Clean water, a healthy planet and a clean energy future for America.

Clean Water Action
November 5, 2009

Climate and energy legislation are vitally important to the success of our economy and the health our environment. America's energy policy should be driven by clean energy incentives and firm limits on carbon pollution, which will help drive America's economic recovery. We must invest in energy efficient technologies which would create hundreds of thousands of new construction, energy service, and building maintenance and operations jobs by 2020, and ultimately reduce consumers' energy bills.

Your Senators needs to hear from you today - negotiations are getting fiercer and we need to pass a bill which is strong enough to solve our economic and climate crises. We know we need to make the reductions that science tells us are needed while rejecting handouts to polluters and subsidies for dirty, expensive, and unsafe technologies, like coal and nuclear.

We, the people, have the tools to act and the ability to create clean energy jobs - as a country, we've overcome tremendous hurdles in the past, and this time will be no different.

Please don't delay - send the message below to your Senators right now. They are waiting to hear from you...

Click on Title above to act!

Help protect endangered sea turtles in Costa Rica

Natural Resources Defense Council
August 31, 2009

We need your immediate help to save one of the few remaining populations of leatherback turtles found in Costa Rica.

The Costa Rican government is considering a proposal to downgrade Las Baulas National Marine Park -- home to the critically endangered leatherback turtle -- in a move that could be devastating for the turtles.

Please urge the Costa Rican government to maintain national park status for Las Baulas.
If the park is downgraded, it would allow for development in sensitive areas near the turtles' nesting sites. Leatherback turtles return year after year to Las Baulas to lay eggs on the beach where they hatched, and any development has the potential to disrupt this delicate cycle.

The leatherback population in the Pacific Ocean has already plummeted 90% in the last 20 years. Today, fewer than 1,000 of these magnificent creatures survive in the entire eastern Pacific.

With leatherback turtles so perilously close to extinction, it is unconscionable to allow more development that could endanger their few remaining nesting sites.

Tell the Costa Rican government to reject the proposal to downgrade Las Baulas National Marine Park.

Thank you for taking action to protect Costa Rica's wildlife.

Click on Title above to take action!

Save Bristol Bay

EarthWorks
August 2009

ACT NOW to Urge the Obama Administration to Protect the World's Richest Salmon Fishery...

Click on Title above to take action!

Watching Whales Watching Us

By CHARLES SIEBERT
Published: July 8, 2009
New York Times Magazine

In a Baja lagoon, something is going on between whales and marine biologists. Is it interspecies communication?

To continue click on Title above

Help Make Overfishing a Thing of the Past!

Ocean Conservancy

Be one of the first to play our brand-new "Go, Fish!" game and help put an end to overfishing. Each time a new player completes the game, a generous supporter will donate $1 to help us end overfishing!

Public support creation of marine nature reserve

By Emily Beament, Press Association
Monday, 8 June 2009
The Independent

More than four fifths of people support the introduction of a nature reserve in our seas to protect stocks of fish, according to a survey published today on World Oceans Day.


The poll came ahead of the launch of a film, The End Of The Line, which reveals the impacts of overfishing on the world's oceans...

African Women and Water Update

Women's Earth Alliance

Following our 2008 African Women and Water Conference in Nairobi, co-organized by A Single Drop, Crabgrass, Groots Kenya, and Women's Earth Alliance and hosted by the Greenbelt Movement, our women participants returned to their communities invigorated--each team has received seed grant to implement innovative water projects. Women across Africa are building solar cookers, erecting water storage tanks, constructing water filters, and training others to do the same. We are receiving exciting reports from A Single Drop and GROOTS Kenya advisors, who are coordinating site visits to the women's projects and supporting them in their steps toward creating income-generating water projects.

We invite you to watch a short video from our African Women and Water Conference, which features our special guest, Dr. Wangari Maathai. For an inside look at partner's successes, visit the blog at www.africanwomenandwater.org. Stay tuned for updates on our West Africa program, being launched in Ghana in early 2010.

Military sonar blamed for mass dolphin strandings

Mass strandings of dolphins and whales could be caused because the animals are rendered temporarily deaf by military sonar, experiments have shown.

Tests on a captive dolphin have demonstrated that hearing can be lost for up to 40 minutes on exposure to sonar. Hearing is the most important sense for dolphins and other cetaeceans, and losing it is likely to cause them to become disorientated and alarmed...

Pepsi Adopts Human-Right-to-Water Policy

"This agreement moves beyond the vague promises of water conservation that many corporations claim to support," said Julie Goodridge, CEO of NorthStar Asset Management, a socially responsible company that helped Pepsi develop its new resolution on water. "It fully commits the company to respecting the right to sufficient clean water, as well as individuals' rights to be involved in the development of processes that extract water from their communities."..."

The UN estimates that currently a billion people in the developing world, mainly poor and marginalized communities, lack access to water and that figure is projected to grow to two out of three people in the near future," writes Mark Hays of Corporate Accountability International....

Water Rights Activists Blast Istanbul World Water Forum as “Corporate Trade Show to Promote Privatization”

Sunday was World Water Day and marked the close of a week-long gathering held in Istanbul, Turkey to discuss water policy at a time when over a billion people lack access to clean water and 2.5 billion people lack water for proper sanitation. Activists from the People’s Water Forum, an alternative formation representing the rural poor, the environment and organized labor, slammed the official event as a non-inclusive, corporate-driven fraud pushing for water privatization and called for a more open, democratic and transparent forum...

Speak out to ban unregulated imported swordfish

The Marine Mammal Protection Act bans fish imported from foreign countries whose fishing practices harm and kill more marine mammals than allowed by U.S. standards, but the law is not being enforced. Urge the National Marine Fisheries Service to ban imported swordfish until foreign fishing vessels employ the same measures to protect marine wildlife that are required of U.S. fishermen.

Take Action Now: http://www.nrdc.org/action/

Setting Annual Catch Limits for U.S. Fisheries: An Expert Working Group Report, 2007

Solutions to Overfishing; we'd like to keep eating!

http://www.pewtrusts.org/our_work_report_detail.aspx?id=30769&category=150&WT.srch&source=google

Stop Palin's Attack On Beluga Whales

Center for Biological Diversity

Governor Sarah Palin won't give wildlife a break. Last week, she announced the state of Alaska will sue to strike down Endangered Species Act protection for the imperiled Cook Inlet beluga whale. This rare white whale's population has already plummeted from thousands to just 375 in the last two decades. They will certainly go extinct if Palin has her way.

Our lawyers and scientists are already in court to block Palin's anti-polar bear actions, and we'll soon jump in to save the beluga from her reckless campaign to promote oil & gas interests. But we also need to build a groundswell of public support. Please help us now to protect beluga whales by sending a letter asking the Obama administration to oppose Palin's lawsuit.

Bottled Water Quality Investigation: 10 Major Brands, 38 Pollutants

Bottled water contains disinfection byproducts, fertilizer residue, and pain medication
October 2008



Authors: Olga Naidenko, PhD, Senior Scientist; Nneka Leiba, MPH, Researcher; Renee Sharp, MS, Senior Scientist; Jane Houlihan, MSCE, Vice President for Research

The bottled water industry promotes an image of purity, but comprehensive testing by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) reveals a surprising array of chemical contaminants in every bottled water brand analyzed, including toxic byproducts of chlorination in Walmart’s Sam’s Choice and Giant Supermarket's Acadia brands, at levels no different than routinely found in tap water. Several Sam's Choice samples purchased in California exceeded legal limits for bottled water contaminants in that state. Cancer-causing contaminants in bottled water purchased in 5 states (North Carolina, California, Virginia, Delaware and Maryland) and the District of Columbia substantially exceeded the voluntary standards established by the bottled water industry.

Unlike tap water, where consumers are provided with test results every year, the bottled water industry does not disclose the results of any contaminant testing that it conducts. Instead, the industry hides behind the claim that bottled water is held to the same safety standards as tap water. But with promotional campaigns saturated with images of mountain springs, and prices 1,900 times the price of tap water, consumers are clearly led to believe that they are buying a product that has been purified to a level beyond the water that comes out of the garden hose.

To the contrary, our tests strongly indicate that the purity of bottled water cannot be trusted. Given the industry's refusal to make available data to support their claims of superiority, consumer confidence in the purity of bottled water is simply not justified.

Laboratory tests conducted for EWG at one of the country’s leading water quality laboratories found that 10 popular brands of bottled water, purchased from grocery stores and other retailers in 9 states and the District of Columbia, contained 38 chemical pollutants altogether, with an average of 8 contaminants in each brand. More than one-third of the chemicals found are not regulated in bottled water. In the Sam's Choice and Acadia brands levels of some chemicals exceeded legal limits in California as well as industry-sponsored voluntary safety standards. Four brands were also contaminated with bacteria...