June 2013

Last Thursday in Lake Charles, Louisiana, U.S. Senator David Vitter of Louisiana was asked by Ms. Dorothy Felix, a resident of Mossville, why he sponsored a legislative revision of the Safe Chemicals Act that cut out important provisions in the bill.

More than two months after ExxonMobil’s 65-year-old Pegasus pipeline burst and spewed a gusher of thick Canadian tar sands oil through Mayflower, AR, and into a marsh on Lake Conway—the state’s most popular fishing spot—residents are still complaining of health problems and are worried about poisonous impacts on wildlife and in the environment. Many locals and some scientists have little faith in the continuous rosy assurances from Exxon and the Unified Command that

By Dr. Bonny Schumaker and Dr. Rick Steiner.  Residents from across the Gulf Coast met last week to forge ahead with formal establishment of a Gulf of Mexico Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council (GoM RCAC), whose purpose is to empower and involve citizens in the prevention of and effective response to future pollution incidents occurring from oil and gas operations in the Gulf of Mexico.

michael triticoOur little environmental group, RESTORE (Restore Explicit Symmetry To Our Ravaged Earth), founded in 1974, welcomes the new energies that are coming forward in the necessary struggles to restore public health and ecosystem vitality in our region! Sometimes in the past there have been eras of near dormancy in organized efforts along those lines.

It sounds like the stuff of movie scripts and novel fodder, the idea of darkly clothed men sneaking in and out of hotel rooms, leaving behind watch battery sized listening devices, hidden in phone receivers and taped to the inside of lamp shades. Yet during the not-so-long-ago civil rights era, that seemed to be the primary business of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.