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The nonprofit Center for Health, Environment and Justice (CHEJ) kicked off a new campaign last week to bring public pressure to bear on Target retail stores. The aim is to convince the company to phase out a wide range of products made from polyvinyl chloride (PVC). CHEJ, a leading advocate for environmental justice and consumer health, labels PVC as "the poison plastic" because its production, use and disposal can lead to the release of chemicals linked to cancer, birth defects and other human health maladies.

We call it planet earth but it’s really planet ocean. Seventy one percent of the surface and 97 percent of the livable habitat of our amazing spherical space pool is saltwater. It’s the crucible of life and source of delight for so many of us. We all gain much from the ocean including transportation, recreation, trade, energy, protein, medicine and a sense of awe and wonder at being part of something so much larger than ourselves. We feel a natural connection to the sea. We all come from saltwater, both on an individual and evolutionary basis. Our bodies are 71 percent saltwater just like our planet. Our blood is salty as the sea. That may explain why I’ve always found it easier to sleep by the shore. The beat of the waves is like our mother’s heartbeat.

Following an international plea by a coalition of 60 environmental groups concerned about the health of marine ecosystems, the Bush administration last week joined dozens of other countries in calling on the United Nations to institute an international moratorium on unregulated high seas bottom trawling. Scientists say the fishing practice is destroying some of the world’s rarest and most sensitive ocean habitats.

Environmentalists around the globe are toasting a deal announced last week in which the U.S. government has agreed to forgive $24.4 million in debt from Guatemala to free up the money for use in forest conservation efforts there. Two leading international conservation nonprofits, the Nature Conservancy and Conservation International, were instrumental in putting the "debt-for-nature" together, and each organization also provided $1 million toward Guatemalan conservation initiatives to help sweeten the deal.

In the early 1970s, the "Project Tiger" conservation program launched in India resulted in tough laws to prevent Bengal tiger hunting and trade, and created a system of tiger reserves, now numbering 27. But now more than 30 years later, less than 6,000 tigers are estimated to be left in the wild. Environmentalists in India say the big cat will be extinct within a handful of years, due to unchecked poaching to serve the thriving black market for tiger body parts (used in traditional Chinese and Asian medicine). They’re calling for stricter prohibition and harsher enforcement, and have even suggested using the army to protect the tigers.

A much-anticipated and long-overdue study by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) released last week concludes that large wind energy projects can move forward as long as developers take precautions against interfering with military radar installations. A lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club in June accused DoD of instituting a near-moratorium on the construction of new wind power facilities by failing to complete the study, which Congress passed last year as part of the National Defense Authorization Act. Without the study, at least a dozen wind farm projects were stalled, encompassing more than 600 individual windmills and capable of producing 1,000 megawatts of power.

Frances Moore Lappé says her new book Democracy’s Edge (Jossey-Bass, 2006) "is about hope—not sappy, wishful thinking but hope grounded in a grasp of the root causes of spreading misery. I propose that we are in the midst of an extraordinary historical moment—one in which anti-democratic forces appear to be in ascendance while at the same time, invisible to most of us, a powerful current is stirring that may well take us to democracy’s next historical stage. I cast aside the gloomy view that Americans are hopelessly divided, left vs. right and secular vs. religious, and uncover widespread shared sentiment and common democratic innovation across these supposed barriers."