Even in Marin County, environmentalists see a need to preserve more lands in open space, and have formed a new organization to do just that.

Visit the MOST website here .

To view the Marin County Open Space District website as well as a map of current open space land, click here .

Plastic shopping bags have been banned in cities as big as San Francisco and as small as Healdsburg, but Marin county attorney Stephen Joseph says they’re getting a bum rap.

Tiburon Attorney Stephen Joseph has created the SaveThePlasticBag.org website.

His campaign was also recently profiled in TIME magazine.

Below, Joseph talks about the few photos that purport to show wildlife being harmed by plastic bags in their natural environment.

Plastic bags should be reused whenever possible, and those not being used can be recycled.

How do you improve the health of a whole county? That’s the challenge that Sonoma Health Action is tackling.

The number of uninsured in Sonoma County is estimated at over 42,000 and growing. Physicians continue to leave the community and specialists are in short supply. District hospitals are struggling financially as the competitive pressures of a rapidly changing health care marketplace continue to threaten and destabilize an already broken health care system.

Sonoma County is not alone in experiencing the impacts of the health care situation. Communities throughout the state have come together seeking solutions at the local level.  On August 14, 2007, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors authorized the Department of Health Services to convene a health action council to work on improving health and health care for all Sonoma County residents.

Visit their website here .

To take the Health Action Survey, click here .

There's  a schedule of upcoming public meetings hosted by Health Action here (pdf).

International free trade agreements are an expansion of domestic US policies that have been in place for over a century, but critic Jane Anne Morris says they were never a good idea.

Below, Morris explains how the issues generating protests against NAFT and the WTO now are much the same as they were 125 years ago when free trade was first imposed within the United States.

In Gaveling Down the Rabble, author/activist Jane Anne Morrow explores a century and a half of efforts by corporations and the courts to undermine local democracy in the United States by using a "free trade" model. It was that very nineteenth-century model that was later adopted globally by corporations to subvert local attempts at protecting the environment and citizen and worker health.

Jane Anne Morris is a corporate anthropologist with a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Texas. Her 1994 book was based on her work on energy issues in Texas during the 1980s. She has been active in anti-war, women's and environmental struggles since the 1970s.

Many of the biggest protest demonstrations of the past decade, such as thos one in Costa Rica, have been in opposition to "Free Trade" policies promulgated by major corporations, many of them US-based.