For the first time, national environmental groups are looking beyond federal politics and allocating a portion of their campaign financing to state elections in California, New York and elsewhere. The Sierra Club is spending a third of its $4 million campaign budget on state races. The League of Conservation Voters is chipping in 10 percent of its $7 million political war chest to state contests as well.

Last week, the New York-based Blacksmith Group, a nonprofit dedicated to solving pollution problems in the developing world, released the results of a recent study of the world’s most polluted places. According to the group, sites in Russia, India, Peru, Zambia, China and the Dominican Republic topped the list of locations that qualify as ecological nightmares. Most of the problem areas lack strong environmental laws and suffer from unchecked development and/or resource extraction.

With its back-to-the-future curves and swoops, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin, California Civic Center feels like the perfect venue for hosting the annual Bioneers conference. A sprawling complex of streamlined colonnades, perfectly round auditoriums and sky-blue roofs, Wright’s design manages to come off as at once strikingly futuristic and—now decades old—comfortably familiar. The center is a fine example of wild creativity meeting stolid pragmatism, which seems very much the point of the Bioneers" gathering of eco-visionaries from around the world.