At yesterday's Energy Media Breakfast (minutes 44:29-47:00), Gale Norton (Secretary of the Department of the Interior, making her in charge of the US Fish & Wildlife Service), was quizzed by Chris Holly with the Energy Daily, about the recent polar bear decision and whether it could compel government action to prevent climate change.

The short answer:  No.  
The long answer:  Ha ha ha! Are you kidding?  We employ scientists!  No.

Transcript below the fold.

Many women are so polluted it could affect their babies.  From Grist:

You weren't thinking of having children, were you? Good: One in five American women of childbearing age may have unsafe levels of mercury in their bodies, according to a new report by the Environmental Quality Institute at University of North Carolina-Asheville.

Half of breast cancer cases may be environmental.  From the Oakland Tribune:

As many as half of all new breast cancers may be foisted upon woman by pollutants in the environment, triggered by such items as bisphenol-A lining tin cans or radiation from early mammograms, according to a review of recent science by two breast cancer groups.

The Breast Cancer Fund reports that half of all men and one out of three women will develop some kind of cancer in their lifetime.  What do you think of this?  Starting to get serious, huh?

Amid concerns that global warming is melting away the icy habitats where polar bears live, the federal government is reviewing whether they should be considered a threatened species.

What is so cool about this?  This is the beginning of an amazing effort to open up new avenues for fighting climate change using the Endangered Species Act.  

To the extent that global warming threatens the polar bears, and to the extent that government activities (or activities they regulate) cause global warming, the government would have to stop activities that cause global warming.  (After a decade of legal battles, but still!)

One thing I do as a job is to write a news update for a small environmental nonprofit.  I flip through eco-news headlines, compile them, add our spin, and send it off.  The tone of this nonprofit is "the future is now," not "the end is nigh!!"

So I don't go looking for these things.  But you want to know what this week's news roundup is??  Here it is...

Failure to Act in Next Five To Seven Years Leads to Irreversible Downward Spiral for Ocean Health
(John Heilprin, Associated Press, 2/3/2006)

[more ocean doom on flip...]

So, for all of us who believe in changing attitudes one person at a time, here are some quick responses to those myths, and some helpful, if stunning, facts...

First, let's applaud a NYT op-ed for giving prominent year-end coverage to two global warming stories and quickly memorize a few factoids from them.

The bill is bad in itself.  But worse, if it passes, it goes to a House-Senate reconciliation committee where all the worst provisions of the House version (Pombo's HR 3824) could be added back in.  

The endangered species crisis is huge.  Federal agencies are not following the basic law, as written.  And now, there's a concerted attempt to rewrite the law.  

This stuns me.  What is so sacred about ... anything we're doing that it justifies attacking this protection against the animals that are clinging to survival by, say, 78 individuals (like the southern resident killer whales that live in the Puget Sound near Seattle)?

Another was more blunt.  "Bush claims the Iraq war is God's will.  Christians in this country need to insist on an immediate end to the atrocities.  God does not want war."

To get you warmed up (heh heh), there's more on the flip, including the latest news, some great Hollywood dialogue, and -- gasp! -- corruption within the Bush administration.

Mostly for amusement -- but even then, people don't like to hear about it.  Almost everyone suggests I find another distraction.

My cousin for instance.  He (more blunt than most) said, "Maybe you should take some time off to get a little perspective on things."

"A quarter of all mammals could go extinct in the next 30 years," I said, as matter-of-fact as I could.  "Isn't that perspective?"  

Isn't it?

Since then, though, I've been trying to get perspective.  "Is this the big picture?"  I'll ask myself.  "Is that the big picture?"

So I thought I'd ask you all: what do YOU think is the big picture?  

My nominations follow...

It's barely beginning to happen -- and it urgently needs to.

The good news:
Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) introduced a resolution designating March 8, 2006 as nationwide "Endangered Species Day" to raise awareness (voting this week, call your Senators).

The devastating rewrite of the Endangered Species Act (HR 3824, Pombo, R-CA) has thus far been kept in the Senate committee.

The bad news:

According to one report, the oceans may not recover from overfishing. (You can see which fish to choose so you don't contribute here.)

Apes and chimps may be extinct in the wild in one human generation.