Plastic bags are out, reusable tote bags are in. Some people are trading in their gas-guzzlers for hybrids or smaller cars that get 30-plus mpg.

 Over the weekend, people turned out for St. Louis Earth Day festivities. The headline in the Post-Dispatch today said that ‘green goes mainstream.’

 At my home, we recycle. Newspapers and magazines, cardboard and cans, plastic and glass. We don’t have curbside recycling; we have to haul it up to the village once a month. It’s not terribly convenient, but it’s the right thing to do — at least for us.

Is that true that green…

It’ll cost Ameren nearly $180 million to settle the mess that was made almost two years ago, when the Taum Sauk reservoir burst, spilling millions of gallons through Johnson’s Shut-Ins State Park.

Here’s a few paragraphs from our story today:

Ameren Corp. reached a settlement agreement that will require the state’s largest utility company to pay $179.7 million in cash and property to compensate for damages resulting from the Taum Sauk reservoir collapse, the Missouri attorney general’s office said this morning.

Ameren’s settlement brings an end to months of negotiations between the St. Louis-based company and three state agencies, said…

Mowing the back yard a week ago, I stepped over at least four piles of scat. Little pellets, and lots of them, in each pile.

Before that, in the midst of the week-and-a-half heat wave in St. Louis, I’d walk out to pick up the paper at the curb each morning and see the heat’s effect on my withering front yard flower beds. Then, one morning, I glanced over to find that the flowers were gone. The beds were empty.

The deer have been regularly invading my yard, apparently. But they are quite stealthy about it. I never see them….

Thousands of people now ride, hike and camp at Missouri’s St. Joe State Park in Park Hills, Mo., the former lead mining site, about 55 miles south of St. Louis.

But nearly 30 years after it was converted into a recreational park, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has raised new questions about letting the public play in the mine’s gritty leftovers.

It’s a dusty, gritty place in areas where all-terrain vehicles are allowed. For most of the past 30 years, park users have been stirring up the sandy, dusty mine tailings that the EPA says are left over from lead…

Throughout the metropolitan area, communities are spending millions to spruce up their downtowns or build new ones. From the story:

The movement is a return to a simpler,  more intimate way of life that has swept the country during the past 20 years. Urban planning experts say children of the suburbs have grown disenchanted with life in a subdivision and crave a more stimulating living environment.

The movement called new urbanism, which emphasizes pedestrian friendly, high density, mixed use developments, has come a little late to the region.

It’s as if the communities are trying to build an identity by building a…