Despite increasing warnings about the fact that current human, government, and corporate consumption and behavior are unsustainable, the envirohuman impact of decisions still seems to not be considered enough by both individuals and large organizations alike. Yes, it’s beginning to be important for more than a small number of people, and many are really considering the impact of their decisions, but it still is not weighed for every big decision. Even when it is considered, we often decide against the more sustainable choice.

This is where news, blogs, conversations, and emails all come into play. The environment has to be in the daily conversation before it gets considered in our daily decisions. Earth Day/Week/Month is not the only time for this dialogue. It needs to be everyday.

For this reason EnviroHumanImpact joined the ranks of other websites and blogs to help promote the consideration of one’s envirohuman impact. We’re here everyday trying to help you the individual to make daily living changes that help improve your envirohuman impact while influencing companies to bend to your will, as a consumer, to offer greener options and to improve their behaviors.

We’re bringing news, advice, and tips because we care and we want everyone to care. It matters to us all, whether we have admitted that or not. Please, when you read something here, participate! Don’t leave the site thinking how great the ideals are without doing something. Start employing small life changes that add up to improved envirohuman impact.

Your behavior rubs off on your peers and can have a huge impact over time. Being greener can be healthier and can save you money! Start with our Greener Under Twenty Series or check out our growing Product Reviews section for easy ways to begin living greener!

Find something useful? Share it with friends! Use our Share functions found at the bottom of every post. You can email articles or share them on many different social networks. Use the Digg or Reddit functions so that these online conversations infiltrate others’ consciousness, making it easier to have personal conversations on a shared basic understanding of the issues we face.

At that point, when news, websites, social sites, etc. are all saturated with quality content regarding the environment, people will begin talking, considering, buying, and acting greener. Companies will have to listen and adapt or face potential loss of business.  In many ways, people are adopting a more environmentally friendly approach — but we have far to go.

We have joined the conversation, helping to spurn action, and you can do the same, right here. Comment on articles here, and please, take the opportunity to make our environment healthier for today and tomorrow with your daily living choices.

Recently, it was reported that there have been $1,000,000,000 (yes, that’s a billion dollars) donated to political campaigns for the U.S. Presidency this election cycle. What does that mean for the environment?

Well, we can wish that it would mean that the two main campaigns remaining — those of Senators John McCain and Barack Obama — would not spend so much of their piece of that money on polluting activities (FYI: much of the $1 Billion was donated to other candidates in the primaries).

Alas, much of that money will be spent on T.V. commercials, which while not eco-friendly, pale in comparison to the mailers sent out, the plastic and metal signs put up in yards and on street corners across the United States, and the jet and motorcade costs of the candidates’ campaign travel activities.  After all, chances are, those televisions are already being watched, but that charter bus or plane is not being flown on any one person’s behalf, except for the candidate using it.

What voters could hope for from the two candidates would be a little less talk about what he would do as President to green the country (both candidates have given major speeches regarding issues pertaining to the environment), that is, until they have outlined what it is his campaign is doing to green its activities.

Certainly, a long, grueling campaign includes much travel, paper advertisements, and signage on behalf of candidates.  But the near silence of the two campaigns pertaining to greener campaigning, including possible carbon offsets, signage and paper leaflet turn-in points at the polls (fat chance on that one!), etc. is regrettable.  What if the campaign volunteers near the polling places agreed to collect recyclable paper, bottles, cans, and other materials, especially campaign materials, to help make a statement and potentially counteract some of their campaigns’ negative envirohuman impact?  Targeting communities where recycling facilities currently do not exist would make an extra good impact.

Now is the time to set an example for how a leader would lead. Senator McCain and Senator Obama, how are you improving the envirohuman impact of your individual campaigns for the White House? The planet is dying to know!

Weigh in on this issue: what can we reasonably expect from candidates’ campaigns regarding making them more eco-friendly?

We all see the constant stream of news, commercials, and websites claiming new ways we can and should green our lives (hey, you’re on one of those sites right now!), but it can get difficult to discern from that, or rather, sift out of all of it, a few tips you plan to implement immediately to improve your personal envirohuman impact.

Here, I have compiled for you a list of five areas of your life for you to examine and begin making improvements to reduce pollution.  Ready?

1. Transform your transportation: If you can (and have not changed already) consider getting to school, work, shopping, and play by means other than your own personal vehicle.  So explore the opportunities of using public transportation, biking, or walking. If these options do not fit the bill all of the time, consider implementing them some of the time, so maybe you can walk to the store but public transportation may not be available to you, so you might end up driving to work. Also, the option of carpooling is available in most areas, so try a website such as e-rideshare or a slew of others.  Also, make sure your tires are fully inflated and do not accelerate and break suddenly.  With gas prices as high as over $4.00, if you are tired of filling the tank on your older car (or for many, SUV!), consider buying a hybrid or other more fuel-efficient car — it will pay you dividends for the less gas you use and reduced carbon footprint!
2. Change your household cleaners: I’m going to direct you to our rapidly increasing list of product reviews for specific products’ information, but concentrate on finding truly greener products, ones that list the ingredients on the label, and if you have the time, investigate the safety of those ingredients, an area where usually, Wikipedia can help.  Concentrate on finding one quality “green” dishsoap, laundry detergent, and all-purpose cleaner, looking for natural, petroleum-free, plant-based, biodegradable products, especially, and you will be well on your way.
3. Greener thinking by greener reading: Begin frequenting a green website that can offer you daily news and tips related to your new, green lifestyle to offer you encouragement and continued ideas for little ways to live a more environmentally-friendly life.  What does this do for you?  While websites like Grist and Tree Hugger are great, and rather all-encompassing, for some, it can feel almost like too much advice and tips.  You can count on EnviroHumanImpact to provide you with something everyday that puts you in a greener mood, including tips, our different series of posts, like Greener Under Twenty, can give you realistic, simple life changes, usually for less than $20 in fewer than twenty minutes.  EHI provides, “just enough,” rather than more environmental information than you can possibly read in one sitting — and we will not overflow your RSS feed everyday — typically one or two per day from us at EHI.  You can join our RSS feed for a daily dose of information and advice.  Plus, reading a green-focused website will keep you on track toward a more sustainable lifestyle!
4. This one is easy!  Save some energy, money, and the world from significant amounts of pollution by switching over to compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs), which now can be recycled at Home Depot!
5. Speaking of recycling, if you are not recycling, then you should be.  Find ways at work and home to recycle paper, metals, plastic products, and organic matter!  It is highly energy- and environment-intensive to extract raw materials from the earth, and it is in most cases better to recycle your garbage.

We recently came across a very interesting piece of consumer research: the Greendex courtesy of National Geographic Online.

While most research looking at various countries’ impact on the environment is measured by the actions taken by the governments, the Greendex is a consumer based survey that ranks countries’ envirohuman impact based on the individual consumers’ green-related habits, consumption, and sentiments.

Basically, this gets at the heart of the green movement by finding out what people are actually doing and how their personal decisions towards sustainability compare to that of others around the world. So how do you stack up? Where does your country rank and what can we take away from the the survey?

First, some results and takeaways according to the site:

Story quoted from the AP on May 20, 2008. Report Charges Interference on Emissions
The story begins:

The administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency initially supported giving California full or partial permission to limit tailpipe emissions, but reversed himself after hearing from the White House, a Congressional report says.

Sounds like politicians meddling in science-based decisions for political ends.

The report, by the Democratic staff of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, cites sworn depositions by high-level officials of the agency and amounts to the first solid evidence of the political interference alleged by Democrats and environmentalists since the administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, denied California’s request in December.

Mr. Johnson has defended the decision as his alone. He has refused to say whether there was White House pressure.

Uh-huh.

Polar bears have been listed on the “Endangered Species” list, although environmentalists did not get the win they had hoped for with this case. They had wanted for this to push legislation to combat global warming.

From the New York Times’ May 15, 2008 story, “Polar Bear Is Made a Protected Species,” we will get some of the details of this story, of course with commentary:

The polar bear, whose summertime Arctic hunting grounds have been greatly reduced by a warming climate, will be placed under the protection of the Endangered Species Act, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced on Wednesday.

But the long-delayed decision to list the bear as a threatened species may prove less of an impediment to oil and gas industries along the Alaskan coast than many environmentalists had hoped. Mr. Kempthorne also made it clear that it would be “wholly inappropriate” to use the listing as a tool to reduce greenhouse gases, as environmentalists had intended to do.

What seems to be lacking is a clear explanation for why that is so inappropriate. Here is some explanation provided:

If you have been following the controversy over why Mary Gade was forced to resign from her post as head of the U.S. EPA’s Region 5 Office in Chicago, you may have encountered the question, “So what? People get fired unfairly all the time. Why does this matter so much?”

If you’re just joining us and would like some insight into what has happened on this story so far, here are EnviroHumanImpacts articles on the matter:

EPA Ousts Mary Gade
Continuing Coverage and Commentary: EPA Gade Controversy
More Mary Gade Coverage (Or Is It Less?)

But back to, “Why does this matter so much?” Fair enough question with a fair enough answer. Sure, people are fired all the time, and many times one could conclude they were fired unfairly. Many, like Gade seems to have been, may have been doing their job and doing it well.

Of course, they all matter, but Gade’s firing is a matter of public safety regarding major industrial chemical pollution. That’s right, say it again, “major industrial chemical pollution.” Dioxin, in Michigan, released by Dow Chemical, at levels thousands of times greater than the federal and Michigan state cleanup standards is seeming to get a pass.

Readers are contacting EnviroHumanImpact, curious about what has happened in the firing/forced resignation of Mary Gade, who until recently was head of the U.S. EPA’s Region 5 office in Chicago. She contends that this is about a dispute regarding dioxin cleanup between the EPA, specifically her office, and Dow Chemical.

You can read our original article on the matter, here. Our continuing coverage from May 4 is also a good read.

Yesterday, we mentioned a Wall Street Journal article that gave some more insight into the Gade matter. It does offer a little more than the original Chicago Tribune story that broke this news last Friday. Because just as yesterday, the mainstream media seems to be shirking away from this story, we’ll pull some excerpts from the Journal’s piece to help give our readers a better sense of what’s going on.

Yes, it’s from a couple of days ago, May 3, and the continued question is, “where is the mainstream media on this one?” Is what was front page controversy on Friday not newsworthy on Monday?

We originally brought you the story yesterday of Mary Gade, an EPA Official who has been asked to resign and has done so, allegedly because of her efforts to have Dow Chemical clean up dioxin.  The story we excerpted with commentary was from the Friday Chicago Tribune: EPA Official Ousted While Fighting Dow.

This story is of great interest to EnviroHumanImpact, because on the surface of this firing, Gade’s ouster was due to her pursuing her duties to enforce the laws breached by Dow (regarding the environment).  Who knows what kind of leverage Dow has used to influence the EPA or Bush Administration (or both) to have Gade removed from their corporate back?  Have there been similar firings during the Bush Administration?

Where is the Mainstream Media on this? The point here is that there are a lot of unanswered questions about a situation that is very reminiscent of the U.S. Attorney Firing Scandal.  What’s sad is that the Chicago Tribune covered the story on Friday but EHI has not yet been able to find a follow-up article in print or online Tribune stories.

Seemingly underreported, but what made front-page news on Friday’s (May 2, 2008) Chicago Tribune is a story about an EPA official who was told to resign or be fired. Read the entire story here.

The story begins:

SAGINAW, Mich. – The battle over dioxin contamination in this economically stressed region had been raging for years when a top Bush administration official turned up the pressure on Dow Chemical to clean it up.

Now, she has been asked to leave, and has complied.

On Thursday, following months of internal bickering over Mary Gade’s interactions with Dow, the administration forced her to quit as head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Midwest office, based in Chicago.

Gade told the Tribune she resigned after two aides to national EPA administrator Stephen Johnson took away her powers as regional administrator and told her to quit or be fired by June 1.

Gade contends she was forced out of her job because of her work to hold Dow Chemical to the laws governing cleanup of dioxin.