Washington, DC -- As I write this, the AP is breaking the story about (and Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne is putting together an emergency press conference to discuss) the Bush Administration's secret plan to repeal the most important sections of the Endangered Species Act. From what we know of the plan, it reprises all of the disdain for science and political trumping of expertise that has characterized previous Bush Administration efforts to dismantle fundamental environmental laws. And it sends a clear signal that the Administration will spend the rest of its days razing the rules and regulations left standing.
This plan to render the ESA impotent would exclude federal biologists from decisions about whether a federal project threatens species, and it specifies that if an agency chops its projects into small-enough pieces, then "by definition" the project is so small that it cannot be a threat!
So now Kempthorne is going public. These changes have already been called "illegal" by Environment Committee Chair Barbara Boxer and hearken back to the early days of the ESA and the National Environmental Policy Act, when agencies routinely claimed their projects wouldn't endanger the environment because each segment of a road would have no impact on air pollution, and no one timber sale would wipe out a species. The courts repeatedly rebuffed these efforts, so Boxer is on strong ground -- and Congress will have a chance to overturn any rule the Administration issues while it is in session. But this announcement makes it clear that in the next 100 days the Administration will try to do by regulation what it has been blocked from doing for the past eight years.
Martha's Vineyard, MA -- Watching the shenanigans in the nation's capital from the shores of Tashmoo Pond has been entertaining, if not exactly amusing, this week. First we got confirmation that the appointments process in the Justice Department has been severely politicized, with political hacks being put in key career positions. Then, as if to remind us of why this kind of political manipulation in the Department of Justice is so important, we had the indictment of Ted Stevens by career officials of exactly the sort that Attorney General Gonzalez was trying to replace with cronies. And today we learn that the list of cronies to be appointed came all the way from the White House.
Things haven't been much better over at the EPA. A federal judge in Florida, in a stinging rebuke to both the state and to the EPA, ruled that the Agency had turned a "blind eye" as Florida broke its own rules committing it to restore the ecosystem.
The Miccosukee Indians, who live in the Everglades, and Friends of the Everglades sued in 2004 over Florida's repeated delay in pollution cleanup deadlines.
District Court judge Allen Gold ruled that the environmentalists and the tribe "are correct." Gold wrote that "EPA has once again avoided its duty to protect the Everglades." Gold also ruled that the Florida legislature "violated its fundamental commitment and promise to protect the Everglades."
This was also the week that an internal EPA email instructing its enforcement officials not to talk to investigators, including EPA's own Inspector General, leaked out. "If you are contacted directly by the IG's office or GAO requesting information of any kind ... please do not respond to questions or make any statements," reads the e-mail sent by Robbi Farrell, the head of the Agency's Office of Enforcement and Compliance, A cynic might conclude that the Agency has something to hide. He might also wonder how effective such a missive will be, given how rapidly it leaked out. Isn't the attempt to restore the reign of terror to the ranks of the civil service a bit like trying to toughen discipline for prisoners of the Bastille -- after it was already stormed?
And, finally, this became the week when enough was enough for Congress. Four of the leading Senate overseers of the EPA -- California's Barbara Boxer, Rhode Island's Sheldon Whitehouse, Minnesota's Amy Klobuchar, and New Jersey's Frank Lautenberg finally joined the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth in demanding that EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson resign, and that the Justice Department investigate him for lying under oath to Congress about the role of the White House in Johnson's decision not to permit California to implement its tougher clean air standards for cars.
The smoking gun of Johnson's obeisance to White House pressure came in the form of testimony from a former EPA official, Jason Burnett, to Congress -- which may explain Johnson's desperate attempts to keep his enforcement staff, who probably know best where the real skeletons are buried, away from the press and the Agency's independent Inspector General.
Of course, many of the Justice Department officials who will respond to the Senators' request for an investigation are the same politically tainted staff who were illegally shoehorned into career jobs under former Attorney General Gonzalez at the demand of President Bush.
So while the kettle is bubbling in the nation's capital, real justice seems several hundred days away.
Cleveland, OH -- Not since the Sierra Club's first-ever Presidential endorsement, of Walter Mondale back in 1984, has a Club Presidential endorsement gotten the kind of media attention that our endorsement of Barack Obama received on Friday. Perhaps it was the unusual joint announcement with Leo Gerard of the United Steelworkers and Allison Chin, President of the Sierra Club. Perhaps it was the centrality of our message -- that a new energy future is the key to our economy, our environment, and our security -- to this year's Presidential dialogue. Perhaps it was the fact that Senator John McCain, who had been sitting on the fence on environmental issues all year, picked last week to fall off -- firmly inside George Bush's Big Oil corral.
But the audience understood that Obama gets it -- that if Obama were in the White House there wouldn't be any doubt that we would be pushing wind, solar, and a host of new energy technologies to the forefront, instead of extending bloated subsidies to oil and nuclear -- that Obama believes that green jobs are the American future.
Senator Sherrod Brown was there, one of the people in the U.S. Senate who gets it best -- and the Ohio that two years ago sent Brown to the Senate and elected Ted Strickland as Governor, is poised to make Barack Obama our next President, and the first green leader of the 21st century.
San Francisco -- No, I'm not referring to how the rest of the world views George Bush's United States. Nor even to how Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama fans feel about each other. Today's question is why the American right hates polar bears.
Not all conservatives loathe Ursus maritimus. South Carolina Senator John Courson, whose conservative credentials are established by his role as Strom Thurmond's campaign director, loves to photograph bears. A year ago he told me, "I don't need a scientist to tell me global warming is going to happen. I've been to Churchill Manitoba to photograph polar bears, and I've seen global warming happening."
But this commonsense, seemingly conservative approach doesn't apply to most of the pundits on the right. They almost foam at the mouth at the idea of declaring the polar bear at risk.
Columnist George Will recently launched the latest salvo. He is withering in his contempt for the idea that because the bears might be wiped out in 45 years we should act now. "45 years ago, the now long-forgotten global cooling menace was not yet foreseen." (Of course, 45 years ago AIDS was not foreseen either -- does Will reject taking public health steps now to protect our grandchildren?)
What's going on here? Is this simply shilling for the oil industry's desire to be able to drill without limits in polar bear habitat? (That's clearly what motivates Alaska Governor Sarah Palin in her threats to sue over the listing and to spend millions of dollars of taxpayer dollars trying to debunk it.)
That may be part of it. But Will pivots off his attack on the polar bear listing to uncover the real underpinning of the right's resistance to admitting the reality of global warming. "What Friedrich Hayek called the 'fatal conceit' -- the idea that government can know the future's possibilities and can and should control the future's unfolding -- is the left's agenda." He goes on to say that this concern about the future is bogus -- it's simply a ploy to get control of people's lives. "The left exists to enlarge the state's supervision of life, narrowing individual choices...."
That's what we need to understand. The very concept that present generations should try to anticipate the future consequences of our acts, and take responsibility for them, is anathema to the leaders of the current American right.
Which means, of course, that they are not true conservatives at all. Compare Will's screed with this quote from the father of conservatism, Britain's Edmund Burke: "Society is a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are to be born." Or listen to Barry Goldwater's original inspiration, Russell Kirk, on the environmental crisis, writing in the 1960s: "The modern spectacle of vanished forests and eroded lands, wasted petroleum and ruthless mining," he wrote, "is evidence of what an age without veneration does to itself and its successors (italics mine)."
You can almost imagine Will's lips curling as he closes with this line: "Onward green soldiers, into preventive war on behalf of some bears …."
Wrong, George. We're simply the real conservatives.
Apostle Islands, Wisconsin -- Here in one of the most recently glaciated, and therefore youngest, ecosystems in the U.S., it's all too easy to grasp the complexity of the 21st century's ecological challenges.
In Duluth, the papers headline what seems like good news -- major revenue growth for the Port of Duluth -- importing wind turbines from overseas. This supplements Duluth's other major cash generator, exporting iron ore to China and other places where those wind-turbines are made. This two-way trade is good for the Port of Duluth but bad for the U.S. economy and the environment. If we had maintained the same kind of interest in wind power that other countries did, those same turbines would be manufactured much closer to home -- in Chicago and Cleveland.
One reason why the global reach of the wind-turbine trade is bad for the environment is that all that shipping results in 5 billion gallons of untreated ballast water containing invasive species being dumped into Duluth's harbor every year. As a direct result zebra and quagga mussels, and round gobies and Eurasian ruffe, have already invaded Lake Superior's once pristine water. Because the lake's ecosystem is relatively young, it is more easily invaded by these alien species.
I'm here to deliver a commencement speech at Northland College, one of the greenest -- in both curriculum and sustainability -- colleges in the U.S. But northern Wisconsin is hurting economically because its paper mills are shutting down -- not from over harvesting of the forests, but because paper manufacturers must compete with Chinese imports -- produced from illegal rainforest logging in Myanmar and Indonesia. So the economy of northern Wisconsin is suffering because we aren't protecting the rainforests of Southeast Asia, while we are missing the opportunity to produce paper from more potentially sustainable forests.
And although the Native American presence is still strong here, there is tremendous anxiety over the wild rice harvest that is one of the tribal economic staples. The last few years have been dry, and the level of Lake Superior has fallen, forcing the rice beds into dormancy -- a normal occurrence. Now the lake is rising again. But with so many invasive plant species seeded around the lake, it's feared that they took over critical habitat during the dry period and that the wild rice beds might not be able to come back.
And here, where the temperate forest transitions to the boreal, people have watched global warming for years -- as the boreal slowly but steadily retreats northward with the warming globe.
What's striking is that all of these ecological challenges could, at the front end, have been easily managed or avoided. In fact, many could still be tamed -- but it will require thinking about their interconnection -- not just solving each challenge in the cheapest or simplest fashion. And if the web of life is this complex in a place as young as Lake Superior, how much harder will it be in older and more complex ecosystems such as the southern Appalachians or the rainforests of Indonesia? This is a century when we need to think about connections -- something market fundamentalists aren't good at.
Seattle -- Six years ago, the Bush Administration agreed that Canadian timber producers were getting unfair subsidies from their government. So our government slapped tariffs on Canadian wood imports, collecting more than $5 billion.
But Canada challenged those tariffs in international trade courts, winning the cases but continuing to lose markets over the tariffs. So Bush finally offered a settlement: the U.S. would refund the $5 billion and drop the tariffs -- but the Canadians would pay the Administration $1 billion. Why not just refund $4 billion? Well, then the other $1 billion would go to the U.S. government. This way it went to a slush fund controlled by the Administration, which it could use for off-budget expenditures on behalf of timber companies and their allies.
In effect the Administration privatized tariff collection -- something that used to happen in the bad old days of banana republics and corrupt regimes like Manchu China. Canadian timber interests were bitter. It's "the worst deal Canada ever made," one Canadian lawyer said. "Most of us in the industry believe it was done out of political expediency," said Ron McAllister, a Toronto timber dealer. But Bush Administration officials pointed out they could have kept dragging the lawsuits out for many more years -- sound familiar?
What happened to the money? That's what Seattle environmentalist Peter Goldman set out to learn several years ago. He didn't like what he found. The money -- surprise -- didn't seem to be going to the purposes originally specified. So Goldman has sued. "This is about an administration that wanted to see this money go to friendly faces and didn't want the inconvenience of dealing with Congress."
But the White House claims that the $1 billion is not public money, because it was deposited in "special U.S. Customs accounts" and never went to the U.S. Treasury. "The United States (government) never claimed a right to the funds," said Gretchen Hamel of the U.S. Trade Representative's Office. She doesn't explain why not.
You and I might be forgiven for wondering just what a "special U.S. customs account" is -- when you come across the border and have to pay duty, you probably thought the money went to your government, regardless of which account it first hit.
It appears there was once a legal provision for trade penalties to be paid out to private groups, not the government. But the Courts repeatedly threw this provision out, and Congress allowed it to expire -- before the Canadian deal was signed.
So where did the money go? Well Goldman and his fellow plaintiffs, including the Sierra Club, have filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find out. According to an investigative story in the Seattle Post Intelligencer by Robert McClure:
The records show that the deal was monitored by Harriet Myers, then President Bush's chief lawyer. They also show that the University of Washington College of Forest Resources was among those trying to get a slice of the money. That was not successful, but a retired dean of the college was appointed to the board of the nonprofit that got the most money, the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities.
The administration will next send the environmentalists a listing of all the documents the administration chose to withhold, and citing the section of the law that allegedly allows the withholding.
But most of the money has been spent, it appears, on public relations for the timber industry, including a campaign to encourage the use of wood products as a way of curbing global warming. Jon Gartma an executive with Sierra Pacific Industries involved in the project, said, "Science supports the use of wood as environmentally preferable to any other building product."
This is all reminiscent of the scandal over the arms-for-hostages deal the Reagan Administration cooked up to finance the Contras back in 1986 -- with an Administration that doesn't want to deal with Congress simply taking important governmental functions off the books by claiming that, as long as the bank accounts in question don't bear the citation "U.S. Treasury," it's really not Congress's or the public's business. Meanwhile, of course, our National Forests have been starved for basic services and funding over the past six years because the government "can't afford" to do the people's business.
So the rural communities and forests that were the actual victims of unfair Canadian competition -- if it was unfair -- have gotten nothing out of this settlement. That could stand as a memorial to this Administration -- it's standard operating procedure. To reverse the fabulous quote from Robert Goodloe Harper celebrating Thomas Jefferson's repudiation of the Barbary Pirates at the beginning of the 19th century, this Administration finds "billions for tribute, not one cent for defense" -- or any other public purpose.
San Francisco -- The annual Goldman Environmental Prize ceremony always recharges my hope battery. However difficult the challenges we environmentalists face in the U.S., they pale by comparison with the odds that are faced -- and overcome -- by grassroots activists elsewhere. I met Rosa Hilda Ramos, one of this year's winners, three years ago when we were launching the Sierra Club's newest and most vibrant chapters, in Puerto Rico. Camilla Feibelman, our staffer there, has worked closely with Rosa Hilda, so I asked her to write today's blog.
Bogeymen and Butterflies by Camilla Feibelman, Sierra Club Regional Representative, San Juan, Puerto Rico
When the Sierra Club's Board of Directors came to Puerto Rico to hear the locals' case for chapterhood in 2005, one speaker in particular held the audience between wowed inspiration and raucous laughter. That was Rosa Hilda Ramos, one of this year's Goldman Environmental Prize winners.
I remember Carl Pope making a beeline to me before the other speakers on that panel had finished. "You have to nominate this woman for the Goldman Award!" It was clear that we had a winner on our hands.
Rosa Hilda and her husband had recently moved to their dream home in Cataño, a town across the bay from San Juan. But their dreams were quickly clouded by emissions from the nearby Palo Seco power plant, operated by the local energy authority. Both the EPA and the local government knew the plant was out of compliance. Even with the island's powerful ocean winds, Cataño's air did not meet EPA standards. Respiratory disease and cancer rates were notoriously high. When her own mother succumbed to cancer in the early 1990s and Rosa Hilda looked to donate her medical equipment, she found many others with similar illnesses. She began to see a connection between the Palo Seco plant and the health of its neighbors. The question of whether to fight or flee was only a brief one for Rosa Hilda: she is a firecracker, and her fuse had been lit.
When the EPA and the local government failed to clean up Palo Seco, Communities United Against Contamination (CUCCo), an organization founded and run by Rosa Hilda, sued and represented themselves in federal court. (A cucco is a bogeyman, Rosa Hilda says. She wanted the polluters to be afraid of her fledgling group.) Puerto Rico's power authority was eventually fined $7 million dollars for their violations. But instead of allowing the money to disappear into the federal coffers, Rosa Hilda had something else in mind.
The day that Rosa Hilda discovered Puerto Rico's Hidden Lagoon the butterflies and the dragonflies exploded in to motion around her like confetti at the height of a parade. Looking at the Palo Seco plant belching in the distance, she knew the fine money should go to protecting the lagoon and the surrounding Las Cucharillas marsh as a nature reserve. So the community brought the marsh to the state legislature. Children dressed up as butterflies and dragonflies and flitted along the marble floored halls of the capital building. These kids were lobbyists that could not be ignored, even by the hardest of hearts.
Now, La Cienega Cucharillas is a 1000-acre marsh that quietly filters runoff water that drains from surrounding roads, industrial facilities, and factories before spilling into the San Juan Bay. Because of Rosa Hilda and CUCCo's efforts, the marsh has now been named a nature reserve. Many of the lands are still in private hands and are at risk for development. Nonetheless, Rosa Hilda's vision continues to bloom. She envisions an artistic botanical garden, a series of butterfly gardens, and a glass museum that links people to the water and species below and around them.
On the last night of the Sierra Club Board's visit to the island and the evening after approving Puerto Rico as the first new chapter in ten years, Carl described the island as a bioluminescent lagoon. The waters may appear calm and impassive, but when moved sparks of light fly. Rosa Hilda is that movement, that momentum toward action.
San Francisco -- For the first time in history there will be no West Coast salmon fishing season. The unexpected collapse of the Sacramento River's fall run chinook fishery led the Pacific Fishery Management Council to vote to cancel all commercial salmon fishing this year from the California coast to north-central Oregon. "This is a complete disaster by any standard," said Don Hansen, the council chairman.
The suspected culprits? Diversion of fresh water to agribusiness by the federal government, and global warming's disruption of the ocean's food chains. In reality, the salmon season was only a shadow of its former self, because the other salmon runs on rivers like the Klamath and the San Joaquin had already been destroyed. An article in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle tells the story of how the mismanagement of the Klamath by the Bush Administration had set the stage for this year's catastrophe, and how that mismanagement has devastated the Yurok people who live along the lower Klamath and rely on its fisheries.
There's a debate about whether it's too late -- in a scientific sense -- to bring this fishery back. But the more fundamental question is whether we can muster the moral will to restore natural ecosystems even when it is feasible. We know how to restore a great many landscapes and species -- we simply have to give natural processes more room to do what they are best at, which is create and expand life. Yet last week at the Global Philanthropy forum, in a panel on the problem of deforestation in places like Haiti, I asked for examples of large-scale restoration of forests or grasslands. I offered one example -- US soil conservation programs launched in the 1930s did, indeed, dramatically restore the American heartland (at least, until the agricultural fence-post to fence-post policies of the Nixon Administration reversed that). And the Conservation Reserve program launched in the 1980s also worked -- until the corn ethanol boom tempted farmers to withdraw from it.
But those were successes born in an era of agricultural abundance. On last week's panel of very knowledgable people, not one could offer a story of large-scale success during a historical moment of scarcity -- which is what we are facing now, with so many of our resources. There are some smaller-scale successes with fisheries, but if we really want to reforest the world to help curb global warming, or restore the oceans to maintain our fisheries, we are going to need to act in a much more calculatedly self-serving way -- which ironically means being much more generous with nature. Leaving large-scale ecosystem restoration to The Market just won't cut it.
San Francisco -- Although the reactionary ideologues appointed by the Bush Administration to privatize public lands are still up to mischief and will still damage our heritage in their remaining ten months, you can sense that the resistance is growing in effectiveness.
Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey avoided going to jail for his agency's refusal to comply with federal court orders on evaluating the safety of fire retardants, but he was forced to stand before Judge Donald Malloy and admit, "We’re beyond the point of making excuses and there’s no way to put a positive face on the fact that we dropped the ball.”
Rey also had to drop his proposed massive restructuring of the Forest Service, one that would have pulled almost all the biologists and other resource specialists out of the national forests and placed them into six regional offices where they could be more closely monitored for sticking to the headquarters' political line even at the expense of the science. On February 20, Forest Service Chief Abigail Kimball announced that the Agency would abandon that plan in order to "avoid additional disruption and confusion." Then the Agency found itself being sued by America's most popular Republican, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, for proposing to open up four National Forests in Southern California to roads and oil drilling. California Attorney General Jerry Brown, representing the Governor, said that "the Bush Administration is just operating with reckless disregard for the public trust."
Meanwhile, over at the Interior Department, the ride keeps getting rougher. When the Fish and Wildlife Service tried to back out of an agreement to decide whether or not the sage grouse required protection under the Endangered Species Act, the federal courts slapped the Agency down and said, "Comply."
And when Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne decided to "flush" the Grand Canyon with a simulated springtime flood, the rest of the Department publicly called the idea ill timed and poorly planned -- Kempthorne went ahead anyway, but what he had hoped would be a feather in his cap turned into a PR nightmare.
Washington, DC -- It will be painful to watch the executive branch of government for the next eleven months. Domestically, the concept of responsible governance has clearly been abandoned. Let's take a look at the Mark Rey's last budget for the U.S. Forest Service. Remember, several years ago the President flew to Portland, Oregon, announced a "Healthy Forests" initiative, and staked his legacy on our ability to find ways to restore forest landscapes while protecting rural communities from fire. Most people understood that the protecting landscapes bit was cover for helping timber companies. But most people (including Democrats in Congress) thought they were dealing with what we called, during my years in a village in rural India, "honest graft." If Congress helped the President get his "Healthy Forests" bill, the timber industry might get some special breaks, but at least the money raised would be used to reduce the fire risk to rural folks.
Well, it didn't happen that way, and now even the pretense is gone. The last Bush Forest Service budget slashes funding by eight percent, which will mean huge layoffs -- more than ten percent of agency staff. Since preparing community protection fuel-reduction plans is a highly labor-intensive activity, this is bad news all around. Washington Congressman Norm Dicks calls the budget "an unmitigated disaster." The Administration finally concedes that fighting fires costs more than previous budgets admitted, so those funds go up -- but instead of drawing the obvious conclusion, that we need to be spending more next year to prevent fires in following years, the plan would cut spending for fire prevention and preparedness -- an approach Dicks said ''would guarantee large, expensive wildfires again next year."
If you want to know how badly Bush and Rey have managed the National Forests, consider the fact that in their final year they will spend 48 percent of the total Forest Service budget fighting fires. Imagine if you ran your house so sloppily that you spent as much money putting out grease and waste basket fires as you did on your mortgage, or if your electrical system routinely shorted out and instead of hiring an electrician you simply bought more fire extinguishers!
