Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt was all jowls and loony fervor while addressing an audience at the Great Smoky National Park last week. "When these ancient and hardy creatures are in trouble," Babbitt declaimed (perhaps thinking of his own persistent woes with Native American casino licensing), "it's very likely that a host of others are not far behind." Canaries in the global coal mine, frogs span incredibly vast and varied habitats across the world, leading a Zen existence -- everything flows through their permeable skins: waterborne toxins, airborne scuzz, ultraviolet radiation. They're so sensitive to biosphere wobbles that some scientists aren't even sure it's pollution that's at fault, but instead a more mysterious terrestrial trauma.

With news of the amphibian decline, environmental alarmism -- the bio-shriek -- has given way to the eco-mourn, a tenebrous Green fatalism. Cursed by research characterizing human dominance of the Big Blue Marble as a relative anomaly, this new phase finds an eloquently depressing voice in David Quammen's essay, "Planet of Weeds," from this month's Harper's. His thesis is pure Silent Running: human overpopulation and manifold species devastation will accelerate another planetary mass-extinction (there have already been many), leaving behind nothing but "weeds" -- cockroaches, rats, pigeons, coyotes. Ugly beasts, blight species, a triumphant plague. Homosapiens, of course, are the weed perfected. We'll thrive, in what Quammen envisions as a bleak future, riven by class warfare. Obviously, no frogs. "It's main consoling felicity," he writes of this wasteland, "is that there will be no shortage of crows." Maybe they'll taste like chicken. They certainly won't croak us to sleep at night.
-- Matthew DeBord

Post your thoughts on today's column in the FEED Daily Loop.

While obscenity remains illegal, the "right to communicate indecent material with intent to annoy someone over the Internet" is protected by the Constitution, a federal court ruled last Thursday, in favor of ApolloMedia's challenge to the Communications Decency Act. ApolloMedia produces annoy.com, a website that aims to spark political action through shock tactics, angry venting, and antagonistic digital postcards. But now that it's okay to offend, annoy.com's creator Clinton Fein complains to Wired: "the only regret that I have is this: The most indecent and annoying thing I have yet to see on the Internet is the Ken Starr report, and with this ruling, we've just saved his ass!"

"I've broken my right wrist three times, my right collar bone three times, had my shoulder separated once, hyperextended my elbow, hyperextended my knees, dislocated my hip, got smacked in the face real hard once, had to have my cheek rebuilt, and I broke a leg or two -- but all in all, I'd go do it again," says one weather worn cowboy about his days as a rodeo rider. Check out Journal-E's photo documentary "Busting Loose."