Uncategorized

Paving the road

Oh crap. From an excellent article in the Boston Globe:

Along hundreds of miles of the north-south highway that bisects the Brazilian Amazon, the canopy of rain forests has been wiped out. Where the road is paved, loggers, ranchers, and commercial farmers have razed the landscape, removing valuable hardwoods and clearing fields for cattle and soybeans as far as the eye can see.

My father made a living as an excavator. I grew up watching him "raze landscapes" with his bulldozers. I recall the time he brought home a baby owl found in a tree he had knocked down. The first piece of equipment I learned to operate was the International TD20. It was the only dozer that had an automatic transmission and, therefore, the easiest thing for a fourteen-year-old to drive. But anyway ...

Russian hot air

Irony of ironies: The early 1990s collapse of Russian industry positions it well to collect on the Kyoto-inspired carbon trading market. Speculation is the boon could be as big as $1 billion. The Europeans are looking eastward to upgrade Russian facilities and count carbon credits towards meeting their Kyoto goals. This NY Times business piece shows there is at least one environmental topic Putin and company actually like.

The trend otherwise has been to criminalize environmental activism and accuse whistle blowers of treason. Read about Alexandr Nikitin's time locked up by the FSB as a case in point. The former Russian submarine captain was working at the time for the Norwegian NGO the Bellona Foundation, an outstanding source for information on Russian environmental conditions and politics.

Biophilia this

The word biophilia means the love (philia) of nature (bio), and was popularized by E.O. Wilson in a book back in 1984. I requested a Wikipedia article on the topic several months ago. Looks like someone jumped on it and did a pretty good job.

A friend of mine is an avid birder and maintains an impressive backyard wildlife habitat. However, her bird feeders also attract squirrels and rats. The squirrels were becoming a nuisance so she had traps set for them a week ago. She figured there were three or four problem animals. The fourteenth squirrel has been eliminated and they are still coming. As for the rats, well, that's what rat poison is for.

Bears in Napa Valley are being shot to protect grapes and wolves in Idaho are being shot and poisoned for lots of reasons. You can go here to learn how to poison a wolf.

I think Wilson really missed the mark on that one. People are to biodiversity on Earth what a drop of penicillin is to bacteria in a petri dish.

Let them breathe cake

I would say "unbelievable," but this is Texas we're talking about.

The majority of Houston-area lawmakers in the Texas House voted against legislation intended to protect the public from toxic air pollution, a Houston Chronicle analysis of 2005 voting records has found.

The five rejected amendments would have made the state's health screening levels for pollution more strict, required companies to continuously monitor emissions and set fines for the periodic releases known as "upsets" that plague fence-line neighborhoods.

Yet 20 of 34 representatives in the eight-county region, where toxic pollution problems have been well-documented, particularly along the Houston Ship Channel, voted to table these actions.

All 20 of the dissenters are Republicans, some of them representing industrial districts such as Pasadena, Baytown and Seabrook, where people and industry exist side by side.

No doubt a matter of conservative principle, right?

(via TPMCafe)

New American dream towns

Outside magazine has a list of 10 "New American Dream Towns."

When we combed the country for the sweetest innovations and the freshest ideas for making neighborhoods better places to live, work, and play -- with tons of green space, easy access to the outdoors, and big-think visions for smarter, more sustainable everyday living -- we hit the jackpot. ...

To spotlight the new American dream towns, we started with a wish list of criteria: commitment to open space, smart solutions to sprawl and gridlock, can-do community spirit, and an active embrace of the adventurous life. We looked for green design and green-thinking mayors, thriving farmers' markets and healthy job markets. We found it all -- and then some: ten towns that might tempt you to box up your belongings, plus nine more whose bright ideas are well worth stealing. Check out these shining prototypes for what a 21st-century town -- what your hometown, perhaps -- can be: cleaner, greener, smarter. Better.

Some of the choices are expected (Chicago, Portland, Ore.), but some may surprise you. (They surprised me anyway, particularly given my lifelong hostility toward Salt Lake City.) And don't miss the short pieces at the end of the package: Smart Urban Ideas parts one, two, and three.

(via Treehugger)

What’s the real reason the feds are spying on enviros?

LA Weekly's Judith Lewis has written a short but incisive piece on a subject dear to my heart:

When the American Civil Liberties Union this week released a new batch of documents obtained from the FBI verifying that the federal agency has been monitoring domestic environmental- and animal-rights groups, it was only the latest evidence of government working on behalf of the anti-environmentalist industry and property-rights advocates to, as one of those advocates put it in 1992, "destroy the environmental movement." It's an effort that's been under way since the 1980s, using various tactics from intimidation to slander. Only recently have the anti-environmentalists hit upon their most promising idea yet: Linking environmentalism to terrorism.

Lewis goes on to question whether the ELF (Earth Liberation Front) actually exists as an organization at all. Its alleged website is little more than a hook for a bunch of advertising; its alleged spokesmen are self-promoting cranks; the criminals allegedly connected to it deny any such connections.

Indeed, the people who seem to have the most to gain from the ELF existing are Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the leaders of the wise-use movement, and certain industries whose excesses are threatened by environmental activism.

Zealots need enemies, and if those enemies don't exist, zealots will create them.

The documents the FBI has released so far, most of them heavily edited accounts of monitoring activities directed at Greenpeace and PETA, may be just the tip of the surveillance iceberg. "The reason we have the documents on PETA and Greenpeace is because we asked for them," says Ben Wizner, an attorney with the ACLU. "There have also been requests by local environmental groups around the country. They're trickling out. And I expect that because of these revelations there will be more groups that want to see their FBI files," he said.

You could call the FBI surveillance a colossal waste of public resources, but Wizner thinks it's worse than that: Also in the documents obtained by the ACLU is a memo about a source planted within Greenpeace informing the agency that recent law-enforcement efforts have already damaged morale.

As I've said before, the goal here is not just to hurt morale, not just to slander, but more specifically to question the tax-exempt status of certain powerful environmental organizations.

I think it's far past time for the mainstream green movement to speak out about this publicly. They're letting their enemies define the terrain.

Monitor your electricity use

In the making-the-invisible-visible department, I give you the Kill-a-Watt, a $30 widget that plugs in between an electrical device and an outlet to tell you exactly how much electricity the device is using.

I could plug one of these up between my power strip (computer/external hard drives/printer/scanner/monitor/speakers) and the outlet, but frankly I'm too scared.

(via BB)

Make your own ecosystem

Choose dry-land or marine-aquatic!

(via Digg)

China, China, China

Two interesting stories on China, one small, one large.

The small one, in the L.A. Times, is about the latest toxic river spill in China and the government's quick and transparent response -- obviously it learned some lessons from last month's disastrous Songhua River spill.

The long one, in the N.Y. Times, is about fledgling attempts by NGOs and citizen groups in China to have a say in big development projects. Specifically, it focuses on huge hydropower projects like the one planned for the Nu River. There are also some interesting details about the country's electricity situation.

One study estimated that China might build enough new dams, most of them in Yunnan, to double its hydroelectric output in the next five years. One plan would inundate one of the most popular tourist attractions in China - Tiger Leaping Gorge.

Part of the frenzied hydropower development is driven by the thirst for new energy supplies. But part of it is caused by the breakup of the state monopoly that once controlled electrical generation in China. That breakup left regional state-owned energy giants who were each assigned "assets" - like rivers or coal deposits. Each faces competitive pressures to develop new power plants quickly in order to claim market share.

Mr. Ma, the environmental consultant in Beijing, said environmentalists understood that China faced a complex challenge in developing new energy sources even as it must reduce pollution. But he said this intense pressure to develop was why laws that provide oversight and public review must serve as safeguards.

Lots of food for thought.

Rebuilding: He-said, she-said

Everything -- everything -- eventually becomes fodder for a partisan food fight.

In some ways, the nation's response to Katrina is cleaving the public down partisan lines as a domestic issue, just as Iraq has on foreign policy. Both issues have become polarizing, rather than unifying, issues for the country, said Glen Bolger, a pollster for Hill Republicans.

According to a poll this month for the Hotline political newsletter, which asked whether Congress should tackle Iraq or the Katrina recovery first in 2006, Americans wanted the Gulf Coast rebuilt by 58 percent to 28 percent.

Democratic and independent voters generally agreed on addressing Katrina's problems, while self-identified Republicans chose Iraq, 46 percent to 37 percent.

Update [2005-12-26 11:10:29 by David Roberts]: Also, don't miss the extremely thorough L.A. Times rundown on the history of bureaucratic feuding that doomed New Orleans' levees.