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Tight federal budget prevents old-growth timber sales

The Oregonian today reports on an unexpected consequence of a tight federal budget: The U.S. Forest Service doesn't have enough money to prepare timber sales in old-growth forests.

From the article:

[T]he administration and Congress are starving the U.S. Forest Service of money to plan sales of the big trees, and fight the inevitable appeals and lawsuits by their defenders. Forest managers say they are no longer pouring their shrinking funds into thankless conflicts they rarely win.

"We can't afford expensive timber sales -- the kind where controversy is engendered," said Gary Larsen, supervisor of the Mount Hood National Forest. "We're trying to find those where people can agree on the benefits."

Nifty: We can save money and old-growth in one step. How come it took so long to figure this out?

Dept. of irony

This is hilarious. Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Tex.) is holding a fundraiser for beleaguered ex-House Speaker Tom DeLay (R-Tex.). Where, you ask?

The Petroleum Club.

Poetry.

Readers talk back about school choice, organic rules, bike commuting, and more

  Re: Storm Front and Center Dear Editor: If we could only make politicians and multinational firms understand the direct relation between forest clear-cutting and floods, we might be able to prevent — or at least reduce — the damage caused by tropical storms and hurricanes. Hurricane Katrina is one good example of many stupid […]

Civil servants quit or get canned for bucking bad environmental policy

In Nick Turse's astonishing list of Bush administration casualties -- civil servants who have quit or been fired for bucking administration policy -- are numerous entries of interest to greens. Here are a few:

The Dark Side of the Source

EPA issues draft rules that would gut air-pollution standard The U.S. EPA has issued draft regulations that would allow the nation’s dirtiest power plants to emit more air pollution. The proposed regs — anticipated and dreaded by clean-air advocates — would supersede new-source review (NSR), the Clean Air Act regulation requiring plants to upgrade their […]

Poll: everyone supports us but no one really cares

All the sustainable bloggy folk are reporting on a new poll in the Wall Street Journal.

On the bright side, "nearly three-quarters of U.S. adults agree that protecting the environment is important and standards cannot be too high."

Then again, "Only 12% of U.S. adults describe themselves as active environmentalists."

There's a lot to be unpacked in this, but I gotta skeedaddle home. Read the whole thing. I'll just say: greens are rather obsessed with the idea that if they just get the facts out there, people will want action. (This is particularly true on global warming.)

But the facts are already out there. People already want action. But there's a difference between wanting action in the "I'd say so on a poll" way and wanting action on the "I'd make it a voting priority" way.

We don't need more facts and studies and "proof." We need to figure out how to motivate people. Those are separate undertakings, and it's the latter greens are failing at.

Sprol: still cool

Sprol seems to have redesigned since the last time I visited. Their RSS feed is a little fritzed, for me anyway, but as usual there's tons of fascinating stuff there. Just thought you'd like to know.

Pope on GAS Act

So, Carl Pope, what's up with this refinery business going on in Congress?

The answer is clear: Oil industry members of Congress and their allies in the Administration believe that America needs new petroleum sacrifice zones. It's not enough that the oil industry has devastated the Louisiana and Texas coasts by destroying the wetlands that should have protected New Orleans, by fouling the turtle nesting areas of Padre Island National Seashore, and by killing and maiming thousands of residents of Cancer Alley along the Mississippi River. Now, California, Florida, the Carolinas, Virginia, and New England must also be turned over to the oil industry. First we must throw them billions of dollars of taxpayer dollars to ensure their engorged profits. Then we will allow them to build new refineries without regard for their neighbors or for state and local control. Then we will bribe state governors to turn their coastlines into oil fields to feed these new refineries. And then we will eliminate public health standards to make these refineries even more profitable. This is not even a conspiracy -- it's not secretive enough.

Speak it!

Most U.S. food aid goes up in smoke

Celia Dugger, my favorite New York Times reporter, had another knock-out article in yesterday's paper. Titled "African Food for Africa's Starving Is Roadblocked in Congress," the piece lays out the absurd tangle of laws that govern the United States' food-aid program.

Rather than send money to Africa to buy food from African farmers to relieve hunger there, generating a little economic development in the process, U.S. policy stipulates that "American generosity must be good not just for the world's hungry but also for American agriculture," Dugger reports.

Thus all U.S. food aid must utilize food grown on domestic soil. But like another scheme designed to help farmers -- the commodity-subsidy program -- this one really benefits the middlemen, processors like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill.

Writes Dugger:

Just four companies and their subsidiaries, led by Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill, sold more than half the $700 million in food commodities provided through the United States Agency for International Development's food aid program in 2004, government records show.

These companies, along with U.S. shippers and anti-hunger NGOs, form what critics have called the "Iron Triangle" of food aid. Under the system they are fighting to maintain, only 40 cents of every dollar the U.S. spends on food aid actually buys food. Much of the rest literally goes up in smoke -- it's spent hauling U.S. grain to distant places.

The Bush administration is actually trying to reform the program; but Congress, impressed by the Triangle's political might if not its arguments, is holding out.

Supermarkets push to the southern hemisphere, driving farmers out of business

The United States has made two great contributions to world cuisine over the last century: the fast-food franchise and the supermarket.

Temples of the cheap-food revolution, both institutions flourished in the 20th century, offering consumers convenience and the cachet of fast life. At the height of the post-war prosperity boom, before the yuppie-led backlash, fast-food and the supermarket occupied the cutting edge of food fashion in a rapidly suburbanizing nation.

At a Grocery Manufacturers Association convention in 1962, an air of hubris and self-celebration held sway that would not have been out of place at, say, a tech trade show in Silicon Valley, circa 1998. As Harvey Levenstein writes: