By Nils Bruzelius, EWG Executive Editor

Lobbyists for polluting industries and opponents of environmental regulation have been tripping over one another to come up with self-serving lists of targets for the Congressional Super Committee as it labors to find ways to reduce federal spending and trim the deficit.

The nation deserves a more thoughtful approach, one that recognizes that Americans want, and deserve, to live in a place where air and water are clean, where soil and natural resources are conserved for future generations, and where health and safety - not merely profit - stand atop the hierarchy of public values.

EWG believes that many, but not all, of the budget proposals offered by President Obama go in the right direction by recognizing a larger vision of the public good, one that takes into account the interests of all Americans, not just the self-serving interests of the wealthiest and those who seek to profit while sacrificing health and the environment.

With that in mind, EWG offers the Super Committee its own lists:

Top 10 Things NOT to Cut - if you care about the environment and public health:

1. Good food for kids. Full funding for nutrition programs that help Americans who lack access to affordable, nutritious food, especially the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (formerly Food Stamps), the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, school meals and the Fruit and Vegetable School Snack Program, as well as funding for the Healthy, Hunger-free Kids Act of 2010.
2. The EPA. The Environmental Protection Agency's funding and authority to protect human health and the environment, including the resources it needs to appropriately enforce the Clean Air, Clean Water, Safe Drinking Water and inadequate Toxic Substances Control acts.
3. Healthy foods. Programs that promote cultivation and consumption of fruits, vegetables and other healthy foods, including Section 32 Fruit and Vegetable Purchases, including the Department of Defense's FRESH program, and the Department of Agriculture's Specialty Crop Block Grants that are targeted to a wide range of specialty crop farmers and consumers.
4. Food safety. Programs at the Food and Drug Administration and the US Department of Agriculture designed to ensure food safety, especially funding for the brand new Food Safety Modernization Act.
5. Agricultural conservation. Conservation and research programs that support farming practices that prevent the loss of irreplaceable soil, prevent water and air pollution and conserve water and wildlife habitat.
6. Water infrastructure. Funding for state and local efforts to replace the nation's crumbling, leaky infrastructure of aqueducts, pipes and water treatment facilities that struggle to supply Americans with pure, safe water.
7. Clean energy. Funding for basic and applied scientific research at the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy that sow the seeds for tomorrow's true clean energy breakthroughs.
8. Extreme weather. Research and monitoring programs at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and elsewhere that seek to better understand the dynamics of climate change and to develop strategies to reverse the trends toward warmer temperatures and extreme weather events.
9. Toxic-related disease research. Programs at public health agencies that identify, understand and find cures for disease and disability caused by poor diets and environmental contamination, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, the National Toxicology Program and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
10. Sustainable agriculture. USDA programs that provide new market opportunities and research for beginning, sustainable and organic farmers and ranchers, including the Farmers Market Promotion Program, Value-Added Producer Grants, Beginning Farmers and Ranchers, Sustainable Agriculture Research Education Programs and Organic Extension and Research Initiative.

Top things that the Congressional Super Committee should cut:

1. Kickbacks for dirty fuels. Subsidies, tax credits and special breaks for the oil, gas, and mining industries that encourage the fouling of land, water and air.
2. Ethanol subsidies. Subsidies and tax credits for first generation biofuels such as corn ethanol that encourage fencerow-to-fencerow crop production, contribute to higher food prices and barely dent the nation's reliance on fossil fuels.
3. Cash to wealthy, absentee landowners. Direct payments that go to wealthy farm operations regardless of need and to landowners who do no farming, and loopholes that allow these subsidies to be paid to landowners and farmers who exceed payment limitations or income caps.
4. Crop insurance. Heavily subsidized crop insurance programs that enrich insurance companies and farmers already making record incomes.
5. Antiquated price support programs. Outdated price support programs for crops that currently command all-time high prices, such as corn, soybeans and wheat.
6. Bogus rural energy programs. Energy programs in the farm bill that undermine true energy efficiency and independence at the expense of wind, solar and energy conservation projects, such as subsidizing large pulp and paper companies and funding installation of ethanol blender pumps.

Like our lists? Great. Then let the 12 members of the Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction (aka the Super Committee) know that you want them to tackle the deficit the right way - because there IS a right way.

EWG sent the committee members our recommendations, showing that they can address the budget AND make sure that we protect programs for children, the environment and our health, as well as ensure that there's a true safety net for farmers who need it.

Just click here now to stand with EWG.

If you're a Westerner - and what American isn't, really? -- Colorado College's State of the Rockies Project is a must-read, must-bookmark web destination.

The project's mission -- to conduct "state-of-the-art research to help Rockies residents clearly see their communities, environment and economy, so they can better shape their own future" -- is strikingly like Environmental Working Group's detailed, hyper-local data and analysis.

This year: Food & Ag
This year's topic, food and agriculture, is a natural fit with EWG's work. CC students, guided by economics professor Walter E. Hecox, an economics professor, are using EWG's farm subsidy database to help document how the economics and demography of farming are changing the physical and cultural landscape -- and how its traditions and economic and demographic pressures are shaping agriculture and ranching.

Last week, I traveled to the CC campus to preview EWG's new AgMag for a State of the Rockies symposium on the politics of agriculture. (Full disclosure: my son Shannon Morgan, a CC sophomore contemplating a major in an environmental field, was in the audience. It was great to see him and enjoy a few moments at an historic campus where Katherine Lee Bates, a visiting teacher, was inspired to compose America the Beautiful. But he's not one of the privileged few upperclassmen tapped each year for the project team.)

Students find complicated agricultural picture
The student researchers have already dug up some facts that make for a complicated picture. On one hand, farmland acreage is shrinking and the number of farming and ranching operations is growing. That could suggest more family and small-business farms profiting from rapidly expanding demand for locally-grown food. On the other hand, "mega-agricultural enterprises" are major factors in the regional agricultural economy.

Upcoming speakers: Stanford professor Rosamond Naylor, an expert on trade-offs between grass-fed and industrial livestock, journalist and author Richard Manning, author of Rewilding the West: Restoration in a Prairie Landscape,"and Dr. Bonnie Lynn-Sherow, associate professor of history at Kansas State University and author of Red Earth: Race and Agriculture in Oklahoma Territory.

If you can't make the lectures, no worries - you can download past report cards and sign up for the agriculture edition, due in March.

Meanwhile, there's a wealth of information in previous years' report cards.

The most recent, published last spring, focuses on incarceration, historic preservation and protection of wildlife in a region whose population is increasing 2.6 times faster than that of the U.S. The CC Rockies project is aimed at helping the West's people manage that tumultuous change.

You can still see the wilderness as it was, and still is, and should remain, in the State of the Rockies photo gallery.

Our new year's resolution: build on the accomplishments of 2008 to make 2009 the year we turn the corner on crucial environmental issues facing our society. We scored breakthroughs on a range of problems last year. Among them:

Advancing the Kid-Safe Chemicals Act.
EWG's work on toxic chemicals spurred the reintroduction of the Kid-Safe Chemicals Act and its requirement of mandatory biomonitoring of industrial chemicals in people. EWG briefed Congressional staff members on the legislation, that aims to replace the weak Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976. In the next Congress, EWG plans to organize briefings and push for hearings and passage of the bill.

Progressing toward a ban of toxic plastic chemical BPA.
On October 31, the Science Board of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a stinging rebuke to the agency and embraced EWG arguments that bisphenol-A (BPA), a synthetic estrogen used to make polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resin may be a threat to human health. The panel forced FDA to retreat from its stance that trace levels of BPA are safe in food packaging, including infant formula cans and baby bottles. EWG scientists testified, wrote comments and served on the expert panel for the Science Board.

In September, the National Institutes of Health's National Toxicology Program (NTP)declared that BPA, shown in laboratory tests to disrupt the endocrine system, may alter brain development, cause behavioral problems and damage the prostate glands in fetuses, infants and young children.

In 2009, EWG will work with Congressional leaders and the Obama administration to press for a federal ban of BPA in food packaging and other products that expose children and pregnant women to the chemical.

With strong advocacy by EWG's California office, the California assembly office came close to passing the first state-level BPA ban. In 2009, 13 state legislatures are expected to consider similar measures.

Blowing the whistle on FDA plan to push mercury-laced seafood.
On December 12, the Environmental Working Group made public internal government documents disclosing the Food and Drug Administration's secret plans to reverse federal warnings that pregnant women and children limit their fish intake to avoid mercury, a neurotoxin especially dangerous to the fetus and infants. EWG obtained both the FDA plan, stamped "CLOSE HOLD," and memos by senior Environmental Protection Agency scientists attacking FDA's rationale. The Washington Post broke the story, and other national stories followed.

Reaction from Capitol Hill was swift and sharp. Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., denounced FDA: "Now, in the administration's 11th hour, they are quietly trying to water down advisories for women and children about the dangers of mercury in fish, disregarding sound science on this issue....This backroom bouquet for special interests should be stopped in its tracks. If they slip this through, I will work with the incoming Obama Administration to restore science-based decisions on mercury."

Today we updated our farm bill pro-reform editorial map. The tally now stands at 411 reform minded editorials published in American dailies since January 1st, 2007. After the jump I break down some of the papers pushing hard for a change in the inequitable and wasteful farm subsidy system.

Cross posted on Mulch.

When few in America really understand what's at stake in the farm bill, and junk food is trying to run away with the subsidies again, what's a wholesome apple to do?

Ask for your help, is what. You can read more about the bill at foodbattle.org, and keep up to date on its movement in Congress at Mulch.

Remember the petition we asked (and asked, and asked) you to sign to tell Congress to Grow Organics?

Yesterday a team of EWG staffers descended on the Hill to deliver the petition -- 75 feet long -- to Representative Kind. When the Farm Bill comes to the floor of the House at the end of this week, Reps. Kind (D-WI) and Flake (R-AZ) will present the Fairness in Farm and Food Policy Amendment -- a bi-partisan amendment that will reduce direct payments to the largest landowners and agribusinesses and use those savings to bolster programs in nutrition, conservation, and rural development, as well as provide more support to socially disadvantaged farmers.

And, as Ken Cook pointed out, the amendment also provides "the most significant increase we've ever seen proposed for organic food and farming."

According to Rep. Kind, "This is about choice. This is giving farmers the options and the tools on how they want to work their own land -- and sustainable agriculture is the way they want to go."

So we here in the office are having a round of applause for all of you who signed the petition. But it's not over yet -- we've got an amendment headed to the floor, but the only way to make it a reality is to make sure your Representatives know that you expect them to support it.

Call your Representative and ask him or her to support the Fairness Amendment. You can find your Rep's phone number at Project Vote-Smart by entering his or her name or your 9-digit zipcode (don't know it? Find it here).

You may have heard a thing or two about a little bill that the House is scheduled to vote on at the end of July. Of $76 billion in subsidies in the current Farm Bill, organic farmers would receive less than one percent (Who is getting all that money? Have a look at the Farm Subsidy Database).

EWG Action Fund has created a petition asking Congress to include fair funding for organics in the Farm Bill. We want them to level the playing field for organic farmers and expand access to safe, healthy organic food. We set the bar high -- we're looking to get 30,000 signatures by July 15th. On July 17th, EWG Action Fund will deliver the petition to Congress to let them know that we want them to vote for organics.

What can you do? For starters, sign the petition. Then, tell your friends -- link it from your Myspace page, send out an email, share it on Facebook, and tell that nice lady you buy lettuce from at the farmer's market. Post about it on your blog -- and while you're at it, post a badge!

This week, EnviroLove goes out to Katrina at Kale for Sale, Caroline at FarmGirl's Adventures, Jennifer at Eco Child's Play, the friendly folks at What's Organic, Diane and her Big Green Purse, Caroline at Culinate, the Blue-Green Marble blogger, Organic Mama, Krista at the cleverly named Livin' la Vida Verde, Marc at Eat Local Challenge, Granny Miller, the author of Stories in America, the Organic Connection blog, and the inimitable Sam Fromartz at both Chews Wise and Gristmill. A special shout-out to Tabetha at Think Bigg, who also posted about the awesome tote bag you can get by donating $65 or more to the Grow Organics campaign!

Post about the petition on your blog, and next Friday I'll make sure you get some link lovin' from Enviroblog!