The Goliad County case is the latest in a string of hotly contested challenges the EPA has faced in recent years as officials try to balance the drive to tap new sources of energy with the need to preserve water for future use in a changing climate.
For whatever reason, its motives presumably mixed, the monkey for the next ten days, attentively on post at the height of my right knee, accompanied me on the path to pure consciousness, a path on which I was careful to scatter crumbs of stale chocolate and shards of dry cheese.
via Lewis Lapham: The Conquest of Nature - Guernica / A Magazine for Art & Politics
Mexico City plans to draw drinking water from a mile-deep aquifer, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. The Mexican effort challenges a key tenet of U.S. clean water policy: that water far underground can be intentionally polluted because it will never be used.
U.S. environmental regulators have long assumed that reservoirs located thousands of feet underground will be too expensive to tap. So even as population increases, temperatures rise, and traditional water supplies dry up, American scientists and policy-makers often exempt these deep aquifers from clean water protections and allow energy and mining companies to inject pollutants directly into them.
…In a parched world, Mexico City is sending a message: Deep, unknown potential sources of drinking water matter, and the U.S. pollutes them at its peril.
Read more Guernica Daily
Source: guernicamag.com
(via Meaghan Winter: Extinction is the Rule - Guernica / A Magazine of Art & Politics)
A couple months later, one night soon after Hurricane Sandy hit, I decided to walk home through an industrial tract that separates a friend’s Brooklyn neighborhood from mine. It was after midnight; I knew I was foolish for walking alone. As I rounded the corner onto a normally desolate stretch, cars and trucks idled in a queue whose end I couldn’t see. Drivers loitered outside their vehicles, talking and arguing, some angrily. The storm had disrupted deliveries and there was a run on gas. I hurried past the usual warehouses and piles of scrap metal and, in disbelief, past block after block of cars. Only headlights and voices and the smell of chemicals cut through the dark.
For the first time since arriving home, my intellectual understanding of environmental degradation melded with my lived experience. My visceral response to Beijing came back to me. What may seem like abstract or future or faraway problems are in fact concrete, current, here. How lucky I’ve been, and how limited my mind, that only occasionally have I really and completely realized that my life relies on the health of the environment. Extinction is the rule, I thought, pausing in the dark. We can’t have everything, so what are we going to give up?
Source: guernicamag.com
Federal officials have given energy and mining companies permission to pollute aquifers in more than 1,500 places across the country, releasing toxic material into underground reservoirs that help supply more than half of the nation’s drinking water.
In many cases, the Environmental Protection Agency has granted these so-called aquifer exemptions in Western states now stricken by drought and increasingly desperate for water.
EPA records show that portions of at least 100 drinking water aquifers have been written off because exemptions have allowed them to be used as dumping grounds.
“You are sacrificing these aquifers,” said Mark Williams, a hydrologist at the University of Colorado and a member of a National Science Foundation team studying the effects of energy development on the environment. “By definition, you are putting pollution into them. … If you are looking 50 to 100 years down the road, this is not a good way to go.”
Source: guernicamag.com
According to recent estimates, humanity has very little time to slow climate change—possibly as little as sixteen years—or we will have passed a critical limit. The green economy seems to make saving the planet an easy choice. Why, then, are protests breaking out in resistance to it, especially across the developing nations of the global south?
Source: guernicamag.com
Is it time to think about a different economic system, for the sake of the planet?
Source: guernicamag.com
An excerpt from Gail Collins’ new book As Texas Goes: How The Lone Star State Hijacked The American Agenda in our latest issue.
“By 2000, when George W. Bush was running for president, the days when Republicans could burble about protecting the forests and stopping climate change were pretty much over. The environmental discussion shifted to the need for “market-based incentives” and the rights of local communities. The 2000 Republican platform did promise that the party nominee would approach environmental issues “just as he did it in Texas.” That sounded rather ominous, since at the time Texas ranked first in airborne carcinogens, first in ozone components, first in toxic air releases. Houston had the nation’s dirtiest air and Texas was number one when it came to unhealthy ozone levels.”
