Welcome to My Picks. Here is my personal collection of environmental news stories and editorials that I think are worth sharing with everyone. Please read and circulate them! Shirley

Rebirth of a River!

The San Joaquin River, once a major salmon run, literally died in the 1940's, when the Friant Dam was built to supply irrigation water to farmers. After years of litigation by environmentalists, the river will be getting some of its water restored. There is even some hope that the salmon may return.

Choice: New Reserviors or Peripheral Canal?

As Southern California's demand for new water supplies increases with its growing population and decreased supply of Colorado River water, the only two viable alternatives could be a Peripheral Canal or new reservoirs......

Bill Moyers on the media and the environment....

 A Question for Journalists: How Do We Cover Penguins and the Politics of Denial?

    By Bill Moyers

    CommonDreams.org

    Friday 07 October 2005

"Our government and corporate elites have turned against America 's environmental visionaries - from Teddy Roosevelt to John Muir, from Rachel Carson to David Brower, from Gaylord Nelson to Laurence Rockefeller. They have set out to eviscerate just about every significant gain of the past generation, and while they are at it they have managed to blame the environmental movement itself for the failure of the Green Revolution. If environmentalism isn't dead, they say, it should be. And they will gladly lead the cortege to the grave.

What Chief Justice John Roberts means for environmentalism- -take off the gloves, folks....

The Hapless Environmentalist

    By Kelpie Wilson

    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Tuesday 13 September 2005

The panel's approach in this case leads to the result that regulating the taking of a hapless toad that, for reasons of its own, lives its entire life in California constitutes regulating "Commerce ... among the several States."

-- Justice John Roberts, dissenting opinion, US DC Circuit Court of Appeals, Rancho Viejo v. Gale Norton, No. 01-5373, July 22, 2003

    "Does a hapless environmentalist who, for reasons of his own, decides to protect a hapless toad, have any right to freedom of speech?

    Does this hapless environmentalist have any standing to come before a court and advocate for the hapless toad under the laws of the land?

    If the environmental laws passed by a hapless Congress happen to be based on the Constitution's commerce clause, will an excessively narrow interpretation of that authority by a future Supreme Court turn said laws to toad poop?

    These are questions that must be asked as the Senate considers DC Circuit Court of Appeals Justice John Roberts for Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. Roberts' opinion, cited above, represents an extreme activist judicial philosophy that would lead to the evisceration of the landmark environmental laws passed in the 1970s that cleaned up our air and water and brought the bald eagle and other endangered species back from the brink of extinction....

  

This insightful essay is both alarming and inspiring....

Left Behind: Bush's Holy War on Nature

    By Chip Ward

   "Bush's assault on the environment makes perfect sense once you see the bargains that drive it. The fundamentalists give Bush political power; his corporate cronies get free reign to plunder the land for their profit; and the fundamentalists get the heads of nature-worshipping enviros on an arsenic platter. The rest of us, of course, get left behind....

From Bill Moyers, one of the greatest thinkers of our time,

9/11 and the Sport of God

"The corporate, political and religious right converge here, led by a president who, in his own disdain for science, reason and knowledge, is the most powerful fundamentalist in American history....

The Long Emergency

by James Howard Kunstler

Published by Rolling Stone, April 13, 2005

What's going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle?

"It has been very hard for Americans -- lost in dark raptures of nonstop infotainment, recreational shopping and compulsive motoring -- to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life in our technological society. Even after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, America is still sleepwalking into the future. I call this coming time the Long Emergency....