Just a few months ago, few would have guessed that Big Oil would be licking its wounds in the wake of what can only be described as a devastating defeat on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Yes, President Obama punted, giving the Keystone pipeline a delay instead of a denial....

Last week some of the biggest players in the logging industry met in Burlington, Vermont. The occasion was the annual conference of the Sustainable Forest Industry (SFI,) a creation of Big Timber whose raison d'etre is to cover up all their unsightly and destructive clearcuts with a kinder, gentler "green"...

Last week, the world's largest credit card companies descended on Miami for the 23rd annual Card Forum & Expo. On the agenda for American Express, Chase and other collectors and pushers of the world's debt were a bevy of credit card industry insider topics such as 'Prepaid and...

During my decade-long career as the head of ForestEthics, I've become a hopeless tree geek. Dr. Seuss' Lorax come to life, my days are too often spent studying the sources of forest destruction: endless piles of catalogs and junk mail, mountains of copy paper...

A disaster in Michigan is a cautionary tale for residents of the Pacific Northwest, and anyone whose community is threatened by the self-interest of the fossil fuel industry:

Last July a pipeline owned and operated by Canadian oil company Enbridge burst and spilled an estimated 1 million gallons of tar sands crude into Michigan's Kalamazoo river. Within days it was crowned the largest oil spill in Midwestern history.

As Enbridge switched into damage control mode -- they've had practice, having caused 610 leaks between 1999 and 2008 -- CEO Pat Daniels made solemn promises to the cameras (see the video above) and company reps even went door to door promising that Enbridge would pay damages.

Now that the media's moved on, Enbridge is dropping the act and bringing in the lawyers: Attorneys representing Enbridge are reportedly gearing up to fight claims made by victims of the spill, claiming that the perpetually leaky company was not responsible because it had followed all relevant laws and regulations.

You can imagine how this feels to residents of these communities: "So what if your water is ruined, your community is fouled, and it took us 18 hours to lift a finger to stop the leak? We're a law-abiding company!"

There's no silver lining here -- communities along the Kalamazoo are damaged, health concerns are real, and justice may not be served.

But Enbridge's Michigan disaster should serve as a cautionary tale for US and Canadian residents on the West Coast, site of Enbridge's next big proposed leaky project: the Northern Gateway pipeline, which will run crude from Alberta's tar sands oil developments through to the Great Bear Rainforest on British Columbia's coast -- which I hear isn't far from the U.S. west coast -- while carrying the world's dirtiest oil to the Asian marketplace.

It's not a question of if there will be spills, it's a question of when. Enbridge can't safely run a pipeline in suburban Michigan -- it would be a foolish surrender to the destructive power of oil interests and give them entry into one of the most fragile and remote wilderness areas on the planet.

ForestEthics is determined to stop allowing forests to be destroyed to feed a dead-end addiction to oil. Join us, and take action...

This week ForestEthics released "SFI: Certified Greenwash", a report that exposes the Sustainable Forestry Initiative's (SFI) industry-sponsored greenwash of wood and paper products.

If you were in Chicago at the 1893 World Fair you couldn't have missed the shrieks and groans at one of the fair's...

Originally published at Grist.org

My first job in the social change movement was working for Ralph Nader. I was a lawyer, one of Nader's Raiders. Not in the '70s when it was cool and people actually knew what that was, but in the '90s, when it was decidedly...

If you think receiving your daily dose of junk mail just kills trees, clogs landfills, exacerbates climate change, is an invitation to identity theft, and is incredibly annoying, well, it actually gets worse: you are also paying for the privilege of receiving it.

For example, in Seattle, the taxpayer...

Seeing the future is hard enough--but can you smell it? If you are talking about green energy maybe you can... We conducted our own scientific research on this very question in Washington, D.C., where we unveiled the world's first-ever "Clean Energy Smell Test." If you thought the Coke and Pepsi...

Happy postage increase day: Today the cost of a first-class stamp increases to 44 cents, the third increase in as many years. Though forty-four cents is not terribly expensive, you could be paying as little as 14 cents if you were sending junk mail to total strangers. And this...

Just three years old this April, Vanity Fair's Green Issue already feels like an annual rite of Spring. More significant than its Earth Day timing, however, is its demographic real estate - the synthesis of haute couture and hard-boiled reporting provides a forum previously unknown to environmental issues. In many...