They're clean! They're green! Or so the industry PR boasts about biomass power plants. If anything, the opposite is true.

Biomass is any substance that isn't a fossil fuel and is arguably organic. Wood waste is one of the primary fuels that biomass incinerators burn. Wood waste includes industrial wood waste (like shipping pallets and sawdust), which is often contaminated with toxic chemicals and plastics that form dioxin, the most potent carcinogen ever studied, when burned.

Biomass power plants aren't built in white, middle-class neighborhoods but in urban neighborhoods populated with poor people of color. Other prime locations are poor, rural areas, such as Crawford County, in southwest Indiana.

On Feb. 1 President Barack Obama asked Congress to approve a record $708 billion in defense spending for fiscal 2011. The budget calls for a 3.4 percent increase in the Pentagon's base budget to $549 billion, plus $159 billion to fund the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

But citizens aren't sitting by while the Pentagon's budget balloons. On March 20, just after the seventh anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, protestors will march on Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and San Francisco.

On Friday evening, March 19, at least 55 Hoosiers and Kentucky residents will board a bus bound for Washington, D.C., for the second peace march since President Obama was elected. Participants will demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan and Iraq.

On Thursday, Jan. 21, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision that’s already reverberating throughout the nation.

The decision, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, allows business corporations to donate unlimited amounts of money to electoral campaigns, including attack ads. The Court ruled that for-profit corporations can exercise their First Amendment rights to lobby candidates by buying the outcomes of elections.

Even President Obama, in an ephemeral moment of liberal feeling, opposes the decision. According to the New York Times, right after the court issued the decision, Obama called it “a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics.”

We live in an age of attacks on human and civil rights -- for instance, jailing people indefinitely without charging them with a crime and combating protestors violently, such as at the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh a few months ago. People who dissent or engage in left-wing activism are right to worry about being charged with a crime despite not doing anything the Constitution doesn't allow.

To prepare activists for visits by federal law-enforcement agents, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) has republished If an Agent Knocks, a 47-page booklet that it's distributing to the public free of charge. Originally published in 1989, the booklet was revised and updated this past September.

CCR describes its mission as follows. "The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration for Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization [and public interest law firm] committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change."

It's not every day that the U.S. secretary of defense comes to Bloomington to address the new graduates and receive an honorary doctorate. Local peace activists saw this event, which took place at 9 a.m. on Dec. 19 at Assembly Hall, as a call to action.

On the cold, snowy Saturday morning, 22 people with signs stood, conversing quietly, across from the south entrance to Assembly Hall as people arrived to observe a commencement ceremony that featured Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

Gates served as secretary of defense under President George W. Bush and continues in that role today under President Barack Obama. He was the director of the CIA from 1991 to 1993. Before that, from 1986 to 1989, he was the deputy director of the CIA.

Fourteen people braved the cold Friday night to hold a candlelight vigil at the Monroe County Courthouse Square to demonstrate their concern about global climate change and the meeting about it now taking place in Copenhagen, where world government officials are meeting to craft a treaty that will ameliorate the worst effects of climate change.

The vigil was a follow-up to the worldwide demonstrations on Oct. 24 in support of a critical goal, reducing the world's CO2 emissions to 350 parts per million from the current 390 parts per million.

"We're asking the world's leaders to follow the science," said Michael Beczkiewicz.

On Oct. 29 came a long-awaited state legislative study hearing about the future of the Morgan-Monroe/Yellowwood State Forest backcountry, a 3,000-acre wilderness that hasn't been logged commercially in 30 years. As polls have demonstrated repeatedly, environmentalists and the majority of the public want it to stay that way. But the state's Department of Natural Resources (DNR) plans to commercially log the backcountry.

The Indiana House of Representatives Natural Resources Summer Study Committee, made up of three representatives and three senators, held the hearing on a bill, introduced by Rep. Matt Pierce (D-Bloomington), to prohibit logging in the backcountry. The DNR gave a presentation advocating commercial logging in the backcountry, and then the floor was opened to comments.

This month the U.N. General Assembly is debating the "Goldstone Report," authored by the U.N. Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict.

The report calls for both Hamas and Israel to conduct thorough, independent investigations of possible war crimes committed during Israel’s 22-day siege of Gaza, called “Operation Cast Lead,” or face possible prosecution by the International Criminal Court in six months.

According to Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the report is “a crucial mechanism for ensuring that all parties are held accountable for war crimes against civilians.”

Small Box, a new opera set in a death row visiting room, will have its world premiere in Bloomington next month. The opera will be performed for one night only on Saturday, Nov. 7, at 7 p.m. at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater.

With music by Herman Whitfield III and a libretto by Bruce L. Pearson, the one-act, hour-long opera takes a serious look at the death penalty without arguing either for or against.

"The opera," Pearson said in a phone interview, "offers a fairly typical cross-section of those who find their way to death row." With Small Box he hopes to "make people think by presenting a realistic view of prison life." The raw material, Pearson said, "is from getting to know the guys on the row."

On Saturday, Oct. 24, drop everything and get yourself to the Farmer's Market at noon. It's the International Day of Climate Action, and everyone counts.

More than 3,000 actions in 158 countries -- from Nepal to Belize to Brazil, Egypt and the United States -- are in the works for that day.

350.org is coordinating the events. Founded by author and environmentalist Bill McKibben, it's the first universal grassroots global campaign against climate change.