Environmental Writings
Environmental Links
Exxon: Enemy of the Planet
Global Warming Update - Icecap coverage 20% below average
GeoGreening by Example
No Refuge from Greed
Bush still targets Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling
Arctic Oil Myth
Link: Natural Resources Defense Council
State of the Environment, 2005
Compromise? Hell! - Wendell Berry
Are we eating Jet Fuel?
Dioxin anyone?
Environmental links:
The Sierra Club
Have a look at the Bush administration's devastating effect on our environment
BushGreenWatch.org
Citizens for Corporate Responsibility
Environmental Defense Fund
Orion Online
Grist Magazine - environmental news and commentary
EcoJustice - Justice for God's planet and God's people
Enemy of the Planet
By PAUL KRUGMAN
April 17, 2006
New York Times Op-Ed Columnist
Lee Raymond, the former chief executive of Exxon Mobil, was paid $686 million over 13 years. But that's not a reason to single him out for special excoriation. Executive compensation is out of control in corporate America as a whole, and unlike other grossly overpaid business leaders, Mr. Raymond can at least claim to have made money for his stockholders.
There's a better reason to excoriate Mr. Raymond: for the sake of his company's bottom line, and perhaps his own personal enrichment, he turned Exxon Mobil into an enemy of the planet.
To understand why Exxon Mobil is a worse environmental villain than other big oil companies, you need to know a bit about how the science and politics of climate change have shifted over the years.
Global warming emerged as a major public issue in the late 1980's. But at first there was considerable scientific uncertainty.
Over time, the accumulation of evidence removed much of that uncertainty. Climate experts still aren't sure how much hotter the world will get, and how fast. But there's now an overwhelming scientific consensus that the world is getting warmer, and that human activity is the cause. In 2004, an article in the journal Science that surveyed 928 papers on climate change published in peer-reviewed scientific journals found that "none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position."
To dismiss this consensus, you have to believe in a vast conspiracy to misinform the public that somehow embraces thousands of scientists around the world. That sort of thing is the stuff of bad novels. Sure enough, the novelist Michael Crichton, whose past work includes warnings about the imminent Japanese takeover of the world economy and murderous talking apes inhabiting the lost city of Zinj, has become perhaps the most prominent global-warming skeptic. (Mr. Crichton was invited to the White House to brief President Bush.)
So how have corporate interests responded? In the early years, when the science was still somewhat in doubt, many companies from the oil industry, the auto industry and other sectors were members of a group called the Global Climate Coalition, whose de facto purpose was to oppose curbs on greenhouse gases. But as the scientific evidence became clearer, many members — including oil companies like BP and Shell — left the organization and conceded the need to do something about global warming.
Exxon, headed by Mr. Raymond, chose a different course of action: it decided to fight the science.
A leaked memo from a 1998 meeting at the American Petroleum Institute, in which Exxon (which hadn't yet merged with Mobil) was a participant, describes a strategy of providing "logistical and moral support" to climate change dissenters, "thereby raising questions about and undercutting the 'prevailing scientific wisdom.' " And that's just what Exxon Mobil has done: lavish grants have supported a sort of alternative intellectual universe of global warming skeptics.
The people and institutions Exxon Mobil supports aren't actually engaged in climate research. They're the real-world equivalents of the Academy of Tobacco Studies in the movie "Thank You for Smoking," whose purpose is to fail to find evidence of harmful effects.
But the fake research works for its sponsors, partly because it gets picked up by right-wing pundits, but mainly because it plays perfectly into the he-said-she-said conventions of "balanced" journalism. A 2003 study, by Maxwell Boykoff and Jules Boykoff, of reporting on global warming in major newspapers found that a majority of reports gave the skeptics — a few dozen people, many if not most receiving direct or indirect financial support from Exxon Mobil — roughly the same amount of attention as the scientific consensus, supported by thousands of independent researchers.
Has Exxon Mobil's war on climate science actually changed policy for the worse? Maybe not. Although most governments have done little to curb greenhouse gases, and the Bush administration has done nothing, it's not clear that policies would have been any better even if Exxon Mobil had acted more responsibly.
But the fact is that whatever small chance there was of action to limit global warming became even smaller because Exxon Mobil chose to protect its profits by trashing good science. And that, not the paycheck, is the real scandal of Mr. Raymond's reign as Exxon Mobil's chief executive.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
Fears over climate as Arctic ice melts at record level
· Coverage is 20% below average for time of year
· Destructive cycle could affect Earth's weather
David Adam, environment correspondent
Thursday September 29, 2005
The Guardian (UK)
Global warming in the Arctic could be soaring out of control, scientists warned yesterday as new figures revealed that melting of sea ice in the region has accelerated to record levels.
Experts at the US National Snow and Data Centre in Colorado fear the region is locked into a destructive cycle with warmer air melting more ice, which in turn warms the air further. Satellite pictures show that the extent of Arctic sea ice this month dipped some 20% below the long term average for September - melting an extra 500,000 square miles, or an area twice the size of Texas. If current trends continue, the summertime Arctic Ocean will be completely ice-free well before the end of this century.
Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the Colorado centre, said melting sea ice accelerates warming because dark-coloured water absorbs heat from the sun that was previously reflected back into space by white ice. "Feedbacks in the system are starting to take hold. We could see changes in Arctic ice happening much sooner than we thought and that is important because without the ice cover over the Arctic Ocean we have to expect big changes in Earth's weather."
The Arctic sea ice cover reaches its minimum extent each September at the end of the summer melting season. On September 21 the mean sea ice extent dropped to 2.05m square miles, the lowest on record. This is the fourth consecutive year that melting has been greater than average and it pushed the overall decline in sea ice per decade to 8%, up from 6.5% in 2001.
Walt Meier, also at the Colorado centre, said: "Having four years in a row with such low ice extents has never been seen before in the satellite record. It clearly indicates a downward trend, not just a short term anomaly."
Surface air temperatures across most of the Arctic Ocean have been 2-3C higher on average this year than from 1955 to 2004.
The notorious northwest passage through the Canadian Arctic from Europe to Asia - where entire expeditions were lost in earlier centuries as their crews battled thick ice and bitter cold - was completely open this summer, except for a 60 mile swath of scattered ice floes. The northeast passage, north of the Siberian coast, has been ice free since August 15.
Springtime melting in the Arctic has begun much earlier in recent years; this year it started 17 days earlier than expected. The winter rebound of ice, where sea water refreezes, has also been affected. Last winter's recovery was the smallest on record and the peak Arctic ice cover failed to match the previous year's level.
The decline threatens wildlife in the region, including polar bears that spend the summer on land before returning to the ice when it reforms in winter. It is also the latest in a series of discoveries that have raised the spectre of environmental tipping points: critical thresholds beyond which the climate would be unable to recover. Duncan Wingham, an Arctic ice expert at University College London, said: "One has to be a bit careful with the notion of a tipping point because the situation is recoverable.
"If you drop the atmospheric temperature then the ice will come back again. There is a distinction between that and the Greenland ice sheet, which wouldn't reform because the modern climate is far too warm."
Prof Wingham is head of a European project that will launch a new satellite next weekend to monitor the thickness of the Arctic sea ice - and to check on the role global warming plays in its decline. Some had suggested that a periodic weather system called the Arctic oscillation had blown thick sea ice from the Arctic during the 1990s, leaving thin ice more liable to melting in its place.
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Geo-Greening by Example
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, New York Times
Published 4/27/05
How will future historians explain it? How will they possibly explain why President George W. Bush decided to ignore the energy crisis staring us in the face and chose instead to spend all his electoral capital on a futile effort to undo the New Deal, by partially privatizing Social Security? We are, quite simply, witnessing one of the greatest examples of misplaced priorities in the history of the U.S. presidency.
"Ah, Friedman, but you overstate the case." No, I understate it. Look at the opportunities our country is missing - and the risks we are assuming - by having a president and vice president who refuse to lift a finger to put together a "geo-green" strategy that would marry geopolitics, energy policy and environmentalism.
By doing nothing to lower U.S. oil consumption, we are financing both sides in the war on terrorism and strengthening the worst governments in the world. That is, we are financing the U.S. military with our tax dollars and we are financing the jihadists - and the Saudi, Sudanese and Iranian mosques and charities that support them - through our gasoline purchases. The oil boom is also entrenching the autocrats in Russia and Venezuela, which is becoming Castro's Cuba with oil. By doing nothing to reduce U.S. oil consumption we are also setting up a global competition with China for energy resources, including right on our doorstep in Canada and Venezuela. Don't kid yourself: China's foreign policy today is very simple - holding on to Taiwan and looking for oil.
Finally, by doing nothing to reduce U.S. oil consumption we are only hastening the climate change crisis, and the Bush officials who scoff at the science around this should hang their heads in shame. And it is only going to get worse the longer we do nothing. Wired magazine did an excellent piece in its April issue about hybrid cars, which get 40 to 50 miles to the gallon with very low emissions. One paragraph jumped out at me: "Right now, there are about 800 million cars in active use. By 2050, as cars become ubiquitous in China and India, it'll be 3.25 billion. That increase represents ... an almost unimaginable threat to our environment. Quadruple the cars means quadruple the carbon dioxide emissions - unless cleaner, less gas-hungry vehicles become the norm."
All the elements of what I like to call a geo-green strategy are known:
We need a gasoline tax that would keep pump prices fixed at $4 a gallon, even if crude oil prices go down. At $4 a gallon (premium gasoline averages about $6 a gallon in Europe), we could change the car-buying habits of a large segment of the U.S. public, which would make it profitable for the car companies to convert more of their fleets to hybrid or ethanol engines, which over time could sharply reduce our oil consumption.
We need to start building nuclear power plants again. The new nuclear technology is safer and cleaner than ever. "The risks of climate change by continuing to rely on hydrocarbons are much greater than the risks of nuclear power," said Peter Schwartz, chairman of Global Business Network, a leading energy and strategy consulting firm. "Climate change is real and it poses a civilizational threat that [could] transform the carrying capacity of the entire planet."
And we need some kind of carbon tax that would move more industries from coal to wind, hydro and solar power, or other, cleaner fuels. The revenue from these taxes would go to pay down the deficit and the reduction in oil imports would help to strengthen the dollar and defuse competition for energy with China.
It's smart geopolitics. It's smart fiscal policy. It is smart climate policy. Most of all - it's smart politics! Even evangelicals are speaking out about our need to protect God's green earth. "The Republican Party is much greener than George Bush or Dick Cheney," remarked Mr. Schwartz. "There is now a near convergence of support on the environmental issue. Look at how popular [Arnold] Schwarzenegger, a green Republican, is becoming because of what he has done on the environment in California."
Imagine if George Bush declared that he was getting rid of his limousine for an armor-plated Ford Escape hybrid, adopting a geo-green strategy and building an alliance of neocons, evangelicals and greens to sustain it. His popularity at home - and abroad - would soar. The country is dying to be led on this. Instead, he prefers to squander his personal energy trying to take apart the New Deal and throwing red meat to right-to-life fanatics. What a waste of a presidency. How will future historians explain it?
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No Refuge from Greed
by American Progress Action Fund
"As one of his last acts in office" Republican President Dwight Eisenhower set aside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, "the only place in the nation where the full spectrum of arctic and sub-arctic ecosystems is protected in an unbroken continuum." The 19 million-acre refuge is a land so pristine that it has been described as "a domain for any restless soul who yearns to discover the startling beauties of creation … where life exists without molestation by man." The name given to the area by the Gwich'in tribe, the indigenous people of the region, "translates to The Sacred Place Where Life Begins." But big oil has been greedily devouring the lands surrounding this virgin wilderness area, turning them into an industrial site riddled with scores of contaminated waste sites and daily pollution spills. And now, after using backdoor tactics disapproved of by the overwhelming majority of Americans, right wingers in the Senate and White House have set the stage for big oil to drill through the very "biological heart of this untamed wilderness," with the hope of drilling in other environmentally sensitive areas.
click to the American Progress Action Fund for links and source materials
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2/24/05:
Bush Team Readying Backdoor Route to Drill Arctic Refuge
Having been thwarted repeatedly in its effort to open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to drilling for oil, the Bush Administration and its Congressional leadership have come up with a plan for a sneak attack on the issue.
Rather than holding a straightforward vote on the Senate floor, where strong public opposition halted drilling in the past few years, House and Senate members are quietly planning instead to attach the drilling measure to upcoming budget legislation, where it would be all but impossible to stop (budget bills are exempt from filibuster or extended debate).
This past Tuesday, SaveOurEnvironment.org, a national coalition for the environment, said the planned maneuver demonstrates that "proponents of drilling know they cannot pass this through the normal legislative process, so they are resorting to a procedural tactic to prohibit open and honest debate." [1]
"Not only does this type of backdoor maneuver endanger the Arctic Refuge, its wilderness and wildlife, it also poses a genuine threat to the integrity of our democratic process," said Bill Meadows, president of the Wilderness Society. The society reported that a recent bipartisan national survey found Americans oppose drilling in the refuge by a margin of 53 to 35.
The refuge's 1.5 million-acre coastal plain--where drilling would take place--is described as the "biological heart" of the refuge by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It is home to some 250 animal species, including caribou, polar bears, grizzlies, musk oxen, wolves, and millions of migratory birds.
Despite the fact that it would take up to 10 years for any ANWR oil to reach the market, the Bush Administration and its allies depict such drilling as a way to ease America's current energy crisis.
At the same time they refuse to consider such immediate answers as an increase of only one mile-per-gallon in automobile fuel efficiency standards, an easily attainable goal that would save a half-million barrels of oil per day.
Also shunned are such effective--and painless--steps as energy efficiency, energy conservation, and greatly increased support for alternatives such as wind power and solar energy.
Environmental and conservation organizations are urging the public to oppose the use of budget measures to achieve drilling in ANWR.
source BushGreenwatch.org
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Artic Oil Myth
Proponents of drilling in the Arctic Refuge insist that only 2,000 acres within the 1.5-million-acre coastal plain would be disturbed. But this is pure myth.
Why? Because U.S. Geological Survey studies have found that oil in the refuge isn't concentrated in a single, large reservoir.
Rather, it's spread across the coastal plain in more than 30 small deposits, which would require vast networks of roads and pipelines that would fragment the habitat, disturbing and displacing wildlife.
See Natural Resources Defense Council site for full story.
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February 1, 2005
Environmentalists Offer Own "State of the Union"
Aiming to get the jump on President Bush's State of the Union address tomorrow night, several environmental groups held a press conference yesterday in Washington to insert their issues into the news cycle. Mr. Bush's past addresses have given short-shrift to environmental matters of any kind.
Global Warming: The 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1990. Yet the Bush Administration continues to stonewall any of the many proposals to reduce greenhouse gases, the primary human-caused factor in climate change.
Indeed, when a host of nations met last month to plan for a cooperative effort to reduce greenhouse gases, the U.S. delegation actually worked to obstruct the conference rather than seek ways to combat the problem (BGW, Dec. 21, 2004).
Despite the refusal of the U.S. to participate, 128 nations will begin implementation of the Kyoto Protocol on February 16. The U.S. is by far the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Meanwhile in Congress, Senators McCain and Lieberman have introduced the Climate Stewardship Act, a modest attempt to cap U.S. global warming emissions at 2000 levels by 2010.
Energy: Intertwined with the global warming issue is the continuing struggle over a new U.S. energy policy. Congress is expected to debate a new bill by spring, with most of last year's features again included. Environmentalists expect the bill will once more be top-heavy with huge subsidies for the already-rich oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries, while energy conservation and alternative energy sources such as wind and solar again receive little support.
Congress and the Bush Administration continue to reject any suggestion of even a slight increase in the automobile fuel economy standard, which virtually every expert agrees is the most effective short-term answer to reducing the U.S.'s costly dependence on imported oil.
Yet there are signs that the administration is actually aiming to make the situation even worse. Despite thousands of public comments urging stronger fuel economy standards, in December the Bush administration proposed a weight-based system that would encourage sales of the heaviest vehicles--SUVs and pick-up trucks--because their mileage requirements are even lower (the U.S. is already at a 24-year low for average fuel economy).
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Instead of experts' recommended solutions to America's foreign oil dependence, the Republican Congress and White House are again calling for drilling oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). This despite the fact that none of the oil would reach the lower 48 states for up to 10 years, and that the most generous estimates predict ANWR may hold at best only 6-months' supply.
Clean Air, Water: The Bush Administration is offering a "Clear Skies" plan that delays deadlines for meeting public health protections, allows violations of soot and smog health standards to continue for another 17 years, and repeals measures enacted by Congress in 1990 that control emissions of smog and soot from utilities, industry and transportation sources. "Clear Skies" also weakens protections from toxic mercury emissions and repeals current protections for local air quality when power plants expand their capacity.
Threats to Americans' clean water come more from the Bush Administration than Congress. Among other things, the administration is expected to continue seeking to reduce the number and categories of waters protected, lower water quality standards and allow dumping more untreated sewage into the nation's waters.
SOURCES:
State of the Environment 2005 presented at the National Press Club.
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Compromise? Hell!
- Wendell Berry
We are destroying our country - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are. Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all - by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians - be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us.
How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.
Since the beginning of the conservation effort in our country, conservationists have too often believed that we could protect the land without protecting the people. This has begun to change, but for a while yet we will have to reckon with the old assumption that we can preserve the natural world by protecting wilderness areas while we neglect or destroy the economic landscapes - the farms and ranches and working forests - and the people who use them. That assumption is understandable in view of the worsening threats to wilderness areas, but it is wrong. If conservationists hope to save even the wild lands and wild creatures, they are going to have to address issues of economy, which is to say issues of the health of the landscapes and the towns and cities where we do our work, and the quality of that work, and the well-being of the people who do the work.
Governments seem to be making the opposite error, believing that the people can be adequately protected without protecting the land. And here I am not talking about parties or party doctrines, but about the dominant political assumption. Sooner or later, governments will have to recognize that if the land does not prosper, nothing else can prosper for very long. We can have no industry or trade or wealth or security if we don't uphold the health of the land and the people and the people's work.
It is merely a fact that the land, here and everywhere, is suffering. We have the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico and undrinkable water to attest to the toxicity of our agriculture. We know that we are carelessly and wastefully logging our forests. We know that soil erosion, air and water pollution, urban sprawl, the proliferation of highways and garbage are making our lives always less pleasant, less healthful, less sustainable, and our dwelling places more ugly.
Nearly forty years ago my state of Kentucky, like other coal-producing states, began an effort to regulate strip mining. While that effort has continued, and has imposed certain requirements of "reclamation," strip mining has become steadily more destructive of the land and the land's future. We are now permitting the destruction of entire mountains and entire watersheds. No war, so far, has done such extensive or such permanent damage. If we know that coal is an exhaustible resource, whereas the forests over it are with proper use inexhaustible, and that strip mining destroys the forest virtually forever, how can we permit this destruction? If we honor at all that fragile creature the topsoil, so long in the making, so miraculously made, so indispensable to all life, how can we destroy it? If we believe, as so many of us profess to do, that the Earth is God's property and is full of His glory, how can we do harm to any part of it?
In Kentucky, as in other unfortunate states, and again at great public cost, we have allowed - in fact we have officially encouraged - the establishment of the confined animal-feeding industry, which exploits and abuses everything involved: the land, the people, the animals, and the consumers. If we love our country, as so many of us profess to do, how can we so desecrate it?
But the economic damage is not confined just to our farms and forests. For the sake of "job creation," in Kentucky, and in other backward states, we have lavished public money on corporations that come in and stay only so long as they can exploit people here more cheaply than elsewhere. The general purpose of the present economy is to exploit, not to foster or conserve.
Look carefully, if you doubt me, at the centers of the larger towns in virtually every part of our country. You will find that they are economically dead or dying. Good buildings that used to house needful, useful, locally owned small businesses of all kinds are now empty or have evolved into junk stores or antique shops. But look at the houses, the churches, the commercial buildings, the courthouse, and you will see that more often than not they are comely and well made. And then go look at the corporate outskirts: the chain stores, the fast-food joints, the food-and-fuel stores that no longer can be called service stations, the motels. Try to find something comely or well made there.
What is the difference? The difference is that the old town centers were built by people who were proud of their place and who realized a particular value in living there. The old buildings look good because they were built by people who respected themselves and wanted the respect of their neighbors. The corporate outskirts, on the contrary, were built by people who manifestly take no pride in the place, see no value in lives lived there, and recognize no neighbors. The only value they see in the place is the money that can be siphoned out of it to more fortunate places - that is, to the wealthier suburbs of the larger cities.
There are such things as economic weapons of mass destruction, and we have allowed them to be used against us.
Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations.
We citizens have a large responsibility for our delusion and our destructiveness, and I don't want to minimize that. But I don't want to minimize, either, the large responsibility that is borne by government.
It is commonly understood that governments are instituted to provide certain protections that citizens individually cannot provide for themselves. But governments have tended to assume that this responsibility can be fulfilled mainly by the police and the military. They have used their regulatory powers reluctantly and often poorly. Our governments have only occasionally recognized the need of land and people to be protected against economic violence. It is true that economic violence is not always as swift, and is rarely as bloody, as the violence of war, but it can be devastating nonetheless. Acts of economic aggression can destroy a landscape or a community or the center of a town or city, and they routinely do so.
Such damage is justified by its corporate perpetrators and their political abettors in the name of the "free market" and "free enterprise," but this is a freedom that makes greed the dominant economic virtue, and it destroys the freedom of other people along with their communities and livelihoods. There are such things as economic weapons of massive destruction. We have allowed them to be used against us, not just by public submission and regulatory malfeasance, but also by public subsidies, incentives, and sufferances impossible to justify.
We have failed to acknowledge this threat and to act in our own defense. As a result, our once-beautiful and bountiful countryside has long been a colony of the coal, timber, and agribusiness corporations, yielding an immense wealth of energy and raw materials at an immense cost to our land and our land's people. Because of that failure also, our towns and cities have been gutted by the likes of Wal-Mart, which have had the permitted luxury of destroying locally owned small businesses by means of volume discounts.
Because as individuals or even as communities we cannot protect ourselves against these aggressions, we need our state and national governments to protect us. As the poor deserve as much justice from our courts as the rich, so the small farmer and the small merchant deserve the same economic justice, the same freedom in the market, as big farmers and chain stores. They should not suffer ruin merely because their rich competitors can afford (for a while) to undersell them.
Somehow we have lost or discarded any controlling sense of the interdependence of the Earth and the human capacity to use it well.
Furthermore, to permit the smaller enterprises always to be ruined by false advantages, either at home or in the global economy, is ultimately to destroy local, regional, and even national capabilities of producing vital supplies such as food and textiles. It is impossible to understand, let alone justify, a government's willingness to allow the human sources of necessary goods to be destroyed by the "freedom" of this corporate anarchy. It is equally impossible to understand how a government can permit, and even subsidize, the destruction of the land and the land's productivity. Somehow we have lost or discarded any controlling sense of the interdependence of the Earth and the human capacity to use it well. The governmental obligation to protect these economic resources, inseparably human and natural, is the same as the obligation to protect us from hunger or from foreign invaders. In result, there is no difference between a domestic threat to the sources of our life and a foreign one.
It appears that we have fallen into the habit of compromising on issues that should not, and in fact cannot, be compromised. I have an idea that a large number of us, including even a large number of politicians, believe that it is wrong to destroy the Earth. But we have powerful political opponents who insist that an Earth-destroying economy is justified by freedom and profit. And so we compromise by agreeing to permit the destruction only of parts of the Earth, or to permit the Earth to be destroyed a little at a time - like the famous three-legged pig that was too well loved to be slaughtered all at once.
The logic of this sort of compromising is clear, and it is clearly fatal. If we continue to be economically dependent on destroying parts of the Earth, then eventually we will destroy it all.
So long a complaint accumulates a debt to hope, and I would like to end with hope. To do so I need only repeat something I said at the beginning: Our destructiveness has not been, and it is not, inevitable. People who use that excuse are morally incompetent, they are cowardly, and they are lazy. Humans don't have to live by destroying the sources of their life. People can change; they can learn to do better. All of us, regardless of party, can be moved by love of our land to rise above the greed and contempt of our land's exploiters. This of course leads to practical problems, and I will offer a short list of practical suggestions.
We have got to learn better to respect ourselves and our dwelling places. We need to quit thinking of rural America as a colony. Too much of the economic history of our land has been that of the export of fuel, food, and raw materials that have been destructively and too cheaply produced. We must reaffirm the economic value of good stewardship and good work. For that we will need better accounting than we have had so far.
We need to reconsider the idea of solving our economic problems by "bringing in industry." Every state government appears to be scheming to lure in a large corporation from somewhere else by "tax incentives" and other squanderings of the people's money. We ought to suspend that practice until we are sure that in every state we have made the most and the best of what is already there. We need to build the local economies of our communities and regions by adding value to local products and marketing them locally before we seek markets elsewhere.
We need to confront honestly the issue of scale. Bigness has a charm and a drama that are seductive, especially to politicians and financiers; but bigness promotes greed, indifference, and damage, and often bigness is not necessary. You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don't need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don't need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally.
And, finally, we need to give an absolute priority to caring well for our land - for every bit of it. There should be no compromise with the destruction of the land or of anything else that we cannot replace. We have been too tolerant of politicians who, entrusted with our country's defense, become the agents of our country's destroyers, compromising on its ruin.
And so I will end this by quoting my fellow Kentuckian, a great patriot and an indomitable foe of strip mining, Joe Begley of Blackey: "Compromise, hell!"
"Compromise, Hell!" originally appeared in Orion,187 Main Street, Great Barrington, MA 01230.
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EPA Tests Find Rocket Fuel in Nation's Milk, Lettuce
from bushgreenwatch.org
Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tests released this week have confirmed the presence of perchlorate - an explosive additive in solid rocket fuel - in almost every sample of lettuce and milk taken in a nationwide investigation. Perchlorate, leaking from military bases and defense contrator's facilities, is known to cause regional water pollution, resulting in serious health effects.
The FDA investigation found the toxic additive in 217 of 232 samples of lettuce and milk from 15 states, including areas not previously known for perchlorate contamination. According to the Environmental Protection Agency's perchlorate coordinator for the southwest and Pacific region, Kevin Mayer, the FDA results show that this regional pollution problem is now exposing people across the entire U.S. to the toxin. [1]
"This is surprising new evidence that rocket fuel is getting into the food supply in places we never would have suspected. It means that perchlorate exposure is not just a problem in areas where the drinking water is contaminated, but a concern for everyone, every time we visit the grocery store," Bill Walker, West coast vice president of Environmental Working Group (EWG) told BushGreenwatch.
Problems associated with perchlorate include impaired thyroid function, tumors, cancer, and decreased learning capacity and developmental problems - such as loss of hearing and speech - in children. [2]
BushGreenwatch reported last December on the stalling tactics of the Bush Administration and the Defense Department regarding a national standard for safe drinking water. [3] The EPA's preliminary risk assessment found that perchlorate should not exceed 1 part per billion (ppb) in drinking water for protecting developing fetuses, but industry and Defense Department scientists claim that as much as 200 ppb is safe for human consumption. [4]
The EPA's suggested safe level of 1 ppb is below levels found in several drinking water sources, including the Colorado River. Since perchlorate pollution stems largely from military sites, costs for clean-up would be the responsibility of the Defense Department.
"With these results, it's time for health officials, perchlorate polluters and food producers to stop stalling by saying we need more studies," said Renee Sharp, a senior analyst at EWG. "Rocket fuel is in our water, in vegetables, in milk. How much more evidence do we need?"
SOURCES:
[1] "Chemical Problems Widen," Press-Enterprise, Nov. 30, 2004.
[2] Environmental Protection Agency fact sheet.
[3] BushGreenwatch, Dec. 11, 2004.
[4] Press-Enterprise, op. cit.
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Dioxin Anyone?
Ukraine Dioxin Poisoning a Reminder of U.S. Delay
from BushGreenwatch.org
News that Ukranian presidential candidate Victor Yushchenko was apparently poisoned by a tiny dose of dioxin serves as a timely reminder that this ubiquitous substance is still in wide circulation and still poses a serious public health threat.
Dioxin is formed primarily by the incineration of hospital and municipal waste. Lesser sources include chlorine bleaching of pulp and paper, and certain types of chemical manufacturing. Released into the air, dioxin eventually floats down into water or land, where it is ingested by fish or animals, and into the food supply.
In 2001, a long-awaited study on the potential dangers of dioxin began working its way through the Bush administration, where industry groups pressed hard to delay its release. Called the Dioxin Reassessment, the study passed through an EPA review. It is now being reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences.
Coincidentally, the NAS review panel includes many of the same reviewers who participated in the EPA review, which some environmental groups say will lead to the same conclusions by the panels.
The exceptionally slow process to regulate this carcinogenic substance has greatly frustrated health advocates. "They've done nothing in regulations, and I don't see anything on dioxin moving on the federal level in the next four years," Lois Gibbs,
executive director of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, told BushGreenwatch.
Dioxin is so harmful to health that it has long been classified as a Persistent Organic Pollutant (POP). Indeed it is one of 12 POPs designated by the Stockholm Convention on Persistent
Organice Pollutants to be banned or severely restrictedworldwide.
The U.S. is a signatory to the Stockholm Convention. Unfortunately, however, the Bush Administration has designed implementing legislation that negates a key part of the treaty [BushGreenwatch, July 12]. The Bush legislation opposes the "adding mechanism" of the Convention, a provision that is essential for adding new chemicals to be banned or restricted at the domestic level.[l].
The Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) explains that the Bush Administration supported the initial terms in the Stockholm Convention, "...in part because none of the so-called 'dirty dozen' is manufactured or used in the United States anymore, and because the U.S. chemical industry believes banning these first-generation pesticides and chemicals will 'level the playing field' for export of more modern, profitable chemicals to foreign markets, especially in the developing world."
It is possible that when other chemicals are added to the Stockholm Convention, they may still be on the market in the U.S. Public health and environmental groups fear that without the "adding mechanism," corporate influences may override concerns for public health. [2]
SOURCES:
[1] CIEL website, http://ga3.org/ct/Jd1LW1s1HQZI/.
[2] BushGreenwatch, Jul. 12, 2004, http://ga3.org/ct/J11LW1s1HQZW/.
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