in an address on the NRDC website: “Barack Obama’s election is a huge win for everyone exhausted from playing defense. Count us among them. It rekindles our hope that environmental protection may be restored to its rightful place as a treasured American value.”

Gene Karpinski, head of the League of Conservation Voters, was no less ebullient. “America embraced change today. And the planet will be better for it,” he announced.

Karpinski noted that, along with Obama, the nation also elected some environmental-minded senators, such as cousins Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Tom Udall (D-N.M.), from a family with a long conservation history.

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By John DeFore

Pretenders bandleader Chrissie Hynde has been visible for years as a vegetarian and PETA supporter, but her latest album nods to the well-being of the plant world as well.

The first copies of the band’s new album Break up the Concrete come wrapped in a half-sleeve made of handmade paper with tiny seeds molded into it. Listeners can soak the paper in water and plant it in hopes of growing some flowers.

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By Shermakaye Bass

Republican presidential candidate Arizona Sen. John McCain, who has historically opposed drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), has been uncharacteristically taciturn on the energy issue since he chose pro-drilling Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Green-energy proponents find that ominous.

“With the pick of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin for his running mate, John McCain’s race towards the Bush administration’s failed energy policy is now complete,” Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope said recently. “… No one is closer to the the oil industry than Governor Palin. Along with her support for drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge and off our coasts, she also opposes a windfall profit tax on the richest oil companies. …She has been dismissive of alternative energy, saying ‘alternative-energy solutions are far from imminent and would require more than 10 years to develop’, when in reality it is the oil she would like to drill that would take a decade to bring to market.”

The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) in Washington, D.C., showed a similar concern over Palin.

“Obviously, it’s a very disappointing pick for a (presidential) candidate who at one time made a priority of getting us away from the old fossil fuels of the past – Sen. McCain,” said David Sandretti, the League’s communications director.

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By Barbara Kessler

Some things just make sense, like the Phoenix Suns using the desert sun to help power the US Airways Center where they play.

The basketball team, electricity provider APS and the city of Phoenix announced Thursday that the utility and the team have teamed up to install a 194 kilowatt photo-voltaic system on the fifth level of the US Airways parking garage. The system will cover about 18,000 square feet and produce more than 330,000 kilowatt-hours each year - enough to meet about one-quarter of the parking garage’s power needs.

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By John DeFore

Last Wednesday, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced his desire to turn the city into a wind-power titan, sprinkling the city with turbines and building huge wind farms off the coasts of Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island.

Speaking at the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas, he issued a formal request encouraging green power entrepreneurs to submit plans for a range of sustainable energy projects. But what got the most attention was the suggestion that “perhaps companies will want to put windfarms atop our bridges and skyscrapers,

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By Barbara Kessler

Lance Armstrong may have to take his own advice and “dare to change” his life after being outed as the city’s biggest water guzzler, using a whopping 222,900 gallons of water in June, according to an AP report that appeared in the Austin American-Statesman late last week.

In July, consumption jumped to 330,000 gallons, putting him way out in front of the competition at about 38 times what the average household uses, according to the New York Times, which jumped onto the story.

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By Diane Porter
They could all be fine.
Or they could suffer allergic reactions, coughs, asthma attacks, respiratory infections, oxygen debt and cramps. Their performances could slip,

Photo: Frank Wechsel / triathlon.org
 
Jason Shoemaker competes at the 2007 BG Triathlon World Cup
their chances for world records could suffer. And predicting medal winners could prove more difficult than usual, [...]

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By Shermakaye Bass

When legislators cross party lines and governors publicly plead for water reform, you know the country’s water crunch has reached a new degree of direness.

And yet, some conservationists ask, who’s really listening?

In late July an Opinion column appeared in the Los Angeles Times and other California newspapers. In it, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, and senior U.S. Senator, Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, attempted to jolt water-hoggers into acknowledging that their state is in a full-blown water crisis.

The unlikely duo delivered frightening news: California’s largest reservoir, the Shasta Reservoir, is operating at only 48 percent capacity this year, and the state’s second largest water storage reservoir, Lake Oroville, has less water to spare than it has in three decades. California’s multi-year drought has allowed wildfires to gobble up more than a million acres this year. And job-loss has become a major factor, they say, noting that in two of the past three years, the Pacific salmon fisheries (which impact tens of thousands of jobs) have shut down because there just isn’t enough salmon for fishing.

In light of those facts, you have to scratch your head over why Americans, who consume two to three times the amount of Europeans daily, still squander water, the most essential thing to life itself.

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The Alliance to Save Energy, a 30-year-old coalition of business, political, consumer and environmental leaders, today urged the U.S. Senate to adopt a bill that would grant or extend tax credits to consumers for energy-saving home improvements, while also potentially stimulating the economy.
The bill, The Jobs, Energy, Families & Disaster Relief Act of 2008, would [...]

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By Harriet Blake
The climate change bill may be stuck in Congress but green initiatives march on. From the coasts to the heartland, states are taking matters into their own hands with many governors leading the way.
Among the most prominent “Green Govs” today are Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and Democrat Deval Patrick of Massachusetts. [...]

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By John DeFore
It must be a bittersweet moment to be Darrell Hammond.

Every talk Al Gore gives, after all, continues to prove the Saturday Night Live veteran’s brilliance at honing in on the speech patterns of public figures; if Gore can’t tweak his style after years of mockery, then clearly Hammond caught something elemental.
But in [...]

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