EnviroMentalog

I’m not going to pretend to know everything there is to know about “borehole thermal energy storage”, but I have to say, at first glance, I am really in love with this idea. Buying cooperatives and collective bargaining are discussed in all sorts of policy circles (health insurance being a popular recent example), but [...]

The New York City water system in a word is AMAZING. It serves 1 billion gallons of water to over 8 million residents on a daily basis. Just take a minute and let those numbers process in your brain. If you can’t, let me help you. It’s a lot!There are 2 major watersheds that provide [...]

Risk assessment is an inexact science. In fact, let’s just go ahead and call it an art. Or maybe it would be more accurate to describe it as a knock-down, drag-out, bare-knuckled brawl between government and industry. Because without a formula to dictate when a state or the feds should step in and declare that [...]

Today I stumbled across this article from March. Frankly, I am surprised this is the first I am hearing about it. Apparently, in addition to growing their own organic garden the Obamas are also harvesting their own honey from a hive of honeybees. Not only am I a big fan of honey (tastewise), but I [...]

Spoiler alert: this luddite has figured out how to link to things and I’m gonna pull out all (ok, some of) the stops people.

Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC, which calls for reduced carbon emissions in the next few decades, is missing an important slice of the proverbial pie: FOOD. A recent resolution proposed by NYC Council Member [...]

Peter Singer’s article in this Sunday’s Times Magazine – Why We Must Ration Health Care – spelled out the economics and history of our insurance morass in under a dozen pages what I only kinda got in a semester’s worth of Health Econ 101. As a plus, Singer trades the economists’ frustrating unwillingness to address [...]

As students of both public health and the environment we like to practice what we preach. So the 4 of us are sharing a rooftop garden (more like a bin) this summer. I went today to pluck some of our bounty and I bring you these lush pictures.

As you can see we are [...]

Click here to check out Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed piece today.It is an interesting discussion on phthalates and their effects as endocrine disruptors.We want to hear your opinions on the phthalate debate.

The NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has launched the Environmental Public Health Tracking Portal, giving the public user-friendly and transparent tools to explore the exposure and health outcome data that describe us (with no unique identifiers, of course). A 2001 report from the Pew Environmental Health Commission identified the lack of a linked, [...]

A category of air pollution all its own, particulate matter, or PM, is among the most damaging things a person can inhale. The smaller the PM, the greater its ability to lodge deep in the most sensitive parts of the lung, where it can inflict maximum damage. The most dangerous PM are those [...]