great jupiter!

Or: How I snuck aboard the USS Scripps despite erratic biorhythms.

Getting accepted into the Scripps Howard Institute on the Environment for a week of specialized enviro journalism training has got my brain humming. It’s humming early Ramones. Stuff about Chinese food and electric shock; the crackle of adrenaline and obliviousness.

Seems the neural channels this opportunity is illuminating are deep in those same pleasure centers of delinquent memory. Simple, pure, and supercharged.

proud

If you haven’t yet, read my critique of ongoing nuke industry efforts across the great state of Texas. Loving that The Daily Climate rolled it into their feed. I’d blush if all my oxygenated blood hadn’t poured into my purple prose already…

gonzalez, hardberger, ahern, femicide

Straddling my body, perfectly preserved by ocean-milled plastic, a bottle drums your heel. Imagine a message in that bottle. A warning. “Blog machine stuck on ‘hum.’ Can’t figure out how to stop this flash non-fiction train.” Omnipresent Guest, possessing my Twitter feed, you know all.

NEW POST: CPS Energy coming back for another rate increase. http://is.gd/zc8Y This one is the “good” conservation rate increase.
NEW POST: Hardberger (and others) ask Gonzalez to push for tough climate bill. http://bit.ly/puBr9
ALSO NEW POST: Millions flowing to SA for home weatherization. http://bit.ly/tY6H5

LAST WEEK:
Matt Ahern’s EchoTown rolling out Saturday. http://bit.ly/cSLBe A promising new eco-endeavor for San Antonio.
NEW POST: On the pavement for climate action. P.S. did South Texas activists find their own Joe the Plumber? http://bit.ly/uiFgk
NEW POST human-rights and legal groups are suing mexico’s federal government over juarez femicides. http://bit.ly/23wOsh
NEW POST rep. gonzalez getting hammered by green messages at home. http://bit.ly/eFmha

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protesting gonzalez

Wild in the Streets: U.S. Rep. Charlie Gonzalez got an early warning blast at the King William Fair parade this weekend from a handful of exhuberant climate activists. He must be thinking his support for giving pollution credits away to industry may not be such a sound idea.

I’ll be posting the video in the morning at Sacurrent.com.

Until then, let me just say that Charlie seemed genuinely surprised to be waylaid while a hat-wearing horse wheeled him about the delightfully quaint King William.

If he’d just play nice and support making industry pay for those pollution credits, we wouldn’t have to tell you what a louse he’s being, now would we?

[UPDATE, 04/27: Just posted video/analysis of climate protest. Enjoy!]

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read ‘em an weep

Back-to-back killer news. The EPA is triangulating on greenhouse gas with the Obama Administration, leaving business-as-usual, ‘what-me-worry?’ petro-industry vassals convulsing in their untenable position AND I get shimmery gems from the Society of Professional Journalists up in Fort Worth, the former habitue of my former n’er-do-well teenagehood.

Let’s start with me, shall we?

Yep. It was a delicious night having the opportunity to step up for my paper, the San Antonio Current, and retrieve three First Amendment Awards from SPJ’s Forth Worth chapter (Since I was here an’ all, I felt duty-bound to collect my boss’s teardrop gem, too).

global warming: slow dancing?

Even as I was filing my story on the latest from the climate-change frontier, news was pouring in.

The EPA was preparing the way for CO2 regulation by declaring greenhouse gases a danger to human health, and fascinating panels about adaptation to global warming were being held in Washington.

(And, yes, i still prefer “global warming” to the more nebulous, Republican creation, “climate change.”)

talkin’ desalination & drought

I was the pest elbowing along stretched in a bellyslide inviting junior-league ticks a chance at longevity enhancement. Nine-banded armadillo at Aransas National Wildlife Refuge hardly seemed to notice.

fall down, retch

Were I a runner, this sort of effort would have in me on the ground, cramped and retching.

But I am a writer. I sit at my desk, pick at the keys, stare across the room and mutter to myself.

Just my way of saying: Hope you enjoy some of my thoughts — and some of the well tenderized thoughts of others — about our dear San Antonio River.

Plenty of slideshows and liquid symbolism for all. Check in with San Antonio returns to its ailing Yanaguana.

what am i doing here?

It’s been another Mission Verde week.

My thoughts on Mayor Phil Hardberger’s challenges in getting community and political buy-in on his city sustainability plan are shared at the SACurrent.

Post publication, I’m studying up on water issues. Checking out the roots of San Antonio’s water quality concerns at the library today  and ran across this truly gruesome story about mad doctor who boiled down several Comanches in a soap boiler for their skeletons, flushing their liquified remains into the city’s drinking-water canal in the middle of the night.

san antonio’s green leap

Smiles, applause aplenty at Mayor Phil Hardberger's rollout of Mission Verde at the State of the City Address.

If you hadn’t heard that San Antonio is about to launch itself into prominence as an economically mobilized city of international low-carbon prowess, hit pause now.

white flight of fancy over chocolate city

A child carried at this year's MLK March in San Antonio enters a world changed dramatically both demographically and politically. Welcome to Obama Day.

Despite myself, I am a product of white privilege. Let’s just put that out there.

As such, I know that even in this remarkable age of our celebrated Obama presidency that if I can put on a clean shirt, show up and smile, nine times out of ten my voiceless skin is working in my favor. Being “white” has the added advantage of a long history of institutionalized racism.

200,000 feet on street

Walked in the MLK Day March in San Antonio on Monday, asking a few of the estimated 200,000 participants why that had turned out in the street that day…