Category: <span>Uncategorized</span>

Feeling at Home in the Alphabet Soup

Earlier today, I was standing on top of the former Tippecanoe Sanitary Landfill, which is now a superfund site. Capped and controlled since 2000, now it looks more like a big grassy hill with intermittent monitoring wells sticking out of it. The company I am interning for, Keramida, Inc., has …

Local Money for a Global Environment

Getting Milk? I don’t cry over spilled milk, but I’m not ashamed to admit that trying to navigating my way to the milk isle during peak shopping hours brings me awfully close to tears. Especially right before a snowstorm. It’s not an ordeal I take up willingly, but today we …

Working with the UN to secure water, prevent conflict

 “Where resource exploitation has driven war, or served to impede peace, improving governance capacity to control natural resources is a critical element of peacebuilding.” Carolyn McAskie   I flew out of John F. Kennedy International Airport the day after the People`s Climate March where over 400,000 people gathered to voice their …

Where the City Comes to Play Outdoors: Helping to Keep Tahoe Blue

Written by Meredith Murray (Master’s in Environmental Policy Candidate 2015) Driving into the Lake Tahoe Basin you are surrounded by sapphire blue water varying in colors and parts of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. It is no wonder why they call the lake “the Jewel of the Sierras”. Lake Tahoe …

A small group of thoughtful committed citizens changing the world

  By: Anne Lapera VAEIC Policy Internship With the implementation of the new 111d regulations and President Obama’a call for a 30% reduction in emissions many states are at a crossroad. Section 111d of the Clean Air Act “requires EPA to develop regulations for categories of sources which cause or …

Helping Close the Gap: Including Environmental Justice in Climate Action

Originally posted on: thegenynot.com Written by, Dorthea Thomas On March 6, 2014 WE ACT for Environmental Justice hosted their first Environmental and Climate Justice Teach-In atThe Peace House in Washington DC. The Peace House is a center that fosters learning and activist excellence through the facilitating various individual, community, and world betterment projects; such …

Green Tea, Georgia Style: A new brand of bipartisanship

Green Tea, Georgia Style A New Brew of Bipartisanship By Andrew Bonanno MS’15 and Jeremy Cherson MS’15   It’s election season 2012 and Colleen Kiernan, chapter director of the Georgia Sierra Club, is battling a bill that would limit the right to protest in the Peach State.  A broad coalition …

Handshake with the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon–the end of a great internship!

  MEETINGS, MEETINGS, MEETINGS…. After two months into the internship, I was already feeling comfortable in both formal and informal settings. Fall season at the World Health Organization (WHO) means a lot of meetings. I was asked to be a note-taker for the Human Biomointoring meeting and the Economics Symposium …

Public Participation and Boston Beaches

This past summer and fall I had the pleasure of working for Save the Harbor/Save the Bay (STH/STB).   STH/STB is an environmental education and policy advocacy non-profit located on Boston’s Fish Pier.   During my time there, I – along with state legislators, community leaders, and Boston citizens – contributed to …

When policy makers actually listen.

The key lesson I learned during my internship is that public engagement with the government is realistic and necessary in environmental politics. For example, I learned that I am capable of getting a meeting with the head of the forestry department. I am welcomed to sit at the table. I …