Send a Message to the Obama Team - "Intervene at Coal River Mountain"

Send a Message to the Obama Team - "Intervene at Coal River Mountain": "Two weeks ago, residents of Pettus, West Virginia to wake up earlier this week and find that the blasting had started on Coal River Mountain, one of the epicenters of the fight over the hideous practice of mountaintop removal coal mining in the Appalachian Mountains. Coal River Mountain is an iconic symbol of the energy choices our country now faces: we can blast off the mountain's top to scoop out the dirty coal inside, or we can harness its enormous wind potential and start to build a better world.

Now we must take a small but signficant action to help our friends who are fighting the good fight there in Appalachia--a 350 future is not a coal-powered future, and Coal River Mountain is one of the epicenters in the fight against coal."

NRDC: Take Action: Urge the Obama administration to help save Coal River Mountain

NRDC: Take Action: Urge the Obama administration to help save Coal River Mountain: "Mountaintop removal strip mining has leveled hundreds of Appalachian peaks, leaving scarred landscapes, polluted water and impoverished communities behind, and now the last remaining mountain in West Virginia's Coal River valley is in danger. Send a message right away urging the Obama administration to immediately halt the blasting on Coal River Mountain. Learn more about this issue �"

Gucci Group commits to saving Indonesia’s rainforests | Grist

Gucci Group commits to saving Indonesia’s rainforests | Grist: "There’s a new fashion trend this fall: saving Indonesian rainforests. The Gucci Group, the prestigious conglomerate of fashion and luxury brands that owns Yves Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney, and Balenciaga, has decided to eliminate all paper made from Indonesian rainforests. That includes everything from its letterhead to the pretty paper bags with ribbon handles that they give to shoppers to hold their new couture."

Corporate Accountability International

Corporate Accountability International: "This summer, Congress sent letters to Coke and 12 other industry CEO’s demanding to know the sites and sources of its bottled water. Most of Dasani comes from public water supplies, though you wouldn’t know from the label!

Coke has made it clear that, even with the demands of Congress and thousands of people around the country, it'll take much more for it to come clean.

Now is the time to tell Coke to put this information on its Dasani brand labels. Send a message to CEO Muhtar Kent and join the hundreds taking action across the country during this National Coke Week of Action."

WakeUpWalMart.com - Take off Walmart's health care "mask"

WakeUpWalMart.com - Take off Walmart's health care "mask": "Apparently, every day is Halloween at Walmart headquarters. For months, Walmart has been dressed up as a health care champion: trumpeting support for the employer mandate and running ads about how 'proud' it is of its health care record. In truth, Walmart's talk simply masks the reality of its health care failures.

Behind Walmart's PR mask is something uglier and scarier than anything you will see this Halloween. Behind the mask is the harsh reality of Walmart's notion of health care: unaffordable and inadequate coverage, nearly half of its employees without company health care, and a staggering number of its workers forced onto taxpayer-subsidized health care.

This Halloween, we want to do something a little different. We want to take off Walmart's mask and challenge the company to live up to its own rhetoric on health care. Join us. Take action, and help us 'remove Walmart's mask' in time for Halloween."

Win a Vegan Feast From Field Roast | Thank You | PETA.org

Win a Vegan Feast From Field Roast | Thank You | PETA.org: "Need a few more reasons to ditch your turkey dinner this Thanksgiving? Take just a couple of minutes to watch 'Butterball's House of Horrors: A PETA Undercover Investigation.'"

Glenn Beck Takes on Vegetarians | TakePart Social Action Network™

Glenn Beck Takes on Vegetarians | TakePart Social Action Network™: "Speaking of Fox News former TakePart blogger Kerry Truman just alerted me (via Twitter) to a frustrating rant from Glenn Beck about vegetarianism (which seems to be all over the place these days). In it Beck expresses his disgust with Meatless Mondays (whom we love here at TakePart) a group that recently partnered with Baltimore city schools to stop the schools from serving meat one day a week.

Beck’s rant is below."

Corn-based meat and ethanol: burning the planet to a crisp | Grist

Corn-based meat and ethanol: burning the planet to a crisp | Grist: "What do industrially produced meat and corn-based ethanol have in common?

Well, they both thrive on the assumption that it’s good idea to devote vast swaths of land to an incredibly resource-intensive crop—corn—and then run that crop through an energy-sucking process to create a product of dubious value.

And ... they both got tagged as major drivers of climate change this past week."

Six months after the outbreak, who’s investigating the CAFO-swine flu link? | Grist

Six months after the outbreak, who’s investigating the CAFO-swine flu link? | Grist: "When respiratory viruses get into these confinement facilities, they have continual opportunity to replicate, mutate, reassort, and recombine into novel strains ... The best surrogates we can find in the human population are prisons, military bases, ships, or schools. But respiratory viruses can run quickly through these [human] populations and then burn out, whereas in CAFOs—which often have continual introductions of [unexposed] animals—there’s a much greater potential for the viruses to spread and become endemic.”
—Gregory Gray, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Iowa College of Public Health, quoted in “Swine CAFOs & Novel H1N1 Viruses,” Environmental Health Perspectives, September 2009, by Charles W. Schmidt."

Maria Cantwell for U.S. Senate - Cantwell.com

Maria Cantwell for U.S. Senate - Cantwell.com: "Currently, there is little competition in the health insurance market. Most communities are served by only one or two companies and this lack of competition translates to higher costs and less coverage. Allowing people to choose between a public option and a range of private companies would improve competition and result in better coverage for a better price.

If you agree, please make your voice heard by adding your name using the form on the right."

Corporate Accountability International

Corporate Accountability International: "Coke National Week of Action

October 26 - October 29

Coke, one of the largest manufacturers of bottled water in the world, has been ignoring the growing concern of its misleading marketing of its Dasani brand water. From October 26th through October 29th Corporate Accountability International will be joining with communities, activists, members, students and consumers across the country for a week of action to demand Coke appropriately label their Dasani bottles to reflect that the water in the bottle comes from a public water source.

You can help by making a quick phone call to Coke headquarters asking for Coke to change its misleading ways (directions below). Make sure to place your call before 7PM EST!"

Blue Language From Schwarzenegger's Red Pen? - The Two-Way - Breaking News, Analysis Blog : NPR

Blue Language From Schwarzenegger's Red Pen? - The Two-Way - Breaking News, Analysis Blog : NPR: "His office swears (pun intended) that it's unintentional. But reading down the lines, it sure looks like California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger dropped an F-bomb on his critics in the California State Assembly."

Sierra Club: Thank you! Please take a moment to contact your mayor.

Sierra Club: Thank you! Please take a moment to contact your mayor.

In Depth: America's Safest Cities - 4. Seattle, Wa. (tie) - Forbes.com

In Depth: America's Safest Cities - 4. Seattle, Wa. (tie) - Forbes.com: "4. Seattle, Wa. (tie)

Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, Wash.

Violent crime: 3 of 40

Workplace deaths: 2 of 40

Traffic deaths: 8 of 40

Natural disaster risk: 31 of 40

Read on for more, including where Americans pay most to live, strange homes for sale and an interactive look at the country's most expensive ZIP codes."