Amanda Witherell

Circus battles "animal special interest groups"

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By Steven T. Jones

I’m still waiting for the dispatch from our correspondent at opening day of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus elephant abuse trial, which I’ll probably post in the morning. Read more »

Profiles of change

Inauguration Issue: President Obama's call for citizen action is already resonating
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amanda@sfbg.com
Photos by Pat Mazzera

"Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America," President Barack Obama told US citizens on his Inauguration Day. Read more »

Obama kite

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By Amanda Witherell

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It was a great day to be out and about in San Francisco. This morning, before I headed to Civic Center to watch the swearing-in ceremony in front of City Hall, I was recalling where I had been in 2005 when Bush was inaugurated for the second time -- sitting glumly at my kitchen table in Sedgwick, Maine, listening to the brutal truth broadcast by NPR. Read more »

This land was your land

The American West at Risk confronts mine-all-mine mentality
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Anyone paying any kind of attention has a deep-gut feeling that things aren't going well for Earth. No matter how fancy or technologically advanced we get, everything humans make and break is fashioned from the resources at hand — water, air, petroleum, minerals, soil and its nutrients, and plants and trees and their fruit. Your MacBook may look space age, but it didn't fall from the sky. "Nearly everything you use every day is based on minerals mined somewhere, often leaving behind disfigured land and a toxic mess," Howard G. Wilshire, Jane E. Nielson, and Richard W. Read more »

LIT: Authors and SFBG talk saving the earth

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by Amanda Witherell

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Yes, even careless placement of renewable energy is hurting the land -- addressed in chapter five. Read more »

Losing the West

Green City: "Americans have to start caring about the survival of small communities, their local towns, and their local resources"
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amanda@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Our society can't continue functioning the way it does. Exploiting the natural abundance of resources in the western United States, without balancing the needs of nature, has lead to the myriad environmental problems outlined in The American West at Risk, a book recently penned by Bay Area–based geologists Richard W. Hazlett, Jane E. Nielson, and Howard G. Read more »

Waning wildlife

Green City: Bay Area wildlife is already being negatively affected by a warmer world
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amanda@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Changes to ocean and air temperatures, rising sea levels, loss of habitat, scarcity of food, altered precipitation patterns, environmental asynchronicity — these are the concerns of wildlife biologists who are watching the increased effects of climate change on the thousands of plant and animal species that share the earth with people. Read more »

The Chron's skewed notions of water and rights

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by Amanda Witherell

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“Is there a right to water?” The San Francisco Chronicle’s editors asked today. The editorial outlined how water isn’t currently considered a human right by the UN, an issue the Guardian also recently covered. The Chron still found a way to Read more »

Powerless

There's almost unanimous approval throughout the city that beefing up transmission lines would be better than building a power plant
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> amanda@sfbg.com

GREEN CITY Sup. Read more »

Budget funeral

San Francisco's social safety net takes brunt of mid-year cutbacks
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amanda@sfbg.com

Hundreds of people gathered for a funeral among makeshift gravestones buried in the lawn of City Hall on Dec. 11. The tombstones marked some of the essential public health and community services laid to rest by mid-year budget cuts: health care for jail inmates, day services for the homeless, the SRO Collaborative, and the Laguna Honda adult day care center.

Collectively they amount to a $36 million thinning of an already stretched social safety net that is designed to catch the most vulnerable populations in San Francisco. Read more »