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1.27.12: NNR’s Ben Pomeroy talks in depth with energy policy blogger and NNR contributor Andrew Shenkel about the election-friendly energy agenda laid down by the President in the State of the Union.

1.18.12: Film director Larry Fessenden (pictured above) boasts a prolific career scaring people. Of all the horrors he been part of, Larry may be most frightened by what’s happening in real life on planet earth. Many of his films find their terror from present day ecological and resource crises, like climate change or water shortages.

When he’s not grave robbing on the screen, Larry runs the website Running Out of Road to give voice to the environmental issues and personalities that motivate (read enrage) him.

Producer Ben Pomeroy talks with Larry about horror movies as cautionary tales and how a good Hollywood scare flick can help carve some edginess into the green movement.

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12.28.11: From the debates on federal oil subsidies, the disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant to the fight over fracking in New York State, environmental news in 2011 mirrored the contentions and unknowns also found in the economy and the world of politics.

In our year end retrospective we bring you the varied voices from some of our stories that were the news of 2011: political insiders in DC, ethanol growers in Iowa, dishwashers at Occupy Wall Street and a fisherman in Louisiana one year after the BP oil spill.

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12.16.11: Climate negotiators from around the world gathered in Durban, South Africa last week to discuss how the international community might beat back global warming. Though the United Nations Framework on Climate Change summit yielded a consensus to renew the Kyoto Protocol and fund mitigation and adaptation measures in developing nations, heavy hitters like India, China and the U.S are still resistant to the policy framework. To make matters worse, Canada, one of the world’s top ten polluters, dropped out of the Protocol entirely after the conference concluded.

Brad Johnson, editor of the Think Progress Green Blog at the Center for American Progress, talks us through the existential state of affairs over the world’s only climate summit.

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Last year the Gowanus Canal was designated a Super Fund site by the Environmental Protection Agency in order to remove the chemicals, heavy metals and pollutants from what that agency called, “one of the most extensively contaminated waterways in the nation”.

Producer Ben Pomeroy visited the Gowanus and the surrounding neighborhood to learn some of it’s history and the people who live and work around its banks.

He discovered that behind the somewhat mistaken reputation as a fetid body dump- is a Revolutionary War battle site, a tree from China, a third generation family company and a foster home for the set pieces of blockbuster movies.

Ben spoke with Eymund Diegel, curator of the Hall of Gowanus at Proteus Gowanus Gallery, Daryl Carneo of Statewide Fireproof door Company and Jane Borock of Film Biz Recycling.

This story is from our archives.

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