The Boundary Waters Canoe Area on the border between Canada and Minnesota sees 200,000 visitors a year, making it the most widely visited wilderness area in the nation. And you can tell when you’re there, you see people all the time, but they’re friendly so you don’t mind not being alone in a wilderness area. [ more... ]

Outdoor sage and proponent of civil disobedience Edward Abbey penned several personal letters that were run a few years ago in Orion Magazine. This one, posted recently on Adventure Journal, was sent to the University of Georgia responding to criticism of Earth First! and Abbey’s novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang. The work is pure Abbey, [ more... ]

Another enterprising filmmaker would like some of your money. But here’s the good news: it looks like they’ve unearthed some more Edward Abbey archival footage. This documentary focuses on those who linger on the extremes of the environmental movement, and hey, it’s great environmentalist don’t all play by the rules, we all know huge corporations don’t. Check out the movie Wrenched, and if you’re inspired, feel free to help them get it produced.

via Cold Splinters

With an asterisk. You have to go back to Nixon to find the last environmental Republican who scored well among a survey of green groups. But don’t mock Nixon: He established both the Clean Air and Clean Water acts as the Environmental Protection Agency — all laws and departments attacked by present-day Republicans as needless [ more... ]

Malibu, despite its place in the firmament of surfing, has some of the skankiest water this side of a Superfund site. In the 1990s, four surfers died of water-borne diseases and a fifth nearly succumbed from a viral infection. You would think that residents would agree the nasty Malibu lagoon needed to be cleaned, but [ more... ]

Twenty-five fuel pods used by F4 Phantoms in the 1970s have been pulled out of remote corners of the Noatak National Preserve and Kobuk Valley National Park. The gas tanks are used to extend the range of the jets, and the pilots jettison them when they’re empty. In total, the pods removed so far weigh [ more... ]

As if the 800-pound gorilla of global warming isn’t enough giant metaphorical primate in one room, there’s ocean acidification — an environmental result of increased atmospheric carbon that’s every bit as threatening as climate change, only not as well understood or known by most people. It is, however, making itself felt with increasingly ominous effects [ more... ]

Funny how you change your tune once the chickens come home to roost. Shall we mangle more metaphors? No, let’s get to the point: While the United States dithers about climate change (at best), Australia has just enacted the first stage of its regulation of carbon, issuing permits for emissions that can be swapped under [ more... ]

Writer and environmentalist Andrew Blackwell has a pretty dark sense of humor and a broad sense of beauty, too. He says that by visiting Alberta tar sands, China’s “coal city” of Linfen, the great Pacific garbage patch, as well as the site of one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters (which gets billing in the [ more... ]

A federal court in Washington, D.C., yesterday handed the Environmental Protection Agency a huge defeat, striking down an EPA rule that demanded cuts in soot- and smog-forming power plant emissions that cross state lines. Republican lawmakers and energy industry reps are rejoicing, while those who actually breathe polluted air should be dismayed. EPA can force [ more... ]