I just got a note that the segment is scheduled to air Monday.

The topic is whether the environmental movement has become preoccupied with global warming. It’s based, at least in part, on a piece I wrote for Lighter Footstep last June: Five Things that Are Worse than Global Warming. I published it on •the day of the Live Earth concerts, and it ended up being one of Lighter Footstep’s most read (and most controversial) articles.

Neda interviewed me for the better part of a half hour, and I expect the finished piece will only be three to five minutes. That means the bulk of what I had to say will remain on NPR’s virtual cutting floor. We’ll have to see what ends up actually making it on-air.

Lighter Footstep is primarily about personal approaches to Green Living, so we don’t directly address climate change that often. But the position I took with Neda is that the global warming issue was a real sea change for the environmental movement. Before An Inconvenient Truth came out, U.S. environmentalists were deeply demoralized after six years of being largely dismissed by the current administration. Within a matter of months, everything turned around. People are actually talking about the environment again, and you can’t walk into a store or turn on the television without seeing an unprecedented variety of green products and services.

The downside to all this attention to global warming is that other issues — some related, some not — are getting the cold shoulder. People are pretty quick to wonder how much carbon dioxide comes out of an automobile tailpipe or the stacks of some coal-burning power plant, forgetting entirely the tons of mercury, sulfur dioxide, and an alphabet soup of known carcinogens which find their way into our food and lungs each year. In terms of time line, the most pressing environmental issues probably have to do with water and energy. Our oceans are under increasing pressure from pollution and overfishing; deforestation is advancing at an alarming pace; and we have yet to fully address the ultimate environmental threat: nuclear weapons.

It’s a complex web of problems. We’ll see how the segment turns out. You can track down your local NPR station here. NPR also makes streaming audio available from their website.

I’d like to thank Neda for having me on, and WUWF — our NPR affiliate here in Pensacola — for so courteously proving me with studio time.

• Streaming audio of the Morning Edition feature is now available here.

Radio silence.

It’s a bit quiet here — and on some of our other sites — as my partners and I plot a course for 2008. We’ve had a great year: Lighter Footstep was tapped as one of Read/Write Web’s Top 35 Environmental Sites; we’re close to announcing a neat partnership with one of the world’s best-known news brands; and Google was unexpectedly kind to ecoTumble, our little green tumblelog.

There are a few things in the works which aren’t ready for discussion. Right now, I’m deep in the bunker preparing a site launch that should be a lot of fun. It’s a blog, and my first project in a while which is not explicitly green. I’ve enlisted a longtime blog friend to help make it happen. More to come — soon.

Speaking of things ecological: I’m scheduled to tape a short segment with NPR next week.They have a studio set aside for us on Thursday, and I’ll pass along air times once I know what they are. I haven’t been on the air since leaving commercial radio almost two years ago, and it’s a thrill to put on headphones for NPR. I’ve also enjoyed getting to know the impressive Neda Ulaby, who’s anchoring the report.

For now, though, it’s back to the dank confines of the bunker.

ToiletPaperWorld.com only works with Internet Explorer. Go figure.

WordPress 2.3.1 was released late Friday — a bugfix and security update. It also features support for Windows Live Writer and speed improvements in WP’s tag handling. The release notes are here.

Upgrading is straightforward: backup; overwrite; and run the installation script. Instructions are here. How to do a clean installation is here.

WordPress 2.3 was released on September 24th, featuring a built-in tagging system, update notifications, and improvements to the system’s SEO-friendliness.

It’s the weekend before Halloween, so perhaps it’s no surprise that Google has been handing out both tricks and treats.

First came a strange — and unexplained — round of Google Toolbar PageRank penalties for some of the web’s most popular sites. There was plenty of speculation and gnashing of teeth as to why this happened. PageRank was declared dead by some; Others were quick with an “I told you so” regarding the practice of selling text link advertising, which offends The Google. Whatever the reason, these changes are generally agreed to be individually applied penalties, not the long-overdue refresh of toolbar rank neurotically expected by skittish site owners.

This morning, Darren at Problogger, one of the penalized sites, noted that his previous PageRank has been restored. He also tipped that his sources indicate that Google’s blogger slapdown was, indeed, a response to text link ad sales. Problogger hasn’t sold links in quite some time, and was likely popped by mistake.

Enough of the tricks — on to the treats. It would appear that Google PageRank update has actually begun. There have been a few false alarms over the past month or so, but I’m seeing changes on several of my sites. Lighter Footstep is up from PR4 to PR5. Its sister site, ecoTumble, went from unranked to PR5. So perhaps we’re off to the races. If so, PageRank changes should fan out across the web over the next several hours as Google’s data centers update their indices.

Whether Toolbar PageRank will mean much over the coming months is another question.

Somebody once told me that the first post on a website is always the hardest: After deciding to publish, getting your site online, and actually committing your first few paragraphs to the ether, things get easier as you go. In theory, at least.

He quit blogging after six weeks.

Writing for the web is hard. Want to be noticed? Buy a dog and wait for dinnertime. According to the folks at Technorati, you’re one voice among 70 million. Admittedly, most of those other 69,999,999 other websites are pretty awful, and some of the web’s most successful New Media publishers will be quick to volunteer that they’re really no more talented than the next person. It’s just that they hung with it.

As I’m also doing. My name is Chris Baskind, and I run a developing group of green lifestyle sites for Vida Verde Media. This, however, is going to be a personal page — a place to chat about New Media and related topics, my projects, and some of the things which cross my desk. Please subscribe the feed, if you’re so inclined. Browse the links. And jump in when something interests you. Thanks for reading.

There: first post, done. It’s downhill from here, right?