Our Work

A cause for our times: Repeal gravity now!

Our Jim Gerstenzang, with his writing partner at Safe Climate Campaign, Dan Becker, joined up on this satirical bit:

Memo to: Fellow Members of Congress

From: Darrell Issa, Republican of California

Re: Support for legislation to abolish an antiquated law.

I urge you to join us in sponsoring the Hall-Latta-Flake-Issa-Upton-Noem-Goodlatte Act.

For too long, science has been trotted out to justify environmental protection, when it is actually being used to mask tax-and-spend policies that sink our economy. With that in mind, I ask you to support the next logical step in our Republican Caucus' crusade to abolish job-killing "environmental" laws and excessive regulations. Please join us in cosponsoring H.R. 32174, a bill to repeal the Law of Gravity.

Robyn Norwood on energy drinks and the health of young athletes

Our Robyn Norwood made the cover of USAToday the other day with this revelatory piece about energy drinks and their impact on the health of children and adolescents, partocularly those engaged in sports. From her story:

From youth playing fields to major league clubhouses, caffeinated energy drinks such as Red Bull and its scores of cousins have become a familiar presence in sports.

"The bottom line is, it's a long season. You're going to do what you have to do, whether you feel like you have to jump into a cryogenic freezing tank or a hyperbaric chamber or drink a Red Bull," said Texas Rangers pitcher C.J. Wilson, a World Series starter who says he has never used alcohol or drugs but consumes energy drinks socially and to prepare himself to pitch. "I see nothing wrong with drinking Red Bull."

Some athletes and industry officials compare the beverages to a cup of coffee.

But doctors and other experts increasingly warn of misunderstandings about energy drinks' contents, lax labeling requirements and the risks of high doses of caffeine — particularly to young athletes.In June, a clinical report in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, warned that "stimulant-containing energy drinks have no place in the diets of children or adolescents."

Rick Schmitt and the pistol-packing public

Our Rick Schmitt has a telling look through the Center for Public Integrity at laws that have made it easier for people to carry guns in public. From his story:

In Ohio, it is now OK to possess a hidden, loaded handgun in cars and bars, public parks and parking lots. Gun owners have broad discretion in using deadly force against burglars and car thieves. A 12-hour gun training course is still needed to get a concealed-carry permit, one of the stiffest requirements in the country. But in 2008, a written test to renew a concealed-carry license was abolished as over-regulation.

Today, seven years after the Buckeye State first allowed citizens to carry concealed weapons, more than a quarter-million Ohioans have concealed carry permits. People debate the impact, although the fact that the identity of the permit holders is off limits to the general public makes that tough. A law giving reporters access to the information was scaled back after gun rights’ groups complained that the press had abused the privilege.

The sweeping changes are part of a little-known but dramatic expansion of user-friendly gun laws across the country. Rough estimates put the number of concealed carry permit holders at between 4 and 7 million nationwide.

Kathy Price-Robinson looks into energy audits - good time of year for it

Our Kathy Price-Robinson, who is based in New Orleans, traveled recently to Montana to sit in on an energy-audit class, and wrote about the experience for the website GreenBuildingAdvisor.com. From her story:

When I arrive for the five-day energy-auditing course at the Pure Energy Center in eastern Montana, I see instructor A. Tamasin Sterner outside the main house, clapping her hands and doing a little dance.

If you know Tamasin, a veteran energy auditor who famously counseled President Obama on the need for weatherization programs, you expect this show of exuberance.

And even if you haven’t met her, you can imagine Tamasin’s exhilaration. After attending spiritual retreats on this 212-acre wooded ranch for more than 20 years, Tamasin recently bought the property, which has cabins and lodging for about 30 retreatants, from her spiritual teacher. Her goal: to further develop it into a retreat, event and training center. This is the first women-only auditing course at the site.

Janet Wilson looks at links between local environment and a family's illnesses

Our Janet Wilson has a deeply reported piece out through California Watch on the suspected links between persistent illnesses among members of one Maywood, California, family, and industries adjoining their neighborhood (in this separater piece Janet explains her reporting). From her story:

The Martin family lives 10 minutes from downtown Los Angeles, in a neat yellow house in a city called Maywood. 

Starting a few blocks from their home, nearly 2,000 factories churn out Southern California’s hot dogs, pesticides, patio furniture and other products. Trucks rumble off the I-710 freeway into sprawling freight rail yards. Odors of rotting animal carcasses waft through the family’s windows on hot summer nights.

The Martins also have endured years of illness. 

From the time Anaiz Martin was born until she was a toddler, her father would carry her in his arms, his big mustache tickling her baby cheeks. This simple embrace carried a haunting consequence. By age 3, Anaiz weighed just 19 pounds and could barely raise her head. Her parents said they were told by doctors that Salvador Martin’s mustache probably held sickening levels of lead from his plating factory job.

The heavy metal attacked her neurological system, permanently robbing her of critical learning skills.

Two decades later, her family's woes continue. Anaiz, now 21, her mother and siblings – Adilene, 22, and Sal Jr., 18 – have suffered irritable bowel syndrome, an ovarian cyst, skin rashes, chronic nausea, diarrhea, asthma and depression.

Their mother, Josefina, frets constantly about what she thinks are likely causes: the air they breathe, the ground beneath their home and, most of all, the gunky black, brown or yellow water that has intermittently run from their faucets for years.

“Sometimes I think, ‘Oh my God, I can’t take it anymore,’ ” Josefina, 45, said during an interview in the summer of 2010. “I try to keep myself up and going, but I am really upset all the time. I just want to know what’s going on with my family and all of this contamination.”

 

Robyn Norwood on female jockey Chantal Sutherland and the Breeder's Cup

Our Robyn Norwood, a veteran sports writer, spent some time at the Santa Anita Park horse racing track in Southern California for this story on Chantal Sutherland, who hopes to be the first female jockey to win the Breeders' Cup Classic coming up n Louisville, Ky., this weekend. From Robyn's story:

In a small annex to the jockeys' room at Santa Anita Park near Los Angeles last week, Chantal Sutherland sat in front of her stall on a stool that once belonged to Julie Krone.

Around her were not-so-subtle signs that the four jockeys in the room were different from the ones next door. Makeup bags surrounded the sink, and above the stalls were the neatly stacked towels Sutherland chooses because she knows they won't end up in the men's stalls: They're pink.

On Saturday at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky., Sutherland will attempt to become the first woman to win the $5 million Breeders' Cup Classic. Not even Krone -- the first female jockey to win a Triple Crown race, the Belmont Stakes in 1993 -- could accomplish that feat, although she did win the 2003 Juvenile Fillies on Halfbridled.

"The longer I've been a rider, the more experience I have, I realize how amazing she was to do what she did," Sutherland said.

 

Rick Schmitt and the new era of piracy on the high seas

Our Rick Schmitt has a piece in the recent Pomona magazine diving into the legal backdrop of prosecuting piracy in the modern era. From his story:

It’s July 2011. Three young men dressed in gray prison garb shuffle into a federal courtroom in Norfolk, Va. They stand accused of hijacking a U.S.-flag vessel a half a world away and summarily executing the four Americans aboard while the military was attempting to negotiate their release. The dead include Jean Hawkins Adam ’66 and her husband Scott, the owners of a 58-foot sloop they called the Quest, and two friends.

Dusting off a statute that dates to the early 19th-century, prosecutors have charged the men with “piracy under the law of nations,” as well as kidnapping, hostage-taking and murder. Eleven of their shipmates have already pleaded guilty to piracy, which carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison. If convicted, the three alleged triggermen could face the death penalty.

The prosecution by the U.S. is a response to an eruption in modern day piracy in the Horn of Africa, where young Somali men have since the mid 2000s largely succeeded at holding the world at bay as they prey upon unarmed merchant ships and other vessels. In the lawlessness of Somalia, piracy has become an organized industry, institutionalized to the point where syndicates sell shares in planned attacks in exchange for a correspondent share of ransoms paid.

Despite heightened international awareness, and patrols from navies across the globe, the scourge has continued, largely unabated. While international law and treaties give countries the right to try pirates they capture in their own domestic courts, they have shown little disposition to do so except in cases that involve their own citizens or ships.

 

Leslie Carlson with a little click-and-learn

Our Leslie Carlson created this interactive graphic for a story by the Center for Health Reporting on preparations by hospitals for the eventuality of a significant earthquake. It turns out that hospitals along the riskiest faults, such as the San Andreas, are unprepared to remain open after a major earthquake - with some obviously serious potential effects on the communities they serve.

 

Chris Kraul, our busy man in Bogota

Our Chris Kraul, who is based in Bogota, Colombia, has been very busy lately. The other day he had a piece in Barron's on potentially good investments in Latin American banks. And he also has this interview piece for KPMG with the head of Fiat Argentina on trying to sell cars in Brazil. And he has this piece for the University of Pennsylvania's Knowledge@Wharton site on Argentine ranchers switching to soy production, From his story:

In San Miguel del Monte, Argentina, fifth-generation cattleman Mario Caceres never wanted much more from life than to be a modern day gaucho tending his herd, which a few years ago topped 1,600 head of Angus cattle, the breed that has helped make his country synonymous with delicious cuts of beef.

But globalization, modernization and his country’s politics have intervened. Like hundreds of other Argentine cattlemen, Caceres is slowly leaving his cowboy life -- if not its spirit -- and becoming a farmer of row crops, notably soy, to meet increasing demand from food buyers in Asia as well as biofuel manufacturers in his native country.

Since the height of his cattle-ranching career in 2007, Caceres has converted half his two ranches’ 5,000 acres to soy and other row crops while reducing his livestock to 130 head -- a token number that he keeps, he says, largely for sentimental reasons. And he’s hardly alone. In the San Miguel del Monte district of Buenos Aires province, virtually all his neighbors on the eastern edge of the Pampas have converted in some degree or other to soy, corn, sunflower and wheat, Caceres says.

It's a microcosm of a trend spreading across Argentina. According to the Agriculture Ministry, the national herd this year will decline 22%, to 47 million head from the 2007 peak of 58.7 million head, and is expected to continue falling. 

Jamie Reno weighs in on the Aubrey Sacco story

This is unusual for us. Two of our members have now written about the same topic - the sad story of Aubrey Sacco, who has gone missing in Nepal, and the efforts of her family - including brother Morgan Sacco, a San Diego State University soccer player - to find her. Robyn Norwood wrote about it a couple of weeks ago for USA Today. Now we have Jamie Reno's take on it for ESPNW:

SAN DIEGO -- Aubrey Sacco, an accomplished athlete, scholar, musician and artist, is the brightest star in her family's universe.

"Aubrey lights up a room when she enters it," said her younger brother, Morgan Sacco. "She's an effervescent person, full of life, and she totally loves glitter -- it reflects her personality."

But a year and a half ago, the "Glitter Girl," as her family and friends call her, mysteriously disappeared.

Aubrey, then 23, was nearing the end of a five-month journey of self-discovery through India, Sri Lanka and Nepal. She graduated from the University of Colorado in 2009, with a double major in art and psychology. She taught yoga, studied meditation and volunteered to teach children in one of the region's poorest schools on this trip.

Aubrey, who'd been everywhere from Costa Rica to Greece to Thailand, took a 45-hour train trip to Katmandu, Nepal, followed by a 10-hour bus trip to Syabrubesi to get to the western tip of Nepal's Langtang National Park. But she may have made a big, perhaps even fatal, mistake when she left her laptop and other items at a hotel and headed out on the popular Langtang Trek trail alone. It was the end of the trekking season and very few other backpackers were in the area.

That was in April 2010.