Monday, October 22, 2012 at 12:00AM 
The Sierra Club marked the 40th anniversary of the Clean Water Act by releasing a Clean Water Voting Record for the U.S. House of Representatives. The online report card features an interactive map and issues letter grades for U.S. Representatives’ voting records on clean water issues.
Monday, July 2, 2012 at 12:00AM 
Last week while the rest of the known universe was focusing on the Supreme Court, the House Asspropriations Committee was doing everything in its power to gut environmental protections for clean water.
On June 28 the House Appropriations Committee passed by a 26-19 vote the Interior and Environment Appropriations bill. The bill would slash the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) budget by about a fifth for fiscal year 2013, the lowest it has been funded since 1998 and deeply cut funding for other environmental programs including the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a program that provides critical resources for protecting national parks, wildlife refuges and local recreation areas.
In addition, the bill was riddled with anti-environmental riders, including ones that would block the Obama administration from finalizing and implementing proposed guidelines to restore Clean Water Act protections to many of America’s rivers, lakes, streams and wetlands.
As an added bonus the bill also contains a rider to block Interior Department regulations that may be proposed to protect streams from mountaintop removal mining.
LINK (via: ecowatch)
vote the environment in Conservation, Environment, Politics Thursday, June 21, 2012 at 12:04AM Patagonia is partnering with the band Wilco, Headcount and the League of Conservation Voters to encourage customers to identify what they love about the environment, register to vote and vote the environment in November.
VENTURA, Calif. (June 20, 2012) — Patagonia Inc., a leading designer of outdoor, surf and sport-related apparel, announces the launch of its Vote the Environment campaign – a campaign that asks customers to register to vote, learn about candidates’ environmental records and vote for the world they want to live in. Patagonia is one of the only for-profit businesses to engage in a public campaign that aims to sway its customers’ voting towards the most environmentally-minded candidates.
www.votetheenvironment.org/
This year, Patagonia has partnered with the rock band, Wilco, the non-profit HeadCount and the League of Conservation Voters to achieve the campaign’s objectives. The company will also launch a Twitter campaign around the hashtag #becauseilove. People at Wilco shows, in Patagonia retail stores and online will be encouraged to tweet messages and images that complete the sentence "I vote the environment because I love …" in order to personalize the environmental issues at stake in this election. The #becauseilove tweets will be displayed in real-time at Wilco shows, in Patagonia stores across the country and online at Patagonia.com thanks to a technology partnership with Austin-based social integration company Mass Relevance.
Vote the Environment, along with voter registration group HeadCount, will accompany Wilco on tour this summer, with a booth at each US-based show. Additionally, Wilco has donated an exclusive version of their song “Whole Love” - the title track from their Grammy-nominated album The Whole Love. 100% of the proceeds from the sale of this song benefit HeadCount. http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/whole-love-live-live-single/id528700126
"Given the current state of American politics, it's easy to see why people become disillusioned and don't participate in the system,” notes Jeff Tweedy, Wilco’s lead singer, “But my hope, and my reason for this partnership with Patagonia, is to remind people that they do have a voice, and voting is an effective and undeniable way to be heard. And nature, while powerful, needs our voices and votes to protect and preserve it."
The social media component of the Vote the Environment campaign is designed to get customers thinking about what aspect of the environment matters most to them, and inspire voting that will preserve what they love. The company’s hope is that customers will spread the “I vote the environment #becauseilove…” on their social networks to get the word out about “voting the environment” in November.
“People protect what they love,” says Patagonia’s founder and owner Yvon Chouinard, “It’s time to hold our candidates accountable to environmental issues: if you care about clean air and water, how do the candidates on the national, state and local levels measure up on those topics? Get informed before casting your vote.”
Thursday, June 21, 2012 at 12:02AM 
The asshats in the House are at it again.
The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a package of anti-wilderness bills including H.R. 1505 the National Security and Federal Lands Protection Act.
The anti-wilderness package allows logging in California roadless areas, clear-cutting of old growth forests in the Tongass National Forest and virtually rent-free grazing on public lands.
H.R.1505 would hand over “operational control” of federal public lands within 100 miles of the Canadian and Mexican borders to the U.S. border patrol and would outright suspend 16 environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act, within 100 miles of U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada.
The US Customs and Border Patrol would also have immediate access to develop roads and infrastructure on the more than 600 million acres of national parks, monuments, Indian reservations, wilderness, wildlife refuges.
LINK (Via: Ecowatch)
tongass, vote the environment in Environment, Politics Tuesday, August 30, 2011 at 12:01AM 
"I never thought I would see the Republican Party doing this kind of stuff."
Everything Klug says regarding the threat to the environment and it's impact on the fly business is spot on, and he should be congratulated for making such a public statement. However, it's not exactly news that Republicans are suddenly trying to gut environmental regulations, they've been at it for the last 30+ years.
Remember James Watt? He was Secretary of the Interior under Ronald Reagan.
Watt decreased funding for environmental programs, restructured the department to decrease federal regulatory power, tried to eliminate the Land and Water Conservation Fund, eased regulations of oil and mining companies, and directed the National Park Service to draft legislation that would have de-authorized a number of previously Congressionally authorized National Parks. Watt resisted accepting donations of private land to be used for conservation purposes and proposed that all 80 million acres of undeveloped land in the United States be opened for drilling and mining in the year 2000. The area leased to coal mining companies quintupled during Watt's term as Secretary of the Interior. Watt was eventually fired for making bigoted remarks.
How about Reagan's Director of the EPA Anne Gorsuch Burford? She was indicted for having tried to gut the agency. As agency head, she cut the budget of the EPA by 22%, reduced the number of cases filed against polluters, relaxed Clean Air Act regulations, and facilitated the spraying of restricted-use pesticides. She cut the total number of agency employees, and hired staff from the industries they were supposed to be regulating. Gorsuch resigned in the midst of a Congressional investigation.
Gale Norton? She was the Secretary of the Interior under George W. Bush and a former staffer for James Watt. At the time of her resignation, Norton was considered "the Bush administration's leading advocate for expanding oil and gas drilling and other industrial interests in the West. After her resignation, driven by an inspector general ethics probe, Norton joined Royal Dutch Shell Oil company as a legal adviser in their oil-shale division.
Norton's replacement Dick Kempthorne held the record for protecting fewer species over his tenure than any other Interior Secretary in United States history, a record previously held by....... James Watt.
Dick Cheney? Where do you start? In addition to his influence on loosening regulations on polluters, he was personally responsible for cutting off water on the Klamath in favor of irrigators resulting in tens of thousands of salmon rotting on the banks of the Klamath River.
Bottom line is the politics do matter. Of the 110 anti-environment votes in the current congress, 97 percent of Republicans voted for the anti-environment position, 84 percent of Democrats voted for the pro-environment position. We can lobby the current congress all day long to vote for a healthier environment but ultimately the real change will have to come from the voting booth.
fish politics, vote the environment in Politics Saturday, October 30, 2010 at 12:00AM 
Photo by Bill Klyn
With the election upon us a note about voting from Yvon Chouinard.
My friend Tom Brokaw recently wrote an op-ed about an issue gone missing in this election -- the war, the two wars, we’ve been involved in for the past decade, that so far have taken 5,000 American lives and a trillion dollars out of the treasury. Tom’s call for voters to take a more sober look before casting ballots on Tuesday inspires me to call attention to another issue that goes unheralded in this election, and every election in recent memory.
The health of our environment never makes it to the top list of voter concerns. But it has everything to do with all the major issues our elected officials face. Everything we make ultimately comes from the ground, or what’s beneath it, or from our common waters. Every job and every economy depends ultimately on the health of the natural world of which we’re a part.
We’ve seen a decade of record heat around the world, more-virulent storm systems, the evacuation of a major American city and, just this fall in Pakistan, the flooding of an area the size of Italy with seven million homeless. New drilling techniques for harder-to-reach oil created the largest oil spill in history. Fresh water, a resource for which we have no alternative, is being drawn down all around the world faster than it can be polluted. The major fisheries are depleted or close to depletion. The fish at the top of the food chain will poison us if we eat too many in a given month. A gyre of plastic waste twice the size of Texas floats the Pacific. There are fewer species of all kind, flora and fauna – fewer strands to the web of life. They’re disappearing at a rate unprecedented since the meteor hit the dinosaurs.
And when it comes to war, as with politics, follow the money. Once you see past the rhetorical fog of curtailed freedom or misapplied justice, you’ll find an important resource base, or access to one.
What is to be done? Plenty – and on all fronts. Well-meaning people have brought every one of these questions to the attention of their fellow citizens. People everywhere are learning what they can do to harm nature less in the course of their ordinary day. Some of these people are politicians. We have to assume that the people we elect to office care, and care deeply, about finding the human means to live as part of nature. But they don’t always make it a part of their political program.
For example, George Bush, in his retirement, collects rainwater and uses geothermal energy to run his house in Crawford. “We’ve tried to live our life that way, you know, without thumping our chest,” he said in a recent interview. “We just did it. Not for political purposes, just because we want to live our life.” The presidential library he’s building at Southern Methodist Univeristy will be LEED-certified.
That’s good, but not enough. We need a lot more senators, congressmen and women and governors willing to both “live their lives” and stake their political fortunes on the work we need to do to keep the planet habitable and life possible for our children. The private feelings we all share for our compromised, endangered natural environment must translate now into a steady stream of responsible action from communities, which includes government and business. That stream will also translate into jobs.
What can you do today? Vote as though your life depended on it. Before you mark your ballot, check the environmental record of the person you’re voting for. The League of Conservation Voters’ environmental scorecard provides a good place to start.
Yvon Chouinard is the founder and owner of Patagonia, Inc.
Via: The Cleanest Line
vote the environment in Environment 
