Item: It seems as if every month American Electric Power (AEP) puts out with its billing some sort of "greenwash" message. This month it was, in part, as follows: "Last month AEP was recognized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] for its outstanding participation in the Pesticide Environmental Stewardship program. Only 10 out of the 110 companies, agencies and business organizations in the program were honored for their leadership in reducing risks from pesticides."

Of course, nothing was said about the fact that AEP was being sued by EPA for repeated violations of the Clean Air Act, subjecting citizens to risk of lung disease and death for having to breath the toxic air which AEP blankets throughout the region. According to Kurt Waltzer of the Ohio Environmental Council, "American Electric Power is one of America’s dirtiest utilities,"

Curious that EPA let many years go by before they made a move to sue, and that they chose to do so after environmental groups brought their suit on the same grounds a few weeks earlier.

Item: According to the Jan.-Feb. 2000 World-Watch, the earth is on the verge of a potentially catastrophic water crisis. Some parts of the earth are already in such a crisis. Many regions in the US are not protective of their water sources, thereby inviting disaster. One third of US water is obtained from aquifers, and for the first time in history, major aquifers are becoming dangerously polluted. This is because of two factors, a greatly speeded up use of the water, and significant pollution from many sources, point and non-point. As water is pumped out, polluted water from agriculture, industry and municipalities seeps into the aquifer to take up the space. Any existing sources of clean groundwater should be given the highest priority for protection.

Item: Well-known West Virginia treehugger, Vivian Stockman, has an article on mountain top removal mining in the Dec.15 issue of the Progressive Populist, a nationally distributed publication. Congrats, Vivian!

Item: According to the Jan.-Feb 2000 Sierra, the extraordinary damage created when Hurricane Floyd moved on to the coast of North Carolina was not so much the very heavy rains from Floyd, but the works of Man that created the conditions to make such a storm into a disaster. One was an out-of-control factory hog farm industry which collected the excrement of 9,000,000 hogs into lagoons which overflowed and polluted all the waterways in the region. The other was the draining, ditching and filling of wetlands that prevented the land from absorbing the water as historically it did.

Item: Because of the very strong reactions against the idea of plants killing their own seeds, industrial chemical giant, Monsanto, has decided (for now), to drop its plans to go ahead with the infamous "terminator technology."