News of the world environment

NEWSLETTER | FEBRUARY 28, 2020

Information Inspires Action

This past Wednesday, the Journal’s publisher, Earth Island Institute, filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against ten big corporations — including giants like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Proctor & Gamble, and Nestle — for their contribution to the plastic pollution crisis.

Earth Island filed the suit on behalf of itself and four of its projects — Plastic Pollution Coalition, Shark Stewards, International Marine Mammal Project, and 1000 Fountains — that are fighting to stop plastic pollution and protect marine environments. It seeks to hold corporations accountable for their claims that plastic packaging is recyclable and accuses them of using the same playbook as Big Tobacco and Big Oil to market their products and create misinformation campaigns to hide the harms those products can cause to public health and the environment.

Given that the Journal’s work is all about marshaling facts using the best principles of journalism — fairness, accuracy, and intellectual rigorousness — to inspire people to action, and given that we have been reporting about plastic pollution for at least a decade, this legal effort by our publisher feels like a perfect case of putting your money where your mouth is.

We couldn’t be prouder!

Maureen Nandini Mitra
Editor, Earth Island Journal

Drinking Forever Chemicals?

Residents of the City of Pleasanton, an upscale suburb just north of California’s Silicon Valley, recently learned that their water was tainted with PFAS, a class of chemical pollutants that persist in the environment forever and are linked to diseases like testicular and kidney cancer, reproductive irregularities, and ulcerative colitis. As California and other states begin testing for PFAS in water supplies, all of us may be due our own rude awakening about this toxic public health threat.

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The Cruelty of Inattention

Journalist Andrew Lewis, who grew up along New Jersey’s Delaware Bayshore — a 40-mile stretch of coast in Cumberland, the poorest county in the state — reflects on the imbalance of attention paid to different places post-Hurricane Sandy. “People here know labor and they know the outdoors, and they know the feeling of being forgotten by a state perpetually focused on its much wealthier environs,” he writes.

And Yet She Persists

Maria Pito has dedicated her life to protecting the web of life in the high elevation wetlands of the Colombian Andes, often at great risk to her life as well as her family members’. Indigenous Nasa leaders like her are among the social leaders most threatened, kidnapped, and assassinated in Colombia. But, she says, of those who would do her harm: “They cannot keep us silent.”

ICYMI

Starting Early

Zebra finches sing to their eggs. Aww! Now new research shows that the songs they sing to their eggs late in development may give chicks a head start in dealing with warm weather once they hatch. That’s taking it from aww to awesome!

Read more »

Let's Play

Social media users are having a collective heart-melt over a video of a coyote and badger hanging out in a wildlife underpass in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains. What’s the story behind this adorable interspecies relationship?

Watch »

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