Hundreds of local groups formed to organize events and actions that made the vision of Earth Day a reality. The Ecology Center in Berkeley was one of those organizations. Today we continue this work of turning ideas into reality and making the visionary mainstream.

Conceived in 1969 and granted nonprofit status on Earth Day 1970, the Ecology Center was born as a
local institution that could serve as both a hub and a springboard for environmental efforts—a place where people could meet, get informed, and get active pursuing policies and projects to reduce the negative environmental impact humans have on the planet.

After four decades, our environmental movement has gone through a lot of changes, with large advocacy groups pushing for national and international change, and issue-specific groups filling every niche in the environmental spectrum. Yet the need for organizations like the Ecology Center has never been stronger. As every aspect of our society begins to awaken to the need to be a part of local solutions, individuals, governments, businesses, institutions, and social groups are reaching out to find examples of how to take ideas into action, and how to reduce harmful impacts in real and meaningful ways.

The Ecology Center helps people find ways to make positive change, whether through example, access to products, or just the right information to make it easier to take the next step. For forty years the Ecology Center has played a central role in helping Berkeley and the region be one of the most environmentally conscious and sustainable cityscapes on the planet. From pioneering recycling to pushing the boundaries of what a farmers’ market should be, from banning Styrofoam containers to supporting Zero Waste policies across the region, the Ecology Center has led and supported
the key local efforts of our time.

As we turn forty, we are as engaged and passionate about the work as ever, providing current, relevant, and consistent support to help people from all walks of life address their environmental challenges. We reach out to people who would not consider themselves to be environmentalists and support whatever positive efforts people make. Our environmental hotline answers questions about everything from ants to the ozone, and our EcoDirectory connects people with the vast community of experts, agencies, and businesses prepared to put ideas into action.

At the policy level, we recently helped develop the solid waste, food and farming elements of Berkeley’s Climate Action Plan, making it one of the most comprehensive municipal climate plans to date. We are actively involved in passing a bag reduction ordinance to eliminate disposable plastic bags and place a fee on paper bags. If passed, it will be one of the first comprehensive carryout bag reduction ordinances in the country. While these may be small accomplishments in the global scheme of things, we know from experience that small successes feed each other, and that that successes in Berkeley sustain others around the world, as we are sustained by accomplishments in other communities.

We are so grateful to the activists, staff, board members, and volunteers who have been at the core of
keeping the Berkeley Ecology Center vibrant all these years and to our members and donors for continuing to make the work possible. Our future depends on individuals offering ideas, energy, connections, and financial resources to make the work possible.

We invite you to join us at this juncture by celebrating with the Ecology Center on Earth Day and
becoming a member, donor, or volunteer. Come meet us at the Center, the Berkeley Farmers’ Markets, or on an EcoHouse tour, or visit us on the Web. Our doors are open, welcoming you to take your next step on our shared path to a safer and healthier planet.

Lyanda Lynn Haupt never meant to write a book about crows, but an editor insisted, and Crow Planet was born. Crows are not Haupt’s favorite bird but, as she puts it, we can’t all sit
around painting yellow warblers. Crows, possibly as many as one per every five to ten humans, remain the subject of fear (one of Haupt’s neighbors “brooms” a young crow to death merely for being too close to her child) and fascination (most people she queries about crows respond cautiously: “I know they are smart… I can’t say I like them. I don’t wish them harm or anything. I’m actually a little afraid of them.”). Crow Planet includes plenty of examples of crow play, mischief, and even grief, but Haupt also uses crows as a metaphor and a reality check: Crow numbers have grown exponentially, paralleling human population growth and urbanization. Yet crows can connect us with the natural world. With our concrete and suburbs, garbage cans and food scraps, suggests a friend of Haupt’s, maybe crows are the bird we “deserve.” But, Haupt writes, if it were a matter of deserving, we’d have no birds at all—“As it is, we have a shiny, black, intelligent, native, wild bird.”

Trained as a wildlife biologist, Haupt began observing crows in her neighborhood after she moved to Seattle from its less urban outskirts. She walked her new urban ‘hood with binoculars and notepad, watching, listening, and paying attention not only to crows, but also to the other—sometimes
surprising—wildlife around her. The book becomes a call for us to become urban naturalists as a way to reconnect with nature. It’s not that we don’t need those places with “all the sparkly trees in the Sierra Club calendar, the place we visit with a knapsack and a Clif Bar,” where we refresh our souls,
writes Haupt. But it is our daily lives—the way we consume food and water, and clean or pollute the air around us—that are the most meaningful interactions we have with wider earth and that impact the wilder earth. When we think of nature as something “out there,” writes Haupt, we become
complacent: “If nature is somewhere else, then what we do here really doesn’t matter.” So put on your walking shoes, open your eyes and ears, say hello to a crow, and save the planet while you’re at it. —Lisa Owens Viani

Radical Homemakers
Reclaiming Domesticity From a Consumer Culture
by Shannon Hayes
Left to Write Press (2010), $23.95

In the glut of books about the collapse of nearly everything in sight, we’re usually left at a loss as to what we might do to make a positive difference. Shannon Hayes has answers, and they’re right here at home. She invites us—actually, her style runs more to exhortation—to consider shifting our
personal centers of gravity from work to home. The timing of the message is perfect, as thousands of newly jobless people are having that shift made for them. Here’s how to experience change as an opportunity that leads not only to survival but to real satisfaction. Or, depending upon your outlook, you can get a jump on the future by choosing this shift proactively.

Hayes herself had the decided advantage of growing up on a small farm and loving it. Still, when she finished high school she went away to college and prepared for a career that would march her off to work for forty years. After she married, the newlyweds bought a cabin near her family’s farm, hoping for careers within commuting distance. When her husband’s layoff and her own lack of prospects forced them to consider relocation, they paused to do the math: Two cars to get to two jobs, appropriate wardrobes, childcare versus staying at home with those kids-to-be, enjoying a big garden while helping out with Hayes’ parents’ farm. Their calculations showed the two career
lifestyle putting them $10,000 ahead in actual discretionary income, which seemed not nearly enough
to offset the considerable losses in their time. As a bonus, the environmental payoff weighed greatly in favor of staying home. So began the story of a couple of radical homemakers.

The book is divided into two parts: Why and How. The Why is a fascinating history of industrialization’s worldwide wrecking ball course, full of surprising details. Why has dinner become
the big meal of the day? I’d never considered this recent development as a necessary side effect of industrialization, or given thought to the increase in the length of the day’s labor for those
who prepare the meal, who previously made a large midday “dinner” and kept “supper” a simple leftover affair. Hayes traces the peculiarly American acceptance of tasteless food back to its origins as a marketing tool (a “food scientist” in 1899: “The test of good food is to have no reminder of it after eating”), paving the way for the industrialization of food itself.

For the How of Radical Homemakers, Hayes interviewed twenty of the over 200 people who responded to her call for men and women who “have learned to live on less in order to take the time to nourish your family and the planet through home cooking, engaged citizenship, responsible consumption and creative living.” Rather than tell each person’s story, Hayes organized the feedback in broad categories, like Reclaiming Domestic Skills. The resulting hodgepodge of voices is less than entertaining but remains useful for those fired up by the book’s first half and looking for how to proceed.

Be warned that How does not translate to How-to. Rather, it’s a philosophy, a grand vision for all us jobless stay-at-homes and wannabes, translated through the down-to-earth feedback of the twenty correspondents on parsing through such issues as health insurance, mortgages, food, child-raising, and community. All are examined through the lens of economies, community, and individual responsibility. As Hayes puts it: “When women and men choose to center their lives on their homes, creating strong family units and living in a way that honors our natural resources and local communities, they are doing more than dismantling the extractive economy and taking power away from the corporate plutocrats. They are laying the foundation to re-democratize our society and heal our planet.” —Gina Covina

Arthur’s botanical illustrations seem underwhelming at first, with their timid brushstrokes and modest amateur air. A second look reveals how very carefully he watched the plants to see how they showed him their characters through gestures of leaf and stem or the angle of a flower’s nod, all of which he reproduced faithfully. The result: a beauty and dignity specific to each species. David Rains Wallace’s accompanying biographical essay lights up the relationship
between Van Deventer and Jepson. What a lot of fun they had finding plants, identifying them, and leaving a record still useful and beautiful today. —Gina Covina

Tree Spiker
From Earth First! to Lowbagging: My Struggles in Radical Environmental Action
By Mike Roselle with Josh Mahan
St. Martin’s (2009), $24.99
The CliffsNotes of radical protest, particularly around forest issues, Tree Spiker zeros in on the good stuff at the expense of haggling and history. This has its positives: for instance, although the decades’ long pounding of egos among the environmental movement’s bull elephant seals
can be easily inferred, we don’t have to hear much about it.

Mike Roselle dove into the world of activism to party (remember the Yippies?), but stuck around out of conviction. The cofounder of Rainforest Action Network, Earth First!, and the Ruckus Society, Roselle has a low tolerance for appeasement and long meetings. He may also have had a low tolerance for putting together this book, hitting the high points over a few pints. Many of these stories are hilarious, and the book is written in a chatty, no-holds-barred style that takes you behind the scenes to see, for example, what happened during that Woody Harrelson/Golden Gate Bridge stunt. In his time on the frontline (which continues as he fights King Coal), Roselle
discovers that the important features of success are persistence, nonviolence, and having fun. This will surprise some, but Roselle is convincing, and his lambasting of anarchist-led riots
at the Seattle WTO makes the point.

Although the book is enjoyable all the way through, the last couple chapters, in which Roselle sums up his hard-won wisdom, are worth the price. This is a great gift for budding activists. They’ll insist on learning these lessons themselves, but it helps to have a nudge, and it’s inspiring to see how much sway a few dedicated people can bring to an argument, gradually shifting the weight of public opinion from apathy to appreciation. —Linnea Due

Evolution: The Story of Life
By Douglas Palmer, illustrations by Peter Barrett
University of California Press (2009), $39.95
This year marked naturalist Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, as well as the 150th anniversary of the publication of his masterwork On the Origin of Species. In commemoration, the University of California Press has released Evolution: The Story of Life, a stunning coffeetable picture book showing the twists and turns life has taken over approximately the last 600 million years.

The book’s central feature is a timeline of a hundred full-color, vividly illustrated “snapshots” of the world’s best-known fossil sites, each displaying a representative spectrum of the creatures and plant life that existed at that location during a key geologic era. Author Douglas Palmer is quick to point out that portraying extinct species, particularly those with no surviving ancestors to serve as artists’ models, is an uncertain process. Each of the illustrations is accompanied by photographs of fossils from that time period, showing the basis for illustrator Peter Barrett’s work, as well as inset maps showing how the Earth’s continents were arranged at the time.

The illustrations portray ancient fauna that are, by turn, elegant (the Confusciusornis, a primitive bird of the Early Cretacious Epoch with two strikingly long feathers that blaze behind it like the tail of a shooting star), terrifying (the Dunkleosteus, an armored fish of the Late Devonian Epoch that “could deliver the most powerful bite of any fish known in the history of life, with a chopping force… in the Tyrannosaur league”), and downright bizarre (the Beipairosaurus of the Early Cretaceous Epoch, that looks like what you’d get if you crossed a turkey with a lizard and added a set of ten-centimeter claws.) And, oh yes, we and our ancestors
are in there, too, at the very end of the timeline along with the last of the giant bison and the flightless moa birds. It’s a pleasure to page through this book and marvel not only at the infinite variety of what the evolutionary process has already wrought, but to wonder where natural selection will take us next. —Kara Platoni

Many organic materials can be used as mulch. Some common mulches include wood chips and other green waste, such as shredded leaves, twigs, and straw; aged compost; and dried grass clippings. Lay down two to six inches of mulch, a thinner layer if using fine materials such as grass, a thicker layer if your materials are chunkier.

Mulch also makes attractive paths in the garden, reducing compaction of the soil. Inorganic mulches, such as rocks, can also benefit the garden by stabilizing soil temperatures and slowing evaporation.

One technique for rehabilitating a malnourished or weedy patch of earth is to sheet-mulch. First pull or cut weeds, then layer the ground with compost and wet it down. Cover the surface completely with sheets of corrugated cardboard or black and white newspaper, overlapping the edges of each sheet by several inches. Wet again with water, and finally cover with four to six inches of organic mulch. Over the next season or two, the cardboard will decompose, feeding the soil beneath.

Use recycled materials, such as trimmings from your own yard, your friends’ yards, or from a tree trimmer. Call to find out which ones offer this service, and whether they provide trimmings for free.

Don’t place mulch up against stems or trunks. Age compost before using it as mulch, whether green waste from yard and food scraps, or manure from livestock.

There are few don’ts. Don’t use cocoa mulch around pets. The theobromine in cocoa is toxic to dogs. Don’t dig woody mulches into the soil. Place them on the surface
where they won’t compete with the plant roots for available nitrogen. Don’t use trimmings from diseased plants or hay or other materials with a lot of seeds. (Rice straw does not contain seeds.) And don’t use mulch from far-away or virgin sources.
—Carrie Bennett, information services coordinator

There’s a set of large electric power lines running down my street. Is this is a health hazard? —Wary
The power grid that brings us electricity is made up of several parts: the generator plant; the extra high voltage lines that usually run in uninhabited areas; transmission substations situated closer to the service area; high voltage transmission tower lines (the kind you refer to); distribution substations; and distribution lines, the kind we usually see in neighborhoods. If you live near a substation or transmission tower line, you may encounter a heavy load of electromagnetic frequencies (EMFs), depending on how close you are and the amount of electricity running through the line. Power lines on the street can also carry a heavy load at peak hours.

The strength of EMFs falls off exponentially as you move away from the point source. It’s possible that any EMF you measure at your house from the high voltage power lines could be less than those from power lines coming into your home and wires running down your street. A Gauss meter can be used to measure EMF levels. Most utilities, including PG&E, will conduct EMF measurements for customers at no charge. Meters can be rented, and there are a few Bay Area companies that can be hired to take measurements and give advice.

Although controversial, measuring EMF levels is the best approach to determine the health impacts of living near the power grid, whether those are high voltage power lines, substations, or the wiring and appliances in your home. Most homes have a “normal” ambient level of .5 to .9 milligauss (mG). If Gauss readings are over 3 mG there’s a real problem. Quite a few studies have been done on occupational exposure to EMFs; adverse health effects include significant alterations in biological cycles, depressed levels of dopamine and seratonin, and depression. Other studies found links to childhood cancers, especially brain tumors and leukemia.

If high EMF exposure is suspected, move bedrooms away from point sources, especially children’s rooms. Be sure to use grounded appliances and situate electrical sources away from areas where the most time is spent. Avoid low-frequency (60 Hz) pulsating electromagnetic
fields such as those found in electric blankets and waterbed heaters.—Beck Cowles, information services program manager

Here’s a dream of a book, gorgeous to look at, with quick vivid descriptions of incredible places, and not so much detail that the reader bogs down in lists of species or particulars on how to get there. I’ve been opening it at random just before sleep, taking in one short chapter
a night about someplace I’d never heard of: Korgalzhyn State Nature Reserve, in Kazakhstan. The Bangweulu Swamps of Zambia. The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the highest coastal mountain range in the world, in Colombia. Descriptions and photos address each location
as a whole, intimating its natural and cultural significance, while also spotlighting particular avian amazements. The chosen sites ring the globe, and even though endangerment to species and habitats is noted repeatedly, the vision remains of a world of wonders.

I presume the title is deliberately provocative, sure to stir controversy among the ranks of serious birders over sites not included. And that may be so. But soon after receiving the book I had a chance visit from just such a birder, someone who’d actually gone to the Dzalanyama forest of Malawi expressly to see the pennant-winged nightjar. Bob fastened on the book like a
northern hawk owl on a vole (or if you’d rather, a pallid harrier on a steppe lemming). “They got this just right,” he exclaimed over various birding hotspots in Asia and South America. And, “Oh—I want to go here, and here.” I had to pry the book from his fingers.
—Gina Covina

Build a Green Small Business: Profitable Ways to Become an Ecopreneur
Scott Cooney
McGraw Hill, 2009, $19.95

Green is red-hot, and sustainability consultant Scott Cooney has done an enormous amount of legwork to help you start up your own successful green business in his first book, Build a Green Small Business. This is a book for the solo entrepreneur looking to break into the green market, or for the established company looking to transition to more environmentally friendly practices.

Following a forward by former Sierra Club president Adam Werbach, the user-friendly book starts out with information about how to select the green biz that’s right for you, and how to market to the best niche once you’ve made your choice. Cooney has researched networking ops, Web sites, and niche markets already attracting green clientele for you to tap into, and there’s
even a set of ecopreneur rules to follow.

The second part will help with the first: Cooney offers a very comprehensive list of business ideas from ecotourism to health to food service to publishing. Discover how to find customers, what to charge, and exactly how you’ll green your business. There are many levels of
green for businesses big and small, and Cooney covers a sampling: making your business energy-efficient, using environmentally friendly building materials and products, incorporating sustainable decisions, and supplying green products and services. Short bios of “Ecopreneurs
in Action” inspire and demonstrate how others are blazing the green business trail. The appendix has green franchise ideas and government resources for small businesses. Learn how LOHAS and LEED certification can be profitable for you.

Cooney has done his homework, and his engaging style keeps the reader motivated and interested. This is a must-read for any business owner, new or established.
—Mary Vance

Hijacking Sustainability
Adrian Parr
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009, $24.95

In Hijacking Sustainability, Adrian Parr marries brilliant deductions and surprising conclusions to convoluted academic writing. Reading this book saddens me at the progress we might have made if this generation of academics, rather than parading for each other behind an opaque curtain, had been taught to value clarity.

At least Parr writes with authority as she critiques the co-opting of the concept of sustainability by Wal-Mart, Hollywood, eco-villages, the White House (before the vegetable garden!), and the US military, in “Green Boots on the Ground.” This last is a treat to read; she discusses the folly of the Clinton-era initiative to turn environmental concerns into national security issues:
“Pollution, stratospheric ozone depletion, clean water, and climate change are a collective problem affecting all forms of life on earth. They are not a selective problem of security, exclusive to any one particular nation.” Parr is no fan of US democracy-building in pursuit of
capitalist aggrandizement across the globe. In the second section, she writes about challenges to sustainable life, such as systemic poverty and e-waste “recycled” to developing countries that do not have the capability to retrieve useful material.

Courageous Parr does not hesitate to delve into the enormous problems of public life. The book will broaden your thinking about everything from shopping to crime to the cultural snafus of disaster relief.—Linnea Due

Rooted in Community is a national grassroots network that empowers young people to work for food justice in their own communities, offering a space for youth from excluded communities to have a voice and influence on their own futures. Moving to a new city each year, RIC creates opportunities for youth to increase their skills by working at urban agriculture programs, preparing and eating fresh local foods, and engaging with their peers around food culture, social, and environmental justice issues. Attendees can explore new cities and schools and take time to enjoy natural areas.

The Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice program, which brings nutrition education and fresh, local produce to underserved Berkeley residents, serves on the advisory council of RIC; this year, co-manager Gerardo Marin accompanied the four to the conference, which also included
farm trips on the outskirts of Boston.

Out of the many experiences at RIC, Nakia Dillard was impressed by the coordination of bike trips for a hundred riders to six garden work project sites. Dillard hadn’t ridden a bike in years and felt inspired and energized throughout the journey. She appreciated the blowing
wind, the burning sensations in her leg muscles, and remembers her joy as her comrades smiled back at her.

The group ran a skit, “Whose wealth is it, anyways?” which imagines strategy sessions in corporate food industry boardrooms as well as a game, Health Awareness Jeopardy, that increases awareness of predatory fast food marketing schemes, the detrimental impacts of the industrial food system, and in contrast, the value in sustainable agriculture. “Our participants gave us positive and constructive feedback,” says Dillard, “and that made us more aware of significant information about sustainable food systems that we want to incorporate into future workshops.”

Says Ramirez, “I was surprised to see so many youth my age teaching nutrition and creating fresh food access for folks like we do! It felt great to present to such a large group of leaders.” Ramirez says the few attendees who were a little rude at the start opened up and became more comfortable by the end of the conference.

Shawn Stewart says, “I had a great experience learning how to identify plants and picking weeds so that strawberries could grow in peace. It was fun to interact with so many people at once, and the group discussions around race and privilege brought us closer.”

Dillard says she enjoyed working on the farm—but perhaps the best was being able “to offer a gift through my poetry/spoken word at the open mic/dance party on the grass. I was approached the very next day by youth who hadn’t spoken to me before. They’d say, ‘Aren’t you the person who said that Afro poem?’ It felt empowering to know that my poetry touched many youth that night.”

Who defines what is sustainable? Is a seaweed fishery sustainable just because the seaweed harvesters say it is? How do they know their commercial activities do no harm to the seaweeds or the surrounding ecosystem? Where is their evidence? These are the claims that critical thinkers need to ask and seek answers to before leaping to conclusions about whether or not having a functional network of no-take marine protected areas is in the best, long-term interests of marine life and the diversity of human stakeholders who care about and use the ocean in many different ways (not just for commercial gain).

Commercial take of seaweed is growing rapidly, regulations are virtually non-existent, and some species are particularly vulnerable to overexploitation because of their ecology. We have hundreds of examples of how unregulated (or poorly regulated) fisheries and other commercial industries fare. You need only look to the declining availability of local fish in your local market, the limited (if any) fishing seasons for many local species and the current financial crisis to see how well self-regulation works. “Just trust us” just doesn’t sound like such a good idea anymore.

The Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) process, in contrast to the “just trust us” model, has been built on a foundation of the best available science. The networks of sites are proposed by a dedicated, hardworking and thoughtful group of stakeholders (including commercial and recreational fishermen, divers, conservationists, tribal representatives, educators, etc.) in a very public process with many opportunities for community input. Each proposed network is evaluated by a team of leading marine scientists to assess how well they conform to scientific guidelines (based on peer-reviewed scientific evidence). Each team of stakeholders then has the opportunity to revise their proposal several times in light of a wealth of scientific, socio-economic and public input to try and find an appropriate balance among these factors while meeting the minimum, scientifically based criteria for effectiveness.

Contrary to the assertions of many seaweed harvesters, access to the entire coast will not be denied to them and others interested in reaping commercial gain from the ocean; instead a few areas of the coast will be set aside as marine reserves, spaced so that they work together as a network to conserve intact ecosystems and allow organisms to disperse among them. These protected areas not only serve as “natural capital” protecting the plants, animals and seaweeds within their borders, but they can also replenish areas outside their boundaries where people will engage in commercial and recreational fishing and gathering. Additionally, they help compensate for some of the inadequacies of fisheries management in the face of inevitable uncertainties in stock assessments, unpredictable changes in ocean conditions and political pressures. Evidence for these outcomes can be found in the rich scientific literature on marine conservation.

Karina J. Nielsen, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Biology, Sonoma State University

Member of the Science Advisory Teams for the North Central Coast MLPA &

CA Ocean Protection Council

There is no doubt that illicit marijuana growing operations in national parks, forests and other wild areas cause significant environmental problems, as your story, “The Long Thirst” (Spring, 2009), correctly noted. It is disturbing, however, that neither our political leadership nor the bulk of the environmental movement have had the courage to recognize that this problem has both an obvious cause and an obvious solution.

Marijuana is, like it or not, a popular consumer product — estimated to be the largest cash crop in both California and the U.S. But our present laws ban legitimate businesses from producing it in a safe, orderly manner. Instead, prohibition has handed this very large market — estimated at roughly $14 billion in California alone — to criminal gangs.

Our efforts to “eradicate” this lucrative business have simply driven the growers into more remote, environmentally sensitive regions. According to the state of California, the number of marijuana plants seized by the state’s Campaign Against Marijuana Planting increased by over 2,000 percent  from 1998 to 2008. And while as recently as 2001, the majority of plants were seized from private lands, now fully 70% are seized on public lands — those national parks and forests that everyone is rightly worried about. Our misguided policies have literally driven the growers into the hills.

The answer is as simple as it is politically inconvenient: Regulate production of marijuana just as we regulate production of beer, wine, and liquor. After all, there’s a reason we don’t read of drug cartels planting vineyards in our national parks.

Regards,

Bruce Mirken, Director of Communications

Marijuana Policy Project

P.O. Box 77492

Capitol Hill

Washington, D.C. 20013

Stick to the Hard Stuff
First, let me say that I look forward to the release of no other magazine more than Terrain. I absolutely love and admire its coverage and editorial slant. Although I should have written about how much I love the magazine before I chose to write to critique it, I felt that I had to chime in with my thoughts about the latest issue (“Cradle to Grave,”
Summer 2008). Perhaps I am getting a bit ahead of myself here, but it is, frankly, my sincere hope that Terrain will not go the way of so much environmental journalism and become lifestyle-focused. As a greenie and parent, I can tell you, for one, that there is certainly no shortage of magazines, Web sites and other resources to completely freak me out and make me feel terrible about the potential environmental consequences of what I buy and what I feed my daughter. I’m not sure we need to have Terrain dedicate its space to such coverage, particularly when you could just put in another killer article like the one immediately before it about marine sanctuaries. And green weddings? I mean, give me a break. My hopes that Terrain would give the hard truth (you have no chance to green your wedding if even as few as five people fly to it) was dashed with a single sentence that you could buy offsets for place travel

(certainly, I would think, offsets are worthy of skepticism in the pages of Terrain). And then a couple more advice columns? “How do I get green flatwear for my garden party?” Terrain is just far too valuable and important as a serious, accessible, and free environmental magazine to become the province of orthodox greeniacs and their quest for carbon purity. I urge you to leave that to Sunset, Plenty, Grist.org, Living on Earth, and the whole fleet of media covering the super-individualistic tweaks we can make to feel like we’re doing our part for the environment. However, as Terrain would most certainly agree, it’s far more important to do something about the environment than to feel like you’re doing something for the environment. Please, Terrain, keep doing what you were doing so well.

Justin Horner, Oakland

More About Nukes
This is an overdue comment on the Fall/Winter 2008 issue’s article, “Nuclear Redux.” Author Amy Kiser used many important references such as the 2007 Stanford study of wind power and reliable baseload technology. She also notes the US nuclear power industry’s replacement of the word “reprocessing” to refer to fuelfrom decommissioned nuclear weapons with “recycling,” a term more appealing to environmentalists. This latter point relates to the main lobbying group for the industry, the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI). Its role in utilizing the threat of global warming to promote nuclear power is described by Karl Grossman in the Jan/Feb 2008 issue of Extra and Diane Farsetta in the June 2008 Progressive. Former Greenpeace activist Dr. Patrick Moore is co-chair of the industry-funded pro-nuclear Clean and Safe Energy Coalition and has been widely quoted in mainstream media as part of NEI’s public relations efforts. Two pertinent sources of information not cited in the Terrain article include the Nuclear Information Resource Service (www.nirs.org) and the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research
(www.ieer.org). IEER has developed a Statement of Principles to Achieve a Carbon-Free and Nuclear-Free US Energy System. As of mid-December 2008, there were around 150 signatories to its principles, including “some of the largest public interest, environmental, disarmament, and peace organizations in the
country,” according to IEER’s home page. Your focus on this important and timely issue is most appreciated.
Elizabeth Brown, Kensington

Send letters to terraineditorial@ecologycenter.org