Articles by Alan Durning

Going local

The Bush Administration's plan to put greater control of National Forests into the hands of local forest rangers is provoking cries of outrage from the environmental movement and Democrats, as reported by many publications just before Christmas. I share the discontent but, unlike many of my mainstream environmental associates, I am attracted to one rather un-green reordering of public-lands governance. Just not this one.

The Gonad Test

Joel Gallob, who writes for the Newport (Oregon) News, has a fascinating column on Tidepool.

It points out the awful time lag between how fishing is regulated and how fish populations change. There's too much fishing when fish populations plummet and too little fishing when populations surge. And he suggests an ingenious mechanism -- involving the gonads of female black rockfish -- for synchronizing fishing with fish numbers. Check it out.

Our daily oil spills

Most of the points I mentioned on Northwest Environment Watch's blog about the recent devastating oil spill in southern Puget Sound also apply to the Unalaska spill now unfolding in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Here's a recap of the most relevant points, with an addition.

1. Like the death toll in the Middle East and the melting of the Northwest's glaciers, these spills show us the true cost of oil -- which is far higher even than the prices in this year's world oil market.

2. The spilled petroleum is ship fuel, not a product being transported on a tanker. Parts of the shipping industry are holdovers from the bad old days of dirty fuel, dirty engines, and careless practices. The "bunker fuel" they burn is literally the dregs of oil refining: the polluting crud that's left over after gasoline, diesel, and other products are "cracked" out of crude. In recent years, shipping has finally begun to get the attention it deserves from the press and environmental regulators, both to its air pollution and to the sewage dumped by cruise ships. But it's still in the days cars were in before catalytic converters.

Plan B tries again

Plan B, the emergency contraceptive rejected for over-the-counter sales by the FDA in May, has reapplied after limiting sales to those 16 years of age and older.

Concern about sales of the contraceptive to young teens was the FDA's putative reason for rejecting Plan B, despite the overwhelming support for the medicine from FDA's scientific panel. Many observers believe that the FDA's director bowed to pressure from the anti-abortion movement and its allies in the Bush administration.

But Plan B is likely to slash the number of abortions. As the PI article reports:

James Trussell, director of Princeton University's Office of Population Research . . . has concluded that easy access to emergency contraception could cut by half the number of unintended pregnancies and abortions among U.S. women, ages 15 to 44.