I still love this cover art from back in May. You can see more award-winning Chuck Kerr creations or click the image for the story on autism and the environment.
Filed under: global, regional | Leave a Comment »
Lone Star Green: Placenta shampoos, BPA, and Monsanto’s genetic empire
Posted on February 29, 2012 by gharman
We are experimental people. By that, I don’t mean we like to tinker. Though tinker we certainly do. We’re experimental people in the way that white-coated Wistar rats are experimental rats. After hundreds of thousands of years spreading about the planet, settling everywhere from Africa’s deepest deserts to the Arctic’s most frigid barrens, humans face a new and possibly impenetrable challenge. Suddenly, the terrarium we haunt has been thoroughly, and potentially irrevocably, chemically and genetically altered. Simply put: we live and die exposed to substances that didn’t exist on the planet until very recently. It all hits women and children the hardest: babies across the U.S. are born with toxic chemicals in their bloodstreams and Inuit mothers, living as far away from industrial pollution as you can get, have been measured with toxic loads in their breast milk at truly hazardous proportions thanks to the transport of poisons through the marine food web. <more>
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: BPA, chemical safety act, estrogen, hormones, international womens day, monsanto, organic farmers, toxics | Leave a Comment »
Lone Star Green: Nuclear waste dump push and Texas
Posted on February 1, 2012 by gharman
Nuclear energy may be on the ropes post Fukushima’s explosive meltdowns, but 70 years of U.S. bomb and power plant waste doesn’t dissipate so easily. Despite federal promises to the power industry to dispose of their highly toxic, long-lived poisons — and despite utilities collecting more than $25 billion in fees for such from customers — more than 75,000 metric tons of high-level waste is still being stored at nuclear power plants and other sites across the country, including the South Texas Project nuclear complex in Matagorda County.
Not only is radioactive waste extremely difficult to contain, it’s also wildly unpopular. Go figure.
Filed under: global, regional | Tagged: Andrews, blue ribbon commission, chernobyl, fukushima, nuclear waste, obama, texas | Leave a Comment »
Lone Star Green: ‘Clean’ coal sticks its snout under San Antonio’s tent
Posted on July 15, 2011 by gharman
My second LSG column went up this week.
In the slow-motion planetary train wreck that is fossil-fuel-derived climate disruption — whether you call it global warming, global ‘weirding,’ or a worldwide conspiracy of the labcoat class — no one factor ranks higher in the blame game than coal. Once burned, the dark rock we level mountains for releases a range of poisonous substances, including brain-addling mercury, lung-damaging sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, airborne radioactive materials, and loads of heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as the normally benevolent carbon dioxide.
Coal is killing us in the here and now and destabilizing the planet’s natural processes to such a degree that our survival as a species has become not an infrequent subject of scientific papers. And no state gets more of its electricity from coal than Texas.
Yet last month, San Antonio-owned CPS Energy became the first utility in the nation to make the prescient business decision to close our oldest coal-fired power plant rather than invest in costly pollution-reduction equipment.
Filed under: regional | Tagged: "clean" coal, carbon dioxide, carbon sequestration, Climate Change, coal, coal power, CPS Energy, doyle beneby, Global Warming, julián castro, lone star green, odessa, San Antonio, summit power, texas | Leave a Comment »
lone star green: the new column
Posted on June 17, 2011 by gharman
No pipebombs were injured in the production of this inaugural column. No lizards, neither.
Endangered Species Act has kept the water flowing in South Texas and won’t stop the oil, either
Imagine you’re flying 20,000 feet above a tempestuous sea, fiddling with a stalling engine. As you walk the wing and hunch over the engine, you’re dropping tools and tossing out obstinate nuts and bolts that twinkle briefly in the sun as they fall below and out of sight. As perhaps the most defining force on the planet, that’s the situation the human race finds itself in today when it comes to species management. Before we even understand a lifeform, it has slipped away. [More at sacurrent.com.]
Filed under: regional | Tagged: endangered species act, oil, sand dune lizard, texas, water | Leave a Comment »
fukushima dai-ichi triptych
Posted on April 20, 2011 by gharman
Filed under: personal | Tagged: artwork, fukushima dai-ichi, ink, japan, triptych, watercolor | Leave a Comment »
just remembering
Posted on March 8, 2011 by gharman
… that not everything is wasted. there is this place here at harman on earth. and though i rarely feel there is time to write into it, there is a venue. and there are wonderful people to read and travel with. this isn’t everything, but it’s not the end either. now that i’ve organized and launched nearly 20 contributing blogs at San Antonio Current and survived a (near) complete turnover of the fulltime staff here, perhaps it’s time, at last, to think about what i want to write most deeply. something beyond surviving pace and pressure. i’ll be sure to include notes (and expressions of my new watercolor adventures) here for my far-flung and heart-embedded companions. you know who you are.
Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
