Bird-A-Thon is here! This is Felix Neck’s annual birding fundraiser. Kickoff is 6pm on May 15 and the birding mayhem continues through Saturday, May 16 at 6PM. Last year we had great participation from both birders and sponsors. You can join our team and go birding with us, bird on your own, pledge a set amount or per species, and spread the word to your friends, neighbors and fellow birders. If you want to bird, let me know and I will add you to our team roster. If you raise $75 or more, you get a Bird-A-Thon t-shirt. If birding isn’t your bag, you can support us by making a donation. New this year – we can all create our own personal fundraising website. Justen and I have set ours up, go to http://www.firstgiving.com/suzanbellincampi or http://www.firstgiving.com/justenwalker. You can make your own fundraising website, Justen will show you how or pledge at ours! Please stop by to pick up your Bird-A-Thon pins, postcards, pledge sheets and get all of the details. Or give me a call to let me know if you can help. Thanks for everything that you all do. Suzan.

Local herbalist Holly Bellebuono is accepting applications for the Basic Apprenticeship Program. Apprentices will learn first-hand the art and science of herbal medicine making, including botanical identification of wild plants, wild crafting and harvesting, making salves, tinctures, liniments, syrups, extracts, teas and more; as well as entrepreneurial skills involved with an herbal medicine business. Apprenticeship begins mid-May and ends Mid-October; a certificate of completion will be given at the close of the program. Interested applicants should email Holly at holly@VineyardHerbs.com for further information.

HOUSTON — The decline in crude oil prices gets all the headlines, but the first globalized natural gas glut in history is driving an even more drastic collapse in the cost of gas that cooks food, heats homes and runs factories in the United States and many other countries.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/21/
business/energy-environment/21gas.html?hpw

AS tens of thousands of people recently strolled among booths of the nation’s largest organic and natural foods show here, munching on fair-trade chocolate and sipping organic wine, a few dozen pioneers of the industry sneaked off to an out-of-the-way conference room.

Although unit sales of organic food have leveled off and even declined lately, versus a year earlier, the mood among those crowded into the conference room was upbeat as they awaited a private screening of a documentary called “Food Inc.” — a withering critique of agribusiness and industrially produced food.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/
business/22food.html?hpw

Plastic Plague, a National Geographic film Here is another video on our vast plastic pollution problem. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1glVFMej_3g

In a sharp reversal of Bush administration policies, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday that the agency planned an aggressive review of permit requests for mountaintop coal mining, citing serious concerns about potential harm to water quality.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/
science/earth/25mining.html

IN AN EFFORT to meet clean-air laws, the Public Service Company of New Hampshire is busy trying to install an expensive scrubber on the smokestack of its Merrimack Station coal-fired power plant in Bow. A group of angry ratepayers is trying to slow it down. And here's the man-bites-dog thing, which makes this one of the more interesting ecological battles underway in the nation: The angry ratepayers are almost certainly the real defenders of the green.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/
oped/articles/2009/03/26/a_lemon_for_new_hampshire/