Author: Shawn Collins

According to the non-profit Environmental Working Group, California’s public water systems in the San Joaquin Valley and urban areas like LA and San Bernardino and San Mateo counties are contaminated with a very dangerous, cancer-causing chemical known as 1,2,3 trichloropropane (“TCP”). Eviden...

Who is Donald Trump trying to impress with his demands to slash spending on scientists and scientific research, and his twitter-blizzard attacks on established science (climate change, as but one of many examples)? In the environmental field in which I work, the results of research studies done by f...

Scott Pruitt has repeatedly stated that he’s cutting the EPA’s budget for Clean Air programs because those programs are not the EPA’s job and that he expects the states to do more to ensure clean air. This is a lie. Here’s what Scott Pruitt knows: (1) The states don’t have the money for mo...

The politicians that we send to Washington enjoy the greatest healthcare in the world. If they or their spouses or kids get sick, they have immediate access to the finest doctors and hospitals, and the best and most advanced medicines, treatments, and therapies. They will never have to worry that so...

What do you suppose happens when a town cuts its police force and no longer tries to catch people speeding on the most dangerous roads in the town? More speeding, more danger, right? In fact, if the town didn’t want to catch speeders any more on those roads, what is the surest way to accomplish [&...

A recent article titled “Righting Civil Wrongs” sadly describes how the poor, minority residents of communities throughout the United States have been left with no choice but to sue their government (the US EPA, specifically). Years ago, these residents formally claimed that they were the victim...

Will President Trump and the man he appointed to head the EPA, Scott Pruitt, rig our system for determining which sites are the most environmentally dangerous in the country by ignoring the threat of vapor intrusion that these sites pose to human beings living near them? Sadly, there are many thousa...

More than perhaps anything else he does, a president’s budget proposal tells us what he thinks is important. By that measure, President Trump’s just proposed massive budget cuts for the EPA tell us that Trump does not value the EPA mission of ensuring clean air and water for Americans, and in fa...

Pro-business forces in Congress have proposed laws aimed at restricting, or even eliminating, the rights of injured Americans to join together in bringing their claims in the form of a single “class action” lawsuit. A class action is a kind of lawsuit in which those who have been injured by the ...

If many of us went to our garages or sheds, we would find “Roundup,” a popular lawn and garden weed killer sold by Monsanto. Since its commercial introduction in 1974, Roundup has become the most widely used weed killer in the United States, and possibly the world. In fact, Roundup is used in mo...