EnvironmentLA - The City's official site for information about projects and programs that are making Los Angeles more sustainable and environmentally friendly.
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power - LADWP offers environmental Green LA programs, including Trees for a Green LA, Energy Efficiency for a Green LA, Solar Energy for a Green LA, Electric Vehicles for a Green LA, Green Power for a Green LA, Recycling for a Green LA and Educational Services for a Green LA.
Green LA Action Plan - The City's official plan to improve energy conservation, transition to renewable power sources, and change the ways citizens commute to work and school.
US Green Building Council-LA - A resource for agencies, municipalities, professionals and companies interested in sustainable, green buildings.
Squint and you can’t see them. Try a standard microscope. They’re still not there.
And yet, they’re everywhere. Nanoparticles are in hundreds, if not thousands, of consumer products, from sunscreen to child car seats to sports socks.
So the EPA has decided to take a closer look at these eensy particles, to investigate their potential to harm humans and the environment.
Nanos, which are about 1/100,000 of the width of a human hair and have been aggregating in consumer goods faster than E coli at a feed lot, have raised concerns among environmentalists, public health officials and others. These guardians of the environment want to know more about how nanos act in water. air and soil, and also whether they can invade and damage human tissue.
By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
For those of us who are frustrated, daily, by the vast dispersed array of government information on environmental threats to our health, a new website assembled by the Centers for Disease Control may offer some relief.
The National Environmental Health Public Tracking Network aims to help us connect to information about [...]
By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
Discerning diners would probably not find this much of a topic for dinner discussion, but back in the fields where their broccoli is grown, fungus can stop a good crop cold. Most farmers apply fungicides to deal with the problem, but fungicides, a subset of pesticides, can kill beneficial organisms and cause environmental damage in the course of attacking the problem invader.
Fungicides, like other pesticides, also can wind up growing better fungus as the disease adapts to fend off the poison. The fungus becomes resistant to the pesticide, and creeps back ever-more resilient. Which requires more chemical treatments; which can increase resistance; requiring more treatments…
To try to break this cycle, researchers in Canada have been developing new “green” fungicides that are less environmentally damaging because they go in for a targeted kill. This surgical approach plays off the plant’s own defense strategy by attacking the fungal infection as it ramps up to break through the plants defenses. Effectively, the new eco-fungicides, called “paldoxins,” disrupt the fungus’ response to the plant.
Thurgood Marshall, with 365 students in grades 9 through 12, is a college preparatory school with a focus on law and legal careers. But thanks to teachers like Sam Ullery, 29, who teaches 9th grade earth science and 12th grade environmental science, the students also are learning many hands-on ways they can reduce their impact on the earth.
Across the country, in preparation for Earth Day and in response to growing public awareness of climate change, students and teachers are not only learning about the environment but using that knowledge to change their schools.
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.
Disturbing reports haunt the news lately, suggesting that the faltering U.S. economy could stall environmental progress or even force a digression on climate change programs.
Two U.S. wind energy companies and several corn ethanol projects have been delayed for lack of financing, TheNew York Times reported this week in “Alternative Energy Suddenly Faces Headwinds“.
A similarly upbeat piece “Environment will wither whoever wins US election” from The Times in London, notes that “environmental groups are already bracing themselves for delays or disappointment on action to tackle global warming”. The article postulates that post-election political leaders will face opposition to environmental programs from job-starved states in the Rust Belt reliant on coal and other heavy industry. American’s immediate need for cold green cash, it warns, could trump green growth.
Two evangelical groups are in the spotlight for their efforts to improve the environment. The most recent to join the eco-movement is a small group of Southern Baptists whose climate initiative is receiving a lot of press these days.
“I was sitting in theology class at Southeastern Seminary [in Wake Forest, N.C.],” he says. “We were discussing how God reveals himself both through scripture and through nature. My professor made the statement that when we destroy God’s creation, which is a form of divine revelation, it is similar to tearing a page out of the Bible.
“That broke me,” says Merritt, “and began a shift in perspective for me.” The 26-year-old son of noted evangelist Dr. James Merritt, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, decided that his faith needed to get on board with global warming.
Over the last few years, moviegoers may have come to expect that any documentary pairing scientists and ice caps will be a scare-fest or a sermon — a big-screen effort to hammer home the urgent need to take action countering climate change.
Not so with Encounters at the End of the World, a film [...]
