submitted by Albert Gomez

www.plasticstoday.com - by Heather Caliendo - June 22nd, 2012

While much talk and discussion centers on plastic waste in the Pacific gyre, a new study will be conducted this summer on the Great Lakes, including Lake Erie.

This study will assess for the first time the potential effect plastic pollution has on these bodies of water. It's expected to provide data regarding the levels of discarded plastics from trash to tiny particles found in the lakes, as well as examine their impact on food supplies, according to an article on Cleveland.com.

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Poisoning the Great Lakes: Mercury Emissions from Coal-Fired Power Plants In the Great Lakes Region (54 page .PDF file)
http://www.nrdc.org/air/files/poisoning-the-great-lakes.pdf

switchboard.nrdc.org - Thom Cmar's Blog - June 8, 2012

This week we released a report, Poisoning the Great Lakes: Mercury Emissions from Coal Fired Power Plants in the Great Lakes Region, which highlights the impacts of mercury emissions from Great Lakes power plants on the people, fish, birds, and wildlife of our region.  EPA recently issued new nationwide Mercury and Air Toxics Standards that require power plants to cut their mercury emissions by 90% on average, as well as to make similar cuts to their emissions of arsenic, lead, acid gases, and other toxic air pollution.  

submitted by Janine Rees

Stream Gaging Station by Beige Alert, on Flickr

by John Farrell - energyselfreliantstates.org - February 27, 2012

In a New York Times SundayReview piece last week – Drawing the Line at Power Lines – Elisabeth Rosenthal suggested that our desire for clean energy will require significant tradeoffs . . .

I disagree.

The future of American electricity policy is not about tradeoffs, but rather a chance to trade-in an obsolete, centralized paradigm for a local, clean energy future.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

First, there is great value in a systems approach as a heuristic for understanding interlocked social-ecological-technological processes, and in analysis across multiple scales. Yet we need to move beyond both systems as portrayed in resilience thinking, and the focus on actors in work on vulnerability, to analyse networks and relationships, as well as to attend to the diverse framings, narratives, imaginations and discourses that different actors bring to bear.

For More:

http://resilienturbanism.tumblr.com/post/7573475902/reframing-resilience

There are many definitions of resilience from simple deterministic views of resilience anchored in Newtonian mechanics to far more dynamic views of resilience from a systems perspective, including insights from quantum mechanics and the sciences of complexity.  One baseline perspective of resilience sees it in terms of the viability of socio-ecological systems as the foundation for sustainability.  For those that are ready to look beyond resilience as the ability to return to the "normal state" before a disaster, take a look at:

http://www.resalliance.org/