There’s a folksy saying my grandma taught me: ‘If it smells like licorice and tastes like licorice, it must be licorice.’ Now it has a corollary: ‘Or it could also be a 4-methylcyclohexane methanol spill into your water supply, so grab the children and run for your lives.’ It’s not quite as folksy anymore.” […]

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The nuclear power industry is having its roughest time since reactors were first conceived in the 1950s. Health risks are at the core of the problem. At Fukushima, huge amounts of radioactivity continue to pour into the Pacific Ocean. Nobody knows exactly where the three melted reactor cores are—somewhere in or under the buildings—since it […]

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  Americans are generous by nature. About half of U.S. families contributed to earthquake relief in Haiti in 2010, and millions of us have already supported typhoon aid for the Philippines. But there’s a golden opportunity for our country to do much more. We can help generations of Filipinos withstand the typhoon seasons that rock […]

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  Pittsburgh On a Monday morning a month ago, I was sitting on the marble floor of the Squirrel Hill branch of PNC Bank, with a circle of activists protesting PNC’s financing of mountain-top removal (MTR) coal mining across Appalachia. MTR causes increased cancer rates and birth defects as well as massive environmental degradation—not to […]

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  In 1969, Gaylord Nelson, seven years out of the U.S. Senate, called on Denis Hayes to organize what Nelson envisioned as a national teach-in on the environment. The result was the first Earth Day, conceived of by the former Democratic senator and realized by Hayes and a staff of 85. Today Hayes is head […]

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