Author: Shawn Collins

The oil industry hack (Scott Pruitt) who was appointed by President Trump to head the EPA has just quietly fired half the members of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board. This is the group of highly-regarded and dedicated scientists who determine, for example, the dangers to human health threatened by...

Yes. You read that correctly. First, the State of Michigan and the City of Flint took away Flint residents’ clean water. Then they substituted lead-contaminated water. Now, the City of Flint has just sent notices to 8,000 Flint residents threatening that, if the residents don’t pay for the lead-...

Health researchers have long known that air pollution causes certain cancers and heart disease. With this in mind, the Healthgrove organization collected data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in order to identify the county in each state in the US with the worst air pollution. He...

The world is rushing head-long into ever greater dependence on dangerous man-made chemicals. We now accept these chemicals are a part of our everyday lives, at home, at work, in schools, etc. But, rather than just accept this as an unavoidable reality, we must pause for a moment to consider this chi...

A St. Louis jury just ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay $120 million to a woman who claimed her ovarian cancer had been caused by her 40+ years of the company’s talcum powder products. The most significant part of the award is the $110 million in punitive damages the jury assessed. Obviously, t...

Fifty percent of Americans depend on groundwater for daily use in their homes, i.e., drinking, showering, etc. Unfortunately, the quality and safety of our groundwater is under increasing threat from a variety of man-made sources, with potentially grave risk to the health of those in our family who ...

In recent executive orders, President Trump announced his intention to allow coal companies to spew significantly more health-endangering chemicals into the environment. “Reducing costs will bring back coal industry jobs”, is Trump’s justification. But a survey of 32 utilities–all of whom ha...

An environmental group known as the Center for Biological Diversity just sued the EPA under the Freedom of Information Act. The Center requested that the EPA make public EPA chief Pruitt’s email communications with polluters like oil companies and pesticide manufacturers. The Center wants to know ...

This month in Germany, the world’s biggest industrial nations are meeting to discuss what to do about increasingly threatening climate change. A good idea, right? Except it turns out that the meeting will be disgraced by the presence of some 270 business lobbyists, most of them there to protect tr...

Do you live near a factory, a landfill, a farming operation, or a gas station? If you do, you should be aware of the possibility of “vapor intrusion”. Vapor intrusion is a process in which chemical contamination– which the factory, landfill, etc., caused by disposing of volatile organic compou...