Last week, Greenpeace announced some of its activists had done something no one has ever done before. They visited a nuclear test site without permission from the country that conducted the tests. That meant no government officials peering over their shoulders, steering them toward this or away from that.

The Greenpeace activists visited the Cannikin test site on Amchitka Island in the Aleutian chain off Alaska. On November 6, 1971, the U.S. government detonated its largest underground nuclear device there. Cannikin was a five megaton blast – or 385 times as powerful as the bomb dropped at Hiroshima. In 1971, people around the world were protesting this bad idea – this detonation of 385 Hiroshimas underground in the volcanic Pacific Rim. But the U.S. government was not to be denied. “Don’t be alarmed, we know what we’re doing,” they said. You’ve all heard that kind of reassurance before. We were promised no radiation would leak from the site.
Continue reading »

Remember “Casablanca”? Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman on that wet runway, he’s telling her to get on the plane, he’s telling her that the problems of two people don’t amount to a hill of beans…

What does a hill of beans amount to? It was not a useful standard of measurement in the 1940s, and even less so today. Those beans are not what they used to be.

The hill of beans I have in mind are soybeans. They’re being harvested right now and will be shipped to market next month. This particular hill of soybeans has been genetically altered by the mad scientists at the Monsanto Corporation of St. Louis, Missouri. The tainted beans are called “Roundup Ready” soybeans. By “Roundup Ready,” Monsanto means that the adulterated beans will not be killed by Monsanto’s herbicide “Roundup,” which kills just about every other form of plant life. Monsanto has altered the beans so they can be bathed in poisons throughout the growing season and then delivered to your table.
Continue reading »

A few months ago, I attended a discussion between environmentalists and journalists. The two sides were trading impressions of each other in a Seattle microbrewery.

One of the themes sounded by the journalists was that too often, environmentalists cry “the sky is falling” when in fact, it is not. Some of the journalists allowed that the media shares some blame for this, in that journalists are more likely to respond to such tactics than they are to more reasonable, but less exciting arguments.

At the time I thought, perhaps they have a point. Beyond the windows, it was a beautiful summer evening and as we 40 well scrubbed, well educated white people sat around politely agreeing to disagree, the sky seemed as firm in the heavens as it ever was.
Continue reading »