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It’s ugly

I know Hurricane Katrina is so 2005, but nonetheless there are some loose ends and ongoing outrages that deserve a little attention.

• The White House was warned, hours before Katrina hit, that New Orleans would likely be flooded. As you may recall, they didn't do much about it. You might also recall that Bush said "no one anticipated" a breach of the levees. That was -- what's the polite term these days? -- misleading.
• The Bush administration has refused to turn over documents and emails relevant to its preparation and response to the hurricane to Congressional investigators. Joe Lieberman, ranking Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, says the Bushies have also instructed other government departments not to cooperate. He says they're trying to run out the clock on the investigation.
• Former FEMA director Michael "Brownie" Brown (who came in at a lowly 35 on the America's most loathsome list, though I would argue for higher placement) kept his $148,000 FEMA salary for two months after he was booted, allegedly to serve as a consultant and help Congressional investigators figure out what went wrong. But now he's refusing to cooperate with the investigation -- though he's taking money to speak on the very same subject at conferences. Toad.
• Meanwhile, New Orleans remains a farrago of opportunism, venality, and despair.

I don't know about y'all, but I feel super comfortable about what might happen in the wake of another terrorist attack or weather disaster. We're in good hands!

Update [2006-1-25 16:34:13 by David Roberts]: On Katrina, James Wolcott is a good read.

Sagebrush ecosystems are overlooked by conservationists cause they’re, um, not pretty

Oregon State University just won a $3.6 million grant for sagebrush-ecosystem restoration. That's good news -- sagelands conservation always seems to take a back seat to other landscapes. I wonder if the explanation for sagebrush's short shrift isn't surpisingly superficial (how's that for alliteration?). Looks matter, and sagebrush just doesn't sell like the prettier places do.

If so, sagebrush ecology is paying the price for its lack of glam appeal. The American West is home to 100 million acres of sagebrush country, but it is a battered landscape. As the AP story today puts it:

Because of the invasion of non-native plants, increasing wildfires and the expansion of juniper woodlands, sagebrush ecosystems have become one of the most threatened land types in the United States, researchers say.

"We are losing sagebrush-steppe ecosystems at an alarming rate, as wildfires fueled by cheatgrass sweep across the landscape," said project coordinator Jim McIver, an associate professor of rangeland resources.

The ongoing tragedy of conservation biology, with its limited resources, is that large attractive creatures -- "charismatic megafauna," in biologist speak, such as the ivory-billed woodpecker -- generate most of the hoopla and therefore receive most of the protection. Less sexy creatures are often ignored, though they may be no less critical to complete and well-functioning ecosystems.

Landscapes tend to go the same way as wildlife. People get animated by old-growth forests, coastlines, canyons, and alpine settings. These are the places we protect in national parks, photograph endlessly, and write volumes of earnest prose about. Big conservation organizations have little trouble "branding" these ecosystems and drumming up the dollars necessary to protect them from depredations. But sagebrush country is another matter.

Tadpole Position

Real-world combos of pesticides highly lethal to frogs, study shows Frogs exposed to a pesticide mix similar to what’s found on the average farm die in greater numbers than those dosed with just one pesticide, a new study shows. In new research in the online edition of the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, scientists at UC-Berkeley […]

America’s most loathsome

Did you know that you're the fourth most loathsome person in America (for 2005, anyway)?

And my fellow blogger Tom will be happy to see that someone agrees with him about the Mustache of Understanding, who comes in at No. 7:

A cool head on Cape Wind

Ultimately, I come down against Bobby Kennedy on the Cape Wind issue. But I've been bothered by the strident, dismissive tone of some of the criticism directed against him by his fellow environmentalists.

My sentiments are expressed eloquently in a post by Tom Andersen, author of This Fine Piece of Water: An Environmental History of Long Island Sound. It's the most thoughtful thing I've seen written on this contentious topic.

Energy use matters as much as — or more than — energy supply

Of the many ideas Amory Lovins has pushed into our cultural dialogue, here's one of the most important, one that everyone involved in energy debates should take to heart:

It is not energy that people want; it is the services energy provides.

The obsessive focus of energy debates on supply -- nuclear or wind? clean coal or hydrogen? -- is so narrow as to distort. The way we use energy is just as important: How do we store it? Transmit it? Where do we live? How do we get around? How can the same services be provisioned with less energy? How much is wasted?

The whole energy system is the proper focus of our attention.

Not a new point, obviously, but worth repeating, as it leads to very different policy debates and outcomes.

Are FBI informants prodding people into committing ‘eco-terrorism’?

This is not a particularly new subject, but: When exactly does an informant cross the line into entrapment? As readers of my obsessive "eco-terror" blogging know, the big indictment brought recently against 11 people crucially turned on participants that were "persuaded" to act as informants. A closer look at an ongoing case in California that […]

Bill Ford axes a third of his workers, hailed as hero

Despite TIME's fellatial cover story and Wall Street's predictably giddy reaction, it is not in fact good news that Ford Motor Co. is going to sack 30,000 employees. CEO Bill Ford doesn't deserve the lion's share of the blame for this, since the decline has been going on for decades, but it nonetheless seems a little macabre to treat him like a hero. And upper management at Ford deserves a hell of a lot more contempt and pink slips than they seem to be receiving.

Anyway, I was brewing up a long post about all this, but over on Sciencegate, Paul Tullis did it for me. So go read what he said. Particularly this:

Concept gym floats on the Hudson River.

In response to the "silly question" asked of Umbra about human-powered gyms, alert reader Erin B. directed us to architectural visionary Mitchell Joaquim.

Enter the Human-Powered River Gym For New York City, the name of which gives all the basic information about it, the pictures of which are worth a thousand words. Or at least the 167 words of this post.

As writes Joachim:

This training protocol will exploit the inherent disequilibrium of floatation devices.  Often the average urbanite exercising at the gym performs controlled repetitive single plane movements using industrial fitness equipment.  All of this energy is summarily dissipated and ultimately exhausted for the sake of a single individual's wellbeing.  Other potentials exist to harness this vast human expenditure of caloric energy.

Translation: Running on the treadmill is boring and pointless. Exercising in a pod in the middle of the Hudson River is awesome!

The concept for this water-purifying, commuter-hauling, calorie-burning bundle of clean energy won third place in New York Magazine's Create a Gym competition.

The Fries Have It

Boston diner gets its heat from used veggie oil Restaurant owner Don Levy geared up for this year’s chilly Boston winter by getting rid of his furnace. Wait, it’s not as batty as it sounds: Levy replaced his old heating system with a boiler that runs on 100 percent vegetable oil — a readily available […]