Author: Shawn Collins

Your average second-grader knows that 1,300 is not the same as 50,000…..and that 400 is not the same as 7,000. But the man who heads the US EPA evidently does not know this. EPA chief Scott Pruitt was all over the airwaves the last few days, defending the United States’ backing out of the Paris ...

It’s such a compelling story: A 10-years-in-the-making plan to pour $1 billion into the redevelopment of Jordan Downs, a once-dangerous, crime-ridden public housing project in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, that had been the stage for nationally-televised riots in the 1960s. The idea is to...

President Trump’s decision to abandon America’s commitment to the Paris Climate Change Accord is just the latest horrible environmental decision that he has made. Here are just some of the others: These decisions reveal a level of ignorance and cruelty that was unthinkable until Trump came along...

When Pope Francis met with President Trump at the Vatican this past week, Francis gave him a copy of his 2015 Encyclical, which passionately argued that the environment is God’s gift to mankind, to benefit all mankind, and therefore that the powerful must not exploit it for their selfish purposes....

“Does this chemical cause cancer?” is one of the first questions I get from a mom or dad who has just learned that, unbeknownst to them, a toxic chemical from an industrial source has been in their family’s air or water supply for years. I always caution that, even if the chemical(s) just disc...

Jennifer Flory of Illinois thought she was getting her daughter, Alison, the help she needed when she sent Alison to what had been advertised as a home for addiction treatment in South Florida. Sadly, however, Alison died from a drug overdose, smoking crack cocaine laced with an opiate. Jennifer lea...

The most dangerously contaminated sites in the US are “Superfund” sites. There are, currently, 1,317 of them. New Jersey has the most-114-while California and Pennsylvania follow right behind. The map in this article identifies all of the Superfund sites and allows you to search for where such s...

Hot off the presses is the Trump/Pruitt proposed 31% cut to the EPA’s budget, including slashing more than $300 million from the fund used to clean up the most toxic and dangerous sites in America, i.e., “Superfund” sites. If this cut passes Congress, thousands will get sick and others still w...

Get ready for a lot more of this. Last September, the Obama EPA issued a new rule limiting the levels of air pollution that would be allowed in the states. The idea was to save lives and health, because industrial air pollution is well-documented to threaten both. Wisely, the rule created an excepti...

If you live near a landfill, you need to be especially aware of the ways in which toxic chemicals from the landfill can threaten your family. For example: ·Groundwater contamination: Over time, rainwater mixes with the chemicals from the garbage dumped in the landfill and produces a “leachate”,...