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Biodiversivist

Carnivorous Powelliphanta snails that can grow to the size of a man's fist are being attacked by a coal mining company (note that this article was found in a business journal). What is wrong with letting a company move a colony of endangered snails? Well, first, the odds are very high that the move will fail. Secondly, if you don't draw the line here, what will stop the next person from moving them again when they want to build condos where they have just been moved? Why bother to save a snail species at all?

Green Gauge Report: Bad news

Here we are on the day before a long holiday weekend. A perfect day to bury bad news. So here goes.

The Green Gauge Report is a poll on environmental attitudes, based on 2,000 face-to-face interviews, conducted with a broad cross-section of demographics representative of the U.S. Census, undertaken by an arm of market-research outfit GfK NOP. They do it every year -- though for some reason they skipped 2004.

Joel Makower discusses this year's GGR in a post that tries -- one might say 'strains mightily' -- to put an optimistic spin on the results. But from what I've seen (and I've exchanged a few emails with Bob Pares, the guy who ran it), the results are almost uniformly discouraging. Consider this, from Joel's post:

Here's a breakdown of the study's five market segmentations for 2005 and 1995 (the numbers don't add up to 100 due to rounding):

• True-Blue Greens -- the most environmentally active segment of society: 11% of the U.S. population in 1995, 11% in 2005.
• Greenback Greens -- those most willing to pay the highest premium for green products: 7% in 1995, 8% in 2005.
• Sprouts -- fence-sitters who have embraced environmentalism more slowly: 31% in 1995, 33% in 2005.
• Grousers -- uninvolved or disinterested in environmental issues, who feel the issues are too big for them to solve: 14% in 1999, 14% in 2005.
• Apathetics -- the least engaged group who believe that environmental indifference is mainstream (referred to as "Basic Browns" in earlier Roper polls): 35% in 1995, 33% in 2005.

So: basically no change in the last decade in the number of folks genuinely concerned and engaged with environmental problems.

Syriana and Gaghan: Two steps forward, one back

There's a short piece in the current Rolling Stone called "Hollywood vs. Big Oil" -- the piece isn't online, though a very positive review is -- about the movie Syriana. It's got some interesting background details, including a few about the financing from eBay billionaire Jeff Skoll's Participant Productions.

I'm seeing it on Friday, and I fully expect it to kick ass.

And I respect Stephen Gaghan for making it. It's a real public service. But dude ...

Despite immersing himself in the evils of the oil industry, Gaghan is not a purist. In fact, he has a confession to make. "I have to get a second car," he says quietly. "You know something? I don't like hybrids."

Look, I get that for some reason every mainstream media story about environmental issues has to include some kind of poke at the eco-messengers and how hypocritical they are for not living in huts in the woods. This is what the green movement gets for making personal environmental virtue such an obsessive focus.

But why does Gaghan have to play the game? And why a potshot at hybrids, which unlike, say, composting toilets, are perfectly accessible and practical? These little signals matter.

I'll try to get some kind of review of Syriana up over the weekend.

Update [2005-11-22 12:16:37 by David Roberts]: Well, it appears I was misled (by my own wife!). The opening this Friday is limited -- Dallas and New York, as far as I can tell (Seattle gets no love). It doesn't open wide until Dec. 9. So I guess I'll go see it then. Sigh.

Good Bite, and Good Luck

Grist taking a little Thanksgiving break We Gristers are taking a few days off to stuff ourselves silly and give thanks for our many devoted readers. Happy Thanksgiving! See you on Monday.

Corn-based packaging not as green as it looks

A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran a memorable piece on its front business page about corn overproduction in Iowa. Entitled "Mountains of Corn and a Sea of Farm Subsidies," the piece featured a photo of a monstrous pile of corn outside of a stuffed-to-capacity grain elevator, "soaring more than 60 feet high and spreading a football field wide," the text informs us.

(Shame on me for not writing about this at the time; the piece has since gone premium.)

One ingenious entrepreneur has even rushed out with "Ski Iowa" t-shirts, the article reports -- a funny echo of the "Ski Iraq" t-shirt that transfixed the character Billy on Six Feet Under in its final season.

Seems that farmers once again produced way too much corn in 2005, cranking it out faster than the likes of Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill can transform it into industrial-food filler, high-fructose corn sweetener, and ethanol. Say what you want about it, but input-heavy, energy-intensive, subsidy-dependent agriculture has certainly proven it can crank out a whole bunch of grain.

I got to thinking about that mountain of unwanted corn when I read another page-one story from the Times' business page, this one on growing corporate/investor interest in "green" technology.

Further Down the Drain

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation wants to bet up to $1 billion of your tax dollars that its latest proposals to carry toxic waste waters away from the nation's largest federal irrigation project will not result in another ecological disaster like the selenium poisoning of the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge more than 20 years ago.

The Bureau is putting the final touches on an environmental impact statement (EIS) due Feb. 1, 2006 in which it will announce support for one of three possible drainage solutions: Delta Disposal, Central Coast disposal, or building drainage treatment facilities and evaporation ponds within the San Joaquin Valley with varying levels of land retirement.

Opponents say the Bureau's science is flawed, threatens fisheries and birds, and that construction and operation costs are likely to become astronomical for keeping just a few hundred growers in business irrigating a desert.

Schweitzer and coal-to-fuel conversion

I confess I'm not quite sure what to make of Montana governor Brian Schweitzer's grand scheme to make the U.S. energy independent with coal-to-fuel conversion. The NYT makes only passing reference to the pollution generated -- "what is new is the technology that removes and stores the pollutants during and after the making of synthetic fuel" -- and Schweitzer seems slightly too pat about the consequences of mining the coal:

Mr. Schweitzer said the mining could be done in a way that restored the land afterward. "I call it deep farming," he said. "You take away the top eight inches of soil, remove the seam of coal, and then put the topsoil back in."

Yes, because farming has been so kind to the Western prairie ...

Naturally, my environmental spidey-sense tingles at this sort of stuff. Will the mining really be done carefully? Will restoration really be a priority? Are the pollutants really "removed and stored" safely? I know very little about the process, technically speaking, and would love to be enlightened by an educated reader. But methinks when it comes to energy extraction in the West, an enormous dose of skepticism is warranted.

Still.

When Turkeys Attack

Wild-turkey comeback means more human-critter confrontations As Thanksgiving approaches, we offer this warning: The turkeys are back, and they’re not happy. From its nadir of perhaps 30,000 around 1900, the U.S. wild-turkey population has gobbled all the way up to about 7 million today. But this conservation success story has sharply increased confrontations between territorial […]

General Electric Slide

Leaked memo raises doubts about thoroughness of GE’s Hudson cleanup plan Remember the historic settlement announced last month between the U.S. EPA and General Electric? The one that would have GE clean up PCBs in the Hudson River, one of the largest industrial cleanups ever attempted? Yeah, well … don’t get your hopes up. GE […]

The Constant Guardians

African parks and preserves face complex challenges Conservationists struggling to protect Africa’s nature preserves face challenges ranging from pirate trawlers to locals hunting monkeys for food. At Conkouati National Park, a joint project of the Republic of Congo and the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, oil company reps recently showed up accompanied by government officials […]