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Coalition-building

Larry Schweiger, the relatively new President and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, has a piece in the Winter '05 issue of Creation Care, the environmental magazine of the National Association of Evangelicals.

Here's an excerpt:

Libertarian dialogue seems oddly beside the (moral) point

I've been meaning to comment on Jonathan H. Adler's admirable efforts to start a dialogue with his right-leaning colleagues on the implications of climate change for property rights activists. (The capsule summary: Rich countries may be morally obliged to compensate folks in developing countries for the damage to their property caused by climate change.) Adler introduces the topic here, and the full dialogue at the Property and Environment Research Center is here.

Now Adler has run a response from the Sierra Club's Carl Pope, that he responds to in turn.

I don't have much of value to add to the dialogue. I find myself vaguely bewildered watching someone attempt to build a "normative case" for "direct investments addressing causes of mortality in these countries -- disease, unsafe drinking water, lack of sanitation, lack of infrastructure, etc."

I do think there's a self-interested, libertarian case to be made. Doing so would no doubt be a diverting intellectual exercise.

But that sort of quasi-Vulcan theorizing would just circle around to a moral principle that should be manifestly evident and require no such support: Where one finds widespread suffering, one ought to act to ameliorate it.

ABC News’ John Stossel says dumb stuff about global warming, gets b-slapped

ABC News hack John Stossel writes a dumb column praising Michael Crichton's State of Fear. MediaMatters gives it a well-deserved spanking. Stossel responds with an even dumber column accusing his critics of "smearing" him and being part of the dread "Left." MediaMatters responds with an even-more-decisive beatdown.

Gristmill author savors.

(Via Chris Mooney)

NBC gets wet and wild

Everyone's favorite perky morning show is preparing to run a May series on fifty things to do before you die, and they're asking web-surfing mortals to rank the choices, which range from "write a poem for someone you love" to "drive a NASCAR race car."

I'm not crazy about this panic-stricken approach to wringing every pre-approved, glorious moment out of life. But I was curious to see how many of the items would get people snout-to-snout with the outdoors. The answer is 15. And what does pop culture want us to want to do?

South African zoo wants chimp to kick nicotine habit

An adult male chimpanzee in a South African zoo has taken up a peculiar habit: smoking. Charlie, one of the Bloemfontein Zoo's star attractions, gets his nicotine fix by smoking cigarettes thrown to him by visitors.

"Baby chimps pick up habits by mimicking adults, and we think he started mimicking smokers at his enclosure, which probably led to smokers throwing him cigarettes," spokesman Daryl Barnes said.

Barnes said Charlie was already showing the signs of a true nicotine addict.

"He even acts like a naughty schoolboy by hiding the cigarette when staff approach the area," Barnes said, adding that the zoo was determined to help him quit.

Zoo officials are urging visitors to refrain from giving Charlie their cigarettes or any other treats. Apparently the chimp's got another vice: a sweet tooth for the cans of soft drinks people throw at him (ow?).

Sadly, Charlie is not the only smoking chimp. A zoo in China announced last year that one of its chimps had also taken to the nasty habit.

All my life I’ve waited to use that headline.

As we noted in yesterday's Daily Grist, Sen. Thomas Carper (D-Del.) had threatened to put a hold on the confirmation of Stephen Johnson as head of the EPA. Carper is pissed about the Bushies' refusal to study two alternatives to their "Clear Skies" legislation.

Well, today he's gone and done it. "Carper said he would not lift the hold until the EPA gave him an 'ironclad' guarantee it would evaluate the other plans."

Stay tuned.

The Gold Shoulder

Latin American activists have string of successes against gold mines Even with mining laws, environmental laws, and international free-trade agreements heavily weighted against them, activists in Latin America have had a string of recent successes stopping open-pit and cyanide heap-leach mines from polluting their groundwater and decimating hillsides. In Peru last November, protestors blocked roads […]

Corporations need to be encouraged when they embrace environmental talk, not bashed

After all the hugging and smooching of big corporations on Gristmill today, I thought I'd try to recapture our righteous insurgent credibility by linking to some primo corporation bashing, in the form of GreenLife's just-released list of America's Ten Worst Greenwashers.

But after reading it, I'm afraid I just can't sign on. I may have to go back to being a Running Dog Whore for The Man.

I felt a sense of disquiet as I read through the list, and the reason why is captured perfectly in the "notes on methodology":

Where did all the fishies go?

In all the Northwest's big dailies today: the annual run of big spring Chinook are nowhere to be found on the Columbia River. Normally, by this time of year, roughly 3,100 King salmon have made their way past Bonneville Dam on the Lower Columbia--the vanguard of a run that can easily number a quarter million.

But this year so far, only 200 have arrived. It's the worst early showing since the Bonneville Dam was constructed in 1938. (The last time it was close was 1952 when only 478 had arrived by now.) Scientists are unanimous about only one thing: they don't know what's wrong.

Despite accusations otherwise, U.S. enviros are working to help their Chinese counterparts

I'm going to take my own advice, though I was mostly thinking about oil and global warming. Let's engage.

Cicero, on the neoconservative blog Winds of Change, writes about the recent riots against pollution in rural China:

I would like to see people calling themselves environmentalists take a stand on this. Stopping seal clubbing is not going to change the world. Signing on to feel-good accords like Kyoto accelerates environmental destruction in places like China. Taking a stand with the villagers of Huaxi -- if only a symbolic gesture -- would be a step in the right direction. In the end, we should all do business for child and survival.

I don't think there's any evidence that Kyoto would have any effect one way or the other on "environmental destruction in places like China," so I don't know what he's talking about there. It's a red herring. But China is an environmental catastrophe, and I agree that China's environmental problems are more important than seal-clubbing.

Here's a quick overview of China's disaster from Joshua Kurlantzick: