ConsRep 1505 C

Remember when atmospheric contaminants were romantically called stardust? ~Lane Olinghouse

Announcements

Find Birds Near You ‏

That’s where the birds, are after all.

Lace up your boots and get outside with Audubon this summer. You can find wildlife sanctuaries, nature centers, and birding groups in your area with our interactive map.

You can also virtually explore the outdoors by watching live Ospreys and Atlantic Puffins right from your computer.

For all the bird lovers out there, it’s never been easier to enjoy nature.

Get Outside

The Sagebrush Sea premieres on PBS’ Nature on Wednesday, May 20

Premiering next week on the award-winning PBS Nature series is a movie by the prestigious Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Please consider not only watching this amazing documentary yourself but sharing this opportunity with your membership (via social media or email)!

This is a family-friendly movie that will keep everyone riveted with the stunning images and in-depth reporting on this rich ecosystem –

from Greater Sage-grouse, Golden Eagles, to mule deer and pronghorn antelope.

please check local listing for times.

Of Interest to All

Ruling creates buffers around Shell ships

A federal judge has ordered Greenpeace protesters to stay away from Royal Dutch Shell PLC ships.

U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason on Friday also prohibited Greenpeace from flying unmanned vehicles over the offshore Arctic area where Shell plans to drill.

The safety-zone injunction is in effect until Oct.31, the Alaska Dispatch News reported. Shell Offshore Inc. sued April 7, one day after six Greenpeace protesters boarded the Blue Marlin, a heavy-lift ship carrying a Transocean Ltd. semisubmersible drilling unit, the Polar Pioneer, as it crossed the Pacific.

The injunction establishes buffer zones from 3 00 feet to about 5,000 feet for all of Shell’s Chukchi Sea fleet, anchor lines and buoys attached to ships.

Shell wants to drill this summer in the sea off Alaska’s northwest coast to determine whether there are commercial quantities of oil and gas. Arctic offshore reserves are estimated at 26 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 130 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates.

Shell said it is pleased with the injunction: “We cannot condone Greenpeace’s unlawful and unsafe tactics. Safety remains paramount.”

Greenpeace called the ruling disappointing. “Instead of saying Greenpeace can’t go near Shell, our government should be saying Shell can’t go near the Arctic,” Greenpeace spokesman Travis Nichols said.

Meanwhile in Seattle, Shell wants to park two massive Arctic oil drilling rigs in the waterfront, but it has to get around protesters in kayaks and the city’s mayor.

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray said last week the Port of Seattle must get a new permit before it can host Shell’s drilling fleet. The mayor urged the port to reconsider its two-year, $13million lease with Foss Maritime, a company that has been in Seattle for more than a century and whose client is Shell.

The 400-foot-long Polar Pioneer is in Port Angeles, Washington, but will head to Seattle sometime in the coming weeks.

Protesters plan to converge by land and in kayaks during a three-day “festival of resistance” starting May 16.

Once the rigs are in Seattle, some say they will do what they can to prevent the fleet from leaving to explore for oil.

ASSOCIATED PRESS|5/10/15

Florida lawmakers in Washington team up to fight oil drilling

WASHINGTON – The Florida delegation is gearing up for another fight over drilling. A bipartisan group of House members today filed legislation to prevent seismic testing for oil drilling off the Atlantic coast.

“Seismic testing is the first step in an effort to begin offshore drilling along the coasts of Florida,” the group said in a release.

The legislation was introduced by Reps. Gwen Graham, Patrick Murphy, Bill Posey, Alcee Hastings, Lois Frankel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Sen. Bill Nelson has companion legislation.

“There are strong concerns that these seismic activities can be harmful to undersea mammals like dolphins, disrupting their ability to communicate and navigate. This legislation enacts a moratorium off Florida’s coast so we can study the effects of seismic testing on our sea life,” said Republican Posey.

The bill would reverse a July 2014 decision by the Obama Administration to open the Atlantic Ocean, from Virginia to Florida, for seismic testing for future drilling sites.

Alex Leary|Tampa Bay Times|Washington Bureau Chief|May 13, 2015

Dirty-Energy Supporters Cower before Hurricane Francis Strikes

Some of corporate America’s biggest climate-change deniers — from Exxon-Mobil to the Koch Brothers — are dreading a potent storm that’s gaining strength and headed right at them. It’s the category-5 “Hurricane Francis,” which threatens to overwhelm their flimsy ideological castles.

Rather than extreme weather, this has to do with a diminutive human who’s become a force of nature: Pope Francis.

This summer, he intends to deliver a powerful papal encyclical putting the moral energy of the church solidly behind the urgent imperative to end the industrial pollution that’s causing global warming.

The Pope’s principled, stout-hearted stand is causing fainting spells, gnashing of teeth, and bombastic rants in the lodges of the profiteers and their right-wing, anti-science devotees.Specifically, Francis will lead Catholics in a worldwide campaign to enact sweeping reforms proposed by the United Nations to halt the toxic emissions that profit a few wealthy investors at the expense of humanity itself.

A delegation of climate change deniers from a Koch-funded outfit called the Heartland Institute even scurried off to Vatican City to protest what it calls the “mistake” that Francis is making. And a right-wing writer aptly named Maureen Mullarkey ranted: “Francis sullies his office by using demagogic formulations to bully the populace into reflexive climate action with no more substantive guide than theologized propaganda.”

Whew.

They can wail all they want. But Pope Francis — who chose his papal name in tribute to the patron saint of animals and the natural world — is right. Stopping the looming human disaster of climate change is not only a matter of science, but also of moral duty.

Jim Hightower|OtherWords|May 13, 2015

Potential nightmare.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is considering approving Florida Power and Light’s request to add two new nuclear reactors at Turkey Point — right next to Biscayne and Everglades national parks.

The cooling process alone would be highly water-intensive: First it will use wastewater for cooling, which will release all kinds of nasty things into the air — and when that runs out, it will draw on the Biscayne aquifer and put it at great risk to saltwater intrusion. The altered temperature flows in the water around this massive operation could also upset the conditions needed to support the area’s sensitive wildlife — from corals to crocodiles and manatees.

Besides, no one goes to national parks and preserves to see powerlines or algae blooms overtaking wetlands — or to catch a stiff breeze full of chemicals blown from a nearby reactor.

Please help stop this proposal- sign #2 in “Calls to Action” below.

SFWMD Terminates Contract for U.S. Sugar’s 46,800 Acres

After three months of study and public comment on the issue, the South Florida Water Management District board on Thursday made a formal decision to irrevocably terminate the all-or-nothing 46,800-acre initial option between United States Sugar Corp. and its affiliates and the South Florida Water Management District.

However, the vote, which was unanimous, does not affect the 153,000-acre option that expires Oct. 11, 2020.

“The UF (Water) Study says the No. 1 recommendation is finish the projects,” said SFWMD Vice Chairman Kevin Powers, who made the motion to terminate. “And the No. 2 recommendation is, look for storage north of the lake. I agree. …” He told members of the audience who show up at each meeting to comment, “Let’s continue all these conversations … look for storage north and south and east and west of the lake … and come back next month and the month after that. But all the while we will be advancing projects already under way.”

Some of the more than 50 members of the public who spoke could see the writing on the wall.

Former Martin County Commissioner Maggy Hurchalla, among the leaders of the “Buy the Land” movement, told the board, “I threw out my speech … It occurred to me last night … you do not want to buy the option property. Our frustration comes from the fact that you do not have a plan B.”

Hurchalla, who admitted her interest is the health of the estuaries, suggested the SFWMD board back state Sen. Joe Negron’s plan to ask the Legislature for $500 million to buy land — “the square of land, the perfect piece of land … to send the water south.”

“Storage in the north is only going to stop phosphorus from loading in the lake, it’s not going to stop water from polluting the estuaries,” said Tropical Audubon Society Executive Director Laura Reynolds.

But the U.S. Sugar Corp. contract’s inability to solve the problem of releasing millions of gallons of water from Lake Okeechobee into the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries was a chief factor in Thursday’s termination vote.

Board member Jim Moran told the audience the reservoir sugar-land proponents envision isn’t the panacea they think. “You want us to try to come up with another $1.5 billion to alleviate the problems for the estuaries … but I understand for that, all you would do is take another 2 inches off the lake.”

Moran, an attorney, derided the contract. “It’s a matter of getting the best bang for the buck,” he said, “putting taxpayers’ money to the best use. U.S. Sugar’s contract was a boondoggle from the day it was signed. We paid almost $200 million for land we couldn’t use. … Even if this option were the answer, which it isn’t, and even if we had the money, which we don’t, U.S. Sugar could still continue to farm 35,700 acres until 2030. The contract is a disgrace.”

Board member Rick Barber said, “I want to see us finish projects. Of 68 projects, we have completed zero. Every year there’s a new shiny thing out there to attract the Legislature. … We need to finish projects.”

In answer to Hurchalla and others who brought up the absence of a fall-back plan, board member Sandy Batchelor said, “We already have a plan B. It’s completing our Restoration Strategies, CEPP and other projects left hanging. We have to do that first before we can move a drop of water south.”
Board member Melanie Peterson perhaps stirred the most controversy among the audience. “Read the UF study,” she said. “The whole study … and consider that 85 percent of the pollution is from local runoff.”

In a formal statement after the meeting, Judy Sanchez, senior director, corporate communications and public affairs for U.S. Sugar Corp., said: “It is not surprising that the Governing Board’s legal action today formalized what the district, the governor and the Legislature have been saying for several years — that their priority for Everglades and estuary ecosystem restoration is completing a $5 billion slate of projects that are already planned and approved and will provide real benefits for the environment throughout the 16-county region.

“U.S. Sugar intends to continue to partner in Everglades restoration efforts. In fact, we commit to working with state and federal parties as well as willing environmental organizations in advancing the restoration projects outlined in the governor’s 20-year plan.”

Nancy Smith|May 14, 2015

South Florida celebrates 100 years of Audubon presence

As 2015 unfolds, Tropical Audubon Society (TAS) is marking the 100th anniversary of local, organized Audubon activity in Miami-Dade County in many meaningful ways.

From environmental advocacy to providing ornithological education, TAS and its predecessors have long been on the front lines of the local conservation movement. Indeed, TAS has come to be known as “South Florida’s Voice of Conservation.”

Audubon activism here can be traced to the birth of the Coconut Grove Audubon Society (CGAS) on Apr. 16, 1915, 10 years after the infamous murder of Game Warden Guy Bradley by a plume hunter near Flamingo. Alocal and national hero who was the first Audubon-funded game warden in the Everglades, Bradley is considered the first martyr of the American environmental movement.

His dramatic death compelled the fledgling CGAS to lobby for more game wardens to enforce Florida’s bird protection laws and hunting regulations. Recognizing the pressing need to protect plume birds in the Everglades, CGAS also provided informational brochures and presentations to local schools, and supported the newly designated Royal Palm State Park in the Everglades. By the early 1930s, CGAS threw its weight behind making Royal Palm State Park the nucleus of an eventual Everglades National Park.

During the first half of the 20th Century, a few other Audubon and ornithological organizations formed in what was then called Dade County, but eventually became defunct. Even CGAS went inactive during World War II. In its wake, a group of conservation-minded men and women met on Jan. 21, 1947, to establish a new Dade chapter of Audubon, which was named Tropical Audubon Society. The last CGAS president transferred the group’s remaining funds and considerable library to the new chapter. The torch formally had been passed.

Looking back, 1947 proved to be a seminal year in the history of South Florida conservation. Along with Tropical Audubon Society’s founding, 1947 saw the publication of The Everglades: River of Grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas and the longawaited dedication of Everglades National Park. These three milestones soon brought regional environmental struggles into sharper focus.

Throughout the second half of the 20th Century, TAS became increasingly involved in protecting the South Florida environment, particularly the Everglades and Biscayne Bay ecosystems. Significant environmental victories were achieved during this period, including the creation of Biscayne National Park (originally Biscayne National Monument), which essentially blocked the proposed SeaDade and Islandia projects, and the establishment of Big Cypress National Preserve, which laid the proposed Everglades Jetport to rest. TAS also became a founding member of the Everglades Coalition during this era.

In the 1990s, when a plan was introduced to convert Homestead Air Reserve Base, devastated by Hurricane Andrew, into an airport for commercial aviation, TAS and other environmental groups organized to defeat the proposal.

The environmental leadership role TAS had assumed during this turbulent time was made possible in part by a benefactor who looms large in local Audubon lore.

In the mid-1970s, Arden Hayes “Doc” Thomas, a TAS member and prominent South Miami pharmacist, deeded his unique house and property to the society for use as offices and nature center. Located on Sunset Drive east of Red Road in the unincorporated High Pines neighborhood, the property is in an especially convenient location, sandwiched as it is between the South Miami and south Gables business districts, and within walking distance to Metrorail. Shortly after Doc Thomas died on Dec. 31, 1975, TAS received the property and set about restoring the house. While these efforts were underway, TAS commissioned a memorial plaque in honor of Guy Bradley, installing it at the Flamingo Visitors Center in Everglades National Park and dedicating it in March 1976.

By 1977, the charming Doc Thomas House began operations as TAS headquarters. Completed in 1932, it has enjoyed Miami-Dade County Historic designation status since 1982, and in 2014 earned a coveted place on the National Register of Historic Places for its unique Rustic Style and Wood Frame vernacular architecture.

Those not yet familiar with its cozy confines should become acquainted with the historic Doc Thomas House and grounds (now known as the Steinberg Nature Center) in this centennial year of celebration.

In the 21st Century, TAS has ratcheted up its environmental advocacy role. Defending Miami-Dade County’s Urban Development Boundary; developing a more comprehensive public transportation system; bridging Tamiami Trail to completion; expanding the Biscayne Bay Coalition to further benefit Biscayne Bay, and protecting water resources, rare habitats and endangered/threatened species are among the current priorities.

By spreading its wings beyond ornithological programming to also encompass historic preservation and protection of the precious South Florida environment on which all our lives depend, TAS will continue to amplify its “Voice of Conservation” over the next 100 years.

Dan Jones spent more than four decades as an educator in Miami-Dade County, retiring as a principal in 1998, and subsequently consulting with the school district for the next dozen years. The longtime High Pines resident has served Tropical Audubon Society both as historian and advisor since 2013. Most recently, Jones tackled the formidable task of researching and documenting the history of Audubon presence in South Florida.

Community Newspapers

Coordinated Assault on Endangered Species Act

America’s strongest and most important law for protecting wildlife, the Endangered Species Act, is under a coordinated assault. Since January, over 30 bills and amendments have been introduced in the U.S. House and Senate that would dismantle the Act, including eight extreme bills in the Senate that received a hearing last week.

The Endangered Species Act (ESA), passed in 1973, has helped prevent the extinction of numerous species, including the Bald Eagle, Whooping Crane, Brown Pelican, Peregrine Falcon, and more. While many species are recovering thanks to the ESA, hundreds of species continue to be in dire need of its protections. The bills introduced in Congress, however, would only serve to accelerate extinction.

The bills range from a virtual repeal of the ESA, to a combination of attacks representing a back-door repeal. They include S. 855, sponsored by Senator Rand Paul, which would remove at least half of all species from the ESA by eliminating protections for species that exist in only one state, which applies to birds like the Golden-cheeked Warbler, and would automatically delist all species after five years.

The bills also include attacks on key facets of the ESA, including the fundamental provisions related to sound science and critical habitat. Science-based decision making is at the heart of the ESA. Legislation such as S. 736 could require the use of potentially inferior science, while S. 112 would inject more burdensome and unnecessary economic analyses into the process. Under current law, economic impacts are already taken into account, and there is ample flexibility currently to accommodate working lands.

7 Ways Congress is Trying to Destroy the Endangered Species Act

When one of the leaders in charge of setting our nation’s environmental policy boasts about wearing boots made from the skins of endangered species, it is a dark day for anyone who supports the continued protection of creatures great and small. Yet, this is the reality of having Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma heading up the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Inhofe was being flippant when he told a Washington Post reporter that his cowboy boots were probably made from “some endangered species,” adding, “I have a reputation to maintain.”

Indeed, Senator Inhofe has one of the worst environmental voting records of any sitting senator. And now he and his compatriots on the Hill have one of the most popular and important conservation laws in their crosshairs: the Endangered Species Act. Supported by nearly 85 percent of Americans and remarkably successful in recovering some of the nation’s most beloved and iconic creatures—including the bald eagle, American alligator and gray whale—the act is under threat of being dismantled piece by piece, and critter by critter, through legislative fiat.

While the claims of these anti-conservation crusaders are often off the wall, their power to undermine this bedrock environmental law is no laughing matter. Now that their pack has overrun both chambers of Congress, their bite may turn out to be just as strong as their bark.

The following are some of the ways Congress is attempting to tear apart the Endangered Species Act:

1. Bring Together Birds of a Feather.

In 2013, 13 members of Congress came together under the banner of the Endangered Species Act Congressional Working Group to discuss ways in which the act is working well and to identify how it could be updated and how to boost its effectiveness for both people and species.

While it seemed a reasonable enough premise, the team turned out to be a self-appointed group of anti-Endangered Species Act members, all with atrocious voting records on the environment.

So who’s backing the group?

In 2014, the group issued a set of proposals aimed at diluting the power of the act. Four of those made it into a package of bills known as the “21st Century Endangered Species Transparency Act,” which passed the House but stalled in the Senate.

Though the group disbanded this session, iterations of their destructive bills are currently snaking their way through the halls of the Capitol.

So who’s backing the group? The 800 pound gorilla in the room is the oil and gas industry. Of the working group members who were re-elected to this Congress, oil and gas interests were the leading donors to the collective’s 2014 election campaigns, contributing $943,000. Other industries including mining groups, big agricultural interests and pesticide manufacturers also see safeguards for species as hurting their bottom line. But the truth is that the act is straightforward and flexible, and it certainly allows for development and for economic growth. Nonetheless, big industries give big money to legislators who are bent on pecking away at the Endangered Species Act.

2. Form an Anti-Wolf Pack.

The reintroduction of wolves to the Northern Rocky Mountains has been hailed as one of the greatest achievements of the Endangered Species Act. It also positioned the gray wolf as a poster child of the act, and therefore it became one of the biggest targets for foes of the conservation law.

In 2011, members of Congress managed for the first time since the act was enacted to strike protections for an individual species based purely on political motivations and not on science. Congressmen in the Northern Rockies succeeded in delisting wolves in Idaho and Montana from the Endangered Species Act by slipping wording into the bicameral bill to fund the budget, effectively turning the act into a political bargaining chip.

Who’s leading the pack?

Following that lead, several Congressmen have recently set out to eradicate remaining federal protections for wolves across at least four states, turning over control to states that have increasingly hostile wolf management practices.

Who’s leading the pack? Wyoming Congresswoman Cynthia Lummis, who has had wolves in her sights for years, successfully lobbying for their delisting in her home state in 2011. When a court ruled that the state was mismanaging the wolf population and restored protections, she came back this year teeth bared, introducing another bill with Rep. Reid Ribble of Wisconsin that would skirt the court’s legal opinion and leave wolves vulnerable both in the Cowboy State, as well as several Great Lakes states.

What’s the pack howling about? Anti-wolf congressional representatives have relied on fairy tales over facts to garner support for otherwise unpopular anti-wolf actions. Time and again they reject scientific findings about wolf recovery and play up fantastical myths about the animals’ supposed danger to people.

“Nothing is more attractive to a wolf than the sound of a crying baby,” said then-Rep. Steve Pearce in 2007 about a proposed bill to stop the federal Mexican wolf reintroduction program in southern New Mexico.

His statement of course flies in the face of the fact that there has never been a single recorded human death by wolf attack in the Lower-48. That didn’t stop Rep. Don Young of Alaska from perpetuating this myth during a recent exchange with Interior Secretary Sally Jewell.

“I’d like to introduce [wolves] in your district. If I introduced them in your district, you wouldn’t have a homeless problem anymore,” he said in response to a letter to Jewell from 79 of his congressional colleagues who support continued wolf protections.

3. Declare Open Season on Individual Species.

Emboldened by the success they had delisting wolves in Idaho and Montana, legislators have been aiming to pick off individual vulnerable species one at a time by slipping in riders to often-unrelated bills that would deny protections for these species under the Endangered Species Act.

In other words, legislators could use political cunning to effectively kick a species off the Ark.

Who’s Out Hunting?

Who’s out hunting? Among the Anti-Noahs is Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas, who offered an amendment on the Keystone XL pipeline bill that would have removed federal protections for the lesser prairie chicken. Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, Sen. Inhofe and other members of the House and Senate have also pushed legislation to block or remove protections for wolves, burying beetles, the long-eared bat, and other species. In 2014, then-Rep. Cory Gardner of Colorado introduced a bill with the laughable title “The Sage Grouse Protection and Conservation Act,” which would prevent the sage grouse from being listed under the act for a decade.

Why corner single species? Many of the species singled out by congressional attacks are those that happen to live near areas or resources that corporate interests want to develop.

“[Scientists] are saying that the chicken won’t breed if we’ve got the rigs running during their hours of breeding. Now I don’t know about you, but I didn’t ever find breeding to fit conveniently into a time of the day,” said Rep. Steve Pearce of New Mexico at a rally, speaking about the lesser prairie chicken getting in the way of oil extraction operations.

4. Establish No Man’s Lands for Species Protections.

Some legislators have introduced bills that exclude entire states or regions from following conservation requirements under the Endangered Species Act.

Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah has employed this strategy several times over. In 2010, he introduced a bill that would exclude gray wolves from receiving any Endangered Species Act protections in the state of Utah. He also sponsored legislation that would delay listing under the act of two grouse species in 11 states for at least 10 years.

And there’s more …

Rep. Bishop also led a bill in 2011 that would explicitly exempt U.S. Customs and Border Patrol from complying with a wide array of federal environmental protections—including the Endangered Species Act—within 100 miles of the Mexico and Canada borders.

There’s also a current fight in Utah over a species of prairie dog found just within that state. The act is mandated as a federal law under the Interstate Commerce Clause, and some states are making the argument that species that exist only within the boundaries of the state should not be eligible for federal protection. Legislation limiting Endangered Species Act protections to species that live in multiple states would devastate endangered species conservation and lead to more extinctions. Such legislation would, for example, exclude from federal protection every listed plant or animal on Hawaiʻi. As of 2010, roughly 50% of listed species were intrastate species (i.e., species found in just one state).

So far, arguments that the act should only protect interstate species have not held up in any federal appeals court, and the Supreme Court has rejected requests to hear any such case.

5. Blame The Drought on The Fish.

The tiny delta smelt has been blamed for everything, from stealing water from California’s farmers to causing the next Dust Bowl. This supposed monster’s numbers used to measure in the millions, but a 2014 survey only counted nine fish.

The reality is the drought—not environmental protections—is causing the water shortages to California farms, as well as to cities, towns, the fishing industry, the outdoor recreation industry and plenty of other users. The protections in place for the smelt have not affected any of the water allotment to the Central Valley this year.

Who’s Fingering the Fish?

So who’s fingering the fish? Reps. Devin Nunes, David Valadao, Tom McClintock—all legislators from California’s thirsty agricultural nexus, the Central Valley.

What are they saying? Arguing for an environmentally-destructive bill he introduced under the guise of drought relief, Rep. Nunes went on a tirade against Northern California environmentalists and people who live in cities, saying, “I don’t see any of them up here saying that they’re going to tear down this system, dump this water into the Bay to protect their stupid little fish, their little delta smelt that they care about.”

Big Ag is using the crisis of the drought to try and rollback environmental protections like those offered by Endangered Species Act to funnel water from the north directly to the Central Valley farms, which are already responsible for 80 percent of the state’s water consumption.

What’s in the forecast? Rep. McClintock introduced a bill in March that blocks Endangered Species Act protections during drought declarations. The Big Ag-backed trio is expected to propose a California water bill to Congress soon that will almost certainly undermine current protections afforded by the act.

6. Lasso Scientists in Red Tape.

Former Rep. Doc Hastings, backed by the members of that congressional working group, introduced a bill last year that would both bog down scientists in bureaucracy and threaten to further imperil already vulnerable species.

The bill would require federal wildlife agencies to publish online the data underlying all listing and delisting decisions. On its face, open data is a good thing, but the bill does not account for real-world issues involved in such blanket data-sharing, such as exposing some imperiled species to poaching or illegal collection.

And there’s more …

Another bill introduced in the last Congress by Rep. Randy Neugebauer of Texas would require the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service to consider all data submitted by state, tribal and county governments as the best available science, no matter what the quality of this data. In other words, a county government heavily influenced by a mining corporation could commission its own report, not necessarily even conducted by actual scientists, and yet the federal wildlife agencies would be required to include this county “data,” which would skew agency decision-making under the act.

Both bills have already been reintroduced in some form in the current Congress.

7. Prevent Citizens from Enforcing the Act.

Congress has long recognized that the government needs average citizens to help enforce all sorts of important laws, including the Endangered Species Act.

Citizen suit provisions, found in civil rights laws, voting rights laws, and environmental laws, allow citizens to go to court to ensure that our laws are upheld.

But now …

One bill introduced by Rep. Cynthia Lummis sought to undermine citizen enforcement of the Endangered Species Act by requiring burdensome agency reporting that focus solely on the costs of enforcing the act without any accounting for the benefits these cases provide. Another bill introduced by Rep. Bill Huizenga of Michigan would restrict citizens’ ability to recover the full costs of litigation when they win enforcement actions in court.

Though neither of these bills made it beyond the House in the last Congress, these ideas have cropped up in other places. Earlier this year, an amendment was offered for the Keystone XL Senate bill that would have undermined Endangered Species Act citizen suits and limited the ability of citizens to hire a lawyer for the enforcement of the act.

The Endangered Species Act is one of the most powerful and effective environmental laws of the land.

The act is based on the principle that we have a responsibility to preserve America’s natural heritage by protecting the plants and animals that are part of it.

But since its enactment over 40 years ago, the act itself has become endangered by the heads of industries that want free rein to dig, blast, extract, and pollute wherever they see fit. These powerful interests and their friends in Congress have made it a priority to rollback protections for our wildlife, fish, and plants and the habitats upon which these species depend.

The law is based in common sense and balanced solutions that offer flexibility to communities, private landowners, and government agencies. When upheld properly and adequately funded, the Endangered Species Act succeeds in pulling species back from the brink of extinction.

EarthJustice|April 23, 2015

Feds May Okay Mega-Mall at Grand Canyon’s Doorstep

The Forest Service is on the verge of making a terrible decision that could damage Grand Canyon National Park, perhaps forgetting the agency’s motto to “sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the nation’s forests…to meet the needs of present and future generations. Unless, of course, you think the park isn’t that grand, and would be improved by hundreds of canyon-close vacation units, a retail village and a day of exfoliating in the local spa’s mud bath (presumably sans Arizona’s native javelina, an adorable, medium-sized pig). If so, then you may think the Forest Service is on the right track after all.

Last month, the Forest Service began paving the way for a sprawling resort development near the south rim of the Grand Canyon in what is now the small community of Tusayan, Arizona. More than 2,100 housing units and three million square feet of retail space, along with hotels, a spa and a dude ranch, may soon overwhelm the 580-resident community that serves as a gateway to the national park’s southern rim.

This new development threatens to transform Tusayan from a small, quiet tourist town into a sprawling resort complex as little as a mile away from the park’s boundary. Combined with another proposed development on nearby Navajo reservation land, Dave Uberuaga, superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park, has this to say:

“These two projects constitute the greatest threat to the Grand Canyon in the 96-year history of the park.”

A former superintendent, Steve Martin, is equally troubled, as he recently detailed in a lengthy letter.

And the National Park Service is right to be worried. The development’s biggest threat should be obvious in the desert southwest: water, or lack thereof.  A new city on the canyon’s edge will require vast quantities of water.  Stilo, the Italian developer behind this project, won’t say where it will get the water, but groundwater pumping is the easy—and most damaging—option.  Pumping groundwater to feed the development could lower the aquifer that feeds seeps, springs and streams that support wildlife and recreation on the park’s south rim.  That same aquifer is also the exclusive source of all water for Havasu Springs, the source of life and culture of the Havasupai tribe.

What’s the Forest Service got to do with this?  Stilo needs road and utility access through the Kaibab National Forest to build on its remote properties. Without a permit, development of these utilities can’t proceed. That means the linchpin for the entire massive development is in the Forest Service’s hands.

The Forest Service doesn’t have to say yes to this mess.  It could reject Stilo’s permit application as not in the public interest.  And it should, which is what we, on behalf of National Parks Conservation Association, Sierra Club, Grand Canyon Trust, and Center for Biological Diversity, told the Forest Service in March.  The Forest Service has so far ignored our advice.

Ted Zukoski|May 13, 2015

Calls to Action

1. Ask for a 200 Year Moratorium on the Harvest and Sale of Coast Redwood and Products Derived From Same – here
2. Parks and power plants don’t mix – here
3. European nature laws are in jeopardy – here

Birds and Butterflies

Rachel the Osprey has three gorgeous eggs!

Rachel and Steve, the beloved couple making their home on the Hog Island Osprey nest, have gotten back into the swing of things without missing a beat. After wintering apart 2600 miles away in South America, they reunited in Maine and began successfully mating, with Rachel laying three cream-colored eggs, wreathed and spotted in reddish brown.

The first egg was laid on May 1st, 2015, so we can anticipate a hatch in about 3 weeks. We’ll keep you up to date as we get closer to hatch watch. Stay tuned to the osprey cam on explore.org to watch the osprey family grow live, 24/7!

Audubon Seabird Restoration Program|May 11, 2015

Piping Plovers at Cape Hatteras National Seashore in Danger Again

Piping Plover chicks on the Cape Hatteras National Seashore are in danger again. The National Park Service is poised to reverse parts of its off-road vehicle (ORV) management plan. Since 2008, wildlife buffers have protected Piping Plovers, other beach-nesting birds, and sea turtles. The birds and turtles build their nests on the beaches—and nests, eggs, and chicks were destroyed by chronic disturbance and sometimes run over before the science-based buffers were put in place. The National Park Service’s new proposal weakens these protections.

Beach-nesting birds, sea turtles, and tourism all have thrived under the National Park Service’s management of beach driving by ORVs. The current management plan safeguards beach-nesting wildlife and pedestrian beachgoers on National Seashore beaches while still allowing beach driving within the park. According to the National Park Service’s own data, prior to the current plan in 2007, there were only 82 sea turtle nests. As many as 254 sea turtle nests have been laid in a single year under the current plan. Before the current plan was in place, the numbers of Piping Plover fledglings were devastating, with no chicks surviving to fledge in 2002 or 2004. Since ORV management practices were implemented in 2008, as many as 15 federally threatened Piping Plovers have fledged in a single year.

Audubon is deeply disappointed in the National Park Service’s proposal to roll back wildlife protection at Cape Hatteras. Thanks to everyone who submitted comments in opposition to this flawed plan; we’ll be sure to keep you updated on the National Park Service’s response.

Easy Ways to Welcome Nesting Birds ‏

Happy Garden for Wildlife Month! This is a special time of the year to rally gardeners, wildlife lovers and anyone interested in going the extra mile for local birds, butterflies and other wildlife.

For many gardeners, there’s no greater thrill than to have a family of birds take up residence in your yard. And because May is a crucial nesting time for many birds, now is a great time to ensure your yard welcomes these feathered friends.

Providing nesting materials can make your garden very appealing to nesting birds.

Some bird-friendly favorites that you can find your own yard include:

• Twigs (under 4 inches long)
• Greenery (soft plant matter found on maples, willows, and other trees and shrubs)
• Fluff (like cottonwood trees or lamb’s ear)
• Mud
• Dry Grass
• Moss

You can also create nesting boxes with these great tips or purchase wildlife-friendly boxes from many stores, including the National Wildlife Catalog.

Bird feeding can be a valuable addition to your wildlife gardening. You are especially welcome to learn how, with your enthusiasm for backyard birds and wildlife, you can enroll your yard as a Certified Wildlife Habitat^® — right at home!

David Mizejewski |NWF Naturalist|5/16/15

 Florida Panthers

The Center for Biological Diversity is working to find whoever shot and killed one of Florida’s last remaining panthers. A motorist found the dead panther March 22 and state wildlife officials later determined it died from a gunshot wound. Since 2014, 51 Florida panthers have been found dead out of a population of fewer than 180. Most of the deaths have been human caused, typically by vehicle strikes.

Shooting a panther is a felony, and we need to bring this callous killer to justice.

Panthers once roamed across most of the Southeast, but there are now fewer than 180 left in the wild — 51 have died in the past 18 months. They’ve been gunned down and run down as their habitat is destroyed by development, mining and oil exploration. Urgent action is needed to protect them.

And it’s not just Florida panthers that are under the gun — there’s a war on predator species across America. Last year alone USDA’s Wildlife Services killed nearly 800 bobcats, Utah budgeted $400,000 to lobby for the right to exterminate wolves, and “predator derby” killing contests made sport of wiping out these keystone species.

A wilderness without apex predators is a wilderness out of balance. If we allow predators to be erased from the wild, all of our efforts to preserve nature will fall short. We need to protect big cats and wolves, orcas and Arctic foxes, martens and raptors.

The Center is contributing to a $15,000 reward to find whoever shot and killed an endangered Florida panther. Harming a Florida panther is punishable by up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine. The Center teamed with The Humane Society of the United States and Humane Society Wildlife Land Trust in putting up a $10,000 reward leading to an arrest and conviction in the latest death; that pledge, along with a $5,000 reward offered by state and federal agencies, pushes the total reward to $15,000.

“Florida panthers have overcome so much, surviving near-extinction mere decades ago,” said the Center’s Jaclyn Lopez. “It’s unimaginable that someone would gun down this incredible animal.”

Learn more about our work to save panthers and consider a donation to our Predator Defense Fund.

  Invasive species

Exotic Pet Amnesty Day Events

May 16, 2015
Saturday 10 a.m. – 2 p.m.

Osceola Heritage Park- Extension Services Building
1921 Kissimmee Valley Lane
Kissimmee, FL 34744

Sponsored by:

UF IFAS Extension Osceola County
The Nature Conservancy
Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission

Contact:

Ashley Taylor, 954-577-6409; Ashley.Taylor@MyFWC.com
Cheryl Millet, 863-635-7506 ext. 205; Cmillett@tnc.org
Eleanor Foerste, 321-697-3000; efoerste@ufl.edu

October 3, 2015
Saturday 10am-2pm

Gulfarium Marine Adventure Park
1010 Miracle Strip Parkway SE
Fort Walton Beach, FL 32548

Sponsored by:

Gulfarium Marine Adventure Park
Florida Fish and Wildlife

Contact:

Ashley Taylor, (954) 577-6409; Ashley.Taylor@MyFWC.com

Information:

I don’t have a pet to surrender and I’m not an adopter. Can I still go to an Exotic Pet Amnesty Day event?

Exotic Pet Amnesty Day events are free and everyone is welcome to attend. There are informative and educational displays at most amnesty events, and live animals are usually on exhibit. Kids and families can see exotic animals up close and learn about nonnative species issues.

Information on Surrendering Animals

What pets can I surrender at an Exotic Pet Amnesty Day event?

We accept all exotic reptiles, amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and invertebrates at Exotic Pet Amnesty events. Domestic pets, such as dogs and cats and rabbits, are not accepted.

What will happen to my pet if I surrender it?

Exotic pets can be surrendered between 10:00 am and 2:00 pm, no questions asked. Every pet that is surrendered is inspected by a veterinarian, and all healthy pets are placed with pre-qualified adopters that same day. Our qualified adopters have submitted applications that demonstrate they know how to care for the animals they are approved to adopt.

What should I bring with me to surrender my pet?

First and foremost, your pet – preferably in a transportable container that you are willing to part with. Additionally, you can bring anything involved in the care or caging of the animal that you no longer wish to keep. Anything you surrender with the animal will go with that animal to its new home. This includes caging, food, vitamins, toys, and anything else you commonly use in the care of your animal.

I have multiple animals that I need to surrender, will they all go to the same home?

We strive to place animals into new homes and environments that will provide them the best chance at living a long and happy life. If the animals you surrender are bonded together every effort will be made to place the animals into a new home together. This is usually easy to accommodate if the animals are in pairs or trios.

I’m surrendering my animal, but would like to hear from the new owner about how my animal is doing, is this possible?

When you surrender your animal you are welcome to leave your name and contact information for the new owner of your animal. However, we cannot guarantee that the person who adopts your animal will be open to contacting you.

What if my pet doesn’t get adopted?

So far we have been successful with having all healthy animals adopted during an event. However, in the rare event that an animal was not adopted we would hold that animal while we contacted pre-approved adopters in the area who may not have been able to attend the event.

I missed the last event and have an exotic pet I can’t keep anymore. What can I do?

We can help place exotic pets outside of amnesty events. Contact the Exotic Species Hotline at 888-IVE-GOT1 (888-483-4681).

Information on Adopting Animals

I’d like to adopt an exotic pet

Want to help us find homes for exotic pets in need? Apply today! Read about how to become an exotic pet adopter.

I’m an adopter with the program, what should I expect at an Exotic Pet Amnesty Day event?

At an Exotic Pet Amnesty Day event, animals are surrendered between 10:00 am and 2:00 pm. Surrendered animals are held for the duration of the event and adoptions start around 2:30 pm. Adopters should arrive and check in at 2:15 pm. Once most adopters have checked in, we allow all the adopters to travel through the animal holding area and see the animals that will be available for adoption that day. After every adopter has had an opportunity to see the animals we have a drawing to create a random adoption order. The first adopter called gets to go through the trailer and adopt one animal from a category for which they are approved. This process continues until every adopter has had a chance to go through and adopt an animal. If there are still animals available for adoption we will go back through the random list of adopters.

What animals will be available for adoption at an Exotic Pet Amnesty Day event?

We have no way of knowing what species of animals, or how many, will be surrendered at any given event. Also, we allow for the surrender of any exotic pet so we receive a great variety of animals. In general, we see a lot of animals that can be purchased easily at local pet stores such as ball pythons, green iguanas, pond turtles, and sugar gliders. While less common, we also see small birds, parrots, boa constrictors, and tortoises with some frequency.

I plan on adopting, what should I bring to an event?

If you plan on adopting an animal at an Exotic Pet Amnesty Day event you should bring something to transport that animal home. Depending on what you are approved for this could be a small kennel, a large Tupperware, or even a cloth bag. Don’t assume the animal you are adopting will come with a habitat or something appropriate for transport.

Information on Planning an Exotic Pet Amnesty Day event

Can anyone host an amnesty event?

The FWC invites other governmental agencies, zoos, museums, nature centers, and other conservation oriented organizations to find out more about planning independent amnesty events that are sanctioned by FWC. Independent amnesty events must be planned under the guidance of FWC to avoid violating state rules. Contact the Exotic Species Program Coordinator, Ashley Taylor, at 954-577-6409 for more information.

Python “Saffron” gives birth to a brood of 62 – twice the usual offspring

An 18ft python who mated with a snake half her size has hatched a huge brood of 62 baby snakes – double the usual number of offspring.

Reticulated python Saffron had shown little interest in breeding when she was bought by owners Jen and Andy Webb from south east Asia seven years ago.

The couple, from Gloucester, had given up hope of her producing offspring when they put nine-foot male python Fire in her enclosure to show how much bigger Saffron was.

But the pair mated and Saffron laid an impressive 62 eggs on Valentine’s Day which were put into an incubator.

Twelve weeks later, they have all hatched and produced baby snakes measuring between 12 and 15 inches long.

The new arrivals, born last Saturday, will spend a week or so in the broken egg before shedding their skin.

They will each be fed three meals of defrosted baby rat once a week and could be ready for sale in a few weeks’ time.

The baby snakes will each be sold for between £60 and £150 depending on their markings, fetching the couple up to £9,000

Mrs Webb, 30, who runs Webb’s Reptile Centre with her husband, said Saffron’s enormous clutch of eggs was down to her size – around six foot longer than most females.

She said: ‘She is an extremely large snake and she also didn’t breed until quite late in life.

‘Most snakes breed around two or three however Saffie is eight years old and these are her first babies.

Breeder Mrs Webb said: ‘I actually saw one of the baby snakes pop up out of their egg and I’ve never seen that before’

‘We had written her off and only put a male in with her to show people the size difference, but they did mate.

‘We are breeders and she is one of many we’ve got with hatching eggs, but she is quite special.

Amanda Williams|MailOnline |13 May 2015

Endangered Species

Missouri center helps wolf-repopulation effort

EUREKA, Mo. — A secluded Missouri conservation center heralded for helping repopulate the wild with endangered wolves is tending to its latest puppy season — a ritual that this time has a bittersweet vibe in the absence of the site’s furry matriarch. With 41 Mexican gray wolf pups to her credit until she died April 21, a day before her 14th birthday, Anna came to symbolize the Endangered Wolf Center’s quest to save North America’s rarest subspecies of gray wolf.

The center’s staffers are mourning the loss of the prolific Anna, whose offspring came in just four litters over a five-year stretch to 2008, dwarfing the typical brood of four to seven. Yet, the St. Louis-area center presses on, championing an animal that at times is broadly vilified.

The Mexican wolf population in the Southwest once numbered in the thousands before being nearly wiped out by the 1970s, largely the result of more than a century of being hunted, trapped and poisoned by ranchers and others. Commonly known as “El Lobos,” the Mexican gray was designated an endangered species in 1976 and was considered extinct in the wild until they were reintroduced in 1998.

The 110 said to be in the wild as of early 2014 — by Virginia Busch’s account, all of them with genetic ties to the center for which she is executive director — is up from 83 the previous year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said.

“To take something so close to extinction, breed several generations in captivity and establish a wild population, that’s huge,” said Maggie Dwire, the assistant Mexican gray wolf recovery coordinator for the federal agency. “We’ve been incredibly successful, but we still have a really long way to go.”
Regina Mossotti, the center’s director of animal care and conservation, said roughly 175 Mexican grays have been born at the center since 1980 — amounting to roughly 40 percent of Mexican grays birthed in captivity.

Anna did her part, enough to garner a feature in National Geographic for her birth rate that Busch called “genetically mind-boggling.”

The nonprofit, which was founded in 1971 by zoologist Marlin Perkins, the late St. Louis native best known as the host of TV’s “Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom,” also has three dozen wolves, foxes and African painted dogs roaming enclosures on dozens of acres leased from Washington University.

A similar comeback, with the center’s help, has been waged by the red wolf, now believed to number around five dozen almost exclusively in the Southeast.

For Busch and others at the center, which touts itself as the nation’s biggest holder of Mexican gray wolves, helping such animals battle back has been as much about education as it has about breeding. “People talk of wolves as vicious, scary animals, and they’re not,” Mossotti said. “You tend to fear what you don’t understand. And if people could work here one day, they’d never fear wolves again.”

JIM SUHR|ASSOCIATED PRESS|5/10/15

Indonesian National Police Seize Major Shipment of Pangolins, Arrest Smuggler

The Indonesian National Police’s Criminal Investigation Division (BARESKRIM MABES POLRI), the Government of Indonesia, and the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Wildlife Crimes Unit (WCU) today announced the seizure of a shipment of pangolins headed to China and valued at approximately 1.8 million US dollars (USD). The pangolin smuggler involved in the case has been arrested.

This is the largest case of pangolin smuggling in Indonesia since 2008 when the Indonesian National Police, supported by WCS’s WCU, arrested two smugglers and confiscated 13.8 tons of frozen pangolins in Palembang.

The seizure took place on April 23, 2015, at the Belawan seaport in Medan, the largest city on the island of Sumatra. Belawan Seaport is notorious for being an import and exit point for illegal wildlife trafficking. The haul included 5 tons of frozen pangolins, 77 kilograms of pangolin scales, and 96 live pangolins. A smuggler, identified by the initials SHB, has been arrested in the case. SHB allegedly dealt and exported pangolins that he ordered from local dealers in Aceh and north Sumatra. Under Indonesian law, trafficking of pangolins, their parts and by-products is punishable by a maximum penalty of five years of imprisonment and a maximum fine of USD $10,000.

In recent years, the price of pangolin has increased sharply in the international market, driven by demand from China. Based on current black market prices, the value of the seized shipment is 1.826 million USD. Pangolin scales (considered to have healing qualities by traditional Chinese medicine practitioners) are valued at USD $3,000 per kg, pangolin meat (considered a delicacy) at USD $300 per kg, and live pangolins at USD $992. Smugglers also ship pangolin innards, including fetuses, for traditional medicinal purposes.

Based upon evidence gathered during the arrest, the shipment was headed to China. In order to avoid police and customs detection, the suspect had exported the shipping container that held the pangolin cargo from a secondary port to a cargo ferry offshore, where it was obscured among other containers. The cargo ferry then docked at Belawan port where the container was to be transferred to a vessel destined for China via Haiphong Seaport in Vietnam. The exporter also shipped live pangolins to Penang, Malaysia through a remote seaport in Medan.

There are eight species of pangolins (Family: Manidae) still in existence worldwide. Four of the species are of Asian origin including the Sudanese Pangolin (Manis javanicus), which is listed as Critically Endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The pangolin’s large scales are made of keratin, the same material as fingernails and rhino horns, and account for 20% of its weight.

Deputy Director Tipidter, CID of the Indonesian National Police, Police Senior Commissioner Didid Widjanardi said, “Pangolins are protected under Indonesian law. The Indonesian National Police and WCS’s WCU have done a great job in tackling pangolin smuggling since 2008. We will continue our collaboration in the future through preventive actions, which is important to saving pangolins in their habitat.”

WCS Executive Director for Asia Programs Joe Walston said, “This is a major breakthrough, both in terms of the enormous size of the shipment and in terms of the increasing sophistication of collaborative methods used by Indonesian authorities in making the bust. WCS is committed to supporting the Government of Indonesia in dismantling this insidious illegal trade.”

WCS’s Wildlife Crimes Unit is supported by the Liz Claiborne and Art Ortenberg Foundation, Fondation Segré, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service Multinational Species Conservation Funds, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

ssmith|April 27, 2015

Wildlife Conservation Society at 120: Then and Now, Conservation Action Takes a Movement

In 1907 the American Bison Society arranged for 15 bison donated by the New York Zoological Society (NYZS) to be shipped by railway from the Bronx Zoo to the Wichita National Forest and Game Preserve in Oklahoma to begin the work of restoring the Western Plains’ depleted bison population – reduced in the preceding half-century from well over 20 million to a mere 23 animals in the wild.

The shipment was an extraordinary achievement – the start of what would become the first successful organized conservation effort to save a species from extinction. In the ensuing decades the wild bison population would rebound to close to 25,000, with another quarter million maintained as managed herds in every state in the union. So inspiring is the end result that one could be forgiven in forgetting the work required to make it happen.

Two years earlier, in 1905, Bronx Zoo Director William T. Hornaday brought together a group of diverse stakeholders to form the American Bison Society (ABS). With President Theodore Roosevelt as honorary president, ABS set out to prevent the extinction of the American bison by establishing a number of small herds in widely separated parts of the country.

Anticipating the challenge, Hornaday had already lobbied the Congress to set aside federal land in Oklahoma for the purpose of creating game preserves (as ABS would later do for land in South Dakota and Nebraska). Hornaday now gathered available bison from around the northeast to establish a small population at the Bronx Zoo, operated by NYZS (today the Wildlife Conservation Society, or WCS).

To defray the cost of transporting the animals west, the ABS worked with both Wells Fargo and American Express. The public was also engaged. Between 1908 and 1909, conservation-minded individuals from 29 states – as well as the District of Columbia, England, Canada, and France – made personal contributions, raising more than $10,500 in support of the Montana National Bison herd.

Hornaday juggled these disparate elements of his campaign expertly. Decades before Rachel Carson’s passionate call for the protection of our forests, streams, and pastures in her book Silent Spring, Hornaday helped to establish a veritable blueprint for modern environmental movement-building – one that he would apply again and again to achieve the vision and goals of the zoological society.

As WCS turns 120 this week, it continues that tradition of effective conservation movement building begun a century ago. The past two years have seen perhaps the most ambitious and successful of these efforts with the creation of the 96 Elephants campaign. The campaign takes its name from the roughly 35,000 elephants being killed across Africa each year for their ivory – a figure that translates into 96 elephants per day, or one every 15 minutes.

Responding to the devastating poaching crisis, the 96 Elephants campaign developed a three-prong strategy to curtail the illegal ivory trade: stop the killing, stop the trafficking, and stop the demand. Central to this effort has been an acknowledgement that the United States has itself played a large role in driving demand for ivory.

With poached ivory being sold and traded as antique (the latter is protected by law, but the two are very difficult to distinguish), a tightening of restrictions on ivory purchases and sales in the United States needed to take place.

To achieve that goal, the 96 Elephants campaign followed Hornaday’s tested movement strategy: building coalitions with public and private partners (including more than 120 members of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums), raising public awareness, and working with government leaders.

The results would make Hornaday proud. New York and New Jersey successfully established ivory bans in the summer of 2014. Similar efforts are now underway in California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and elsewhere.

The success of the 96 Elephants campaign is not merely another example of what’s old being new again. It demonstrates that tried and true organizing principles – clearly articulated goals grounded upon public education (including a lot of pavement-pounding), the building of partnerships and alliances, and passionate advocacy at all levels of government – can and should be the basis for other pressing environment and conservation priorities of our time.

In the coming years, WCS hopes to continue to apply this movement strategy for the protection threatened species. In so doing we are not merely working to protect great iconic wildlife like the bison and the elephant. We are developing a constituency for conservation that will continue the fight for future generations as we do now 100 years after William Hornaday’s inspiring example.

John F. Calvelli|Executive Vice President, Public Affairs, Wildlife Conservation Society|05/02/2015

22 live birds found stuffed in water bottles at Indonesian port

An Indonesian man has been arrested on suspicion of wildlife smuggling by Indonesian police after almost two dozen rare live birds, mostly yellow-crested cockatoos, were found jammed inside plastic water bottles in his luggage.

He was stopped by police when he left a passenger ship in Surabaya.

The head of the criminal investigation unit at Tanjung Perak port, Aldy Sulaiman, said police found the birds stashed inside the man’s luggage.

“We found 21 yellow-crested cockatoos and one green parrot,” he said. “All the birds were found inside water bottles, which were packed in a crate.”

The birds have since been sent to Indonesia’s natural resources conservation office, which deals with wildlife-trafficking cases.

If he is found guilty of smuggling he could face up to five years in prison.

The critically endangered Yellow-crested cockatoos are native to Indonesia and neighbouring East Timor and can sell for around £1,000 each.

From Wildlife Extra

Romania set to approve bird hunting during spring migration

A proposed law that would allow spring hunting and trespassing on private property in Romania could be approved imminently, Bird Life International has reported.

This would mean birds could be killed legally during spring migration, which goes against the Birds and Habitats Directives. Spring is a critical time for migrating birds on their way to breed.

The legislation would extend the legal hunting periods for up to three months, including the time that covers the spring migration, for 18 species of birds, mostly goose and duck species (Northern Pintail and Gargany among them).

It is particularly threatening for non-target species such as the endangered Red-breasted Goose, which forms mixed flocks with target species and is accidentally killed.

One of the other 18 species to which this law would apply is the Eurasian Skylark.

It’s one of Romania’s most beloved birds and has been an inspiration for many great musicians all over the world.

It is currently legal to hunt Skylark in Romania and five other EU countries – Greece, Cyprus, Italy, France and Malta. But the Skylark population in Europe has declined up to 50 per cent since 1980, so extending the hunting period would only worsen the situation.

Also, people are known to hunt under the guise of targeting Skylark, but end up killing other species that are legally protected.

The proposed law would also allow anyone in pursuit of a wild bird to walk onto any private field or property without permission from the owner.

The argument by the government is that wild game is owned by the state, so anyone in pursuit of wild game should be allowed to follow their target wherever they like without consent.

This means it would be legal to hunt birds on land and forests that NGOs and foundations have bought with the precise purpose of protecting wildlife.

Therefore, this proposed law also has implications for places that are supposed to protect birds and nature in Romania, such as Natura 2000 protected areas.

Hunting liberalization would undermine the management of these sites.

From Wildlife Extra

How to Create a Pollinator Oasis Right at Home

Did you know that about one-third of the world’s food crop production relies on pollination?

Perhaps due to this connection, the plight of pollinators (bees in particular) has recently become highly publicized worldwide.

Todd Farrell, conservation biologist with the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) says that while bees have been the poster child in the media, other pollinators such as butterflies and moths that are facing similar challenges should not be left out.

“We are just beginning to understand pollinators’ importance in our ecosystems and food systems, and their status in the wild,” says Todd.

“Insect diversity is vast and there’s a lot we still don’t know. Building up this knowledge base can help us better manage our lands.”

Farrell says that by conducting targeted surveys and contributing to province-wide counts, NCC scientists are able to gather more information on population sizes, trends and the locations of certain pollinator species.

For example, findings from one of last year’s moth surveys at an NCC property in the Rice Lake Plains Natural Area proved great potential as a core area for provincially and nationally significant moths.

While conservation organizations like NCC are making progress in the field and helping us build a better picture of pollinators on the lands they protect, change can happen right at home.

Here are three ways you can be a champion for our pollinators:

Pollinator friendly plants and wildflowers

Species such as wild bergamot and black-eyed Susan are examples of plants suitable in all areas. However, some plants may only be appropriate for a certain habitat type or climatic zone. Use native plant guides to learn about what’s appropriate for your area. Plants that pollinators will love include bee balm, milkweed and other nectar- and pollen-rich species. Choosing a variety of plants that flower at different times of the year helps ensure a steady food supply for our pollinators!
Tip: Once you’ve selected your seeds, help them germinate by sealing the seeds in a Ziploc bag with a damp paper towel.

Water and salt licks
Access to fresh, clean water is essential for pollinator health. Line a shallow dish with a few pebbles as landing pads, and voilà: a hydration station for your ladybugs, butterflies, bees and more.

Butterflies also use salt licks to satisfy a need for nutrients and minerals. Make your garden more inviting by creating a damp area over bare soil mixed with a little sea salt for a DIY salt lick.

Tip: Spot a grounded, exhausted bee straggling about? Help get it back on its feet (or wings rather) by offering a spoon with sugar water.

Nesting havens

You may be surprised that not all bees live in hives; in fact, of Canada’s 800 native bee species, about 30 percent are solitary and live in underground burrows, wood tunnels or other cavities.

Tip: Even without any carpentry skills, you can build a bee condo using wood blocks and hollow stems.

The Nature Conservancy of Canada|May 12, 2015

U.S. Honeybee Population Plummets by More Than 40%, USDA Finds

To the horror of beekeepers around the country, it appears that the worrisome decline in honeybees is getting even worse. According to the latest annual government study, U.S. beekeepers reported losing 42.1 percent of the total number of colonies managed from April 2014 through April 2015, much higher than the 34.2 percent from the year prior.

The study was conducted by the Bee Informed Partnership in collaboration with the Apiary Inspectors of America and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Preliminary results indicate that U.S. beekeepers were hardest-hit in the summer of 2014, with an average loss of 27.4 percent of their hives compared to the 19.8 percent the previous summer.

While winter numbers improved about 0.6 percentage points less than the previous winter, the honeybee death rate is still too high for long-term survival. Colony losses were 23.1 percent for the 2014-15 winter months, which is normally the higher loss period.

The Associated Press reported that the study’s entomologists were “shocked” when they noticed bees were dying more in the summer than the winter for the first time. Study co-author Dennis van Engelsdorp of the University of Maryland told the news organization that seeing massive colony losses in summer is like seeing “a higher rate of flu deaths in the summer than winter. You just don’t expect colonies to die at this rate in the summer.”

Total annual loss percentage by state. Photo Credit: Bee Informed

A growing body of evidence has pointed to one class of pesticides in particular, neonicotinoids, as the culprit to the massive bee die-offs. In fact, the European Union banned the three most widely used neonicotinoids in 2o13, but they are still used widely in the U.S.

Environmental advocacy organization Friends of the Earth noted that the extreme bee losses highlight the urgent need to restrict pesticides to protect pollinators. “Bayer, Syngenta and Monsanto make billions from bee-killing pesticide products while masquerading as champions of bee health,” said Tiffany Finck-Haynes, food futures campaigner with Friends of the Earth. “Are their profits more important than our food supply? Are they more important than the livelihoods of America’s farmers? The Obama administration must act now to restrict neonicotinoid pesticides that threaten America’s bees, farmers and food security.”

There’s been a growing movement to save the honeybees, which perform about 80 percent of all pollination worldwide, according to Greenpeace. Just two months ago, the White House received four million petition signatures calling on the Obama administration to put forth strong protections for honey bees and pollinators. This past April, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced a moratorium on new or expanded uses of neonicotinoids while it evaluates the risks posed to pollinators. And last June, the Obama administration also established the Pollinator Health Task Force charged with improving pollinator health and assessing the impacts of pesticides, including neonicotinoids, on pollinators.

Friends of the Earth and their allies have also successfully campaigned for more than twenty garden stores, nurseries and landscaping companies, including Lowe’s and Home Depot to eliminate neonicotinoids from their stores. BJ’s Wholesale Club and Whole Foods have also taken steps to restrict these pesticides.

“The solution to the bee crisis is to shift to sustainable agriculture systems that are not dependent on monoculture crops saturated in pesticides,” Finck-Haynes continued. “It’s time to reimagine the way we farm in the United States and incentivize organic agriculture practices that are better for bees and for all of us.”

Lorraine Chow|May 14, 2015

Saving the Leopard With Furs for Life

It has the widest range of all big cats in the world and was once ubiquitous throughout much of Africa and Eurasia. But the leopard has fallen on hard times.

Native to 35 countries in Sub Saharan Africa, today the leopard has disappeared from almost 40 percent of this historic range. Why? Leopards are dying because of a loss of habitat as a result of human population expansion, killings by herders in retribution for livestock loss, unsustainable legal trophy hunting and poaching for their skins and body parts.

Despite this, leopards haven’t received much attention in the wildlife conservation world. Aid for Africa member Panthera, a global wild cat conservation organization focused on 36 species, including the imperiled African lion, cheetah and leopard, is out to change that through a multifaceted approach focused on research, outreach and solutions for leopard conservation.

One effort is Panthera’s Furs for Life Leopard Project.

The leopard, an emblematic species of Africa, is revered for its beautiful spotted coat. Panthera reports that leopard skins are in increasing demand among members of South Africa’s Shembe Baptist Church, whose followers wear spotted cat fur during religious celebrations. Although trade in leopard skins is illegal, this cultural practice is reducing South Africa’s leopard populations.

Panthera’s Leopard Program Coordinator Tristan Dickerson estimates that nearly 1,000 leopard skins are either worn or sold at every major Shembe gathering. However, the large number of fake leopard skins, including impala skins and other pelts painted with spots, gave him reason for hope.

Panthera collaborated with digital designers and clothing companies to create a cape made from high-quality, realistic fake leopard fur. Panthera and its partners are working with church leaders to encourage their members to use the sustainable fake fur capes at religious ceremonies. Some 6,000 fake leopard furs have been donated to Shembe members throughout South Africa. Dickerson and his team hope to deliver approximately 18,000 fake furs by the end of 2017.

Everyone is optimistic, including Panthera President Luke Hunter, “The Furs for Life Leopard Project has provided a highly innovative solution to one of the gravest threats facing leopards in southern Africa. Panthera identified this emerging threat through its long-term research in the KwaZulu-Natal province, and within a few years, we’ve identified a real solution. . .”

To raise awareness of the plight of the leopard, Panthera has launched the #ifakeit movement with international superstar Shania Twain. Fans of Shania and leopards are coming together through social media to help rescue the once ubiquitous wild leopard from its hard times.

Aid for Africa|May 14, 2015

Does Our Future Include Elephants, Rhinos and Gorillas?

Some of the world’s biggest — and most threatened — animals are herbivores. While these plant-powered creatures rarely hurt a fly, a new study shows that they’re under attack. And not so surprisingly, humans are largely to blame.

In the Not Too Distant Future… “Empty Landscapes”

As reported in The Washington Post, a study published in Science Advances paints a very dark earth. In the not too distant future, picture our planet with “empty landscapes.” A landscape without elephants, rhinos, gorillas and hippos just to name a few. The authors of the study are clear: the herbivores are in trouble, and it’s our fault. Wrap your head around this: 60 percent of the large herbivores are now threatened by extinction.

What’s exactly hurting the herbivores? The short answer is humans. More specifically, our growing population, our out of hand hunting and our voracious appetite for animal products that devastates herbivore habitats. And if we couple herbivores’ naturally low birth rates to all of that, it’s easy to see how they’re getting the short end of the stick.

It’s going to take worldwide action to turn this around. We can help protect the herbivores if together we reduce our birth rates, give women basic rights, consume less animals and animal byproducts, stop the poaching, protect designated protected areas and fight climate change. It’s a tall order, but aren’t they worth the sacrifices?

Recklessly losing our majestic herbivores is a crime. But it’s also much more than that. Large herbivores play vital roles in their environments.

3 Herbivore Ecological Engineers

You can think of these herbivores as ecological engineers. As any good nature documentary shows, it’s easy to see how predators keep other animals — and the environment — under control. While not as exciting as a lioness stalking a gazelle, large herbivores also keep their environment in check. Here a few ways large herbivores serve their environments.

Elephants

Elephants aren’t the best seed digesters, and that’s great news for their environments. Elephants can leave precious seeds wherever they plop down and relieve themselves. They also actively sculpt their environment when they’re “digging with their front legs, pulling up grass [and] knocking down big trees,” reports BBC.

Extinction Red Alert!: An elephant is killed every 15 minutes for its tusks; at this rate, none will be left roaming in 2025.

Rhinos

Up until recently, rhinos got very little credit for engineering their environment. According to Smithsonian Magazine, rhinos are equipped to knock down trees. And research shows that areas with less rhinos “had 60 to 80 percent less short grass cover than places where rhinos frequently hung out.”

Extinction Red Alert!: In 2014, one rhino was killed every eight hours just in South Africa.

Primates (Gorillas)

Like other primates, gorillas help the environment in two main ways. Primates play key role in how seeds are dispersed — they can literally structure entire ecosystems. Their role as folivores also puts them in the eco engineering position; for instance, they’ll eat the flowers so much that the plant species “does not set fruit.”

Extinction Red Alert!: Three of the four gorilla species are critically endangered. The Cross River Gorilla only has approximately 300 members left.

It’s clear that humans aren’t the only ones who can change the landscape. We’re making critical changes to our environment that have consequences larger than we know. Unfortunately, the large herbivores can’t keep up. Can you imagine what our world will look like without them?

Jessica Ramos|May 15, 2015

Whale Entanglement Sightings Reach Record High

Just a couple of miles offshore in Monterey Bay on a grey November day, the ocean surface behind our whale watching boat started to boil with anchovies. As we watched, astonished, a cloud of them shimmered out of the water, followed by the lunging head of a humpback whale. Its enormous throat billowed as it swallowed the unsuccessfully fleeing anchovies. Even our guide exclaimed at the sight. But that exclamation was followed by a note of worry: “You see those buoys right near the whales—those are for crab gear. I sure hope the whales move away from them; otherwise they can get tangled up in the line.” A fellow whale watcher cocked his head: “Really? That happens?”

It does happen, and as I learned earlier this year, record numbers of whale entanglements—mostly humpbacks and gray whales—have been seen entangled in California since 2014. Most of these whales were snared in gear used to catch Dungeness crab, spot prawn and other species. While a lucky few escape from the gear by themselves or get help from a brave team of disentanglement volunteers, those that remain wrapped in buoy line can face serious injury and even death. An entangled whale may be forced to drag hundreds of pounds of gear as it attempts to feed, migrate or simply surface to breathe. Some exhausted whales eventually drown. The line can also cut into the whale’s flesh, leading to infections. Line that remains wrapped around pectoral fins or a fluke can cause those fins to rot off altogether.

KSBW news reports on a humpback whale entanglement rescue in Monterey Bay last May.

KSBW Action News 8/YouTube

Knowing the risk of serious injury associated with these entanglements made the new data on increased incidents in 2014 and 2015 even more alarming. Between 2000 and 2013, California saw an average of eight whale entanglements per year. In 2014, 21 entanglements were observed. And in just the four months of 2015 alone, 25 separate whales were seen wrapped in fishing gear.

While we don’t know all of the reasons behind the escalated incidents, part of the problem may be traced back to those anchovy that the whales were chasing. High quality food like anchovy and sardine is in scarce supply along much of the California coast, in part due to overfishing. Monterey Bay is one of the few spots where significant numbers of anchovy are concentrated, creating a food oasis and possibly leading whales to linger there much longer into the Dungeness crab fishing season. More whales + more crab gear = greater risk of entanglements.

Let’s be clear: No fisherman wants to entangle a whale, just as no driver wants to get into a traffic accident. But regardless of intent, whether you’re talking about whales getting tangled in gear or cars getting snarled with other cars, a spike in those accidents signals a dangerous problem. And that problem demands solutions.

To that end, Earthjustice and our partners recently submitted a letter to the California Fish and Wildlife Department and California Fish and Game Commission requesting that they work with us, federal marine mammal authorities and fishing industry representatives to implement measures to prevent whale entanglement in the Dungeness crab fishery before the next fishing season starts next fall.

Options up for consideration include allowing more than one trap to be deployed with each buoy, thereby decreasing the number of buoy lines swaying in the whales’ path; modifying gear so that buoy lines break off when a whale strains against them; and limiting the amount of gear deployed in areas with high concentrations of whales. We also requested that California obtain authorizations under the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act and Endangered Species Act for the incidental injury to marine mammals caused by state-managed pot and trap fisheries. This process will contribute to the development of longer term, more comprehensive plans to prevent harm to whales. Such measures could involve modifications of fishing gear, increased removal of abandoned or lost gear, and/or limiting the amount of gear deployed in areas where there are large numbers of whales.

I’m optimistic that we will find solutions. Already, key regulators and the public are giving greater attention to this issue and we’re seeing a commitment on the part of California fishery managers and members of the Dungeness crab fleet to address it. We look forward to finding ways to protect our magnificent ocean neighbors so that they can swim freely and safely, and forage for their own dinners without becoming a casualty of ours.

Andrea Treece|May 07, 2015

Humpback Whales Could Be in Danger of Being Removed From Endangered List

The good news is that worldwide humpback whale numbers are on the rise, and researchers believe that many colonies are no longer endangered.

The bad news is that when they are no longer considered endangered, their level of protection reduces, which increases the level of threat to these magnificent and extremely complex marine giants.

Too Eager to Remove Humpbacks from Endangered List?

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is proposing that the world’s humpback whale populations be split into 14 different segments, so that each segment can be viewed and protected according to their individual threat status. This approach would enable resources to be better allocated towards the colonies which are most in need of protection, namely the two groups living in the Arabian Sea and northwest Africa, which would be the only two segments which remain on the endangered species list.

While in principle the proposal makes perfect sense, the problem is that we still do not understand enough about the complex and delicate lives, migration routes and breeding patterns to know exactly how this will affect their numbers. There is a divide within the conservation community, with many groups opposing the initiative, fearing that it could further endanger the species.

Whale and Dolphin Conservation America’s executive director and senior biologist Regina Asmutis-Silvia stated that:

“It’s not so simple as drawing a line and saying: ‘They belong to this population and there’s a lot of them so we are going to take them off the list’… Humpbacks are a really complicated species to really review for declaring these distinct population segments…They are highly migratory in most places, but not everywhere.”

Some of the biggest threats to humpbacks come from entanglement in fishing nets, which are estimated to be killing up to 3 percent of the population, and collisions with boats, which could be affecting around 15 percent off the coast of New England alone.

What Can Be Done to Protect the Whales?

The proposal entered a 90 day public comment period starting April 20 whereby NOAA Fisheries is welcoming the submission of new information and public comments to ensure that their final decision is based on the best available information.

If you want to voice your opinion, or submit scientific or commercial data which could affect the outcome of the decision, you can do so by commenting here, and quote the code NOAA-NMFS-2015-0035.

All Animals Deserve to be Protected as if They Were Endangered

The reason that many wild animal populations are depleting at such alarming rates is that we rarely provide them with the legal protection they require until their numbers become critically low and they are recognized as endangered.

By the time they are placed on the endangered animals list, we have already done too much damage to the natural balance of their ecosystems, social or migratory patterns, or have allowed them to be hunted to near extinction.

Our place in this world is not to decide upon the value of each species lives by the number remaining on the earth, but to hold each animal with equal value and afford them equal protection whether their numbers are thriving or not.

We can never fully understand the damage our activities cause to the complex worldwide web of ecosystems, and to separate each colony of whales and afford them different protection statuses when we cannot fully understand how interlinked and interdependent their lives are seems like a dangerous mistake to make.

Abigail Geer|May 16, 2015

13 Amazing and Critically Endangered Frogs

Today, May 15, is Endangered Species Day, an event organized by a number of conservation groups to raise awareness about the many species that are in real danger of becoming extinct. In honor of this day, I want to turn our gaze to one of the smaller but no less delightful animal orders: the frog. These tail-less amphibians are wonderfully diverse, but sadly many species find themselves in an increasingly inhospitable world. All of the frogs featured here are listed as “Critically Endangered” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. We hope that learning about these creatures will inspire readers to act to conserve their precious habitats.

First on our list is the Lemur Leaf Frog (Agalychnis lemur). This species is primarily found in Costa Rica and Panama. Like many endangered frogs, the decline of this species is likely due to an infectious fungal disease called chytridiomycosis. The fungus has infected amphibians in many parts of the globe, including North and South America, the Caribbean and Australia.

The Black-eyed Leaf Frog (Agalychnis moreletii) is native to Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. They live in lowland mountain forests and wetlands. This species may also commonly be called Morelet’s tree frog. It is another frog threatened by chytridiomycosis, as well as a loss of habitat.

Anodonthyla vallani is a species of narrow-mouthed frog. It is only found in the high forest mountains of Ambohitantely Reserve in Madagascar. Although its habitat is a protected area, the reserve is small, so the survival of this frog depends on the continued preservation of its habitat.

Once believed to be extinct, this Harlequin Frog (Atelopus varius) today is only found in a small area near Quepos, Costa Rica, although its range once stretched across Costa Rica to Panama. The exact reasons for this species’ decline are unknown, but global warming and chytridiomycosis are two possible theories. These frogs are found along streams and are active during the day.

Balebreviceps hillmani is commonly know as the Bale Mountains Tree Frog, because the only population is found in Bale Mountains National Park in Ethiopia. Although the area is protected, these frogs are nonetheless threatened by habitat degradation caused by firewood collection and cattle grazing. They may also be called Ethiopian Short-headed Frogs.

The Williams’ Bright-eyed Frog (Boophis williamsi) is another frog found only in a small region of Madagascar. It lives on the mountain top of Ankaratra Massif, at an altitude of over 8,000 feet above sea level. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, its habitat is threatened by grazing livestock and burns for agricultural purposes.

This frog is commonly known as the Taita Hills Warty Frog (Callulina dawida), named for its habitat in south-eastern Kenya. This population has suffered from habitat fragmentation, and lives in separated patches of forest. There is some good news for this species: the Taita Hills have been recognized as a key biodiversity area, and there are plans to turn a number of tree plantations in the area back into native forests.

This little frog measures about 1.4 inches from head to tail. Known as Gregg’s Stream Frog (Craugastor greggi) these critically endangered creatures are found in Guatemala and Mexico. They live in cloud forests and breed in freshwater streams. This frog is threatened by habitat loss, but its population decline is also likely due to the chytridiomycosis fungus disease.

As its name suggests, the Honduran Brook Frog (Duellmanohyla salvavida) is native to Honduras. It’s found in rainforests, and lays its eggs in vegetation that overhangs streams. When the young hatch, they side into the water below. These species has suffered from habitat loss due to logging and agriculture. Water pollution caused by landslides is also a problem for this species.

This fancy frog is commonly called Rabb’s Fringe-limbed Tree Frog (Ecnomiohyla rabborum). It’s native to Panama, and lives at high elevations in the canopy of the forests. These tree frogs are nocturnal, and can be heard calling to one another at night. They’re considered critically endangered because of their small range, and are at risk due to habitat degradation.

The Corroboree Frog (Pseudophryne corroboree), which is native to Australia, saw a population decline of over 80 percent between the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s unclear what caused this loss, but conservationists have been successful at breeding these frogs in captivity. It is hoped that this “back-up” population may one day help re-establish the Corroboree in the wild.

Another frog native to Honduras, this Spikethumb Frog (Plectrohyla dasypus) is threatened by the fungus that causes chytridiomycosis. The Honduran Spikethumb Frog was first listed as “Critically Endangered” in 2004. It also has a limited range, and is only found in the Parque Nacional Cusuco, in the north-western part of the country.

This frog pictured here is a member of Rhacophorus pseudomalabaricus species. These frogs have only been found in the Indira Gandhi National Park in India. But outside of the park, the forests that these frogs might call home are threatened by logging and conversion for agricultural purposes.

What you can do to help the frogs

There are also many frogs that we know so little about, that we can’t say if they’re endangered or not. Additionally, new species of frogs are being discovered and described all the time—so protecting frog habitats is not only important for preventing certain species from going extinct, but also for understanding the full extent of frog diversity. The advice we give for protecting the human environment can also go a long way towards protecting the environment for all kinds of animals, but there are some things that you can do that particularly benefit frogs.

Avoid pesticides in your lawn and garden
Frogs are particularly susceptible to the chemicals used in pesticides, as work by biologist such as Dr. Tyrone Hayes has shown. Avoid using pesticides in your own backyard, and you can also help support the use of less pesticide use agriculture by choosing organic food.

Donate to a frog-friendly conservation effort
There are a number of awesome conservation efforts going on around the world to prevent more species of frogs from going extinct. Consider donating to the Amphibian Rescue & Conservation Project in Panama or the Amphibian Ark, an organization supported by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

by Margaret Badore|Treehugger|May 16, 2015

Wild & Weird

How Smart Are Crows- The Answer Will Surprise You!

Florida dolphins use their own forms of social media to choose their friends

Just like human beings, dolphins form highly complex and dynamic social networks, according to a recent study by scientists at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute (HBOI) at Florida Atlantic University.

The researchers studied the interactions between some 200 bottlenose dolphins in the Indian River Lagoon (IRL), a 156-mile long estuary located on Florida’s east coast.

They discovered how the dolphins mingle and with whom they spend their time. They may not have Facebook or Twitter but they do have association patterns as well as movement behaviour and habitat preferences.

The IRL lagoon is long and narrow and composed of three distinct water bodies; Mosquito Lagoon, Banana River, and the Indian River. There are five inlets and one lock (Cape Canaveral lock) connecting the IRL to the Atlantic Ocean.

Researchers from HBOI have been conducting photo identification studies of IRL bottlenose dolphins since 1996, identifying more than 1,700 individual dolphins.

In their paper recently published in the journal Marine Mammal Science, the team found that individual dolphins exhibited both preference and avoidance behaviour – so just like humans, they have dolphins they like and associate with and ones they avoid.

The study also found that IRL dolphins clustered into groups of associated animals, or “communities,” that tended to occupy discrete core areas along the north-south axis of the lagoon system.

“One of the more unique aspects of our study was the discovery that the physical dimensions of the habitat, the long, narrow lagoon system itself, influenced the spatial and temporal dynamics of dolphin association patterns,” says Elizabeth Murdoch Titcomb, research biologist at HBOI who worked on the study.

“For example, communities that occupy the narrowest stretches of the Indian River Lagoon have the most compact social networks, similar to humans who live in small towns and have fewer people with whom to interact.”

In addition to providing a unique glimpse into dolphin societies, the study provides important insight and knowledge on how dolphins organize themselves, who they interact with and who they avoid, as well as when and where.

It also gives scientists and resource managers the roadmap needed to understand how dolphin populations perceive and use their environment, and how social networks will influence information transfer and potentially breeding behaviour and disease transmission.

From Wildlife Extra

Explanation for Why Zebras Have Stripes Just Got More Complicated

It turns out the answer to why zebras have stripes isn’t so black and white. Some scientists thought they settled the question once and for all last year when they proposed that zebras developed stripes as part of evolutionary adaptation to help them ward off blood-sucking flies. But a new study published Tuesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science says the adaptive significance of zebra stripes may have more to do with environment, particularly temperature. Brenda Larison of UCLA and colleagues analyzed multiple environmental variables associated with striping in the plains zebra, the most common species of zebra, found in the grasslands of eastern and southern Africa. They found that striping patterns were most highly correlated with temperature: Generally, the warmer the climate, the more stripes found on the zebra.

“In contrast to recent findings, we found no evidence that striping may have evolved to escape predators or avoid biting flies. Instead, we found that temperature successfully predicts a substantial amount of the stripe pattern variation observed in plains zebra,” the researchers wrote. As to the stripes’ function, it could be that they help keep the zebra cool, or serve some other purpose.

“Much additional work is needed to elucidate the true functionality of striping in zebra,” the researchers wrote. “Our work shows a correlation with temperature, but the cause of this correlation remains unknown.”

Everglades

Florida lawmakers sour on Big Sugar land deal to aid Everglades

Florida lawmakers are poised to use hundreds of millions of dollars earmarked to help the Everglades for other projects

NEAR MIAMI — To a visitor’s untrained eye, Florida’s Everglades might seem in good shape.

“They see all this water, they see all this grass, and to them it looks healthy,” said Betty Osceola, who has long taught tourists about the Kahayatle, the Miccosukee tribe’s name for the Everglades.

“I always tell people that Florida is the next California,” she added. “California has a situation where they don’t have water. Florida has a situation, they have water, but eventually you’re not going to be able to drink [it] because it’s too polluted.”

For generations, the Miccosukee lived on tree islands they call hammocks, hunting and fishing in and around waters they know as well as anyone.

“You’re seeing a decline in the turtles and … native fish because the chemical in the water is affecting the food they eat, so it’s a trickle-down effect,” Osceola said. “The Everglades is being used as a vast sewer system.”

There is a way the Everglades might be able to reverse years of neglect — a conservation project so big it was once compared to creating Yellowstone National Park.

But that deal — and more of the Everglades — could die if the Florida Legislature doesn’t act this summer. Last month President Barack Obama visited the Everglades, highlighting the effects of climate change on the endangered area and the risks to the drinking water for millions of Floridians.

“If we don’t act, there may not be an Everglades as we know it,” he said.

Water woes

Getting a close-up view of a vividly colored purple gallinule is a rare thrill for a visitor. But for Ray Judah, the coordinator for the Florida Coastal and Ocean Coalition, the sight of this beautiful bird is more proof of troubled waters.

“There’s a lot of cattails growing in and amongst the sawgrass,” he said, sitting on an airboat. “The phosphorous and nitrogen allows the cattails to flourish. The birds can’t move around because the cattails are so dense.”

What’s more, the water level this time of year should be 18 inches higher, Judah said.

The heart of Florida’s agricultural industry, the land around Lake Okeechobee, is just 80 miles north of the Everglades. And farming interests control the flow of the lake. In the dry season, water is kept in the lake as a reserve for sugar cane growers and others. When there’s too much rain, Lake Okeechobee is flushed into estuaries east and west.

‘Valuable, environmentally sensitive lands are under threat from development. If the state doesn’t acquire them now, they’ll be lost forever.’ said Will Abberger, Florida’s Water and Land Legacy

But not enough water is allowed to follow its natural route south into the Everglades.

“A lot of that primarily has to do with the way the South Florida Water Management District manages about 700,000 acres north of here,” Judah said. “They manage the water levels for optimum growing conditions for the sugar cane.”

Sugar cane is a $500 million a year business for Florida. It’s also a major polluter of the state’s waterways. Its phosphorous-contaminated runoff causes massive algae blooms.

In 2008, then-Gov. Charlie Crist cut what looked like a sweet deal to rescue the Everglades. The state would buy land south of Lake Okeechobee from the United States Sugar Corp., one of Florida’s two sugar makers. The land was to be used to catch and clean the waters before sending the flow south to the Everglades.

The economic crisis struck soon after, dragging Florida into a deeper recession than almost anywhere else in the country. The state’s interest in and funds for buying the land simply dried up.

A doomed deal?

Then in 2010, a land deal that cost taxpayers nearly $200 million bought nearly 42 square miles from U.S. Sugar, allowing the South Florida Water Management District to move ahead with restoration efforts — and gave the state the option to buy up to 240 more square miles of land from the company.

That option expires in October. And now that Florida’s economy is surging again, U.S. Sugar no longer wants to sell the land.

But last year, the people of Florida spoke loudly. Amendment 1, an initiative on last November’s ballot, earmarked more than $750 million a year for 20 years from an existing real estate tax for the state to buy and conserve land for critical environmental projects. It was the largest environmental ballot initiative in U.S. history.

It passed overwhelmingly, with 75 percent of Floridians voting in favor. The law guaranteed more than enough money to buy the U.S. Sugar land — about $350 million.

“Florida is growing and developing again now,” said Will Abberger, who heads Florida’s Water and Land Legacy, the group that spearheaded the campaign for Amendment 1. “Valuable, environmentally sensitive lands are under threat from development. If the state doesn’t acquire them now, they’ll be lost forever.”

But lawmakers still haven’t approved the U.S. Sugar land funds. And with days left in Florida’s legislative session, the deal looks doomed.

So far, the Republican-dominated legislature in Tallahassee has declined to vote on the sugar land purchase and has proposed more than $200 million of Amendment 1 funds toward the operating and regulatory expenses of state agencies. The ballot initiative said Amendment 1 money could not be “commingled with the general revenue fund of the state.”

“The ballot language and actually the text of the amendment specifically says to acquire lands in the Everglades agricultural area, which is where the U.S. Sugar land in question is,” said Abberger. “Instead, they’re funding a lot of existing programs, existing agency operations.

Gov. Rick Scott and other key Republican lawmakers declined repeated requests for interviews, but “America Tonight” tracked down House Speaker Steve Crisafulli to ask about plans for the Amendment 1 money.

“I think we need to be focused right now on the land management side of things,” he told us. That means no sugar land deal.

“America Tonight” asked him if using the funds to pay for state agencies’ operating and regulatory expenses was an appropriate use of Amendment 1 money. “I think it goes toward the overall objectives of those agencies, yeah,” he said.

Should the state’s option to buy the land expire, the price would almost surely go up. The sugar industry usually gets what it wants from Florida lawmakers, thanks to generous campaign contributions, critics charge. U.S. Sugar and its executives have already made more than $500,000 in campaign contributions to state candidates for their 2016 races, The Tampa Bay Times reported.

If the deal doesn’t go through, Osceola fears it will be another step toward the death of the Everglades.

“It would be sadness for the Everglades because that’s another nail in her coffin,” she said. “You hear the birds in the background. You hear the frogs. You even hear the trees over there — they’re rustling. They’re talking. They’re whispering. They all deserve a right to exist. They’re in distress, and those of us that have the ability to do something about it need to wake up and start doing something about it.”

David Martin& Joie Chen|May 9, 2015

Water Quality Issues

MIT created a solar-powered machine that turns saltwater into drinking water

MIT engineers have invented a new desalination machine that runs on solar energy. The project began in 2013 when the engineers went to India with the hopes of helping poorer villages and townships with their drinking water. The assumption was that they would figure out ways to rid these towns of microbes and other contaminants frequently found in poorer, older, water supplies.

“People kept talking about the salt in the water,” recalled Natasha Wright, a doctoral candidate who was part of the team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology that made the journey in 2013. “The groundwater beneath the villages was brackish.”

Those complaints inspired new technology that could some day supply water to thirsty villages and drought-stricken farms in other parts of the world. The MIT team developed a solar-powered water desalination system that uses the sun’s energy to turn brackish liquid into contaminant-free water safe for drinking and for crops.

The science of how the desalination system works is similar to most, sans the power source.

The group came up with a method that uses solar panels to charge a bank of batteries. The batteries then power a system that removes salt from the water through electro-dialysis. On the most basic level, that means that dissolved salt particles, which have a slight electric charge, are drawn out of the water when a small electrical current is applied. In addition to getting rid of salt (which makes water unusable for crops and for drinking), the team also applied UV light to disinfect some of the water as it passed through the system.

Solar-powered desalination projects are not new. But the size and practicality of this project is exciting—it’s won the MIT team the USAID Desal Prize. The team will now continue testing the system against harsher and harsher conditions since the hopes are to employ these types of desalination systems throughout the world in troubled areas, similar to the ones that inspired this work.

The finished prototype is small enough to fit in a tractor-trailer and includes photovoltaic cells to supply the electricity. The system, when fully operational, can supply the basic water needs of a village of between 2,000 and 5,000 people, MIT officials said. Although the prototype was more expensive, Wright said the team is hopes to lower the costs of a village-sized unit to about $11,000.

Such a lower-power system is useful mainly for treating brackish water and not seawater, which contains far more salt. But the prototype now being tested could handle water that contains salt concentrations of up to 4,000 parts per million, meaning it would work in about 90 percent of India’s wells, Wright said. Seawater’s salt concentration averages about 35,000 parts per million.

Walter Einenkel|May 08, 2015

Bottled Water Companies vs. California’s Epic Drought

As the drought in California rolls into its fourth year, causing mandatory water cutbacks by cities and private citizens and concern about the state’s enormous agricultural sector, bottled water plants in the state are attracting increasing attention attention and controversy. Bottled water accounts for a tiny fraction of the water consumed in the state but it’s become something of a symbol of who gets access to water for profit and who is being forced to cut back.

Last week, Starbucks announced that it would be moving the production of its “globally responsible” Ethos Water brand from California to Pennsylvania within the next six months. Its Pennsylvania facility already bottles the water sold on the east coast.

Starbucks’ senior vice president of global responsibility and public policy John Kelly said, “We are committed to our mission to be a globally responsible company and to support the people of the state of California as they face this unprecedented drought. The decision to move our Ethos water sourcing from California and reduce our in-store water reductions by more than 25 percent are steps we are taking in partnership with state and local governments to accelerate water conservation.”

Ethos Water was founded in 2002 in Southern California, promising to donate a percentage of each sale to water projects in developing countries, currently amounting to five cents on the sale of each $1.95 bottle of water. The company was bought by Starbucks in 2005. Ethos has created partnerships with organizations such as the Oscars. Environmental activist Leonardo DiCaprio was seen carrying a bottle at the awards ceremony, and fellow environmentalist Matt Damon has appeared in an ad for the brand.

The move follows a recent article in Mother Jones calling attention to the fact that its West Coast bottling plant is located in Merced, California, drawing its water from private springs in Baxter a few hours north of Merced, as well as from Merced city water. Both Baxter and Merced are in areas of “exceptional drought.”

“While bottled water accounts for just a small fraction of California’s total water use, some residents are nonetheless fed up with bottling plants that profit off their dwindling water supply,” said Mother Jones. “Protesters have begun staging events at Nestlé’s bottling facility in nearby Sacramento.”

Nestlé’s facility buys millions of gallons of Sacramento municipal water and also bottles spring water shipped in from Northern California counties. A grassroots group called the Crunch Nestlé Alliance has been organizing to shut down the plant.

Residents in Merced are also concerned about the Safeway-Lucerne Foods bottling plant in the city that’s pulling groundwater from local wells as they’re being asked to cut back on showers and stop watering their lawns.

The Merced Sun-Star quoted area resident Jandrea-Marie Gabrielle saying at a city council meeting, “Perhaps watering lawns are the least of California’s worries. You might think that in the midst of a drought emergency, diverting public fresh water supplies to bottle and selling them would be frowned upon.”

And while Starbucks is closing its bottled water facility, another will soon be opening in the arid state. The Crystal Geyser Water Company will be opening a plant in Mount Shasta that will take hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day from an aquifer that feeds the Sacramento River and provides drinking water for millions of people. The converted Coca-Cola plant is expected to begin operations this fall. While a company executive said it’s working with area residents to make sure its activities “will not impact the environment in any detrimental way,” local citizen Raven Stevens pointed out, “Crystal Geyser in one day plans to pump more water than any three of my neighbors will use in an entire year.”

California currently has no limits on the amount of groundwater that can be pumped from private property, although state regulations on water withdrawal from the most endangered aquifers with start phasing in after 2020—when the drought could be a decade old. Bottled water companies using water tapped on private property are exempt from the mandatory water cuts placed on cities and towns in March.

“Bottling water is a legal use of water under the law,” said Nancy Vogel, spokeswoman of the California Department of Water Resources.

Anastasia Pantsios|May 11, 2015

Proposed bills entrust water protection to worst offenders

The toxic green slime that killed pelicans, dolphins, fish, and manatees in South Florida two summers ago is back, lurking in Lake Okeechobee, where, as we all know, it will likely spread to the coasts once the government starts releasing water to lower the lake’s level.

It is important to remember that Lake Okeechobee belongs to all of us. But our lake has become a private sewer for agricultural corporations. Instead of strengthening laws to keep agriculture’s polluted runoff out of our water, some politicians in Tallahassee are trying to rescind the currently required state pollution permits altogether. Their new scheme would replace permits with — incredibly — voluntary compliance.

This is like some bad dream, and it will be a forever nightmare for everyone who lives near the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers, where the pollution flows to the coasts. We know this toxic algae kills wildlife and makes people and animals sick, causing flulike symptoms, skin lesions and respiratory problems. Why on earth would we make it easier for these polluters to dump this stuff on us?

This is a get-out-of-jail free card for polluters, and the public shouldn’t stand for it.

At Earthjustice, we have represented citizens groups for decades in legal battles against polluters, trying to require common-sense controls on the toxic slime that’s wrecking our natural areas. It is simply not right for one class of water users to pollute the resource for the rest of us, and then stick us with the cleanup bill.

The water policy legislation was near a vote in the Statehouse right before the House abruptly adjourned. The lobbyists for these big agricultural corporations created a world of double-speak to obscure the fact that they are trying to get away with no regulation. This wholesale destruction of the pollution permitting system was buried in a giant bill that included many other aspects of state water policy, including protections for our springs. It’s the old Tallahassee bait and switch.

Under the legislation, polluters would merely have to write a plan that says they are trying not to pollute — no more permits, a mere promise would be enough. The state admits that it has only a handful of inspectors available to check up on these voluntary pollution plans, and the inspectors would have to get special permission to come on-site to see whether the company is actually doing what it said it would do.

Give us a break! This is a recipe for more green slime in Lake Okeechobee, and more nauseating pollution and fish kills on the east and west coasts.

The Big Ag lobbyists will be in the front row when the Legislature reconvenes for its special session in June, trying to get this nefarious legislation passed in a hurry. We need to tell our legislators that we want them to protect our interests by stopping this political move to repeal water pollution permits. When you think of the heartbreaking images of dead pelicans, dolphins, fish and manatees we’ve witnessed in South Florida, think about what the Legislature should be doing to stop it. Instead of controlling pollution, these politicians are trying to legalize it.

We need to tell our legislators clearly and loudly: When our water is at stake, a polluter’s promise just isn’t good enough. The state simply has to be able to impose consequences when a polluter doesn’t comply with clean-water requirements.

David Guest|managing attorney|Earthjustice|Florida office|May 10, 2015

NEW CLEAN WATER RULE WILL PROTECT AMERICA’S HERITAGE OF HUNTING, FISHING, FARMING, AND FORESTRY

Sportsmen can be optimistic that the final rule will restore protection for wetlands and headwater streams

WASHINGTON, D.C. – On Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took a critical next step toward finalizing a clean water rule that clearly defines protections for headwater streams and wetlands important to trout, salmon, and waterfowl, while keeping farming practices exempt. Taking into account the genuine concerns of hunters, anglers, farmers, manufacturers, and business owners, who submitted more than one million public comments between April 2014 and November 2014, the agencies sent the most recent draft of the rule to the Office of Management and Budget for review.

“The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership would like to commend the EPA and Army Corps for their continued commitment to this rulemaking process and to clarifying language that will benefit fish, wildlife, habitat, and anyone who values clean water,” says TRCP President and CEO Whit Fosburgh.

Without any corrective action, 60 percent of stream miles and nesting habitat for the majority of the waterfowl in America are at risk of being polluted, compromised, or destroyed. “The seasonally-flowing streams clearly protected by the proposed rule are often where trout and salmon go to spawn and where juvenile fish are reared,” says Steve Moyer, Trout Unlimited’s Vice President for Government Affairs. “All anglers benefit from the water quality and fish habitat provided by these streams, and we applaud the agencies for moving forward to restore protections to these incredibly important waters.”

As much as this review process is a behind-the-scenes step, it marks a milestone in the evolution of the clean water rule, especially for the growing coalition of organizations fighting to restore protection of our headwaters and wetlands. “Although the full draft hasn’t been released, from what we’ve seen, the comment period has had an impact and the final rule will be better than the proposal from last year,” says TRCP Center for Water Resources Director Jimmy Hague.

According to an April 6 blog post penned by U.S. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy and Assistant Secretary of the Army (Civil Works) Jo-Ellen Darcy, the new draft of the rule will clarify how protected waters, like streams and wetlands, are significant, and how the agencies make this determination. It will also better define tributaries and protect farming practices. Special consideration has been given to “other waters”-including prairie potholes, the regional waters where 50 to 80 percent of North America’s duck production takes place-that qualify for protection under the Clean Water Act. “We’ve thought through ways to be more specific about the waters that are important to protect, instead of what we do now, which too often is for the Army Corps to go through a long, complicated, case by case process to decide whether waters are protected,” McCarthy and Darcy wrote. The TRCP was one of 185 sportsmen’s groups to address agency leaders in a letter of support for the rulemaking process on the heels of the Clean Water Act’s 42nd Anniversary in October 2014.

“Sportsmen have been actively engaged on this issue and will continue to combat efforts to derail the clean water rule,” says Fosburgh. “Anyone concerned with the rampant loss of wetlands, the health of spawning areas for trout and salmon, or the future of our hunting and fishing traditions should be pleased with the effort to restore protections for these resources.”

Under normal procedures, the Office of Management and Budget has at least 90 days to review the draft. It can recommend changes or leave the rule as proposed, at which point the rule can be finalized and put into effect. Read more about the original rule proposal, public feedback for the rule, and the letter of support from sportsmen’s groups across the country.

Inspired by the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt, the TRCP is a coalition of organizations and grassroots partners working together to preserve the traditions of hunting and fishing.

“NEW CLEAN WATER RULE WILL PROTECT AMERICA’S HERITAGE OF HUNTING, FISHING, FARMING, AND FORESTRY.” N.p., n.d. Web.

EPA Grapples With Regulatory Definitions In Final CWA Jurisdiction Rule – Inside EPA

EPA’s top water official says the agency is grappling with major regulatory definitions in its pending final rule to define the scope of the Clean Water Act (CWA), including how to define “significant” connections between waterbodies subject to the law; distinguishing between jurisdictional tributaries and exempt waters; and other terms.

Ken Kopocis, EPA’s de facto water chief, also told a May 14 American Law Institute-Continuing Legal Education (ALI-CLE) event in Washington, D.C., that the agency still intends to issue the final version of the rule this spring. “I get questions, are you talking about astronomical spring, meteorological spring, and I will stay with ‘spring,'” he said.

As the spring season ends June 20, Kopocis’ remarks suggest the agency could issue the rule this month or next although it does not face a statutory or legal deadline for finalizing the regulation. EPA recently updated its “Rulemaking Gateway” of pending rules to change the regulation’s tentative issue date from April to May.

EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers jointly proposed the CWA jurisdiction rule in April 2014 and sent the final version for White House Office of Management & Budget pre-publication review April 6.

The rule has drawn criticism from industry, GOP lawmakers and others for what they see as an attempt to expand the law’s reach beyond what Congress intended. The House recently approved legislation that would force the agencies to scrap and re-propose the rule based on extensive new consultation with stakeholders including states and industry. A similar, more prescriptive, bill is currently pending in the Senate.

Top agency officials, environmentalists, some Democrats and others have countered that the rule is vital to resolve long-running uncertainty over the CWA’s scope. Supreme Court rulings on the issue created competing tests for determining jurisdiction, and EPA says the rule will help to resolve that confusion.

At ALI-CLE’s wetlands law event, Kopocis pledged the rule will address comments on the proposal that sought specific definitions for key terms including “significant” connections between waterbodies.

While Kopocis offered no specific details on the final rule, he described general policy areas where EPA and the Corps are working to address critical comments, covering at least four areas: the criteria for asserting jurisdiction over ditches and erosional features; the scope of regulatory exclusions for agricultural practices; and the point where a lesser waterbody’s connection, or nexus, with navigable waters becomes “significant.”

“One of the things we heard about was that we needed to better define how protected waters are considered ‘significant.’ . . . Those are very qualitative terms, and was there a way for us to introduce a more quantitative analysis?” Kopocis said.

He did not name any potential solutions to the issue, but said the agencies have investigated possible ways to craft an objective test for “significance” in the rule.

Regulatory Definitions

In response to critics’ concerns that the rule would broadly expand regulatory jurisdiction over ditches, Kopocis said, “We spent more time talking about ditches than any other single water topic,” and found that there are currently no nationally accepted practices for categorizing ditches as jurisdictional or not.

He said the goal of the final rule is to protect ditches that are “constructed in tributaries, or are relocated tributaries, or that function as tributaries” while exempting those “that simply move water from Place A to Place B.”

Kopocis also said the agencies are trying to craft a clearer distinction between jurisdictional tributaries — another term regulators have struggled to define — and “erosional features,” which are channels created by erosion that carry water but lack other characteristics of even a lesser waterbody.

The agencies have sought to establish “[w]here do we draw that distinction between what is a jurisdictional tributary . . . and what is an erosional feature — a feature that the Clean Water Act does not assert jurisdiction over today, and one that we do not intent to assert jurisdiction over in the rule,” Kopocis said.

EPA and the Corps are also continuing to look at how to codify the statutory exemption from CWA permit mandates for “normal” farming practices, Kopocis said. The agencies previously sought to use an interpretive rule issued alongside the proposed version of the jurisdiction rule to spell out what procedures are exempt, but withdrew the rule in response to a Congressional mandate spurred by broad push-back on the policy.

“We wanted to make sure that we preserve all the existing exclusions and exemptions for agriculture,” Kopocis said. He added that some comments filed on the interpretive rule called for an expansion of the existing exclusions, “and we’re taking a look at how the science supports” those requests.

Jurisdictional Determinations

At the ALI-CLE event, Kopocis also said the agencies will not use the rule to rewrite recently issued jurisdictional determinations (JDs) — findings by EPA or the Corps that represent regulators’ decision on whether a waterbody is subject to CWA protections. Instead, regulators will only perform new JDs in response to specific requests from property owners or operators, he said.

“Jurisdictional determinations by the Corps are good for five years, and we intend to respect that. . . . If they have an existing jurisdictional determination and they would like to have it re-evaluated under the new rule, we will allow that. The question of whether a jurisdictional determination is reopened will be entirely the non-federal party’s choice,” Kopocis said.

Kopocis’ statement came in response to concerns aired by audience members at the seminar that agencies could unilaterally revise JDs to apply the new rule’s standards, suddenly applying CWA rules to facilities or property owners who had previously been told that they were not subject to the water law.

However, he added that because of a five-year expiration date on JDs, long-running projects operating under a certification that they do not require a CWA permit for discharges or wetland fills could be forced to seek renewal under the new rule.

But “there is a strong desire on the part of the agency that we do not intend the rule to be disruptive to projects that are already underway,” Kopocis added.

David LaRoss|May 15, 2015

Brazil’s Largest City runs out of Water

I am writing by candle light. The aching in my hand and the irregular handwriting reminds me that it’s been a long time since I wrote on paper and not a keyboard. The power cut has already lasted more than eight hours and I fear that the combination of events and outcome of what we are going through might be a foreshadowing of what’s soon to come around the world.

It started with an irony, that may well be the perfect metaphor: the largest city in a country that holds 20 percent of Earth’s fresh water supply ends up without any. A combination of climate change, years of deforestation, privatization and a badly managed and corrupt political system have come together in a perfect storm to throw my city into one of its darkest crises ever. We now face a reality of four days without water and two with. We might as well call it what it is: a total collapse.

Imagine a megacity like São Paulo as schools are forced to close, hospitals run out of resources, diseases spread, businesses shut down, the economy nose dives. Imagine the riots, the looting … what the police force, infamously known as one of the most violent in the world, will do as this dystopian scenario engulfs us. One of the great modern, rising capital cities of the world suddenly falls apart.

We brought this on ourselves. We buried our rivers under concrete, we polluted the reservoirs, chopped down trees, erased the local biome to grow sugar cane, soy and corn to fuel our vehicles, feed our appetites, our extravagant lifestyles.

I read the IPCC reports warning us of catastrophe. I watched the documentaries exposing corporations’ hidden agendas … the YouTube videos showing polluted oceans, overfishing, extracting, fracking and burning. I knew all this. And how markets march “forward” no matter what. How leaders pose for group shots with those golden pledges they never deliver … and how we, the People, march demanding change.

This is personal … it’s about everything I love. And you have no idea how terrifying it is. It’s the kind of fear that you have no control over, that makes you grind your teeth at night while you sleep. There’s no language to describe this feeling of dread. No way to fix it. No time to fix it. This is the future that science warned us about. The new normal. And the truth is, I never realized it could happen so fast and that my friends, family and I would be forced to live through it, suffer like this.

The battery on my phone is almost dead. The power has been out for 16 hours now. Still no water.

I scroll the photos I took last month on our trip to NYC.
My wife comes to me and in a low voice asks what we are going to do. “I don’t know,” I reply.

What will 22 million people do in the dark?

The Middle East Runs out of Water

A ranking Iranian political figure, Issa Kalantari, recently warned that past mistakes leave Iran with water supplies so insufficient that up to 70 percent, or 55 million out of 78 million Iranians, would be forced to abandon their native country for parts unknown.

Many facts buttress Kalantari’s apocalyptic prediction: Once lauded in poetry, Lake Urmia, the Middle East’s largest lake, has lost 95 percent of its water since 1996, going from 31 billion cubic meters to 1.5 billion. What the Seine is to Paris, the Zayanderud was to Isfahan – except the latter went bone-dry in 2010. Over two-thirds of Iran’s cities and towns are “on the verge of a water crisis” that could result in drinking water shortages; already, thousands of villages depend on water tankers. Unprecedented dust storms disrupt economic activity and damage health.

Lake Urmia in Iran has lost 95 percent of its water in recent decades.

Nor are Iranians alone in peril; many others in the arid Middle East may also be forced into unwanted, penurious, desperate exile. With a unique, magnificent exception, much of the Middle East is running out of water due to such maladies as population growth, short-sighted dictators, distorted economic incentives, and infrastructure-destroying warfare. Some specifics:

Egypt: Rising sea levels threaten not only to submerge the country’s coastal cities (including Alexandria, population 4 million) but also to contaminate the Nile Delta aquifer, one of the world’s largest groundwater reservoirs. The Ethiopian government finally woke to the hydraulic potential of the Blue Nile that originates in its country and is building massive dams that may severely reduce the flow of river water reaching Egypt (and Sudan).

Gaza: In what’s called a “hydrological nightmare,” seawater intrusion and the leakage of sewage has made 95 percent of the coastal aquifer unfit for human consumption.

Yemen: Oil remittances permit Yemenis to indulge more heavily than ever before in chewing qat, a leaf whose bushes absorb far more water than the food plants they replaced. Drinking water “is down to less than one quart per person per day” in many mountainous areas, reports water specialist Gerhard Lichtenthaeler. Specialist Ilan Wulfsohn writes that Sana’a “may become the first capital city in the world to run out of water.”

Syria: The Syrian government wasted $15 billion on failed irrigation projects in 1988-2000. Between 2002 and 2008, nearly all the 420,000 illegal wells went dry, total water resources dropped by half, as did grain output, causing 250,000 farmers to abandon their land. By 2009, water problems had cost more than 800,000 jobs. By 2010, in the hinterland of Raqqa, now the Islamic State’s capital, the New York Times reports, “Ancient irrigation systems have collapsed, underground water sources have run dry and hundreds of villages have been abandoned as farmlands turn to cracked desert and grazing animals die off.”

Iraq: Experts foresee the Euphrates River’s waters soon halved (refer to Revelation 16:12 for those implications). Already in 2011, the Mosul Dam, Iraq’s largest, shut down entirely due to insufficient flow. Sea water from the Persian Gulf has pushed up the Shatt al-Arab; the resulting briny water has destroyed fisheries, livestock, and crops. In northern Iraq, water shortages have led to the abandonment of villages, some now buried in sand, and a 95 percent decrease in barley and wheat farming. Date palms have diminished from 33 million to 9 million. Saddam Hussein drained the marshes of southern Iraq, at once destroying a wildlife ecology and depriving the Marsh Arabs of their livelihood.

Persian Gulf: Vast desalination efforts, ironically, have increased the salinity level of gulf sea water from 32,000 to 47,000 parts per million, threatening fauna and marine life.

Nearby Pakistan may be “a water-starved country” by 2022.

Israel provides the sole exception to this regional tale of woe. It too, as recently as the 1990s, suffered water shortages; but now, thanks to a combination of conservation, recycling, innovative agricultural techniques, and high-tech desalination, the country is awash in H₂O (Israel’s Water Authority: “We have all the water we need”). I find particularly striking that Israel can desalinate about 17 liters of water for one U.S. penny; and that it recycles about five times more water than does second-ranked Spain.

In other words, the looming drought-driven upheaval of populations – probably the very worst of the region’s many profound problems – can be solved, with brainpower and political maturity. Desperate neighbors might think about ending their futile state of war with the world’s hydraulic superpower and instead learn from it.

Daniel Pipes|The Washington Times|May 8, 2015

[Let’s just blissfully keep pumping our extra water to tide or allow frackers to use almost 12 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of oil, contaminating the rest of our water supply in the process.]

Walmart found to be sourcing bottled water from drought-stricken California

Residents who have faced increased water use limits amid fourth year of drought push for greater regulation of water-bottling industry

Walmart is the latest company found to be sourcing its bottled water from drought-stricken California, as state residents push for greater regulation of the bottling industry.

Starbucks was moved to alter its bottling practices in California last week and Mount Shasta community members are fighting the opening of a major bottling plant by California-based company Crystal Geyser. Then on Friday, an investigation by CBS13 in Sacramento found that Wal-Mart’s bottled water comes from the Sacramento municipal water supply.

The revelations come as state residents face increased water use limits during the fourth year of drought in the state. State governor Jerry Brown signed an executive order last week that calls for a 25% urban water reduction across the state.

“It’s only logical that as the governor has asked all Californians to reduce their water consumption that he holds extractive industries like bottled water companies to the same standard, yet he hasn’t asked anything of them,” said Adam Scow, the California director of Food & Water Watch, which is calling for a moratorium on bottling water.

There is little oversight or monitoring of bottling plants in the state, which are also operated by major corporations including Nestle, Coca-Cola and Pepsi.

About 1% of state water is used in industry, and the bottling industry represents an even smaller fraction of that, according to the US Geological Survey.

Walmart, like other large companies, draws water from municipal supplies to keep costs down. A Walmart spokesperson said that the company is “very concerned” about how the drought is affecting its customers and associates.

“We share those concerns and are tracking it closely,” the spokesperson said. “Our commitment to sustainability includes efforts to minimize water use in our facilities. We have and continue to work with our suppliers to act responsibly while meeting the needs of customers who count on us across California.”

Starbucks was pushed to stop sourcing its Ethos bottled water from California after Mother Jones discovered that it had been drawing water from Placer County. Starbucks said it would move production to a supplier in Pennsylvania over the next six months. It is also looking for alternative suppliers for its west coast distribution.

“At the end of the day, bottling the public’s water for private profit is not in the public interest,” said Scow.

He said the practice has a negative effect on local watersheds, that the oil and energy used to make plastic bottles and transport them across the nation are harmful to the environment and that there is a huge waste problem with plastic bottle disposal.

Crystal Geyser, a bottled water company headquartered in San Francisco, announced it is opening a new plant near Mount Shasta, which feeds water into the Sacramento River. The company does not need to obtain a permit to draw the water and there is not a requirement to conduct an environmental impact report.

Raven Stevens, community liaison for the Gateway Neighborhood Association, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the top concern is that there is little regulation for bottling plants.

“Crystal Geyser in one day plans to pump more water than any three of my neighbors will use in an entire year,” Stevens said. “The entire state is under a 25% cut, farmers are letting fields go fallow and we don’t have one piece of legislation regulating water bottling.”

Amanda Holpuch11 May 2015

St. Johns water district pursues new leader

Ann Shortelle appears on track for top water job.

St. Johns water district delayed approval of hiring Ann Shortelle until May 21.

On the heels of a purge at Central Florida’s water agency, its board voted Tuesday after testy and chaotic debate to pursue hiring the chief executive of another state water agency.

Several board members at the St. Johns River Water Management District, which spans from the Orlando area to Jacksonville, indicated they would immediately hire Ann Shortelle, executive director at the neighboring Suwannee River Water Management District.

But a majority of the nine-member board voted to delay any vote on offering Shortelle the job until an emergency meeting scheduled for May 21 because several of the board had little idea of her qualifications.

“I’ve never met her, nor has her resume been sent to me,” said Maryam Ghyabi of Ormond Beach. “I don’t even know if she is here.”

The St. Johns water district lost four top managers last week to resignations that have remained unexplained but are widely suspected to have been ordered by Gov. Rick Scott’s environmental managers. Two of the managers said in their resignation letters they were quitting rather than be fired.

The departures of the four had been preceded by the resignation in March of the district’s executive director, Hans Tanzler, who left his post May 1.

Mike Register, acting director, said he accepted the resignations of the four executives on his sole authority and without guidance from board members or the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. Register started working as the director less than a week before the executives left.

Almost immediately, rumors and speculation pegged Shortelle as the choice of DEP Secretary Jon Steverson, though his spokeswoman had denied that the secretary has played any role.

At the St. Johns district meeting, John Miklos, board chairman, announced his support for Shortelle and said “she would take the job if it was offered to her.”

Shortelle, who did not respond to requests for comment, was hired three years ago to run the Suwannee district. Prior to that she was director of DEP’s office of Water Policy.

Shortelle earned a doctorate degree in limnology, the study of freshwater lakes, from Notre Dame. She was praised highly by Miklos as well as several environmental advocates at the meeting.

Another board member, Chuck Drake of Orlando, called for a vote to hire Shortelle immediately. Board member Fred Roberts said he supported hiring her but stressed that delaying the vote would more likely bring unanimous agreement.

Lisa Rinaman, of the St. Johns Riverkeeper environmental group, said the water district’s credibility has been put at risk by the departure of the four executive who managed water, planning and land conservation.

“That’s something the public deserves to know more about,” she said.

Audubon of Florida’s Charles Lee spoke to board members, protesting the resignation of the experienced executives.

“It’s a done deal from start to finish and orchestrated from above,” Lee said after the meeting.

Kevin Spear|Orlando Sentinel

Lawsuit Forces Mega-Dairies to Supply Manure-Free Drinking Water for First Time in 20 Years

Huge factory-like dairies in Yakima, Washington, that confine tens of thousands of cows were storing millions of gallons of liquid manure in open air cesspools and then dumping it several feet high onto a few fields, and calling it “fertilizer.” In fact, the dairies referred to it as “liquid gold.” The best thing that can be said of that characterization would be that it was a euphemism; it might be better characterized as, metaphorically, a bigger load of shit than they were dumping into the environment.

The cost to the environment, the water, the community, and the animals of operating in this dirty manner was huge.  The picture painted above doesn’t even account for the 50-100 acres covered in piles of dry manure and dead cows approximately the size of the Trans-Siberian Express or the cow pens so filled with manure that the dairy cows lived standing knee deep in their own waste.  Each dairy cow produces as much raw sewage as 20-40 people, so these dairies were producing about the equivalent amount of waste as all of the residents of Hoboken, NJ and dumping it, untreated, onto the ground.  The tons of excess waste drained out of the cesspools and manure piles and overloaded the fields, leaking into the groundwater and contaminating it with high levels of nitrates.  That groundwater just happened to also be the nearby community’s sole source of drinking water.

Excess nitrates in drinking water pose serious human health risks, and can cause blue baby syndrome, several forms of cancer, and autoimmune dysfunction, among other things.  The government sets the limits at 10 parts per million (ppm).  Some of the homes in this community had wells testing above 70 ppm. Some government regulators at both the EPA and the state level, saw the problem but couldn’t do much against the politically powerful factory farm lobby.  If you aren’t familiar with the political lay of the land here, industrial animal agriculture generally gets what it wants in America. Nice job, American Farm Bureau.

But a cool thing happened: The community fought back. After twenty years of fighting for the basic right of clean water and a clean environment, local community groups and some terrific Washington state lawyers teamed up with national environmental warriors, and in February 2013 they filed a case under a great federal environmental law called the Resource Conservation Recovery Act.  It gives courts the power to restrict “solid waste” pollution that may be endangering public health or the environment. The dairies argued that no court had ever before held that cow manure can be a solid waste under RCRA, which was true. As they put it, how can “liquid gold” be a solid waste? (Full disclosure – I am the head of Public Justice, one of the public interest law firms involved in the case, and so strongly believe in it.)

And then a second cool thing happened: On January 15, 2015, after extensive testing had been conducted and scientific evidence gathered, Judge Thomas Rice of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington held that in this case, the mega-dairies’ use of that manure had nothing to do with fertilizer. Instead, the Judge said that, given the evidence and the dairies’ own admissions, they were essentially using their crop fields, compost piles and cow pens as a giant open dump. You see, dairy producers happen to be producing, well, dairy. But when you industrially produce dairy the way a sweat shop produces t-shirts, and not the way a small family farm lives off the land, it’s not farming; it’s manufacturing. And like all manufacturing, there’s a byproduct; in this case it’s manure. And they produce way more of it than could ever possibly be used on a few hundred acres.

In fact, the extent of the contamination and the overwhelming scientific testimony about the risk of harm to the public was so great, the Judge said- even before there was a trial –  that there was no doubt that the dairies violated RCRA.

The dairies talked about trying to appeal the court’s decision, but the carefully reasoned 111-page order could be put into the Wikipedia definition of “precedent setting,” and the dairies were going to have a hard time explaining away the facts in the case. For example, while the dairies insisted that the ground water was perfectly clean and uncontaminated, they were installing reverse osmosis systems for their own employees. When their lawyers said the water was clean, what they meant was “clean enough for you.”

And then yesterday, the coolest thing of all happened: On the eve of the trial on all the remaining issues in the cases, all of these mega-dairies in Yakima Valley reached a settlement with the community groups. The settlement should be a national model for how mega-dairies around the country should operate. The settlement takes a big step toward protecting the health of the local residents, requiring the dairies to pay an independent contractor to provide safe, alternative drinking water to everyone in a roughly three mile downgradient radius. The dairies have to continue to provide this water until the ground water (which will be closely monitored) falls below a safe level for contamination for two straight years.

The settlement also will require the dairies to operate in a dramatically cleaner manner.  Until now, the millions of gallons of liquid manure were stored in what was essentially a pit dug into the ground and the hundreds of thousands of tons of dry manure was just piled on the bare ground. (No Brooke Shields movies were going to be filmed near these so-called “lagoons,”, which were essentially gigantic pits of manure the size of a bunch of football fields.) Now, the dairies will have to install double linings for all their cesspools and wastewater catch basins and keep their carcass-manure train yard on waterproof surfaces. This should protect against further leaks into the aquifer.

The settlement further requires the dairies to use centrifuge systems that pull manure solids out of the wastewater and make it less harmful and places strict limits on the application of that wastewater when the fields are already saturated with nitrates, and to install sensors to detect when that occurs.

There is also a substantial way in which running a cleaner operation necessarily means one that is less horrible for the animals. Until now, the pens where the cows are kept was essentially lined with several feet of manure and ponds of water. While most of us have positive associations with the word pond, making cows stand knee deep in a mixture of their own filth and standing water is a pretty miserable existence, and now the pens will have to be evened out to stop ponding, and manure must be removed on a weekly basis. I guess standing in a single week of your own crapulence is better than 3 months’ worth.

This isn’t to claim that factory farms are now perfect places, by any means. But the industry advocates (both their lawyers in court and their lobbyists and affiliated media) have been saying that it was impossible to run a cleaner operation – you choose: water or milk? When the people of Yakima objected to contaminated water from small lakes and mountains of manure, the gist of the industry’s answer was “too bad, that’s the only way we can run our business.” It turns out that’s wrong. It will cost the dairies more to operate dramatically cleaner operations, but it’s not exactly the economic equivalent of the asteroid hitting Mexico, it’s just the price of running a far more responsible business.

The era of letting factory farms do whatever they want, no matter what it does to their animals, the environment, their neighbors, and consumers needs to end. Other factory farms and mega-dairies around the country should meet the same standards that the Yakima dairies will now have to meet. We intend to pursue a lot of them, and try to make sure that they do.

Paul Bland|Public Justice| co-authored by Jessica Culpepper|Food Safety & Health Attorney|Public Justice.

5 Reasons Why Desalination Plants Won’t Solve Droughts

The drought has most of us on edge, particularly in California. It felt much more real when Governor Jerry Brown implemented water restrictions. Many people are searching for solutions, and while desalination seems to be the frontrunner, it might not be the answer to our drought problem.

What Exactly Is Desalination?

Desalination (desalting or desalinization) means exactly what it sounds like; we take the salt out of our water, and make it safe for us to drink; minerals are also sucked out. When some of the water still contains salt and minerals, then it can be used in irrigation and animal agriculture. Desalination is a natural occurring process invented by Mother Nature, but has been amped up so we can do it on a large scale. As you might expect, this is an energy-intensive and expensive process.

According to International Desalination Association (IDA), here’s a breakdown of desalination by numbers as of 2013:

– There are over 17,000 desalination plants around the world.

– 150 countries use these plants, including the United States.

– Over 300 million people depend on the plants for some or all of their daily water needs.

California is certainly jumping on the desalination train. In recent news, Santa Barbara is willing to spend $2 million on a study just to determine if more desalination is feasible in the area. And as Discovery News reports, on May 6, California’s State Water Resources Control Board signed off on statewide standards for building desalination plants. So we can assume that we’ll be seeing more of these plants in The Golden State.

5 Reasons Why Desalination Plants Won’t Solve Drought

I’m sure that desalination plants are necessary in some parts of the globe. But we should think of the plants as tools — not solutions. Here are a few reasons why desalination plants can’t fix a drought:

1. It’s expensive: It’s worth repeating that desalination is expensive in dollars and energy. A few years ago, Long Beach, Calif., ditched its desalination plans because the electricity was too high, reports The Sacramento Bee.

2. Our oceans are really vulnerable: Ideally, if we had to take water from the ocean, then it would be healthy and thriving. But we know this isn’t the case. Ocean dead zones, finicky fish fertility and islands of trash in the Pacific Ocean are a few examples.

3. Have we really exhausted all of our options?: As reported in KQED, critic Susan Jordan, of the California Coastal Protection Network, encourages cities to exhaust options, including conservation, water recycling and water re-use. Santa Cruz, Calif., stopped its desalination plans when residents disapproved. Instead of drying up, the city’s “residents have cut their water consumption to one of the lowest levels in the state – 62 gallons per person per day – and succeeded in prolonging local reservoir storage,” reports The Sacramento Bee.

4. What are we going to do with all the saltwater? After we’re done filtering out what we don’t want, we can’t just toss it back into the ocean. Once we’re through, the leftovers, officially known as brine, become a toxic waste product that can kill marine life. The Carlsbad plant plans on mixing the brine, so it’s only 20 percent saltier than the ocean. But we don’t know the long-term effects of this. An emeritus water economist at UC Berkeley, Henry J. Vaux Jr. warns in his interview with the Los Angeles Times, “Dumping water that is saltier than seawater into the ocean isn’t harmless. Some organisms can’t survive, others move in — the ocean isn’t a great big garbage can.”

5. We need paradigm shifts, not more plants: Desalination plants can get us out of a pinch, but they won’t work in the long run. We need to stop taking from everywhere, all of the time. This mentality is what got us in this predicament in the first place. And guess what — if we mess up the ocean as bad as we’ve messed up everything else up, then we don’t get a do-over. We also need to wise up and make more water-conscious choices, from the food on our plate.

Jessica Ramos|May 13, 2015

Great Lakes & Inland Waters

Ohio asks neighboring states to help fight Erie’s algae

TOLEDO, Ohio — Pollutants feeding the toxic algae blooms that have been turning parts of western-Lake Erie green and contaminating drinking water in recent summers aren’t just coming from Ohio. They’re flowing into the lake from farm fields in Michigan and Indiana, leaky septic tanks in southern Canada, and Detroit’s wastewater plant.

That’s why Ohio’s governor and environmental chief are starting to ask some of their neighbors to look into what else they can do to cut down on the pollutants — primarily phosphorus — that end up in the lake’s tributaries.

“We can’t do it alone, and they can’t do it alone,” said Craig Butler, director of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. “I think everybody really understands that we need collaboration.”

Discussions with officials from Indiana, Michigan and southern Ontario have centered on the overall goal of reducing phosphorus in waterways and not on specifics about what needs to be done, Butler said.

“We want everybody to come up with their own prescription based on whatever symptom they have,” he said. Ohio within the last year adopted regulations on livestock manure and commercial farm fertilizers. Researchers have found as much as two-thirds of the phosphorus in the lake comes from agriculture. The new rules include banning farmers in northwestern Ohio from spreading manure on frozen and rain-soaked fields and requiring training before farmers can use commercial fertilizers.

Officials from Michigan and Indiana say that they support efforts to improve water quality and that they already have policies that help reduce phosphorus from getting into rivers and streams.

Michigan has a voluntary program to help farmers reduce pollution that goes into waterways and is in the process of closing a loophole in how farm manure is handled, said Dan Wyant, the state’s environmental quality director.

“There’s not a silver bullet to solve this problem,” he said. “More has to be done.”

That includes improving wastewater treatment plants that send raw sewage into rivers during heaving rains and controlling invasive mussels that are thought to help algae thrive, he said.

JOHN SEEWER|ASSOCIATED PRESS|5/10/15

Is the Susquehanna River So Dirty It’s Giving Fish Cancer?

Cancer in fish is rare. When officials find it happening, alarm bells go off. If you’re anywhere near Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River, perhaps you can hear those bells beginning to ring? Some experts do.

In the fall of 2014, an angler fishing on the Susquehanna River caught a smallmouth bass with a big problem. It had a huge, rather grotesque growth on its mouth.

The angler turned in the fish to the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission (PFBC). After testing, the PFBC confirmed this month that the growth was a malignant tumor. That fish had cancer. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Aquatic Animal Health Laboratory at Michigan State University concurred the finding.

According to the PFBC, this is the only documented case of a cancerous tumor being found on a smallmouth bass in the entire state. However, some experts have worried about the health of the Susquehanna River for at least a decade.

“As we continue to study the river, we find young-of-year and now adult bass with sores, lesions and more recently a cancerous tumor, all of which continue to negatively impact population levels and recreational fishing,” said PFBC Executive Director John Arway in a press release. “The weight of evidence continues to build a case that we need to take some action on behalf of the fish.”

Oddly, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and Department of Health are not reacting to the PFBC’s concerns as expeditiously as hoped.

“There is no evidence that carcinomas in fish present any health hazard to humans,” said Dr. Karen Murphy, acting Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Health. “However, people should avoid consuming fish that have visible signs of sores and lesions.”

Well, yes. Eating anything sporting lesions and sores is generally inadvisable, right? One continues to wonder about the environment that caused those abnormalities, though.

PFBC wants the DEP to add the Susquehanna River to Pennsylvania’s bi-annual list of impaired waterways. That would be the first step to getting it on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) official list of impaired waters. PFBC has been asking the state for this designation since 2012.

Causes of impairment, according to the EPA, include include chemical contaminants, physical conditions, and biological contaminants. The PFBC believes the problems with the fish ought to enable the state to determine the river is “ecologically impaired.”

“The impairment designation is critical because it starts a timeline for developing a restoration plan,” Arway said. “We’ve known the river has been sick since 2005, when we first started seeing lesions on the smallmouth. Now we have more evidence to further the case for impairment.”

In 2012, the EPA did recognize that the Susquehanna can no longer be considered “unimpaired.” It noted:

The final report includes a change in the designation for a nearly 100-mile section of the main stem of the Susquehanna River from “unimpaired” for aquatic life and recreational uses, to having insufficient water quality data to make an impairment determination. That change from the draft to the final report reflects comments submitted to PADEP from EPA and others, as well as ongoing efforts to identify the cause of health impacts to the Susquehanna’s smallmouth bass population.

EPA acknowledged there’s an issue to be addressed, but still believes it does “not have sufficient data at this time to scientifically support listed the main stem of the Susquehanna as impaired,” according to NPR.

“If we do not act to address the water quality issues in the Susquehanna River, Pennsylvania risks losing what is left of what was once considered a world-class smallmouth bass fishery,” Arway noted. “DEP is expected to release its 2016 list of impaired waters in late fall. We are urging them once again to follow the science and add the Susquehanna River to the list.”

People catch and eat these fish. Animals do too. What’s in the Susquehanna River that’s been causing sores and lesions for the last decade, and now perhaps cancerous tumors too? It’s worth noting that EPA’s listing of Impaired Waters by State shows that Pennsylvania has far more such troubled waterways than any other state.

The problem — and the negative impact on fish — seem undeniable. Something is wrong in that river. The Susquehanna’s problem needs attention now.

Susan Bird|May 11, 2015

Oil Sheen Spotted On Hudson Following Indian Point Explosion

Update morning May 11th:

A Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman tells the Associated Press that several thousand gallons of oil from the Indian Point nuclear power plant may have spilled into the Hudson River following Saturday’s transformer explosion.

The environmentalist group Riverkeeper reports spotting what appears to be a large oil sheen on the Hudson River this morning near the site of yesterday’s transformer explosion at the Indian Point nuclear power plant. This morning, the sheen extended north and south of the plant, and all the way to the Rockland County side of the river, but it had not reached the Peekskill waterfront to the north, according to the group’s patrol captain John Lipscomb. He said he didn’t know what the rainbow sheen was for sure, but that it gave off an acrid, petroleum smell. “After two hours of floating around in it, I could feel it in my throat and my sinuses,” Lipscomb said.

The activists reported spotting a breach in the boom state officials had deployed to contain the oil, but said that a second boom was being put in place this morning. Riverkeeper’s Leah Rae shot this video:

A spokesman for Entergy, the company that owns the plant, said it’s not yet clear that transformer oil escaped through drains into the river, and that the sheen might be attributable to the foam used to fight the electrical fire, which contains an oily animal fat. The spokesman, Gerald Nappi, downplayed the risk transformer oil would play to the river if it did make it in, because it is a “light, clear, mineral-type oil.” “Transformer oil would be of very little consequence to the environment locally,” he said. “That being said we are very seriously taking every precaution to mitigate any potential release.”

Gov. Cuomo, speaking to the media earlier today, said the oil in the river is definitely from the transformers:

There is no doubt but that oil did escape from the transformer, there is no doubt that oil did go into the holding tank and exceeded the capacity of the holding tank, and there is no doubt that oil was discharged into the Hudson River. Exactly how much, we don’t know.

Riverkeeper is advocating for the closure of the plant, citing safety concerns. Lipscomb noted that the explosion and oil sheen may be alarming for people, but that the plant pulls in and heats more than 2 billion gallons of river water per day, killing huge amounts of river life.

“[The plant] hurts the river every single day,” he said. “And some days it hurts the river a little more.”

Nathan Tempey|News|May 11, 2015

NATURE’S POWER: Vortex Hydro Energy to install 4 energy generating devices in St. Clair River this summer as part of $1.25 million project

The strong currents of the area’s blue waters will be used for more than sailing, paddling and fishing this summer.

Vortex Hydro Energy, a company that has previously studied harnessing the St. Clair River’s current, will be placing energy generating devices in the river near Dunn Paper in Port Huron.

The $1.25 million project will include installing four devices in the river between August and September, with buoys also being set to indicate their presence to boaters.

This will be the third time the company has deployed its new technology in local waters. Vortex Hydro Energy has also deployed the devices twice in canals in the Netherlands and in experimental facilities.

“There was a couple of reasons to bring them to St. Clair County,” said David Haynes, director of business attraction for the St. Clair County Economic Development Alliance. “One, was that Michigan was really pushing green energy project and this was a natural fit due to the speed of our waters. Second, it was bringing an exciting research and development project from U of M to our area along with a high profile project. Lastly, as they look to commercialize the device for a larger market, we hope that some of the production could be produced by local companies.”

Vortex Hydro Energy, a spinoff company hoping to commercialize the technology invented and patented at the University of Michigan, placed prototypes in the St. Clair River near the paper mill north of the Blue Water Bridge in August 2010 and September 2012.

Michael Bernitsas, a professor of naval architecture, marine engineering and mechanical engineering at U-M, invented the technology — called VIVACE, or Vortex Induced Vibrations for Aquatic Clean Energy.

Bernitsas said in an email the installation will happen between August and September, with four smaller devices installed this year. Eight devices will be installed in May 2016. The devices will remain in the water two to three months. There are not currently any devices in the river. The devices, which contain vertical cylinders, are placed on the river bottom. The cylinders move back and forth as vortexes in the current move past them, creating kinetic energy. The kinetic energy is harnessed by what developers call an oscylator and sent to a generator that converts it to electricity. He said during a presentation Tuesday at a meeting of the St. Clair River Bi-national Public advisory Council that the devices would be placed in 20 feet of water about 90 feet from the shore and north of the Blue Water Bridge. The devices are about 18 feet high, 10 feet wide and about 11 feet 8 inches long. Judy Ogden, a member of BPAC and of the Blue Water Sport Fishing Association, said she would be concerned the devices would pose a hazard to recreational boaters. She noted the top of the devices would be about 2 feet from the surface of the water, endangering sailboat keels and powerboat propellers.

“The Coast Guard did not have problems with that as long as we had the two buys,” Bernitsas said. Ogden said not everyone would be aware of the buoys and the buoys might not be visible in fog. “This is a high traffic area at certain times of the year,” she said. “… There are people from outside the community who would not be aware of these buoys.” Bernitsas said there were no navigational issues in 2012 when a device was left in the river for about three months. ]

He said the energy created will either be burned on resistors onshore or to heat water at the paper mill, depending on regulations.

Ogden also asked if any research had been done into the possible impacts on fish populations.

Bernitsas in his email said the devices pose no threat to aquatic life.

“..It is probably the only environmentally compatible marine hydrokinetic energy per a DOE/MIT/Harvard study,” he said in the email. “Instead of a steady lift and turbine blades it uses bluff bodies and alternating lift like fish and other marine life … Fish rest in their wake by barely moving their bodies and spawn more.”

Bernitsas said the company is going through the necessary permitting process, as it has done with the prior deployments.

Joel Anderson, owner of Anderson’s Pro Bait in Port Huron, said many local anglers are concerned about the project.

“I think it’s smoke and mirrors,” he said. “I think it’s people trying to get grant money, and they spend the grant money and nothing comes from it.”

“U.S. Fish and Wildlife has figured out sturgeon spawn right there, right where you’re talking about,” he said. “So who is going to let them put that there?

“It would have a lot of fishing line on it in a few years.”

LIZ SHEPARD AND BOB GROSS|TIMES HERALD

Tri-state group unanimously backs plan for river system

APALACHICOLA – A potential landmark in Florida’s long-running dispute with Georgia and Alabama over the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint river system came Wednesday, when 56 people from the three states unanimously approved what they described as a “sustainable water management plan.”

The group, known as the ACF Stakeholders, developed the plan over nearly five years, trying to balance Atlanta’s need for drinking water with Florida’s need for higher freshwater flows to the Apalachicola Bay and Alabama’s need for hydroelectric energy.

The group issued its recommendations even as Florida is suing Georgia in the U.S. Supreme Court, with Gov. Rick Scott’s administration arguing that too much water is being siphoned off upstream, causing damage to the economically vital oyster industry in Apalachicola Bay.

Among the recommendations is that Florida, Georgia and Alabama should “collaboratively establish a water management institution” that would serve as a data clearinghouse and promote conflict resolution among the states and their different interests.

The group also recommended that each of the states push for higher levels of water conservation through efficiency policies and tracking and reporting data.

“Can everyone live with this?” the group’s incoming chairwoman, Betty Webb of Apalachicola, asked after two days of meetings. The vote to approve ended in cheers.

The ACF Stakeholders formed in 2009 to find a solution to the water dispute, which dates back to 1990. Its members represent fishing, navigation, hydroelectric-power and community interests from the states. The members have raised $1.7 million to gather data and fund their operations privately, and any one member can block the group from taking an action.

The water-management plan will be shared with the three states’ governors and relevant state and federal agencies, but it isn’t binding.

“It’s not a document they need to adopt, but we hope they embrace,” Webb said. “We hope they will embrace it and move forward with us.”

The group is urging state and federal agencies to develop more and better information about the river system to promote better decision-making in the future. The group wrote that it had “encountered challenging gaps in scientific and technical information on the basin during the course of its work and suggests a specific list of studies that, if completed, would support better decision-making in the future.”

The recommendations also focus on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for managing the chain of reservoirs along the Chattahoochee River and controlling the flow of freshwater to the Apalachicola River and Apalachicola Bay.

“Local, state and federal decision-makers should develop consistent drought management plans that define drought conditions, identify drought-response triggers, delineate responsibilities of various water-use sectors and document changes in operational strategies in response to drought conditions,” the group wrote.

In particular, the group is urging the Corps of Engineers to adopt changes to its management of the reservoirs aimed at using storage more efficiently during normal conditions, mitigating the impact of droughts and quickly restoring normal conditions after droughts.

For instance, the group wrote, “The Army Corps of Engineers should study and, if feasible, implement a 2-foot increase in the pool level at Lake Lanier, increasing water storage by 7 percent, to the benefit of all users in the region.”

The suggested changes also include providing two water releases — in May and July — timed to support higher flows and improved navigation on the Apalachicola River. The releases would also help to restore the Apalachicola Bay’s mix of salt- and freshwater, which has made it a renowned incubator for oysters.

Since 2012, however, when the bay collapsed after a series of droughts, the seafood industry — once a major economic driver for the region — has been hard hit.

“Time is of the essence,” said state Sen. Bill Montford, a Tallahassee Democrat whose district includes Apalachicola Bay. “We’ve run out of time. It’s time to sit down and do what’s right, and what’s right is to send more water down the Apalachicola River.”

Meanwhile, Florida’s lawsuit against Georgia is moving forward, and while Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal asked Scott for a meeting two months ago, nothing has come of it yet.

As a result of the litigation, the ACF Stakeholders hasn’t made its data public since 2013, when Florida asked the U.S. Supreme Court to slow Georgia’s consumption of freshwater from the river system.

Margie Menzel|The News Service Of Florida|May 13, 2015

Offshore & Ocean

Town to re-engage lobbyists to fight inlet expansion

As a new proposal to deepen and widen the Lake Worth Inlet takes shape, the town plans to hire the same state and federal lobbyists who helped stop the project last year.

Town Manager Tom Bradford will ask the Town Council Tuesday for $90,000 toward retaining professionals to represent the town in Tallahassee and Washington, D.C.

He also will seek $60,000 to hire a firm to work with U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Florida Department of Environmental Protection officials in Jacksonville to make sure sand sucked from the inlet during regularly maintenance dredging events is placed on the town’s dry North End beaches, not in the water.

Inlet expansion

The town spent $76,000 last June on lobbying and litigation to successfully defeat the originally proposed plan to deepen and widen the inlet. But, a modified plan is in the works.

“It still presents many of the same concerns relative to the environment, recreational amenities, and concerns about the general health, safety and welfare of the community,” Bradford wrote in his memorandum to the council. “Accordingly, it is time to revisit the selection of professionals needed to facilitate the town’s opposition to the proposed deepening and widening.”

Ballard Partners is the firm that cost $30,000 last year to advocate the town’s interests in Tallahassee. The town again wants to allocate $30,000 to the firm.

The council appropriated $120,000 to Squire Patton Boggs last year to represent the town before federal agencies and officials. The law firm used about $16,000, so $104,000 remains in its contract.

Bradford recommended the council terminate the town agreement with Squire Patton Boggs and allocate $60,000 to retain Phil Bangert, who used to work for the firm but now operates independently.

The $90,000 requested to engage state and federal lobbyists would come from the $104,000 of the liquidated contract. The remaining $14,000 from the agreement would revert to the town’s General Fund, according to Bradford.

Litigation

The council also will decide Tuesday whether to retain Greenberg Traurig for continued negotiations with the Corps and litigation, if needed. The firm has a monthly retainer of $2,500 with the town.

“No additional funding is needed at this time,” Bradford wrote.

If direct litigation with the Port of Palm Beach is needed, $20,000 remains available in the town’s contract with White & Case. The firm used $30,000 last year.

“If litigation is initiated, I will likely return to the Town Council for an additional funding allocation,” Bradford wrote.

Sand placement

In 2009, the town sued the Corps over beach erosion caused by the inlet jetties. It dropped the suit in 2013 after officials thought that Jacksonville District Col. Alan Dodd had agreed to place inlet-dredged sand on dry beaches, where it remains longer and provides better storm protection, instead of in the nearshore waters.

But, Dodd wrote a letter to the town last month saying if the town wants sand on the dry beach, it should be prepared to share in the cost. The town said that’s a departure from the Corps’ public and written promise to work with the town for dry beach sand placement with minimal to zero payment from the town.

Bradford plans to ask the council for $60,000 from this year’s General Fund Contingency to allocate to Foley & Lardner for “enhancing the town’s opportunities for beach nourishment.” The former Florida Department of Environmental Protection deputy secretary works for the firm’s Jacksonville office, which is nearby the Corps’ Jacksonville District office, according to Bradford.

He did not name the deputy secretary in his memo, but former DEP official Herschel Vinyard began working for the firm in February.

Aleese Kopf|Staff Writer|Daily News

Marine Sanctuary’s Wrong Science Accelerated Florida’s Coral Reef Destruction

At exactly the time I should have been paying the closest attention, Florida was suffering probably the biggest environmental disaster in its history. It happened on my watch but I wasn’t watching.
During the early 1990s through 1995, 38 percent of the once-abundant living coral in Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary had died.

It was what marine biologist Michael J. Risk of McMaster University called “regional mass extinction” and what his colleague Brian Lapointe from Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute called “one of the worst environmental disasters in modern history.”

I’m ashamed of my ignorance. I was managing editor of The Stuart News/Port St. Lucie News at the time. In 1994 I was president of the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors. I had what I think was a special responsibility to know and report such a cataclysmic event.
But scientists are telling me now, unless I’d been living in the Keys, or unless I was a diver and had seen the “before and after,” I would never have known anyway. Management at the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary kept it under wraps, consistently denying there was a water quality problem in the Keys.

The National Marine Sanctuary was calling for fresh water to be shipped down canals operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and sent into Florida Bay. They still are to this day, and that’s my interest in this now. Sanctuary scientists, who long ago reeled in the Everglades Foundation founders as their disciples, continue to ignore the connection between nitrogen and phosphorus — deadly to coral in combination — because they fertilize algae and invite red tides.

Billy Causey is the southeast regional director for the National Marine Sanctuary. Causey is the man most responsible for keeping the faulty hypothesis alive and well. Scary when you consider he failed to earn his doctorate, so in 2006 the University of South Florida gave him an honorary one anyway. “Oh, he likes to be called Doctor,” one his staff told me. “We have to call him Doctor.”

Causey has been the lead National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) official in the development of the management plan for the Keys sanctuary — and the Keys sanctuary is the third largest marine protected area in the United States. I’m not sure if Causey’s long tenure is more a statement about NOAA — an arm of the U.S. Department of Commerce — or about the sanctuary itself.

In an earlier interview, Lapointe told me, “They (sanctuary scientists) kept saying we need more fresh water from the Everglades. Their theory was hyper-salinity — too much salt water — was killing the reefs. The fact is — all the research shows — what we needed wasn’t fresh water, it was clean water.”
Lapointe and a handful of his colleagues insisted the algae blooms could be explained by the bay’s Petrie dish effect, that you always get your biggest growth response when you add nitrogen and phosphorous together. It’s eutrophication, or over-enrichment by nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorous and silica — the chemicals that come from sewage outfalls, industrial and agricultural runoff — that create the algae.

If you want to see proof, look at the Shark River flows and nitrogen-loading data from Lapointe’s studies (illustration below). What you’ll see is ramped up water flows between 1991 and 1995. Why did that happen?  Because the South Florida Water Management District bought into the flawed “hyper-salinity” hypothesis by increasing water deliveries to Shark River and Taylor Slough. That took Florida Bay and the Keys over a eutrophication “tipping point.”

The Keys already had a major problem with sewage — thousands of cesspits, 30,000 septic tanks, and 1,200 shallow injection wells and nearshore impacts, but these massive flows from the mainland, both agricultural and urban nutrients, triggered the explosive regional water quality deterioration.  That manifested itself in algal blooms in Florida Bay and loss of coral in downstream waters of the Keys.

At the peak of the flows in 1995, a major toxic red tide developed on the Gulf side of the Keys, killing off an enormous amount of wildlife. Over the next four years, as I mentioned earlier, 38 percent of the living coral died in Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Nice work, Causey and scientists Jay Zieman and Ron Jones.

“It’s the saddest thing when you love something,” Don DeMaria told me. “It’s like watching a dear friend die.”

DeMaria, who owns Sea Samples, a company that collects samples for analysis, previously served on a sanctuary advisory board. He said the algae is no less a problem now than it was in the ’90s — in fact, it’s back just off Big Pine, 3 feet deep in mid-channel  and he isn’t entirely sure sanctuary management sees a problem.

“I don’t understand what they’re doing,” he told me. “I reported a sponge die-off off Ramrod Key last week, but NOAA hasn’t weighed in yet.

“What is the sanctuary preserving?”  They allow some commercial fishermen with nets to come in and, for instance, take ballyhoo. These are supposed to be preservation areas. They’re not preservation areas, they’re special privilege areas.”

DeMaria concluded, “Fresh water isn’t the answer, it’s only going to accelerate the coral death. You can’t clean nitrogen out of water like you can phosphorus. That’s the truth of it.”

Commercial fisherman Mike Laucinda, who has been fishing off the Keys since 1969, said the water was pristine and clear until about 1974 and has been worsening ever since. “Within the last six or seven years a new algae has been showing up,” he told me. “It pulls my trap lines, it smothers everything, I can’t pull it off, I have to cut it. It’s about 5 feet deep on the bottom in 20-25 feet of water in Hobbs Channel.”

DeMaria said, “The chamber of commerce talks about ‘the emerald green water of the Florida Keys. … Well, in the old days they talked about it as it should be ‘crystal clear and blue.'”

Meanwhile, I still feel responsible for not knowing the crisis afoot in Florida Bay in 1994 and 1995 failing to sound the alarm The clearly stated mission of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary Act of 1990 is simple: Protect living coral. Instead, wrong science — or should I say, bad science by the wrong scientists — killed it.

Shark River Nitrogen Flows in Florida Bay, by YearHide

Overhunting Threatens the Future of Dolphins in the Solomon Islands

While dolphin drives taking place in Taiji every year have gained international attention and opposition, researchers are shedding light on how drive hunts taking place in other parts of the world are threatening the future of cetaceans.

For a study just published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, researchers looked to the Solomon Islands where hunting dolphins has a long tradition. According to the study, between 1976 and 2013, more than 15,000 dolphins were killed by just one village.

Dolphins are killed for their meat, but the demand for their teeth, which are used to make jewelry used in wedding ceremonies or sold for cash, is also increasing the number of deaths. A single tooth is worth about 70 cents (USD), but their commercial value has increased five times in the last decade alone.

Scott Baker, associate director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University and co-author on the study, called it a troubling trend that’s providing more incentive to kill.

Recent years have also brought captures for the captivity industry, which conservationists believe has continued to support the drives.

In 2010, the Earth Island Institute worked out a deal with three villages to stop hunting by offering financial compensation to support alternative activities for local communities but the life-saving agreement for dolphins was short lived.

Unfortunately, the deal broke down in 2013 and the killing resumed. The media reported high numbers of deaths, which raised concerns about the impact on both the status of the population and the welfare of dolphins who suffer as a result of being caught and killed.

That’s when researchers from the South Pacific Whale Research Consortium, Solomon Island’s Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources and Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute say they decided to go there and document the impact on the dolphin population.

According to their findings, during the first few months of that year more than 1,500 spotted dolphins, 159 spinner dolphins, and 15 bottlenose dolphins were killed in one of the largest hunts on record – one that sadly rivals the annual hunts in Taiji.

Baker pointed out that while hunting larger species like whales is regulated by the International Whaling Commission, smaller cetaceans are left without any official body to protect or regulate the killing, which is leaving them vulnerable to unregulated and unreported hunting.

Continuing to kill and capture dolphins with little regard for the impact continues to threaten their future survival and the problem is getting worse.

“In the Solomon Islands, the hunting is as much about culture as economic value,” said Baker. “In other parts of the world, however, the targeting of dolphins and other small cetaceans appears to be increasing as coastal fishing stocks decline.”

Researchers say their findings point to a need to step in and stop unregulated exploitation, along with adopting better monitoring of populations and documentation of kills and promoting tourism operations that value live dolphins, among other changes, which we can hope will eventually lead to an end of these drive hunts and live captures.

For more info on how to help dolphins in the Solomon Islands, visit the Earth Island Institute’s Dolphin Project and International Marine Mammal Project.

Alicia Graef|May 12, 2015

Tampa Bay seagrass recovers; 40,000 acres most in 60 years

There are more acres seagrass in the Tampa Bay estuary than any time in the last sixty years; the Southwest Florida Water Management District announced Wednesday that the bay now supports more than 40,000 acres of seagrass beds.

WMNF News interviewed Kris Kaufman, a senior environmental scientist with SWFWMD.

Kaufman said their study found a 16.3 percent increase in seagrass coverage in Tampa Bay from 2012 to 2014. She said seagrass recovery requires relatively clean water and congratulated the community for making an effort to cut back on pollution.

Kaufman said the best recovery is in Old Tampa Bay (the location of the three bridges from Hillsborough County to Pinellas) where there are now three thousand acres more seagrass. Next is Hillsborough Bay, near the urban and industrial parts of Tampa.

Seán Kinane|WMNF News|05/13/15

Landmark Lawsuit Challenges Destructive Deep-sea Mining

The Center for Biological Diversity this week filed a lawsuit challenging the U.S. government’s approval of large-scale, exploratory deep-sea mining. The focus of the suit is a destructive project involving Hawaii and Mexico that would damage important habitat for whales, sharks and sea turtles and obliterate seafloor ecosystems.

Deep-sea mining is an emerging market for companies around the world hoping to tear apart the ocean floor in search of gold, nickel, copper and other valuable metals, mostly for consumer electronics. There are a lot of things wrong with deep-sea mining — not least that scientists are just beginning to fathom the mysteries of life in the far reaches of deep-ocean floors. But we do know this much: The project we’re fighting is in a biologically rich underwater world that’s home to hundreds of species.

Said the Center’s Emily Jeffers, “Like mountaintop-removal coal mining, deep-sea mining involves massive cutting machines that will leave behind a barren landscape devoid of life.”

Read more in our press release.

International Help Sought for Mexico’s Vanishing Porpoise

The Center for Biological Diversity and allies yesterday petitioned the World Heritage Committee to designate more than 6,900 square miles of ocean and islands in northern Mexico as “in danger” because of the urgent threat of extinction for a rare porpoise and fish in the Gulf of California.

The committee designated Mexico’s “Islands and Protected Areas of the Gulf of California” as a World Heritage Area in 2005. But two of the site’s most renowned species — the tiny vaquita porpoise and a massive fish called the totoaba — face extinction as a result of fishing activities. An “in danger” designation will focus international attention on these species’ plight and may garner much-needed funds for their habitat’s conservation.

The vaquita is the world’s smallest porpoise and exists only in the Gulf of California. It has suffered a dramatic and alarming decline. Fewer than 100 remain in the wild — and without help this modest marine mammal could be extinct by 2018.

Ocean Assets Valued at $24 Trillion, but Dwindling Fast

A new report highlights the economic value of Earth’s marine environments

Our oceans are worth at least $24 trillion, according to a new WWF report Reviving the Ocean Economy: The case for action—2015. And goods and services from coastal and marine environments amount to about $2.5 trillion each year—that would put the ocean as the seventh largest economy in the world if put into terms of Gross Domestic Product.

The economic values listed in the new report are conservative, as outputs—such as wind energy—are not generated by the ocean, and were therefore excluded from the report. Valuable intangibles, such as the ocean’s role in climate regulation or production of oxygen, were also left out. Working with the Boston Consulting Group and the Global Change Institute, WWF developed this report to marry scientific evidence with potential impacts aligned with current trends, making it one of the first to produce an economic assessment of this kind.

“Oceans produce half the oxygen we breathe and absorb 30% of carbon dioxide emissions. ”

Reviving the Ocean Economy: The Case for Action
2015 WWF Report

More than two-thirds of the annual value of oceans relies on healthy conditions to maintain its current output. However, habitat destruction, overfishing, pollution, and climate change are endangering this economic engine and the security and livelihoods it supports. Marine resources are on a rapid decline and our oceans are changing faster than we have ever seen before.

“The oceans are our ‘natural capital’—a global savings account from which we keep making only withdrawals,” said Brad Ack, Senior Vice President for Oceans at WWF. “To continue this pattern leads one place: bankruptcy. It is time for significant reinvestment and protection of this global commons.”

The report identifies eight urgent, achievable actions that can help turn oceans around and allow it to continue to meet the essential needs of humanity and nature, ranging from taking global action to avoiding dangerous climate changes to driving international cooperation and investment for the oceans.

This year marks a unique opportunity for the future of our oceans, as international negotiations on climate change and sustainable development will soon to take place. In the days following the report release the US government takes a leadership role as Chair of the Arctic Council. Working with the 7 other Arctic member nations the U.S. may chart a path for a sustainable future, critical for the health of people, species, and a thriving global economy of marine goods and services

We need action for resilient oceans, so the marine ecosystems, wildlife and people they support can thrive in a changing climate. Speak out on climate change and our oceans today.

Read the report.

Get details in our press release.

Kimberly Vosburgh|April 22, 2015

Human diet trick could save coral reefs

Coral reefs are beautiful to behold, and essential for maintaining the natural balance of life in the world’s oceans.

And all over the world, they are slowly starving to death.

Under stress from climate change and rising levels of carbon dioxide, coral in nature is continually struggling to find nutrition.

It’s a common problem for humans too; it’s one of the reasons why the dietary supplement market is booming.

So – why not develop special nutritional supplements, and feed them to the coral?

Researchers from the University of Miami are doing exactly that, and the results are encouraging.

“For many years we have known the some types of symbiotic algae can convey climate change resilience to corals,” Chris Langdon, UM Rosenstiel School professor and chair of marine biology and ecology, told ScienceDaily.com.

Staghorn coral, a species once common around Florida and throughout the Caribbean, is now critically endangered. The research suggests that two supplemental feedings of dried zooplankton powder per week not only protects it from carbon dioxide, but from ocean acidification as well.

“In this study we found that the threatened coral was able to increase its feeding rate and stored energy reserves when exposed to high CO2 conditions at 26°C or 30°C, and mitigate reductions in calcification that caused significant decreases in growth rate in unfed corals,” researchers reported.

According to the International Coral Reef Initiative, an informal partnership of nations and organizations striving to preserve the world’s coral reefs and related ecosystems, these are the benefits of healthy coral:

• Habitat: Home to over one million diverse aquatic species, including thousands of types of fish.
• Income: Billions of dollars and millions of jobs in over 100 countries around the world.
• Food: For people living near coral reefs, especially on small islands.
• Protection: A natural barrier protecting coastal cities, communities and beaches.
• Medicine: The potential for treatments for many of the world’s most prevalent and dangerous illnesses and diseases.

America’s National Ocean Service calls corals “the medicine cabinets of the 21^st century,” citing treatments for cancer, arthritis, human bacterial infections, Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, viruses, and other maladies.

Ben Knight|Daily Brew|11 May, 2015

Proposed new waterway causing controversy in Punta Gorda

The city council is moving forward with plans to build a new passage connecting the city’s canals to Alligator Creek.

The new waterway would be added at the end of the River Bay Drive, which would then connect to Alligator Creek and give more access to Charlotte Harbor.

Opponents say it could affect the environment and is too costly.

Supporters say it will improve travel times to the harbor through the canals and cut down on boat traffic and pollution.

Jay Buckley, President of the Punta Gorda Boater’s Alliance said: “In our advertising nationally, we are truly a boating community and that’s what we’re striving for.”

The canal is projected to cost $1.5 million.

See Video Report …

PortMiami counting down until end of Deep Dredge project

PortMiami is counting down to July for the completion of the Deep Dredge project that is deepening the port’s main harbor channel from 42 feet to a depth of 50/52 feet. PortMiami will be the only major logistics hub south of Virginia capable of handling fully laden post-Panamax vessels.

More than $1 billion of capital infrastructure projects are transforming PortMiami. Already in place are new Super Post-Panamax gantry cranes that can service cargo vessels up to 22 containers wide with up to nine containers above deck and11 containers below; new on-dock intermodal rail service linking PortMiami to 70 percent of the U.S. population in four days or less; as well as a new tunnel linking the port directly to the United States Interstate Highway System. These projects are providing the world’s top ocean carriers with the convenience of fast, reliable quality service.

In addition to the already completed infrastructure improvements, the newly deepened PortMiami will be a viable option for trade and commerce from the Southeastern United States to reach markets worldwide. This paves the way for the port to become an even more reliable transshipment hub in the region.

Mayor Carlos A. Gimenez called the countdown to the completion of the deep dredge a “major milestone” for not only PortMiami and Miami-Dade County, but for all of Florida, which will benefit from increased trade opportunities once the expanded Panama Canal opens in 2016.

“PortMiami will be the closest U.S. port to the Panama Canal that’s ready to accommodate the mega size cargo vessels that require a 50/52-foot depth when at full capacity,” Mayor Gimenez said.

“PortMiami is already known worldwide as the Gateway of the Americas. Once the dredge is complete, PortMiami will be well-positioned to capture new trade opportunities, especially with ever-growing Asian markets. New trade opportunities translate into continued economic growth throughout Miami-Dade County,” he added.

“We’re grateful to the vision of our state and local leaders for making this critical infrastructure project a reality,” said Juan M. Kuryla,

PortMiami director and CEO. “The completion of PortMiami’s Deep Dredge cannot be overstated, PortMiami will be positioned as the most convenient and efficient global hub on the North American East Coast ready to service the world’s leading ocean carriers. I am proud to say that PortMiami will be able to berth Post-Panamax ships this summer.”

PortMiami is Miami-Dade County’s second largest economic engine after Miami International Airport. The completion of the deep dredge project will ensure that PortMiami remains competitive in the global marketplace.

The United States Army Corps of Engineers is managing the project. Great Lakes Dredge and Dock Company LLC, is the contractor that was selected for the deepening of PortMiami’s channel to 50/52 feet. Dredging began in August 2013 and will be completed in July, before the opening of the expanded Panama Canal.

For more information visit www.miamidade.gov/portmiami

Andria C. Muiz

Wildlife and Habitat

  TALLAHASSEE — Rules for the state’s first bear hunt in more than 20 years have been published as the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is expected next month to give final approval to the hunt.

The posting of the rules came as the Humane Society has reached out to Gov. Rick Scott to halt the pending hunt because the commission has yet to determine how many bears are in Florida.

“This is very premature,” said Kate MacFall, the Humane Society’s Florida director. “They haven’t even finished the count. They don’t even know about the bear population.”

The society has not heard back from Scott.

The proposed rules were published Tuesday in the Florida Administrative Register and outline how the hunt is expected to occur in four regions of the state starting Oct. 24. The hunt is considered one way to control the bear population as Florida has seen a growing number of bear and human conflicts.

The wildlife commission on April 15 gave tentative approval to the hunt and is expected to take a final vote the week of June 22 in Sarasota.

The proposed rules were issued after two black bears, both estimated to weigh more than 400 pounds, were killed this month in separate collisions with cars in Alachua County.

Opponents of the proposed hunt have argued the state should consider relocating problem bears and that people need to be held more responsible for leaving out unsecured food and trash that attracts bears.

“It’s a trash problem,” MacFall said. “The bears are attracted to trash, and that is where the focus should be, large-scale trash management.”

State lawmakers this spring approved a bill (HB 7021) that would in part increase penalties for people charged a fourth time with feeding bears and alligators not in captivity. The charge would be a third-degree felony. Currently, a fourth offense of illegally feeding wildlife within a 10-year period is a first-degree misdemeanor.

The bill has yet to be sent to Scott.

The hunt, meanwhile, is expected to last from two to six days, depending on when quotas are reached in the different regions — the Panhandle, Northeast Florida, east-central Florida and South Florida.

Diane Eggeman, director of the commission’s Division of Hunting and Game Management, said the agency expects to have hunt quota numbers ready for the commission to approve in September.

“We should have the new estimates from the South and Central bear management units sometime this summer,” Eggeman said. “There is a chance that they’ll be ready by the June meeting, but that is unlikely.”

The hunt will target less than 20 percent of the population in the four bear-management areas.

Black bears were placed on the state’s threatened list in 1974, when there were between 300 and 500 across Florida. At the time, hunting black bear was limited to three counties. In 1994, the hunting season was closed statewide. In moving forward with the plans for the hunt, the state commission has used 2002 numbers, which estimate there are a combined 2,500 black bears in the four regions.

Under the proposed rules, the cost of the hunt would be $100 for Floridians and $300 for non-Floridians. There had been talk by commissioners of lowering the fee for Florida residents to $50, as it is unknown how many will pay to join the hunt. Each hunter would be limited to one bear, and the kill would have to be registered and tagged within 12 hours.

Also, hunters would be prohibited from killing bears within 100 yards of active game-feeding stations.

JIM TURNER|The News Service of Florida|May 13, 2015

Weapons trafficking experts target criminal wildlife trade networks

An outfit usually associated with investigating arms dealers and weapons traffickers is applying its advanced network mapping capabilities to criminal wildlife trafficking syndicates.
This week Washington D.C.-based C4ADS unveiled the Environmental Crimes Fusion Cell, a unit which consists of a team of analysts, network mapping technology provided by software company Palantir, and a network of NGOs and enforcement agencies. The unit analyses wildlife trade data to provide actionable intelligence to pursue and apprehend traffickers.
“We adapt methodologies developed for the security community and combine them with cutting-edge Palantir technology and innovative sources of public and commercial data, to map and expose wildlife criminal networks,” C4ADS’s Jackson Miller told Mongabay. “We have a dedicated team of analysts who work across multiple languages, and have a network of over 50 organizations and individuals around the world who feed us raw data and insights from the field that we can analyze and structure in a way that can lead to actionable, real-world results.”
The initiative includes a web platform that provides current and historic data on large-scale ivory seizures as well as a tracking portal for ammunition typically used for poaching and background information on illicit ivory, rhino horn, and timber supply chains. C4ADS also published a report detailing how trafficking networks often finance their operations and smuggle contraband. It highlights risks and potential exposure for shipping companies and banks.

Two ivory seizure maps from C4ADS. Click images to access the data.

C4ADS further announced that it will provide analytical assistance to law enforcement and conservation groups that have raw trade data but lack the capabilities to analyze it. For example, if a local port authority uncovers a stash of unregistered rosewood or a NGO finds a cache of elephant ivory in a warehouse, C4ADS is offering to help figure out how the contraband links to criminal networks and the broader illegal wildlife supply chain.
“Central to the ‘fusion cell’ concept is the concept of collaboration,” Jackson told Mongabay. “This cell is designed to be supportive of others’ efforts in the field, a resource both conservationists and officials can lean on for objective data and analysis. We hope to become a bridge between the many different stakeholders who must all come together to help solve this very complex issue.”

Rhett A. Butler|May 15, 2015

Forestry

Citrus Greening Continues to Bite into Florida’s Signature Crop

Florida suffered another blow in its battle against citrus greening.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s grim estimate for the state’s $10.7 billion citrus industry, released Tuesday, claims the 2014-2015 Florida orange crop, responsible for 64,000 jobs, will yield just 96.4 million boxes of fruit. That’s down from last season’s 104 million boxes.

The state’s signature crop is fighting for its life against a bacterial disease with no cure.

The estimate released Tuesday represents a decline of 60 percent since the peak of citrus production at 244 million boxes in 1997-98.

In a year with no hurricanes, long freezes or other severe weather events, Florida Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam says it shows what a death grip citrus greening has on Florida’s orange groves.

“The updated citrus forecast, which has decreased by 5.6 million boxes since the April announcement, illustrates just how severely citrus greening is devastating Florida’s citrus industry,” Putnam said in a prepared statement.

“The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services has requested $18 million this year to support research, to grow clean citrus stock and to remove and replant diseased trees. We will fight to save” Florida’s citrus industry, he vowed.

For the first time in 2013 the disease was found in all 32 counties where citrus is grown.

Citrus greening, introduced to Florida in 1998 probably through the Port of Miami, is spread by a vector called the Asian citrus psyllid — an insect no larger than the head of a pin. Infected trees produce misshapen, unmarketable and bitter fruit. Over time, it inhibits the tree’s ability to produce fruit. After becoming infected, trees usually die in three to five years.

The only way to control the disease is to remove the tree.

Researchers estimate that more than half of Florida’s citrus groves are infected with citrus greening.

Greening has crippled citrus production around the world, including in Asia and Africa, researchers at the University of Florida told The New York Times. A decade ago, psyllids were discovered in Brazil, which, with its abundant rural land, has tried to outrun the disease by removing countless trees and planting new acres. Florida is second in the world market only to Brazil in orange juice production.

Sunshine State News|May 13, 2015

11 of the World’s Most Threatened Forests

WWF report identifies regions at risk for catastrophic deforestation by 2030 and what must be done to save them

The Amazon, central Africa, the Mekong. These are home to some of the world’s most species-rich, culturally significant and stunningly beautiful forests. But large segments of these forests, and many others around , may not be there in 15 years if we don’t do more to save them.
A new WWF report identifies the 11 regions of the world where most forest loss is expected to occur by 2030 if we do not change the way we address major forest threats, such as mining, agriculture, illegal logging and road construction.

WWF believes that stopping deforestation now is much more strategic and cost-effective than dealing with the consequences of deforestation later. And we need to stop deforestation in all of the 11 hotspots, not just some of them, so that we avoid pushing deforestation out of one country and into another.

Below are 11 of the most threatened:

Amazon
The world’s largest forest is also the site of the biggest projected losses. More than one-quarter of the region will be without forests if trends continue. Cattle ranching and agriculture are the dominant causes of deforestation in most of the region.

Atlantic Forest/Gran Chaco
The Atlantic forest—spanning parts of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina—is one of the richest rain forests in the world, with richer biodiversity per acre than the Amazon. However, the region also is where 75 percent of the Brazilian population lives, a situation that places a lot of pressure on the forests. Deforestation in the neighboring Gran Chaco, which is the largest dry forest in South America, is mainly due to conversion of forest land to cropland and pasture.

Borneo
Projections for 2030 for the “Heart of Borneo”—home to most of the country’s forest—show only 33 percent of the lowland rainforest remaining. Deforestation and degradation are driven by weak governance and a lack of stability that encourages people—especially those who want to create palm oil plantations—to get what they can while they can.

Cerrado
This high plateau region of Brazil is not nearly as well-known as the Amazon. But it is under just as threatened—mainly from cattle ranching and the conversion of forests to soy plantations. If the current rate of loss continues, much of the Cerrado’s savannah, woodland and forests outside of protected areas will disappear by 2030.

Choco-Darien
The forests in this region, which runs along South America’s northwestern Pacific coast, face pressure from roads, power lines, mining and oil exploration. Most deforestation has been in the Ecuadorian Choco but the Panama and Colombia portions of the region are increasingly under threat.

Congo Basin
One of the most important wilderness areas on Earth, this region contains 20 percent of the world’s tropical forests and the highest biological diversity in Africa. The human population here is expected to double between 2000 and 2030, mainly in urban areas. Forests close to large cities are particularly threatened.

Eastern Africa
Much of this region’s forests are overharvested (for timber and fuel wood), illegally logged or converted for livestock and cash crops. Deforestation cuts through the region’s miombo woodlands, coastal forests and mountain forests. The coastal forests of Tanzania and Kenya have already been reduced to 10 percent of their original area.

Eastern Australia
Despite a recent reduction in forest loss, a projected weakening of key legislation in the frontline states of Queensland and New South Wales threatens a resurgence in deforestation, mainly to create pasture for livestock. Key species affected include koalas, possums, gliders and tree-dependent birds.

Greater Mekong
The economy here is booming. With this comes an urgent need to balance conservation with economic development—particularly the desire to convert forest land for sugar, rice, rubber and biofuels. As more land is converted, the threat to species grows. This is a region rich in species. In 2011 alone, 126 new species were discovered here, including fish, snakes, frogs and bats.

New Guinea
New Guinea and its neighboring islands are home to the largest remaining tracts of tropical forest in the Asia-Pacific region—and more than six percent of the world’s species. But they face a growing deforestation threat—agriculture. The rate of deforestation could surge if current proposals for agricultural development are approved.

Sumatra
Sumatra, especially Riau province, has become the center of Indonesia’s palm oil production—the main industry driving deforestation, even in protected forests and national parks. The status of plans by some governments to stabilize and even reverse forest loss remains unclear, leaving tigers, orangutans, rhinos and other wildlife at risk.

Download the report.

Jill Schwartz|April 27, 2015

How Forest Fragmentation Threatens Biodiversity

The U.S. currently has 59 national parks, protecting more than 210,000 square miles of land with several more public lands being preserved on state and local levels. Very few national parks are large enough to contain ecosystems. Problems such as greenhouse gases, climate change, industrial fumes, the extent of land development and their environmental impacts were not envisioned when most of their borders were first enacted.

The physical boundaries of these public lands are not enough to protect their ecosystems from exterior influences. The National Parks are not islands. They have intimate connections to our lives. They are sources of clean air, clean water and untouched forests that thousands of species, including our own, depend on. New studies reveal that our public lands are too fragmented and small to sufficiently protect the biodiversity of the U.S.

A recent study—Habitat Fragmentation and Its Lasting Impact on Earth’s Ecosystems—on habitat fragmentation came to some startling conclusions for our country’s ecosystems, many of which our public lands were enacted to protect and conserve. The study conducted by some of the leading ecologists in the world focused on long term habitat fragmentation experiments in several different continents. They discovered that 70 percent of the existing forestlands in the world are within .5 mile of the forest’s edge, making them susceptible to suburban, urban and agricultural influences that continue to intrude further into forests everyday. These influences were found to reduce diversity of life by 13 to 75 percent in all areas studied, with the percentage increasing the closer the habitat to the edge. In fragmented habitats, within 20 years nearly half of all species are lost and this downward trend continues over time.

The leading author of the study, Dr. Nick Haddad of North Carolina explains, “Large public lands like national parks are critical for conservation, but not sufficient. Larger connected areas of land need to be conserved. The scope and scale of land needed to protect and preserve a variety of biodiversity is well beyond the area that the national parks encompass. Ideally, it would be great to enlarge national parks, but more realistically the size needed to protect biodiversity should connect other protected areas in conjunction with national parks.”

Haddad used the Yellowstone to Yukon corridor as an example. He states, “The 1,800 miles of lands stringed together consist of several national parks and other protected lands, creating a superhighway for wildlife to flourish. With human population increasing and the resources those increases call for, there is a greater need for more conservation against these pressures. We need to take advantage of the parks and other public lands, think outside their boundaries to create resilience and resist the negative changes of a shrinking wilderness.”

A co-author of the paper published on Habitat Fragmentation, Clinton Jenkins, also published a paper on April 2, U.S. Protected lands mismatch biodiversity priorities. Many areas with high concentrations of biodiversity in the U.S. are inadequately protected and conserved, especially when it comes to protecting unique species to specific geographical areas. “Most species are very small and endemic to very small geographical areas. These rare, narrowly distributed species, most often fish, reptiles, amphibians, are often overlooked when it comes to conservation,” said Jenkins.

The study found that the most endemic rich states in the continental U.S. exist in the southeast and despite consisting of 10.8 percent of the land area of the country, only 7.8 percent of the country’s land easements exist in these regions. Some priority areas cited are the middle to southern blue ridge mountains of North Carolina, the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Florida panhandle and Florida keys among several others. According to the paper, habitat loss is the primary threat to the survival of a species, and the lands being conserved in the U.S. are not geographically configured to distribution of endemic and vulnerable species.

Jenkins states, “It is a biological defined trend that heavily fragmented habitats are too small to thrive in the long term. Multiple strategies to connect these priority areas need to be implemented such as better land management and more incentives to private landowners for conservation. Financial resources are most often directed to the most convenient areas to conserve or where the funding originated rather than what makes the most sense in protecting biodiversity. By redirecting the financial resources available to conservation to connect endemic rich areas large enough to protect ecosystems, it will make it much cheaper and easier to maintain those areas.”

Michael Sainato|April 30, 2015 

Global Warming and Climate Change

Sea rise threatens Florida coast, but there’s no statewide plan to deal with it

ST. AUGUSTINE — America’s oldest city is slowly drowning.

St. Augustine’s centuries-old Spanish fortress and other national landmarks sit feet from the encroaching Atlantic, whose waters already flood the city’s narrow, brick-paved streets about 10 times a year — a problem worsening as sea levels rise. The city has long relied on tourism, but visitors to the fortress and Ponce de Leon’s mythical Fountain of Youth might someday have to wear waders at high tide.

“If you want to benefit from the fact we’ve been here for 450 years, you have the responsibility to look forward to the next 450,” said Bill Hamilton, a 63-year-old horticulturist whose family has lived in the city since the 1950s. “Is St. Augustine even going to be here? We owe it to the people coming after us to leave the city in good shape.”

St. Augustine is one of many chronically flooded communities along Florida’s 1,200-mile coastline, and officials in these diverse places share a common concern: They’re afraid their buildings and economies will be further inundated by rising seas in just a couple of decades. The effects are a daily reality in much of Florida. Drinking water wells are fouled by seawater. Higher tides and storm surges make for more frequent road flooding from Jacksonville to Key West, and they’re overburdening aging flood-control systems.

But the state has yet to offer a clear plan or coordination to address what local officials across Florida’s coast see as a slow-moving emergency. Republican Gov. Rick Scott is skeptical of manmade climate change and has put aside the task of preparing for sea level rise, an Associated Press review of thousands of emails and documents pertaining to the state’s preparations for rising seas found.

Despite warnings from water experts and climate scientists about risks to cities and drinking water, skepticism over sea-level projections and climate-change science has hampered planning efforts at all levels of government, the records showed. Florida’s environmental agencies under Scott have been downsized and retooled, making them less effective at coordinating sea-level-rise planning in the state, the documents showed.

“If I were governor, I’d be out there talking about it (sea -level rise) every day,” said Eric Buermann, the former general counsel to the Republican Party of Florida who also served as a water district governing board member.

“I think he’s really got to grab ahold of this, set a vision, a long-term vision, and rally the people behind it. Unless you’re going to build a sea wall around South Florida, what’s the plan?”

The issue presents a public works challenge that could cost billions here and nationwide. In the third-most populous U.S. state, where most residents live near a coast, municipalities say they need statewide coordination and aid to prepare for the costly road ahead.

Communities like St. Augustine can do only so much alone. If one city builds a seawall, it might divert water to a neighbor. Cities also lack the technology, money and manpower to keep back the seas by themselves.

In a brief interview with the AP in March, Scott wouldn’t address whether the state had a long-range plan. He cited his support for Everglades restoration and some flood-control projects as progress, but said cities and counties should contact environmental and water agencies to find answers — though Scott and a GOP-led Legislature have slashed billions in funding from those agencies. Spokespeople for the water districts and other agencies disputed that cuts have affected their abilities to plan.

“We will continue to make investments and find solutions to protect our environment and preserve Florida’s natural beauty for our future generations,” the governor said in a statement.

Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection is in charge of protecting the state environment and water, but has taken no official position on sea- level rise, according to documents. DEP spokeswoman Lauren Engel said the agency’s strategy is to aid local communities and others through the state’s routine beach-nourishment and water-monitoring programs.

In St. Augustine, downtown streets around 19th century buildings built by oil tycoon Henry Flagler often close during nor’easters because of flooding. While the city’s proximity to the sea has made flooding a problem, residents say it’s worsened over the past 15 to 20 years.

St. Augustine’s civil engineer says that the low-lying village will probably need a New Orleans-style pumping system to keep water out — but that but no one knows exactly what to do and the state’s been unhelpful.

“Only when the frequency of flooding increases will people get nervous about it, and by then it will be too late,” engineer Reuben Franklin said. “There’s no guidance from the state or federal level. … Everything I’ve found to help I’ve gotten by searching the Internet.”

Across coastal Florida, sea levels are rising faster than previously measured, according to federal estimates. In addition to more flooding at high tide, increasing sea levels also mean higher surges during tropical storms and hurricanes, and more inundation of drinking wells throughout Florida.

Water quality is a big concern for many communities. It’s especially bad in South Florida — just north of Miami, Hallandale Beach has abandoned six of eight drinking water wells because of saltwater intrusion. Wells in northeast and Central Florida are deemed at risk, too.

While South Florida water officials have led the charge in addressing sea level rise concerns in their area, their attempt to organize a statewide plan was met with indifference, documents show. The Scott administration has organized just a few conference calls to coordinate local efforts, records show. Those came only after Florida’s water district managers asked DEP for help.

In a recent visit to Everglades National Park, President Barack Obama said the wetlands, vital to Florida’s tourism economy and drinking-water supply, are threatened by infusions of saltwater from rising seas.

The list of other problems across the state is growing. Miami Beach is spending $400 million on new stormwater pumps to keep seawater from overwhelming an outdated sewer system.

In St. Augustine, homes built on sand dunes teeter over open space as erosion eats at the foundations. Beachside hotel owners worry about their livelihoods.

Tampa and Miami are particularly vulnerable to rising seas — many roads and bridges weren’t designed to handle higher tides, according to the National Climate Change Assessment. Officials say Daytona Beach roads, too, flood more often than in the 1990s.

South Miami passed a resolution calling for South Florida to secede from the more conservative northern half of the state so it could deal with climate change itself.

Insurance giant Swiss Re has estimated that the economy in southeast Florida could sustain $33 billion in damage from rising seas and other climate-related damage in 2030, according to the Miami-Dade Sea Level Rise Task Force.

Most towns say they cannot afford the cost of climate-change studies or regional coordination.

“For us, it’s a reality, it’s not a political issue,” said Courtney Barker, city manager of Satellite Beach. The town near Cape Canaveral used to flood during tropical weather, but now just a heavy rainstorm can make roads impassable for commuters.

“When you have to listen to that mantra, ‘Climate change, is it real or not?’ you kind of chuckle, because you see it,” Barker said.

Scott administration officials are moving forward on a five-year plan that will provide basic guidance to cities dealing with sea level rise. Scott has appointed the Department of Economic Opportunity as the lead agency overseeing the project.

The DEO has received nearly $1 million in federal grants for the plan. More than half has been spent on staff time and travel or hasn’t yet been allocated, according to documents. The rest, about $450,000, went to contract researchers who are helping create the document, due in 2016.

Agency spokeswoman Jessica Sims wouldn’t comment and refused requests for the program’s manager to be interviewed.

JASON DEAREN and JENNIFER KAY|Tampa Bay Times |Associated Press|May 10, 2015

3 Ways Scientists Are Affected by Climate Change Denial

It’s unfortunate yet not surprising that the current corporate-led disinformation campaign on climate change is convincing a large segment of the population that global warming is a bunch of hooey. What is surprising, though – and perhaps even more unfortunate – is that even scientists can fall victim to these same propaganda tactics.

The University of Bristol’s Professor Stephan Lewandowsky examined how scientists are impacted by the climate change pushback and found three ways in which they’re susceptible. As Lewandowsky discovered, even if scientists don’t actually change their opinions on climate change, the climate change denial backlash is often enough to scare them out of talking about the subject as thoroughly.

Here are the three main ways some scientists are influenced by the opposition:

1. “Pluralistic Ignorance”

When a small group of people speak loudly enough or receive equal credibility from the media, those in the majority can be fooled into thinking that they are actually part of the minority. This pluralistic ignorance then influences majority opinion holders from speaking out as much, assuming their opinion is somehow less valid.

We’ve definitely seen this play out in regards to climate change. Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus on the subject, pundits have continued to frame global warming as an ongoing, undecided debate. The fact that scientists have to participate in such debates is enough to cause experts to stifle their opinions. How do you convince the public of something you shouldn’t have to convince them of anymore?

2. “Stereotype Threat”

When people are labeled in a certain unappealing way, they tend to avoid the behaviors that get them labeled as such, also known as the stereotype threat.

The rightwing media has done a “good” (though unethical) job of labeling scientists who expose the consequences of climate change as “alarmists,” “liars” or people trying to push some sort of agenda. As a result scientists are more likely to hold back in future communications with the media to avoid being called out in the same way.

That’s not just theoretical either. Other independent studies have verified that scientists who have been called “alarmist” later underplay their reports or hold back on just how dire the situation is in subsequent public statements. In that sense, the pushback against climate science is successfully stifling scientists, even if they don’t realize it.

3. “Third Person Effect”

The third person effect is the mistaken belief that other people are more susceptible to outside manipulation than we are ourselves. In reality, though, all people have their opinions swayed by external pressures, even if they’d like to think they’re above it.

Yes, this goes for scientists, too. Research shows that scientists are not immune to outside influence, even with a wealth of data in front of them. It doesn’t matter that scientifically experts realize that climate change denial is wrong; if they hear that message enough, there’s a good chance that at least some of that will linger in their subconscious.

The Silver Lining?

The good news is that scientists pay more attention to peer-reviewed research than your average schmo, so a study like this one might go a long way to keep scientists conscious of these issues. “Knowing about one’s own susceptibility to outside pressure is half the battle: our research may therefore enable scientists to recognize the potential for this seepage of contrarian arguments into their own language and thinking,” said Lewandowsky.

Hopefully, scientists will be aware of these issues enough to minimize the likelihood of being swayed and/or silenced by climate change deniers. Environmentalists need scientists to convey the truth about climate change and its impact on the future of the world. After all, if even scientists aren’t immune from these falsified arguments, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Kevin Mathews|May 11, 2015

The oldest city in the U.S. could be totally screwed by rising seas

Rising seas are about to engulf the oldest city in the U.S., and it doesn’t look like anyone’s going to do anything about it. That’s because the city of St. Augustine happens to be in Florida, where pythons roam free, Mickey Mouse is king, and climate change doesn’t exist.

St. Augustine is home to Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth, an old military fortress, and — like any respectable historical site — plenty of brick roads and old buildings. The 450-year-old national landmark also happens to be one of many cities along Florida’s coast getting increasingly worried about rising seas — a curious trend, given the state’s exemption from a certain global phenomenon.

To figure out what the state plans to do about these mysterious rising seas, Associated Press reporters sifted through thousands of state documents and emails. Here’s what they found:

Despite warnings from water experts and climate scientists about risks to cities and drinking water, skepticism over sea level projections and climate change science has hampered planning efforts at all levels of government, the records showed. Florida’s environmental agencies under [Gov. Rick] Scott have been downsized and retooled, making them less effective at coordinating sea level rise planning in the state, the documents showed.

“If I were governor, I’d be out there talking about it (sea level rise) every day,” said Eric Buermann, the former general counsel to the Republican Party of Florida who also served as a water district governing board member. “I think he’s really got to grab ahold of this, set a vision, a long-term vision, and rally the people behind it. Unless you’re going to build a sea wall around South Florida, what’s the plan?”

What’s the plan, indeed, Gov. Scott? The AP found that local officials in St. Augustine and elsewhere are trying to adapt to rising seas but are pretty much on their own:

Cities like St. Augustine have looked for help, but Scott’s disregard for climate change science has created a culture of fear among state employees, records show.

The administration has been adamant that employees, including scientists, not “assign cause” in public statements about global warming or sea level rise, internal government emails show.

For example, an April 28, 2014, email approving a DEP [Department of Environmental Protection] scientist’s request to participate in a National Geographic story came with a warning: “Approved. Make no claims as to cause … stay with the research you are doing, of course,” the DEP manager, Pamela Phillips, warned.

“I know the drill,” responded Mike Shirley, manager of the Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve near St. Augustine.

Agency spokeswoman Engel said Phillips was a lower-level staffer whose views didn’t necessarily reflect the entire administration. When asked whether staffers are told not to assign cause, Scott’s office said “the allegations are not true.”

Bigger cities like Tampa and Miami are also up the creek without a state-issued paddle. According to the AP, South Miami is so worried that it called for the southern half of Florida to secede from the rest of the state, leaving its northern brethren to their own self-destructive devices.

In a place like St. Augustine, rising sea levels will certainly wreak less economic havoc than in a big city like Miami, but wouldn’t the loss of America’s oldest city mean something? Is a band ever the same after losing its original lead?

Suzanne Jacobs11 May 2015

What Americans Really Think About Climate Change

With the Presidential Election starting to gain traction, climate change is once again in the political limelight. Given the circumstances, wouldn’t it be interesting to see where Americans stand on climate change?

Fortunately, Yale and Utah State University have teamed up to answer this exact question. They recently published a research project where they sought out to find out what Americans actually think about climate change and the results may surprise you.

Researchers surveyed 13,000 people asking them several questions regarding climate change based on beliefs, risk perception and policy support. For instance a person could be asked whether or not they believe in global warming, whether or not they are worried about global warming and whether or not they supported green energy initiatives.

The findings show that the topic is far more complex than we imagine it to be. While some results may be obvious, others were very unexpected.

There is a lot of diversity on the topic.

While the findings show that California clearly cares about climate change more than the rest of the country, the truth is that it’s not so simple. The reality is there seems to be a lot of diversity regarding the topic of climate change. Opinions vary widely on a local, county and state level.

Recent news stories seem to coincide with these findings. One such is example is Florida. The South Florida region (Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties) are very concerned about climate change due to rising sea levels, floods and their close proximity to the Evergaldes. Meanwhile Florida Governor Rick Scott refuses to even acknowledge it’s existence. At one point the words “climate change” were even banned from state communications.

The diversity can even be seen among counties within close proximity to each other. According to Yale and Utah State’s findings, it’s not uncommon for neighboring counties to differ by 10 to 20 percent.

We can’t agree on whether climate change is caused by humans.

As a nation, 63 percent of Americans believe that climate change is occurring, however only 43 percent think it’s caused by humans.

The good news is that Americans are starting to believe in climate change more and more. Public belief about climate change and concerns regarding the phenomenon have been on the rise since January.

States who have experienced extreme weather are at the forefront of the climate change debate.

California, Hawaii, Vermont and Massachusetts are the four states most concerned with climate change, with at least 50 percent of the population in each county citing that climate change was a major issue.

This isn’t surprising given California’s recent drought and the record-breaking winter just experienced by residents of New England.

A state’s political reputation doesn’t mean anything.

The research study found that while Texas is typically seen as a hard-core conservative red state, a lot of people in Texas are extremely concerned about climate change.

Southwest Texas in particular showed a lot of diversity when it came to the climate change debate. Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change, theorizes that the heavy Latino population in Southwest Texas could account for the results. He cites previous research that shows Latinos are far more concerned about climate change. Additionally, surveys conducted in Central and South America have shown that these countries are more concerned about climate change than most other countries.

Conclusion

While the results are varied, it would seem that Americans are moving toward believing that climate change is a big problem. Whether it’s because of extreme weather or because elections are looming, who knows? The bigger picture is the landscape is clearly changing.

Amanda Abella|May 13, 2015

10,000-Year-Old Antarctic Ice Shelf Could Disappear Before Decade’s End, NASA Study Finds

In 2002, two-thirds of the Larsen B Ice Shelf, located along the east coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, collapsed in a span of less than six weeks. According to a new NASA study, the remains of this ancient structure, which has existed for over 10,000 years, are likely to disintegrate completely before the end of the decade — an event that would significantly contribute to global sea level rise.

“These are warning signs that the remnant is disintegrating,” Ala Khazendar from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who led the study, said in a statement. “Although it’s fascinating scientifically to have a front-row seat to watch the ice shelf becoming unstable and breaking up, it’s bad news for our planet.”

Several recent studies have spotted an uptick in the melting of Antarctica’s floating ice shelves, which act as doorstops and hold back its glaciers and ice sheets from spreading outward into oceans. In some regions, the thickness of these shelves has fallen by as much as 18 percent over the past 18 years — a process that has accelerated over the last decade.

According to the predictions by Khazendar’s team, which used the data collected as part of NASA’s Operation IceBridge, widening cracks along the shelf’s grounding line would eventually lead to the Larsen B remnant breaking off completely from the Peninsula. This free-floating chunk — about 625 square miles in area and about 1,640 feet thick at its thickest point — would then shatter into hundreds of smaller icebergs.

Aerial photographs taken in February and March 2002 of parts of the Larsen B shelf in the Antarctic showing different aspects of the final stages of the collapse.  Reuters

“What is really surprising about Larsen B is how quickly the changes are taking place,” Khazendar said in the statement. The fastest moving part of the Flask Glacier, one of the shelf’s tributary glaciers, had accelerated 36 percent between 2002 and 2012. “Change has been relentless,” he said.

According to some estimates, if Antarctica’s ice sheet melts completely, it would raise sea levels by over 200 feet — enough to flood the planet’s land masses. Although this is not something that is likely to happen anytime soon, the latest observation is one of the many pointing toward a warming trend on the continent.

Avaneesh Pandey|ibtimes.com|May 15 2015

Extreme Weather

Tropical weather season arrives early in Carolinas

Ana is expected to hit land Sunday

Tropical Storm Ana — arriving three weeks before the official start of the Atlantic hurricane season — was pushing toward the Carolinas and could make landfall early Sunday, bringing high winds and flooding, the National Hurricane Center said Saturday.

Ana was moving toward the U.S. mainland at 3 mph, with a final turn expected to put the center on track for landfall near the South Carolina-North Carolina border.

As of 5 p.m. EDT, the storm was about 65 mph southeast of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and had maximum sustained winds of 60 mph.

With tropical-storm-force winds stretching 125 miles from the center, Ana (pronounced AHN-nah) was packing 60 mph winds with higher gusts.

The National Hurricane Center said the first tropical storm conditions were likely to rake an area from South Santee River in South Carolina to Cape Lookout, North Carolina, by Saturday evening.

The storm surge and tide were expected to push water as much as 2 feet above normal high-tide levels as far north as Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.

Ana was expected to dump 1 to 3 inches of rain — and up to 5 inches in some areas — over eastern portions of North Carolina and South Carolina through Monday.

The Atlantic hurricane season officially runs from June 1 to Nov. 30. The hurricane center said Ana was the earliest subtropical (or tropical) storm to form in the Atlantic basin since a previous Ana, in 2003.

Doug Stanglin and Doyle Rice|USA TODAY|5/10/15

From Rockies east, storms cast wide net

South Dakota was the center of weather extremes Sunday, with a tornado damaging a small town on the eastern side of the state and more than a foot of snow blanketing the Black Hills to the west.

Several Great Plains and Midwest states were in the path of severe weather, including in North Texas, where the National Weather Service said a likely tornado damaged roofs and trees near Denton.

At the same time, a tropical storm came ashore in the Carolinas, and wintry weather also affected parts of Colorado.

Tropical Storm Ana made landfall near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, on Sunday morning and was downgraded to a tropical depression by Sunday afternoon. The storm’s maximum sustained winds were at 35 mph, and it was expected to move over eastern North Carolina on Sunday night.

In South Dakota, weather service meteorologist Philip Schumacher said law enforcement reported a tornado about 10:45 a.m. Sunday in Delmont — about 90 miles from Sioux Falls.

Delmont Fire Chief Elmer Goehring said there “have been some injuries,” and Avera Health spokeswoman Lindsey Meyers said three people were in good condition at a local hospital. No deaths were reported.

South Dakota Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Kristi Turman said about 20 buildings were damaged and the town has no water, power or phones.

“One side of town was taken away,” Delmont resident Anita Mathews said. S he said a large Lutheran church had been heavily damaged as well as a new fire hall.

In North Texas, a likely tornado ripped roofs off buildings and damaged trees near Denton, about 40 miles northwest of Dallas, National Weather Service meteorologist Tom Bradshaw said.

About 100 miles west of Fort Worth, people in the sparsely populated ranching and farming community of Cisco were left to clean up from Saturday’s tornado that left one person dead and another in critical condition. Cisco Fire Department spokesman Phillip Truitt said the two people were near each other.

The weather service said that torna­do was rated an EF-3, with winds ranging from 136 mph to 165 mph. At least six buildings were damaged south of Cisco, as well as six others near Lake Leon, Truitt said.

A strong line of storms moved through the Dallas-Fort Worth area Sunday morning, forcing significant delays and a total of 100 flight cancellations at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and Dallas Love Field Airport.

Forecasters issued tornado watches through Sunday evening for parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Iowa, South Dakota, Nebraska and Minnesota.

Farther north, a late-season snow fell in parts of the Rockies, western Nebraska and western South Dakota.

Weather service meteorologist Kyle Carstens said 10-18 inches of snow had fallen Sunday morning in the Black Hills, and totals could reach 20-24 inches by the time the system moves out. Rapid City, South Dakota, had 8-11 inches, accompanied by 20-30 mph winds.

Nearly 18 inches of snow fell in southern Colorado, a state that also saw hail, flooding and tornado warnings over the weekend.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

DEADLY STORMS ROAR THROUGH TORNADO ALLEY

String of tornadoes, warnings puts large swath of US on alert

A massive cleanup and hunt for the missing were underway Monday after a line of tornadoes and wild storms roared through the nation’s Tornado Alley, killing five people and injuring dozens. More than two dozen tornadoes ripped through parts of Arkansas, Iowa, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Texas on Sunday, National Weather Service meteorologist Greg Carbin said. The storms were the latest in a string of recent deadly storms. A tornado Saturday near Cisco, Texas, killed one person.

“We’ve had at least one tornado reported somewhere in the nation every day since May 2,” Carbin said. “It’s a dangerous time of year.”

More tornadoes hit the U.S. in May than any other month, the weather service said.

Tornadoes were possible in southern Texas and around the Great Lakes for later Monday, he said. A tornado watch had been posted for Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Kentucky.

In Van, Texas, Van Zandt County Fire Marshal Chuck Allen said a man and a woman died and 43 people were taken to hospitals after a tornado tore through the county Sunday night. Three people remained missing.

The tornado that tore through Van was rated an EF-3, the weather service reported Monday afternoon. Its winds were estimated at 135-140 mph. About 30 percent of the city received some kind of damage, and 50 people in the town of 2,700 sought shelter with the American Red Cross, Allen said.

County Judge Don Kirkpatrick thanked the public for the outpouring of support.

“We are working very hard to get Van back to normal,” Kirkpatrick said. “Van is a strong city, a strong community. We will rebuild.”

The storm was part of severe weather that stretched across North Texas on Sunday. Another likely tornado ripped roofs off buildings and damaged trees near Denton, about 40 miles northwest of Dallas, weather service meteorologist Tom Bradshaw said.

In Corsicana, Texas, a man died after being being swept into a ditch after leaving his car in floodwaters, WFAA-TV in Dallas-Fort Worth reported.

Two people died in Nashville, Arkansas, when a possible tornado rolled through Howard County late Sunday, County Coroner John Gray told THV11.com in Little Rock. Michael and Melissa Mooneyhan died shielding their baby girl, who survived the storm, authorities said. In South Dakota, the 200plus population of Delmont was evacuated after a tornado that injured nine people, the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls reported.

John Bacon & Doyle Rice, USA Today|May 11, 2015

Genetically Modified Organisms

11 Ways to Eliminate Genetically-Modified Food from the Planet

By now you may have heard that the state of Vermont was victorious against the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) and other industry groups in upholding their law requiring genetically-modified foods (GMOs) to be labeled as such. A victory for Vermont is a victory for us all when it comes to our right to know what we’re eating. But that doesn’t mean we should all sit back. It’s more important than ever to take a stand against genetically-modified organisms and the purity and safety of our food supply. Here are 12 things you can do to help eliminate GMOs from the planet:

1) Boycott the most common genetically-modified foods as much as possible. These foods include: corn, canola, soy, alfalfa, sugar beets, milk, zucchini and yellow crookneck squash.

2) Buy certified organic food wherever possible.

3) When buying packaged foods choose those with the “Non-GMO Project Verified” logo. The Non-GMO Project is a non-profit organization whose mandate is to preserve and build the non-GMO food supply, educate consumers, and provide third-party verified non-GMO choices.

4) Write to your local, state/provincial, and federal politicians asking them to defend your right to know what’s in the food you buy, the importance of proper genetically-modified foods labeling, and the safety and security of your food supply. Better yet, ask them to ban genetically-modified foods altogether. Many countries have banned genetically-modified organisms altogether, including: Switzerland, Australia, Austria, China, India, France, Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Greece, Bulgaria, Poland, Italy, and Russia.

5) Write to your local newspaper, radio station, and television to let them know your concern about the health and environmental safety of genetically-modified organisms and your right to know what’s in the food you buy. Remind them of the importance of “journalistic integrity”—that advertisers not influence editorial content.

6) Start a petition asking your local health food and grocery stores to ban genetically-modified foods.

7) Sign a petition on Care2 against GMOs.

8) Donate to organizations that inform the public and fight against genetically-modified foods, such as the Organic Consumers Association.

9) Share information you read about genetically-modified foods with your friends, family, and neighbors.

10) Plant only organic seeds or seedlings in your garden, planters, or indoors.

11) Stop buying and using products like Roundup and other highly toxic herbicides and pesticides. The money from Roundup goes directly into the hands of Monsanto which has a history of suing organic farmers in their effort to promote their own genetically-modified seeds.

The battle against GMOs is stronger than ever. Together we can make a huge difference to the safety and security of our food supply as well as our collective health and the health of our planet.

Michelle Schoffro Cook|May 9, 2015

Health Disaster in the Making: Hundreds of Schools Are Next to Fields Doused by Monsanto’s Toxic Weed Killers

Prepare yourself for “superweeds.”

Genetically engineered crops, or GMOs, have led to an explosion in growers’ use of herbicides, with the result that children at hundreds of elementary schools across the country go to class close by fields that are regularly doused with escalating amounts of toxic weed killers.

GMO corn and soybeans have been genetically engineered to withstand being blasted with glyphosate – an herbicide that the World Health Organization recently classified as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” The proximity of many schools to fields blanketed in the chemical puts kids at risk of exposure.

But it gets worse.

Overreliance on glyphosate has spawned the emergence of “superweeds” that resist the herbicide, so now producers of GMO crops are turning to even more harmful chemicals. First up is 2,4-D, a World War II-era defoliant that has been linked to non-Hodgkin lymphoma, Parkinson’s disease and reproductive problems. Young children are especially vulnerable to it.

A new EWG interactive map shows the amounts of glyphosate sprayed in each U.S. county and tallies the 3,247 elementary schools that are located within 1,000 feet of a corn or soybean field and the 487 schools that are within 200 feet. Click on any county on the map to see how much GMO corn and soy acreage has increased there as well as the number of nearby elementary schools.

The 15 states outlined on the map across the center of the country are the ones where the Environmental Protection Agency has approved the use of Dow AgroSciences’ Enlist Duo – a combination of glyphosate and 2,4-D – on GMO corn and soybeans engineered to tolerate both weed killers.

The chart shows the 10 states with the most elementary schools within 1,000 feet of a corn or soybean field. These states account for 53 percent of the total acreage planted with genetically engineered GMO corn and soy. EPA has approved the use of Enlist Duo in seven of them.

The inescapable connection between GMO crops and increased use of toxic herbicides is one reason why many people want to know whether the products they buy contain GMOs. Polls show that more than 90 percent of consumers favor labeling GMOs, but without a mandatory labeling law, they have no way to know for sure.

Methodology:

EWG approximated school locations using the ESRI (www.esri.com) landmark shape file for schools, derived from the U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System – Schools layer. These are considered the best available data for school locations. The data were filtered to the best of EWG’s knowledge to include only locations whose attributed name reflects an operating elementary school, but they may inadvertently include some free-standing school administrative offices or buildings that formerly housed schools but are now in other use.
Zones within 200 feet and 1,000 feet of each school were delineated using the school’s point location in the ESRI data, not the physical footprint of the school grounds. As a result, EWG’s analysis may over- or under-estimate the exact distance of school grounds to the boundaries of nearby corn or soybean fields. School locations were evaluated for proximity to the boundaries of corn and soybean fields as delineated in the USDA 2013 cropland data layer (30-meter resolution).
EWG acknowledges that spatial analyses of this kind may include some level of error (such as incorrect or outdated school or crop field locations or boundaries) even with standard, best available data sources. EWG welcomes information to revise and correct any locational errors in the underlying data.

Data on estimated glyphosate use was drawn from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Estimated Annual Agricultural Pesticide Use for Counties of the Conterminous United States (2008-2012 & 1992-2009). According to the USGS, “Pesticide use estimates from this study are suitable for making national, regional, and watershed assessments of annual pesticide use, however the reliability of estimates generally decreases with scale.”

Data on the acreage of genetically modified corn and soybeans were assembled by extrapolating from county-planted acreage using state percentages of biotech varieties by crop, as reported by the USDA. For corn, state level “herbicide resistant” + “stacked gene” varieties were used to extrapolate county-level planted acreage. If a state was not specifically listed in the USDA NASS Acreage Report, the category “Other” was used in the extrapolation. For soybeans, the state-level “all biotech varieties” was used to extrapolate planted acres at the county level. If a state was not specifically listed in the USDA NASS Acreage Report, the category “Other” was used in the county extrapolation.

Mary Ellen Kustin, Soren Rundquist|Environmental Working Group|May 9, 2015

10 Things You May Not Know About GMOs

Confused about GMOs? Are you constantly bombarded with news that GMOs are harmful and then turn around a few minutes later to read they are not harmful and safe? There is no question GMOs (Soy, corn, cotton, canola, sugar beets, alfalfa, papaya, squash) are front and center in many food conversations and news sources. I have put a quick list of some GMO facts that you may not know:

1) GMOs is not a food. GMOs (genetically modified organism) are a breeding technology. Sometimes when I talk with people about GMOs, I get the feeling they really don’t know what GMOs are. So let’s start with these three fast facts:

• GMOs are not Monsanto.
• GMOs are not Round Up or Glyphosate.
• GMOs are not chemicals.

So exactly what is GMO? Our food has been genetically modified for thousands of years. GMO technology allows us to be more precise in the genetic modifications. According to a Popular Science article – “Scientists extract a bit of DNA from an organism, modify or make copies of it, and incorporate it into the genome of the same species or a second one. They do this by either using bacteria to deliver the new genetic material, or by shooting tiny DNA-coated metal pellets into plant cells with a gene gun. While scientists can’t control exactly where the foreign DNA will land, they can repeat the experiment until they get a genome with the right information in the right place. That process allows for greater precision. With GMOs, we know the genetic information we are using, we know where it goes in the genome, and we can see if it is near an allergen or a toxin.”

2) Herbicide resistant weeds, or “superweeds” are not caused by GMOs. The reason we have “superweeds” is because weeds continually change to resist pesticides. Superweeds are not new.  Weeds have always changed (on their own) to resist pesticides. What would happen if they didn’t? Weeds would be extinct.

Yes, farmers have relied on Round Up (glyphosate) for quite a few years because it was so effective, low cost and much safer than other pesticides. But as weeds do, they are becoming resistant to Round Up. The solution? Farmers have been slacking. They need to continually change their weed plan, using several methods including crop rotation and other pesticide control measure, to combat weed pressures in their fields.

3) The medical community also uses GMOs. Perhaps the most popular is insulin, which is used by million every single day. Other medical uses of genetically engineering is drug treatments for cancer, Alzheimer’s and cystic fibrosis. Our world is much better because of these medical treatments – all which are genetically modified organisms.

4) GMOs do happen in nature. The sweet potato was modified, in nature, some 8000 years ago. Soil bacteria entered the plant and modified the sweet potato plant. According to Jan Kreuze, “People have been eating a GMO for thousands of years without knowing it.”

5) Europe IS importing feed/food that has used the GMO technology. One issue that is constantly brought up by consumers is Europe has banned GMOs. And then it is always followed up with, “why doesn’t the U.S. do the same?” The reality is Europe never banned GMOs (only two countries have outright banned GMOs), but rather, had not approved them. The EU has now authorized the importation of 17 GMOs for food/feed uses.

6) GMO’s are not causing the increase in food allergies. Food allergies are mostly caused by eight major food products – milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, soy, wheat, fish and shellfish. All GMO foods are required to be tested extensively for these eight food products and biotech developers work closely with the FDA to assure any new GMO foods do not produce any new allergens. And, perhaps, the coolest thing about this technology is we can use the biotechnology to remove known allergens from foods. Imagine a world where someone can eat peanuts without the “peanut allergen.”

7) Long Term Studies on GMOs. Probably the most common statement I have seen or read is, “There are no long term studies on GMOs.” There have been GMO studies done on animals where the results show no negative effects on animals. And then the question also becomes, what is considered long term? For the naysayers, there will be no amount of time that will satisfy them. In addition, there have never been long-term studies required on any other new seed variety or crop. GMOs are the only crops that require extensive pre-marketing scrutiny. And think all natural plant foods are always good for us? Think about rhubarb leaves and pits of peaches – all which are poisonous to humans.

8) GMOs only affect 1-4 genes, where traditional breeding plants affect 10,000 – >300,000 genes. And the 1-4 genes that are changed? Scientists know everything there is to know about them.

Plant Breeding Chart

9) GMOs = Sustainability. Using GMO technology allows farmers to use less pesticides. Less pesticides = good for people and the environment. Not only do farmers use less pesticides, but newer GMO varieties include a drought tolerant trait where plants require less water.  There is also the possibility of GMO plants using nitrogen already present in the soil as a nutrient. Presently, plants have a hard to time accessing and using the nitrogen already present in the soils. Biotechnology possibilities are endless.

10) Farmers care. Farmers really do care about what they grow. Our goal is to grow safe, affordable food. Farmers rely on expert advice that helps them determine the best seeds to plant. We can plant whatever seed we choose. We are not forced into any seed choices or seed companies.

Farmers choose to plant biotech seeds. We do need to sign a technology agreement that says we cannot save any seed back to plant for future years. We know that and understand that. Personally, we have farmed for over 35 years and we have never held back any seed to be used for the following growing season. And, finally, our farm field (where GMO corn and soybeans are grown) is literally in my backyard. Why would we grow something dangerous to our health right in our backyards? We really do care. We know GMOs are not the only solution, but just a single tool in our farming toolbox. And it seems farming requires multiple tools and I also believe our “toolbox” will continue to grow in the future.

wpatsche@gmail.com|May 12, 2015

[Yes, farmers do care – it is the producers of the herbicides that do not care.]

Monsanto Bets $45 Billion on a Pesticide-Soaked Future

Once an industrial-chemical titan, GMO seed giant Monsanto has rebranded itself as a “sustainable agriculture company.” Forget such classic post-war corporate atrocities as PCB and dioxin—the modern Monsanto “uses plant breeding and biotechnology to create seeds that grow into stronger, more resilient crops that require fewer resources,” as the company’s website has it.

That rhetoric may have to change, though, if Monsanto succeeds in buying its Swiss rival, pesticide giant Syngenta. On Friday, Syngenta’s board rejected a $45 billion takeover bid. But that’s hardly the end of the story. Tuesday afternoon, Syngenta’s share price was holding steady at a level about 20 percent higher than it was before Monsanto’s bid—an indication that investors consider an eventual deal quite possible. As The Wall Street Journal’s Helen Thomas put it, the Syngenta board’s initial rejection of Monsanto’s overture may just be a way of saying, “This deal makes sense, but Syngenta can hold out for more.”

The logic for the deal is simple: Syngenta is Monsanto’s perfect complement. Monsanto ranks as the globe’s largest purveyor of seeds (genetically modified and otherwise), alongside a relatively small chemical division (mainly devoted to the herbicide Roundup), which makes up just a third of its $15.8 billion in total sales.

Syngenta, meanwhile, is the globe’s largest pesticide purveyor, with a relatively small sideline in GMO seeds that accounts for a fifth of its $15.1 billion in total sales.

Combined, the two companies would form a singular agribusiness behemoth, a company that controls a third of both the globe’s seed and pesticides markets. To make the deal fly with US antitrust regulators, Syngenta would likely have to sell off its substantial corn and soybean seed business, as well its relatively small glyphosate holdings, in order to avoid direct overlap with Monsanto’s existing market share, the financial website Seeking Alpha reports. So the combined company would have somewhat smaller market share than what’s portrayed below:

In trying to swallow Syngenta, Monsanto is putting its money where its mouth isn’t—that is, it’s contradicting years of rhetoric about how its ultimate goal with biotech is to wean farmers off agrichemicals. The company has two major money-making GM products on the market: crops engineered to carry the insecticide Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, which is toxic to certain insects but not to humans; and crops engineered to withstand the herbicide glyphosate, an herbicide Monsanto sells under the brand name Roundup.

Syngenta is the main US supplier of the herbicide atrazine, which has come under heavy suspicion as an endocrine-disrupting chemical.

The company markets both as solutions to farmers’ reliance on toxic chemicals. Bt crops “allow farmers to protect their crops while eliminating or significantly decreasing the amount of pesticides sprayed,” Monsanto’s website declares; and its Roundup Ready products have” allowed farmers to … decrease the overall use of herbicides.”

Both of these claims have withered as Monsanto’s products have come to dominate US farm fields. Insects and weeds have evolved to resist them. Farmers have responded by unleashing a gusher of pesticides—both higher doses of Monsanto’s Roundup, and other, more-toxic chemicals as Roundup has lost effectiveness.

Monsanto’s lunge for Syngenta and its vast pesticide portfolio signals that the company thinks more of the same is in the offing.

One immediate winner would be the Monsanto’s formidable PR department. Battle-tested by years of defending the company from attacks against GMOs and also from the World Health Organization’s recent finding that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans,” the department would also find plenty of opportunity to flex its muscles if Syngenta came on board.

Syngenta is the main US supplier of the herbicide atrazine, which has come under heavy suspicion as an endocrine-disrupting chemical that messes with frogs’ genitalia and seeps into people’s drinking water. Syngenta is also one of two dominant purveyors of neonicotinoids—blockbuster insecticides (annual global sales: $2.6 billion) that have been substantially implicated in declining health of honeybees and other pollinators, birds, and water-borne animals. Both atrazine and neonics are currently banned in Europe, and widely, albeit controversially, used in the US.

All of which would make it ironic if, as some observers have speculated, Monsanto hopes to use the deal as an excuse to move its corporate HQ to Syngenta’s home base in Europe, in order to avoid paying US taxes.

Tom Philpott|May 13, 2015

Chipotle and the Empty Science of GMO’s

Last week,  Chipotle Mexican Grill proudly announced their decision to cook their food with only non-GMO ingredients, becoming the first major fast food chain in America to do so. The action was applauded by health food activists, environmentalists and many of Chipotle’s average consumers.

While Chipotle’s decision to uphold its corporate values and  desire to deliver a high quality product to consumers is certainly laudable, I cannot help but feel that it is ultimately an unscientific decision that places unfounded health concerns onto GMOs.

There are lots of complexities in food science, particularly surrounding GMOs but Chipotle’s wholesale abandonment of GMOs does nothing to actually educate the public well.

The first reason Chipotle gave for not using GMOs was that “scientists are still studying the long term implications of GMOs” and also that they believe scientific consensus has not been reached on the safety of them. In fact, a wide variety of organizations including the American Medical Association, the National Academies of Science, the World Health Organization and many other scientific organizations have all given their approval to GMOs.

The attempt by Chipotle to paint the scientific community’s response as a non-consensus, whether out of ignorance or malicious intent, is similar to the efforts of climate change deniers to create the appearance that an intense debate still exists amongst scientists — which is simply not happening.

Chipotle’s second reason was that “the cultivation of GMOs can harm the environment.” Now, this reason is actually incredibly reasonable; in fact, the heavy use of pesticides on  pesticide-resistant GMOs has been tied to the mass die-off of  beneficial insects like butterflies and bees. The devastating population reduction of insects like these could severely impact both the natural environment and large-scale food production in the U.S.

However, the issues relating to pesticide use on GMO crops is fundamentally an issue with farm management on the part of corporate and private growers. The issue is that these farmers continue to use massive amounts of incredibly harmful pesticides on their crops despite the severe environmental stress it causes.

GMOs themselves are not  necessarily harming the environmental. If farmers chose to plant their fields with GMOs that produced their own insecticides, it could drastically reduce the amount of pesticides used in farming and thus prevent harmful chemicals from making their way into waterways and needlessly killing insects and natural flora.

The third reason Chipotle gave for discontinuing the use of GMOs in their food was that believed, “Chipotle should be a place where people can eat food made with non-GMO ingredients.” Ultimately, that’s not something that can be wholly criticized. Yes, it may not be a good thing that Chipotle is potentially feeding into the unreasonable fears of people who don’t know much about GMOs, but Chipotle can do what they want with their business.

Despite this decision, Chipotle has not completely removed GMOs from their food and drink. While their beef is one hundred percent grass fed, much of their dairy and other meats have come from animals that have been fed “at least some GMO feed.” Funny that much of their soda utilizes corn syrup, which is, in their words, “almost always made from GMO corn.”

Discussions about both practices and ethics in the agricultural and food industries is undoubtedly necessary, but they should not be confused with the scientific issue of GMOs. Companies like Monsanto, Dow, and other industrialized agro-businesses  and chemical companies certainly have a lot of issues to answer for — many of them involving the intense environmental and personal issues they have caused. The debate over GMOs, however, is a red herring that prevents legitimate discussions from taking place.

Legitimate discussions concerning pesticide usage and other practices have nothing to do with the frankly marginal issue of GMOs. Imagine the amount of good that could be done if people cared as much about the effects of Agent Orange on Vietnamese civilians and U.S. veterans as they did about the health effects of adding a precursor to Vitamin A in rice. Imagine what could be done if the “healthy” consumer eating a thousand-calorie beef burrito were less concerned with whether the cow in it ate GMO corn and was more concerned with the disposal of toxic chemicals in creeks in Alabama. GMOs are not even close to being the biggest issues that these industrialized agro-businesses should be addressing.

Chipotle’s desire to act with transparency is something that should be lauded, despite the way they’ve chosen to go about it. Chipotle has shown more regard for consumers than many businesses do, particularly agro-businesses. Consumers have the right to know what ingredients are going into their food and Chipotle should be given credit for giving consumers information on their food.

At least Chipotle recognizes that they still have work to do and at least they let consumers know what GMO products remain. Hopefully Chipotle sincerely works to remove GMOs from the products completely, lest they be proven to be  hypocrites only using an anti-GMO stance as a cheap marketing ploy to make money.

Chipotle has the right to what they want with their business, but a lot of their logic is faulty at worst, or contentious at best. I disagree with their decision to forego the use of GMO but I applaud their decision to act transparently for their consumers. Ultimately, I know that I will continue to eat at Chipotle because their burritos are delicious — GMO or not.

Roy Lyle|May 10, 2015

They Are Biocides, Not Pesticides — And They Are Creating an Ecocide

“A single corn kernel coated with a neonicotinoid can kill a song bird.” As a long time environmental lawyer and campaigner, I should not have been stunned by that fact but I was. Shaking my head in dismay, I read on, “Even a tiny grain of wheat or canola treated with the …neonicotinoid… can fatally poison a bird.”

The report is from the American Bird Conservancy and the neonicotinoids referred to are a relatively new class of insecticides that have become the most commonly used in the world, with several hundred products approved for use in the U.S. These “neonics” are neurotoxins that paralyze and eventually kill their victim. My organization, Center for Food Safety, has been working hard to halt the use of these neonics through litigation, legislation, grassroots advocacy, and legal petitions to the Environmental Protection Agency. We are suing to address the well-publicized threat that neonics present to the survival of honey bees and wild bees. At the time we launched our legal actions, I did not even know about the song birds.

The anger-stirring realization that a song bird could be felled by a single seed and the prospect of bees being silenced forever brought me back to the words of Rachel Carson, written more than half a century ago in Silent Spring. “These… non selective chemicals have the power to kill every insect, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad,’ to still the songs of the birds and the leaping fish… they should not be called insecticides but biocides.” Through Carson’s crusade, biocides like DDT were eventually banned but new chemicals like neonicotinoids and other similar “systemic” insecticides/biocides have taken their place causing similar ecological havoc. Sadly, our regulatory agencies under the sway of the agrochemical industry have enabled this tragic and continuing environmental destruction.

I think it is long past due that we who work in the food and environmental movement adopt Carson’s nomenclature. Let’s not refer to pesticides, whether they are insecticides, herbicides or fungicides, by anything but their real name: biocides. Words do matter.

The “cide” ending in all these terms comes from the Latin caedare meaning “to kill.” Given that these chemicals are designed to kill that root word is accurate. But using the word pest-icide gives the impression that all these chemicals do is kill “pests,” whether insects, plant, or fungi pests. The neonicotinoids killing bees and song birds puts that delusion to rest. The bee is an insect but not a pest and the song bird is neither an insect nor a pest.

But Carson only referred to insecticides as biocides. Is it fair to put all pesticides, including herbicides and fungicides, in the same pejorative etymological category? Well, let’s look at Monsanto’s Roundup. It is the most widely used herbicide in the world because of the adoption of genetically engineered (GE) crops designed to tolerate the chemical. Is Roundup just a pesticide, a careful killer of just those “bad” plants called weeds that farmers wish to remove? Of course not. Roundup does so much more than kill plant pests. It wipes out beneficial plants of all sorts: food crops, fruits in the orchard, flowers in the garden, in fact anything that is green. Most of these are not pests or weeds. Among the beneficial plants it destroys is milkweed, on which monarch butterflies depend. The massive use of Roundup in the U.S. has destroyed so much milkweed that monarch butterflies are now at risk of extinction. Monarch butterflies are not pests or weeds.

Then there were the University of Pittsburgh researchers who a decade ago tested how Roundup might impact immature and mature frogs in ponds. This is how the researchers summarized their results: “The most striking result from the experiments was that a chemical designed to kill plants killed 98 percent of tad poles within three weeks and 79 percent of all frogs within one day.” That is very effective killing indeed, but of course frogs are not pests or weeds. Argentinian researchers using animal models then linked Roundup and its active ingredient glyphosate to cranial malformations and other birth defects long reported in the children of farm workers who were repeatedly exposed to the chemical. Infants are not pests or weeds. And then in March 2015, the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) cancer authorities — the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) — determined that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans” based on multiple lines of evidence: kidney, pancreatic and other tumors in glyphosate-treated test animals; epidemiology studies showing higher rates of cancer in farmers that used glyphosate; and research showing that glyphosate damages chromosomes, one mechanism by which cancer is induced.

So Roundup is a butterfly killer, a frog killer and potentially an infant and adult human killer. And it has numerous other untold victims, to be sure. None of these are pests or weeds. So let’s not continue to use misleading euphemisms. Roundup is not a pesticide or herbicide; it is a “biocide.”

And now to fungicides. Their use in agriculture in the U.S. has skyrocketed, almost doubling in the last seven years. Unfortunately, research on their ecological and human health impacts has not kept up with the exponential growth in the use of these chemicals. But there is growing evidence that many of these toxics kill beneficial soil life, disrupting essential soil ecosystems. They are also increasingly becoming a water pollution problem, threatening aquatic life. Research has also pointed to concerning synergistic effects when used in tandem with other pesticides – delivering an even more toxic cocktail to bees and other beneficial insects exposed to the chemicals. Past studies indicate that 90 percent of fungicides are carcinogenic in animal models. To add insult to injury, they are also suspected of increasing obesity, especially in children. These health impacts remind us of yet another Carson insight: “Man is a part of nature and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”

Overall, let’s contemplate what these biocides are bringing us: vast areas of this country stripped of all vegetation save for monocultured GE crops, devoid of flowers, bees, butterflies and song birds, with contaminated rivers and streams with little or no insect life, and fish and frogs and other aquatic life dead or deformed. Then there are the birth defects and cancers in our own children. What is the word that would encompass the result of our using nearly a billion pounds of biocides each year? I would suggest it is nothing short of ecocide.

Andrew Kimbrell|Executive Director|Center for Food Safety

This article was originally published on The Huffington Post, May 4, 2015.

Energy

Shell gets approval to drill in Arctic Ocean in July ‏

Agency gives Shell the stamp of approval to drill in fragile Arctic Ocean, despite threats to the Arctic and the climate

In a reckless decision that places the Arctic’s iconic wildlife and the health of our planet on the line, the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management just approved Shell’s plan to drill in the Arctic Ocean’s Chukchi Sea starting in July.

The approved plan is bigger, dirtier, and louder than any previous plan, calling for more sound disturbances and harassment of whales and seals, more water and air pollution, and more vessels and helicopters.

It also runs the risk of a catastrophic oil spill that could not be cleaned in Arctic waters.

In fact, a recent government environmental report predicts a 75 percent chance of at least one major spill in the Chukchi Sea if development goes forward! And drilling for oil in the Arctic Ocean takes us in the wrong direction on addressing climate change. Yet despite these odds, Shell is rushing full-speed ahead.

In 2012, the company’s accident-filled efforts to drill demonstrated that neither Shell nor any other company is ready to drill in the Arctic Ocean. Shell proved that again just last month, when its drillship Noble Discoverer was held in port due to pollution control failures.

The consequences of a spill in the Arctic would be disastrous, with oil spewing into ocean waters that provide critical habitat for wildlife like polar bears, walruses and bowhead whales—waters so icy, rugged and unpredictable that a spill of any kind could be nearly impossible to clean up.

Earlier this month, Earthjustice submitted approximately 38,000 comments to the agency of behalf of environmental supporters that requested the Interior reject Shell’s risky plan. The project Interior approved today is bigger, dirtier, and louder than any previous plan, calling for more sound disturbances and harassment of whales and seals, more water and air pollution, and more vessels and helicopters. It also runs the risk of a catastrophic oil spill that could not be cleaned in Arctic waters.

The company’s accident-filled efforts to drill in 2012 demonstrate that neither Shell nor any other company is ready to drill in the Arctic Ocean. Shell proved that again just last month when its Discoverer drillship was held in port due to pollution control failures. Drilling for oil in the Arctic Ocean also takes us in the wrong direction on combating climate change.

Interior rushed through its reconsideration of the lease sale by which Shell obtained its leases when it reaffirmed a Bush era oil lease sale in late March. Now it has rushed to approve Shell’s drilling plan without adequately considering the potentially significant risks and effects of Shell’s operations.

“This decision places big oil before people, putting the Arctic’s iconic wildlife and the health of our planet on the line,” said Erik Grafe, Earthjustice staff attorney. “The agency should not be approving such threatening plans based on a rushed and incomplete environmental and safety review. Ultimately, Arctic Ocean drilling is far too risky and undermines the administration’s efforts to address climate change and transition to a clean energy future. These fossil fuels need to remain in the ground.”

Erik Grafe|Staff Attorney|Earthjustice|May 11, 2015

 Did Canadian Voters Just Save the U.S. From the Keystone XL Pipeline?

American environmentalists have been working tirelessly to prevent approval of the infamous Keystone XL pipeline, and hope may have finally arrived from an unexpected place: Alberta, Canada. The province, which perhaps has the most to gain from the transcontinental pipeline, just elected a new liberal party with remarkably green views.

Previously, the New Democratic Party hasn’t had much success in Alberta, but voters chose candidates from the party by a significant majority this election. Alberta’s new leader, Rachel Notley made several progressively green pledges during her campaign, so presumably the voters approve of a more eco-friendly agenda.

For context, many call Alberta the “Texas of Canada” because of its abundance in oil and longstanding conservative politics, so this week’s election results mark a major shift for this region. It’s been a foregone conclusion that Alberta would back the pipeline from its end, but now that theory is certainly in jeopardy.

Before the election, Notley pledged to rescind Alberta’s support for the Keystone XL pipeline. Simultaneously, she vowed to raise taxes and royalties on oil companies. Even if these steps wouldn’t outright block the pipeline, they’d certainly make it more difficult, risky and unappealing for the company to move forward on the plan.

Could a liberal party really spell doom for the Keystone XL pipeline? Some investors seem to think so. The stock for Suncor Energy Inc., the company tied to the pipeline project, quickly dropped by over 4 percent following the election results. Certainly, people who have been banking on the company experiencing massive profits once the project kicks off are less confident in its success at this point.

This is great news for environmentally conscious Americans who weren’t anticipating this potential support from the Canadian side of the border. Although President Barack Obama has done a good job of at least stalling the pipeline’s approval, the 2016 election could quickly turn the tides. Not only do most Republicans support the Keystone XL, but Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton also has some notable ties to the project’s investors leaving many to assume she’d ultimately allow construction to occur.

We’ll have to wait and see how aggressively the New Democratic Party stands against the pipeline. It is unlikely that even progressive Alberta politicians will try to completely dismantle the oil industry given the population’s reliance on oil money and jobs. Still, if Notley and her peers stay true to their goal of prioritizing renewable energies over oil, they’ll do their parts to make sure the Keystone XL pipeline doesn’t come to fruition.

Kevin Mathews|May 9, 2015

Turning the Tide on the Offshore Drilling Threat
Drilling off the Atlantic coast is too costly for communities

For the first time in over 30 years, the federal government has proposed offering leases to companies for offshore drilling off the Atlantic coast. The proposed lease areas lie directly off of the coasts of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, and the leases may be sold in 2021, with drilling happening thereafter. The proposal comes just a few months after the federal government’s decision to allow exploration for oil & gas off the Atlantic coast using highly detrimental seismic airgun surveys.

SACE is opposed to offshore drilling and exploration in the Atlantic, especially as clean, renewable energy such as solar and wind become ever more economical for the Southeast. Recent SACE blogs have detailed the good prices available on both solar and wind. Furthermore, the cost of onshore natural gas is low, which will make offshore drilling relatively expensive and potentially nonviable for years to come.

We believe that offshore drilling off the Atlantic coast is too risky to be of benefit to our communities.

In the coastal Southeast, our economy relies on clean, healthy beaches, marshes, and fisheries. These assets are what draw people to live here, vacation here, and drive our high quality of life. Hundreds of thousands of Southeasterners work in the tourism and fishing industries, which generate billions of dollars per year and are anchored by the presence of a clean, beautiful environment. Jeopardizing these critical, established industries for high-risk offshore drilling would be a grave mistake and a disservice to our communities.

And it’s not just the threat of a catastrophic spill like the Deepwater Horizon that would threaten our coast, but it’s more likely to be the everyday impacts that are intrinsic with the offshore drilling industry. Looking to the Gulf, we see that the offshore drilling industry has had the effect of industrializing large stretches of the coast with pipelines and refineries, while thousands of small spills take place every year with a big cumulative impact. Meanwhile their wetlands are eroding at a rate of a football field’s worth of wetlands every 45 minutes, due in large part to the canals used for pipelines and vessel traffic.

We find these risks unacceptable for our coast and have been working in coalition with many partners since 2010 to prevent the expansion of offshore drilling to the Atlantic. We have helped galvanize local opposition to offshore drilling, evidenced by the 52 Mid- and South Atlantic communities that have passed resolutions opposing oil & gas exploration and/or drilling, newspaper editorial boards writing in opposition, and bipartisan opposition from state legislators and Congressmen.

While public opinion is predominately in opposition to offshore drilling in the Atlantic, convincing the oil industry and the federal government to back off is a tall order, so we need to keep the pressure up. There will be a few comment periods over the next 18 months in which you will be able to voice your opinions. We encourage you to stay tuned to SACE’s newsletter, email blasts, and blog to be kept abreast of developments. More immediately, a significant way you can help protect our coast is to participate in the annual Hands Across the Sand day of action next Saturday, May 16.

Hands Across the Sand is an international event in which communities all over the world gather at their local beach to symbolically protect their beach from the impacts of offshore drilling. Participants join hands in a line as long as possible, drawing a physical and metaphorical line in the sand as a sign of protecting their beach from the impacts of offshore drilling. Dozens of Hands events are taking place throughout the Southeast. You can find your local event at http://handsacrossthesand.org. SACE is proud to have been an original sponsor of Hands Across the Sand when it started in 2010, and has served on the steering committee since 2012.

Stephen Smith|Southern Clean Energy Alliance|May, 2015

FPL & Nuclear at Turkey Point
Federal Regulators Hear Opposition to Licensing of FPL’s Proposed Turkey Point Nuclear Reactors

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) recently issued the draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for Florida Power & Light’s licensing application to potentially build two costly, water-intensive new nuclear reactors at their existing Turkey Point plant in Miami-Dade County, about 25 miles south of Miami and is seeking public comment. Despite many serious problems with this proposal, the draft EIS recommends license approval.

In April, the NRC held three well-attended public hearings, one in Miami the day President Obama visited the Everglades to discuss climate change, and two in Homestead. SACE’s George Cavros presented compelling comments in Miami in which several local mayors state and elected officials, community leaders and others voiced opposition to the licensing of the reactors.

If approved, the two reactors, which may operate for 60 or more years, would make Turkey Point one of the largest nuclear plants in the country, would require using massive amounts of water and degrade water quality, threaten the drinking water supply, and jeopardize critical wildlife habitat for neighboring Biscayne National Park and ongoing Everglades restoration efforts.

As SACE highlighted at the hearing, there is no need for the proposed reactors. They have been delayed several times and the in-service date pushed back at least ten years and FPL has not even committed to actually completing the project.

Moreover, the NRC’s reliance on Florida Public Service Commission (PSC) orders and the state’s utility resource planning process is badly misplaced.

There are far better energy choices for Florida and our region. Energy efficiency is the lowest cost resource in meeting electricity demand at an investment of less than 3 cents per kWh, a fraction of the levelized cost of the proposed reactors, which is over 15 cents per kWh.

FPL’s past efforts in helping customers reduce energy use and save money on their bills has been abysmal but even at those low-level goals, if FPL continued the conservation programs it had in place in 2013, it would have captured 70% of what it now claims it needs in the 2027/28 timeframe from the proposed reactors.

Unfortunately, FPL’s forthcoming efforts over the next ten years to help customers reduce energy use and save money on their bills is simply a national embarrassment. The PSC recently approved the Company’s request to gut its conservation goals. If FPL were a state, it would rank almost at the bottom – behind Alabama and Mississippi in energy savings for customers.

This is likely the last opportunity before a final EIS is issued for this project that, if built, will impact surrounding communities and Floridians’ utility bills. These reactors are not the answer to Florida’s energy needs. In the face of climate change, clean, safe, and affordable renewable energy along with energy efficiency and conservation will not endanger our health, environment, or future.

View our talking points on clean energy solutions and visit our website. For information from the NRC, click here. Please send in your comments opposing the approval of the combined operating license and supporting for the “No Action Alternative” by May 22 to TurkeyPoint.COLEIS@nrc.gov.

Stephen Smith|Southern Clean Energy Alliance|May, 2015

Bill would exempt pipeline companies from FOIA requests

A bill introduced last week in the state House would make it harder for residents in St. Clair County to obtain information on pipelines running under their communities.

House Bill 4540 would exempt information about existing and proposed energy infrastructure from disclosure under the Michigan Freedom of Information Act.

The bill would exempt information that “could be useful to a person in planning an attack.”

The bill was introduced by Rep. Kurt Heise, R-Plymouth, and co-sponsored by local politicians, Rep. Andrea LaFontaine, R-Columbus Twp., and Rep. Paul Muxlow, R-Brown City.

Heise told the Detroit Free Press the bill would prevent people with ill intent from knowing the exact location of underground utilities or the pump stations associated with them.

LaFontaine did not return a call for comment. Muxlow directed questions about the legislation to his staff.

Bryan Modelski, legislative director for Muxlow’s office, said the bill will help to prevent an attack on infrastructure, which “could have an impact on safety, lives, the economy and future investment.”

The Michigan State Police and Enbridge Energy support the bill.

“We are among a number of energy entities that own and operate critical energy infrastructure in Michigan that are joining state police and regulators in supporting the bill, which would keep sensitive information out of the hands of bad actors who may seek to harm Michigan and its citizens,” said Jason Manshum, spokesman for Enbridge.

Tiffany Brown, MSP spokeswoman, said the agency believes the legislation could help prevent attacks.

“Disclosure of information relating to critical energy infrastructure could pose a security concern,” Brown said, in an email. “If released, hackers and other criminals who wish to inflict harm will have the ‘playbook’ and know how to best circumvent security.”

According to the Michigan Public Service Commission, about 14 companies operated pipelines in St. Clair County, as of early 2015. Eight of the company are natural gas transmission pipeline operators, and six are hazardous pipeline operators.

At least 13 transmission pipelines from nine companies are under the St. Clair River.

Heise said that local governments, regulators and first responders would still have access to all information about energy infrastructure they need. He said journalists, environmentalists and members of the public possibly could appeal a denied FOIA request.

Jeff Friedland, director for the St. Clair County Homeland Security Emergency Management Office, said he understands the need to protect some of the information from those who use it unsafely.

“I would hope that this legislation would not just ignore residents within a certain proximity,” Friedland said.

“I think that the pipeline companies should provide residents within a certain distance of their pipelines with information on it.”

Whether someone living in the Upper Peninsula or out-of-state should have that same access is debatable, Friedland said.

He said the emergency management office keeps a pipeline book with information on the routing of the pipelines, what they carry and emergency contacts.

He said the office continues to work with companies to obtain updated mapping information in a variety of formats, as well as updated information on what’s running through the pipelines.

“It’s very difficult to know exactly what’s in a pipeline at any given time,” Friedland said.

“There has to at least be awareness when you get to local government. It’s running through our backyards. If something happens, we’re here at the start, we’re here at the finish and we live here day to day.”

The bill is assigned to the House Committee on Oversight and Ethics, and is up for hearing Thursday.

Beth LeBlanc|Times Herald|May 11, 2015

The World’s First Solar Road Is Producing More Energy Than Expected

In its first six months of existence, the world’s first solar road is performing even better than developers thought.

The road, which opened in the Netherlands in November of last year, has produced more than 3,000 kilowatt-hours of energy — enough to power a single small household for one year, according to Al-Jazeera America.

“If we translate this to an annual yield, we expect more than the 70kwh per square meter per year,” Sten de Wit, a spokesman for the project — dubbed SolaRoad — told Al Jazeera America. “We predicted [this] as an upper limit in the laboratory stage. We can therefore conclude that it was a successful first half year.”

De Wit said in a statement that he didn’t “expect a yield as high as this so quickly.”

The 230-foot stretch of road, which is embedded with solar cells that are protected by two layers of safety glass, is built for bike traffic, a use that reflects the road’s environmentally-friendly message and the cycling-heavy culture of the Netherlands. However, the road could withstand heavier traffic if needed, according to one of the project’s developers.

So far, about 150,000 cyclists have ridden over the road. Arian de Bondt, director of Ooms Civiel, one of the companies working on the project, said that the developers were working on developing solar panels that could withstand large buses and vehicles.

The SolaRoad, which connects the Amsterdam suburbs of Krommenie and Wormerveer, has been seen as a test by its creators — a stretch of bike lane that, if successful, could be used as a model for more roads and bike lanes. The researchers plan to conduct tests of the road over the next approximately two and a half years, to determine how much energy the road produces and how it stands up to bikers. By 2016, the road could be extended to 328 feet.

Though the Netherlands’ solar road seems to be going as planned, solar roads overall typically aren’t as effective at producing energy as solar arrays on a house or in a field. That’s because the panels in solar roads can’t be tilted to face the sun, so they don’t get as much direct sunlight as panels that are able to be tilted. However, solar roads don’t take up vast tracts of land, like some major solar arrays do, and they can be installed in heavily-populated areas.

One couple is set on making solar roads a reality in the U.S. Scott and Julie Brusaw created an Indiegogo campaign last year to help fund their Solar Roadways project, and the campaign raised more than $2.2 million. The U.S. might have to wait a while to see solar roads installed, however. As Vox pointed out last year, cost could be a major barrier for solar road construction in the U.S. And according to a Greentech Media article from last year, one of the biggest things that officials still aren’t sure about with the roads is safety. They want to be sure the roads can stand up to heavy traffic, and that the glass protecting the solar panels won’t break.

“We can’t say that it would be safe for roadway vehicular traffic,” Eric Weaver, a research engineer at the Federal Highway Administration’s research and technology department, told Greentech Media. “Further field-traffic evaluation is needed to determine safety and durability performance.”

Katie Valentine|May 11, 2015

Court Finds Federal Government Illegally Approved Coal Mining

Last Friday, a federal court agreed with us that the U.S. Interior Department failed to account for the impacts of burning coal when approving more mining.

You see, it’s a simple matter of cause and effect. More mining means more burning. More burning means more carbon and other harmful air pollution.

Put another way, if we have any chance of reining in coal and moving our nation to clean energy, we have to start at the mines.

In spite of this, our federal government has for years refused to come clean with the American public and disclose the impacts of coal burning. Instead, I’ve seen them continue to rubber stamp more mining and worse, keep the public in the dark.

I’m thrilled to say that this has now changed.

In a ruling last Friday, a federal judge held that mining approvals in Colorado illegally ignored coal burning impacts and excluded the public.

It’s a much-needed rebuke to the Interior Department’s practice of green lighting more fossil fuel development even as our nation struggles to reduce greenhouse gases and combat climate change.

With cleaner energy taking hold throughout our nation, providing more jobs than ever, and boosting economies to new heights, I think this ruling is a major step in the right direction.

And I think this underscores how effective and important our work at WildEarth Guardians is. As the judge said during our hearing in this case:

I think that all of us in this room and all of us in general ought to be glad that there are people like the WildEarth Guardians that care enough about the environment to be…the sand in the wheels sometimes.

I’m honored to be a part of Guardians’ success in confronting coal in the American West and I thank you for your support for helping us all move forward.

Jeremy Nichols|Climate and Energy Program Director|WildEarth Guardians

Turning the Tide on the Offshore Drilling Threat
Drilling off the Atlantic coast is too costly for communities

For the first time in over 30 years, the federal government has proposed offering leases to companies for offshore drilling off the Atlantic coast. The proposed lease areas lie directly off of the coasts of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, and the leases may be sold in 2021, with drilling happening thereafter. The proposal comes just a few months after the federal government’s decision to allow exploration for oil & gas off the Atlantic coast using highly detrimental seismic airgun surveys.

SACE is opposed to offshore drilling and exploration in the Atlantic, especially as clean, renewable energy such as solar and wind become ever more economical for the Southeast. Recent SACE blogs have detailed the good prices available on both solar and wind. Furthermore, the cost of onshore natural gas is low, which will make offshore drilling relatively expensive and potentially nonviable for years to come.

We believe that offshore drilling off the Atlantic coast is too risky to be of benefit to our communities.

In the coastal Southeast, our economy relies on clean, healthy beaches, marshes, and fisheries. These assets are what draw people to live here, vacation here, and drive our high quality of life. Hundreds of thousands of Southeasterners work in the tourism and fishing industries, which generate billions of dollars per year and are anchored by the presence of a clean, beautiful environment. Jeopardizing these critical, established industries for high-risk offshore drilling would be a grave mistake and a disservice to our communities.

And it’s not just the threat of a catastrophic spill like the Deepwater Horizon that would threaten our coast, but it’s more likely to be the everyday impacts that are intrinsic with the offshore drilling industry. Looking to the Gulf, we see that the offshore drilling industry has had the effect of industrializing large stretches of the coast with pipelines and refineries, while thousands of small spills take place every year with a big cumulative impact. Meanwhile their wetlands are eroding at a rate of a football field’s worth of wetlands every 45 minutes, due in large part to the canals used for pipelines and vessel traffic.

We find these risks unacceptable for our coast and have been working in coalition with many partners since 2010 to prevent the expansion of offshore drilling to the Atlantic. We have helped galvanize local opposition to offshore drilling, evidenced by the 52 Mid- and South Atlantic communities that have passed resolutions opposing oil & gas exploration and/or drilling, newspaper editorial boards writing in opposition, and bipartisan opposition from state legislators and Congressmen.

While public opinion is predominately in opposition to offshore drilling in the Atlantic, convincing the oil industry and the federal government to back off is a tall order, so we need to keep the pressure up. There will be a few comment periods over the next 18 months in which you will be able to voice your opinions. We encourage you to stay tuned to SACE’s newsletter, email blasts, and blog to be kept abreast of developments. More immediately, a significant way you can help protect our coast is to participate in the annual Hands Across the Sand day of action next Saturday, May 16.

Hands Across the Sand is an international event in which communities all over the world gather at their local beach to symbolically protect their beach from the impacts of offshore drilling. Participants join hands in a line as long as possible, drawing a physical and metaphorical line in the sand as a sign of protecting their beach from the impacts of offshore drilling. Dozens of Hands events are taking place throughout the Southeast. You can find your local event at http://handsacrossthesand.org. SACE is proud to have been an original sponsor of Hands Across the Sand when it started in 2010, and has served on the steering committee since 2012

5 dangers of oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean

The Obama administration just gave Shell conditional approval to drill for oil in the U.S. Arctic. Sure, there’s lots of oil up there, but there are also lots of reasons to leave it under the ocean. Here are 5.

The Arctic is the final frontier of the oil era. Overused oil fields around the planet are dwindling, tempting energy firms to tap the top of the planet despite its hostile environment. An estimated 13 percent of Earth’s undiscovered oil lies underneath the Arctic, totaling about 90 billion barrels. At our current rate of consumption, that would be enough to meet worldwide demand for about three years.

Russia broke the ice, so to speak, in 2013 with its Prirazlomnaya project, the world’s first stationary oil-drilling platform in the Arctic Ocean. Oil companies are also vying to drill in Arctic waters off Canada, Greenland and Norway, although fickle oil prices have dampened some enthusiasm lately.

In the U.S., Royal Dutch Shell has has spent nearly $6 billion since 2005 on leases, permits and lawsuits in its quest for Alaska’s oil-rich Beaufort and Chukchi seas. That quest suffered a string of setbacks in 2012 — most notably when its Kulluk drilling rig ran aground off Kodiak Island — but Shell hasn’t given up. And this week, U.S. regulators rewarded Shell’s determination by granting the company conditional approval to begin drilling in the Chukchi Sea.

That marks “a major victory for the petroleum industry and a devastating blow to environmentalists,” as the New York Times put it. Why would oil rigs be “devastating” in such a remote part of the world? Here are five of the biggest concerns about trying to extract oil from the Arctic Ocean:

1. The noise.

Even if nothing goes wrong — which history suggests is unlikely — a lot can go wrong.

“[T]here will be unavoidable impacts from each phase of oil development in the Arctic Ocean — seismic exploration, exploration drilling, production platforms, pipelines, terminals and tankers,” writes conservation biologist Rick Steiner, a former marine researcher at the University of Alaska who now runs a sustainability consulting project called Oasis Earth.

“The acoustic disturbance to marine mammals from offshore oil development is of particular concern, as underwater noise can affect communication, migration, feeding, mating and other important functions in whales, seals and walrus,” he adds. “As well, noise can affect bird and fish migration, feeding and reproduction, and can displace populations from essential habitat areas.”

2. The remoteness.

Remember how hard it was to wrangle the Gulf of Mexico’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill five years ago? It took several months, even though it occurred just 40 miles off a more heavily populated and industrialized U.S. coast. The response effort involved mobilizing an armada of vessels, crews and equipment, not to mention coordinating how and when it would all be used.

Now imagine if the spill had occurred off Alaska instead of Louisiana. Even getting the necessary ships and gear to the spill site would be a herculean task. Shell has an official safety plan in case of a spill — including a local stock of tugboats, helicopters and cleanup equipment — but as the Deepwater Horizon illustrated, fail-safes like blowout preventers can fail and pre-spill plans can fall woefully short.

3. The sea ice.

Even when response crews do mobilize to clean up an Arctic Ocean oil spill, their options will be limited. As the World Wildlife Fund points out, “there is no proven effective method for containing and cleaning up an oil spill in icy water.” Dispersants helped break up the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010, but they also proved dangerous in their own right, with a 2012 study suggesting they made the oil 52 times more toxic to wildlife. On top of its remote location, the Chukchi Sea is frequented by chunks of sea ice for most of the year. That can make navigation difficult, not to mention oil-spill cleanup.

“A major spill in the Arctic would travel with currents, in and under sea ice during ice season,” Steiner writes, “and it would be virtually impossible to contain or recover.”

4. The slow ecological recovery.

As bad as the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill was, at least it occurred in a large, warm gulf populated by microbes that can eat oil. The Arctic Ocean, on the other hand, has low temperatures and limited sunlight, making an oil spill more likely to fester — as seen after the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989.

“A large spill would undoubtedly cause extensive acute mortality in plankton, fish, birds and marine mammals,” according to Steiner. “[T]here would be significant chronic, sub-lethal injury to organisms — physiological damage, altered feeding behavior and reproduction, genetic injury, etc. — that would reduce the overall viability of populations. There could be a permanent reduction in certain populations, and for threatened or endangered species, a spill could tip them into extinction. With low temperatures and slow degradation rates, oil would persist in the Arctic environment for decades.”

5. The emissions.

In addition to 90 billion barrels of oil, the Arctic may hold as much as 1.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas — about 30 percent of the planet’s undiscovered supply. Natural gas is harder to transport than oil, requiring either pipelines or facilities that convert it to liquefied natural gas (LNG), at which point it can be shipped by tankers. That kind of infrastructure is sparse in the Arctic, so offshore rigs might be more likely to burn off the extra natural gas on-site, a process known as flaring. That’s better than letting the gas escape, since methane is a potent greenhouse gas, but flaring can produce other pollutants like black carbon, which causes snow and ice to melt more quickly by absorbing more heat.

Flaring can also cause more direct problems, says Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, an environmental justice advisor for the Alaska Wilderness League in Barrow, Alaska. Ahtuangaruak began working in Barrow as a community health aide in 1986, when a boom in onshore oil drilling — and gas flaring — was associated with a spike in health problems. “One of the things we saw right away were the respiratory illnesses,” she tells MNN. “On nights when there were many natural gas flares, I was only getting a couple hours of sleep because of all the patients coming into the clinic.”

Oil drilling also brought benefits like running water and better medical care, Ahtuangaruak says, but the influx of patients convinced her the negatives outweighed the positives. And on top of that, oil booms have a long association with social problems like crime, she notes. “Our national energy policy should not cost the health and safety of people who live where the oil and gas development is going to occur.”

Of course, any new oil or gas drilling also poses a much broader public-health problem: climate change. Every barrel of oil removed from the Arctic Ocean will presumably be burned, releasing carbon dioxide that will spend centuries trapping solar heat in the atmosphere. Burning the Arctic Ocean’s oil could release an additional 15.8 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, which is equivalent to all U.S. transportation emissions over a nine-year period. It would raise global CO2 levels by 7.44 parts per million (ppm), nearly 10 percent of the global rise in atmospheric CO2 over the past 50 years.

Earth’s air already has more CO2 than ever before in human history — recently reaching 400 ppm for the first time since the Pliocene Epoch — and it’s growing at an unprecedented pace. Not only would Arctic Ocean drilling release more CO2, but any new long-term commitment to fossil fuels slows down the inevitable transition to climate-friendly renewable energy.

“Society faces a fundamental choice with the Arctic,” Steiner writes. “Let’s hope we choose wisely.”

Russell McLendon|May 12, 2015

Suit Filed to Halt Illegal Dumping of Toxic Oil Waste Into California’s Water

The Center for Biological Diversity and allies have filed suit to halt illegal oil-industry operations that are dumping millions of gallons of toxic oil waste a day into California’s dwindling underground water supplies — in the midst of the worst water shortage in the state’s history.

State regulators pushed through rules that would continue the practice till 2017, characterizing the inconvenience to Big Oil from interrupting its illegal injections as a public “emergency.” Our lawsuit asks the court to force California officials to halt injection operations that are contaminating underground water in scores of aquifers across the state, from Monterey to Kern and Los Angeles counties. Oil wastewater often contains high levels of cancer-causing benzene, as well as fracking fluid, linked to cancer and birth defects.

“It’s inexcusable that state regulators are letting oil companies dump toxic wastewater into California’s water supplies during the worst drought in 1,200 years,” said Hollin Kretzmann, a Center staff attorney.

Get more from NBC News and check out our interactive map of injections.

Drilling begins 3 miles from epicenter of BP oil spill

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Just 3 miles from the catastrophic BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a Louisiana company is seeking to unlock the same oil and natural gas that turned into a deadly disaster.

Drilling has begun in the closest work yet to the Macondo well, which blew wild on April 20, 2010, killing 11 people and fouling the Gulf with as much as 172 million gallons of crude in the nation’s worst oil spill. Federal regulators gave their blessing last month to LLOG Exploration Offshore LLC. to drill the first new well in the same footprint where BP was digging before.

The resumption of drilling at the former BP site comes as the oil industry pushes into ever deeper and riskier reservoirs in the Gulf. It reflects renewed industry confidence – even as critics say not enough has been done to ensure another disaster is avoided.

“Now that five years have passed it seems that some of the emotions are less raw,” said Pavel Molchanov, an energy analyst with the investment firm Raymond James in Houston.

If anything, drilling into BP’s Macondo reservoir may be safer now, he said.

“Just because there was a spill there doesn’t mean it’s more dangerous,” he said. “It could make it less dangerous considering how much the seabed there has been studied.”

Paul Bommer, a petroleum engineer at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of national panels investigating the BP disaster, said it was only a matter of time before drilling would resume there.

There is just too much money at stake.

Yet LLOG’s own exploration plans provide a window into the potential risks.

In September exploration plans, LLOG estimated its worst-case scenario for an uncontrolled blowout could unleash 252 million gallons of oil over the course of 109 days. By comparison, the BP spill lasted 87 days and resulted in as much as 172 million gallons of oil pouring into the Gulf.

“Our commitment is to not allow such an event to occur again,” said Rick Fowler, the vice president for deep-water projects at LLOG.

Fowler said the shallow part of the well has been drilled and that the deeper section will be completed later this year.

LLOG’s permit to drill a new well was approved April 13 by the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which oversees offshore oil and gas drilling operations.

Lars Herbst, the agency’s regional director, said in a statement that LLOG had demonstrated it could be trusted.

“In order to obtain a permit to drill LLOG had to meet new standards for well-design, casing, and cementing which include a professional engineer certification,” he said.

But Liz Birnbaum, former director of the Minerals Management Service, the former agency that oversaw oil drilling at the time of the BP spill, said allowing drillers to go after that oil is cause for concern because regulations covering well-control are not in effect and years away from being mandatory.

Five years ago, BP, its contractors and federal regulators struggled to contain the blowout and kill the out-of-control well. In all, the federal government calculated that about 172 million gallons spilled into the Gulf. BP put the number much lower, closer to 100 million gallons.

Richard Charter, a senior fellow with the Ocean Foundation and a longtime industry watchdog, said drilling into that reservoir has proved very dangerous and highly technical, and it raises questions about whether LLOG has the financial means to respond to a blowout similar to BP’s.

The shallow part of the well was dug by the Sevan Louisiana, a rig owned by Sevan Drilling ASA, a large international drilling company based in Oslo, Norway. Another rig, the Seadrill West Neptune, will complete the well.

Since 2010, LLOG has drilled eight wells in the area in “analogous reservoirs at similar depths and pressures,” Fowler said. The company has drilled more than 50 deep-water wells in the Gulf since 2002, he said.

The company already has drilled three wells in the vicinity that tap into the same reservoir BP was going after in 2010. He said those wells were drilled without problems.

He said the company has studied the investigations into the Macondo disaster and “ensured the lessons from those reports are accounted for in our design and well procedures.”

BP spokesman Brett Clanton said an area even closer to the well, owned by BP, is an “exclusion zone” where oil and gas operations are off-limits both “out of respect for the victims” and to allow BP “to perform any response activities related to the accident.”

CAIN BURDEAU|Associated Press|May 13, 2015

 Transportation

6 Reasons Why Bike Commuting Is the Fastest Growing Mode of Transportation

Have you noticed more two-wheelers on your commute, especially if you live in a city? According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of Americans who travel to work by bike increased an incredible 60 percent over the last decade, making it the largest percentage increase of all commuting modes.

People choose to bike for many reasons (it saves money, it’s good for health), but here are six big reasons more Americans are leaving the car keys at home:

1. Cities are wooing millenials. The Pew Charitable Trusts reported that communities are trying to build a cycling-friendly reputation to attract millennials and the creative and economic energy that comes with them. “States and cities are competing for the most mobile generation ever and so the job creators and the innovators are really pushing for these amenities,” said Bill Nesper of the League of American Bicyclists in the report. “Baby boomers want to live near millennial children and their grandchildren, so we’re really seeing Washington and most major cities seeing this as a way to attract and keep talented people.” Amenities such as …

2. Bike infrastructure. Paths dedicated to two-wheelers are popping up in climates of all sorts, from sunny Malibu to chilly Anchorage. According to the Alaska Dispatch News, the Alaskan city is adding 3.75 miles of bike lanes to its existing 15 miles, with more expected next summer.

The reason bikers love bike paths? Simply because they don’t have to contend with scary motor traffic. (It’s also a win for cities since it helps reduce congestion).

“Bike lanes give a dedicated lane for people to bicycle,” Lori Schanche, non-motorized transportation coordinator for the Municipality of Anchorage told the publication. “It’s a lot safer for everyone all around.” In fact, Pew’s research noted that across the country, there’s been a 31 percent decline in serious injuries over the last 20 years, even though there are more people riding on bikes—fatalities for bike commuters fell from 21 per 10,000 trips in 1980 to only nine in 2008.

With these safety measures, cities have seen an uptick in pedaling. According to People for Bikes, after Honolulu installed protected bike barriers on one of its streets last year, biking increased by a whopping 71 percent. In Brooklyn, nearly 200 percent. Check out the graph below:

Protected bike lanes have significantly increased the total number of bikers these areas. Photo credit: People for Bikes

3. Women. So you know that 60 percent increase in biking we cited in the beginning of this article? Well, most of the new riders are men.The Census Bureau found that the rate of bicycle commuting for men was more than double that of women. There are many reasons why women bike less than men, but it comes down to safety concerns, convenience, confidence, feeling welcome in male-dominated bike shops and belonging to a community that welcomes women riders, the League of American Bicyclists noted in a report.

However, when cities improved biking infrastructure, the number of female riders shot up, the report found. Some examples:

• According to a 2013 analysis, the presence of a bike lane on a street increases women’s ridership, on average, by 276 percent in Philadelphia.
• The number of female riders grew 115 percent after the installation of a bike lane on New Orleans’ South Carrollton Avenue in 2009.
• The number of women riders rose 100 percent on Los Angeles’ Spring Street after the installation of a buffered bike lane in 2011.

The widespread adoption of family-friendly cargo biking has surely encouraged more women to pick up riding as well; they’re kind of like pedal-powered minivans.

4. Bike-friendly legislation. Cities have created laws that better accommodate bicyclists. For example, Portland, Oregon (which has the highest bicycle-commuting rate in the country at 6.1 percent) lowered the speed limit on neighborhood greenways by five miles to 20 miles per hour in order to reduce the crash and fatality rate. Portland, as well as other bike-centric communities, also has bicycle-sensitive traffic signals and speed bumps to calm car traffic.

Some communities are also making sure that bikers have a place to park their ride. A report from the League of American Bicyclists said that a Santa Monica, California ordinance stipulates that destinations have an adequate supply of bike racks, and also requires event organizers to have monitored bicycle parking for 200-250 bikes if attendance is expected to reach 1,000 or more, as well as three attendants to guard the area.

5. Bike shares. A flurry of cities have adopted bike sharing, and cities are seeing huge numbers of participants. According to a post from architect and urban planning firm Opticos Design, Austin, Texas’s new bike sharing program set a nationwide record at last year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival. “The 10-day event held March 7–16 saw an average of 6.4 checkouts per bike per day. On Friday, March 14, that number jumped to 2,774 checkouts, an average of 10.1 checkouts per bike for the day, beating the previous record held by New York City’s Citi Bike program. The total number of checkouts during SXSW reached 17,000,” the post read.

6. The green movement.For many Americans, it’s no longer a rite-of-passage to own a car.We reported that car ownership is declining and the proportion of residents bicycling to work increased in 85 out of 100 of America’s largest urbanized areas between 2000 and 2011. More than half of the U.S. population lives within five miles of their workplace, making it easier to commute via bike. It also comes down to changing attitudes about sustainability, the improvement in public transportation and the growth of the sharing economy.

With the Obama administration OK’ing Shell’s plan to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean, it’s clear that the we must look to other ways to curb consumption of dirty fossil fuels. In fact, biking just two days a week can reduce carbon pollution by an average of two tons per year, the Environmental Protection Agency says.

Now that National Biking Month is in full swing and Bike to Work Day happening this Friday, perhaps you should consider breaking out that pollution-free vehicle to get to work.

Lorraine Chow|May 12, 2015

Google’s Self-Driving Car About to Hit Public Roads

Self-driving cars, once a product of science-fiction, are about to become a reality. Google will roll out a handful of prototype electric cars on the streets of Mountain View, California, where the company’s headquarters are based.

Google’s self-driving car project director Chris Urmson explained in a blog post that the cars will be supervised by safety drivers and buzz around neighborhoods at a top speed of 25 MPH. The cars will also be outfitted with a removable steering wheel, accelerator pedal and brake pedal that allows the drivers to take over driving if needed. The new prototypes will be powered by the same software as the company’s existing fleet of self-driving Lexus RX450h SUVs, which have logged nearly a million autonomous miles on the roads.

Although it might take some time before we can actually buy one, the positive environmental impacts of Google’s cars could be big if they become widely adopted. Since they are electric, these cars could drastically cut our dependence on fossil fuels. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated that in 2014, about 136.78 billion gallons of gasoline were consumed in the U.S., a daily average of about 374.74 million gallons. And, since electric cars produce little to no tail pipe emissions, it means less pollution and improved air quality.

Google also touts that their cars could cut time in traffic and reduce time spent looking for parking, which uses up a lot of gasoline. As NBC News reported, San Francisco transportation officials estimated that 30 percent of traffic in the city was caused by people looking for parking. Another study from the Imperial College in London found that 40 percent of all gas used in congested urban areas was burned by people looking for parking.

“Vehicles that can take anyone from A to B at the push of a button could transform mobility for millions of people, whether by reducing the 94 percent of accidents caused by human error, reclaiming the billions of hours wasted in traffic, or bringing everyday destinations and new opportunities within reach of those who might otherwise be excluded by their inability to drive a car,” Urmson wrote.

The safety of Google’s automated transit was brought to light after the company revealed they were involved in a handful of traffic accidents since it kicked off this project six years ago. However, the company has chalked it up to human error.

“If you spend enough time on the road, accidents will happen whether you’re in a car or a self-driving car,” Urmson wrote in a blog post. “Over the 6 years since we started the project, we’ve been involved in 11 minor accidents (light damage, no injuries) during those 1.7 million miles of autonomous and manual driving with our safety drivers behind the wheel, and not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident.”

Lorraine Chow|May 16, 2015

Recycling

World’s First $9 Computer Could Solve the E-Waste Crisis

We’ve seen how innovators are doing amazing things to help our fragile environment. And now Oakland/Shenzen-based engineers at Next Thing Co. have created a computer that costs less than a decent bottle of wine and could help bring computer technology to all.

Behold, the C.H.I.P.

The company has dubbed their creation “the world’s first nine dollar computer.” By the looks of their incredibly successfully Kickstarter, it’s about to make a big splash. The campaign blew past its $50,000 crowdsourcing goal on the first day, with more than $100,000 in a mere 12 hours, the company enthusiastically tweeted.

For such a small piece of hardware, the C.H.I.P. boasts a 1GHZ processor, 512MB of ram, 4GB of storage and can connect to any screen, old, new, big or small with its built-in composite output or with an adaptor. Digital Trends hilariously pointed out that it has more ports than the new MacBook’s single USB-C port.

To make it a completely portable device that would fit in your jeans, you can buy a $49 add-on called the PocketC.H.I.P. that includes a 4.3 inch touchscreen, a miniature QWERTY keyboard and a 5-hour battery.

As for its software, the device is preinstalled with dozens of applications, tools, games and works with LibreOffice (a free open source office suite) which can create spreadsheets, documents and presentations.

While it doesn’t look like much, the potential of this computer could be really big. Last month, we reported on the devastating e-waste crisis that’s piling up in underdeveloped countries. According to a new report from United Nations University, a staggering 41.8 million metric tons of e-waste was produced in 2014. Instead of buying, say a new Macbook, you can connect the C.H.I.P. to an old keyboard and monitor that’s sitting unused or would otherwise end up in a landfill.

Lorraine Chow|May 12, 2015

Miscellaneous

Vertical farms start to grow in Detroit

New technique takes advantage of open spaces

DETROIT — Detroit’s urban farmers have proven to be some of the most innovative people in the city.

They’ve reclaimed vacant lots and learned how to bring fresh, nutritious food to neighborhoods in need of it.

Now two new ventures continue that innovation by introducing vertical farming systems into the city’s mix.

One, known as Artesian Farms of Detroit in the Brightmoor district on the far west side, has begun to grow vegetables in a hydroponic system — trays filled with water and nutrients — stacked up to 14 feet tall. The other, known as Green Collar Foods, set up its vertical racks last week in a corner of Eastern Market’s newly renovated Shed 5. It uses an aeroponics system, in which nozzles mist a thin, watery film on the roots of plants suspended in air inside trays.

Growing plants indoors inside cities has been done for a long time in various places around the world, including in the RecoveryPark project on Detroit’s east side. Now adding vertical racks greatly increases the production capacity of any given project by taking advantage of vertical space.
“It doesn’t necessarily take a huge building,” Ron Reynolds, one of the partners in Green Collar Foods, said last week at Eastern Market. “You don’t have to go to the city and say, ‘I’d like that 50,000-square-foot building.’ Effectively in 400 square feet you can have three stories up. So a lot of the buildings begin to open up for viability.”

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack visited Detroit recently and said that growing food inside cities could become an important part of regional food systems in a world beset by drought and other issues. Detroit, he added, is known far and wide as one of the centers of that movement.
“I think it’s real and I think it’s a great complement to the agriculture that takes part in other parts of the country,” Vilsack said. “We face a very interesting challenge of feeding an ever-increasing world population when the land available for production will likely shrink. We have to have new and creative ways to produce the food to feed our people.”

Artesian is the creation of Jeff Adams, a neighborhood resident who spent most of his career marketing automotive products and then spent a decade fund raising for nonprofits.

“I was looking for entrepreneurial opportunities that could employ neighborhood people,” he said last week. “The whole urban garden thing really piqued my interest.”

He bought an empty industrial building in Brightmoor last August. It had been empty since 1998. He installed a system of vertical racks designed and produced by Green Spirit Farms of New Buffalo, Michigan. Known as Vertical Growing Stations, the units are 14 to 16 feet high utilizing specially designed lighting that provides the right type of light at the right intensity for a good growing environment.

Each VGS can hold approximately 1,200 to 2,400 plants depending on the produce to be grown. With about 6,000 square feet of space in his building, Adams has enough room to install 40 of the vertical racks, which he estimates is the equivalent to about 20 acres of field growing. Adams can harvest 17 crops per year of a mix of salad greens including several types of leafy lettuce plus spinach, kale, and basil.

“You look at what it means for our city — transforming blight, employing local people, and then you look at how it affects the environment,” he said. “This system can grow produce year round and uses about 90 percent less water than what is used where our big agriculture belts are in California and Arizona.”

Unlike the vast majority of community gardens in Detroit, Artesian Farms is a for-profit entity, an L3C organization known as a social enterprise, where the profits go to support community needs. Initial funding for the project was provided by Impact T3 Investment Fund, Skillman Foundation, Max M. & Marjorie S. Fisher Foundation and the Scott Brickman Family Trust.

Adams plans initially to distribute his produce in local farmers markets, but he’s working on an agreement with the Whole Foods chain to sell his salad greens in the company’s stores in metro Detroit.

JOHN GALLAGHER|MICHIGAN.COM

Meet Chernobyl’s Wild Residents

It seems like a strange place to call a wildlife park: Nearly 30 years after the most catastrophic nuclear incident in global history, Chernobyl’s exclusion zone has turned into a paradise for animals of all species and sizes. A variety of raptors, deer, big cats, foxes, bears and birds have moved into the region, taking advantage of a vast habitat with almost no humans. That habitat, though, is contaminated with radioactive materials, and scientists still hotly debate the potential costs of radiation exposure to the animals of Chernobyl, some of whom have become famous.

This fox, for example, went viral thanks to his interaction with a radio crew, as members of the crew tossed out bread and meat and the canny animal collected them in what looked an awful lot like a sandwich:

Researchers have seen an explosion of wildlife at the site in recent years, with camera traps providing an opportunity to look deep into the world of the region’s animals without disturbing them. Stunning photography shows animals like wolves and bears roaming freely in the exclusion zone, unconcerned about the potential for human visitors. Perhaps most astonishingly, a population of Przeswalski’s horses, an endangered species critical to the biological and evolutionary history of modern equids, is booming in the region—which isn’t exactly what one might expect, given the radioactive contamination.

At the time of the reactor failure at Chernobyl, dozens of workers were killed, with numerous more, along with aid workers and nearby residents, sickening in the days and weeks to come. Tens of thousands of people are facing potentially prolonged and painful premature deaths as a result of their exposure to extremely high levels of radiation at Chernobyl, and the exclusion zone won’t be safe for humans for another 20,000 years—at least. At the heart of the zone, close to the failed reactor, radiation levels still remain lethally high.

So how are animals not just living in the zone, but actively thriving? It’s a subject of vigorous debate for researchers who work in the exclusion zone. Some, like Anders Møller, argue that radiation is causing clear birth defects and impairments in animals around the site, based on his studies focusing on the barn swallow population. He sees the region as a “sink” that draws in animals from surrounding regions, as they’re attracted by the prospect of a wild space with no interfering and potentially dangerous humans. Others contend that the exclusion zone is safe, especially when considering concentrations of overall animal populations. As the population increases, it’s an indicator that something must be going right.

The situation at Chernobyl is a subject of scientific fascination, but it’s also one with big implications as researchers are facing similar questions about the region surrounding Fukushima, Japan. Learning more about how low-level radiation affects animals will provide important information about the populations of animals that appear to be thriving around Chernobyl, and about those returning to Fukushima, including those fed by brave animal welfare advocates like Naoto Matsumara, who stubbornly stayed behind to feed the region’s stray cats and abandoned farm animals.

As animals move in where humans fear to tread, Chernobyl has paradoxically become a safe zone for those driven out of habitats around Europe and Asia, like wolves, which have difficulty finding a place to call home in regions with dense human populations. The area might be turning into a cradle of biodiversity, a bizarre turn of events for one of the world’s most infamous hot spots.

See Video

s.e. smith|May 11, 2015

Signs of change are sweeping Canada

Recent events in Canada have shown not only that change is possible, but that people won’t stand for having corporate interests put before their own.

When plummeting oil prices late last year threw Alberta into financial crisis, people rightly asked, “Where’s the money?” They could see that an oil producer like Norway was able to weather the price drop thanks to forward planning, higher costs to industry to exploit resources and an oil fund worth close to $1 trillion! Leading up to the election, the government that ran Alberta for 44 years refused to consider raising industry taxes or reviewing royalty rates, instead offering a budget with new taxes, fees and levies for citizens, along with service cuts.

The people of Alberta then did what was once thought impossible: they gave the NDP a strong majority. Almost half the NDP members elected were women, giving Alberta the highest percentage of women ever in a Canadian provincial or federal government.

On the other side of the country, voters in Prince Edward Island followed B.C.provincially and Canada federally and elected their first Green Party member, as well as Canada’s second openly gay premier. Remember, homosexuality was illegal in Canada until 1969!

In my home province, after a long struggle by elders and families of the Tahltan Klabona Keepers, the B.C. government bought 61 coal licenses from Fortune Minerals and Posco Canada in the Klappan and Sacred Headwaters, putting a halt to controversial development in an ecologically and culturally significant area that is home to the Tahltan people and forms the headwaters of the Skeena, Stikine and Nass rivers. The Tahltan and the province have agreed to work on a long-term management plan for the area.

On the same night as Alberta’s election, people of the Lax Kw’alaams band of the Tsimshian First Nation met to consider an offer by Malaysian state-owned energy company Petronas of $1 billion over 40 years to build a liquefied natural gas export terminal on Lelu Island near Prince Rupert, at the other end of the Skeena River, an estuary that provides crucial habitat for salmon and other life. The 181 people attending unanimously opposed the offer. Two nights later in Prince Rupert, band members also stood unanimously against the proposal.

A final vote was scheduled after this column’s deadline, but the message is clear: integrity, the environment and human health are more important than money. Gerald Amos, a Haisla First Nation member and community relations director for the Headwaters Initiative, said the federal Prince Rupert Port Authority’s decision to locate the facility on Lelu Island also demonstrated a failure to properly consult with First Nations. “By the time they get around to consulting with us, the boat’s already built and they just want to know what color to paint it,” he said.

On a broader scale, change is occurring around the serious threat of climate change. Even well-known deniers, including U.S. oil billionaire Charles Koch, now admit climate change is real and caused in part by CO2 emissions. But they argue it isn’t and won’t be dangerous, so we shouldn’t worry. Most people are smart enough to see through their constantly changing, anti-science, pro-fossil-fuel propaganda, though, and are demanding government and industry action.

We’re also seeing significant changes in the corporate sector. The movement to divest from fossil fuels is growing quickly, and businesses are increasingly integrating positive environmental performance into their operations. Funds that have divested from fossil fuels have outperformed those that haven’t, a trend expected to continue.

We can’t expect miracles from Alberta’s new government, which has its work cut out. After all, it would be difficult to govern Alberta from an anti-oil position, and the fossil fuel industry is known for working to get its way. Although NDP leader Rachel Notley has spoken against the Northern Gateway pipeline proposal, she isn’t opposed to all pipeline and oilsands development, and she’s called for refinery construction in Alberta. But she’s promised to phase out coal-fired power, increase transit investment, implement energy efficiency and renewable energy strategies, and bring in stronger environmental standards, monitoring and enforcement.

I’ve often said things are impossible only until they aren’t anymore. The past few weeks show how people have the power to bring about change.

By David Suzuki with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor Ian Hanington.

Norway Creates Police Force To Fight Animal Cruelty

In April, Norway took a giant step for animals and announced it will test out the first-ever animal police project.

Police in Sor-Trondelag, Norway, will implement a three-person force to specifically focus on animal rights. The force will have an investigator, a legal expert and a coordinator. The project will be tested out over the course of three years and is a combined effort between the state agricultural ministry and state police.

Norwegian minister of agriculture and food, Sylvi Listhaug, is one of the project’s supporters. She told AFP News, “First of all, it’s important to take care of our animals, so that they enjoy the rights they have and that there be a follow-up when their rights are violated.”

Listhaug believes this effort is not only good for animals, but humans as well, saying, “…studies show that some of those people who commit crimes and misdemeanors against animals also do the same to people.”

This is not the first step the country has taken to fight animal cruelty. Norway’s Animal Welfare Act, which was published in 2009, states that “Anybody who discovers an animal which is obviously sick, injured, or helpless, shall as far as possible help the animal. If it is impossible to provide adequate help, and the animal is domestic or a large wild mammal, the owner, or the police shall be alerted immediately.”

The four-chapter act details personal responsibility for animals and details punishment for those who do not abide by the act. Anyone not in compliance is fined, imprisoned for a maximum of one year, or both. Serious violations can come with a maximum of three years in prison.

According to reports from NRK, there were 38 cases of animal abuse reported to Norwegian police in 2014.

While Norway may be progressive in its new program, it is important to note that the country allows an annual whaling season. With 720 whales killed by 21 whaling vessels, 2014 was the deadliest whaling season for the country. The quota for the four-month hunting season is 1286. Only 5 percent of Norwegians eat whale meat, however, so the industry is primarily for export.

Luckily, conservation groups are putting pressure on Norwegian’s whaling industry. Recently, the Environmental Investigation Agency and the Animal Welfare Institute revealed that the Japanese government rejected whale meat from Norway. Tests revealed that there were pesticides and chemicals twice the allowed amount within the meat. Without an export market, the industry within Norway will struggle.

It is not uncommon, however, for countries like Norway to support animal rights while at the same time participating in practices that harm animals. According to the World Animal Protection organization, there are a number of countries that have contradicting legislation. The website highlights the best and worst countries for animals, with the United Kingdom, Austria, New Zealand and Switzerland being the countries that are kindest to animals. The data is gathered from legislation, efforts to improve animal welfare and recognize animals’ cognitive and emotional abilities.

The organization’s website offers a number of ways you can stop animal cruelty across the globe. There are a number of campaigns listed where you can help different animals.

Despite the contradictions, it is important to bring attention to the positive work Norway is doing with its new animal police initiative. If we spread the news, hopefully other countries will implement their own animal police unit.

Lindsay Patton|May 14, 2015

In Memoriam

Marc Cornelissen,46 and Philip de Roo, 30, veteran polar explorers and scientists, planned to document thinning Arctic sea ice.

The pair is presumed to have drowned, victims of the thin ice they had come to study.

Environmental Links

SFAS International Wildlife News Audubon Advocate Audubon Restore Eco-Voice South Florida Wildlife Care Center Sawgrass Nature Center & Wildlife Hospital The Turtle Hospital The Marathon Wild Bird Center Climate change info Audubon’s Coastal Strand Audubon of Florida News Blog Bioenergy News Climate Progress – climate science, politics and solutions Collins Center for Public Policy Comprehensive Everglades Restoration News EcoWatch – feeds from the WaterKeeper Alliance Everglades Foundation – press releases Everglades Hub Fort Myers News – Press Green Front Pages from Florida Newspapers Herald Tribune Newspapers –  Environmental News KeysNews.com Naples Daily News  – Environmental News National Public Radio Eco-News Riverwatch News about the Caloosahatchee Sierra Club Sierra Club Florida South Florida Watershed  Journal South Florida Water Management District Union of Concerned Scientists – news Yahoo News Search: Everglades NASA Climate Information American Littorial Society log NASA Climate Information Sun Newspapers – Lake Okeechobee News Everglades City News  – Mullet Wrapper IFAW’s World of Animals Magazine

ConsRep 1505 B

How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life? ~Charles A. Lindbergh

Announcements

You’re Invited: Lionfish Removal and Awareness Day ‏

The first annual Lionfish Removal and Awareness Day is May 16 (first Saturday after Mother’s Day).

On this day, the FWC will promote lionfish awareness and encourage divers to remove lionfish from Florida waters.

Lionfish are an invasive species that have a potential negative impact on Florida’s native wildlife and habitat.

The weekend of May 16-17, the FWC will host a festival from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Plaza de Luna in Pensacola. 

If you are in the area, we’d love to have you join us at this family-friendly educational event.

The event is free to the public and open to all ages! 

If you are not going to be in the Pensacola area, please visit MyFWC.com/Lionfish and click on “Events and Derbies” 

to check out other lionfish awareness and removal events occurring throughout the state that same weekend.

Or, if you are a diver, please consider removing lionfish and reporting them via the Report Florida Lionfish app or online at MyFWC.com/Lionfish.

Let’s see how many lionfish we can remove from Florida waters in one weekend!

For more information visit ReefRangers.com or visit our Facebook page at Facebook.com/lionfishreefrangers

Seeking Broward electric car owners ‏

Forwarding a request message from Florida Sierra staffer, Jon Ullman.  See his contact info below.

Subject: Seeking Broward electric car owners

Hi Friends of Broward Sierra Club!

Sierra Club’s EV (Electric Vehicle) campaign would like to hold a Saturday 1/2 day meeting with electric car owners in Broward in the next couple weeks.

We already have two Tesla owners on board, but we’re seeking a Nissan Leaf and and a Chevy Volt driver to round out the team.

Do you know someone who: 

a) owns or leases one of those cars, and 

b) wants to be part of a team to promote and expand EV use in Broward? 

If so, please send them to me. You can either email me or call me on my cell at 305-283-6070.

Thanks!

Jonathan Ullman

South Florida/Everglades Senior Field Organizer

Sierra Club

300 Aragon Ave., Ste. 360

Coral Gables, FL 33134

Evenings at the Conservancy

The Evenings at the Conservancy Speaker Series continues on Tuesday, May 12 with a presentation by Jennifer Hecker,

Conservancy director of natural resource policy.

She specializes in water, listed species, Everglades restoration and environmental lands policy.

Jennifer’s presentation, Inappropriate Oil Drilling and Water Don’t Mix,

will give you an in-depth look at the current Southwest Florida oil rush

and she’ll explain what can be done to better protect citizens, our water supply

and our quality of life in the face of extreme oil extraction.

Jennifer will also provide an update on exactly what happened during the recent legislative session.

The presentation will be on Tuesday, May 12 in the Jeannie Meg Smith Theater,

located inside Eaton Conservation Hall, from 6:30-7:30 p.m. with an opportunity for questions and answers. 

The event is open to the public and all Conservancy members are encouraged to attend.

We will also be serving free wine, beer and food throughout the evening.

The lecture series frequently sells out. We encourage you to reserve your seat quickly.

To attend, please pre-register for the event by emailing Kelsey Hudson at kelseyh@conservancy.org or by calling 239.403.4228.

The Evenings at the Conservancy lecture series is sponsored by Arthrex and Vi at Bentley Village.

Members: FREE
General Admission: $10
Don’t miss these future Evenings lectures:

July 14
Director of the von Arx Wildlife Hospital – “A Look inside the von Arx Wildlife Hospital”

August 11
Conservancy Director of Governmental Relations Nicole Johnson – “Smart Growth”

The Ospreys Need You, Citizen Scientists!

Audubon and explore.org need your help!

As fans and viewers of the Osprey Cam, you are in a unique and exciting position to

collect valuable scientific data about ospreys Rachel, Steve, and their future offspring.

And it starts by taking a snapshot.

The Citizen Science feature pops up every time you snap a pic of the Osprey Nest.

You’ll be given the option to take a fun, interactive survey and tell us what you see on the cam!

Just press the camera icon, and select “Use this Snapshot for Research”.

Of Interest to All

Bill Nelson files federal bill blocking seismic testing off Florida

U. S. Sen. Bill Nelson says he filed legislation that he says would block a federal plan to allow oil and gas exploration off Florida’s Atlantic coast.

The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is considering 10 permits to allow seismic testing from Delaware south to about Melbourne off the coast of Florida. There is no timeline on a permitting decision because they involve multiple agencies, a bureau spokesman said.

Environmental groups and 75 scientists have asked President Barack Obama to halt the program because they say seismic blasts are as loud as explosions and can mark whale calls over thousands of miles.

The Florida Department of Environmental Protection last week sent a letter raising concerns that testing could harm sea turtles, marine mammals including endangered right whales and other sea life.

Nelson, a Democrat from Melbourne, filed legislation this week that would establish a moratorium on seismic testing off Florida. The moratorium could be lifted when the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration determines that the “reasonably foreseeable impacts” on sea life is minimal.

Nelson reiterated his opposition to drilling off the coast of Florida.

“Drilling off Florida’s Atlantic coast would be unwise and impractical,” he said. “It would interfere with military operations off of Jacksonville and rocket launches from Kennedy Space Center and Patrick Air Force base, not to mention the environmental hazards it would pose.

“If you’re not going to drill there, then why do the seismic testing?” Nelson asked.

Jacksonville Beach adopted a resolution last month, as have Fernandina Beach, Neptune Beach, Atlantic Beach, St. Augustine and St. Marys, Ga., according to the Orlando Sentinel.

Jacksonville Mayor Alvin Brown also wrote to Energy Management officials last year, asking them not to permit seismic testing, the newspaper reported.
“We’re certainly concerned. Our beach is our biggest asset, and the marine life in our ocean is pretty important,” said Jacksonville Beach Mayor Charlie Latham, who sought the resolution.

Dry winter, slow progress on Everglades work puts Florida Bay at risk

Florida Bay is thirsty, and it’s starting to bug the fish.

Last month, while the rest of the state fretted over polluted water from Lake Okeechobee fouling nearby rivers, officials at the South Florida Water Management District reported that the southern Everglades was in trouble.

Salinity in Taylor Slough, a historic freshwater artery for the bay, had spiked for the second year in a row, threatening to violate targets set to protect the marshes and marine life. A withering winter had left the region parched. And that could be bad news for shallow estuaries and creeks that fringe the bay.

Freshwater minnows, the first link in a complicated food chain, were not showing up in winter counts of fish stock. Last year, scientists counted a record low number of spotted sea trout, a fish perfectly engineered to reflect changes in the bay.

“What I think we’re seeing there is a direct response,” said Chris Kelble, an oceanographer with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration who studies the link between fish and the environment.

While spring rain is expected to drive down salinity in the short term, scientists fear the frequent swings from fresh to salt could be upsetting long-term stability and may hint that rising sea levels are trekking inland. Peat, the manna of Everglades marshes, could collapse. Coastal fringes that act as nurseries could become barren.

And the impacts would not just slam the ecosystem. A $7.6 billion recreational fishing industry could also be hurt. That includes an avid band of anglers who set their clocks by the annual spring migration of tarpon around the tip of Florida, synced precisely over millions of years to coincide with the wet season and freshwater that flowed from the north, University of Miami fisheries scientist Jerry Ault said.

“It’s an incredible choreography,” he said. “We’re putting the system into an imbalance that will play out over years, not just year to year.”

To keep the bay healthy, the South Florida Water Management District tries to balance flood control with water use and what the ecosystem needs to stay happy by setting minimum flow levels of freshwater, said Susan Gray, the district’s chief environmental scientist. Using models, they calculate how much freshwater is needed to keep units of salinity, called PSUs, in the right range: freshwater is 0 and ocean levels are 30.

But over the last two years, drought conditions have complicated that balance. Last month, for the first time, the district risked dropping below the required minimum flows for Taylor Slough. And for the second year in a row, the freshwater slough looked more like ocean water. Gauges in mangrove ponds have climbed up steadily from about 10 PSUs since the beginning of the year, while the amount of water in the slough has steadily dropped by more than half.

“We are not there yet, but we know we are very close,” Gray said last week.

Everglades restoration projects are intended to fix the problem. But so far, only one part of one of three critical projects aimed at increasing freshwater to the slough is working: the western half of the C-111 spreader canal.

The project was meant to undo decades of damage caused by the C-111 canal, a wide, long and deep canal dug in the 1960s. The canal completely upended the natural sheet flow of water across the Everglades by rerouting water from Taylor Slough — only a quarter of historic levels now move through the slough — to the drainage channel and out Barnes Sound. The spreader was supposed to suck water out of a nearby canal and allow it to flow more naturally. As with other restoration projects shared by the state and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, work stalled.

To speed things up, the state took over and completed the western half of the spreader in 2012. (An eastern project remains unfinished.)

Within a year, the ecosystem started responding. Underwater plants flourished, increasing their cover by five times as much. Freshwater flows into Taylor Slough doubled.

But when two abnormally dry winters hit the region, Jerry Lorenz, Audubon Florida’s state director of research, said he realized the C-111 spreader couldn’t work without water from the north to supplement rainfall. It had nothing to spread.

“We need upstream water up and running for it to function properly,” he said.

But that piece of the puzzle is complicated. A suite of projects aimed at getting water moving through the Central Everglades stalled last year after the U.S. Corps of Engineers failed to send a report in time to Congress. And farmers to the east have also increasingly complained that the spreader is sending too much water into their fields rather than west into the Everglades, drowning crops.

“Right now we can’t move the water where we need to until the projects are complete,” Gray said. “We don’t have the capacity to move the water effectively.”

Scientists say they may already be seeing impacts from the high salinity in places. Since 2011 when the district last surveyed patches of Ruppia, a type of sea grass that once dominated the bay, Gray said coverage dropped from about 40 percent to 10 to 20 percent. In his winter fish survey, which he is now compiling, Lorenz said scientists found no freshwater fish. Last year, 40 percent of all the fish collected were freshwater, he said.

Data collected from Everglades National Park indicate some high and very high levels of salinity in the last two weeks, biological branch chief Tylan Dean said. But none of the levels are unprecedented, he said.

“There are enough signals… out there that many of us are concerned, so we’re watching the system closely to see what happens,” he said.

Salinity tends to be highest in the center of the wide shallow bay because it’s too far from currents off the Gulf of Mexico that keep water moving through the western bay. But crucial estuaries at the north end of the bay have historically been hardest hit because swings in salinity can destabilize habitat. If salt is too high, salt-tolerant plants will start to grow. But when salinity drops, they die.

“You never get a standing crop of aquatic vegetation and without that, you don’t get habitat for prey-based food,” Lorenz said.

In its natural state, water flowed into the bay across transverse glades. But those were typically the first places where flood control structures were built, Ault said. Everglades restoration is meant to undo that. But just delivering water isn’t enough, he said. It has to be clean.

“In the natural flow system, a water particle in Lake Okeechobee today would be out on the coral reef in less than 90 days,” he said.

So finding a place to store the water is critical, Lorenz said. Lorenz’s bosses and environmentalists are waging a bitter battle in Tallahassee to convince lawmakers and Gov. Rick Scott to use money from a constitutional amendment passed by voters in November to spend $10 billion over 20 years on environmental land.

A 2010 contract would allow the state to buy 46,000 acres of U.S. Sugar land. Of that, 26,000 acres south of the lake could be used for storage. Another 20,000 is too far west. A recent study by the University of Florida recommended the land be part of several storage solutions. But lawmakers opposed to the deal argue the state already owns too much land and Scott has said the state needs to finish the projects already started.

But of all the areas hit hard by damaging flood control measures, Everglades Foundation director of science and policy adviser Tom Van Lent said, Florida Bay may be most vulnerable.

“The bay is always on a kind of knife’s edge,” he said. “The single biggest input in the late dry season was this flow from the Everglades and it’s gone.”

Jenny Staletovich|MiamiHerald.com05/04/2015

California Farmers Are Watering Their Crops With Oil Wastewater, And No One Knows What’s In It

As California farmers face a fourth year of the state’s historic drought, they’re finding water in unexpected places — like Chevron’s Kern River oil field, which has been selling recycled wastewater from oil production to farmers in California’s Kern County. Each day, Chevron recycles and sells 21 million gallons of wastewater to farmers, which is then applied on about 10 percent of Kern County’s farmland. And while some praise the program as a model for dealing with water shortages, environmental groups are raising concerns about the water’s safety, according to a recent story in the Los Angeles Times.

Tests conducted by Water Defense, an environmental group founded by actor Mark Ruffalo in 2010, have found high levels of acetone and methylene chloride — compounds that can be toxic to humans — in wastewater from Chevron used for irrigation purposes. The tests also found the presence of oil, which is supposed to be removed from the wastewater during recycling.

“All these chemicals of concern are flowing in the irrigation canal,” Scott Smith, chief scientist for Water Defense, told ThinkProgress. “If you were a gas station and were spilling these kinds of chemicals into the water, you would be shut down and fined.”

Chevron, which produces around 70,000 barrels of oil and 760,000 barrels of water each day at the Kern River oil field, has been selling water to farmers in the surrounding area for two decades. But government authorities have never required that water to be tested for chemicals used in oil production — only naturally occurring toxins like salts and arsenic. And even those standards are “decades-old,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

Before getting to the Central Valley fields, wastewater from the Kern River oil field is mixed with walnut shells, which helps remove residual oil. The water then passes through a series of treatment ponds before flowing down an eight-mile canal to the Cawelo Water District. While in the canal, the wastewater is sometimes diluted with freshwater — and sometimes not. The water from the Kern River oil field is applied to some 45,000 acres of crops, irrigating everything from nut trees to citrus fruits.

Last year, the California state legislature passed a law requiring oil companies to disclose the chemicals that they use in oil extraction, and in April, California water authorities declared that oil companies would need to start checking to make sure that those same chemicals aren’t making it into recycled water bound for agricultural use. Oil companies have until June 15 to disclose the results of these new tests.

“We need to make sure we fully understand what goes into the wastewater,” Clay Rodgers, assistant executive officer of the Central Valley Water Quality Control Board, told the Los Angeles Times.

To test the recycled wastewater for contaminants, Water Defense’s Smith — who has consulted with the EPA and other government offices on more than 50 oil spills — took samples from 10 different points of varying depth along the Cawelo canal’s eight-mile stretch. Smith compares his testing method to a video, and says the state’s method is more like an instant picture — it looks at the wastewater for a split second, and can miss contaminants. His method, he contends, gives a better holistic picture of the water’s composition. One sample Smith took had levels of methylene chloride — an industrial solvent used to soften crude oil — as high as 56 parts per billion, four times the amount of methylene chloride Smith found in 2013 when he tested parts of an Arkansas river fouled by the 2013 ExxonMobil tar sands pipeline spill.

Chevron is pushing back against claims that the wastewater contains dangerous chemicals, saying in a statement emailed to the Los Angeles Times that “protection of people and the environment is a core value for Chevron, and we take all necessary steps to ensure the protection of our water resources.” Out of an “abundance of caution,” however, both Chevron and the Cawelo Water District will contract with an outside group to test the wastewater. Still, Chevron would not disclose publicly the fluids it uses for drilling or well maintenance.

Blake Sanden, an agriculture extension agent and irrigation water expert with UC Davis, told the Los Angeles Times that farmers can smell the petrochemicals in the water, but most assume that the soil is filtering out any harmful toxins before they can be absorbed by the crops. While soil does filter out some impurities, Sanden says it’s impossible to know for sure whether waste from oil production is making its way from irrigation water into the roots and leaves of crops.

To Smith, that’s just another missing piece of information that needs to be understood before wastewater from oil production is deemed safe for agriculture.

“The state appears to not even be testing for oil in the water,” Smith said. “You’re not going to find chemicals of concern if you don’t look for them.”

According to the Los Angeles Times, monitoring the oil fields has been a “low priority” for California’s Water State Resources Control Board, the state body that regulates wastewater. The burden for testing wastewater falls largely on the oil companies, which in the past have sought to reduce testing and disclosure requirements due to concerns over time and expense.

With the drought placing more attention on water resources, Smith says that it’s important for testing of wastewater to continue.

“We want to work with Chevron, we want to work with the regulators. We want to use multiple methods of testing,” he said. “That’s the best way to figure out what’s in that water and what can be done to solve it.”

Natasha Geiling|May 5, 2015

[Using 760,000 gallons of water to obtain 70,000 gallons of oil at a time when California is in the worst drought in recorded history is going from the ridiculous to the sublime. 10.9 gallons of water to produce a single gallon of oil?]

Yet Another Oil Bomb Train Explosion Proves New Regulations Fail to Protect Us

The town of Heimdal, North Dakota was evacuated this morning after yet another train carrying crude oil derailed and exploded. A BNSF Railway oil train derailed around 7:30 a.m., setting at least 10 oil tanker cars on fire. No injuries or fatalities have been reported.

“The tank cars involved in the incident are the unjacketed CPC-1232 models,” BNSF spokesperson Amy McBeth told Valley News Live. These newer tank cars are suppose to be safer than older models, but the four oil train accidents in the first three months of 2015 all involved the newer cars, according to Common Dreams.

“Again another derailment and explosion of a train carrying crude. Again another community evacuated and its people counting their blessings this didn’t happen half a mile down the track in the middle of town,” said Earthjustice attorney Kristen Boyles. “Under the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (DOT) new rules, the type of oil tank cars that are burning in Heimdal will stay on the rails for five to eight years. DOT’s new industry-pleasing rule is too weak and too slow. We need to get these exploding death trains off the tracks now.”

Last week, the DOT released new oil-by-train safety standards, but many environmental groups believe the standards are not strong enough and “leave communities at risk of catastrophe.” The Center for Biological Diversity is one of the groups calling for a moratorium on these so-called “bomb trains.”

“We will continue to see these fiery derailments even with the new regulations in place, because they fail to take sufficient actions to prevent oil trains wrecks,” said Jared Margolis, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity. “As this accident demonstrates, people, wildlife, rivers and lakes will continue to pay the price for the government’s failure to take steps to adequately protect us from these dangerous oil trains.”

Oil train derailments have become more and more frequent in recent years across North America, as oil shipments via rail have increased.    

Cole Mellino|May 6, 2015

Expansion by Indonesia’s largest palm oil company frozen for disobeying RSPO standards

Palm oil conglomerate ordered to halt expansion of operations following multiple violations of RSPO standards.

The RSPO’s Complaints Panel has upheld the Forest Peoples Program in its complaint against Golden Agri Resources, which was seeking to expand 18 of its operations in Kalimantan. After concluding that it has ‘reasonable grounds’ to conclude that the company is in violation of several RSPO norms, the latest ‘determination’ by the Panel notes:

“The Panel hereby prohibits GAR from acquiring or developing any new areas until this complaint has been dealt with to the satisfaction of the Complaints Panel.”

Repeated field surveys by Forest Peoples Program with local partner, LinkAR-Borneo, show that the company has sluggishly responded, after the NGOs had repeatedly raised concerns first with the company and then the RSPO. The NGOs found that the company had filed to expand its operations after it had taken land without proper consent, had not completed required High Conservation Value assessments and was of questionable legality. The Complaints Panel rules that:

“GAR must also take remedial steps to correct any shortcomings in its land acquisition process with the affected communities… and insists that GAR must honor its commitment to allocate 20 % of the land for the smallholders as it has promised to do…”

Agus Sutomo Executive Director of Pontianak-based LinkAR Borneo says:

“We need the Government to take note of this decision. Chaotic law enforcement and handing out permits for oil palm plantations on indigenous peoples’ lands without even informing them in advance is bad for people, bad for forests and bad for Indonesia.”

In past years NGOs have expressed growing dismay that the RSPO was failing to enforce its standards and turning a blind eye to multiple violations.

“We hope this decision will now persuade GAR/SMART that it has to renegotiate with communities where it has taken over their lands without their informed consent”, says Marcus Colchester, Senior Policy Advisor of the Forest Peoples Program. “We are greatly encouraged that the RSPO is upholding its standard. We need to eliminate all land-grabbing from the RSPO-endorsed supply chain.”

Press release|May 7, 2015

Calls to Action

1. Tell President Obama to Protect Country of Origin Labels – here
2. Urge the Government to Ban a Giant Freezer Trawler That Has Killed Eight Dolphins and Four Seals – here
3. Protect Grand Canyon From Proposed Mega-Mall – here
4. Sea Turtles Need You – here
5. Don’t Gut NASA’s Climate Change Research – here
6. Tell Congress- Don’t gut the Land and Water Conservation Fund – here
7. Don’t kill the bobcats in Illinois – here
8. Your urgent donation will help us protect Piping Plovers – here
9. Tell True Value & Ace: Stop Selling Bee-Killing Pesticides – here
10. Does Your Orange Contain Fracking Chemicals – here

Birds and Butterflies

Bird of the Week: Piping Plover

The small, sand-colored Piping Plover, named for its melodic, plaintive whistle, is a bird of beaches and barrier islands, sharing this habitat with Least Terns, Black Skimmers, and Wilson’s Plovers.

Beaches are also popular with people, and their impacts have caused serious declines in Piping Plover populations. Shoreline development and stabilization projects, free-roaming cats and other predators, poorly sited wind turbines, gas/oil industry operations, and global warming are some of the biggest threats to this species.

Beach Sprites

Piping Plovers resemble wind-up toys as they dart along the beach in search of food, taking a wide variety of insects, marine worms, and crustaceans. They nest in small depressions in the sand called scrapes and often nest in the same area with Least Terns.

Like many other plover species, adult Piping Plovers employ a “broken wing display” when threatened to draw attention to themselves and away from their chicks and nest.

Saving the Piping Plover

The Piping Plover is federally listed as Endangered in the Great Lakes region and Threatened in the remainder of its U.S. breeding range; it’s also listed as Endangered in Canada. The Great Lakes population is on the 2014 State of the Birds Watch List.

Critical Piping Plover nesting habitats are now protected to help the species during its breeding season. Populations have seen significant increases since the protection programs began, but the species remains in danger.

For example, at popular Jones Beach near New York City, nesting Piping Plovers are threatened by a colony of feral cats. ABC is urging authorities to remove the cats for the safety of this federally protected species.

ABC is also leading a Gulf Coast conservation effort that is working to identify and implement protective measures for vulnerable beach-nesting birds and other birds, such as the Piping Plover, that winter there. Strategies include preservation of plover habitats; public education; limiting off-road vehicle (ORV) traffic; and limiting predation of free-roaming cats and dogs.

Hear some piping calls

American Bird Conservancy

Wind Beneath Their Wings

Here they come again…monarch butterflies are headed north.

And they’re off! The annual monarch migration is underway as of March 24, when Journey North citizen scientists in Angangueo, Mexico, spotted a mass of the burnt-orange beauties fluttering northward. After a winter-long siesta in toastier climes, the eastern population will travel all the way to the northern United States and southern Canada. In this, one of the world’s most magnificent migrations, no individual butterfly makes it from start to finish. Rather, each successive generation pushes a bit farther north—hitching a ride on south winds you can watch for on this map—then stops to breed. When fall comes, the fourth generation returns to Mexico to start the cycle all over again.

This is just the beginning of their journey, but out of the gate, monarchs have a lot working against them: climate change, habitat loss, pesticides, and parasites have all driven their numbers down. The population counted in Mexico earlier this year was the second lowest on record. Attention green thumbs: Conservationists are calling on you to plant native milkweed and give them the lift they need.

Clara Chaisson|April, 2015

Five Years After Deepwater Horizon Spill, Growing Gulf-Wide Effort Protects Beach Nesting Birds

The April 20, 2010, Deepwater Horizon spill was a horrific event that impacted the lives of many families as well as the gulf environment. But there are bright spots that periodically emerge, such as a report from American Bird Conservancy (ABC) on a Gulf-wide, multi-partner bird conservation effort that continues to gain momentum and deliver important successes in protecting wild birds impacted by the spill.

“2014 was by far our best year in terms of delivering bigger conservation results for beach-nesting birds.  We worked at 58 sites with 21 partners providing some combination of protection, monitoring, and outreach on more than 2,400 acres of coastal habitat that supported 950 nests and 1,400 breeding pairs of our target species: primarily Least Terns and Wilson’s and Snowy Plovers,” said Kacy Ray, ABC’s Gulf Conservation Program Manager.

These birds were impacted both by the spill itself, and by cleanup efforts that often ignored nesting birds as they attempted to rid beaches of oil – in some cases destroying nests with heavy earth-moving machinery and causing significant disturbance with beach cleanup crews and their vehicles.

Across the Gulf, the conservation program, which began in 2011, reached thousands of people through on-the-ground stewardship and community engagement. In 2014, more than 50 volunteers put in more than 1,000 hours educating the public about beach-nesting birds. Nest site stewardship led to outstanding results in St. Pete Beach, FL; Gulf Shores, AL; and East Beach, TX, where Black Skimmers and Snowy Plovers produced one fledging chick per breeding pair, which Ray describes as a remarkable reproductive output.

The effort includes partners from multiple conservation groups as well as local, state, and federal agencies implementing conservation activities to help impacted coastal birds recover. The project has brought expertise not only from ABC, but from partners throughout the Gulf region, including the Barataria-Terrebonne National Estuary Program; US Fish and Wildlife Service; Coastal Bend Bays and Estuaries Program; Houston Audubon; Audubon Louisiana; Grand Isle State Park; Gulf State Park; Eckerd College in Pinellas County, FL; and the Gulf Coast Bird Observatory, among many others. The project, which is primarily funded by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, has focused on beach-nesting bird habitat in Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, and Florida.

Least Terns were among the top ten birds most affected by the spill, and Black Skimmers and Snowy and Wilson’s Plovers were also victims. “All of those species are targeted by our program’s conservation efforts,” said Ray.

“This project will reduce impacts on key beach-nesting bird colonies, many of which are currently vulnerable to accidental disturbance by members of the public, dogs, and ATVs, which can cause adult birds to abandon a nest or lead to crushed eggs and injured chicks,” said Ray. “Nesting birds occupy a tiny portion of the region’s beaches, usually well back from the shoreline, so there doesn’t need to be a conflict with beach goers. But the areas they do use are absolutely vital to their breeding success,” she added.

“We all love the beaches of the Gulf – they are economically vital to our coastal communities – so our project goal is not to restrict public access.  Instead, we hope to engage the public in helping us with beach bird recovery by sharing this beautiful shoreline during nesting season,” she said.

“Beaches are among the most limited and threatened of all bird habitats in the U.S. They provide only a tiny sliver of nesting opportunity for birds, and are often heavily used by humans, squeezed by development, and frequented by colonies of feral cats. Consequently, birds that require this habitat face considerable survival challenges. Much of their plight is caused by anthropogenic (human-related) impacts, so it is only fitting that we take steps to fend off some of those challenges and give them a fighting chance,” said Dr. George H. Fenwick, ABC’s President.

“The best thing for beachgoers to do, especially in the spring and summer months, is to avoid getting close to areas where larger congregations of birds are gathered, and to always respect areas that are roped off or marked with signs designating an area that is used by nesting birds,” said Ray. “The habitat for these birds is diminishing every year due to beach development, erosion, and ever-increasing recreational use, so the birds can really use any break we can give them. They have no other place to go.”

Ray pointed out that it can be difficult for both the year-round resident and the casual vacationer to see the difference between a bird that is simply sitting on the sand and one that is tending eggs or a nest or young. Ray said that most nesting birds tend to use higher parts of the beach away from the surf or behind the primary dunes, so it should be possible to avoid conflict with beach nesters so long as people remain close to the water and away from the dunes or higher areas.

“You know you’ve entered a nesting area when large groups or individual birds vocalize loudly, dive-bomb your head, or feign injury to lead you away from their nests. If this happens, back away and share the beach so the birds can successfully rear their young,” she said.

ABC and its partners are working in the Tampa Bay region; Gulf Shores, AL; Grand Isle, LA; and along the Texas coast to help these birds and their young, added Ray.

Robert Johns|05/04/2015 

(Not) Flying South for the Winter

Birders find that hummingbirds are sticking around through the cold season.

When the weather turns to spring and flowers blossom many U.S. bird lovers look for the hummingbirds to return to local nectar feeders or flower patches. For a lucky few in particular parts of the U.S.—especially in the West Coast, South, and Southwest—hummingbirds hang around all year long. That’s been the pattern for years, but things seem to be changing. Birders are documenting more hummingbirds that have opted to overwinter in the U.S. For example, during the 115^th Christmas Bird Count, birders found 312 Ruby-throated Hummingbirds in expected locales like southern Florida, but they also spotted the birds in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. The question is: Why? Did these winter birds forget to migrate?

Scientists are hoping to answer this question, in part by looking at data from citizen science programs like Hummingbirds at Home, to see if these shifts mirror the shifts in climate and flower-blooming times. There is ample evidence that this shift is occurring. The 1974 book “Louisiana Birds” by George H. Lowery, Jr., lists five documented hummingbird species in Louisiana. Today, there are 13. Of those species, only the Ruby-throated Hummingbird regularly breeds in Louisiana and the eastern US. The others merely pass through or winter in Louisiana.

In recent years more people in Louisiana have been managing their yards and gardens with hummingbird-friendly plants. Do these hummingbird friendly places attract the birds to come to Louisiana, or conversely have the increasing number of wintering hummingbirds resulted in the setting out of an invitation by interested people? Providing a nectar feeder will not delay a hummingbird’s migration, but will help them with a food source during their journey. They will migrate once the day length indicates it is time to go south. But there is still a lot to learn about hummingbird migration patterns and why they might be in places we don’t expect in winter.

The Ruby-throated story is even more complicated than it seems on the surface. Individual birds do not stay in Louisiana; instead, overwintering birds migrate as far north as Canada to breed, while those that show up in the spring actually overwinter in Central America. The Louisiana Winter Hummingbird Project, which focuses on banding wintering hummingbirds, documented that one Ruby-throated Hummingbird banded there during the winter was found a few months later in Manitoba during the breeding season. This project was started to learn more about the unexpected hummingbird species showing up out of season in Louisiana.

The more we look at these kinds of data and watch hummingbirds, the more questions we have. By collecting data about where the hummingbirds are in winter and what they are feeding on during their return to breeding areas, citizen scientists provide the valuable information to help us answer some of these questions. Help us learn about the hummingbirds near you when they return home, and tell us what nectar sources they are visiting by joining at www.hummingbirdsathome.org

Kathy Dale|Apr 27, 2015

6 Spring Migration Hotspots

Spring migration.

Those two words are enough to induce rapid heartbeat and manic, anticipatory glee among birders.

Why, you ask?

Every year between March and May, millions of birds stream northward into the United States from their wintering grounds in Central and South America. Some settle in for the breeding season, while others wing their way north to Canada.

For some species, the only time to see them on U.S. soil is a few-week window in the spring and fall. Spring migration is arguably glitzier, as both males and females are strutting their stuff in bright, colorful breeding plumage.

So where do you go to see spring migration in action? Check out our picks below, and share your favorite birding sites in the comments.

Dry Tortugas, Florida

Claim to fame: Weird vagrants and storm-tossed rarities

When to go: March, April, May

What you’ll see: sooty tern, masked booby, magnificent frigatebird, neotropical migrants

Best for: Travelers, listers, and rarity-chasers

Nearly 70 miles west of Key West, the Dry Tortugas islands are a literally life-saving stop for neotropical migrants — songbirds and other species that migrate from Central and South America. For these birds, the fastest way to get to the U.S. is across the Gulf of Mexico, but flying 600 miles across open water in a single flight is a daunting and downright dangerous obstacle for a songbird weighing 1 ounce or less. These sandy islands offer a place for birds to rest and refuel, and a safe haven in bad weather.

Things get weird in Dry Tortugas, even by Florida’s standards. The bird list is brimming bizarre species — like fork-tailed flycatchers and bananaquits — many of which are blown in by storms. Even the expected species, like warblers, tanagers and orioles, are often seen foraging on the beach, which is a strange sight for species usually found in the forest.

For birders, the only access to the islands is by boat or plane. Those willing to make the journey will also be rewarded by rare shorebirds, like masked booby, black noddy, brown noddy, and sooty tern.

High Island, Texas

Claim to fame: Legendary fallout

When to go: April through mid-May

What you’ll see: Warblers, tanagers, vireos, and buntings

Best for: Fallout junkies and migration nerds

This nondescript island between Galveston, Texas and the Louisiana border is legendary for one thing — fallout. What’s fallout? Ask Jack Black. (Yes, that Jack Black.)

Even if you aren’t lucky enough to see “a hundred thousand birds literally dropping from the sky,” High Island offers fantastic birding during migration. Birders shooting for a Big Day — trying to see as many species in a 24-hour period — easily top 100 species or more just at High Island. One team of expert birders from The Cornell Lab of Ornithology broke the national Big Day record with a jaw dropping 294 birds, in part thanks to a stop at High Island.

Don’t miss the oak grove in Smith Oaks Bird Sanctuary, where tall trees attract migrants like a magnet, or Purkey’s Pond, where grandstand bleachers overlook a pond where migrants drink and bathe.

Magee Marsh Wildlife Area, Ohio

Claim to fame: The Warbler Capital of the World

When to go: The second and third weeks of May

What you’ll see: 30+ warblers species

Best for: Warbler enthusiasts

A 30 warbler day — both a birder’s dream a real possibility at Magee Marsh. There are about 56 species of warblers in the U.S., depending on how you slice the deck, and a good handful of those are quite rare. (A few tricky species, like the yellow-breasted chat, are lumped in with the warblers despite being the subject of much taxonomic debate.)

Seeing 15+ warbler species on a single day is an achievement, while a 30-warbler day is something to brag about for years. If you’re going to go for the big 30, go to Magee Marsh.

Situated on the southern shore of Lake Erie, Canada-bound migrants stop here to refuel after crossing the country. Serious birders should go in mid May, when diversity is at its peak. That also happens to coincide with a 10-day festival dubbed The Biggest Week In American Birding.

Cape May, New Jersey

Claim to fame: Legendary funnel for East Coast migrants

When to go: March, April, May

What you’ll see: Anything and everything

Best for: Generalist birders and shorebird lovers

The Jersey Shore is for beachgoers and birds. It all boils down to geography: northbound migrants crash-land on Cape May’s point after crossing the Delaware Bay. Some birds don’t quite make it — there are stories of birders wading out into the surf to rescue exhausted songbirds that collapsed before reaching the beach.

Cape May is such a legendary and productive hotspot that you can find doorstop-sized books written about birds and birding on this tiny peninsula. It’s a place where anything can happen, and birders (like Jersey beachgoers) should be ready for the weird, rare, and unexpected.

Most of the action occurs west of the town, at a trio of sites: Higbee Beach WMA, Cape May Point State Park, and South Cape May Meadows, a Conservancy preserve. Another great site is Rea Farms, but to bird here you’ll need to purchase a pass from the Cape May Bird Observatory (CMBO) office. Before you go, check the Cape May Bird Observatory calendar for events guided walks, and their blog for birding and nature happenings.

NYC’s Central Park, New York

Claim to fame: A hotspot in an urban jungle

When to go: March, April, May

What you’ll see: Classic migrants in an unexpected setting

Best for: City-bound naturalists and beginning birders

Just trust me on this one. The heart of Manhattan is not obvious birding territory, but that’s exactly why you should bird here. Migrants flying high above New York look down and see one lone, dark patch of green amidst a veritable sea of lights and concrete — and they aim straight for it. (If you’re skeptical, check out “The Central Park Effect,” a documentary about Central Park birds and birders.)

You have a chance of seeing nearly all of the park’s 250 recorded species in the Ramble, a 36-acre wooded area with a maze of paths in the center of the park. Despite its rather seedy history, the Ramble’s woods make it prime territory for migrants. Next, scan the skies and lake at Belvedere Castle before swinging south to the Maintenance Meadow, the local birding nickname for the green space just southwest of the intersection of East Drive and the 79th Street traverse.

Point Reyes National Seashore, California

Claim to fame: 50 percent of all North American birds

When to go: March, April, May

What you’ll see: Tons of Pacific flyway species

Best for: Generalist birders

Roughly an hour north of San Francisco lies one of the best birding hotspots on the Pacific coast —Point Reyes National Seashore. With more than 70,000 acres of estuaries, coastal prairie, scrub, and forest, this hotspot has a wealth of different habitats to attract everything from shorebirds to warblers. Plus, the seashore’s peninsula projects 10 miles out to sea, drawing in open-ocean migrants and vagrants.

The Point Reyes bird list boasts nearly 490 species, or more than 50 percent of all birds found in North America. Keep an eye out for the snowy plover and the northern spotted owl, two threatened species that conservation scientists are monitoring at Point Reyes.

This hotspot is huge, so don’t expect to bird the entire seashore in one day unless you’re feeling ambitious. Birders new to the area should check out this list of popular birding locations or join one of the guided field trips during the Point Reyes Birding and Nature Festival.

By Justine E. Hausheer|science writer|Nature Conservancy|April 6, 2015

Caracara Old Timer

Oldest documented wild Crested Caracara; looking good at 24 years of age!

Our story begins with Brian Schmidt, a dedicated bird photographer based in central Florida, submitting his photo of a banded Crested Caracara, a Federally Threatened species, to the Bird Banding Laboratory (BBL) for ID. The BBL contacted Dr. Joan Morrison who has studied Caracara habits for two decades. Morrison could only read 3 of the 9 number string but suspected it was a very old band. She contacted Schmidt to get additional photos of the bands which he did.

Morrison subsequently emailed the BBL: ‘This definitive photo by Brian confirms a new longevity record for Crested Caracara! This male is at least 24 years old. I banded him as a breeding adult in a cattle pasture in March 1994!’ Schmidt commented, ‘My love for this bird goes beyond anyone’s imagination. The Caracara is such a smart bird, most people have no idea!’ Morrison sure knows. She even remembers capturing this particular male in 1994, commenting, ‘This Caracara’s home territory has not changed at all which might explain why he is still successfully nesting there.

It is really great to have Brian as a citizen scientist partner in our Caracara work along with the ranchers who maintain pasture habitat preferred by Caracaras’. Morrison plans to write-up an article about the Caracara’s lifespan with Schmidt as co-author.  

See beautiful Caracara photos here. 

Miami Blue

The Miami Blue butterfly, which appears on the Save Wild Florida license tag, is a small, brightly colored butterfly found only in Florida.

Not long ago, the Miami Blue, once flying across the entire southern half of Florida, teetered on the verge of extinction. Insecticide use in South Florida, as well as destruction of roadside vegetation, natural disasters and an invasive species of fire ant devastated the Miami Blue butterfly population, which, at its lowest point, dwindled to 35 individuals.

Because of timely and decisive efforts on behalf of the State of Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission through the Florida Museum of Natural History and the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity, the Miami Blue population was successfully restored through breeding and re-release. From 35 individuals, the beautiful and rare Miami Blue butterfly has been returned to South Florida by captively bred individuals in the thousands.

In 2006 alone, wildlife watchers spent $3.1 billion on wildlife-watching activities in Florida, not including hunting, fishing, and boating. The Miami Blue butterfly is one of many of Florida’s unique natural attractions. Despite its recent comeback, the butterfly is still listed as endangered in the state of Florida. However, it is not the only natural resource in need of support. Many of Florida’s native wildlife and natural wonders face increasing peril every day, and without funding for conservation projects, the state risks a multi-billion dollar contributor to its economy and well being.

Audubon Center for Birds of Prey Set to Release 500th Bald Eagle ‏

We are proud to announce that on May 14, the Audubon Center for Birds of Prey will release our 500th Bald Eagle back to the skies over Florida.

Every bird that receives treatment at our famous Center has a story. Since opening its doors in 1979, the Center has treated over 18,500 individual patients, each one with varying degrees of injury and illness. Rescued birds come to us from all over the state.

Audubon volunteers, donors, and staff devote themselves to the care and recovery of these remarkable Florida species. Kestrels and kites, hawks and falcons. And of course, Bald Eagles – the national symbol of our country. The Center provides care for all Florida’s injured birds of prey. 

Like all veterinary work, some days are better than others. But coming next week, the Audubon Center for Birds of Prey will hit a truly remarkable milestone.

Treatment for a Bald Eagle averages a whopping $3000 for each patient, depending on the injury. This moment (and the 499 that came before!) would not have been possible if not for the generous contributions from people like you that support our Bald Eagle rehabilitation and conservation work. 

Charlie – as the 500th eagle is affectionately known – is going through the final days of rehab at the Center’s 100 foot Magic of Flight Barn. Audubon invites you to watch his progress on our live web camera, found here.

You can also follow along on the Center’s official Facebook Page. You will see photo and video updates each day between now and the release, including footage of Charlie’s triumphant return to the wild on May 14.

It takes a dedicated community of people to save an eagle’s life. This day belongs to us all. You don’t want to miss it. 

Click here to watch Charlie fly.

Audubon Florida |5/07/15

Your Photos Can Help Birds

Doug Tallamy, author of ‘Bringing Nature Home’, has launched a new scientific endeavor at the University of Delaware, to find missing links between specific native plants, specific insects, and specific bird species that eat those insects. Knowing exactly which insects birds are eating can determine how specialized birds are on their insect prey. This is absolutely vital in planning gardens to support birds. And you can join the research by providing pictures of birds eating arthropods.

Take the Brainy Bird Challenge!

 

  Invasive species

How Not to Spread Invasive Pests

When hungry insects decide to travel to new areas, they can devastate crops and trees and upset native ecosystems. And we humans often inadvertently provide transportation for these hungry pests.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), invasive pests are a growing problem, costing the United States billions of dollars in losses. Invasive pests are insects or other organisms that have moved beyond their natural habitat into a new environment where they have no natural enemies to keep them in check. If they’re allowed to establish themselves, they can become a threat to native plant and animal species, water systems, and human health.

How Invasive Pests Spread

They’re small, quiet, and crafty enough to travel undetected by

• hitching a ride on our vehicles, clothing, and outdoor gear;
• hiding on plants or animals as we transport them from one environment to another;
• coming in on commercial shipments of food, plants, or just about anything else.

How To Help Prevent Invasive Pests from Spreading

• After camping or hiking, wash your outdoor gear carefully. That includes RVs, dirt bikes, lawn furniture, and tents. Insects (or their eggs) may even be hiding out on your tires and wheel wells. Remove seeds and other plant parts, too.
• Don’t transport fruits, vegetables, or plants out of quarantined areas unless they’re properly inspected. Be sure to declare these items when crossing customs.
• Invasive pests love to hide in firewood, so don’t move firewood from one place to another. Buy locally whenever possible.
• Buy only certified, pest-free nursery whenever possible. Buy plants from a reputable source and avoid using invasive plant species!

According to the USDA, the top invasive pests in the U.S. are:

• coconut rhinoceros beetle (damages a number of crops including coconut, date and oil palms)
• imported fire ant (damages plants, stings animals and humans)
• khapra beetle (destroys grains and seeds)
• Mediterranean fruit fly (infests fruit and vegetable crops)
• Asian citrus psylllid (once it infects a tree, there’s no cure)
• citrus greening disease (Huanglongbing) (ruins fruit and kills trees within a few years)
• European grapevine moth (damages grapes)
• sudden oak death (infects a variety of trees)
• Mexican fruit fly (infests fruit and vegetable crops)
• Oriental fruit fly (infests fruit and vegetable crops)
• giant African snail (carries a parasite that causes meningitis, consumes 500 types of plants, damages plaster and stucco)
• False codling moth (threatens fruits, vegetables, and other crops)
• light brown apple moth (damages garden foliage and produce)
• European and Asian gypsy moths (defoliates trees)
• emerald ash borer (no treatment — trees must be felled)
• Asian longhorned beetle (threatens hardwood trees, and there’s no cure)

To learn which invasive pests are a threat in your state, visit the USDA’s hungrypests.com.

Ann Pietrangelo

Endangered Species

Baby Rhinos Signal Conservation Success in South Africa

In the face of sobering poaching numbers, relocation fosters a baby boom

At the end of 2014, the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal reported an exciting milestone: its black rhino population had grown to 500, up from 411 in 2004.

That news was a bright spot in an otherwise dark year. South Africa is home to more than 90% of the world’s approximately 20,000 white rhinos and 40% of the 5,000 black rhinos. But rhino poaching in the country has skyrocketed since 2008; in January 2015, South African officials announced that 1,215 rhinos were killed in poaching incidents during 2014—the highest number recorded in a decade.

KwaZulu-Natal’s recent success presents an important counterpoint—and reflects the efforts of the Black Rhino Range Expansion Project, an initiative started by WWF, Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife and other partners in 2003. The project relocates small groups of black rhinos from healthy populations to start new ones. “Science shows that if you take a group of animals out of a stable population and move them elsewhere, it can allow the original population to grow more quickly again,” says Dr. Jo Shaw, rhino program manager for WWF-South Africa.

Since its launch, the project has established nine new black rhino populations in the provinces of KwaZulu-Natal and Limpopo with more translocations in the pipeline. Only five adults have been lost to poaching from its sites, while more than 70 new calves have been born—a ratio that points to a brighter future than these terrible poaching statistics suggest.

From World Wildlife Fund|May, 2015

One in six species could be wiped out by climate change, study says

A warming climate means less Arctic ice and less opportunity for polar bears to hunt. A new study predicts that climate change could cause as many as one in six species to become extinct.

If present trends continue, a hotter world could spell the demise of 16% of the species alive today

Even if temperatures rise only 2 degrees C above pre-industrial times, the global extinction risk will be 5.2%

‘Extinction risks from climate change are expected not only to increase but to accelerate,’ study warns

About one in six species now alive on the planet could become extinct as a result of climate change, according to a study published in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

If present trends continue, the Earth’s temperature will wind up 4.3 degrees Celsius higher than it was before the onset of the industrial era. Should that scenario come to pass, as many as 16% of species around the world would be at risk of dying out, the study says.

Author Mark Urban, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Connecticut, based his calculation on a meta-analysis of 131 previous studies that made predictions about how multiple species would fare in a warmer world. Although the studies focused on different species in different parts of the world and used different modeling techniques to make their forecasts, Urban’s statistical methods found that none of those variables mattered as much as “the level of future climate change.”

For instance, the current risk of global extinction is 2.8%, Urban wrote. But the hotter the Earth gets, the more that risk rises.

If the world is somehow able to stick to its target of making sure temperatures rise only 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the global extinction risk would rise to 5.2%.

In the more realistic scenario that the Earth warms by 3 degrees Celsius, an estimated 8.5% of species would be projected to become extinct.

And if things continue the way they are, the global extinction risk would nearly double, to 16%, Urban wrote. That’s one out of every six species gone.

The average of all the scenarios is that 7.9% of species will become extinct as a direct result of climate change, according to the study.

The extinction risk isn’t the same in all areas of the globe, Urban found. It  appears to be lowest in North America, where about 5% of species are likely to disappear. (That figure could be higher or lower depending on how much temperatures rise.) Europe is a close second, with 6% of species at risk.

At the other end of the spectrum, South America could lose 23% of its species. That continent is particularly vulnerable because it has a lot of creatures that live in small ranges. If changing climate conditions make their homes uninhabitable, there’s nowhere for them to go where they can find equivalent conditions.

In Australia and New Zealand, as many as 14% of species could disappear, Urban wrote. As in South America, the animals that live Down Under have the misfortune of inhabiting niche environments with no ready alternatives. The fact that they live on islands further limits their ability to seek comfort by moving into new ranges.

The analysis also revealed that the faster Earth’s temperature rises, the more species will die out as a result. If temperatures rise more gradually, animals will have more time to adapt — and better odds for success.

“Extinction risks from climate change are expected not only to increase but to accelerate for every degree rise in global temperatures,” Urban wrote. “The signal of climate change-induced extinctions will become increasingly apparent if we do not act now to limit future climate change.”

Urban noted that the species that go extinct aren’t the only ones that will be forced to reckon with climate change.

“Even species not threatened directly by extinction could experience substantial changes in abundances, distributions, and species interactions,” he wrote. That “could affect ecosystems and their services to humans.”

The 131 studies that were used to make these estimates did not take into account such complex factors as the way climate change may prompt species to change they way they interact with each other. Nor did they attempt to predict how species might evolve to adapt to their new realities.

Still, the results offer a “sobering estimate of climate change-induced biodiversity loss,” wrote University of Washington biologist Janneke Hille Ris Lambers in a commentary that accompanies Urban’s report.

The study is only one of many that makes the case that “climate change will have enormous impacts on the organisms with which we share our planet,” she wrote. Despite the uncertainties inherent in making these kinds of predictions, she added, “we should not wait … before taking action, preferentially by curbing emissions.” 

Karen Kaplan|May4,2015

Tchimpounga’s Mandrill Mom ‏

The Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) takes care of over 150 rescued chimpanzees at our Tchimpounga sanctuary in the Republic of the Congo … but did you know that we take care of a number of other animals as well?

In addition to chimpanzees, Tchimpounga has been home to rescued antelopes, moustache monkeys, various bird species, lizards, and mandrills.

Mandrills, an endangered species, are large, brightly-colored primates. Due to their gentle nature, many poachers illegally capture mandrills to sell them as pets. Some of these captured mandrills have been rescued and sent to Tchimpounga, where JGI is operating a mandrill release program in the forests near the sanctuary.

One of the mandrills at Tchimpounga is a feisty female named George. At the release site, George became pregnant and later gave birth to a healthy infant at Tchimpounga … a great sign that this population of mandrills is adapting well. 

In order to ensure the safety of George and her daughter, she and her infant are living at the sanctuary where they can both be observed … and where the little mandrill can grow older and stronger before being released back into the forest with her mom. 

the Jane Goodall Institute|5/04/15

Singer Shania Twain becomes a Leopard Ambassador

Singer Shania Twain has helped wild cat conservation organisation Panthera launch #IFAKEIT – a social media campaign to raise awareness of the need to save one of fashion’s most revered but underrepresented icons – the leopard. 

“I was shocked to learn that these gorgeous animals are being killed for their beautiful skins and other parts for the illegal trade, and yet are so loved by the fashion world,” says Shania, who has been given the title of Leopard Ambassador. 

Referred to as the ‘new neutral’, the big cat’s spotted print has inspired fashion for centuries, influencing style all over the world.

The purpose of this campaign is to inform the general public that while the spots they are wearing are so widespread, the real leopard is under serious threat. 

Every year, more leopards are killed in the wild than any other big cat. The species has vanished from nearly 40 per cent of its range in Africa and over 50 per cent in Asia. Many are killed simply for their beauty, as although they are in jeopardy from loss of habitat and conflict with people, the demand for their skins is one of the main causes of their decline. 

Even though the international trade in leopard skin is now illegal, it is still common for local communities in Africa and Asia to use real leopard skins for religious and cultural ceremonies, whether worn as capes or used for other traditional regalia. 

Panthera’s Furs for Life Leopard Project is providing a simple and sustainable solution that protects leopards but also supports local culture, collaborating with digital designers to create a high-quality and realistic faux leopard skin to replace the authentic skins worn at ceremonies.

More than 5,000 faux leopard capes have already been donated in southern Africa, and Panthera’s new partnership with the Peace Parks Foundation and Cartier will enable the distribution of at least another 13,000 more capes before the end of 2017. 

“We wanted to capitalize on the fact that people everywhere are wearing more leopard print than ever, but so few know what’s actually happening to them in the wild,” says Shania.

“With Panthera, we aim to begin this conversation and generate awareness for leopards on a grand scale, while giving people something tangible to grasp, and engage in a fun and impactful way.” 

To do this, the singer and the charity have launched the #IFAKEIT campaign, which asks people around the globe to join the movement and show how they ‘fake it’ for leopards.

They are encouraged to post photos of themselves wearing fake leopard print to Twitter, Instagram and Facebook with the #IFAKEIT tag. People can also donate to the campaign at ifakeit.org, where just $30 can support the creation of one fake leopard skin and save a leopard’s life. 

The campaign first aims to generate 18,000 unique mentions tagged with #IFAKEIT on social media, to accompany each donated cape, as a thank you to the communities willing to fake it and to stop leopards from being killed for their skins.

The campaign also aims to raise $300,000 for the creation of at least 5,000 new fake leopard skins to distribute to communities outside of southern Africa, and to support other conservation activities to protect leopards across their range. 

Lizwi Ncwane, an elder and legal adviser of the Nazareth Baptist ‘Shembe’ Church, says, “As a leader of the Shembe community, I have seen first hand how receptive my community is to using these fake skins.

“Not only do they look and feel like real leopard skins, they also last longer. We’re grateful that Panthera has worked with us in finding a solution that interweaves the conservation of leopards with the customs of the Shembe.”  

For Immediate Release, May 1, 2015

Contact: Robin Silver, (520) 345-5708, rsilver@biologicaldiversity.org

Emergency Endangered Species Act Protection Sought for
Two Grand Canyon Species Threatened by Tusayan Development

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz.— The Center for Biological Diversity filed an emergency petition with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today seeking Endangered Species Act protection for a tiger beetle and a flower found in wet seeps in the Grand Canyon and nowhere else on Earth. The Arizona wetsalts tiger beetle and Macdougal’s yellowtops, a flower in the aster family, could be driven extinct due to groundwater pumping to support massive new real estate developments planned for the tiny town of Tusayan at the South Rim of Grand Canyon National Park.

“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service must act quickly to protect these rare Grand Canyon species under the Endangered Species Act, or we’ll be at risk of losing an irreplaceable piece of our natural heritage to shortsighted real estate development,” said Robin Silver, a founder of the Center.

The springs the two rare species depend on are fed by the Redwall/Muav aquifer. The already-stressed aquifer would be depleted by the Tusayan development, causing the flower and the tiger beetle to go extinct. There are no safeguards in place to protect the springs or the species from the development plan.

Endangered Species Act protection would make it illegal for anyone to harm the species or their habitat. It would also require any project on federal land or that receives federal funding or permits to consult with the Service to make sure the species would not be harmed.

The Tusayan development would include more than 2,100 housing units and 3 million square feet of retail space along with hotels, a spa and conference center. The proposal, by the Stilo Development Group, would transform the 580-resident community of Tusayan from a small, quiet tourist town into a sprawling complex of homes and strip malls. Groundwater pumping accompanying the development will also likely lower the aquifer that is the exclusive source of all water for Havasu Falls, the cultural foundation of the Havasupai tribe. The superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park has called the project one of the greatest threats to Grand Canyon in the 96-year history of the park.

Species Background
Macdougal’s yellowtops is a perennial yellow flower in the aster family that grows to be 3 feet tall with woody rootstalks. It occurs in five small populations in the western Grand Canyon between Granite Narrow and Lava Falls (river miles 135 to 177). It is found in hanging gardens or terrace ledges in perennial alkaline or saline seeps, in Muav Limestone and at Muav Limestone Bright Angel Shale interfaces from elevations of 1,750 feet to 4,000 feet. It is scientifically significant because it is different from all other yellowtops species and may be the only plant in its genus. Its Latin name is Flaveria macdougalii.

The Arizona wetsalts tiger beetle is half an inch long with a green back and an attractive dark-and-light, wavy wing pattern. It occurs sporadically in seeps and springs of the eastern basin of the inner Grand Canyon from Nankoweap Creek (River Mile 52) downstream to Stone Creek (River Mile 132). It is restricted to the banks of perennial streams that run over bedrock and cobble gravel at elevations between 600 feet and 1,230 feet. Ongoing genetic research indicates that it will likely be elevated from subspecies to species status. Tiger beetles are so named for their aggressive predatory behavior, strong mandibles and fast running speed. The Arizona wetsalts tiger beetle’s Latin name is Cicindela hemorrhagica arizonae.

The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 825,000 members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.

Finding Solutions for Wolves in the Great Lakes

There are just three wolves surviving at Isle Royale National Park, an island ecosystem and World Heritage site locked within Lake Superior in Michigan. That’s down from 50 some years ago, and the surviving three wolves show signs of inbreeding. Since the wolves have all but vanished from the island, the moose population has doubled, and an ecosystem that once had a strong balance of predator and prey has been thrown out of whack.

South of there, on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, there are approximately 600 wolves, and the state’s voters last November decided in overwhelming numbers on two referendum questions to maintain their protected status and to forbid the state Natural Resources Commission from declaring them a game species who can be hunted and trapped.

Still, though, there are some loud voices – a distinct minority given the landslide votes in favor of wolves – who want to kill wolves, scaremongering about their very infrequent killing of cattle and other farm animals, and trumping up charges against the wild canids.

The HSUS is determined to find a long-term solution to the debate. We’ve put forth two proposals -safeguarding the long-term viability of wolves at Isle Royale and on the Upper Peninsula while also protecting the interests of farmers concerned about wolves. We’ve won strong legislative support for them, including from dozens of U.S. Representatives and from U.S. Senator Gary Peters of Michigan.

First, we’ve suggested that some livestock-depredating wolves be captured and sent to Isle Royale. There are no farm animals there and no year-round human residents. There’s just a large moose population that threatens forest health. An augmented wolf population, infused with new genetic material, can help control moose numbers and also protect the forests.

We’ve also suggested that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service accept our petition to list the wolves as threatened in the entire Great Lakes Region – which includes Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. That policy would likely prevent any sport hunting or commercial trapping of wolves, while allowing state agencies to selectively remove wolves in the rare circumstance that they pose a threat to farm animals or human safety. This is the current policy in Minnesota, and it gives farmers and government officials more tools than they have now in Michigan and Wisconsin.

In a broader sense, it’s clear that wolves provide an enormous economic and ecological benefit to the Great Lakes region. People will trek to wolf-inhabited forests precisely because they are there, boosting tourism-related commerce. Wolves also limit deer and moose populations, depressing crop depredation and shrinking the number of collisions between these animals and cars. Through their killing of the weak, sick, and older deer and moose, beavers, and other animals, they have a broad, balancing, and beneficial impact on ecosystems.

We hope that the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service will accept our recommendations, which protect wolves and balance the tricky sociology of managing wolf populations in our era. These creatures, once brought to the brink of extinction, should be allowed to survive in the decades ahead and not have their packs ceaselessly battered by random and reckless killing by trophy hunters and commercial trappers. Fortunately for us, they stay away from people and help farmers and forests like no other large predator. We need to discard the myths about wolves and recognize their rightful place in the wild.

Wayne Pacelle|May 6, 2015

Wild & Weird

‘Bizarre’ bat-winged dinosaur discovered in China

Story highlights

• Scientists discover new dinosaur with bat-like wings
• However, it might not have been able to fly well
• It would have glided rather than flapped

(CNN)Chinese scientists say they have discovered a new dinosaur species, with bat-like wings, that sheds light on how dinosaurs may have evolved into birds.

Based on a fossil specimen discovered in China’s Hebei province a decade ago, scientists estimate the bird-like dinosaur existed for a very short time 160 million years ago during the Jurassic Period, according to a new paper published in scientific journal Nature on Wednesday.

The flying creature weighed about 230 grams and was 63 centimeters in length.

Xu Xing, a paleontologist with China’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, and lead author of the report, told CNN the dinosaur’s fossilized remains highlighted the complexity of evolution.

Named Yi qi, or “strange wing” in Chinese, Xu said it was one of the earliest dinosaurs to show some capacity for flight — even though it wasn’t very successful.

Unlike other bird-like dinosaurs, its wings were made from membranes — like a bat — rather than composed of feathers.

It didn’t become the birds we see today — it tried but failed.

‘Failed experiment’

“It’s a failed experiment, it’s an evolutionary dead end,” Xu said.

“Over the last 30 years, there were so many discoveries made that demonstrate birds are really descendants of dinosaurs,” he said.

“It’s a great example showing how dinosaurs evolved into birds.”

Artist reconstruction of dinosaur Yi qi.

Even though the dinosaur had wings, Xu said it’s unclear whether it could flap them and most likely moved through the air mostly by gliding.

He told CNN the fossil is now held in a museum in Shandong Province, and the next step would be trying to find more fossils of the same species to be able to better understand, for example, its flight capability.

Thanks to a robust economy, China has become a major center for dinosaur discovery and research.

“We have more funding for paleontological expeditions,” he said. “So now there are more expeditions in this country than 30 years ago, which means you can find more fossils.

Widespread construction work also helps to expose more rocks and fossils, he added.

Shen Lu and Katie Hunt|CNN|April 30, 2015

 

Puget Sound’s clingfish could inspire better medical devices, whale tags

It’s called the Northern clingfish, and its small, finger-sized body uses suction forces to hold up to 150 times its own body weight. These fish actually hold on better to rough surfaces than to smooth ones, putting to shame industrial suction devices that give way with the slightest uneven surface.

Researchers at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Laboratories on San Juan Island are studying this quirky little fish to understand how it can summon such massive suction power in wet, slimy environments. They are beginning to look at how the biomechanics of clingfish could be helpful in designing devices and instruments to be used in surgery and even to tag and track whales in the ocean.

Watch a Science Friday video about the Northern Clingfish

“Northern clingfish’s attachment abilities are very desirable for technical applications, and this fish can provide an excellent model for strongly and reversibly attaching to rough, fouled surfaces in wet environments,” said Petra Ditsche, a postdoctoral researcher with Adam Summers‘ team at Friday Harbor Labs.

Ditsche presented her research on the sticky benefits of clingfish last month in Nashville at the Adhesive and Sealant Council’s spring convention in a talk, “Bio-inspired suction attachment from the sea.”

Clingfish have a disc on their bellies that is key to how they can hold on with such tenacity. The rim of the disc is covered with layers of micro-sized, hair-like structures. This layered effect allows the fish to stick to surfaces with different amounts of roughness.

“Moreover, the whole disc is elastic and that enables it to adapt to a certain degree on the coarser sites,” Ditsche added.

Many marine animals can stick strongly to underwater surfaces – sea stars, mussels and anemones, to name a few – but few can release as fast as the clingfish, particularly after generating so much sticking power.

On land, lizards, beetles, spiders and ants also employ attachment forces to be able to move up walls and along the ceiling, despite the force of gravity. But unlike animals that live in the water, they don’t have to deal with changing currents and other flow dynamics that make it harder to grab on and maintain a tight grip. (Read a recent paper by Ditsche and Summers on the differences between adhesion in water and on land.)

Clingfish’s unique ability to hold with great force on wet, often slimy surfaces makes them particularly intriguing to study for biomedical applications. Imagine a bio-inspired device that could stick to organs or tissues without harming the patient.

“The ability to retract delicate tissues without clamping them is desirable in the field of laparoscopic surgery,” Summers said. “A clingfish-based suction cup could lead to a new way to manipulate organs in the gut cavity without risking puncture.”

Researchers are also interested in developing a tagging tool for whales that would allow a tag to noninvasively stick to the animal’s body instead of puncturing the skin with a dart, which is often used for longer-term tagging.

Ditsche, Summers and the UW graduate and undergraduate students who are studying the Northern clingfish have no shortage of specimens to choose from. This species is found in the coastal waters near Mexico all the way up to Southern Alaska. They often cling to the rocks near the shore, and at low tide the researchers can poke around in tide pools and turn over rocks to collect the fish. If they can unstick them, that is.

There are about 110 known species in the clingfish family found all over the world. The population around the San Juan Islands is robust and healthy.

Now that they have measured the strength of the suction on different surfaces, the researchers plan to look next at how long clingfish can stick to a surface. They also want to understand why bigger clingfish can stick better than smaller ones, and what implications that could have on developing materials based on their properties.

This research is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Seaver Foundation.

Michelle Ma|May 4, 2015

Everglades

Everglades Scores Big in House Appropriations Bill — But, Cross Your Fingers

The massive Energy and Water Appropriations bill for the next fiscal year, which passed the U.S. House 240-177 Friday, makes a big winner of the Florida Everglades. It earmarks $123 million for repair and restoration efforts within this national treasure, one of the largest wetlands in the world.

The spending plan even answers Gov. Rick Scott’s call for the federal government to move more quickly on shoring up the deteriorating Herbert Hoover Dike around Lake Okeechobee, by providing $64 million for the structure’s repair. It’s the dike’s poor condition — its risk of breaking — that necessitates the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ damaging releases into the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries during exceptionally rainy periods.

The problem is, the bill has significant hurdles to overcome for the appropriations to stay intact. Even if the Senate passes its version of the bill and is equally generous to the Everglades, President Obama has threatened to veto it. While he supports Everglades restoration — and made a point of saying so when he visited the national park on Earth Day — the legislation contains other provisions he particularly objects to, for example, funding cuts to alternative energy programs.

The fiscal year begins Oct. 1.

Florida Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart, founder and co-chair of the Congressional Everglades Caucus, said this about the bill’s passage in the House: “As Floridians, we are lucky to have the Everglades in our backyard, and we must do everything we can to restore it to its natural state for future generations. … As a member of the Appropriations Committee, I have worked tirelessly with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to include full funding to restore the Everglades in this legislation, and I am very pleased with its passage.”

Florida Congressman Tom Rooney, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said the bill will provide critical funding for Everglades restoration, water infrastructure, and energy security projects, while cutting red tape.

“This bill includes funding I requested for Everglades restoration and water infrastructure projects, which are critical to keeping Florida beautiful and maintaining our state’s economic growth,” Rooney said. “In addition to funding vital water and restoration projects in Florida, our bill will help ensure the safety of our nation’s nuclear stockpile, advance energy independence, cut red tape, and strengthen our infrastructure, while meeting strict spending caps to save taxpayer money.”

Freshman Florida Congressman Carlos Curbelo called the bill “a step in the right direction to ensuring that environmental cleanup and energy programs expand and thrive throughout the country.”

He said $10 million provided to an environmental infrastructure account will help the Florida Keys Water Quality Improvement Program and the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

Here’s a breakdown on some of the appropriations linked to Florida:

• $35.4 billion for the Army Corps of Engineers
• $64.1 million for Hoover Dike Seepage Control
• $9.5 million for Tampa Harbor operation and maintenance
• $2.75 million for the Okeechobee Waterway
• $123.7 million for South Florida Ecosystem Restoration
• $700,000 for Intracoastal Waterway operation and maintenance
• $400,000 for Manatee Harbor operation and maintenance

Nancy Smith|May 2, 2015

Diaz-Balart Successful in Fully Funding Everglades Restoration in FY16 Appropriations Bill

Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL), founder and co-chair of the Congressional Everglades Caucus and chair of the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations, released the following statement after the passage of H.R. 2028, the Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 2016:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – May 1, 2015 – (RealEstateRama) — Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL), founder and co-chair of the Congressional Everglades Caucus and chair of the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development Subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations, released the following statement after the passage of H.R. 2028, the Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 2016.

“The FY16 Energy and Water Appropriations bill provides for our nation’s waterways and energy infrastructure. As Floridians, we are lucky to have the Everglades in our backyard, and we must do everything we can to restore it to its natural state for future generations. This bill is significant to Florida, not only because of the Everglades restoration components, but it will improve our ports, channels, dams, and other infrastructure that supports our economy. Furthermore, Everglades restoration is critical for our drinking water supply in South Florida, while also providing a huge economic boost to our state. As a member of the Appropriations Committee, I have worked tirelessly with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to include full funding to restore the Everglades in this legislation, and I am very pleased with its passage.

“I am grateful to Chairman Simpson for his leadership on this bill, and most importantly, for helping continue the preservation of one of our nation’s greatest natural treasures.”

Diaz-Balart founded the Congressional Everglades Caucus in 2005 with Congressman Alcee Hastings to provide a strong voice in Washington to advocate for these issues and increase awareness. Within the FY16 Energy and Water Appropriations bill, the following are specific to South Florida:

$64 million for the Herbert Hoover Dike repair and restoration
$123 million for Everglades restoration and construction projects for the Army Corps of Engineers
$7 million for operation and maintenance of Army Corps of Engineers Projects

RealEstateRama|May 1, 2015

FINALLY, HERE’S ONE THING WE CAN ALL AGREE ON: HELPING THE EVERGLADES.

What is it about the Everglades that brings people together who can’t otherwise seem to agree on anything?

For example, you might not expect Democratic National Committee Chair and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to have much in common with Tea Party-backed Republican Congressman Curt Clawson. They have different views on immigration, health care, and what a responsible federal budget looks like. Yet they both spoke at the most recent Everglades Coalition Conference and both support Everglades restoration. Clawson even shared movingly in his State of the Union response that he originally got into politics in part to help preserve the Everglades, calling it “a real national treasure we must protect.”

Maybe it’s not such a surprise, then, that in a political climate where members of Congress engage in tense debates and crippling stand-offs over seemingly every dollar, funding for Everglades restoration projects have won wholehearted bipartisan support.

In February, President Obama released a Fiscal Year 2016 budget that would provide $240 million for Everglades restoration, an amount that’s significantly higher than it was a year ago. This money would fund on-the-ground restoration projects led by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, an important federal partner that accomplishes much of the planning, design, construction, and management of the restoration work. The money would also fund Department of the Interior initiatives, such as combatting invasive species like the infamous Burmese python.

We are optimistic that these projects will receive the requested funding in the coming year, despite other measures proposed in the president’s budget that will likely fail due to partisan wrangling. Here’s a look at some of the projects that this money would advance on the ground.

• C-111 South Dade: The C-111 South Dade project will provide a series of detention basins that hold water in places that need it, like Everglades National Park, instead of releasing it to places that don’t need it, like the agricultural and urban areas of Miami-Dade County. Ultimately it will allow more freshwater to flow south through Everglades National Park and Florida Bay.
• Biscayne Bay Coastal Wetlands: This project will rehydrate freshwater wetlands in Biscayne National Park by returning more freshwater to Biscayne Bay in a more natural pattern via a spreader canal system.
• Kissimmee River Restoration: A major restoration project that is very near completion, this project will restore more than 40 square miles of river-floodplain ecosystem, including almost 20,000 acres of wetlands and 44 miles of historic river channel.
• Picayune Strand Restoration: This project will restore wetlands in an 85-square-mile area that was originally slated for residential development located on the edge of Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve by removing canals and roads. Doing so will also restore important habitat for the endangered Florida panther.
• C-43 and C-44 Reservoirs: Building these two reservoirs and water treatment marshes will directly improve the health of the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries, respectively, by capturing and storing water from Lake Okeechobee and allowing harmful nutrients to filter out before being sent to the estuaries.

NPCA is now working with Congress to pass these budgetary measures so we can continue to build on the recent political momentum supporting the Everglades. Fortunately, this bipartisanship is nothing new. Democratic President Bill Clinton and Republican Governor Jeb Bush came together back in 2000 to sign the landmark legislation that made many of these projects possible in the first place, the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan.

That’s right: Even a Clinton and a Bush joined forces to celebrate-and fund-this unique and spectacular subtropical wetland.

It’s an investment that pays off. An economic study by Mather Economics found that for every dollar invested in Everglades restoration, more than four dollars are returned to the economy. Everglades restoration work also employs thousands of workers, while supporting a robust tourism economy. According to the National Park Service, in 2013 alone, Everglades and Biscayne National Parks and Big Cypress National Preserve created more than 2,670 jobs and generated approximately $202 million in visitor spending. Sustained funding for these restoration projects is critical for the ecosystem, economy, and water supply for nearly 8 million Americans.

So, what is it that brings people together to protect the Everglades? Perhaps, like many of America’s Great Waters, it captures our imagination or connects us to fond memories. Maybe it provides a loved one’s drinking water or employs a friend. In these ways, and many more, protecting the Everglades continues to be a bipartisan success story in these often politically divided times. And that should give us all hope for the future.

Sarah Barmeyer|Director of Conservation| National Parks Conservation Association

Picayune Strand Restoration Project Clears Another Hurdle

COLLIER COUNTY – The Florida Department of Environmental Protection has authorized the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) to continue the next phase of the Picayune Strand Restoration Project (PSRP), which will restore historic water flow and enhance wetlands in the western Everglades.

The PSRP is a project component of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, commonly called CERP. Once completed, the PSRP will reestablish historic water flows, reduce unnatural freshwater inflows, improve the water quality of coastal estuaries and restore ecological connectivity in the area.

“This project exemplifies the department’s dedication to protecting Florida’s Everglades and the larger south Florida ecosystem,” said DEP Deputy Secretary for Ecosystem Restoration Drew Bartlett. “The department will continue to work closely with our state and federal partners to ensure that Everglades restoration continues.”

This next phase of the PSRP – the Manatee Mitigation Feature – is essential for completion of future PSRP efforts. Located on Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve lands, this phase will create a connection to warm groundwater by constructing a small oxbow lake on the western edge of the Faka Union Canal that will provide a warm water refuge that can support over 200 manatees. Manatees seek out warm water in this area during the colder months of the year, and this refuge will be important as freshwater flows into the Port of Islands Basin are reduced when the Faka Union and Miller canals are plugged in a subsequent phase of the PSRP.

“Each phase of the PSRP is an important step toward reconnecting the Everglades ecosystem,” said Blake Guillory, executive director of the SFWMD. “Restoration of Picayune Strand will provide significant environmental benefits, including replenishment of the state’s water supplies and added protection against saltwater intrusion.”

PSRP aims to reverse the effects of a failed residential development that partially drained the area during the 1960s. By plugging 48 miles of canals, which will include the Faka Union and Miller canals, and removing 250 miles of crumbling roads, the project will remove water blockages and restore flow to 55,000 acres of Picayune Strand. As a result, restored wetlands will create essential habitat for a variety of natural vegetation and wildlife, including the endangered Florida panther.

PSRP is a coordinated effort between many agencies including the United States Army Corps of Engineers, SFWMD, Florida Forest Service, the Department’s Office of Ecosystem Projects, Florida Coastal Office, Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, and Division of State Lands, as well as United States Fish and Wildlife Service and Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

For more information about the Picayune Strand Restoration Project, click here. 

Water district to rebuff U.S. Sugar land deal…again

The governing board of the South Florida Water Management District will take another swing at explaining why it is against the U.S. Sugar land deal at its monthly meeting on May 14.

The controversial land deal will be the first item addressed during the discussion portion of the meeting at the district’s West Palm Beach headquarters, according to the agenda released Thursday.

The dispute over the land deal stems from the 2010 contract the district signed with U.S. Sugar to purchase 26,800 acres for Everglades. Under terms of the contract, the district paid $197 million for the land and options to purchase additional land in the future.

One option, set to expire on Oct. 11, enables the district to purchase another 46,800 acres at market value, estimated to be at least $500 million.

Environmentalists, riled up by the Everglades Foundation, want the district to purchase the land to store water south of Lake Okeechobee. Costumed protesters have attended the board’s meeting in March and April.

Although the district laid out a litany of reasons against the deal at its April meeting, it did not definitively say it would not buy the land. U.S. Sugar, which is obligated to sell the land if the district wants it, does not want to sell the land on which they grow sugarcane.

Water managers said at the meeting next week they will explain constraints in the 2010 contract that would only allow the district to use 11,100 acres of the 46,800 acres until 2030.

Christine Stapleton|May 7, 2015

Water Quality Issues

Sierra Club seeks federal protection for Florida’s aquifer

Florida’s aquifer needs special protection from being over-pumped, the Sierra Club contends in a petition sent to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The club’s Florida chapter has filed the petition asking the EPA to declare it a “sole source aquifer,” a tool to protect drinking water supplies in areas where there are few or no alternative sources. Such a declaration, carried out only after a public hearing, would require the federal government to give it greater protection and also offer grants and other financial assistance for avoiding pollution. The aquifer, which is the primary source of water for Florida’s 19 million residents, is “threatened by …over-pumping, pollution and waste,” said Tom Larson, Sierra Club Florida chapter conservation chair.

Following EPA’s technical review of a SSA petition, the Agency summarizes the information in a technical support document that is made available for public review. Then, interested people may provide written comments to EPA or participate in an EPA-sponsored public hearing before a designation decision is made.

SSA designation will provide limited federal protection for the Floridan Aquifer System, increase public awareness of its vulnerability and is a critical first step towards creating new management plans by federal, state and local officials.

Twenty million Floridians depend on safe, pure water from the Floridan aquifer. Agriculture and industry require clean, abundant water. Florida’s waters attract and sustain 100 million visitors to our state each year. Yet, we continue to deplete, pollute and waste our water as if it is an inexhaustible and indestructible resource. It is neither inexhaustible nor indestructible.

“Protection of Florida’s vital water resources is one of the highest priorities of Sierra Club Florida. We are pledged to protect critical recharge areas from development, curtail nutrient pollution, encourage conservation and hold accountable those who abuse this most essential of all public properties. The newest threat to our water supply is ‘fracking’, which we will continue to oppose vigorously,” said Larson.

He added, “The Sierra Club is confident that the Floridan Aquifer System qualifies both quantitatively and qualitatively for greater protection and will soon be granted Sole Source Aquifer status. And we look forward to building on this new protection with better water management policies, including an end to polluting ‘enhanced oil/gas recovery techniques’ (which include acidizing and fracking) and waste disposal and aquifer storage & recharge injection wells that threaten the delicate Floridan karst geology and our water supply.”

Times staff|Tampa Bay Times|May 5, 2015

Great Lakes & Inland Waters

Oregon’s Lost Lake Is Disappearing Through a Strange Hole

Bye bye, lake. Where it’s going, nobody knows for sure.

Just off U.S. Highway 20 in Central Oregon there is a lake with a curious fate. Every winter the aptly-named Lost Lake fills up, before slowly draining through a hole, drying up and making way for a meadow.

The hole has been there as long as anyone can remember, Jude McHugh, spokeswoman with the Willamette National Forest, told The Bulletin. And while the hole may appear to be one of those oddest of mysteries that nobody can quite figure out, the explanation is rather simple. The volcanic landscape of the area gives way to a number of quirky geologic traits – the one responsible for swallowing the lake is a lava tube. The tunnel-like structure is formed when flowing lava hardens near the surface but continues to flow downwards, and the inner lava escapes before hardening. The result, a tube that opens to the surface and leads to the mysterious depths below.

McHugh says it’s unclear exactly where the water goes, but it possibly seeps into the porous subsurface underground, refilling the expansive aquifer that feeds springs on both sides of the Cascades.

McHugh said there have been numerous attempts – unauthorized and discouraged – to plug the leak, so to speak. Over the years, workers from the U.S. Forest Service have found car parts, engines and other debris in the hole. Success in those endeavors, however, would only lead to local flooding as the area has been planned with the fickle nature of the ever-disappearing lake in mind.

“If anyone was ever successful at plugging it, which we’re not sure they could do, it would just result in the lake flooding, and the road. It’s an important part of how the road was designed,” she said.

Watch the ground swallowing Lost Lake .

Melissa Breyer|TreeHugger|May 4, 2015

The World’s 15 Most Beautiful Waterfalls

Offshore & Ocean

The closure of Shell Key’s northern pass worries environmentalists

A few decades ago this uninhabited island at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico was little more than a small crescent of sand and mangroves with a tiny spit of land to its south.

Today the south Pinellas County barrier island known as Shell Key Preserve stretches 2.6 miles and occupies 1,800 acres of beach, mangroves, sea grass beds and sand flats.

After years of storms, tides and even dredging to keep Shell Key separated from the community of Tierra Verde, a small channel on the island’s north side appears finally to have closed off, creating a sandy wall that seals the estuary on its back side from the Gulf.

This sort of thing can happen when man doesn’t interfere with the natural shifting of sands on these ever-changing coastal islands. But the speed with which Shell Key has transformed worries one of the area’s leading environmental groups, Tampa Bay Watch.

“This used to be a major pass, hundreds of yards across,” said Peter Clark, president of the organization headquartered nearby in Tierra Verde.

Now that the pass has closed, there’s no water washing back and forth from the Gulf into the shallow, sensitive habitat to the south — let alone access for boaters.

“It’s kind of like the bathtub effect: Water will slosh up and down the northern side of the preserve, but it can’t be exchanged with water from the Gulf or Tampa Bay. That water becomes stagnant; it becomes superheated, which can kill sea grass beds. It may also allow for larger algae blooms,” Clark said.

While county officials have yet to perform a comprehensive study of what’s happening at Shell Key, Clark has a theory about what has caused the particularly rapid accumulation of sand here: hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of sand pumped every few years onto the eroding beach just north of the preserve at Pass-A-Grille.

Beach nourishment has been rebuilding Pass-A-Grille Beach, at the southern end of St. Pete Beach, since the 1980s, a critical measure to protect the historic beach community from Gulf storm surge.

“A lot of the sand is probably moving its way south and that’s what’s been accumulating on Shell Key, making the barrier island much, much bigger and eventually clogging the pass and filling it in,” Clark said.

Near the mouth of Bunces Pass, a channel that separates Shell Key’s south end from Fort De Soto Park’s north beach, another large deposit of sand has formed in recent years, creating a huge offshore sandbar even as sections of the park itself have eroded severely.

Sand along Central Florida’s Gulf coast tends to shift over time from north to south, but Pinellas officials can’t say for sure whether all the sand that has ended up on Shell Key or off Fort De Soto’s shores has come from Pass-A-Grille.

When funding is available, the county’s Natural Resources Division plans to study both the Bunces Pass inlet and Pass-A-Grille Channel, which is just north of Shell Key, between Pass-A-Grille and Tierra Verde.

The goal is to assess the effect of these two channels on the long-term movement of sand in the immediate area and also to gauge why Shell Key has grown so much while parts of Fort De Soto have shrunk.

“That might give us some idea why that’s filling in and what might be the future of it,” said Andy Squires, the county’s manager of coastal and freshwater resources.

The county also has alerted the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, which manages beach nourishment projects, about people’s concerns about the Shell Key pass closure.

For the time being, though, it is unclear whether the change at Shell Key is simply a natural phenomenon.

Several efforts have been made in the past to keep a channel open between northern Clearwater Beach and undeveloped Caladesi Island State Park, an island about the same size as Shell Key, but natural forces keep closing it back up.

“That’s what these barrier islands do, they migrate. Shell Key was barely anything. That whole island in the last two decades has changed significantly and grown,” Squires said.

“There’s an evolution of these barrier islands.”

Local recreational boaters have seen that evolution happening from one year to the next along Pinellas County’s southern coastline.

“It ebbs and flows. A couple years ago there was a sandbar out in front of Shell Key. Now there’s a big sand bar to the west of Fort De Soto. It is constantly changing,” said Bill Knepper, a boater and resident of the nearby Vina Del Mar community.

He has seen large boats navigate Shell Key passage but, at other times, a jet ski hardly could squeeze through it.

While much of the change may be natural, Knepper said he does have concerns about the pass being stopped up.

“Once that water gets stagnant, then everything back there dies,” he said.

Tampa Bay Watch plans to ask the Pinellas County Commission to begin monitoring water quality in the Shell Key estuary to determine how detrimental the closure is to the environment there, Clark said.

In addition to stagnating water that could kill off sea grass beds, Clark also worries about raccoons, coyotes and other predators gaining access to the island to prey on nesting birds and their eggs.

The next time the Army Corps is scheduled to nourish Pass-A-Grille, Clark’s group will urge it to consider dredging sand from the north end of Shell Key and redistributing it at the beach.

A smaller-scale effort a few years ago to dredge the channel by private developers in Tierra Verde did little to deter the flow of sand.

Pinellas officials would have to seriously consider how much good dredging would do in the long run, says Paul Cozzie, director of the county’s parks and conservation resources department.

“The real question is how successful would any dredging be or is this something that’s going to have to be continually done and, in that case, who should be paying for it?” Cozzie said.

Dredging for beach nourishment projects is funded primarily with federal dollars combined with matching state and local money, but the Army Corps and contractors determine where sand will be collected.

The larger solution may prove complicated, especially on a natural preserve that is meant to remain untouched by human intervention, he said.

“Sand is going to go where it wants to go and it is a preserve, so we’re not going to use really any artificial means,” Cozzie said.

JOSH BOATWRIGHT|Tribune staff|May 3, 2015  

Lessons From History on Ocean Acidification

Part of my job involves fielding worried emails and phone calls about alarming-sounding science news, especially when it relates to ocean acidification. Recently a study in Science made a big splash, generating headlines like “Ocean acidification caused the largest mass extinction ever” and “Acidic oceans helped fuel extinction.” And those are some of the calmer headlines. Naturally, people are saying, “This is scary stuff! Are we going to see the same thing?” Let’s take a look.

When studying major global changes like warming, ocean acidification, or ocean oxygen loss, scientists often look back in the geological record to see what happened when Earth experienced similar conditions before. That helps scientists put global change in the proper perspective.

In past geological ages when volcanic activity has been high, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen and dramatically changed the Earth’s climate and ocean chemistry. Last week’s Science study focuses on one of these periods—the Permo-Triassic (P-T) boundary. It’s one of the most “rapid” releases of volcanic carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, taking 60,000 years. As slow as that seems, it’s fast for the Earth—60,000 years out of a 4.5 billion year old planet’s life is like half a day of a 100-year-old person’s life. All this volcanic carbon dioxide drove rapid ocean acidification towards the end of the P-T boundary, and a major extinction of ocean life followed. Marine life with calcified shells and skeletons, like corals, shellfish and calcifying algae, were pretty much wiped out.

This science study offers insight into what extreme, unchecked ocean acidification could look like. The rate of carbon dioxide release to the atmosphere that drove acidification during the P-T boundary was about the same as today’s. However, the P-T boundary isn’t exactly like today. The total amount of carbon released then was nearly five times as large as ALL the fossil fuel reserves on Earth. Also, ocean pH dropped by up to 0.7 pH units during the P-T boundary, but ocean pH has only decreased today by 0.1 units, with another 0.2-0.3 units expected by 2100. Most scientists agree we probably won’t see wholesale extinction of shelled animals and corals from today’s ocean acidification. But if we even just put a dent in marine populations over mere moments of the Earth’s life, that’s pretty scary. To the Earth, the 200 years we’ve been emitting carbon dioxide is like two minutes of a 100-year-old’s life.  We’ve made huge changes to the ocean in a small amount of time.

What are our options? To avoid repeating geological history, mankind needs to cut carbon dioxide emissions swiftly and decisively. Nations are pledging to do this in preparation for this year’s United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP 21) meeting. Researchers are exploring how to do this in ways that will lead to overall socioeconomic benefits in the short and long terms. Some programs, like the long-running U.S. Energy Star program, have already shown that citizens can benefit financially while saving energy. Meanwhile, local and regional governments are seeking ways to cut their own carbon dioxide emissions. Maine and Maryland have recently called for reductions in carbon emissions as one of several steps they’ll take to combat ocean acidification, echoing Washington State’s resolve. West Coast states and British Columbia are working on this collaboratively. At the same time, businesspeople are finding ways to adapt to, or stave off, some of the worst effects of ocean acidification. But since humans depend on marine life of all types, calcified or not, protecting creatures in the ocean is actually in our own self-interest. Formally committing to cut our carbon dioxide emissions, which every country can do at this year’s COP 21 meeting, is a big but needed next step to protect the oceans and ourselves.

Sarah Cooley|April 29, 2015

Slowly Sinking Blue Whales Are in Trouble, Says New Stanford Study

There’s no doubt that blue whales are beautiful. And their size has helped them evolve to dominate the ocean without predators. But a new study from Stanford reveals that we’re putting our beloved blue whales in deep trouble.

Slowly Sinking Whales

Blue whales never faced a serious threat… until large cargo ships started moving through their territory. In response, whales have learned to move out of the way — although perhaps not fast enough. Rather than diving quickly down to escape the cargo ships, whales just sink down.

As you’d imagine, sinking isn’t very fast. Jeremy Goldbogen, the principal author of the Stanford study, describes it this way: “Instead of diving, where the animal kicks tail up and goes down vertically, they just sink horizontally. This results in a slow dive and leaves them susceptible to ship strikes.”

Collisions Kill and Injure Whales

Like other cetaceans, blue whales are vulnerable to these collisions with ships and vessels. According to Whales and Dolphin Conservation (WDC), these collisions often go unreported. Some vessels are too large to notice that a whale has been hit. Sometimes death is instant. In fact, “up to one third of whales found dead display signs of having died due to a collision with a boat or ship,” according to WDC. The organization Wild Whales says that necropsies of whales have revealed injuries “consistent with high impact blunt force trauma, such as skull fractures.”

Other times, death can occur years down the line from injuries of these boat traffic accidents. Blue whales, humpback whales and North Atlantic right whales are the most vulnerable. Although, researchers are seeing more dolphins with scars and injuries from vessels. Either way, the whales’ social groups are compromised by these deaths.

And humans aren’t in the clear. During whale watching trips, many of these whale-ship collisions injure and kill people, too.

Too Many Close Calls

Some vessels are trying to protect the whales. Wild Whales recommends that ships slow down to “less than 7 knots within 400 m of whales,” especially if they are entering whale hotspots. The whales can’t always sense where a ship is. In other cases, entire shipping channels have been rerouted.

But we need to do more. This new Stanford study can only help us do more because it’s the first study of its kind that provides “direct knowledge of how whales behave once they sense an oncoming ship.”

Some whales will sink-dive after “playing dead,” which doesn’t work. The researchers observed many close calls — the ships missed the whales by a hair:

A whale must dive 30 meters below the surface to escape the suction created by a ship’s propeller. In the study, the whales sank at about a half a meter per second and showed no evidence for swimming laterally to avoid the ship. In most cases, this was barely fast enough to get out of the ship’s way.

Why We Can’t Lose Our Whales

Unfortunately, blue whales have more threats to dodge. Commercial whaling in the past decimated blue whale numbers. Today, like other endangered marine life, blue whales are threatened by climate change, toxins and a loss of habitat. Apart from invasive ships passing through their homes, blue whales can also get caught in fishing gear. And other research suggests that krill — the primary food source of many whales — is at risk via climate change; as our waters get warmer, our whales could go hungrier.

We can’t lose our whales. They stabilize our oceans by keeping populations in check. Blue whales eat 40 million krill every single day! Even whale poop is valuable; the poop can draw in carbon from the atmosphere, so our air is healthier, says Whale Facts.

The ocean is their home, and we need to respect that. Wild Whales has an excellent resource of wise whale watching guidelines that will keep both whales and humans safe.

Jessica Ramos|May 8, 2015

Forestry

The Oregon double-cross

In the movies, they call it a double-cross. In Salem it’s called politics.

It was only a few months ago we heard good news: the State Land Board declared the Elliott State Forest would not be sold off to logging interests. But now the privatization plan is back, in the form of House Bill 3533.  This bill legalizes the sale and privatization of public Elliott State Forest lands.  Worse, HB 3533 may have the blessing of Gov. Kate Brown and the Department of State Lands – the same people who told Oregonians that selling the Elliott to be clearcut was off the table last December.

Between 20 and 30% of endangered Oregon coastal Coho salmon originate in the Elliott State Forest. Their recovery is endangered by the aggressive logging practices.

Oregon’s 93,000 acre Elliott State Forest is a precious resource. It’s home to pristine salmon streams, vast tracts of old, carbon-storing forests, and threatened wildlife habitat. The State Land Board – Kate Brown, Treasurer Ted Wheeler, and then-Governor John Kitzhaber – recognized this last December when they considered a number of plans on the future of the Elliott. Rather than selling off the forest to timber interests who had enthusiastically announced plans to aggressively clearcut it, the Board endorsed a number of proposals that would help keep the land in public ownership.

Legislation to protect the Elliott was moving through the state legislature, but was killed by Rep. Caddy McKeown and logging interests. Now the only legislation on the Elliott is a bill that would allow the state the sell off any part of the Elliott, at any time! 

Last December, Governor Brown and members of the Oregon Land Board told Oregonians the Elliott State Forest, with its century old trees and key salmon bearing rivers, would be protected, not privatized.  Join us in fighting to keep Oregon’s public lands public!

Help us keep the Elliott from being sold off and clearcut!

Steve Pedery|Conservation Director|Oregon Wild

Global Warming and Climate Change
Carbon dioxide levels rise to ‘milestone’

Worldwide atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide — the gas scientists say is most responsible for global warming — surpassed 400 parts per million for the month of March, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Wednesday.

Though there have been readings this high before, this is the first time global concentrations of the CO2 gas have averaged 400 ppm for an entire month. Measurements of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere began in the late 1950s.

“It was only a matter of time that we would average 400 parts per million globally,” said Pieter Tans, lead scientist of the NOAA’s Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network. “Reaching 400 parts per million as a global average is a significant milestone.” The burning of the oil, gas and coal that provides the energy for our world releases “greenhouse” gases such as CO2 and methane.

These extra gases have caused Earth’s temperature to rise over the past century to levels that cannot be explained by natural variability.

USA TODAY|5/6/15

Pope Francis: ‘If We Destroy Creation, Creation Will Destroy Us’

A declaration at the end of a meeting in Rome hosted by the Vatican made a plea to the world’s religions to engage and mobilize on the issue of climate change.

“Human-induced climate change is a scientific reality, and its decisive mitigation is a moral and religious imperative for humanity,” the declaration said. “In this core moral space, the world’s religions play a very vital role.”

Vatican watchers and climate experts say the meeting, “The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Development,” shows that Pope Francis is—in marked contrast to his predecessors—keen for the Catholic church to be more involved in the climate change issue, and is also urging other religions to become more actively engaged.

The meeting was organized by various religious and non-religious organizations, including the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the UN-affiliated body, the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary-General, also spoke at the one-day conference.

Fundamental principles

In a few weeks’ time, the Pope is due to release an encyclical on climate change—within the Catholic church, a statement of fundamental principles. He has also made several impassioned speeches on the issue.

“If we destroy Creation, Creation will destroy us,” the Pope told a gathering of thousands in St Peter’s Square, Rome, last month. “Never forget this.”

Groups that insist that climate change is not a threat, and that seek to oppose the findings of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other scientific bodies, have been quick to criticize the Pope’s stand.

Members of the Heartland Institute, a U.S.-based organization funded by billionaire industrialists and others who deny climate change is caused by human activity, travelled to Rome to speak against the meeting.

“The Pope has great moral authority, but he’s not an authority on climate science,” a Heartland employee told the UK newspaper, the Daily Telegraph.

“The Pope would make a grave mistake if he put his moral authority behind scientists saying that climate change is a threat to the world.”

Selling investments

Separately, the Church of England announced that it is selling various investments in fossil fuel industries. The Church said £12 million worth of investments in companies making 10 percent or more of their revenues from the production of coal or oil from tar sands would be sold.

The Church of England is not selling all its investments in fossil fuel operations, but says it wants to influence companies that contribute to global greenhouse gas emissions. The Church recently called on two major oil companies, BP and Shell, to be more transparent about their policies on climate change.

“The Church has a moral responsibility to speak and act on both environmental stewardship and justice for the world’s poor, who are most vulnerable to climate change” says Professor Richard Burridge, of the Church’s Ethical Investment Advisory Group.

Kieran Cooke|Climate News Network|May 6, 2015

We Could Lose 1 in 6 Species Because of Climate Change

If we continue to warm our planet through releasing greenhouse gases, our wildlife could pay a huge price.

Every degree the temperature rises will speed up the rate of extinction, according to a new study published in Science. Mark Urban, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut, examined 131 previously published papers covering how climate change will affect species extinctions to paint a picture of what will happen across the globe.

“We can look across all the studies and use the wisdom of many scientists,” said Urban. “When we put it all together we can account for the uncertainty in each approach, and look for common patterns and understand how the moderators in each type of study affect outcomes.”

By his calculations, 2.8 percent of species are currently predicted to become extinct from climate change. An increase in 2 degrees Celsius brings the risk up to 5.2 percent. One degree higher, and the risk increases to 8.5 percent.

According to Urban, if we continue to follow our current, business-as-usual trajectory which is expected to bring rise of 4.3 degrees, climate change will threaten one in six species – bringing a 16 percent extinction rate.

The risk changes around the world depending on habitats. North America was found to have the lowest risk, with a 5 percent loss, along with Europe, which is expected to lose 6 percent. South America, on the other hand could lose 23 percent of its wildlife. Australia and New Zealand were also found to be at high risk, both with 14 percent predicted loss, because limited space will stop species from being able to potentially find new homes as their habitats are altered.

We’ve continued to look at charismatic species like polar bears who are being impacted by a changing world, but so many others live in limited habitats and they won’t be able cope with, or adapt to, warmer climates.

In the West, the American pika, a small relative of the rabbit, is well adapted to survive in cold climates, but their populations are already disappearing as temperatures rise and alter their habitat. Some may move to higher altitudes, but others will be unable to relocate. The current threat to their future survival has led to calls for protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Even if all species aren’t driven to extinction, the loss of some could have serious consequences for others, changing their distribution and behavior, and for ecosystems as a whole. Urban points out that other areas rich in biodiversity may face a higher extinction risk, but not enough is known yet and more studies are needed to help determine where the most protection is needed.

“It’s hard enough to predict change, but in the end, we have one climate to contend with,” said Urban. “With living things, we are dealing with millions of species, none of which act precisely the same. In fact, we may be surprised, as indirect biologic risks that are not even recognized at present may turn out to have a greater impact than we’ve ever anticipated.”

Urban and others hope this new study will lead to immediate action to limit carbon emissions and prevent the tragic loss of the planet’s wildlife.

Alicia Graef|May 5, 2015

Climate change will force Florida’s local governments to act

Climate change is already forcing parts of the Sunshine State to adapt or sink, and rising sea levels are expected to impact everything from insurance rates to racial relations as Southwest Florida feels more of the ecological sting.

Those were some of the sentiments from more than 100 scientists, politicians and lawyers that gathered at Florida Gulf Coast University Thursday for the Southwest Florida Sea Level Rise Summit.

Wetter wet seasons, drier dry seasons, record heat and cold, cities migrating inland, loss of drinking water well fields and extreme storms are coming, many of the speakers said. Similar conditions were described for Southwest Florida in the Third National Climate Assessment from President Barack Obama’s administration.

“It’s a wake up and smell the coffee because the law just may require you to (take action),” said attorney Erin Deady. “(Some) local governments aren’t sitting and waiting for binding targets or regulatory standards. They’re taking initiatives for themselves. It’s happening all over Florida and all over the United States.”

Better water management practices and building on higher, drier ground are a priority for this region, said Southwest Florida Regional Planning Council climate expert Jim Beever.

He said there are only benefits to having cleaner water and air, better infrastructure and long-term planning for a much different future.

“These are all good things that we should have done in the first place,” Beever said. “You want (proactive climate change planning) in your building codes. You want it in your existing inspections. You want it in your health departments, because quite frankly disease is one of the things we’re going to see more of regarding climate change.”

The frequency and duration of red tides and algal blooms will increase because of overall hotter weather. But the weather in 2050 and beyond won’t just be hot all the time. There will be colder cold fronts and more active hurricane seasons to go along with the higher average temperatures.

Punta Gorda is one of the most well-prepared cities in the world when it comes to sea level rise and climate change, according to the National Climate Assessment. Beever helped city planners develop priorities for dealing with rising sea levels and climate change.

He compared cities like New Orleans, where the water is blocked with water management structures and pumps used to drain the land, to Galveston, Texas, which is essentially using fill dirt and other substrates to raise the city.

Punta Gorda considered relocation, filling the estuaries with sand and allowing the mangroves and other vegetation to move with sea level rise and simply letting the town flood.

The city is planning to build up and protect historic areas while leaving natural shoreline to help protect the city from storms and higher sea levels.

Punta Gorda’s lofty climate change status was only possible because the community agreed to address issues like regular flooding, heavier rainfall events, and a changing landscape.

“Here we have a community that is dominantly Republican agreeing that there is climate change,” Beever said. “Sea level rise, it’s a problem to adapt and we need to adapt to and we’re going to adapt and live in a better way.”

Florida’s transient demographic probably doesn’t help with public perception, which drives most sea level adaptations here.

“If you’ve not been there for 10 years you don’t know that your community isn’t supposed to look like this,” said Jennifer Jurado, Broward County’s top environmental and resiliency planner.

Jurado encouraged municipalities, corporations and everyday individuals to use aggregated planning resources online and to take advantage of federal government tools like the National Climate Assessment.

President Obama recently spoke about these issues at Everglades National Park.

“We have an opportunity to participate in that (federal) task force,” Jurado said. “It’s about having an opportunity to have your community directly participate in the conversation.”

Deady, the attorney, said laws like the Endangered Species Act and Clean Water Act provide the basis for determining at-fault parties during environmental suits.

She referenced a case in which an island off Alaska sued the energy industry, saying it was responsible for sea level rise and the abandonment of the island.

“The energy industry turned to the insurance carrier and said ‘well, you’ve got to cover us under general commercial liability.’ ” Deady said. “And the insurance company said (no). This was not an occurrence, an accident like the BP spill. ‘You knew you what you were doing was inherently dangerous because you were emitting greenhouse gases.’ ”

The latest court ruling, Deady said, sides with the islanders.

Another case she spoke of involved property owners in New Orleans area suing the Army Corps of Engineers for not keeping the water control structure in proper working order. The most recent ruling said the Corps failure to maintain the levee resulted in the taking of property.

The Corps also maintains the Herbert Hoover Dike surrounding Lake Okeechobee. The dike and drainage canal systems are all that prevent the lake from spilling onto millions of acres of farm land and wilderness and flooding millions of homes.

Just who is responsible for these and other concerns will play out in court, she said.

“If you don’t implement the plans people are going to submit insurance claims because of the increased flooding and the harm,” Deady said. “This case will start to show what the obligations of the water drainage district are.”

In some places such as North Florida, a migration will occur to urbanized areas farther inland, and some fear minorities will be forced out of those prized locations. What are now impoverished areas or agriculture fields could become new homes to moving cities, Deady said.

Beach renourishment projects could impacts on other areas of the coast, which would pit Florida towns and counties against each other. Lack of planning for such an event could be costly down the road, Deady said.

“The law is going to require you (government agencies) to do it anyway,” she explained. “You can do it willingly or you can do it screaming all the way to the bank. It’s going to happen.”

CHAD GILLIS|May 7, 2015

Extreme Weather

Epic Drought Brings Fear of Worst Wildfire Season Yet

The firefighters are primed, hoses at the ready. May and June are often the peak months for forest fires in the southwest of the U.S., and the outlook for this year is grim.

“I wish I could have some hope,” says Dr Wally Covington, director of the Ecological Restoration Institute at North Arizona University. “It’s just a terrible situation in southern California.”

Covington, an internationally recognized expert on forest restoration, says a prolonged drought, higher temperatures and stronger than usual winds mean big wildfires are inevitable across the southwestern U.S.

The main season for wildfires in the region has in the past been from mid-May through till late September, but now forest fires burn virtually year round.

Vulnerable landscape

“Climate change and misguided forestry policies have combined to present a landscape very vulnerable to devastating fires,” Covington told the Climate News Network.

“Since around 2000, we’ve seen more severe dry weather, matched with high winds throughout the western U.S. Intense firestorms are the result. Get in the vicinity of one of those and it’s like being near a blast furnace.”

Covington and other experts say it is vital that people and government policy adapt to the changes in climate.

Over the years, forests have been densely planted in many areas, and old forestry practices—such as clearing out forest and shrub -land by regularly burning off old tree cover and dry shrubs—were stopped.

The result is not only an abundance of dense forested areas where fire can build up and spread easily, but also accumulations of dried-out grasses and shrubs—referred to as fine fuel.

Opening up forest areas and reintroducing controlled, periodic burning to rid the landscape of these tinder-dry fuels is key, according to Covington.

He says: “The U.S. Forest Service now sees opening up forest areas and restoring them to what they once were—right across the U.S.—as its primary goal. That’s a huge policy breakthrough.”

The past three years have been among the driest on record in California, and there are fears that the drought will continue.

Historic low

Wells have dried up in many areas, reservoirs in the state are at a record low, and the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountain range—vital for feeding water on to the lands below—is at an historic low for the time of year.

For the first time in California’s history, mandatory water restrictions have been brought in, with cities and towns required to cut water use by 25 percent.

This does not, however, apply to the state’s multi-billion dollar agricultural industry, which uses up to 80 percent of water supplies.

Besides the drought, strong winds and higher temperatures, other factors have increased the risk of wildfires across the region. For example, building houses in forest and shrub-land areas has also increased the danger of fires being ignited.

“We’ve just got to stop building in those places,” Covington says. “It was crazy 40 years ago—and it’s even more crazy now.”

Kieran Cooke|Climate News Network|May 4, 2015

NWCC’s interactive map now displays current conditions

Genetically Modified Organisms

Judge Says Vermont Law on Genetically Modified Food Stands

A Vermont law that could make the state the first in the country to require labeling of genetically modified food has been allowed by a federal judge to stand for now despite opposition by food industry groups.

U.S. District Court Judge Christina Reiss in Burlington on Monday ruled against the Grocery Manufacturers’ Association and other industry groups in their request for a preliminary order to block the law from going into effect as scheduled on July 1, 2016.

The judge partially granted and partially denied the state’s motion to dismiss the industry lawsuit, meaning the case is likely to go to trial.

Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell, whose office finalized rules to implement the law on April 17, said in an interview, “There’s a lot of good news in this decision for us and for the heart and soul of the labeling law.”

The Grocery Manufacturers Association said it was pleased the court “found us likely to succeed on several of our claims” but was disappointed at the denial of its request for a preliminary injunction.

“Manufacturers are being harmed, and they are being harmed now,” the association said in a statement. “Act 120 is unconstitutional and imposes burdensome new speech requirements on food manufacturers and retailers.”

The ruling comes nearly a year after Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin signed the law, under which Vermont is expected to become the first state to require genetically modified organism, or GMO, food labeling. Connecticut and Maine passed laws earlier but required that neighboring states follow suit before they would take effect.

The Grocery Manufacturers Association was joined by the Snack Foods Association, the International Dairy Foods Association and the National Association of Manufacturers as plaintiffs in the lawsuit, seeking to have Vermont’s law declared unconstitutional.

Throughout the legislative and legal debate on GMO labeling, industry groups have argued that the First Amendment gives them broad discretion about what to include on their labels and that there’s no compelling state interest to offset that.

Supporters of the law have included consumer and environmental groups. Muslims and some Jews avoid pork, and concerns have been raised about pork genes being introduced into other foods.

The judge found that the concerns embedded in Vermont’s law were well within the state’s purview.

“The safety of food products, the protection of the environment, and the accommodation of religious beliefs and practices are all quintessential governmental interests, as is the State’s desire ‘to promote informed consumer decision-making,’” she wrote, quoting from the state’s court filings.

The court dismissed the industry groups’ request that it apply a legal standard of strict scrutiny to the free-speech issues in the case, making it easier at trial for the state to rebut the companies’ First Amendment claims. It also dismissed the plaintiffs’ request that the law be found to violate the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Conversely, Sorrell said the court made it clear the state would face “an uphill battle” in defending a ban in the law on food companies labeling genetically modified food as “natural.”

Dave Gram|Associated Press|April 27, 2015

The Bullies Are Escalating

For nearly two decades, Monsanto and the Biotech Bullies have bullied their way to taking over the U.S. agriculture system with one aim in mind: sell more toxic chemicals. Apart from a small minority, consumers were largely unaware that untested genetically engineered organisms were infiltrating our food system. Unlabeled.

Now that the majority of Americans know the truth, and are fighting back, the Biotech Bullies are being forced to escalate. Things could get a lot uglier, before they get better.

Last week, a judge affirmed the constitutionality of Vermont’s GMO labeling law by denying Monsanto’s demand to hold up enactment of the law until the industry’s frivolous lawsuit makes its way through the courts.

Monsanto promptly turned around and filed an appeal. It’s a stalling tactic. But much more—because the bullies know that their threats against Vermont aren’t going unnoticed by lawmakers in other states—like Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and others—who fear their states will be dragged through the courts, too, if they stand up to Monsanto as Vermont lawmakers have.

It’s intimidation at its best.

Meanwhile, in Washington D.C., the bullies are scrambling to get a law passed that will strip states of their constitutional rights to pass GMO labeling laws. It’s the worst kind of attack on democracy. And the irony is that some Democrats, who claim to support consumer rights, are now signing on to Pompeo’s bill. While so many Republicans—whose constituents have made it clear that they want mandatory labeling laws—are not only thumbing their noses at voters, they’re thumbing their noses at democracy. Not to mention the states’ rights they claim to hold so dear.

While we keep a watchful eye on the Vermont court case, GMO labeling bills that are making their way through state legislatures (opposed by out-of-state multi-billion dollar lobbying groups), and the outrageous (and desperate) play in Washington D.C. to end the GMO labeling conversation permanently, we keep working. On all fronts.

The bullies will keep bullying. We will keep fighting.

Organic Consumers Association|5/7/15

Energy

Got Science? Ohio Wake-up Call on Fracking Disclosure Laws

At a Halliburton fracking site in Clarington, Ohio, in the southeastern part of the state, a fire broke out on a recent Saturday morning. What happened next should be a wake-up call to every U.S. citizen, especially the millions of Americans who live in communities where fracking is planned or underway.

Ohio firefighters battled the blaze for an entire week. Before they managed to fully extinguish it, the fire caused some 30 explosions that rained shrapnel over the surrounding area; 20 trucks on the site caught fire; and tens of thousands of gallons of chemicals — including a toxic soup of diesel fuel, hydrochloric acid, and ethylene glycol — mixed with runoff into the nearby creek, killing an estimated 70,000 fish as far as five miles downstream. State officials physically removed the decomposing remains of more than 11,000 fish and other aquatic life in their efforts to reduce the damage to the waterway.

Drinking Water Threatened
If the severe damage to a local creek weren’t troubling enough, this particular waterway feeds into the Ohio River roughly five miles away where, just another 1.7 miles downstream, a public water intake on the West Virginia side of the river serves local residents.

But here’s the most disgraceful thing of all about the accident: despite the fish kill and potential contamination of drinking water, the public still doesn’t know the full list of chemicals that polluted the air and water supply. In fact, the fire raged and runoff occurred for five full days before Halliburton provided state and federal EPA officials with a full list of the proprietary fracking chemicals the company used at the site.

Why?

Because Ohio, like many other states, has a fracking disclosure law that does more to protect company secrets than it does to protect citizens.

It’s a situation that clearly needs to change.

Officials in the Dark
The preliminary EPA report on the accident in Ohio makes for eye-opening reading. After the fire began on June 28, local, state, and federal officials worked straight through the July 4th holiday to contain the accident but their efforts were hampered by poor interagency coordination and a lack of adequate information about the hazards involved.

As one environmental official at the site later told the press: “We knew there was something toxic in the water. But we had no way of assessing whether it was a threat to human health or how best to protect the public.”

Officials made the determination to evacuate residents within a one-mile radius of the fire. Luckily, in rural Clarington, this meant the evacuation of just 25 households. But the report makes it clear that the precaution was based on insufficient information. Among the report’s many revelations is the fact that significant quantities of more than 16 chemical products were stored at the site, including caches of explosives and even radioactive Cesium-137.

Ron French, a Clarington, Ohio resident who lives less than two miles from the fracking site, says his property was blanketed in soot but he was neither evacuated nor fully informed about the potentially toxic hazard he and his family faced. He now worries about letting his kids play in the yard.

Outrage in Ohio
Nathan Johnson, an attorney for the Ohio Environmental Council, says the Clarington fire “points out that we sorely need changes to Ohio law to protect the public and get this essential information to officials in order to protect public health.”

As Johnson notes, the way Ohio fracking disclosure law is written, it prohibits anyone from accessing information about “trade secret” fracking chemicals except the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) or doctors treating a specific patient. By statute, however, neither ODNR nor doctors are allowed to share that crucial information. The Clarington case points out that the key emergency responders didn’t have access to the information they needed to protect the public, Johnson says. “Water authorities need secret chemical information immediately. Our drinking water is at risk unless the legislature makes some much needed changes.”

The argument seems to have convinced Gov. John Kasich, a strong supporter of fracking. Since the accident, Kasich has stated that Ohio needs to change its law, telling the Ohio press that it was unacceptable for emergency responders, including federal and Ohio EPA officials, not to know the full list of chemicals that might have spilled into the river. Under such conditions, Kasich said, “We want people to know what the fracking fluid contains.”

A National Problem
The alarming fact is that Ohio’s laws are actually slightly stronger than those in many other states. Of the roughly 30 states where fracking is now underway, only six require advance disclosure of the fracking chemicals that will be used. Many state laws, like the one in Ohio, allow the agency overseeing oil and gas drilling to receive the needed chemical information but limit that agency’s ability to share the information, even in the case of an emergency.

Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, says the Ohio case clearly highlights the need for laws across the country to better protect the public. As he puts it, “It is totally unacceptable that claims about trade secrets should be allowed to trump public health and safety.”

No matter what, Rosenberg says, the safety of our communities must be paramount. “Can we as a society really believe that allowing Halliburton to protect its profits is more important than protecting the health of our communities and citizens when a disaster occurs?”

As Rosenberg notes, the Center for Science and Democracy has called for stiffer fracking disclosure laws, baseline analyses of air and water quality near drilling sites, comprehensive monitoring, and increased community access to information about local fracking activities.

Based on a meeting last year that brought together scientists, lawyers, oil and gas representatives and community activists from across the country, the Center published a free community toolkit on fracking that offers local citizens vital information to make informed decisions about unconventional oil and gas drilling in their communities. If you live near a fracking site or know someone who does, you owe it to yourself to take a look.

Seth Shulman|Editorial Director|Union of Concerned Scientists|07/31/2014

Tar Sands Mining Coming to the Tennessee River Valley?

The Alabama Oil & Gas Board has been authorized by the state legislature to create regulations to allow for the strip mining of tar sands in North Alabama. The agency has stated that they will release a draft of these proposed regulations soon, along with a public notice and opportunity for a public hearing to comment on the rules.

Tennessee Riverkeeper expects that the Oil & Gas Board will conduct at least one public hearing to solicit comments from concerned citizens and stakeholders, before it issues a final draft of the proposed regulations. These rules will then be published in the Alabama Administrative Monthly, with a 35-day comment period prior to official adoption.

No oil sands mining can be conducted in Alabama until The Alabama Oil & Gas Board establishes regulations. However, one local mineral exploration company has already purchased several thousand acres of pristine land in the Tennessee River Valley of northwest Alabama with the anticipation of commencing the mining operation once the necessary operational permits have been issued by the Oil & Gas Board. Companies, including MS Industries and Archer Petroleum, have plans to strip mine large areas of Northwest Alabama near the Tennessee River.

Bituminous sands, or tar sands, or oil sands, are a type of unconventional petroleum deposit, that have only recently been considered to be a part of the world’s oil reserves. Tar sands extraction negatively affects the land, air, and water in communities near these mines. The mining of oil sands can release a grim litany of heavy metals including: arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead, and mercury. The mining of oil sands can also release petroleum-based volatile organic compounds such as: benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes into local groundwater and surface streams.

The oil sands deposit in north Alabama is located in the local Hartselle Sandstone and would require extensive mining in order to become available for commercial use. The Hartselle Sandstone was formed beneath a shallow seabed, approximately 325 million years ago during the Mississippian Period. Additionally, the crushed rock that contains the oil sands would require transportation to a processing factory, where the bitumen oil would be separated from the rock through a chemically intensive practice.

According to experts: “Core samples from this region have shown that the bitumen accounts for between 3 percent and 10 percent of the weight of this rock. Thus the separation process will result in a large amount of material having no value as a petroleum resource.”

A coalition of organizations and citizens, including Tennessee Riverkeeper, Alabama Rivers Alliance and the Shoals Environmental Association, are concerned about contamination of nearby tributaries and aquifers of the Tennessee River that would occur when oil sands mining begins.

David Whiteside|Tennessee Riverkeeper|April 30, 2015

Could Fracking Spark a Modern-Day Dust Bowl?

Oil wells and natural gas may have made individual Americans rich, but they have impoverished the great plains of North America, according to new research.

Fossil fuel prospectors have sunk 50,000 new wells a year since 2000 in three Canadian provinces and 11 U.S. states, and have damaged the foundation of all economic growth: net primary production—otherwise known as biomass, or vegetation.

Brady Allred, assistant professor of rangeland ecology at the University of Montana’s College of Forestry and Conservation, and colleagues write in the journal Science that they combined years of high-resolution satellite data with information from industry and public records to track the impact of oil drilling on natural and crop growth.

They conclude that the vegetation lost or removed by the expansion of the oil and gas business between 2000 and 2012 added up to 10 million tons of dry vegetation, or 4.5 million tons of carbon that otherwise would have been removed from the atmosphere.

Loss of fodder

Put another way, this loss amounted to the equivalent of fodder for five million cattle for one month from the rangelands, and 120 million bushels of wheat from the croplands. This wheat equivalent, they point out, adds up to the equivalent of 13 percent of the wheat exported by the U.S. in 2013.

Net primary production—the biomass that plants make from photosynthesis every day, all over the world—is the basis of all wealth and food security. It underwrites all other human and animal activity.

Human wealth depends ultimately on what grows in the ground, or what can be dug from the ground, and most of the latter—such as coal, oil and peat—was once stuff that grew in the ground.

The same net primary production is the basis of what economists sometimes call ecosystem services on which all civilization depends: the natural replenishment of the water supply, pollination of crops, provision of natural nitrogen fertilizers, and the renewal of natural habitat for wild things.

And what worries the conservation scientists is that this loss of net primary production is likely to be “long-lasting and potentially permanent, as recovery or reclamation of previously drilled land has not kept pace with accelerated drilling.”

“This is not surprising because current reclamation practices vary by land ownership and governing body, target only limited portions of the energy landscape, require substantial funding and implementation commitments, and are often not initiated until the end life of a well.”

They say that the land actually taken up by wells, roads and storage facilities just between 2000 and 2012 is about 3 million hectares. This is the land area equivalent to three Yellowstone National Parks.

The hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” used to extract oil and gas is between 8,000 cubic meters and 50,000 cubic meters per well, which means that the total quantity of water squirted into the ground at high pressure during the 12 years to 2012 could exceed 33,900 million cubic meters. At least half of this was used in areas already defined as “water-stressed.”

New wells

The researchers considered the drilling of new wells in Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan in Canada, and in Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and Wyoming in the U.S.

Although there is legislation, it is limited to lands subject to federal jurisdiction, and 90 percent of all drilling infrastructure is now on privately-owned land—at least, in the U.S.

The study’s authors want decision-makers to confront the challenges of this kind of ecological disruption. There are lessons from history in all this, they warn.

“In the early 20th century, rapid agricultural expansion and widespread displacement of native vegetation reduced the resilience of the region to drought, ultimately contributing to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s,” they write.

“It took catastrophic disruption of livelihoods and economies to trigger policy reforms that addressed environmental and social risks of land-use change.”

Tim Radford|Climate News Network|April 28, 2015

States Fail to Properly Manage Fracking Waste, Says Groundbreaking Report

It might seem illogical, but in 1988 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) put a loophole in the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) which regulates hazardous and solid waste, exempting the waste from oil and gas exploration, development and production (E &P) from oversight. While it conceded that such wastes might indeed be hazardous, it said that state regulations were adequate.

That was then, and this is now. The fracking boom has brought oil and gas operations into states and communities that never dealt with them before. Elected officials in those states are often beholden to those oil and gas interests, especially as the amount of money flowing into elections has multiplied exponentially. Basically, the fox is guarding the henhouse.

A new study, Wasting Away: Four states’ failure to manage oil and gas waste in the Marcellus and Utica Shale, conducted by Earthworks, explore just how inadequate state oversight of drilling operations is today. It specifically looks at four states that sit on top of the lucrative Marcellus and Utica shale deposits—New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia—to discover exactly how well they are doing in overseeing the identification and handling of the potentially hazardous waste materials left behind after the shale has been fracked.

Not very well, it found.

“Many of the questions asked about oil and gas field waste decades ago persist, including what it contains and how it is, and should be, treated and disposed of,” the report says. “Also debated is whether states have the ability and resources to adequately protect water, soil, and air quality in the process. Many policymakers and advocates have started to ask: as drilling continues, where is all the waste going and what happens as a result? States are revising regulations and policies in an attempt to catch up with growing volumes and associated problems. However, these efforts by states, both current and proposed, are lacking.”

The report points out that a series of  high-profile events over the last seven years has raised public awareness and concern—events such as illegal dumping, wastewater spills and earthquakes. That awareness has also increased thanks to a burgeoning number of studies documenting the toxic ingredients in fracking waste and how they can enter the environment. Those studies were cited by Dr. Howard Zucker, New York state’s commissioner of health, in his testimony that led that state to ban fracking in December 2014.

“Thirty years ago the Environmental Protection Agency exempted oil and gas waste from federal classification as hazardous, not because the waste isn’t hazardous, but because EPA determined state oversight was adequate,” said report lead author and Earthworks’ eastern program coordinator Nadia Steinzor. “But our analysis shows that states aren’t keeping track of this waste or disposing of it properly. States must take realistic, concrete steps to better protect the public.”

Earthworks’ report made a series of specific recommendations of the types of regulations states should adopt. They include state-level legislation identifying oil and gas waste as hazardous, filling in gaps in current state laws, requiring testing of wastes before they leave the site, implementing “cradle to grave” tracking of wastes and requiring detailed documentation throughout its lifespan, upgrading testing and monitoring of wastes, and requiring treatment and disposal of wastes at specialized facilities designed to detoxify them.

It found all four states lacking. While it pointed out that West Virginia has adopted some new regulations and Pennsylvania is currently revising its regulations, it cited numerous shortcomings in how those states handle fracking waste. Of Ohio it said, “Even as shale gas development surges in Ohio, the state has done little to strengthen regulations and procedures related to waste management. HB59, passed in 2013, directed Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) to adopt rules for waste storage and disposal—but critical regulations have still not been put forward for public review and adoption. As a result, operators and disposal facilities have wide discretion to decide whether waste is contaminated and how to dispose of it.”

“Ohio’s land and water are at great risk from improper and under-regulated disposal of fracking wastes,” said Melanie Houston, director of water policy and environmental health at the Ohio Environmental Council. “As this report details, regulations in Ohio remain woefully inadequate when it comes to protecting human health and the environment from the radiological and chemical risks associated with fracking waste.”

And although New York has banned fracking inside its borders, it still produces waste from conventional drilling and increasingly accepts fracking waste from other states. And like the EPA rule, it said that New York law specifically excludes all oil and gas field waste from the definition of industrial and hazardous waste.

“As a result, operators can dispose of waste at municipal waste landfills and sewage treatment plants,” the report says. “The actual tracking of waste is currently left up to drillers and the operators of disposal facilities. Oil and gas operators are not required to report the volume, type, chemical content, disposal process, or origin and destination for waste with any specificity.”

“This report illuminates the dirty secret of oil and gas development—what to do with the enormous amount of waste generated each year. In New York, problems with the improper reuse and disposal of oil and gas waste persist despite the ban on high-volume fracking,” said Riverkeeper staff attorney Misti Duvall. “We have a state that not only allows importation of waste from Pennsylvania into New York’s landfills, but also permits the not-so-beneficial reuse of oil and gas waste on our roads.  It’s past time for New York to rethink its haphazard approach to oil and gas waste.”

The report condemned the piecemeal “Create it now, figure it out later” approach taken by the states in the Marcellus and Utica shale region, saying “All four states have taken essentially the same approach—one that unfortunately has inadvertently created an opaque picture of what’s really happening with waste and inadequate efforts to fix problems associated with it.”

“Drilling waste harms the environment and health, even though states have a mandate to protect both,” said report co-author and Earthworks energy program director Bruce Baizel. “Their current ‘see no evil’ approach is part of the reason communities across the country are banning fracking altogether. States have a clear path forward: if the waste is dangerous and hazardous, stop pretending it isn’t and treat it and track it like the problem it is.”

Anastasia Pantsios|April 2, 2015

Fracking Chemicals Found in Drinking Water, New Study Says

If you ask communities on the frontline of the fracking industry in the U.S. what their greatest concern is about the controversial technology, often the reply is the threat to their drinking water.

The fracking industry replies in the way it always does to these concerns: it downplays the risks with an arrogance that verges on indifference.

The standard reply from the industry is that fracking cannot contaminate water as the fracking rocks are normally thousands of feet below drinking aquifers and that there are layers of impermeable rock between the two. Never the twain shall meet.

But slowly and consistently over the last few years the evidence of water contamination has accumulated as the science has slowly and steadily caught up with the technology. And now scientists have published more compelling evidence of harm.

Yesterday a new study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which analyzed drinking water taken from three homes in the heart of the shale fields in Pennsylvania.

And they found what the industry’s critics will argue is damning evidence: traces of a compound commonly found in Marcellus Shale drilling fluids.

The scientists believe they have answered one of the outstanding issues surrounding fracking and water pollution, by outlining a series of events by which the fracking chemicals could have contaminated the water.

In 2012, the scientists collected drinking water samples from the households and subsequent analysis in one of the samples found 2-Butoxyethanol or 2BE, a common drilling chemical which is also a potential carcinogen.

And they believe they know how this chemical has ended up in the drinking water. “This is the first case published with a complete story showing organic compounds attributed to shale gas development found in a homeowner’s well,” Susan Brantley, one of the study’s authors and a geoscientist from Pennsylvania State University told the New York Times.

Brantley added that: “These findings are important because we show that chemicals traveled from shale gas wells more than 2 kilometers (1.25 miles) in the subsurface to drinking water wells.”

The scientists believe that the pollution may come from a lack of integrity in the well which passes through the drinking aquifer and not the actual fracking process below.

If this is the case, it reinforces the concerns of communities from the U.S. to the UK that the fracking industry often has to drill through drinking aquifers to reach the shale oil or gas.

And many people believe that the issue of well integrity could be the fracking industry’s Achilles heel.

The wells in this case were drilled in 2009, with a protective casing of steel and cement down to 1,000 feet, but below that the wells had no protective casing.

Two years later three homeowners in Bradford County sued the drilling company, Chesapeake Energy Corporation, due to pollution of their drinking well water.

The case was settled the following year, leading to the state Environmental Protection Agency recommending that the drilling company extend the depth of protective casings.

As other countries look to expand their fracking industries across the globe, so the risk to drinking water increases.

The paper concludes that “As shale gas development expands worldwide, problems such as those that occurred in northeastern Pennsylvania will only be avoided by using conservative well construction practices.”

Andy Rowell|Oil Change International|May 5, 2015

Texas Passes Ban on Fracking Bans (Yes, You Read that Right)

The Texas state legislature voted yesterday to ban fracking bans. Ever since the people of Denton, Texas voted to ban fracking last November, state lawmakers in cahoots with the oil and gas industry and the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, have attempted to strip municipalities like Denton of home rule authority to override the city’s ban.

In response, citizens banded together to form Frack Free Denton to fight for home rule. The group has put together a powerful film, which premieres on Friday, documenting their fight to ban fracking within city limits in the heart of oil and gas country. The vote comes despite recent findings by a team of researchers from Southern Methodist University that linked the earthquakes in one area of Texas, which did not have earthquakes prior to the fracking boom..

Marketplace′s Kai Ryssdal and Scott Trang discuss Texas’s ban and other states considering similar bills. “The bill would provide what’s called state preemption and that is state law here would trump anything that local jurisdictions, cities and towns pass,” says Trang.

A similar bill, in Oklahoma, passed one chamber. “The sponsor of that bill said he wants to ‘get ahead of what we’re seeing in other states,’” reports Trang. Ryssdal asks if there is a group connecting all these state lawmakers. Trang’s response? You guessed it: ALEC.

Cole Mellino|May 5, 2015

Park District Goes Solar, Saves Big While Preserving Open Space

Not only do community parks provide green space for recreation and leisure, they also increase property values, attract business, and offer gathering places for all social groups — enhancing the quality of life for local residents.

The South Suburban Park and Recreation District is a special district in Colorado that provides recreational facilities and services for nearly 140,000 residents throughout south metro Denver. “We’ve always tried to save energy; we’ve always tried to save water throughout the parks,” said Brett Collins, the district’s director of planning and development. Sporadic energy-saving tactics had been implemented over the years, including the installation of a highly-efficient irrigation system with computer controllers. “We did a bit here and a bit there, but wanted to bring it all together and do a really big project,” Collins said.

So the South Suburban Park and Recreation District hired McKinstry, an energy service provider, to assess the district’s facilities and provide guidance on optimizing efficiency while reducing operational costs. As part of its strategy, the district board looked into community solar as a sustainable, cost-cutting tactic that would allow more projects to be included in the overall plan.

Community Solar as an Energy-Saving Tactic Community solar developer Clean Energy Collective (CEC) presented its community-shared solar solution to the district board. “It’s a huge investment,” Collins said of the $630,400 price tag. “But once we reviewed all the information, it just made sense. The board saw the value in [community solar] and we moved forward.”

The South Suburban Park and Recreation District purchased 720 photovoltaic (PV) panels in two of CEC’s Denver area solar arrays. Expected to produce 260,000 kilowatt hours (kWhs) of green power each year, the panels will help offset the power requirements for several of the district’s high demand irrigation systems that serve its golf courses and ball fields. The bill credits that the park district receives from Xcel Energy for the clean energy generated will offset the high demand electrical use.

“All of our golf courses are on non-potable water but a lot of parks are on potable water — so that’s where our big expense comes in.” The computer-controlled irrigation system allows the south metro district to save more water than the typical recreation agency. Still, many of its facilities are aging. “Even if the 30-year-old boiler is still working, it’s not working very efficiently,” Collins said.

A More Attractive Payback Than Rooftop

While making upgrades throughout the parks, the district’s sustainability committee considered having solar panels installed on the individual buildings. “I’ve looked into that over the years, but we have never been able to see the payback we want,” Collins said. “Until CEC came along.”

Rather than the 20-year payback a small rooftop system offered, CEC’s community solar option provides a payback between years six and seven. “That was probably the most important thing, at least for our board, that it was sustainable and it pays back in a reasonable amount of time,” Collins said.

CEC estimates that in the first year of solar production, the park district will save more than $90,000 on its 170 kilowatt (kW) system. Over 20 years, the projected savings (less the purchase price) is over $1.75 million. “Once it pays back and we’re saving a lot of money in electricity after that sixth year, it helps all-around for the district,” Collins said.

Going Solar Without Sacrificing Open Space

The savings enables the South Suburban Park and Recreation District to commission more energy efficiency projects in its comprehensive $5.7 million plan, from installing new windows and doors to replacing water heaters and dehumidification units.

Part of the district’s inclusive strategy, community solar offers a hassle-free approach to solar without the need to install a ground-mounted array in precious open space. “It seemed more sustainable because we’re not taking up the land,” Collins said. “And we don’t have to maintain it.”

The 720-panel purchase coincides with the district’s values. “We’re parks and recreation, so that’s one of our missions — to be stewards of the land and preserve our resources,” Collins said. “So this is really exciting.”

Emily Hois|May 04, 2015  

Help Save One of America’s Most Pristine and Endangered Rivers from Proposed Coal Mine

Approximately 45 miles west of Anchorage, Alaska, near Beluga and Tyonek, lies the Chuitna River watershed. Like most of Alaska’s untouched beauty, this area houses pristine aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. These areas are home to animals such as fox, lynx, wolves, coyotes, wolverines, waterfowl, bears, moose and beluga whales. However, the most important renewable resource to Alaska’s economy, culture and well-being includes five species of wild Pacific salmon, including sockeye, Coho, chinook, pink and chum salmon. These five species use the Chuitna River and its tributaries for spawning purposes. Salmon are keystone species in these environments because animals and other organisms rely on them as part of their diet.

Among this beautiful, pristine, nearly untouched ecosystem, an out of state company, PacRim Coal has proposed a coal strip mine. Not only is the coal market dwindling in today’s economy, but this proposal would be the first in Alaska’s history to even think about mining directly through a salmon stream. A conservative estimate of the total length of salmon streams to be removed would be roughly 13.7 miles through Middle Creek, a main tributary in the Chuitna River watershed. Besides the destruction of the streams, PacRim Coal would have to dig 300 feet down to have access to the coal bed. This estimate only accounts for the first phase of coal mining on West Cook Inlet. The project would have a total of three phases, all destroying salmon habitat. PacRim owns the leases to these three phases, while another company, Barrick Gold holds the surrounding coal leases. Both PacRim’s and Barrick Gold’s leases would displace 57 miles of salmon streams and a total area of 60 square miles, all to produce 12 million tons of coal per year for a minimum of 25 years.

Both PacRim’s and Barrick Gold’s leases would displace 57 miles of salmon streams and a total area of 60 square miles. Photo credit: Doug Tosa

If PacRim receives the green light, they would set up infrastructure that would make it viable to mine both companies’ coal leases in an area full of streams and wetlands. The established infrastructure would include an eight-mile conveyor belt to transport coal from the mine site to a man-made island, and then a two-mile trestle to reach the barges leaving Cook Inlet. If that doesn’t sound bad enough the coal product would not be staying in or benefiting the U.S., the low-grade coal will be exported to Asian markets.

The wetlands that would be damaged from the development of the mine would alter the ecosystem in different ways. Wetlands are natural filtration systems, breeding areas and provide habitat for multiple organisms. The protection of all interconnecting waterways including wetlands, rivers, lakes, ponds and oceans are crucial to healthy aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. If a disturbance like a coal mine interferes with a wetland, it may take the wetland over 10 years to regain its natural state including abundant flora and fauna.

According to an economic report conducted by Center for Sustainable Economy in 2011, “For every $1 generated by things like taxes, royalties and job creation, there is $3-6 in economic losses in the form of environmental damage, reclamation costs and lost economic opportunity.” That figure amounts to $2 billion that Alaska would lose economically over the course of the coal mine. The Chuitna Watershed supports sport, commercial and subsistence fishing adding to the fisheries economy and a way of life for Alaska Natives.

A public comment period with the Alaska Department of Natural Resources on an application for an in-stream flow reservation applied for by Chuitna Citizens Coalition ended a few weeks ago. There was an overwhelming 7,000 Alaskans that commented in support of the in-stream flow reservation. An in-stream flow reservation is a water right that can be obtained by an individual, organizations or government organizations. A reservation of water is to ensure that the stream level is at an adequate level for the individual or organization applying and the public’s use, while not used for other purposes. An in-stream reservation can be applied to protect fish and wildlife, recreation, transportation and sanitation. If the in-stream flow reservation is accepted, the Chuitna Citizens Coalition will have precedent over others who file later. In this case, PacRim has done that very thing; it has applied for an out-of-stream reservation. An out-of-stream reservation is a water right to remove water from a system for power generation, industrial use, irrigation, mining and recreational (e.g. snowmaking).

Earlier this month, the nonprofit American Rivers released its list for America’s Most Endangered Rivers of 2015, and the Chuitna River came in at number six. The list highlights the major threat of PacRim’s coal mine in the Chuitna River watershed. The report states that the mine would produce 7 million gallons of mine waste per day. The estimated flow of Middle Creek at the southern boundary of the mine is on average 6.5 million gallons per day. This essentially means the proposed mine would take a clean, healthy, productive river and replace it with a river’s worth of polluted waters. Mine waste in the Cook Inlet region would pose threats to the Inlet’s endangered beluga whales and other marine life. The U.S. Army Corp of Engineers is expected to release a draft environmental impact statement soon, initiating a public comment period.

To bring awareness to this pristine watershed and the threats of the coal strip mine, Save the Chuitna and Patagonia produced a documentary, Chuitna: More Than Salmon on the Line, which has been screened across the country including at the 2015 Wild and Scenic Film Festival.

Watch the gripping trailer here:

Ryan Astalos|April 29, 2015

[I look forward to hearing more about this evolving situation. When the DEIS comes out and the public comment period begins, I will post the information as I receive it.] 

Seattle Port Lacks Permit for Drilling Rig, Mayor Murray Says

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray said the Port of Seattle can’t host Royal Dutch Shell’s offshore Arctic oil-drilling fleet unless it gets a new land-use permit.

Shell has been hoping to base its fleet at the port’s Terminal 5. Environmentalists have already sued over the plan, saying the port broke state law in February when it signed a two-year lease with Foss Maritime, which is working with Shell.

At a breakfast for a clean-energy group on Monday, Murray said city planners reviewed the planned use of Terminal 5 as a base for the drilling fleet and found that it would violate the port’s land-use permit, which allows a cargo terminal on the site.

Shell has argued that its planned activities at the terminal — such as docking, equipment loading and crew changes — are no more environmentally risky than loading or unloading shipping containers.

Dozens of environmental groups including Greenpeace and Climate Solutions have been campaigning against the plan and training for direct action on the water using kayaks and chanting, “Shell No!”

Murray says he thinks the Port of Seattle is in serious trouble, if oil drilling rigs are the only way for it to be competitive.

The oil company wants to base part of its Arctic Drilling fleet at Terminal 5 in West Seattle, before heading to Alaska’s north slope. One rig, the Polar Pioneer, is already in Port Angeles and is waiting for a green light to come to Seattle.

The mayor says the deal is not in line with the region’s values. And the money to upgrade the terminal should be available from other sources.

“This is a city in a region where businesses are developing and choosing to locate here , where international investment is interested in participating. We should be able to build a vigorous port based on other than bringing (drilling) rigs into the city, for just a few years.” 

In February, The Port and Foss Maritime signed a two-year contract worth millions of dollars that would be used to upgrade the terminal.

Bellamy Pailthorp|Associated Press|May 4, 2015

Duke Energy buys stake in proposed natural gas pipeline

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Electric utility giant Duke Energy has purchased ownership stake in the proposed Sabal Trail natural gas pipeline.

In a statement released Tuesday, Duke Energy announced it will invest about $225 million in the approximately 500-mile pipeline.

The $3 billion pipeline will run from Alabama, across Georgia, and into Florida.

The pipeline is scheduled to begin service in 2017. It will require federal and other regulatory approvals, which Sabal Trail Transmission hopes to secure by early 2016.

The pipeline drew protests from southwest Georgia residents last year, who said they do not want a pollution-emitting compression station near their homes.

Currently there are only two major pipelines that deliver natural gas to Florida. Both are nearing capacity.

MyPalmBeachPost.com|May 5, 2015

FPL’s nuclear-power plan regressive, harmful

Florida Power & Light argues that its new nuclear project is environmentally friendly, that it will benefit us economically, and that its future plans at Turkey Point are safe. Unfortunately, none of these claims are accurate.

FPL is currently seeking approval from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission for two new nuclear reactors at Turkey Point and miles of 10-story transmission lines in residential Miami-Dade County and downtown Miami.

FPL’s project would reduce the availability of fresh water for our communities, it would commit South Florida to antiquated and expensive nuclear technology from last century, and it would render our electric system vulnerable to storm surges from rising seas. FPL ignores these difficult facts.

Nuclear plants consume vast amounts of water to keep reactors cool. FPL currently accounts for less than 1 percent of the water used in Miami-Dade County, but a nuclear expansion would raise that to 10 percent of water usage. In two decades, the demands on our limited water supply are already projected to skyrocket. FPL emphasizes that the primary cooling system will use reclaimed wastewater. But it ignores the inconvenient fact that its backup cooling system will also draw over 7 billion gallons of water a year from Biscayne Bay and the Biscayne Aquifer, our only source of drinking water, threatening the coastal Everglades, Biscayne National Park, and South Dade well fields. Given the anticipated demands on our shrinking water supply, FPL’s water grab is an irresponsible use of resources.

When the Turkey Point expansion was first proposed, the projected cost was about $7 billion. The latest projections are $20 billion. Nuclear expansion might make sense for FPL’s shareholders but it doesn’t for us.

FPL’s project commits us to expensive nuclear power for the next 60 years without fairly evaluating more cost-effective energy that does not require local storage of radioactive waste. The cheapest, cleanest and safest way to meet our energy needs is through energy conservation and efficiency. Conservation is one-fifth the cost of nuclear generation, yet FPL opposes conservation standards and presses for nuclear, the most expensive and risky investment available. Given the falling prices of solar power and new batteries, we question the wisdom of committing customers to $20 billion worth of last century’s technology, while closing the door on cheaper, safer and more environmentally responsible options.

Florida law allows FPL to charge its customers for the licensing and construction costs for this project. In the past three years, FPL has charged us $209 million. Even if FPL never completes the new reactors, it keeps our money. These charges include new transmission lines in Everglades National Park and the heart of Miami-Dade’s dense commercial and residential neighborhoods. Massive 105-foot tall towers along Dixie Highway would cut through Pinecrest, South Miami, Coral Gables, Coconut Grove, and then Brickell, on their way into downtown Miami, carving tens of millions annually from the county’s tax base and killing thousands of jobs in the process. The proposed transmission lines will not be built to Florida hurricane safety standards. If a tower buckles during a storm, it could destroy the Metrorail and surrounding homes.

The original decision to build nuclear reactors at Turkey Point, on a hurricane-swept coastline vulnerable to storm surge, was made a half a century before we understood climate change and sea-level rise. FPL’s new reactors would operate until 2080, during which, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recommends that power plants account for three feet to 6.6 feet of sea-level rise. FPL’s application accounts for only one foot of sea-level rise for that period, clearly unrealistic given the five inches of sea-level rise measured locally in the past five years.

Even one foot of sea-level rise will inundate the area surrounding Turkey Point and turn the power plant into a remote island. A difference of two feet of sea-level rise will dramatically affect the height of future storm surges. FPL’s assertion that new reactors will be safe from a storm surge because they are 26-feet above “sea level,” overlooks the facts that FPL’s “sea level” standard is 27 years old; and the project does not properly account for realistic storm surge projections. FPL ignores these facts to double down on a dangerous position based on yesterday’s science.

Join us by expressing your objection to FPL’s project as proposed. Contact the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission atTurkeyPoint.COLEIS@nrc.gov. This federal agency has the most authority over FPL’s project and is required by law to account for public comments submitted before May 22.

By TOMÁS REGALADO, CINDY LERNER, PHILIP STODDARD AND JOSÉ JAVIER RODRÍGUEZ

Tomás Regalado is mayor of Miami; Cindy Lerner is mayor of Pinecrest; Philip Stoddard is mayor of South Miami; and José Javier Rodríguez is the state representative of District 112.

Energy rich US states move to quash local limits on drilling

Lawmakers in Texas and energy producing states across the nation are rushing to stop local communities from imposing limits on oil and gas drilling despite growing public concern about the health and environmental toll of such activities in urban areas.

The slump in oil prices that has led to job losses in the oil patch has only added to the urgency of squelching local drilling bans and other restrictions the industry views as onerous. The number of jobs nationwide in the sector that includes energy production has fallen 3.5 percent since December, and Texas alone lost about 25,000 jobs in March, according to federal data.

A half dozen states — Texas, Oklahoma, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado and New Mexico — have imposed or grappled with the issue of putting limits on local municipalities’ ability to regulate drilling or hydraulic fracturing, a practice of blasting huge volumes of water and chemicals underground to release tight deposits of oil and gas. And two of the biggest energy producers in the nation, Texas and Oklahoma, are poised to ban cities and towns enacting any ordinances considered unreasonable to energy exploration, including limits on fracking, water disposal, well maintenance and other activities.

The backlash against local bans represents the third phase of the U.S. shale boom. In the last decade, fracking spawned a massive expansion in drilling that pushed the United States to the number one oil and gas producer in the world. Cities responded to environmental and health concerns by passing restrictions. Now, state lawmakers are stepping in to shut down the groundswell of local activism in order to keep the energy expansion rolling.

“It had gotten to the point where various municipalities have been writing extremely detailed and onerous ordinances, making it difficult for companies to operate,” said Ed Ireland, head of the Barnett Shale Energy Education Council, which advocates for developing the rich deposit in Texas.

About 60 municipalities in Texas — the nation’s biggest oil and gas producing state — have some form of ordinance on the books limiting drilling or fracking, according to the Texas Municipal League. Dallas does not permit drilling closer than 1,500 feet of homes, schools or churches. Suburban Southlake bans drilling during the dry summer months. Mansfield doesn’t allow drilling on Sundays or holidays.

In Mansfield, a wealthy suburb about 30 miles southeast of Dallas, Tamara Bounds said the loud whir of fracking a few hundred feet from her backyard kept her awake at night for nine months.

“I couldn’t sleep. I had to barricade my windows with mattresses,” said Bounds, who is running for the city council on a platform that includes tighter control of oil and gas activities.

Hundreds of natural gas wells dot the hilly landscape, and pipelines snake behind housing cul-de-sacs. A 16-well pad site and compressor station hums behind the city’s performing arts center. Mayor David Cook is an example of the fine line some public officials try to walk in Texas between protecting their communities and supporting the oil and gas industry. He backs the natural gas drilling in the area but opposes efforts by the state Legislature to prohibit communities from setting some rules.

“Instead of a balancing act, it’s a Texas two-step. Health and safety come first. After that, you do everything you can do to develop the economy of the state of Texas,” Cook said.

Drilling is forging ahead in energy rich states despite growing evidence that the practices are effecting the environment. In Oklahoma, the state’s geological survey conceded last month it was “very likely” that recent seismic activity was caused by the injection of wastewater from drilling into disposal wells.

Earthquake activity in 2013 was 70 times greater than it was before 2008, Oklahoma geologists reported.

Even so, the Oklahoma House approved a wide-reaching bill last month that prohibits cities and towns from banning oil and natural gas drilling, or implementing restrictions that are not “reasonable.”

When a single Texas community, the university town of Denton near Dallas, voted last fall to impose a ban on fracking within its boundaries, lawmakers in the Republican-controlled Texas Legislature sprang into action to ensure others wouldn’t follow suit.

There are no fewer than 11 Texas bills designed to ban future local limits on energy production.

The state’s energy industry lobbied heavily to ensure passage of the Texas legislation, which allows communities to have a say in things above the surface of the ground such as noise, lighting and traffic. But the bill says any local limits have to be “commercially reasonable,” a test that critics contend will allow drillers to do pretty much what they want. The bill sailed through the Texas Legislature and is now headed to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who is expected to sign it into law.

In Mansfield, the looming law is throwing into doubt an ordinance passed in March that includes notifying potential home buyers if a gas well has been permitted within 300 feet of their property.

“It could be months of work down the tube,” said Cook, the mayor.

Texas politics have for decades been awash in oil money. Drilling operations contributed more than $12 billion to state coffers in 2013, accounting for about 4.5 percent of the budget. Oil and gas industry donors contributed about $400 million to 2014 campaigns.

“Our government in Texas is owned by the oil and gas industry,” said Sharon Wilson, a Gulf regional organizer for the environmental group Earthworks. The 11 bills in the Legislature “are meant to show Texans who’s in charge,” she said.

EMILY SCHMALL and WILL WEISSERT|Associated Press|5/7/15

Victims of Coal Ash Contamination Demand Access to Solar at Duke Energy’s Shareholder Meeting

People from North Carolina communities impacted by coal ash joined allies today to demand access to solar and a transition away from dirty coal. Both inside and outside of Duke Energy’s annual shareholder meeting, teachers, faith groups, business leaders, NGOs and residential customers pressed the company to stop dumping toxic coal ash into vulnerable communities, while blocking access to affordable solar that would benefit them in a variety of ways. As the meeting began, community members took their message inside and protested Duke by calling on the company to stop blocking solar energy.

“Duke Energy is destroying my community, my air and water with its toxic coal ash, and has the audacity to simultaneously block access to the clean solar energy that people want and need,” said Michael Carroway, who spoke at a press conference outside the meeting about the impacts of Duke’s coal ash on his hometown of Goldsboro, North Carolina. “Duke has worked hard to misinform my community about solar, but the truth is it’s cleaner and cheaper for everyone. It benefits our health and environment and minimizes the need for more dirty power plants and rate hikes.”

The rally and protest at Duke headquarters were part of a series of actions around Duke Energy’s annual shareholder meeting to send a strong message to the monopoly utility that blocking access to solar, while communities suffer the impacts of toxic coal ash dumping, will not be tolerated in North Carolina or the other states the company serves. On Tuesday, Greenpeace NC flew its Earth-shaped hot air balloon with banners that read: “Duke don’t block solar” and “Solar works for all.”

On the ground below, community members also spelled out “Duke: we want access to solar” in giant white letters. Leading into this week,​​ “clean graffiti” (​a clean message on a dirty sidewalk) with an #IStand4Solar message was ​implemented ​in strategic locations throughout Charlotte.​

“Duke Energy cares about its statewide monopoly and large profits over the people that it serves,” said Danielle Hilton, an organizer with Moms Clean Air Force from Charlotte who spoke at the press conference. “It’s clear that the reason the company is blocking access to clean solar energy is to maintain its stranglehold on the energy market here. Unfortunately, the rest of us suffer for it in the form of rate hikes, coal ash spills and polluted air, which harms our health and the climate.”

Duke has actively lobbied the North Carolina state legislature in an attempt to defeat HB 245, the bipartisan Energy Freedom Act, which would open up North Carolina electricity markets to third party sales, meaning companies could offer businesses, schools and residential customers options for no money down solar. Duke opposes the bill because it could mean fewer customers and profits for them, jeopardizing their fossil fuel-based monopoly in the state.

“I think it’s important that more people are able to use solar energy because it will mean a healthier world for me and for my children and my children’s children,” said 8-year-old Abigail Driscoll from Charlotte who spoke at the press conference. “I hope that Duke Energy remembers that the decisions they make affect me and my family, now and in the future.”

Duke has lobbied against beneficial solar policies in other states as well. Their plan is to limit solar choice via third party energy sales; weaken net metering, or the amount of money solar rooftop customers are credited for adding power back to the grid; and work with allies like the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Koch brothers to gut renewable energy policies and incentives. In Florida, according to a Florida Center for Investigative Reporting story, Duke and other utility companies have spent $12 million on political campaigns for state lawmakers since 2010—directly influencing the expansion of distributed rooftop solar in the state. In Indiana, Duke has used its cozy relationship with regulators and representatives to try to push anti-solar policies, including adding a fee for net metering customers, in an effort to maintain monopoly control in the state.

Perry Wheeler|Greenpeace|May 7, 2015

Shell’s oil rig is already falling apart — and it hasn’t even left for the Arctic

In today’s news: The Noble Discoverer, Royal Dutch Shell’s oil drilling rig, already failed a routine Coast Guard inspection — months before it is even scheduled to leave for the Arctic. VICE News reports that inspectors found malfunctioning anti-pollution machinery aboard the rig last month.

This is a bad omen for everyone.

Why? Here’s a little history: In 2012, Shell stationed the Kulluk, an oil drilling barge, and two tug boats off the coast of Alaska to drill five oil wells in the Chukchi Sea. After multiple failed drilling attempts, the Kulluk ended up wrecked in the Aleutian Islands. The disastrous oil “exploration” mission ended with the rig’s handlers pleading guilty to eight felonies for marine crimes.

With that kind of track record, it’s no surprise environmentalists and concerned citizens are up in arms about the company’s plan to return to the Arctic this July.

Naturally, Shell officials assure us that everything’s JUST DANDY. From VICE:

Shell spokesman Curtis Smith told VICE News that the oil company still has full confidence in the vessel and its contractor.

“This system has since been upgraded and passed inspections prior,” Smith wrote in an e-mailed response to questions. “This is a case of mechanical repairs, which from time to time are required on any equipment.”

This isn’t the first “repair” the company has had to make, however. In December, the Noble Discoverer’s handlers reported that an oil separator and other instruments were out of commission, VICE reports. “Noble Discoverer’s crew struggled to deal with a buildup of water below decks and rigged up a makeshift system to discharge water from the engine room straight overboard — then tried to hide that system from the Coast Guard, federal investigators concluded.”

But despite the glitches, the rig continues to make its way to Seattle, which would be the home base for the Arctic drilling operation.

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray threw a roadblock at Shell earlier this week when he announced the Port of Seattle would have to apply for a new land-use permit in order to allow Shell to use its cargo terminal. During a conference in Houston on Tuesday, however, Shell officials announced ominously that they have a “backup plan” if they are blocked from using Seattle’s port, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

If that’s not doomy enough for you, here’s another taste of the email Shell’s Smith sent to VICE:

“In the meantime, it’s widely accepted that global demand for energy will double by the year 2050 — so, we’ll need energy in all forms, and Alaska’s outer continental shelf resources could play a crucial role in helping meet that energy challenge,” he wrote.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME, SHELL? Drilling the planet will NEVER be an answer to solving our global energy needs.

Ana Sofia Knauf|7 May 2015

Plans for nuclear dump advance

Canadian site opposed by 75-plus communities

Plans for a lakeside nuclear waste facility — a project that more than 75 Michigan communities opposed, that prompted resolutions, bills and opposition from state legislators — have received the thumb’s up in Canada.

In a nearly 450-page report, the Joint Review Panel recommended the Canadian Minister of Environment approve Ontario Power Generation’s plan to bury 7 million cubic feet of nuclear waste about a half-mile from Lake Huron in Kincardine, Ontario.

The Minister of the Environment made the report public Wednesday evening.

In an executive summary of the report, the panel concludes with: “… The project is not likely to cause significant adverse environmental effects, taking into account the implementation of the mitigation measures committed to by OPG together with the mitigation measures recommended by the Panel.”

The mitigation measures recommended by the panel were not immediately clear.

In a statement, OPG said the company and a team of scientists will “closely analyze the panel’s conditions, many of which reinforce our commitment to the stewardship of the Great Lakes.”

“The idea for this project came from the community. OPG developed the DGR with one goal in mind: To create permanent, safe store for Ontario’s low and intermediate-level nuclear waste,” Laurie Swami, OPG’s senior vice president, said in the statement. “We are pleased with the panel’s conclusion that the project will safely protect the environment.”

The Joint Review Panel was authorized in January 2012 to do an environmental assessment of OPG’s plans to bury low- and intermediate-level nuclear waste about 2,200 feet below ground and 0.6 miles from the shore of Lake Huron in Kincardine, Ontario.

Now that the panel has submitted its recommendation, the Ministry of Environment can, if it chooses to do so, authorize the panel to give a license to prepare the site and construct the deep geologic repository, according to a statement from the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency.

“If the project is authorized to proceed to the next phase of the permitting process, the decision statement will include conditions related to the project that will be legally binding on the proponent,” the CEAA statement said.

That final authorization and license could take several more months.

Beverly Fernandez, spokeswoman for Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump, said the organization was disappointed in the panel’s recommendation.

“We are deeply disappointed that the panel is recommending OPG’s plan be approved,” Fernandez said.

“This is an intergenerational non-partisan issues that affects millions of Canadians and Americans. It is a decision that will affect the Great Lakes for the next 100,000 years. The last place to bury and abandon radioactive nuclear waste is beside the largest supply of fresh water on the planet.”

Fernandez said the organization has collected about 75,000 signatures on a petition to stop OPG’s plans. She said 154 communities in the U.S. and Canada oppose the Kincardine nuclear waste dump or any nuclear waste dump in the Great Lakes basin.

Ed McArdle, chairman of the Southeast Michigan Sierra Club conservation committee, said the announcement wasn’t completely unexpected, but still was frustrating.

“We’re not going to give up,” McArdle said. “We’re going to work with our Canadian friends and pursue other ways to fight this.

“In these kind of fights you don’t give up until even after the thing is built.”

In an interview with the Times Herald last week, Jerry Keto, vice president of nuclear decommissioning at OPG, said OPG could have its license to construct by the end of the year at the earliest.

Construction would begin in 2018 and last until 2025. In 2022, the company would apply for another license to operate the facility as the application and review process is lengthy.

“This is a robust process,” Keto said. “This is the most complex and rigorous environmental review in Canada.”

OPG began studying Kincardine as a possible site for its deep geologic repository in 2001. Keto said the geology is sound and does not present a risk to the Great Lakes. The waste would be buried in limestone beneath a shale cap.

“The opposition that we’re seeing to the repository has no technical value,” Keto said. “It’s an emotional issue.

“If the rock were not what it is, we would be looking some place else.”

Politicians weigh in

In a statement Thursday, Congresswoman Candice Miller, R-Harrison Township, renewed her appeal to the U.S. Department of State to engage the International Joint Commission in the study of OPG’s proposed waste facility.

We must act before it is too late, which is why I am calling on Secretary (John) Kerry again to take action,” Miller said. “Canada has always been a great neighbor and ally of the U.S., as well as a great steward of the lakes, and I believe that, working through the International Joint Commission, we can come up with a viable alternate site for their proposed nuclear waste facility.”

U.S. Congressman Dan Kildee expressed disappointment with the panel’s decision, and its failure to consider other sites or growing opposition in the U.S. and Canada.

“So far, 20 members of Congress — 10 Democrats and 10 Republicans — have also cosponsored my resolution seeking an alternative location,” Kildee said, in a statement.

“The Joint Review Panel’s conclusions are inconsistent and should not be certified by Canada’s Minister of Environment.”

U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow, in a statement Thursday, said she was disappointed in the panel’s report and will continue fighting against OPG’s plans.

“By including a number of recommendations, the report clearly recognizes significant environmental risks, and I’m not willing to take chances with the fate of our Great Lakes hoping these recommendations will be followed,” Stabenow said.

State Sen. Phil Pavlov, R-St. Clair Township, and Representative Dan Lauwers, R-Brockway Township, have spoken out strongly against OPG’s plan and recently introduced new legislation to stop it.

In a statement Thursday, Pavlov said it was “extremely troubling” that the panel “turned a deaf ear” to opposition.

“With today’s decision, the world’s largest supply of fresh water is in peril,” Pavlov said. “It is a sad day for Michigan, Canada and every state in the Great Lakes basin.”

BETH LEBLANC|TIMES HERALD

Broken Federal Coal Leasing Program Threatens Climate Progress

Over the past weeks and months, President Obama has made great strides to curb the climate crisis by both reducing carbon emissions and mitigating the worst effects of climate disruption already felt in communities across the country.

Actions to increase the efficiency of our cars and trucks, decrease toxic emissions and carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants and continued efforts to promote the thriving clean energy economy are putting the U.S. on a path to climate progress. Case in point: to mark the celebration of the 45th Earth Day, the President visited the Florida Everglades to announce new investments that will make our national parks more resilient to climate disruption.

But as highlighted by experts at a recent National Press Club event in Washington, DC, even as the administration is reducing carbon emissions, it continues to advance dirty fuel production on public lands. We have seen some progress in the past months—the federal Office of Natural Resources Revenue (ONRR) announced that it will consider updating royalty rate and leasing policies, and in March, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell noted that it is “time for an honest and open conversation” about the federal government’s coal leasing practices and their impact on the climate—but we need more substantive change.

After all, nearly a quarter of our country’s annual carbon emissions come from coal, oil and gas produced on public lands. Expanding development of these dirty fuels undermines the President’s climate objectives, locks in decades of environmental harm, and saddles current and future generations with billions of dollars in damages as a result of climate disruption.

For example, the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Utah, much of which is public land, generates approximately 42 percent of the nation’s coal. Mining available coal reserves from just this one area could release 60 billion tons of carbon pollution—more than ten times the pollution saved by the new fuel economy standards.

In all, 40 percent of coal mined in the U.S. now comes from our nation’s public lands. Both common sense and the latest science make clear that keeping these dirty fuels in the ground is a must if we are to avoid the worst consequences of climate disruption, meet international climate commitments, and achieve the President’s Climate Action Plan goals.

One of the first steps should be for the administration to reform the federal coal leasing program. Outdated federal coal leasing policies haven’t changed in decades. Royalty rate and policy loopholes allow coal companies to make enormous profits by mining coal on public lands at prices far below market value, while American taxpayers lose millions of dollars each year.

And while the federal agencies overseeing coal leasing often calculate the amount of carbon pollution that comes with new mines, they have yet to take the next logical step to account for the effect that this pollution has on our climate, communities and economy. Coal companies can sell their cheaply-bought federal coal to affiliate brokers who sell the coal for a profit overseas, allowing the mining company to dodge federal export royalties.

This social cost of carbon is a robust measure that can be readily calculated using information the agencies already gather in the course of leasing. Developed by scientific and economic experts from the agencies themselves, the social cost of carbon provides a widely-agreed upon method for calculating, in dollars, the damages new carbon pollution will cause as a result of worsening climate disruption. In economic terms, it shows the effect of climate change on people’s health, property and agricultural productivity, among other things. Incorporating this piece of the puzzle is absolutely essential.

The cost of carbon price tag for just four leases that have been proposed to expand two coal mines in the Powder River Basin—Peabody’s North Antelope Rochelle Mine and Arch Coal’s Black Thunder Mine—could come in anywhere from $43.7 billion to $449 billion over the life of the leases. That’s a far cry from the zero that’s essentially now in the flawed cost-benefit analysis of decision making on new leases.

Continuing to ignore the social cost of carbon puts us all at risk. Federal agencies, particularly the Bureau of Land Management, should start considering the cost, not just the amount, of carbon pollution before rubber-stamping lease permits to mining companies. Reforming the coal leasing program is a must and would save taxpayer dollars and open space for more clean energy jobs, providing just one more reason (or perhaps billions of reasons) why dirty fuels must remain in the ground.

Mary Anne Hitt and Dan Chu|Sierra Club|May 9, 2015

Capture the Leaking Methane!

I was aware that leaking methane is a problem, both as a greenhouse gas, and as a lost source of energy and revenue.  However, I was unaware of the extent of the problem.  There are two methane clouds in particular that could boggle the mind.  Of course Republicans oppose the solution for one.  They are the cause of the other.

In March, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell cited a methane gas plume the size of Delaware hovering over the Four Corners area in Northwest New Mexico as evidence that the Interior Department needs to cut “wasted gas that results from venting and flaring during oil and gas operations.”

This methane hot spot, which is located above an area that contains more than 40,000 wells, arises primarily from leaks in natural gas production and processing equipment spanning a large area of federal lands. While it may be the most visible instance of this issue, it is far from the only instance of methane — a powerful greenhouse gas that traps up to 34 times as much heat as carbon dioxide over the course of a century — being emitted into the atmosphere above public lands. A new report from the Government Accountability Office notes another unfortunate side effect of this inefficiency: the loss of tens of millions of taxpayer dollars each year.

The GAO has been urging the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), an Interior Department agency, to cut methane emissions via flared or vented gas since at least 2010, when the government office found that 40 percent of this methane could be economically captured and sold. According to the 2010 report, “such reductions could increase federal royalty payments by about $23 million annually and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an amount equivalent to about 16.5 million metric tons of CO2 — the annual emissions equivalent of 3.1 million cars.” … [emphasis added]

Posted by TomCat|May 8 2015

 

Air Quality

The Link Between Air Pollution and Low Birth Weight Grows

Scientists have known about a potential link between air pollution and low birth weight for a number of years now, and new research further corroborates that if we want to tackle childhood diseases that are associated with low birth weight we need to take air pollution seriously.

The study, which is published in Environmental Health Perspectives, used the rare opportunity of air pollution reduction efforts surrounding the Beijing Olympics of 2008 to assess how that might affect the development of unborn children.

It’s thought that massive state intervention reduced the total level of air pollution in Beijing–which often tops international pollution charts–anywhere from a still significant 18 percent all the way up to a staggering 59 percent. Did this affect the birth weight of babies born in that time? The study suggests so. After reviewing the birth weights of 83,672 babies they found that the average birth weight was 23 grams heavier in children who were in the eighth month of development during the Summer Olympics compared to babies born at the same time of year in 2007 and 2009.

This isn’t the first time that this air pollution/birth weight link has come up, either.  A large European cohort study found that for every 5 micrograms per cubic meter of exposure to fine particulate matter air pollution during pregnancy, the risk of a baby being born with a low birth weight rises by about 18 percent.

While birth weight isn’t a fool-proof predictor of infant health and development, we know that babies with a lower birth weight tend to be more susceptible to infection, respiratory problems, neurological problems and gastrointestinal issues. They also appear to be at an elevated risk of sudden infant death syndrome. It is worth noting that some of this may be down to the fact the low birth weight and premature birth obviously overlap, and so we have to be careful not to confuse the two. With that in mind, we also know that low birth weight tends to tally with slightly slower development in early childhood. There is evidence that many children born with a low birth weight do in fact catch up by puberty, but in the interests of giving children the best start in life, air pollution’s link to lower birth weight is worth exploring.

Researcher David Rich, a health scientist from the University of Rochester, United States, commented on the link:

“Even a short term reduction in pollution in a community has a very large public health impact. Some of these babies will have fewer complications or diseases later in life. So any time we can improve or increase birth weight we’re protecting not only the babies when they are born, but also in later life,” he said.

That said, the researchers also observed that mothers who were between one and seven months pregnant during the Beijing Olympics tended to have babies who fell largely in step with those born at the same time in 2007 and 2009. The researchers contend that this doesn’t necessarily undercut their findings, but perhaps suggests that air pollution may be particularly problematic in the later stages of pregnancy when fetal development speeds up rapidly. The researchers don’t know exactly why that might be, but Rich speculates that pollution may cause inflammation in the mother, which in turn prevents the developing baby from accessing vital nutrients at this important time; future research could be used to confirm that finding and explore the reasons why.

In the past, studies have shown that air pollution tends to tally with lung disorders and of course with asthma. There is also some research to indicate an increased likelihood of mothers giving birth to children who will later express moderate to severe autistic behavior if the mother was exposed to a high level of particulate matter when she was pregnant, though while those findings have been corroborated research is still ongoing in that area because, obviously, autism isn’t likely to be down to one fact alone.

Perhaps the key thing that this research seems to suggest is that our efforts to reduce air pollution can have an effect, and sometimes a dramatic one, even in a short space of time. Let’s hope that when climate change and environment talks commence in Paris this December, the above research will also be brought up as yet another reason why we need to severely curtail our use of fossil fuels and switch to cleaner energy sources because they in turn can provide us with cleaner air and a better and healthier start for our children.

Steve Williams|May 3, 2015

National Clean Air Month Highlights Florida’s Top Air Quality

TALLAHASSEE –The Florida Department of Environmental Protection is celebrating May as Clean Air Month with a proclamation by Governor Rick Scott that recognizes Florida’s air as among the nation’s cleanest.

Florida proudly boasts 171 state parks and trails, 35 state forests and hundreds of city and county parks that provide an abundance of outdoor recreational opportunities. Breathing clean air is a critical component to enjoying the wonders these places provide Floridians and visitors.

“In Florida, we are fortunate to breathe some of the cleanest air in the country,” said DEP Secretary Jon Steverson. “I am proud of the department’s efforts to curb air pollution across the state so that we can enjoy the many outdoor activities available to us.”

Emissions of key industrial pollutants contributing to the formation of ozone and fine particulate matter continue to decline in Florida, a trend that has existed for years. For example, since 2010 power plant emissions of two of these pollutants, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, have decreased 37 percent.

“Clean Air Month is a time to celebrate Florida’s air quality,” said Justin Green, director of the Division of Air Resource Management. “Thanks to hard work by local and state air program professionals, investments in our air monitoring network and new technology, residents and visitors can be confident they are breathing clean air.”

According to the most recent “State of the Air” report from the American Lung Association, Florida experienced zero unhealthy days from ozone pollution during the three-year study period. In addition, Florida boasts 28 of the cleanest cities nationwide.

The department’s Spatial Air Quality System allows web users to access updated air quality data as reported by its statewide network of air quality monitors. Additional information about Florida’s air quality is available through the department’s Division of Air Resource Management website.

jmahondep|May 5, 2015

Transportation

Inexpensive Electric Cars May Arrive Sooner Than You Think

A new study suggests that battery-powered vehicles are close to being cost-effective for most people.

Transportation accounts for roughly a quarter of the world’s annual carbon dioxide emissions.

Electric cars may seem like a niche product that only wealthy people can afford, but a new analysis suggests that they may be close to competing with or 3

The true cost of lithium-ion batteries in electric cars is a secret closely held by manufacturers. And estimates of the cost vary widely, making it tough to determine just how much lower they must go before electric vehicles with long ranges can be affordable for most buyers. But a peer-reviewed study of more than 80 estimates reported between 2007 and 2014 determined that the costs of battery packs are “much lower” than widely assumed by energy-policy analysts.+

The authors of the new study concluded that the battery packs used by market-leading EV manufacturers like Tesla and Nissan cost as little as $300 per kilowatt-hour of energy in 2014. That’s lower than the most optimistic published projections for 2015, and even below the average published projection for 2020. The authors found that batteries appear on track to reach $230 per kilowatt-hour by 2018.+

If that’s true, it would push EVs across a meaningful threshold. Depending on the price of gas, the sticker price of an EV is expected to appeal to many more people if its battery costs between $125 and $300 per kilowatt-hour. Because the battery makes up perhaps a quarter to a half of the cost of the car, a substantially cheaper battery would make the vehicle itself significantly cheaper too. Alternatively, carmakers could maintain current EV prices but offer vehicles with much longer ranges.6

The range would likely be crucial for many buyers because it’s so much cheaper to “fill” an EV with electricity-charging a car with a 300-mile range could cost less than $10. Given the disparity in gasoline and electricity prices, the study’s authors, Bjӧrn Nykvist and Måns Nilsson, research fellows at the Stockholm Environment Institute, say that if batteries fall as low as $150 per kilowatt-hour, this could lead to “a potential paradigm shift in vehicle technology.”5

The analysis suggests that the cost of packs used by the leading EV manufacturers is falling about 8 percent a year. Although Nykvist acknowledges that “the uncertainties are large,” he says it’s realistic to think that this rate of decline could continue in the coming years, thanks to the economies of scale that would be created if large manufacturers like Nissan and Tesla follow through with their separate plans to massively increase production. The speed at which the cost appears to be falling is similar to the rate that was seen with the nickel metal hydride battery technology used in hybrids like the Toyota Prius, he says.1

Nykvist and Nilsson relied on estimates from a variety of sources: public statements by EV manufacturers, peer-reviewed literature, news reports (including from MIT Technology Review), and so-called gray literature, or research papers published by governments, businesses, and academics.+

Luis Munuera, an energy analyst for the International Energy Agency, and Pierpaolo Cazzola, a transport policy analyst for the same agency, caution in an e-mail to MIT Technology Review that the cost reductions implied in the new analysis “should be taken with care,” since battery cost figures from disparate sources are often not directly comparable. Further, they point out, the degree to which cost decline trends for energy technologies can be extrapolated into the future is unclear. Still, they admit, “we have seen events moving quicker than expected in lithium-ion battery technology.”

Mike Orcutt|April 2, 2015

Recycling

22 Facts About Plastic Pollution (And 10 Things We Can Do About It)

It seems nearly impossible to escape plastic in our every day lives, doesn’t it? And we can’t escape plastic pollution, either.

 

Plastic is literally at my fingertips all day long. Plastic keyboard. Plastic framed computer monitor. Plastic mouse. The amount of plastic I encounter daily doesn’t end there. Chances are, you can relate. Plastic is an epidemic.

But where does all this plastic go? We ship some of it overseas to be recycled. Quite a bit ends up in landfills. And more than you can imagine ends up on the loose as plastic pollution, eventually making its way into our waterways.

Tiny plastic beads used in hundreds of toiletries like facial scrubs and toothpastes have even been found in our Great Lakes—the largest group of freshwater lakes in the world! Giant garbage patches (one twice the size of Texas) can be found floating around in the oceans. And all this plastic pollution is not only a problem for the earth, it’s bad for our health.

Green Diva Meg and I chatted about the plastic in our oceans on the recent Green Divas myEARTH360 Report podcast, which inspired me to uncover more facts about plastic in all of our lives and how it ends up in our precious water. Have a listen:

22 Preposterous Facts about Plastic Pollution.

• In the Los Angeles area alone, 10 metric tons of plastic fragments—like grocery bags, straws and soda bottles—are carried into the Pacific Ocean every day.

• Over the last ten years we have produced more plastic than during the whole of the last century.

• 50 percent of the plastic we use, we use just once and throw away.

• Enough plastic is thrown away each year to circle the earth four times.

• We currently recover only five percent of the plastics we produce.

• The average American throws away approximately 185 pounds of plastic per year.

• Plastic accounts for around 10 percent of the total waste we generate.

• The production of plastic uses around eight percent of the world’s oil production (bioplastics are not a good solution as they require food source crops).

• Americans throw away 35 billion plastic water bottles every year (source: Brita)

• Plastic in the ocean breaks down into such small segments that pieces of plastic from a one liter bottle could end up on every mile of beach throughout the world.

• Annually approximately 500 billion plastic bags are used worldwide. More than one million bags are used every minute.

• 46 percent of plastics float (EPA 2006) and it can drift for years before eventually concentrating in the ocean gyres.

• It takes 500-1,000 years for plastic to degrade.

• Billions of pounds of plastic can be found in swirling convergences in the oceans making up about 40 percent of the world’s ocean surfaces. 80 percent of pollution enters the ocean from the land.

• The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is located in the North Pacific Gyre off the coast of California and is the largest ocean garbage site in the world. This floating mass of plastic is twice the size of Texas, with plastic pieces outnumbering sea life six to one.

• Plastic constitutes approximately 90 percent of all trash floating on the ocean’s surface, with 46,000 pieces of plastic per square mile.

• One million sea birds and 100,000 marine mammals are killed annually from plastic in our oceans.

• 44 percent of all seabird species, 22 percent of cetaceans, all sea turtle species and a growing list of fish species have been documented with plastic in or around their bodies.

• In samples collected in Lake Erie, 85 percent of the plastic particles were smaller than two-tenths of an inch, and much of that was microscopic. Researchers found 1,500 and 1.7 million of these particles per square mile.

• Virtually every piece of plastic that was ever made still exists in some shape or form (with the exception of the small amount that has been incinerated).

• Plastic chemicals can be absorbed by the body—93 percent of Americans age six or older test positive for BPA (a plastic chemical).

• Some of these compounds found in plastic have been found to alter hormones or have other potential human health effects.

 

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

Is it possible to go plastic-free?

Listen to the Green Divas feature interview with Beth Terry, author of Plastic-Free: How I Kicked the Plastic Habit and How You Can, Too.

Ten Ways To “Rise Above Plastic.”

• Choose to reuse when it comes to shopping bags and bottled water. Cloth bags and metal or glass reusable bottles are available locally at great prices.

• Refuse single-serving packaging, excess packaging, straws and other “disposable” plastics. Carry reusable utensils in your purse, backpack or car to use at bbq’s, potlucks or take-out restaurants.

• Reduce everyday plastics such as sandwich bags and juice cartons by replacing them with a reusable lunch bag/box that includes a thermos.

• Bring your to-go mug with you to the coffee shop, smoothie shop or restaurants that let you use them, which is a great way to reduce lids, plastic cups and/or plastic-lined cups.

• Go digital!  No need for plastic cds, dvds and jewel cases when you can buy your music and videos online.

• Seek out alternatives to the plastic items that you rely on.

• Recycle. If you must use plastic, try to choose #1 (PETE) or #2 (HDPE), which are the most commonly recycled plastics. Avoid plastic bags and polystyrene foam as both typically have very low recycling rates.

• Volunteer at a beach cleanup. Surfrider Foundation Chapters often hold cleanups monthly or more frequently.

• Support plastic bag bans, polystyrene foam bans and bottle recycling bills.

• Spread the word. Talk to your family and friends about why it is important to reduce plastic in our lives and the nasty impacts of plastic pollution.

Watch Rise Above Plastics—Plastics Kill from Surfrider Foundation:

Lynn Hasselberger|The Green Divas|April 7, 2014

This is What Happens When We Put ‘Flushable Wipes’ Down the Toilet

It’s a growing problem around the country, and the small city of Wyoming, Minn., can’t take it anymore. Those flushable wipes so many of us love to use are causing an incredible amount of damage to municipal sewer systems and wastewater treatment plants.

Technically they are indeed “flushable” (as in you can put them in the toilet and won’t see them after you flush). It’s what happens after those wipes go down the toilet that’s causing headaches. They aren’t breaking down like they’re supposed to.

Instead, what they’re doing is gumming up the works in a big way. All over the country — from little Wyoming, Minn. to New York City — municipalities are having to repair or upgrade sewer equipment at great cost to just keep their systems functional.

What exactly is happening? After the wipes flush and disappear from your bathroom, they have to make it through the sewer system piping to wastewater treatment plants. They’re supposed to break up almost immediately, like toilet paper does, and flow with the water and the waste.

Mostly, they reportedly don’t do that. Baby wipes, feminine wipes, sanitized wipes and similar products remain intact and get snagged on piping joints and tree roots that have intruded into the piping. If the wipes do make it further down the line, they inevitably combine with grease and paper products, accreting into sticky, soppy globs that block and bind up treatment plant pumps and waste screens.

“They basically just form a knot and a clump in [wastewater system] pumps,” Harry Mathos, director of water resources in Beliot, Wisconsin, told RouteFifty.com.

When that happens, which is constantly, it looks like this:

Photo from Wyoming, Minn. lawsuit complaint, showing what these flushed wipes end up doing to the municipal sewer system.

“It’s a huge problem — an absolutely horrible problem,” the Minnesota Rural Water Association’s Frank Stuemke told the Star Tribune. “Wipes have shortened pumps’ lives and transformed what it means to maintain a system. To smaller communities, in particular, it can be difficult.”

Difficult indeed, and expensive. Municipal workers around the country who have to deal with this stinky, messy issue on a daily basis call these masses of wipes “polar bears.” Like many cities across the country, Wyoming, Minn. is spending big bucks it can ill afford to keep up with the damage being done.

“They’re stringy and instead of coming apart, they’ll stretch out and then two, three, four, five, six of them wrap together. It looks like a mop head,” Andy Coppola, plant manager at the Schenectady Water Pollution Control Facility in New York told The Daily Gazette. “Anyplace that stuff can hang up on, it will, and then when one grabs, the next one grabs, the next one grabs, and then you end up with an issue.”

Finally, the city of Wyoming decided to take action. It is suing six major manufacturers for their “false claims regarding the flushability of these wipes.” The city filed a class action lawsuit in U.S. District Court on April 23, 2015.

“These flushable wipes do not degrade after flushing,” alleges the city’s complaint. “Rather, the flushable wipes remain intact long enough to pass through private wastewater drain pipes into the municipal sewer line, causing clogs and other issues for municipal and county sewer systems and wastewater treatment plants, resulting in thousands, if not millions, of dollars of damages.”

The city of Wyoming named six major manufacturers of this kind of wet wipe in its lawsuit. Defendants include Procter & Gamble Co., Kimberly-Clark Corp., Nice-Pak Products, Inc., Professional Disposables International, Inc., Tufco Technologies Inc. and Rockline Industries.

What’s the industry response to this type of allegation?

Flushable wipes makers have “empathy for the challenges the wastewater operators are having with nonflushable materials impacting their systems,” Dave Rousse, president of the Association of Nonwoven Fabrics Industry, told the Star Tribune. “However, we take great exception to any effort to blame flushable wipes for the problems being caused by nonflushable wipes.”

Rousse says the source of everyone’s woe is consumers sending the wrong kind of wipes down the commode. However, many believe even the flushable wipes are not living up to the promises of biodegradability made on their packaging.

Wipe-clogged sewer systems aren’t a problem limited only to the United States. In 2013, the complaint notes, a “15-ton, bus-sized clog” formed in a sewer main in London, England. It took workers three weeks to dislodge the gargantuan blockade of wipes and grease. It took a further six weeks to repair the damage to the pipes.

Canada faces this problem, too. It spends about $250 million every year repairing damage caused by flushed wipes.

In addition to monetary damages, the city of Wyoming’s lawsuit demands:

• A declaration that the defendants’ flushable wipes do not degrade and are not sewer safe

• An order enjoining defendants to desist from further advertising, sale and distribution of said “flushable wipes”

• An order requiring the defendants to establish a fund to compensate the city and others in the class for the cost associated with ongoing clean-up and removal of flushable wipes from their sewer systems

“I think people really do need to be educated on why they should not be flushing [wipes] into the septic systems,” Linda White, a homeowner in Wadena County, Minn., told The StarTribune. “I was shocked at how expensive it was to the city of Wadena to take care of this problem.”

Nearly everything we’re flushing contributes to this problem. Despite what the packaging might promise, experts say we should never flush items such as disposable diapers, diaper liners, baby wipes, pre-moistened wipes, household cleaning wipes or brushes, feminine hygiene products (yes, that means tampons, ladies), toilet seat covers, dog poop collection baggies and cat litter.

Sure, these disposable items are convenient. Are they good for sewer and septic systems? Experience says no, not at all.

Whether you’re on city sewer or have your own septic system, the only thing you should be flushing is poo, pee and toilet paper. Nothing else is guaranteed to break down fast enough to avoid problems, no matter what the packaging promises.

Disposability is handy but rarely good for the environment or our infrastructure. All that stuff has to go somewhere when we’re done with it. If it doesn’t magically disappear, we must deal with it.

Susan Bird|May 4, 2015

14 Heartbreaking Photos That Will Inspire You to Recycle

Global pollution has reached unprecedented levels as the trash produced by the more than 7 billion people pollutes the land and sea around the world. All too often, our waste takes on a life of its own after we toss it in the trash without another thought. Animals get tangled up in our trash or mistakenly ingest it, often resulting in death.

Add to that the effect our polluting activities have on humans and other species and you begin to realize the massive global impact we human beings have. Luckily, there are lots of people out there working to create a better world.

Here are 14 photos that capture the heartbreaking impact of worldwide pollution:

Stork trapped in a plastic bag. Photo credit: UnknownAlbatross killed by excessive plastic ingestion in Midway Islands. Photo credit: Population Speak OutA bird is coated in oil from a nearby spill. Photo credit: UnknownPenguins covered in oil. Photo credit: John HrusaSurfing on a wave full of trash off the coast of Java, Indonesia. Photo credit: Population Speak OutA seal with his nose stuck on a piece of plastic. Photo credit: Unknown

This boy spends each morning looking for recyclable plastic to sell to help support his family. Photo credit: George SteinmetzLandscape full of trash in Bangladesh. Photo credit: Population Speak OutBoy swims in polluted water in India. Photo credit: Green AtomFake Hong Kong skyline for tourists because the actual one is so polluted. Photo credit: Molly SmithA seal’s neck was sliced by trash. Photo credit: Ares CaiusA bird is covered from an oil spill. Photo credit: Charlie RiedelA turtle is stuck in a piece of plastic. Photo credit: UnknownA tortoise is trapped by a piece of plastic. Photo credit: Unknown

Plastic Pollution = Cancer of Our Oceans: What Is the Cure?

By now, many people know that the ocean is filled with plastic debris.

A recent study estimates that the amount of plastic waste that washes off land into the ocean each year is approximately 8 million metric tons. Jenna Jambeck, the study’s lead author, helps us visualize the magnitude by comparing it to finding five grocery bags full of plastic on every foot of coastline in the 192 countries included in the study.

As someone who lives in a highly urbanized coastal city in California, this estimate didn’t shock me. I grew up watching loads of plastic trash spew from river outlets into our ocean. Our beaches are covered with things like plastic bottles, bags, wrappers and straws—all mostly single-use “disposable” items.

For years, I’ve watched polluted water flow beneath the bridge at the end of the San Gabriel River, a channel that drains a 713 square mile watershed in Southern California. This bridge is special … it’s where my fascination with plastic waste began—it’s where our plastic trash becomes plastic marine debris.

As Algalita’s education director, it’s my job to help people wrap their heads around the complexities of this issue. Many times, it’s the simple questions that require the most in-depth responses. For example: “Why can’t we clean up the trash in the ocean?”

I won’t say extracting plastic debris from our ocean is impossible; however, I will say most plastic pollution researchers agree that its output is not worth its input. They believe our cleanup efforts are best focused on land and in our rivers. Here’s why:

The ocean is imperious and is constantly changing.

The ocean is complex, and is influenced by an endless list of processes. It’s three-dimensional, interconnected, and unpredictable. It’s massive, dynamic, and acts as one giant imperious force. The fact that the ocean is ever-changing makes it impossible to fully understand.

Our experience of the ocean is entirely defined by our interactions with it. Most researchers who have studied plastic marine debris will tell you that, logistically, working in the open ocean is arduous and unpredictable. Some days you are completely powerless against its will.

Waste management ends at the end of the river.

Humans lose the ability to manage plastic trash once it enters the ocean and becomes marine debris. Ocean cleanup is not a form of waste management. It is simply an attempt to extract plastic debris from our complex ocean.

There are different types of plastic marine debris.

Our ocean is filled with all sorts of plastic—from fully intact items like bottles and toothbrushes to plastic fragments, filaments, pellets, film and resin. Recently, a team of researchers from six countries calculated that an astounding 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic weighing 269,000 tons can be found floating in the global ocean. Most of the 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic are small, between just 1mm and 4.75mm in size.

Each piece of debris is unique, with its own shape, size, and chemical composition. Its structure and buoyancy change as communities of organisms adhere to its surface. Some pieces have been completely transformed into artificial habitats that harbor dozens of species.

Some plastics, like fishing nets, line and film have a tendency to snag and accumulate other pieces of debris. Imagine a kind of snowball effect as tangled debris rolls around in the ocean’s currents. These composite mixtures come in all shapes and sizes, from massive ghost nets to tiny clusters of monofilament fibers invisible to the naked eye.

The heterogeneous nature of the debris poses critical challenges that, if not addressed properly, can have significant negative consequences and potentially jeopardize the health of the ocean.

As you can imagine, ocean cleanup is a controversial issue. Let me try to simplify things—think of ocean plastic pollution as a type of cancer. The cure for ocean plastic pollution is eliminating disposable plastics all together. I’ll be the first to admit that this is never going to happen. So let’s see what prevention and treatment look like.

Redesigning plastic products to be valuable and sustainable is our biggest leap toward prevention. When designed in cradle-to-cradle systems, plastic products have a much better chance of being recovered and recycled. Also, better product design may ease many of the challenges plastic recyclers face. Waste reduction also falls into the prevention category as it helps scale down the amount of waste to be managed.

Waste management can be viewed as treatment for the disease. This is how we keep things under control.

Ocean cleanup is comparable to invasive surgery—and that’s why it’s so controversial.

Most plastic pollution researchers agree that ocean cleanup is a radical approach to the issue. Many will even denounce it as impractical and overly idealistic. However, this engineering challenge should not be ignored completely … just as surgery for a cancer patient is sometimes our last-ditch effort.

Surgery is most successful when done by a specialist with a great deal of experience in the particular procedure. The problem is, ocean plastic pollution is a relatively new disease and therefore, there are no specialists in this type of “procedure”—there are no textbooks, courses or degrees related to ocean cleanup. Experience starts now.

An understanding of the ocean and this “disease” is best gained through experience. If we are to attempt ocean cleanup, our best approach is to connect the proponents of clean-up schemes with people who understand the complexities of the disease—experienced plastic pollution researchers.  And if these plastic pollution experts denounce certain methods of cleanup, we should pay close attention to what they’re saying. Those who propose ocean clean up schemes should embrace the critiques of these individuals, as there is immeasurable value in their scrutiny.

EWContributor|May 4, 2015

See the story of Microbeads

Miscellaneous

The Positive Environmental Effects of Removing Dams

Although scientists had long thought that rivers would not be able to handle or recover from dam removal, a new school of thought has taken hold. Now that researchers have paid close attention to the dams that have been removed in recent years, they’ve discovered that rivers not only are remarkably adept at adjusting, but they also thrive.

Scientists at the United States Geological Survey hope their newly published findings will help to inform future dam-related decisions. “Heraclitus has said you can’t step in the same river twice. Well, you don’t get exactly the same river back after you take a dam off it that you had before, but you can come pretty close,” said researcher Gordon Grant. “In some cases, it can even be difficult to identify in just a few years where dam was.”

The research has helped to reignite a new debate: should we really have too many dams in the first place? Yes, some dams are built to help prevent against flooding, but just as often dams are constructed to generate hydroelectric power or to make it easier for humans to obtain water. The bottom line, however, is that wealthy entities profit from these dams therefore they tend to go up regardless whether they’re necessary or even particularly helpful to society in the first place.

Of course, messing with Mother Nature has its consequences. As Scientific American notes, dam construction:

• Obstructs fish migration
• Lowers the overall quality of water
• Generates algae and removes oxygen making it hard for other species to survive
• Blocks habitats from properly forming
• Negatively impacts the temperature of the water, thereby wreaking havoc on marine life

Thankfully, unlike most of the environmentally unsound decisions the human race is actively making, dams don’t seem to cause irreversible harm. While it would have been better to not construct some dams at all, rivers are resilient enough to return to (most of) their former glory.

Time and time again, researchers found that the sediment trapped behind dam walls takes a fraction of the time initially expected (just weeks or months) to dissipate, and luckily it redistributes evenly downstream. Additionally, the fish populations drastically increase as the fish species quickly start swimming back upstream again, now able to utilize the full habitat.

Like taking off a Band-Aid, it appears that it’s better to deconstruct it quickly rather than dragging it out over a long period of time. On the whole, rivers respond better to the complete change rather than a gradual adjusting period. Evidently, rivers are prepared to be fully functioning rivers just as soon as we let them.

National Geographic took a close look at the removal of Glines Canyon Dam, the largest dam ever deconstructed. Experts weren’t sure what would happen to Washington’s Elwha River after a dam that huge disappeared, but the effects have been wholly positive. Not only has the salmon population rebounded, but a wide variety of species that hadn’t been seen in the river in recent years have made a comeback as well. Land mammals and birds have also returned to the area as the food chain replenishes and the river becomes a fully functioning ecosystem again.

Obviously, no two dams are alike, so the researchers still encourage communities to study the potential effects of removing a particular dam before doing so. The good news, though, is that recent dam removals have provided us with every reason to be optimistic about the process. While there may be no undoing climate change or rainforest destruction, at least we know it’s possible to easily fix the damage that dams have caused. Now we just have to make the choice to do it!

Kevin Mathews|May 5, 2015

10 Ways You’re Hurting the Environment and Don’t Know It

You know the environment needs help, and you’re just the person to do something about it. But sometimes when you think you’re helping, you may actually be harming. Other times you’re just going about your business, and you have no idea that what you’re doing is harmful to the environment.

Here are 10 ways you’re hurting the environment and don’t know it:

1. Cleaning up after your dog

I’m sure we can agree that picking up your dog’s poop is the right thing to do. But using plastic bags as your portal—not so much.

In 2012, Care2 shared that 78 million dogs living in the United States create 10 million tons of feces annually. That’s a lot of poop, for sure, and it’s got to get picked up somehow, but plastic bags are not the answer.

As Dogster put it, the plastic bag may be king, but there are other ways to get the job done. They list 13 ways to pick up dog poop, which should be more than enough for you to get the job done without harming the environment. 

2. Washing your recycling 

You just finished that last lick of peanut butter, so now it’s time to wash it out so you can recycle it. (Yes, it does need to be cleaned.)

But water is an essential resource, dangerously dwindling in areas like California, which is now in its fourth year of severe drought. So is it worth wasting water to clean recyclables?

Yes and no. Clean them, yes, but waste water in the process? No.

Here’s what to do instead: Simply collect the water you used to clean dishes or pots and pans, pour some into the recyclable, slap a lid on that baby, and shake. You may need to do a little scrubbing to get it ready for recycling, but there’s no reason to waste good, clean water in the process. And if there’s no lid, cup the top with the palm of your hand before shaking.

3. Purchasing “eco-friendly” products 

You might think you’re doing the right thing by choosing eco-friendly personal care and cleaning products, but if they’ve got any of these ingredients — polyethylene, polypropylene, polyethylene terephthalate or polymethyl methacrylate — well then, “you’re cleaning up with plastic and being duped into contributing to plastic pollution in the environment”.

What I’m talking about are plastic microbeads, which are really small particles found in body washes, hand soaps, toothpaste, lip gloss, nail polish and cosmetics designed to be washed down the drain. Unfortunately billions of these tiny plastic particles make their way into our environment everyday, and they end up littering our rivers, lakes and oceans.

The result is terrible for our environment and the animals living in it because a single microbead can be up to a million times more toxic than the water around it.

What can you do about microbead pollution? The Story of Stuff Project is leading a coalition of over 100 groups to get these tiny plastic beads out of commerce. You can find out more here.

4. Recycling

That’s right. Even if it’s washed, recycling itself can be harmful to the environment. Here are a few ways, according to this must-read LISTVERSE article:

• The mindset it gives people — The idea is that by putting materials in the recycle bin, by buying products made from recycled material, we’re saving the environment—we’re all a team of individual Captain Planets, kicking pollution to the curb. But how effective is that when the U.S. alone still produces 250 million tons of trash every year?
• Recycling’s main impact is to convince us that it’s okay to be wasteful in other areas, because we make up for it through recycling. It encourages consumption, rather than pointing out ways to reduce consumption overall.
• Recycling plants are huge polluters

…and the list goes on. So yeah, recycling is not the green solution to our consumptive behavior. Eliminating, or at least reducing, is.

5. Reusable tote bags 

Of course you’re not harming the environment by bringing your own tote bag to the grocery store, but if that’s where your concern for minimizing waste ends, then Houston, we have a problem.

It’s shocking how much excess packaging exists in the grocery industry. The other day I went to buy a cucumber at Trader Joe’s. An organic one, mind you. It came wrapped in plastic!

So much attention has gone to grocery bags, we forget to consider all the other packaging associated with groceries. Stuffing an organic cotton grocery tote bag with a bunch of excessively packaged products seems to defeat the purpose, don’t you think?

LISTVERSE says, “There are about seven types of plastic that you’ll find in day to day life, and only two of them are recyclable. Anything else placed in a recycling bin will be collected, processed, and sorted, and then thrown straight into a landfill.”

If you’re looking to help the environment while you gather food, get hooked on products that don’t come smothered in excess packaging. Until packaging-free groceries stores come to your neighborhood, a great place to start is the bulk foods section of your local grocery store, and don’t forget to BYOW (bring your own whatever): mason jar, glass container, reusable sacks, etc.

6. Choosing organic, all natural animal products

Sure, “free range” AND “organic” may sound like responsible choices for meat eaters who care about the environment, but no matter how much land livestock have to roam on and how well they are fed, the fact is, livestock production may have a bigger impact on the planet than anything else. And I’m not talking about the good kind.

If you want to know more, read 10 Reasons Why the Meat Industry is Unsustainable.

7. Thickening your gravy

Attention, chefs! If you’re making gravy, hold the corn starch. Sure, it can thicken sauces and soups with the greatest of ease, but corn starch is usually made with genetically modified corn. Here’s why GMOs are a concern.  

The good news is, you can skip corn starch and still thicken to your heart’s content. Just use arrowroot powder instead. It’s an easily digested starch extracted from the roots of the arrowroot plant that works just as well as corn starch, plus it has a more neutral flavor and can be used at low temperatures.

8. Upgrading your gadgets

Updating to the newest have-to-have electronic gadget is commonplace these days. People don’t even wait for things to break anymore before lining up to buy the latest greatest gizmo.

That consumer thinking is part of the problem.

Here’s a scary fact: Back in 2012 a partnership of UN organizations reported more than 48 million tons of gadgets are thrown away every year. That’s 11 times heavier than 200 Empire State Buildings.

The solution is simple: get as much use out of each product you buy before tossing it aside to make room for the new shiny object.

If you think recycling your electronics absolves you from premature upgrading, think again. Only 13 percent of electronic waste is disposed and recycled properly.

9. Flushing things down the toilet to spare landfills

Flushing unwanted items down the toilet is not a magic process that makes things disappear. They end up somewhere, just like the garbage we put on the curb each week.

Even though some products are marketed as “flushable,” that doesn’t mean you should flush them.

Here are two Don’t Flush items:

• Baby wipes: Technically they are “flushable.” It’s what happens after those wipes go down the toilet that’s causing headaches. They aren’t breaking down like they’re supposed to.
• Kitty litter: Although most green litters are septic- and sewer-safe, it’s best not to flush them. Cat feces contains the Toxoplasmosis gondii (TG) parasite, dangerous to pregnant women and marine life, particularly sea otters. Unfortunately TG is not filtered out in most water treatment plants.

10. Putting food waste into the garbage disposal

EcoMyths explains, ”Garbage disposals have been heralded as the ‘next great tool for urban sustainability,’ but while sink disposals do have some clear benefits over trashcans, they are not the greenest way to dispose of your uneaten food.”

According to life cycle analysis expert Eric Masanet, PhD, of Northwestern University, and Debra Shore, commissioner of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, the hierarchy of green ways to dispose of food goes like this, from least green to most:

• Not-so-green: Throwing it in a trashcan headed for the landfill
• Light green: Running it through the sink disposal, from which it then heads to the wastewater treatment plant
• Green: Toss it in your compost bin for efficient composting
• Greenest ever: Reduce the amount of food we waste in the first place! Globally we waste about a third of our food every year. Talk about an environmental footprint.

So if you want to spare the planet, the best thing you can do with your food is eat up!

That’s a wrap

Sometimes we truly want to do what’s best for the environment, but what’s best isn’t always clear. If you want to do your part for the planet, start by educating yourself.

Tex Dworkin|May 6, 2015

Digging science: Citizens amplify knowledge about the natural world

One of this year’s most popular Sundance Film Festival entries, Tangerine, was shot with an iPhone 5S and edited with an $8 app called Filmic Pro. New technology has also made music easier to produce and distribute, inspiring independent musicians. Science, too, is now in the hands of citizens around the world. From the ocean depths to the outer reaches of distant galaxies, and from projects run out of home garages to research platforms with over a million volunteer contributors, science has never been more accessible to the average person. Citizen science can link people to an established project or encourage those working on their own.

We’re on the cusp of a major revolution in the way we approach environmental science. In February, a water sample showed that the first trace amounts of ocean-borne radioactive contamination from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster reached North American shores. The sample wasn’t taken from an oceanographic vessel. It was collected in a 20-liter sample bottle from the public dock in Ucluelet, B.C., by a class of Grade 5 and 6 girls participating in a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution project that connects concerned citizens from North American communities around the Pacific shores. A decade ago, this type of organizing and sample-taking by engaged citizens would have been inconceivable.

Along with valuable scientific information, citizen scientists also provide significant economic support to science. A paper in the journal Biological Conservation estimates that citizen science has contributed billions of dollars of in-kind funding and even exceeded most government-funded studies over a larger area and longer time period.

Glen Dennison, an electronic technologist during the week and recreational diver and deep-sea researcher on his time off, offers an example of this new way to conduct science. He’s been in B.C.’s Howe Sound mapping sponge reefs nearly every weekend over the past five years, using his own underwater sonar mapping equipment and homemade sewer pipe cameras (cameras housed in a pipe that can be dropped up to 300 metres to the seafloor). Were the government to undertake this work, it could cost thousands of dollars a day for vessel time and salaries. With assistance from his daughter and a grad student, Dennison has contributed more than $100,000 of his own time and resources to this project. Government researchers have used his maps to better manage sensitive marine ecosystems.

Citizen science is growing in leaps and bounds. Recently, NatureWatch revamped its website and its popular WormWatch, FrogWatch, PlantWatch and IceWatch programs. For the first time in NatureWatch’s 15-year history, people can use phones or tablets to record, submit and view data. Environmental monitoring is happening as people walk to work, go on vacation or even play golf. You never know when you’ll find a frog in a water hazard!

NatureWatch’s website walks people new to science through everything they need to know. Like the girls in Ucluelet, you could even make a scientific discovery. Amateur bee observers participating in the American BeeSpotter program identified bee species thought to have disappeared in some areas. You don’t even need to live in the area you’re observing to record scientific data. A Minnesota-based volunteer recorded, for the first time ever, a major migration of deep-sea crabs on Canada’s West Coast by reviewing underwater video footage online as part of a program run by Ocean Networks Canada in Victoria.

Just as people who learn first aid are not substitutes for paramedics and doctors, citizen science should never be a justification for cutting government science spending. Governments in countries like the U.S. are funding citizen science programs to amplify the effectiveness of government science programs. The U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration facilitates 65 citizen science programs alone. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency runs dozens of programs in areas ranging from water quality to air pollution monitoring.

Many citizen science programs are based on the simple notion that more eyes lead to better findings. Whether taking pictures of frogs, recording the state of the ice on a local pond or viewing underwater footage taken from the sea floor, citizen science is making a great contribution to Canada’s scientific knowledge. We’re just beginning to realize the full potential of using technology to connect curiosity and concern for the planet with meaningful scientific pursuits.

By David Suzuki with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Research Scientist Scott Wallace.

In Memoriam

Agoyo Mbikoyo, one of the rangers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, was shot by a group of armed poachers a short distance from his patrol unit’s campsite.

Environmental Links

SFAS International Wildlife News Audubon Advocate Audubon Restore Eco-Voice South Florida Wildlife Care Center Sawgrass Nature Center & Wildlife Hospital The Turtle Hospital The Marathon Wild Bird Center Climate change info Audubon’s Coastal Strand Audubon of Florida News Blog Bioenergy News Climate Progress – climate science, politics and solutions Collins Center for Public Policy Comprehensive Everglades Restoration News EcoWatch – feeds from the WaterKeeper Alliance Everglades Foundation – press releases Everglades Hub Fort Myers News – Press Green Front Pages from Florida Newspapers Herald Tribune Newspapers –  Environmental News KeysNews.com Naples Daily News  – Environmental News National Public Radio Eco-News Riverwatch News about the Caloosahatchee Sierra Club Sierra Club Florida South Florida Watershed  Journal South Florida Water Management District Union of Concerned Scientists – news Yahoo News Search: Everglades NASA Climate Information American Littorial Society log NASA Climate Information Sun Newspapers – Lake Okeechobee News Everglades City News  – Mullet Wrapper IFAW’s World of Animals Magazine

ConsRep 1505 A

Will urban sprawl spread so far that most people lose all touch with nature? Will the day come when the only bird a typical American child ever sees is a canary in a pet shop window? When the only wild animal he knows is a rat – glimpsed on a night drive through some city slum? When the only tree he touches is the cleverly fabricated plastic evergreen that shades his gifts on Christmas morning? ~Frank N. Ikard

Of Interest to All

State officials ponder cattle ranching and more to make money off state parks

The new boss of the state Department of Environmental Protection, Jon Steverson, wants to make the award-winning Florida State Park system pay for itself.

That means letting some things into the parks that until now have been kept out. Timber companies chopping down the state’s trees. Cattle grazing on taxpayer-owned grass and leaving behind cow pies. Metal cell phone towers looming over the tallest pines, palms and oaks.

Legislators and other state officials have tried to change Florida’s parks before by adding such things as golf courses, hotels, even a prison. But this goes beyond that, say park advocates.

“This is the biggest threat to the park system I’ve ever seen,” said Jim Stevenson, a retired DEP employee who worked for the Florida park system for 24 years.

The change is the result of a concerted push by Gov. Rick Scott and the Legislature to convert the parks from pristine refuges that attract millions of visitors into a state land-management operation that benefits agriculture as much or more than the environment.

A pair of bills to make this experiment mandatory have been working their way through the House and Senate, even as the DEP is quietly testing the idea out with a proposed cattle lease at Myakka River State Park near Sarasota.

Former DEP employees say this effort to convert the parks into a moneymaking operation by adding agriculture or other uses goes against a policy that dates back to the start of the state park system in 1935.

“State parks in Florida have not been designed to make money,” Florida’s first state parks director, Lewis Scoggin, said in 1941. “They have been designed to give something to the people of Florida and to our guests that money cannot buy.”

For decades, “Florida’s lawmakers, governors and administrators understood that a state park was . . . for the perpetual preservation of unique portions of original, natural Florida,” said Phillip A. Werndli, who recently retired as chief historian of the Florida Park Service. In fact, state law said the parks are supposed to “conserve these natural values for all time.”

The parks do make money for Florida, though, because their natural beauty attracts so many visitors, both from within the state and around the globe. A DEP analysis last year found that about 27 million people visited the parks, generating an economic impact of $2.1 billion.

To Steverson, though, that’s not enough. In March he told a Senate committee the parks cover only 77 percent of their expenses, and he wants to boost that to 100 percent.

Steverson told the senators he believes the park system can protect the environment “while still becoming self-sustaining. . . . We can do a lot to expand the utilization of this land to support other areas of the DEP mission.”

Steverson said his goal is simple: “I want to maximize value for the taxpayers, but also for the environment.”

That’s also the goal of HB 7135 and SB 7086, bills that are rapidly nearing a final vote in the Legislature. Both call for state park management plans to include “preservation of low impact agriculture” among their mandated goals, and to find parks that could support low impact agriculture. The bills do not really define “low-impact agriculture” except to say it’s the kind of farming or ranching that doesn’t pollute too much or interfere with recreation in the park.

In some cases where ranching, timber or other forms of agriculture are adjacent to a park, the state should try to swap some public land with the owner in exchange for a promise not to develop the private land, the bills say.

The legislation is being driven by “a world view amongst folks involved in natural resources up here (in Tallahassee) for looking at how to maximize the use of the lands that we have,” explained the House bill’s sponsor, Rep. Matt Caldwell, R-Lehigh Acres. “You hear ‘park’ and you think about the 5 or 10 acres around the spaces that the park facilities are on. But we’ve got a lot of parks that are huge tracts of land.”

Caldwell’s House bill passed that chamber this week by 88 to 24 and was sent to the Senate for final action. Meanwhile the Senate bill, which includes some language limiting what agriculture can do in those state parks, has yet to pass its last committee.

DEP officials were not part of drafting the two bills and have taken no position on them, an agency spokeswoman said. She said that before making any changes to boost the parks’ earning potential, the agency will invite public comment.

The test case for this new approach is one of the oldest and largest parks in the system, Myakka River State Park in Sarasota County.

The DEP has been putting together a request for cattle ranchers to bid on taking over 6,630 acres of the 37,000-acre park, which hasn’t had any cattle in it since the state bought it in the 1930s. The proposed lease documents, which have not yet been released publicly, include a number of requirements to limit the impact from the cows’ grazing and subsequent fecal output.

The taxpayers may not get any money for leasing all that public land to a rancher, though. The proposal calls for the rancher to build fences and do other chores for free in exchange for parking his or her herd on public property.

“The draft request for proposal has not finished an internal review, nor do we expect it to be issued anytime soon,” DEP spokeswoman Lori Elliott said Friday. So that no-fee aspect may disappear, she said, just as the whole ranching lease might wind up being ditched as unworkable.

Jono Milller, a retired New College environmental studies teacher, is already rallying opposition to the Myakka lease. He pointed out that the state spent years at Myakka River turning what had been cattle pasture into a restored natural landscape — and now the state wants to undo that.

“It seems crazy to me,” he said.

CRAIG PITTMAN|Staff Writer|Tampa Bay Times|April 24, 2015

Bernie Sanders to Run for President as a Democrat

It looks like tree-hugging liberals will get their dream presidential candidate after all. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has been hinting for months that he might get into the primary race but since he’s an independent (and a for-real Socialist!) who caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate, it wasn’t clear what banner he’d run under.

Now news sources such as Vermont Public Radio are reporting he’ll announce his run Thursday as a Democrat. According to reports, he’s planning to release a short statement this week and hold a campaign kickoff event in his home state in upcoming weeks. He’ll join Hillary Clinton and Maryland ex-governor Martin O’Malley in the race. Former Virginia Senator Jim Webb is also looking at a possible run.

Sanders has been focusing his message on the decimation of the middle class and how the Trans-Pacific Trade deal currently under consideration would exacerbate that. But with a lifetime score of 95 percent from the League of Conservation Voters, he’s also an environmentalist’s dream. LCV has also praised Clinton’s environmental record; she was the keynote speaker at their annual dinner in December.

“Unless we take bold action to reverse climate change, our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are going to look back on this period in history and ask a very simple question: Where were they?” says Sanders. “Why didn’t the United States of America, the most powerful nation on Earth, lead the international community in cutting greenhouse gas emissions and preventing the devastating damage that the scientific community was sure would come?”

Sanders is a member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, where he’s usually taking positions that are polar opposites of those of Chairman James Inhofe (R-OK) who threw a snowball on the Senate floor to “prove” his contention that global warming is a “hoax.” Sanders is also a member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

“As a member of both the Environment and Public Works and the Energy and Natural Resources Committees, Senator Sanders is uniquely positioned to fight for progressive energy policies and increased environmental protection—issues of great importance to him and to all Vermonters,” says the Energy & Environment website, which features a photo of Sanders with 350.org founder Bill McKibben taken at last year’s People’s Climate March in New York City. “Senator Sanders is a leading voice on the need to address global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

Calling climate change “the greatest environmental threat facing the planet,” Sanders was a co-sponsor of the Climate Protection Act of 2013 which would tax carbon and methane emissions from coal, oil and natural gas production and use the revenue to invest in energy efficiency and sustainable energy, including investments in wind, solar, geothermal, biomass and plug-in vehicles. Sanders also introduced the End Polluter Welfare Act to end subsidies and tax breaks for fossil fuel companies. He’s an opponent of subsidies and tax breaks for the nuclear power industry as well.

Fracking? He’s unequivocally against it. “I’m very proud that the state of Vermont banned fracking,” he said last year. “I hope communities all over America do the same.”

And unlike Clinton, whom he worked with when she was in the Senate to pass the Green Jobs Act, which created a green jobs workforce training program, he hasn’t been coy about where he stands on the Keystone XL pipeline.

In an interview with CNN in January, when the pipeline was under consideration in the Senate, he said, “The scientific community tells us, virtually unanimous accounts, that climate change is real. It’s already causing devastating problems and if we do not transform our energy system away from fossil fuel, this planet is gonna face some serious problems. The idea that we would give a green light for the transportation of 800,000 barrels of some of the dirtiest oils all over the world makes no sense to me.”

Sanders was also responsible for introducing an amendment to the Keystone Pipeline approval bill to put the Senate on record that climate change is real and human-caused.

In the January CNN interview, Sanders was asked if he was running for President. He replied, “I”m giving some thought to it. Taking on the billionaire class and Wall Street and the Koch brothers is not easy,” and he expressed some pessimism that it would be possible in the future to elect a candidate advocating for the middle class and working people. While fossil fuel tycoons Charles and David Koch are looking over candidates to find someone in whom to invest the nearly $1 billion they’ve promised to spend on next year’s presidential race, it’s clear Sanders won’t be getting their call.

Anastasia Pantsios|April 29, 2015

[ I try to stay away from political discussions in this blog, but now and then it is unavoidable. I am very happy to be a “tree-hugging Liberal”, if that is what it takes to correct the precarious situation we have placed our World in. If he can do all he says he will do, Sanders would be a good choice for President. That is my opinion only and does not constitute an endorsement.] 

Water, fracking bills die as Senate meets without House

A House bill establishing comprehensive water policy was amended and passed by the Senate on Wednesday but was dead because the House had adjourned on Tuesday.

And House bills dealing with hydraulic fracturing were not voted on in the Senate because their Senate sponsor said they lacked the two-thirds vote needed.

The 2015 legislative session continued in an unusual atmosphere on Wednesday with the Senate taking up bills after the House adjourned amid a budget impasse over healthcare spending. A special session is expected before July 1 to pass a 2015-16 state budget.

When debate on a water bill amendment led to an extended pause while Senate President Andy Gardiner was distracted, he responded “Sorry guys, I was calling the House — nobody answered.” There was loud laughter and applause from senators.

With the House being gone, the Senate could only take up bills that passed the House. Any amendments would doom those bills without the House in session to concur.

So when state Sen. Charlie Dean amended his SB 918 water language onto HB 7003, it effectively ended the possibility of comprehensive water policy passing during the session.

Gardiner pointed out that the Senate bill differed from the House bill by establishing a statewide water resources council that he said would provide oversight for spending under Amendment 1, the ballot measure that will provide an estimated $740 million next year for water and land conservation.

“The oversight commission that you put in here is a very important piece of this puzzle,” Gardiner said. “Unfortunately our friends on the other side of the aisle or across the hall aren’t even around to have the debate or the discussion.

“So we will send them this water bill. It’s one we can be extremely proud of.”

The bill passed 39-1 with state Sen. Joe Negron, a Republican from Stuart, being the only vote in opposition.

He spoke in support of an amendment by state Sen. Darren Soto, a Republican from Kissimmee, that would have directed the South Florida Water Management District to identify water storage areas south of Lake Okeechobee.

That amendment, later withdrawn by Soto, would have provided an alternative approach if the state fails to exercise an option by October to buy 46,800 acres of U.S. Sugar Corp. land for water storage.

The Senate also temporarily postponed HB 1205, which would have established a moratorium on oil and gas hydraulic fracturing for at least a year while an environmental study and rule-making are conducted.

Hydraulic fracturing, also called fracking, involves the use of sand, water and chemicals to extract oil and gas from rock. Opponents say the process threatens groundwater and drinking water, which the industry and bill supporters deny.

The Senate took up HB 1205 on Tuesday and was considering amendments only three minutes after the House went home. That led the bill to be temporarily postponed.

State Sen. Garrett Richter, a Republican from Naples and bill sponsor, said Wednesday he welcomed the opportunity to explain the bill again with fewer distractions. But he said he lacked the two-thirds vote he needed to waive rules and vote to send the bill to the governor.

“I hope we can take up this issue next session,” Richter said. “We’re going to waste the next eight months on (not doing) this study and keep the (regulatory) environment the way it is.”

HB 1209, a companion bill exempting from public records laws proprietary information submitted by companies, failed to pass the House before it adjourned on Tuesday.

One bill that the Senate still could pass on Wednesday is HB 7109, a Public Service Commission bill that allows Duke Energy Florida to issue bonds to cover $1.4 billion in operating costs incurred before the shutdown of the Crystal River nuclear plant. Bill sponsors say the deal would save Duke customers $600 million.

The House on Tuesday refused to concur with Senate amendments. So the Senate would have to strip off its amendments on Wednesday to send the bill to the governor.

Bruce Ritchie|Apr 29, 2015

Sprawling Mega-development Planned for Grand Canyon — Take Action

The U.S. Forest Service began the process Monday to approve permits for roads and utilities that would allow a vast urban development near the south edge of the Grand Canyon, a proposal that Grand Canyon National Park’s superintendent has called one of the greatest threats to the park in its 96-year history.

The Stilo Development Group project — which will require vast quantities of water — would include more than 2,100 housing units and 3 million square feet of retail space, transforming the 580-resident community of Tusayan, Ariz., from a small tourist town into a sprawling complex of homes and strip malls.

“Some will always see the Grand Canyon as a cash register instead of one of Earth’s most awe-inspiring and precious places,” said Center cofounder Robin Silver. “We plan to fight shoulder to shoulder with millions of other Americans to defeat this latest scheme to commercialize the Grand Canyon. Shopping malls don’t belong here.”

Get more from National Parks Traveler and act now to help stop the project.

A volcano may be erupting off the Oregon coast, scientists say

Three hundred miles off the Pacific Northwest coast, the seafloor has been rumbling.

Axial Seamount, an active underwater volcano about 300 miles off the coast of Oregon and Washington, appears to be erupting. The colors in the image correspond to depth. Warmer colors represent areas of less depth. (Bill Chadwick/Oregon State University)

Over the past five months, there were hundreds of small earthquakes on most days at Axial Seamount.

Then on April 24, there was a spike: nearly 8,000 earthquakes. The seafloor level dropped more than two meters. Temperatures rose.

Scientists believe an underwater volcano is erupting.

An eruption is not a threat to coastal residents, researchers say, because the earthquakes are small, mostly magnitude 1 or 2, and the seafloor movements are relatively gradual, so they won’t cause a tsunami.

The volcanic activity has no relationship to the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which scientists watch closely for signs of a much larger and more destructive earthquake.

To Bill Chadwick, an Oregon State University geologist, the eruption at Axial Seamount was not a surprise.

He had predicted it would happen this year. He predicted the previous eruption, in 2011, too.

Chadwick hopes the lessons he and his collaborator, Scott Nooner at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, learn from Axial Seamount can eventually be applied to volcanoes on land.

Land volcanoes have thicker crusts and are influenced by large earthquakes and other nearby volcanoes, among other things, so predictions are more difficult, Chadwick said. 

“Axial Seamount is a pure example, if you will,” he said. “It has relatively simple plumbing.”

Chadwick and other scientists watch the signals at Axial Seamount in real-time via a cable laid out on the seafloor. The cable is part of the Ocean Observatories Initiative funded by the National Science Foundation.

The instruments that sent back the volcano’s measurements were installed only last summer, said Chadwick, who works out of OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. He is also affiliated with NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory.

“Volcanoes like this have very fluid magma that is supplied from below, seemingly continuously,” Chadwick said. “It’s like a balloon filling with air. The seafloor actually rises — that’s what we’re measuring.”

Super sensitive pressure sensors can detect shifts as small as two millimeters, he said.

The earthquakes that University of Washington geologist Bill Wilcock detected are caused by magma forcing its way through the rock, Chadwick said.

Though the signs seem to point to an eruption, it will likely be months before Chadwick can travel out to Axial Seamount to do the measurements that will say for sure. He has a trip planned for August.

Carli Brosseau|The Oregonian|OregonLive|April 30, 2015

Here’s what happened to the fracking bills ‏

You may have heard that legislative session ended earlier this week, with the Florida House abruptly adjourning. Several major pieces of legislation died as a result, including the two dangerous fracking bills we’ve been fighting against.

However, contrary to what you may have heard, the defeat of these fracking bills is more than just a consequence of parliamentary procedure. The reality is, tremendous public pressure that you helped bring about through petitions, letters, and calls created a number of hurdles that led to the bills’ ultimate demise.

HB 1205/SB 1468 would have paved the way for further fracking in Florida by creating a narrow set of regulations. As a result of mounting public pressure, the bill was amended to include a moratorium on fracking during a year-long study. This fig leaf rightly did not please opponents, who continued to fight it at every turn. The bill passed the Florida House on mostly party lines but did not match the senate version, which was facing growing resistance among senators. As a result, when the House adjourned, the bill died.

HB 1209/SB 1582 would have prevented Floridians from knowing what kind of chemicals are being used in the fracking process by creating a public records exemption. A new records exemption like this requires a two-thirds vote in both legislative chambers. Again, thanks to substantial public opposition, the bill died in the House as it was unlikely to achieve a two-thirds vote.

Thank you again for taking action against these dangerous fracking bills. Your voice alongside the hard work of many organizations and activists helped defeat fracking for the third year in a row! Of course, we won’t be content with this victory. We’ll continue to work for legislation that would ban fracking in Florida in its entirety.

Mark Ferrulo|Executive Director|Progress Florida

Calls to Action

1. Tell the EPA and FDA- Immediately suspend Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide – here
2. Ban the bomb trains – here
3. Please tell Interior Secretary Sally Jewell to reject Shell’s plans to drill for oil in the Chukchi Sea – here
4. Let’s not waste more time and money. Tell Congress to stop Yucca now – here
5. Stop destruction of the Amazon Rainforest – here
6. Please sign on to support a moratorium on climate killing fracking projects – here
7. Red alert for bees: support the EU pesticide ban – here
8. Ask your representative to vote for clean water – here
9. tell the White House and Dept. of Transportation that we need a ban on Bomb Trains NOW and to leave fossil fuels in the ground – here

Birds and Butterflies

Meet the “Most Polluted Bird” in the World

Vancouver, British Columbia, has the new and dubious honor of being home to what scientists say is the “most polluted bird” ever found anywhere in the world.

That bird, a Cooper’s hawk, is dead, of course. His body was found in the vicinity of a waste transfer station near Vancouver. Researchers analyzed the liver fat of the hawk, as well as that of 15 other deceased Cooper’s hawks found in the area.

What they found stunned them. Their study, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, reveals the hawk’s liver contained more flame retardant chemicals than any other wild bird ever discovered — anywhere.

Test results showed the bird’s liver fat had accumulated an incredible 197,000 parts per billion (ppb) of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs). According to the study, this amount is more contamination than what’s been found in birds tested at an “electronic waste site in China.” The word you may be searching for right now is “yikes.”

In fact, this one bird was so overwhelmingly polluted with PBDEs that researchers dubbed him “flameproof.” The other dead Cooper’s hawks from the same general area showed levels at around 18,730 ppb — significantly less than this one particular male, but still of concern.

PBDEs, banned in Canada since 2000, were once commonly used as a flame retardant in furniture, vehicles, carpeting, curtains, computers, televisions and other electronics. Though they’re no longer allowed to be used, PBDEs still end up in landfills even today when people throw away older products made with them.

How did this hawk end up with such incredible levels of pollutants in his system? It’s all in what he was eating. As a raptor, the usual diet of the Cooper’s hawk includes other birds and small mammals. Those creatures were eating things containing PBDEs and passing on that contamination in concentrated form to the hawks.

Another study from 2005 determined that peregrine falcons would suffer negative effects if their diets contained any more than 10 percent of starlings, sea gulls, magpies and robins, according to the Vancouver Sun. Each of these smaller birds consume so many pollutants they become dangerous meals for larger animals.

“Many animals, including coyotes, eagles and hawks benefit from the excess food in our cities. A downside is the high levels of pollution,” Kyle Elliott, a professor at McGill University’s Department of Natural Resource Sciences and an author of this study, said in a university news release.

“The levels of flame retardants in starlings, a favorite prey of hawks, which nested near the landfill site were fifteen times higher than levels in starlings found elsewhere in Vancouver,” Kyle added. “We were surprised to see such high levels of contaminants in what I think of as ‘green’ city.”

It makes you wonder what’s going on in cities that don’t have a green reputation, doesn’t it? PBDEs are now banned in the United States too. However, it’s just as likely similar problems exist here as in Vancouver.

Interestingly, the PBDEs didn’t kill this hawk or any of the others tested. Each died as a result of fatal injuries such as being hit by cars or colliding with power lines. However, researchers believe that the level of contamination in this hawk’s system would have affected his thyroid, likely giving him problems with growth, behavior and metabolic issues.

Other types of birds in the area affected by similar contaminants are rebounding, according to the study, so there may be a reason for optimism.

“We can only hope that because many forms of PBDEs have now been banned and the levels of these contaminants are rapidly disappearing from herons and cormorants in Vancouver, the same will be true for other bird species,” Kyle said.

We sometimes forget that many forms of pollution persist in the environment for years. Chemicals we use without a thought today may one day become a new threat for ecosystems and wildlife.

Keep this in mind when choosing the products you use. Where possible, use natural products that minimize chemicals and additives. To the extent you can, help nature resist the harm that humankind inflicts.

Susan Bird|April 26, 2015

Inspiring Action on Climate Change and Protecting America’s Birds

What can I do? That’s the question Audubon hears most frequently when people learn that there may be no Baltimore Orioles in Baltimore or Common Loons nesting in our northern states by the end of the century.

In a study based on decades of data, our scientists found that if climate change continues on its current trajectory, 314 U.S. and Canadian bird species — more than half of the 588 species studied — could lose 50 percent or more of their current ranges by the year 2080. Many could lose so much ground that, without urgent action, they could face extinction.

Our study is a road map for action, from simple steps anyone can take in their own backyard to speaking up about the future boundaries of national parks and collective efforts to address climate change.

So, when people ask me, “What can I do?” I tell them, here’s what’s working:

Young people are powerful agents of personal and collective change

Our kids get it. Birds don’t have a political party. This is not a Republican or a Democratic issue. It’s a bird issue. And young people know it’s their issue.

Young people were the messengers that led the anti-litter campaigns of the ’70s and the recycling efforts of the ’80s — all of which are part of mainstream culture today — and they did that without regard for political affiliation.

Audubon is engaging young people across America: Last week, teenagers lobbied state legislators for climate solutions in Washington. Through an Audubon program, middle school students are becoming community advocates in inner-city Baltimore neighborhoods. And in Madison, Wisconsin, students of all ages are training to become citizen scientists.

Citizen science is making climate change a more personal — and less political — issue

When people see change in their own communities, they get it. And people who watch birds are seeing changes. Birds are leaving later and coming back earlier, or not at all. New birds are showing up in places that they didn’t used to live. And by recording all those observations, people are doing two things: They’re recognizing changes in their communities, and they’re contributing the information that’s needed to make a difference.

New tools, including apps, smartphones, and map-based technologies, are making it easier than ever for anyone to be a citizen scientist.

For instance, our Hummingbirds at Home project engages thousands of participants across the United States to submit sightings of these tiny gems of the bird world along with their nectar-feeding preferences. This collective data will help scientists better understand how hummingbirds are responding to climate change and how we can help them adjust to a warming world, where their migration schedules are increasingly out of sync with the blooming flowers on which they depend.

From Mississippi to Denver to the Pacific Coast, I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t love hummingbirds.

People can make a difference in their own backyards

The stronger that bird populations are today, the better their chances for surviving and adapting to threats posed by global warming. That’s why each and every personal action taken on behalf of birds matters. Imagine if every home, condo or apartment on your block made room for bird-friendly native plants or for more hummingbird feeders. Put all of those together and you know what that’s called? A sanctuary. Right there in your neighborhood.

Here’s another example. In North Carolina, we’re partnering with community groups to install 10,000 nest boxes for brown-headed nuthatches, lively little backyard birds with a call that sounds like a rubber-duck squeaky toy. Similar birdhouse projects have helped bring back the Eastern bluebird, and conservationists are hoping the nesting-box campaign will give nuthatches the help they need to survive deforestation and urbanization, as well as the grave threats this bird faces from climate change.

New tools are assisting conservationists, urban planners, and natural-resource managers

Audubon’s birds and climate study provides conservationists and policy makers new analytical tools to identify the places that birds need now and will need in the future so that they can thrive. Conservation groups, state agencies, natural-resource managers, and other partners are using the detailed maps and science from the study to make long-range conservation plans.

Talking about your #ClimateThing matters

We could quote reams of science about the ecological importance of birds.

But birds also matter because people take them personally. Whether it’s the melody of a Northern cardinal on a soft spring morning or the faraway honking of migrating geese on a crisp fall evening, birds evoke memories.

Audubon members want to make sure there are plenty of birds around so our kids and their kids can make those memories, too. For us, birds are a #ClimateThing. They make climate change personal, and they inspire us to act. That is working.

Whether your #ClimateThing is birds, clean water, or your kids, join the conversation on social media, and then take action. There is something everyone can do. The important thing is to get started.

President|National Audubon Society|04/23/2015

Milkweed is a monarch’s best defence

The monarch butterfly is a wonderful creature with an amazing story. In late summer, monarchs in southern Canada and the U.S. northeast take flight, travelling over 5,000 kilometres to alpine forests in central Mexico. The overwintering butterflies cling to fir trees there in masses so dense that branches bow under their weight.

The monarch’s multigenerational journey northward is every bit as remarkable as the epic southern migration. Three or four successive generations fly to breeding grounds, lay eggs and perish. The resulting caterpillars transform into butterflies and then take on the next leg of the trip. Monarchs arriving in Canada in late summer are often fourth or fifth generation descendants of butterflies that flew south the previous year.

What may be the monarch’s most striking quirk is its caterpillars’ reliance on milkweed as its sole food source, a phenomenon called “monophagy”. Milkweed plants contain small traces of cardenolides, bitter chemicals monarchs store in their bodies to discourage predators, which associate the butterflies’ distinctive coloration with bad taste. But relying on a single type of plant for survival is a risky strategy that has put monarchs in grave danger.

In the mid-1990s, the eastern monarch population was more than one billion. In winter 2013, the population had dropped by more than 95 per cent to 35 million, with a modest increase to 56.5 million this past winter. As University of Guelph postdoctoral research fellow Tyler Flockhart notes, a single severe storm could extinguish the entire monarch population. A 2002 snowstorm wiped out 80 million butterflies. A similar trend has been occurring west of the Rockies, where the western population overwinters in California and migrates as far north as central B.C.

Much of the monarch butterfly decline has been pinned on virtual eradication of its critical food source throughout much of its migration path by profligate use of a glyphosate-based weed killer called Roundup, which corn and soybean crops have been genetically modified to tolerate. Blanketing fields with the herbicide kills plants like milkweed. As a result, several U.S. Midwest states — the heart of monarch breeding territory — have lost most of their native milkweed, causing monarch reproductive rates to drop by more than 80 per cent.

A recent study suggests glyphosate is merely the first of a one-two toxic punch from industrial agricultural operations. The second is neonicotinoids, the controversial nicotine-based insecticides that have been identified as a chief culprit in the decline of honeybees, along with a host of birds, bees and butterflies. It appears that even at one part per billion, these chemicals can affect monarch caterpillar development, delivering a potential knockout blow for the imperiled insects.

The good news is that many jurisdictions are catching up with the science. Ontario’s government has proposed regulations to reduce neonic use by 80 per cent over the next couple of years. In early April, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued a moratorium on new applications to use neonicotinoids. I hope this marks the turning of the toxic tide, but time is running out.

What can you do to help? While government agencies in Mexico, the U.S. and Canada are scrambling to hatch plans to save monarchs, the scientific community has been clear: A lot of milkweed must be planted over the next few years. One great opportunity is the many thousands of kilometres of linear corridors — rail, road and hydro rights-of-way — that run throughout the migratory landscape and can be modified to grow milkweed and other pollinator-friendly plants.

Yards, school grounds and parks are also perfect for butterfly gardens and milkweed patches, and planting milkweed in your backyard or balcony garden is a great way to help. Be sure to call your local garden center or nursery to ensure they stock native milkweed plants this spring.

Find out more about milkweed and information about how to bring monarchs back from the brink at the David Suzuki Foundation’s Got Milkweed campaign website. You can also donate to support Foundation volunteers planting milkweed in the Greater Toronto Area.

Planting milkweed may seem small, but the combined actions of thousands of concerned Canadians stitching together parks and yards with schools and rights-of-way into a glorious tapestry of butterfly corridors could usher in a new, hopeful era for monarch butterflies.

By David Suzuki with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Communications Specialist Jode Roberts.

Audubon Center for Birds of Prey Raptor News

 Florida Panthers

Panther shot, killed; officials investigating

Until seven years ago, intentional killings of endangered Florida panthers were very rare.

At first, the dead Florida panther found lying on a Collier County highway last month appeared to be yet another roadkill victim.

But then a Gainesville veterinarian took an X-ray of the carcass and found a different cause of death. The endangered panther had been gunned down. It’s the seventh one shot and the sixth killed that way since 2008.

Now U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials are offering a $5,000 reward for information, but the odds are against them. Federal investigators have so far solved only two of the six killings.

“At this point we’re still following leads, hoping for new leads and asking the public for help,” agency spokesman Ken Warren said Wednesday. There is no evidence all of the shootings are connected, he said.

The latest panther to be shot was a 5-year-old male found about 8:30 p.m. March 22 on Immokalee Road about a mile from where it intersects Camp Keas Road. That’s a spot northeast of Ave Maria University and the Panther Run Golf Club.

Only about 20 or so panthers wear radio collars that allow biologists to track their movements. This panther wasn’t one of those. That means tracking the big cat’s movements before its death may be impossible.

Each panther found dead is taken to the University of Florida to be examined by a veterinarian who conducts what is known as a necropsy. The procedure, similar to an autopsy for humans, determines a cause of death and documents any other important physical evidence about the panther.

In this case, the necropsy provided the first clue that someone had shot the panther instead of running it over, according to Diane Hirth of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Although it has been Florida’s official state animal since 1981 — not to mention a popular license plate icon and the mascot of Miami’s pro hockey team — the panther has had it particularly rough lately.

Panther killings have been rare since the cats were included on the very first federal endangered species list, drawn up in 1967. The first person accused of the crime, Seminole Indian Tribe chairman James C. Billie, was acquitted of killing one in 1983 in what he said was a religious ritual. His defense raised questions about whether he had killed a purebred panther or a cross-breed not protected under the law, prompting the jury to vote for not guilty.

The second man hauled into court for a panther killing was a deer hunter named Elmer Booker, who in 1985 said he shot a panther because he feared it might climb his tree stand and kill him. Although he pleaded guilty, the judge, an avid hunter, refused to put him in jail and instead sentenced him to probation.

That was it until seven years ago, when the pace picked up considerably.

The first of the most recent spate of Florida panther killings didn’t occur in Florida. In 2008, a Georgia deer hunter shot a panther that had roamed so far from South Florida that it had crossed the state line. He pleaded guilty to the crime in 2010 and was sentenced to two years of probation, during which he could not hunt anywhere, and fined $2,000.

Then came a string in South Florida, beginning in Collier County in February 2009. Federal officials have not disclosed anything more about that cat — including exactly where in Collier County it was found or how it was killed — except to say that the death is under investigation.

In April 2009, a female panther was found shot in rural Hendry County, just outside the boundary of the Big Cypress National Preserve. At 2 years old, the dead panther had been just about ready to breed for the first time. No further information has been disclosed in that death either.

Then, in October 2009, a panther was found dead near the Ave Maria development in Collier County. That one had been shot with an arrow.

A three-year investigation led to the conviction of a bow hunter named Todd “Scuttlebutt” Benfield, who in court admitted shooting the panther with an arrow “because I thought the Florida panther was competing and interfering with my hunting.” Benfield was sentenced to 60 days’ home confinement, 30 days’ intermittent custody, three years’ probation and a $5,000 fine.

And then, in December 2013, an 18-month-old female panther was found shot to death amid the slash pine and saw palmetto of a remote area of the Big Cypress National Preserve. Big Cypress spokesman Bob DeGross said last week that he had no new information about that shooting.

One panther has survived being shot. In November, a passing motorist alerted wildlife officials about an injured panther. They discovered someone had fired a shotgun at the cat’s face, blinding it.

That panther, now known as Uno, became the first patient at the new veterinary care hospital at Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo. Last month, its rehabilitation complete, Uno was moved to the Naples Zoo, where it will remain for the rest of its life.

CRAIG PITTMAN|Tampa Bay Times|Staff Writer|April 29, 2015

  Invasive species

Native lizard hangs tight with rapid evolution

Florida’s native green anoles evolve physically to escape invading brown anoles.

Cuban brown anoles have pushed their home-grown Florida cousins, the green anole, off the ground to live in low branches and shrubs. A recent study found that the greens evolved to have bigger toe pads on the longest toe, the fourth.

Anybody who has lived or played in Florida likely has been called out by a finger-long lizard that taunts people with bold stares, push-ups and throat flexing.

Aggressive, tough and foreign, those Cuban brown anoles also throw attitude at their close cousins, green anoles, which are homegrown to Florida, bullying them off the ground to live in bushes and branches.

But in that forced exodus is resilience: The greens can quickly evolve to have bigger, stickier feet that better grip their lofty perches. Floridians, it turns out, may have a knack for rapid evolution in order to survive invaders.

Lizard evolution

SHINIKO R. FLOYD, ORLANDO SENTINEL

“It’s good news for the green anole, and it suggests some hope for other native species encountering invasives that maybe they can adapt,” said Yoel Stuart, a postdoctoral biologist at the University of Texas.

Stuart is among six researchers at universities across the nation who published findings last month in the journal Science that green anoles evolved in just 20 generations spanning 15 years to have significantly larger and grippier toe pads.

That natural selection toward bigger feet wasn’t a radical change in physical characteristics. The greens didn’t gain ability “to breathe underwater, for example,” Stuart said.

Still, the transformation was significant.

“If human height were evolving as fast as these lizards’ toes, the height of an average American man would increase from about 5 foot, 9 inches today to about 6 foot, 4 inches within 20 generations,” Stuart said.

The study, focusing on a critter and place that are quintessential Florida, was complex. Participant expertise included evolutionary biology, genetics and studying species in a “common garden experiment.”

It began as something else in the 1990s when Todd Campbell, now a University of Tampa biology professor, designed a doctoral thesis to plumb the notion that brown anoles force green anoles into higher turf.

Conventional wisdom was that heavier, faster, ambush-specializing browns were simply gobbling up the stealthy, more deliberate greens.

This is a green anole. Green anoles are native to Florida. They fled from the ground into shrubs and trees, bullied by an invasion of Cuban anoles. Scientists say that green anoles have evolved to have bigger toes and be more agile in shrubs and trees.

This is a green anole. Green anoles are native to Florida. They fled from the ground into shrubs and trees, bullied by an invasion of Cuban anoles. Scientists say that green anoles have evolved to have bigger toes and be more agile in shrubs and trees. (Todd Campbell)

Campbell considered big enclosures for experiments until he realized dozens of tiny islands in the Mosquito Lagoon near Titusville would be an ideal laboratory. He had once water-skied in the area.

“I saw them as cages,” Campbell said.

Desert-like lizard lounges today, the islands are man-made, typically acre-or-so piles of sand and rock deposited in the 1950s from dredging the Intracoastal Waterway.

Campbell found six islands that had only green anoles and with federal permission introduced brown anoles to three of those.

For four years, he recorded the migration of greens into shrubs and trees.

Campbell also observed population declines among greens that fled from the browns. He attributed that to life off the ground being harder.

“They have less food to eat — they do have food — but it’s mostly flying insects that are harder to catch,” Campbell said. “Ground-based insects like cockroaches and beetles, you can just pounce on them and eat them.”

Campbell finished his island research in 1998, wondering whether green anoles had evolved physically in their new habitat. A decade later, he got a call from Stuart, who proposed going back for further investigation.

In 2009 and ’10, they gathered data from the feet of green anoles on islands that had no brown anoles and from the feet of greens on islands invaded by browns.

This is a Cuban anole. Cuban anoles, or brown anoles, invaded Florida decades ago. Scientists say they bullied native green anoles off the ground and into trees and shrubs.

This is a Cuban anole. Cuban anoles, or brown anoles, invaded Florida decades ago. Scientists say they bullied native green anoles off the ground and into trees and shrubs. (Adam Algar)

What they found was that greens forced to live in shrubs and trees — compared with greens living on the ground and not competing with browns — had bigger toe pads on the longest toe, the fourth.

The toe pads also had more scales called lamellae. Each scale has thousands of tiny hairs that exert a molecular attraction to surfaces — a force that also enables geckos to cling to windows or ceilings.

Stuart said green anoles may be hard-wired to live primarily in bushes and branches. Long ago, closely related green anoles in Cuba — also tree and shrub dwellers — found their way to Florida. Encountering no browns, they took they took to living on the ground.

Stuart said that possibly when brown anoles arrived in Florida during the past century, “green anoles retreated back to the ancestral niche they occupied a couple of million years ago.”

Whatever the deeper explanation, the island laboratory in the Mosquito Lagoon is repeated widely in Florida, even in mundane places.

“If you go to a hotel that has a bunch of shrubbery, yaupon holly, hibiscus and firebush and all that stuff, there will be green anoles there with brown anoles,” Campbell said.

“But if you got to a hotel that just has palm trees sticking out of the grass, there will not be any green anoles because the brown anoles will have snapped them up.”

Kevin spears|Orlando Sentinel

Endangered Species

Mexico signs historic agreement to protect jaguars

The Mexican government has signed an historic agreement with global wild cat conservation organisation, Panthera, to work towards the protection of jaguars.

Senator Gabriela Cuevas, President of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Mexican Senate, led a group of senators in the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with Panthera’s Chief Executive Officer, Dr Alan Rabinowitz.

Panthera will work with the Senate, academia, and non-governmental organisations in Mexico to raise awareness of the importance of conserving jaguars in the country and assist in the implementation of science-based conservation actions. 

The jaguar is an historic icon in Mexico, but their range throughout the country has been reduced in recent years by over 50% leaving them in danger of extinction through habitat destruction, which has led to a decline in their prey. They have also been victims of poaching. 

The Mexican government will formulate an official recovery plan for jaguars and Panthera will develop a plan to work alongside existing jaguar conservation activities in the country, and to implement similar measures as those that are currently employed in 13 other Latin American countries which are part of Panthera’s Jaguar Corridor Initiative (JCI). 

At the signing, Senator Cuevas said: “The jaguar is a symbol of the culture and history of Mexico. It is the most representative American feline and is emblematic of biodiversity and conservation of species.

“Rarely are such diverse causes intertwined with so many issues, ranging from foreign affairs and protection of the environment, to climate change, education and agriculture.” 

Alan Rabinowitz said: “We are thrilled to join forces with the Senate and to contribute to the protection and conservation of the jaguar and the corridors between their populations in Mexico.

“Mexico is the northern border for the distribution of jaguars and maintaining connectivity between populations of jaguars is vital for the survival of the jaguar and the biodiversity that lives within these areas.

“We hope to collaborate with Mexican biologists, legislators, academics, government agencies, and non-governmental organisations dedicated to conservation, and to complement and enhance their efforts to promote the protection of this majestic feline.”  

Jaguars currently inhabit 18 countries in Latin America, from Mexico through Central and South America to Argentina, and occasionally in the United States.

Panthera’s Jaguar Corridor Initiative (JCI) comprises nearly six million square kilometers through a mosaic of environments within these countries.

The JCI seeks to connect and protect jaguar populations, especially those that live and move through landscapes dominated by humans, helping to maintain genetic diversity and thus increase the long-term survival of this species. 

Panthera researchers are exploring possibilities to establish a long-term study in the states of Guerrero, Michoacan and Colima, in order to have a more precise understanding of the distribution of jaguars and their prey. Mexico’s signing represents Panthera’s eighth jaguar conservation agreement with Latin American countries. 

Wildlife Extra|4/27/15

The Beautiful Animals Facing Climate Change Extinction  in Pictures

Scientists worried about India’s tiger population

SUNDARBAN TIGER RESERVE, India — At first, the numbers seem impressive: India’s tiger population has gone up 30 percent in just four years. The government lauded the news as astonishing evidence of victory in conservation.

But independent scientists say such an increase — to 2,226 big cats — in so short a time doesn’t make sense.

They worry an enthusiastic new government under Prime Minister Narendra Modi is misinterpreting the numbers, trumpeting false claims of a thriving tiger population that could hurt conservation in the long run.

“The circus is not necessary,” said tiger expert K. Ullas Karanth, science director for the Wildlife Conservation Society in Asia. “All of this tom-tom ‘ing and arm-waving, claiming we’ve had stupendous success, is ridiculous and unscientific.”

The first numbers were released in January. Last week, the government offered details of the data.

Even as scientists begged caution in presenting the count, India’s government doubled down. Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar again boasted of a 30 percent population increase. And Prime Minister Modi rounded that up, saying tiger numbers had seen “about a 40 percent increase. Feels good to hear it!”

If only it were true. This census differs in an important way from earlier tallies: It estimates India’s entire wild tiger population, while preceding counts focused only on cats in sanctuaries and reserves.

“I’d prefer to say there are 30 percent more known tigers, rather than say there is actually an increase in tigers. We might not have counted them all earlier,” said Anurag Danda of the World Wildlife Fund in the Sundarbans, one of many groups that participated in the census.

A 30 percent increase within four years is implausible. Though tigers have high birth rates, they also have high natural death rates, and factors such as habitat loss and poaching haven’t slowed. At least 110 tigers were killed in 2011-14, barely a drop from the 118 poached in 2007-10, according to the Wildlife Protection Society of India.

Globally, experts believe the best that can be hoped for is a 50 percent increase in the world population over 10 years — a much more modest rate of growth.

Such incongruities have happened before. India claimed a 17 percent increase between 2006 and 2010, even while tiger habitats shrank by some 40 percent.

But while Danda interprets the latest numbers more conservatively than some government officials, he agrees they show that conservation efforts appear to be working: “Otherwise, how come we have so many tigers outside the tiger reserves?”

India is by far the world leader in protecting tigers, spending more resources and money than any other country. For decades it has faced immense challenges, from habitat loss and human encroachment to poaching, disease and pollution. Still, India manages to keep about 70 percent of the world’s wild tigers on less than 25 percent of the world’s tiger habitat. That’s partly a credit to its vast rural population, which long ago learned to live in relative proximity to the secretive beasts.

If India can protect tigers, despite a human population 1.26 billion strong, that proves any country can do it, conservationists say.

“But they can’t relax. And that’s my biggest worry about this latest census and the way it’s being presented,” said Alan Rabinowitz, head of Panthera, a New York-based big-cat conservation group. “The worst outcome of that is it allows development and business interests to say, ‘We’ve been doing really well. We can pull back a bit.'”

Desperate to develop its economy and alleviate widespread poverty, India faces intense pressure to convert forests for roads or industrial use, or to allow polluting factories or mining operations near forest reserves and water supplies. Conservationists worry more of those projects will be green-lighted around tiger habitats if the cats are seen to be thriving. The government has already cut the Environment Ministry’s 2015-16 budget by almost 25 percent, with funds for tiger conservation dropping 15 percent.

Over the weekend, the Supreme Court allowed for the widening of a 10-kilometer (7-mile) road between two tiger sanctuaries in central Madhya Pradesh — work its own appointed committee warned would irreparably damage critical wildlife habitat and invite heavy traffic that might mow the animals down.

When India says it now is home to 2,226 tigers, what it is giving is an estimate — a best-guess based on a technique called index-calibration that combines small-scale cat counts and, through complex calculations, extrapolates them to a national total. Those counts are conducted by various groups — forest rangers, independent scientists, tiger charities — through various means, including photographing individual tigers and analyzing tiger droppings and paw prints.

The technique, which India adopted in 2006, is by no means perfect. An Oxford-led study published in February by the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution suggested the data collection was too erratic for adequately predicting cat populations in areas outside census monitoring.

Scientists also question the absence of independent oversight in the government-organized census. And some say that one census every four years is not enough.

“The criticism of the census is rubbish,” said Rajesh Gopal, who headed the government’s National Tiger Conservation Authority from its beginning in 2006 until January, when he joined the Global Tiger Forum.

“Out of the 2,226 tigers estimated in this census, we have photographic evidence for about 1,500 individuals, or 70 percent. And the statistical models are state-of-the-art. The detractors are not being very fair,” he said.

Gopal agreed, however, that the government is overstating things by saying the overall population had grown 30 percent. “These are just the numbers we know of right now. We can’t say anything beyond that.”

Experts praise India for maintaining corridors for the tigers to move between sanctuaries and cracking down on poachers, including giving some state forest rangers the right to shoot suspected poachers on sight. Patrolling has improved in the country’s 47 tiger reserves, covering less than 2 percent of India’s total land mass, or about 53,500 square kilometres.

But India could do more, scientists say, such as establishing prey populations and anti-poaching patrols on some 300,000 square kilometres of unprotected forest that is otherwise suitable as tiger habitat.

India’s greatest conservation strength may be its human population. Villagers long ago learned to live alongside the predators and appreciate their importance to maintaining order within an ecosystem — for example, by keeping deer populations in check so they don’t devour trees and plants. Though they are among India’s poorest people, many villagers would sooner adjust their own behavior in the forests than see the big cats disappear.

In the vast deltas of the eastern Sundarbans region, Nepal Sardar wears two faces while searching for honey — one trained to the trees and looking for bees, the other painted on a mask strapped to the back of his head staring down any tigers that might approach. The mask works, he explains, because the stealthy tigers generally prefer to attack from behind.

Another villager, Anita Mondol, echoed many others in saying she lives in terror of tigers roaming into villages and attacking livestock. The tigers will swim kilometers between islands and ambush people on land. She worries one might break through the woven-thatch roof of her hut, enter her home and carry someone away. It has happened before to villagers she knows. She is certain it will happen again.

Still, “if it weren’t for the tigers, there would be no forest,” the 41-year-old said. “And with no forest, there would be no place for us.”

Katy Daigle|The Associated Press|April 17, 2015

Palm Beach Sea Turtles Killed During Beach Renourishment Project

Sand is being moved for renourishment, but loggerhead sea turtles have gotten caught in the crossfire.

The mangled flipper resembled a piece of rotting chicken, the shredded meat looking like it had been caught in the blades of a lawn mower. The flipper belonged to a loggerhead turtle, one of several endangered sea turtle species that nest in the sands of South Florida. But this mauling wasn’t the work of a predator or even human carelessness. The butchered flipper, and the dead turtle it once belonged to, were collateral damage from a beach renourishment project in the Town of Palm Beach. According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, in less than a month, the project has killed at least four loggerhead turtles and injured a green turtle.

South Floridians have for years grappled with the issue of beach erosion. Condos continue to go up despite wave action that carries sand away. Residents want wide, sandy beaches — and so do turtles, who need it to nest. Almost every city in South Florida has at some point resorted to having sand from afar brought in to artificially replenish the beaches. But as this project shows, turtles are being killed in the machinery.

The current $17.6 million renourishment project is bringing in about 800,000 cubic yards of sand from off the coast and depositing it onto Midtown Beach in Palm Beach. The project is being carried out by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s Bureau of Beaches and Coastal Systems. The first phase is expected to last until the first week of May.

Officials are required to document the deaths of and injuries to endangered species harmed in the process. They use the term “taken” rather than “killed.” The turtles are being hurt by a hopper trawling vessel that sucks up sand from the bottom with a suction tube. According to Robbin Trindell, biological administrator at FWC, the hopper dredge is equipped with something called a turtle exclusion device. But the device doesn’t always work, and the turtles are sucked up and maimed by the dredge. A shrimp trawler has been brought in to run ahead of the dredge to scare the turtles away.

Ed Tichenor, director of the conservation group Reef Rescue, points out an absurdity: It’s illegal for citizens to disturb a sea turtle nest or even have lights turned on in nesting areas, yet the government is allowed to dredge — even now, at the beginning of nesting season — killing or severely injuring the turtles along the way with impunity.

“If you live on the beach and turn your lights on after March 1st, you are subject to fines,” he says. “But they’re permitted to grind up sea turtles for a beach project.”

At minimum, he says, “We would like to see these project scheduled so as not to extend into turtle nesting season.” Tichenor also suspects that FWC’s count of dead turtles might be low. He claims the use of a shrimp trawler to run interference for the hopper dredge isn’t something used before on beach projects in this part of Florida. “It suggests to me a desperation move and causes me to wonder how reliable the turtle take number really is,” he says.

Chris Joseph|April 27, 2015

Are bees ‘hooked’ on nectar containing pesticides?

Bees are attracted to nectar containing common pesticides, scientists at Newcastle University and Trinity College Dublin have discovered.

This could increase their chances of exposure to high levels of pesticides.

Previous studies have suggested that exposure of this kind can affect bees’ fitness. The research, published in Nature, discovered that buff-tailed bumblebees and honeybees could not taste the three most commonly used neonicotinoid pesticides and so did not avoid them. In fact, the bees showed a preference for food which contained pesticides: when the bees were given a choice between sugar solution, and sugar solution containing neonicotinoids, they chose the neonicotinoid-laced food.

The lab-based study also showed that the bumblebees ate more of the food containing pesticides than the honeybees, and so were exposed to higher doses of toxins.

Bees and other pollinating insects are important for increasing crop yields — their value has been estimated to be worth at least €153billion per year globally. When pollinating crops, they can be exposed to pesticides in floral nectar and pollen. Several controversial studies have shown that neonicotinoids have negative effects on bee foraging and colony fitness. As a result, public concern has grown over the impact of neonicotinoids on bees and other pollinators. In April 2013, the EU introduced a temporary ban on the use of neonicotinoid pesticides on flowering crops, while further scientific and technical evidence was gathered.

Professor Geraldine Wright, lead scientist on the study at the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University, said: “Bees can’t taste neonicotinoids in their food and therefore do not avoid these pesticides. This is putting them at risk of poisoning when they eat contaminated nectar.

“Even worse, we now have evidence that bees prefer to eat pesticide-contaminated food. Neonicotinoids target the same mechanisms in the bee brain that are affected by nicotine in the human brain. The fact that bees show a preference for food containing neonicotinoids is concerning as it suggests that like nicotine, neonicotinoids may act like a drug to make foods containing these substances more rewarding. “If foraging bees prefer to collect nectar containing neonicotinoids, this could have a knock-on negative impact on whole colonies and on bee populations.”

Jane Stout, Professor of Botany and Principal Investigator in the School of Natural Sciences at Trinity College Dublin, said: “Our findings imply that even if alternative food sources are provided for bees in agricultural landscapes where neonicotinoid pesticides are used, the bees may prefer to forage on the neonicotinoid-contaminated crops. Since neonicotinoids can also end up in wild plants growing adjacent to crops, they could be much more prevalent in bees’ diets than previously thought.”

The study is part of the Insect Pollinators Initiative, jointly funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), Defra, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the Scottish Government and the Wellcome Trust under the auspices of the Living with Environmental Change (LWEC) partnership. It was also funded by Science Foundation Ireland, the Irish Research Council, and National Science Foundation.

Newcastle University|April 23, 2015

A True Turtle Survival Story ‏

Life in a pond or on a bank isn’t easy for the endangered Pacific pond turtle, even if it is fully grown. San Diego Zoo Global and our partners—U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the San Diego Association of Governments—spent four years overseeing a conservation project to save the small, local freshwater turtles. First, eggs were collected, then carefully incubated and hatched at the San Diego Zoo. Hatchlings were nurtured and “head-started” for a few years until they were large enough to fend for themselves. When you’re the size of a quarter at hatch, it’s best to be at least the size of a muffin before release to the wild! Our next step was to attach tiny radio transmitters to their shells so researchers could keep tabs on them after release.

Then in September 2014, USGS staff found a severely injured male pond turtle they had radio-tagged and released in a different area from our release site—where it was probably attacked by a coyote—and brought him to the Zoo for life-saving measures. With the turtle’s shell fractured in several places, medications were administered by our veterinary team and the fractures stabilized using parts of zip-ties and surgical glue, a novel technique. After five months, the turtle was healed and released back to the reserve. As it basks in the sun at the pond’s edge, we hope this native turtle can better evade danger in the years to come.

San Diego Zoo Global Wildlife Conservancy|4/29/15

West Coast Whale Entanglements Hit Record High

New data reveals that a record number of whales were entangled in fishing gear off the West Coast last year — and the rate of entanglements this year is increasing. That’s why on Tuesday the Center for Biological Diversity and Earthjustice urged California fishery managers to institute broad, lifesaving reforms for whales and other marine mammals.

The new numbers from the National Marine Fisheries Service show 30 reports of whale entanglements in 2014, most of them gray or humpback whales caught in lines connected to crab pots. That’s twice as many as in 2013. In 2015 there have been 25 reports of whale entanglements in California alone, including one involving a killer whale that washed up dead near Fort Bragg.

“It’s heartbreaking to know that so many whales are getting tangled up in fishing gear,” said the Center’s Catherine Kilduff. “They often drown or drag gear around until they’re too exhausted to feed. Even more disturbing is that this problem is only getting worse. We’re calling on the state to manage this fishery to protect whales.”

Read more in the Los Angeles Times.

One step closer to protecting bees in Ontario!

In response to massive bee deaths, Ontario has taken real steps to protect bees and wild pollinators from deadly neonicotinoids (neonics).

Neonics are a class of pesticides that are very toxic to bees. Impacts include reduced resistance to disease, loss of homing ability, impaired learning and memory and less success in foraging and death. Learn more about neonics in our recent report, Save the Bees.

The good news is that Ontario has pledged to reduce neonic usage by 80 per cent on corn and soybean seeds by 2017. This is the first regulatory action of its kind in North America and a major step in the right direction. However, the draft regulations – as written – could be better.

There are three main areas where the draft regulations could be improved:

• Expand the restrictions on neonics to cover other Ontario food crops and ornamental plants. Additionally, the Ontario government should not just focus on the three common neonics that are currently targeted, but should extend the restrictions to all classes of neonics as well as other deadly systemic pesticides.
• Require a reliable means for the government to collect and assess information. Annual reports and compliance audits must be available for inspection by the public. This provision would improve accountability and enable better tracking of neonic use, including frequency and location of use.
• Require independent evaluation of “pest infestation exemptions” (which enable the application of neonics) annually in all parts of the province by 2017.

The multi-billion dollar pesticide corporations are lobbying fiercely against these restrictions, and have run expensive full page ads in Ontario papers. Meanwhile, the Ontario government is collecting public comments on the draft regulations.

Gwen Barlee|Wilderness Committee|4/30/15

Sea Turtle Nesting Season Begins on Upper Texas Coast

Galveston, Texas (April 30, 2015) – On April 24, the Kemp’s ridley nesting season officially began on the Texas coast, with the first nest found on South Padre Island. Turtle Island Restoration Network patrol teams have been walking along the Upper Texas Coast for weeks now, looking for sea turtles, crawl tracks, and disturbances in the dunes that would indicate a sea turtle had left the water to look for a suitable place to lay eggs.

“It’s exciting to have so many dedicated volunteers walking our beaches six days a week looking for nesting turtles,” said Joanie Steinhaus, associate director of Turtle Island’s Gulf of Mexico office  (SeaTurtles.Org). “The volunteers will continue walking the beaches through mid-July and we are hopeful we still see more nesting turtles this year.”

The Galveston County Crew located the first sea turtle nest of the season was found on the Upper Texas Coast. As of April 29th, eight sea turtles have been found. The latest nesting numbers can be found here: https://seaturtles.org/turtle-count-texas-coast/.

From 2012 through 2014, there has been a 48.2 percent decrease in the number of nests in both Mexico and the United States. It’s important that public drive slowly and watch out for sea turtles, as they sometimes blend in with the sand.

Turtle Island asks that visitors to the Texas coastline call 1-866-TURTLE-5 (866-887-8535) should they encounter a sea turtle on the beach. Your call will be answered by a federal, state or non-profit agent.

If a camera is handy, photos are welcome should the turtle finish the nest and return to the water before a federal or state official arrives to the site. Because Kemp’s ridleys are a federally protected endangered species, disturbing their nests can lead to penalties.

Joanna Nasar|Director of Communications|Turtle Island Restoration Network|April 30th, 2015

1,100 Rescues and Counting…

As the California sea lion crisis continues, The Marine Mammal Center is committed to responding to every individual animal. But our reasons for rescuing these animals are about so much more than just the individual.

From its very beginning, The Marine Mammal Center has been an organization with animal welfare at its core. When our founding volunteers first began rescuing stranded sea lions, the effort was about easing suffering and lending a helping hand to animals in need.

This still rings true for us today—responding to suffering animals and providing them with life-saving care is the right and humane thing to do. But the reason we do this work is so much bigger than that now.

Compassion in a Crisis
Earlier this month, we rescued our 1,000th animal for the year, and have now rescued more than 1,100. That means that in the first four months of this year, we have taken in more patients than we did during the entirety of 2014, and we are on pace to break every record set in our 40 years.

In the midst of a crisis like this, where does that compassion end? Why continue rescuing after the 100th, 500th, 1,000th seal or sea lion?

Because as much as this work is about giving each individual animal the care and attention it needs to return to the wild with a second chance, it is also about populations as a whole, the health of the ocean and even human health.

Saving a Species
Thanks to the success of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, many of the species we rescue along our 600-mile range of coastline are no longer endangered. Experts say the current California sea lion population numbers near 300,000, and even with the current California sea lion crisis underway, that number is still in a healthy range.

But everything we’ve learned about marine mammals in our 40-year history has helped us become experts in how to care for species that are still at risk of extinction.

Our newly opened Hawaiian monk seal hospital, Ke Kai Ola, is a prime example. In just one year, our facility has helped rehabilitate and return six healthy Hawaiian monk seals to the wild. With fewer than 1,100 Hawaiian monk seals alive today, every healthy animal is crucial to the species’ survival.

But none of our work in Hawaii would be possible were it not for the four decades of experience we’ve gained here in California caring for many marine mammal species, including northern elephant seals, which have a similar biology.

In fact, Hawaii volunteers training to care for our Hawaiian monk seal patients travel to our facility in Sausalito to work with our elephant seals and learn best practices for animal feeding and care protocols.

Our teaching hospital also provides a vital training ground for marine mammal veterinarians from around the world. Each year, we host 20 to 40 visiting veterinary professionals interested in learning from our world-class team of experts.

Some of these visitors, such as those participating in our International Veterinary-in-Residence program, may go on to apply what they’ve learned to the care of endangered species in their own country.

Connections to Human Health
One sick sea lion won’t tell you much about the health of the greater population. But thousands of sick sea lions rescued over the course of four decades have taught us a lot. In fact, scientists at The Marine Mammal Center have discovered entirely new diagnoses with relevance to human health issues.

In 1998, our senior scientist, Dr. Frances Gulland, discovered that California sea lions are susceptible to a toxin called domoic acid that is produced by a type of algae. Domoic acid targets a specific part of the brain called the hippocampus, which is responsible for spatial processing and memory.

Sea lions affected by domoic acid toxicity often have seizures in addition to exhibiting other abnormal behavior. Scientists at the Center have collaborated on research showing that the brain lesions caused by domoic acid are nearly identical to those seen in temporal lobe epilepsy in humans, translating to a greater understanding of that disease.

Domoic acid can also affect humans who eat contaminated shellfish, resulting in a life-threatening condition called amnesiac shellfish poisoning. Because sea lions are often the first to be affected by a toxic algal bloom, we alert the public health department when we see an outbreak, which helps them better target their surveillance to protect human health.

Domoic acid toxicity isn’t the only illness both humans and marine mammals share. In a typical year, more than 17 percent of sea lions admitted to The Marine Mammal Center are suffering from cancer.

Remarkably, nearly every case is the same type: urogenital carcinoma. Similar to cervical cancer in humans, it starts in the cervix but by the time the patients reach our hospital, the cancer has usually spread through the body.

Cancer research built on our findings in sea lions has revealed some important links. Just as cervical cancer is related to a papillomavirus infection, the sea lions’ urogenital carcinoma seems to be related to a herpesvirus infection.

Researchers have also found a genetic link—animals with cancer have been found to be more closely related genetically than animals without cancer.

Tissue samples from sea lions with cancer have also been associated with higher levels of chemicals like PCB than sea lions without cancer. This organic pollutant is stored in the blubber, or fat layer, of marine mammals and builds up over time, much like it does in humans.

While there is more to be learned about the complex factors that play into the development of this disease, what we learn from these animals contributes to research that could eventually lead to cures for humans.

Sounding the Alarm
As we care for and diagnose these animals, we’re not just learning about the specific diseases that affect marine mammals, we’re also learning about the health of the ocean as a whole.

Animals like California sea lions serve as sentinels of the sea, alerting us to the dangers they face. Rescuing these animals can help raise the alarm and inspire public action on threats like pollutants, ocean trash, overfishing and global warming.

Because many of the threats marine mammals face are caused by human impacts, we feel an even greater responsibility to rescue, rehabilitate and return these animals to the wild.

The Marine Mammal Center is committed to going beyond rescue and research to provide education programming that also helps bring these issues to light. While the cute faces of our patients may draw in the visitors, our educators ensure they’ll leave with more awareness about the overall health of our ocean and what they can do to help.

We care about each animal that comes into our care, and we mourn the loss of those that we can’t save. But in every interaction with every patient, we’re providing compassion and care and advancing our collective ability to make a difference in profound ways.

Marine Mammal Center|April 30, 2015

Wild & Weird

Bird’s Eye View

Saturday, 14th March, an eagle was fitted with a camera . . . an “Eaglecam” and took flight from the world’s tallest building, Burj Khalifa, in Dubai. 

What surprises me is how smooth the flight is with no camera shake whatsoever.

I love how you can see her fold her wings in and then drop like a bullet when she spots the trainer… very cool.

Check out the Video

Everglades

Everglades Under Attack

The Florida Everglades is one of the most unique natural resources in the world, with an abundance of wildlife found nowhere else. It also soaks up carbon dioxide from the air better than major rainforests around the world, researchers say.

But it is slowly disappearing, and has been for more than a century. Today, the Everglades is about the size of New Jersey — half the size it once was.

Much of the damage has been caused by humans through water diversion, population pressures, and agricultural run-off. But there are more subtle forces at work, including the growing effects of climate change.

Fusion met with the scientists whose research may save the River of Grass; got a rare view of the Everglades at night to try to find out why the alligators here are shrinking; and tackled the tricky politics that may hold the key to keeping this vulnerable ecosystem alive.

Lifeline to Everglades

Nick Schulte has the dirty job of picking at the brownish-green algae that grows on the top layer of soil here.

“There’s actually a big party going on that we can’t see…so we collect all of it,” said Schulte, who was covered in dirt and stuffing a plastic container with samples.

Schulte, a 23-year-old master’s graduate student at Florida International University, is out in the middle of Everglades National Park with a group of researchers who are testing water quality and taking samples to understand how this sensitive ecosystem is being affected by climate change.

“It’s a new rate of exposure that we don’t understand how the Everglades ecosystem is going to adapt to,” explained Evelyn Gaiser, an FIU professor who has the impressive title of lead principal investigator with the Florida Coastal Everglades Long Term Ecological Research Program with funding from the National Science Foundation.

The fear is that salt water is moving through Florida’s porous limestone underneath the Glades and into the aquifers where the region gets its fresh water.

At stake: 67 threatened or endangered species, and the drinking water for some seven million Florida residents. The Everglades also soaks up carbon dioxide from the air better than major rainforests around the world, according to experts.

Shrinking Gators

Southern Florida is famous for its alligators, and they serve as one of the top indicators of the health of the glades.

“Alligators are top predators,” said Michiko Squires, a wildlife biologist who goes by the nickname Momo. “So if they’re doing well, if their body condition is good, then we know that everything else in the food chain below them is doing well.”

Which is why it’s so worrisome that the gators are shrinking.

They now weigh 20 percent less than their counterparts in the rest of the state, according to the Croc Docs, a group of wildlife biologists that includes Momo. (The Everglades is the only place in the world where both alligators and crocodiles live.)

One of the top threats: water. Less water means less food for the gators to eat.

“You need the water to have the food they need to survive,” said the 27-year-old Momo.

The group’s research includes a survey to estimate overall what the population looks like and capturing gators to a quick check up: drawing blood, taking measurements and other data before releasing it back into the water.

Changing Times

We are out in the middle of nowhere—there’s no cell phone reception—when we meet up with Steve Markley.

“To you, we’re in the middle of nowhere. To me, we’re in the middle of heaven,” said Markley, better known as Captain Steve.

He gave us a personal swamp buggy tour in an area between Miami and the city of Naples, on the west coast of Florida, where he and his family has lived for generations.

This is all he knows.

“The stuff that I’ve learned, I’ve learned from years and years and years of being around it,” he told us on one of our stops between centuries-old cypress trees.

Sea-level rise is already showing its effects on the environment here, he said. He can tell the difference by what grows and what doesn’t. But he remains optimistic of restoration efforts, he said.

“The area that they’re working on is going to come back…me and you are not gonna see it. Grandkids maybe will see some of it. Whatever it is…it’s moving in the right direction now.”

Everglades: Before & After

Before 1900, the Everglades carried a steady flow of fresh water from Lake Okeechobee to the Florida Bay. However, due to urban development much of that fresh water is now channeled to the eastern coast of Florida. Already cut in half, modern drought and global warming threaten to consume the already fragile ecosystem.

 

Future of Everglades

Congress authorized the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan in 2000, allocating $7.8 million to try to keep pace with the slowly disappearing Everglades.

Those plans, though, remain far behind schedule — stuck in a financial and political limbo in a state where Republican Gov. Rick Scott reportedly banned the terms “climate change,” “global warming,” and “sea level rise.” His office told Fusion he was not available for further comment.

And an important piece of land south of Lake Okeechobee remains in a tug of war between conservationists and the one of largest sugar company in the state.

The land deal would use some of the land to store water and help reroute more water south to help the Everglades. The deal is set to expire at the end of October.

“This is not for the sake to buy land or take out of sugar production,” said Julie Hill-Gabriel, director of Everglades Policy with Audubon Florida. “It’s really the next step in the right direction.”

Once those efforts restore what man has done to this ecosystem, “it’s sending a global message,” said Evelyn Gaiser, the lead researcher for long-term restoration efforts.

Despite any setbacks financially and politically, the race to save the Everglades and restore its natural water flow continues.

Fusion|2/28/15

Sparrow lawsuit has indirect link to water storage, U.S. Sugar land purchase

The Florida office of a national environmental group on Thursday filed a federal lawsuit against federal agencies over protection of an endangered sparrow and Everglades restoration indirectly related to a proposed big land purchase.

Environmental groups and some local government officials are pressuring the state to exercise an option to buy 46,800 acres of U.S. Sugar Corp. land south of Lake Okeechobee before a state purchase option expires in October.

Gov. Rick Scott says he is focused instead on other Everglades restoration projects that will prevent polluted lake water from fouling the Indian River Lagoon and Caloosahatchee River estuary.

The Center for Biological Diversity in Vero Beach on Thursday sued the Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of the Interior and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect the endangered Cape Sable seaside sparrow in Everglades National Park.

The center says the Army Corps and the Fish and Wildlife Service violated the federal Endangered Species Act through water releases that place the sparrow at the risk of extinction. The Corps must follow a federal plan to reduce discharges from Lake Okeechobee and agricultural lands, the center said.

A University of Florida study in March stated that more water is needed for storage south of the lake. The Center for Biological Study supports the U.S. Sugar purchase but that issue isn’t directly tied into the lawsuit, said Noah Greenwald, the center’s endangered species director.

“Ultimately it all goes back to the Everglades Agricultural Area,” he said. “The whole reason why they are pushing too much water onto the western Everglades is they have too much water” without enough storage.

In response, Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman Ken Warren in Vero Beach noted that Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said during an April 22 visit by President Barack Obama to the Everglades that the administration supports the state pursuing the U.S. Sugar land buy.

“Purchasing those acres would definitely help natural wetlands in the Everglades and improve chances of recovery of the Cape Sable seaside sparrow,” Warren said.

In a further response, Warren and Jenn Miller, a spokeswoman for the Corps of Engineers in Jacksonville, described collaborative efforts between the federal agencies and other scientists, and steps being taken to restore habitat for the sparrow and other threatened species.

At events on Wednesday in Stuart and on Captiva Island, environmentalists released letters signed by 25 municipal and county-level elected officials and resolutions approved by 11 counties and cities asking Scott and legislative leaders to exercise a state option to buy the U.S. Sugar land.

A company spokeswoman said a South Florida Water Management District report points out that one of the biggest constraints to moving more water south was federal endangered species protections. So even if the company land was purchased, additional water couldn’t be sent south.

“This suit was filed over the damages to the sparrows by the amounts of water going south today, not the increased amounts being suggested by the coastal groups,” spokeswoman Judy Sanchez said.

Bruce Ritchie|April 30, 2015

Water Quality Issues

DEP: Algae at Port Mayaca toxic

With toxic blue-green algae threatening the St. Lucie River, Lake Okeechobee discharges are suspended until at least Friday, more water tests are pending and the health department will decide whether to issue local avoid-water advisories.

The state Monday confirmed algae on the eastern bank of Lake Okeechobee contains low levels of toxins, but has not tested the algae in the St. Lucie Canal, which links the lake to the river.

The state Department of Environmental Protection reported the toxin microcystin was found in the lake water at a level slightly less than half what the World Health Organization says can cause adverse health impacts from short-term recreational exposure, according to DEP spokeswoman Dee Ann Miller.

DEP and the South Florida Water Management District will continue to collect samples to supplement the initial results, Miller said, and share data with the state Department of Health to determine if advisories against swimming or exposure to the water should be issued.

But it was enough for the Army Corps of Engineers to announce Monday afternoon it would continue holding back Lake O water from the St. Lucie Canal.

Green slime

“There’s green slime all around the (eastern) lake bank,” Eric Eikenberg, CEO of the Everglades Foundation, said Monday afternoon. “A wind from the west is pushing it across the lake and up against the dam.”

Eikenberg said a plume of algae “is just sitting there” on the eastern side — the St. Lucie Canal side — of the dam.

“Once (corps officials) open the gates, and at some point they will because the lake is rising, all that algae is gonna come right down the canal and into the St. Lucie River,” he said.

Lake O stood at 13 feet, 9 3/8 inches Monday morning. The lake got as low at 13 feet, 7 3/4 inches on April 16 but has been rising ever since.

The corps wants the lake elevation to be 12 feet, 6 inches on June 1, the beginning of the rainy season.

The algae was first reported Thursday by Mike Conner, a fishing guide and former fishing magazine editor, in the western end of the St. Lucie Canal at Port Mayaca.

On Friday morning, the corps began releasing water from the canal into the St. Lucie River after a three-week hiatus. When word of the possible bloom because widely known that afternoon, the corps stopped the discharges so the district and the DEP could do their tests.

About 79.5 million gallons of water poured through the St. Lucie Lock and Dam between 7 a.m., when the discharges resumed, and 5 p.m., when the gates were completely shut.

Since the discharges began Jan. 16, about 24 billion gallons of Lake O water has been discharged into the river.

Each day the discharges are suspended keeps about 194 million gallons of fresh water out of the river’s estuary. Too much fresh water over a long period can lower the estuary’s salinity and threaten its oysters and sea grass.

Report sightings

Blue-green algae is a type of cyanobacteria that sometimes produces toxins that can make humans and animals sick, causing stomach and intestinal illness, respiratory distress, allergic reactions, skin irritations, liver damage and neurotoxic reactions. Swallowing even small amounts of toxin can result in flu-like symptoms.

The toxins can kill small animals in the estuary, such as shrimp and crabs.

If you spot possible blue-green algae, contact the Department of Environmental Protection at 772-467-5572.

To report illness from exposure, call the Florida Poison Information Center at 800-222-1222.

Tyler Treadway|Apr 27, 2015

MIT’s Solar-Powered Desalination Machine Could Help Drought-Stricken Communities

A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Jain Irrigation Systems have come up with a method of turning brackish water into drinking water using renewable energy. With parts of the planet running dangerously low on fresh water, this technology can’t come soon enough.

This solar-powered machine is able to pull salt out of water and further disinfect the water with ultraviolet rays, making it suitable for irrigation and drinking. As the MIT News Office explained, “Electro dialysis works by passing a stream of water between two electrodes with opposite charges. Because the salt dissolved in water consists of positive and negative ions, the electrodes pull the ions out of the water, leaving fresher water at the center of the flow. A series of membranes separate the freshwater stream from increasingly salty ones.”

Called a “photovoltaic-powered electro dialysis reversal system,” the technology recently won the top $140,000 Desal Prize from the U.S. Department of Interior (USID) that recognizes innovators who create cost-effective, energy efficient and environmentally sustainable desalination technologies that can provide potable water for humans and water for crops in developing countries, the USID announced.

The USID said that the MIT-Jain system is designed for low-energy consumption and helps reduce costs for underdeveloped areas that do not have easy access to electricity. “By 2050, global water demand is expected to increase by 55 percent, and 70 percent of global water use occurs in food production,” said Christian Holmes, USAID’s Global Water Coordinator, in a statement. “The Desal Prize was developed to supply catalytic funding to capture and support the innovative ideas and new technologies that could have a significant impact.”

Jain Irrigation Systems noted that with this technology, water recovery is above 90 percent and the 5-10 percent reject concentrate is dried in a solar pond without creating any environmental hazard. It also removes hardness as well as salts and chemicals, pesticides, fertilizers as well as micro-organisms.

“This technology has the potential to bring agriculture to vast barren lands using brackish water,” said Richard Restuccia, Jain’s vice president of Landscape Solutions.

According to the MIT News Office, this electro dialysis system provides fresh water for about half the energy required by a reverse-osmosis system (another water purification method that removes particles from drinking water via a semi-permeable membrane). Ultimately, the electrodialysis system could supply enough water for 2,000 to 5,000 people, the project’s researchers found. The technology has already been tested in several villages in especially water-pinched India.

“Jain is committed to address water challenges being faced by India and other nations and will continue to inspire innovation to bring affordable and sustainable solutions for the benefit to citizens and farmers alike,” said Jain managing director Anil Jain.

Using desalination to solve the planet’s fresh water worries isn’t a new idea (nor is the concept of solar-powered desalination), but the reason it hasn’t taken off is because it’s expensive and requires a lot of energy. However, as we previously reported, in recent years, the cost of desalinized water has come down significantly and is comparable in price to conventional water sources.

Currently, there are 13 desalination projects under consideration along the California coast including the Carlsbad Desalination Project, which will be the largest desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere once it’s completed this fall.

Lorraine Chow|May 1, 2015

Critics Say Nestle Is Making California’s Drought Worse

Is Nestlé making California’s historic drought even worse by bottling water on state lands and then selling it back to the public at a huge profit?

The company has been under intense scrutiny from the US Forest Service and critics alike, who allege that they have been using expired permits to take water from state forests.

However, the CEO of Nestlé Waters North America denied the accusation in an op-ed this week, arguing that bottled water isn’t contributing to the drought.

“I know some believe that drought conditions should bring the bottling of water to an end,” Tim Brown, chairman, president and CEO of Nestle Waters North America, wrote in an op-ed for the San Bernardino County Sun. “Experts on water use who have studied the issue have recognized, however, that bottled water is not a contributing factor to the drought … Nestle Waters operates five California bottling facilities, using a total of 705 million gallons of water per year. To put that amount in perspective, this is roughly equal to the annual average watering needs of two California golf courses.”

However, it’s not just about whether Nestlé is doing anything illegal. They also operate a plant out of Sacramento, a perfectly legal operations which transfers water from local bodies of water to be used in company products like Pure Life Purified Drinking Water.

A local group called Crunch Nestlé has been trying to put pressure on the city and company to get the plant out of Sacramento.

“We’re in a drought, and we find it extremely egregious for a company to be bottling water and being charged a pittance for it and selling it back to the public at 1,000 percent profit,” Crunch Nestlé organizer Bob Saunders said in an interview with the Sacramento Bee.

Nestlé Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe became the center of attention back in 2013 after this interview, in which critics say he argued that water is not a human right and should be privatized. The company has been in overdrive since then to clarify his position as more focused on preserving resources and spreading water access to everyone on the globs.

“Everyone should have enough safe, clean water to meet their fundamental daily needs – about 50 to 100 liters per day,” Brabeck-Letmathe says in a separate video posted to the company’s site. But not to fill a pool or wash a car. There is a difference. If we give water a value, there will be an incentive to invest in looking after our supply.”

Eric Pfeiffer|RYOT|May 1, 2015

This post originally appeared on RYOT

Great Lakes & Inland Waters

Lake Mead Hits Historic Low

The big doom-and-gloom news in the water world this week is that America’s former largest reservoir, Lake Mead near Las Vegas on the Colorado River, hit a historic low on Sunday. The reservoir serves water to the states of Arizona, Nevada and California, providing sustenance to nearly 20 million people and crops that feed the nation.

All the news stories and pundits blame the historic draining of Lake Mead on drought and/or climate change, but I’m going to take a different tack on this story. The reservoir hit a historic low because the entire Colorado River water supply system has been grossly mismanaged. Further, the gross mismanagement is escalating as the upstream states plot their next moves to further drain the reservoirs imperiling the economy of the region as well as degrading the health of the Colorado River.

For nearly two decades every water supply agency in the Southwest U.S., including the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation which manages the Colorado River system, has known that the river is “over-allocated”—i.e., that more water is taken out than flows in. Yet, almost nothing has been done to stem the decline which is likely to get worse as climate change progresses. Finally in 2013, the Bureau of Reclamation publicly created the “Colorado River Basin Study” that, sure enough, said the system is in severe decline and offered a bunch of ideas on how to address it. However, few of those ideas have been enacted as the nation watches the reservoir drop and Nevada, Arizona and California still take almost all of their full allotment of water out of the river.

Even more malevolently, the level of water in Lake Mead is partly driven by how much water flows into it from the upstream states of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. At the same time that Mead hit a historic low, those three states are not only still taking all of the same water out of the system, they are aggressively planning to build even more dams and reservoirs that divert more water.

• In Colorado, Denver Water is proposing to build a larger dam/reservoir, Northern Water (which supplies water to Northern Colorado) is also proposing to build a new reservoir, and the State of Colorado is going through a planning process to build billions of dollars worth of water projects, all of which would further drain the Colorado River ecosystem.
• In Utah, state and local planners are moving forward with a massive pipeline proposal out of the Colorado River at Lake Powell, and the state government is going through a planning process that proposes to put more dams on every river in the state.
• In Wyoming, water planners are aggressively trying to start two reservoir projects that would further drain the Green River which flows into the Colorado, and are planning more water diversion projects in the future.

All of these projects are being proposed so the upstream states can get the last legally allowed drops of water out of the system before it collapses in the near future. This water management is a kind of “Mutually Assured Destruction” escalating the water war across the Southwest U.S.

If there is a slight bright side here it’s that the states have agreed to some “trigger” points in Lake Mead—levels to which if the reservoir drops, the states will start taking out less water, led first by Arizona. Those triggers will likely be hit in the next 12 to 18 months. Further, water agencies in Nevada, Arizona and Southern California have also agreed to some new conservation measures that will take less water out of the reservoir.

But that’s not enough. Here’s the bold action that needs to be taken:

1. Every water supply agency needs to agree to water conservation measures that stabilize the system right now, before it reaches trigger points and collapse scenarios. The conservation measures should occur in cities and on farms across the Southwest U.S. If the water supply agencies won’t do it, the federal government—which has the authority—needs to step in and get it done.
2. No water supply agency should propose to take one more new drop of water out of the Colorado River system. Instead of Mutually Assured Destruction, we need Multi-Lateral Disarmament. All of the proposed projects should be stopped—if the agencies won’t stop them, then the federal government should. If the federal government won’t do it, then the court system should as these project go through permitting processes and get hit with inevitable lawsuits.
3. The health of the Colorado River needs to addressed for the first time in history. At the top of the system in Colorado, the river is nearly drained and even more endangered by proposed dam projects. In the middle section of the river in Utah and Arizona, the dams have completely degraded the ecosystem leading to multiple endangered fish and a massively disrupted flow regime and ecology. At the bottom of the system, the Colorado River is still drained bone dry—all 5 trillion gallons drained out before it reaches the Gulf of California creating a holocaust of environmental degradation.

Gross mismanagement needs to be replaced with bold action, and then the doom and gloom news stories would be replaced with hope for a brighter future.

Gary Wockner|April 28, 2015

Dairy Owner to Serve 6 Months Home Detention, Fined $15K for Discharging Cow Feces into French Broad ‏
Dairy Company Owner Sentenced to Six Months of Home Detention and Ordered to Pay $15,000 Fine for Discharging 11,000 Gallons of Cow Feces into the French Broad River

ATLANTA – William “Billy” Franklin Johnston, the owner of one of North Carolina’s largest dairy farms located in Fletcher, N.C., was sentenced Thursday to four years of probation, six months of which he has to spend in home detention, for his role in the discharging of cow feces into the French Broad River, announced Jill Westmoreland Rose, Acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of North Carolina. U.S. Magistrate Judge Dennis L. Howell also ordered Johnston to pay a $15,000 fine. The dairy company, Tap Root Dairy, LLC (Tap Root), was also fined $80,000 and was placed on a four-year probationary term. The company is also required to abide by a comprehensive environmental compliance plan.

Acting U.S. Attorney Rose is joined in making the announcement by Special Agent in Charge Maureen O’Mara of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Criminal Investigation Division (EPA-CID), Atlanta Area Office, and B. W. Collier, Acting Director of the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation (SBI).

A criminal bill of information filed in U.S. District Court on November 11, 2013, charged Tap Root and Johnston, 62, of Mills River, N.C., with one count of violation of the Clean Water Act, in connection with the discharging of cow feces into the French Broad River. Johnston, the owner of Tap Root, is also a Board Member of the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and currently serves as a Council member for the Town of Mills River.

According to filed documents and statements made in court, Tap Root maintains several hundred cows and manages hundreds of acres of crop fields in Fletcher. In the annual course of its operations, Tap Root disposes millions of pounds of solid and liquid animal waste, which are considered pollutants under the Clean Water Act. Court documents indicate that beginning in 2009, Johnston let his certification lapse as Operator in Charge (OIC) of Tap Root’s animal waste management system. Despite receiving repeated warnings and notices, court records show that as of December 4, 2012, Tap Root still had not designated a valid OIC to oversee its waste management system. Furthermore, according to filed documents, from September 3, 2012 to December 4, 2012, for a total of 93 days, Johnston and the Tap Root employees had failed to check and maintain the levels of cow waste in their on-site waste containment lagoons.

According to court records, this resulted in the spillover and discharge of 11,000 gallons of cow feces and other waste into the French Broad River on December 4, 2012. Testing by the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources concluded that the fecal coliform level where the waste stream meets the river was 99,000 parts per million, whereas anything above 800 parts per million is indicative of a release. Even downstream, testing found that the fecal coliform level was 2,200 parts per million.

“Agriculture is an important sector of Western North Carolina’s economy but it should not thrive at the expense of public health. Environmental protection laws are in place to ensure appropriate land use and safeguard our communities from potentially harmful pollutants,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Rose.

“As one of North Carolina’s largest dairies, Tap Root Dairy Farm has an obligation to protect the surrounding community from pollution,” said Maureen O’Mara, Special Agent in Charge of EPA’s criminal enforcement program in North Carolina. “Animal wastes are considered pollutants under the Clean Water Act because when discharged illegally, they can cause serious damage to the environment and put human health at risk. Today’s sentencing shows that those who violate our nation’s environmental laws will be held accountable for their crimes.”

The Clean Water Act is a federal law enacted to prevent, reduce and eliminate pollution, and to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological quality, of the Nation’s waters for the protection and propagation of fish and aquatic life and wildlife, for recreational purposes, and for the use of such waters for public drinking water, agricultural, and industrial purposes.

The French Broad River supplies drinking water to more than one million people and is frequently used for recreational water activities, such as swimming and kayaking. In 2012, North Carolina listed the French Broad River from Mud Creek to NC Highway 146 as “impaired” for fecal coliform bacteria. Tap Root is located on this impaired section of the French Broad River.

The investigation of this case was conducted by special agents of the EPA’s Criminal Investigation Division, and SBI’s Diversion and Environmental Crimes Unit. The prosecution is being handled by Assistant United States Attorney Steven R. Kaufman of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Charlotte.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE|Davina Marraccini|epa.gov|May 1, 2015

Offshore & Ocean

UN Scientists Call for Action on Marine Microplastics as New York Assembly Passes Microbeads Ban

New York may become the next state to ban microbeads. Last week, the New York Assembly passed a bill, the Microbeads-Free Waters Act, which would “prohibit the sale of personal cosmetic products containing microbeads.” The bill passed by an overwhelming majority of 139 to 1.

The bill would prohibit the sale of personal cosmetic products containing synthetic plastic microbeads after January 1, 2016, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Over-the-counter drugs that fall under the definition of personal cosmetic products would receive an additional year to comply and prescription drugs are exempt.

The bill has now moved to the state Senate, but it has stalled there. The Senate bill’s sponsor, Sen. Thomas O’Mara, advanced a different bill in committee “that fundamentally fails to address the microbeads problem,” says the NRDC. Not only would the Senate bill’s version take longer to go into effect, but it exempts some types of plastic and “biodegradable” microbeads, which aren’t truly biodegradable. The bill also forbids municipalities, counties and local governments from taking further action to stop this form of water pollution, says the NRDC.

Dr. Marcus Eriksen of 5 Gyres agrees. “When we found microbeads in the Great Lakes, we knew that this had to change and that we couldn’t replace plastic microbeads with the so called ‘biodegradable’ microbeads, which is exactly what the Personal Care Products Council is pushing the New York Senate to do. It will not solve the problem.”

“Instead any alternative biodegradable plastic must degrade before it enters an aquatic environment. The best is to use a natural biodegradable material or any material that is benign to the environment, like salt, sand, cocoa beans or apricot husks, which are already successfully used in products. So the switch is easy.”

As New York’s state legislature waivers on addressing the problem, a group of scientists that advise the UN are calling for action on marine microplastics, according to The Guardian. The Joint Group of Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Environmental Protection (GESAMP) recently released their report, Sources, Fates and Effects of Microplastics in the Marine Environment: A Global Assessment.

“Even tiny particles, such as those used in cosmetic products or abrasives, could potentially harm marine life if ingested. We need to work globally to ensure that plastics do not end up in the oceans,” Dr. Micallef, director of Marine Environment Division, at the International Maritime Organization, the Administrative Secretary of GESAMP told Marine Technology News.

The report recommends “better control of the sources of plastic waste, through applying the principles of the ‘3 Rs’ (Reduce, Re-use, Recycle), and improving the overall management of plastics as the most efficient and cost-effective way of reducing the quantity of plastic objects and microplastic particles accumulating in the ocean,” says Marine Technology News.

Cole Mellino|April 30, 2015

Vanishing act: The threat of disappearing coral reefs

Swim out into the turquoise waters of the Caribbean, just beyond where the sandy sea floor gives way to massive rock formations, and a decades-long transformation has become apparent. Where a vibrant coral reef should be, there is a vast, colorless surface of almost nothingness.

Years of overfishing, boating and environmental degradation are causing coral reefs in the Caribbean—and around the world—to disappear in huge numbers. Indeed, the erosion threatens not just fish and marine life that are supported by coral ecosystems, but a vast tourism economy that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says translates into a nearly $30 billion boost to the global economy.

The United Nations and conservation groups have sounded the alarm about the ecosystem’s failure and its ripple effects, which include the mass extinction of thousands of species of animals.

“Coral degradation is a global problem,” said Luis Solorzano, executive director at The Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit organization working in more than 35 countries and operating more than 100 marine conservation projects.

“Coral reefs help protect coastlines, which include coastal communities, hotels and other investments, from storms,” Solorzano said. In fact, the stony substance minimizes the force of sea waves and helps protect an estimated 200 million people in islands and coastal states from storms and rising sea levels, according to researchers at Stanford University.

In the turquoise waters off St. Martin, just out of reach from the sandy beach, a towering elkhorn coral comes into sight. A few fish can be seen huddling around its shadow, darting into the dark at signs of danger. Private boats and Jet Skis are frequent visitors.

The vibrant scene, teeming with life, belies the fact that St. Martin’s shores are actually locked in a life or death struggle.

In a study last year, Stanford scientists estimated that up to 60 percent of coral reefs around the world have been wiped out since the Industrial Revolution. Meanwhile, there are indications that things could be getting worse in the Caribbean, which recent studies have shown have lost 80 percent of their coral reefs.

Local economies, noted the U.S. oceanic agency, “receive billions of dollars from visitors to reefs through diving tours, recreational fishing trips, hotels, restaurants, and other businesses based near reef ecosystems.”

St. Martin is an island a third the size of Washington, D.C., and about 200 miles east of Puerto Rico. In the 1960s, it experienced a tourism boom that created “long-term degradation” of its corals, according to a recent study by the American Museum of Natural History.

Fast forward to the current day, and St. Martin’s economy is so heavily reliant on tourism that the service industry makes up 84 percent of its gross domestic product, and 85 percent of the labor force is employed by the tourism industry, according to the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook. That reliance on tourism by St. Martin and other Caribbean islands, is hastening the demise of the ecosystem.

If tropical reefs and other ecosystems are destroyed, the oceans could lose $1 trillion in economic value “by the end of the century,” according to a study published by Scientific American last October. For businesses that depend on tourist dollars, and for people whose income depends on those businesses, there is yet another storm gathering.

In the U.S. alone, for example, there are 5.9 million flood insurance policies, with $1.3 trillion in total property exposure, according to insurance data by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. With coral reefs disappearing, the risk to coastal properties—and the sums it takes to safeguard them—is rising.

Protecting coral reefs “will become even more valuable in the future, as climate change results in more severe—and in some places, more frequent—weather events like hurricanes,” said Solorzano.

Special interest groups and the need for cooperation among different nations have slowed coral conservation efforts, but in the Caribbean, for instance, that seems to be changing.

The Nature Conservancy is helping to lead an initiative to triple the coverage of marine habitats by 2020 through cooperation with nearly a dozen governments in the Caribbean. Other organizations, like the Nature Foundation St. Maarten on the island of St. Martin, have started coral nurseries with the hope to return them to their natural habitat.

Coral growth, however, is a slow process. In St. Martin, for instance, where a piece of the sea was turned into a marine park about five years ago, the American Museum of Natural History study could not yet see an “appreciable increase in coral cover since the establishment of the park.” So might it be too late to save the coral?

“We are optimistic that corals are resilient and that we can help bring them back in the Caribbean and globally,” said Solorzano, who thinks supporting reef-friendly businesses and practicing responsible diving, snorkeling and boating are a few things consumers can do to help.

“Ask the fishing, boating, hotel, aquarium, dive or snorkeling operators how they protect the reef,” he said, and “do not touch the reef or anchor your boat on the reef.”

A world without corals would not only have economic and social costs, added Solorzano, but “our planet would be a very sad place.”

Forestry

The dead trees and fallen leaves near Chernobyl aren’t decaying

It’s been nearly 30 years since the catastrophe at Chernobyl, and as the cleanup grinds on, the far-reaching effects continue to be documented. Birds with smaller brains, increasing spiders, decreasing butterflies, all these and more have been reported from the areas surrounding Chernobyl. One group you don’t hear very much about are the decomposers — those bugs, microbes, fungi, and slime molds who nourish themselves by consuming the remains of dead organisms. Without these recyclers, carbon, nitrogen, and other elements essential to life would be locked in plant corpses. 

The effects of radioactive contamination on the decay of plant material remains unknown… until now. Scientists examining the forests around Chernobyl have found that radioactive contamination has reduced the rate of litter mass loss. The dead leaves on the forest floor, along with the dead pine trees in the infamous Red Forest, don’t seem to be decaying — even a couple decades after the incident. 

“Apart from a few ants, the dead tree trunks were largely unscathed when we first encountered them,” study researcher Timothy Mousseau of the University of South Carolina tells Smithsonian. “It was striking, given that in the forests where I live, a fallen tree is mostly sawdust after a decade of lying on the ground.” 

Mousseau and an international team led by Anders Pape Møller from Université Paris-Sud decided to investigate the accumulation of litter, which was two to three times thicker in the areas where radiation poisoning was most intense. They predicted that decomposing rate would be reduced in the most contaminated sites due to the absence or reduced densities of soil invertebrates and microorganisms. 

To test this, the team filled 572 small mesh bags with dry leaves from four species of trees — oak, maple, birch, pine — collected from uncontaminated sites. They deposited the bags in the leaf litter layer at 20 forest sites around Chernobyl in September 2007; these sites varied a ton in background radiation, some by more than a factor of 2,600. All the bags were retrieved about a year later in June 2008, dried, and weighed to estimate litter mass loss. 

They found that the litter loss was 40 percent lower in the most contaminated sites; that is, there was a lot more litter left over in those bags than in the bags placed in normal Ukraine radiation levels. (In those areas with no contamination, 70 to 90 percent of the litter in the bags were gone.) The thickness of the forest floor increased with the level of radiation and decreased with loss of mass from all litter bags. Simply put, the more lingering radiation, the fewer the decomposers, the more dried leaves left in the bags. 

Additionally, a quarter of the bags deposited were made of a fine mesh (like pantyhose) that prevented access by soil invertebrates. By comparing the normal mesh bags with the fine mesh bags, they found that litter loss was slightly greater in the presence of large soil invertebrates than in their absence. So while insects played some role in breaking down the leaves, microbes and fungi played a much more important role. 

“The gist of our results was that the radiation inhibited microbial decomposition of the leaf litter on the top layer of the soil,” Mousseau explains. The accumulation of litter means that nutrients aren’t being efficiently returned to the soil, he adds, which could explain why trees are growing at a slower rate around Chernobyl. 

Janet Fang|March 17, 2014

Drones and dogs deployed in battle to save the guacamole

With the killers hiding in the trees, heat-sensing drones are launched into the air. When their whereabouts are narrowed, the dogs are sent in. When it comes to protecting the world’s supply of guacamole, no weapon can be spared.

On subtropical farmland in South Florida, researchers are doing battle with the deadly fungus, laurel wilt, which is spread by a tiny beetle and has the potential to decimate Florida’s avocado crop. The hashtag they have adopted for their mission: #savetheguac.

“This is probably the biggest threat to the Florida avocado that’s ever been seen” said Jonathan H. Crane, a tropical fruit crop specialist at the University of Florida.

Laurel wilt is spread by the ambrosia beetle, an invasive species from Asia. It first appeared in the U.S. in Georgia in 2002, and has spread around the Southeast, mostly in redbay laurel trees. Avocados are in the same laurel tree family, and once infected by the fungus the tree can be dead within six weeks.

Researchers and farmers are fighting to halt the fungus before it advances to California, where the avocado is king.

Avocados are Florida’s second-biggest fruit crop, behind citrus. The larger, smooth-skinned avocados in the Sunshine State differ from the smaller, rough-rined California Haas avocados. California produces nearly 90 percent of the nation’s avocado crop and it’s worth about $400 million annually — which is why it’s essential to stop laurel wilt’s spread.

Deep in Miami-Dade County’s southern agricultural enclaves, researchers are testing methods to do just that. Florida avocados are harvested beginning in early June.

On a recent day, scientists from Florida International University and the University of Florida, along with the owners of a drone company and a canine detection team converged on a ranch under a blistering sun.

Part of the challenge of fighting laurel wilt is that by the time a farmer sees evidence of the disease — thin, hair-like prongs sticking out from tree trunks and limbs that are really the sawdust residue left behind by the burrowing beetle — it’s too late to save the tree. But if farmers can catch the disease in its infancy, before symptoms emerge, there’s hope of saving the tree with fungicide.

The first step is finding which part of the grove is infected. That’s where the drone comes in. According to Ty Rozier, owner of Elevated Horizons, a Miami-based drone company, the vehicle carries a thermal digital imaging camera as it soars over the groves in lawnmower patterns.

Researchers analyze the images and videos to find the stressed trees. Then, they send in the dogs.

“It’s almost like cancer detection,” said Ken Furton, an FIU provost and professor of chemistry. “Multiple dogs have alerted on (infected) trees that show no signs of infection.”

The dogs currently used are two Belgian Malinois and two shelter dogs.

Once the dogs key in on an infected tree, farmers can remove and burn it, then inject nearby trees with fungicide in hopes of saving them or staving off the disease.

It’s too costly to try to eradicate the ambrosia beetle, said Crane. The beetle works quickly, sometimes moving 30 to 50 miles a day through redbay laurel trees. Those varieties are found in Texas and “from there it’s not a stretch to California or Mexico,” Crane said. It’s impossible to stop in those wild trees, but farmers must try to contain the disease in the avocado crops.

He added: “You can see the potential ecologic and economic devastation.”

Since first detected on the edge of Miami’s western suburbs in 2011, laurel wilt has killed swamp bay trees scattered across 330,000 acres of the Everglades. Hundreds of millions of redbay trees have succumbed across six Southeastern states since 2002.

And some avocado trees in Florida have been felled as well. About a mile from where researchers were testing the drones and dogs, acres of sick avocado trees were spindly, brown and dead. One researcher said it was likely the farmer couldn’t afford to rip up and burn the trees, or treat the healthier ones.

This two-pronged detection system of drones and dogs could be adapted to other crop diseases, such as citrus greening, Furton said.

A $148,000 state grant is funding the study involving the drones and dogs.

“Florida’s warm climate makes our state a hotbed for invasive species and diseases,” said Adam Putnam, Florida’s agriculture commissioner. “Florida’s avocado industry has a $64 million economic impact in our state, and we will continue to aggressively protect our agriculture industry with cutting-edge research and technology.”

Tamara Lush|Associated Press|April 30, 2015

Restoring the Longleaf Pine: Preparing the Southeast for Global Warming

Atlanta, GA (December 10) – A good-news global warming story about a pine tree with a storied past promises that a back-to-the-future approach will provide economic opportunities and help prepare the southeastern U.S. for a changing climate.

Restoring longleaf pine ecosystems across the Southeast will boost the economy and help the region cope with global warming’s expanding effects, according to a new report from national and regional conservation groups. Standing Tall: How Restoring the Longleaf Pine Can Help Prepare the Southeast for Global Warming is being released today by the National Wildlife Federation and two southeast forest conservation groups, America’s Longleaf, and The Longleaf Alliance.

The report highlights the latest scientific research on global warming’s effects in the Southeast and how it puts southern forests at risk. The report also describes how longleaf pine forests are uniquely resilient to the long term impacts of global warming and the opportunities they present for forest landowners, especially minority and underserved landowners throughout the southern region.

“It is time for the longleaf pine forest to come to national attention,” said Edward O. Wilson, Pulitzer-prize winning author and Harvard University professor emeritus. “A substantial part of America’s environmental future is tied to this one species, which dominates the trees in the land it occupies. The longleaf also holds the key to an important part of the future economy of the southeastern United States.”

Longleaf pine has a storied history in the development of the South. As the dominant native pine of the region, its high-quality wood was used in both residential and commercial structures, including homes across the country and U.S. naval ships. Longleaf forests also provided a variety of other economic products including turpentine, pine straw, and recreational hunting habitat. Unfortunately, overcutting and replacement by short-rotation pine species or agricultural crops has greatly diminished the extent of longleaf pine. It once covered more than 90 million acres across eight states along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, but now is found on less than 3 percent of its historic range.

This loss has had huge impacts on the region’s wildlife as many unique species of plants, insects, birds, amphibians and reptiles are associated with healthy longleaf pine ecosystems. A serious investment in longleaf pine restoration will both protect native biodiversity and help the South better prepare for global warming.

“The South will experience many impacts from global warming in the years ahead, from sea-level rise, to increasingly violent storms, to potentially prolonged drought and wildfire, to the spread of invasive species,” said Eric Palola, senior director of National Wildlife Federation’s Forests for Wildlife program. “We need new tools to deal with the effects of climate change in the South, and the good news is that bringing back the iconic longleaf pine ecosystem is one of the best tools available.”

“Landowners restore longleaf forest on their land for various reasons,” said Joe Cockrell, wildlife biologist, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. “They are aware that the practice brings a wide variety of benefits. This report increases the awareness of an advantage to restoring longleaf pine that has not previously been emphasized.”

The report demonstrates that longleaf pine systems are naturally more resilient to climate extremes than other southern pine species due to their ability to:

• withstand severe windstorms,
• resist pests,
• tolerate wildfires and drought,
• and capture carbon pollution from the atmosphere.

“This new report is a valuable synthesis of the current scientific information and significantly enhances understanding of how restoring the longleaf forest not only benefits an imperiled ecosystem but also addresses climate change,” said Tom Darden, senior editor for America’s Longleaf, an initiative involving more than 20 private organizations and government agencies. “The report advances the discussion on longleaf/climate change set forth in the Range-wide Conservation Plan for Longleaf Pine issued earlier this year as part of America’s Longleaf Restoration Initiative. Southerners have long valued longleaf as the iconic forest of our region’s past; it turns out that longleaf will be an important forest for the future to respond to climate change.”

“This report makes a strong case for an exciting opportunity to restore much of the South to a native ecosystem of immense historic, social, and ecological importance,” said Dr. John S. King, associate professor of tree physiology at North Carolina State University. “The rate at which effects of climate change are happening in the South is proving a surprise even to scientists. In addition to curbing sources of carbon emissions, successful strategies to mitigate the impacts of climate change will include managing the landscape for maximum carbon pollution capture and storage. In certain physiographic settings across the South, there will be no better way to accomplish this than restoration of longleaf pine ecosystems. The added benefits of increased biodiversity, social development, and decreased risk of catastrophic wildfires is icing on the cake.” 

The report calls for a national-level commitment to longleaf ecosystem restoration, on par with other major ecological restoration initiatives such as the Everglades or the Chesapeake Bay. Range-wide restoration of longleaf will also require new levels of support such as those made possible through a federal climate bill that invest in state natural resource agencies and provides direct incentives to private forest land owners to protect and enhance forest’s ability to capture carbon pollution.

Aileo Weinmann|12-10-2009

Reforestation of huge mangrove, beachfront forests in Bicol to involve coastal communities

Department of Budget and Management (DBM) has recently announced its release of Php400 million in initial amount to finance this undertaking nationwide called the Mangrove and Beach Forest Development Project (MBFDP) that is part of the National Greening Program (NGP), a flagship environmental agenda item of the Aquino administration.

The release represents 40 percent of the total Php1-billion funding requirement of the project as recommended by the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRMMC) which will be charged against the Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Program (RRP) under the Fiscal Year (FY) 2014 General Appropriations Act (GAA), according to the DBM. Under this project, the national government — with the participation of concerned stakeholders from both local government units (LGUs) and the private sector or non-governmental organizations (NGOs)— will develop mangroves and beach forests in areas affected by typhoons and other disasters that hit several regions in the country.

Under RRP, all rehabilitation efforts are to be grounded on ensuring the safety of communities against natural disasters in the future, thus, comprehensive preparation and prevention are key elements in the policy of “build back better (BBB)”, which includes the reforestation of mangrove and beach forests on local coastlines.

Among the priority sites of the project are areas in the Visayas and Bicol affected by Typhoon “Yolanda”; communities in Zamboanga affected by siege and unrest; areas in Cebu and Bohol which were damaged by earthquakes; and areas in Mindanao badly hit by Typhoon “Pablo”. The estimated land area of 27,400 hectares covered by the project is broken down to 22,000 hectares of mangrove forests and 5,400 hectares of beach forests and the activities involved are site preparation, nursery development, mangrove and beach forest planting, maintenance, and protection.

The DBM said that since the Php400 million was an initial release, subsequent releases of the remaining fund would require the DENR to submit requirements, including identified sites for target planting activities and actual planting activities supported by with geo-tagged photos—to the DBM. Budget Secretary Florencio “Butch” Abad, in announcing the release, said, “Our country’s natural resources not only shower us with abundant riches but also provide us with a natural defense against typhoons and storms.”

Hence, proper management of resources is part of the Aquino administration’s strategy in climate change mitigation to safeguard our countrymen against future calamities, he stressed. Under the FY 2015 GAA, the national government allotted a budget of Php21.7 billion to implement BBB strategy that integrates a preventive approach with efforts that focus on climate change adaptation and mitigation and disaster risk reduction management actions and interventions, Abad added.

DENR Bicol Regional Director Gilbert Gonzales on Wednesday said that with the region getting as much as Php135 million for the rehabilitation under MBFDP, a total of over 7,100 hectares of beaches scattered through the region’s six provinces, NGOs and other community-based organizations would be tapped into its implementation. The areas of implementation insofar as Bicol is concerned involve 1,000 hectares in Camarines Norte; Camarines Sur, 1,100 hectares; Masbate, 2,130 hectares; Albay; 1,000 hectares; Catanduanes, 700 hectares; and Sorsogon, 314 hectares.

The DENR’s regional Ecosystems Research and Development Bureau (ERDB) has been tasked as overall coordinator of the project while its implementation is assigned to the respective Provincial Environment and Natural Resources Offices (PENROs) of each province in cooperation with local government units (LGUs) and support of other line agencies, Gonzales said.

So far, he said, DENR-Bicol already has its composite action team composed of its personnel who would conduct site assessment, validation and mapping, and determine the sources of planting materials to be used. Site preparations, production of planting materials, planting, maintenance, protection and other activities will be delegated to barangays or communities through duly registered people’s organizations — meaning the actual implementation works would make people in the barangays occupied by these activities, he said.

Every activity is assigned with budget–with the seedling production getting 67 percent of the fund—that is why involvement in any of the activities of the project implementation will also provide these barangay folk extra earnings, the DENR regional chief added. (PNA) RMA/FGS/DOC/CBD/EDS See more at: http://www.voxbikol.com/article/20150425/reforestation-huge-mangrove-beachfront-forests-bicol-involve-coastal-communities#sthash.ttw7m8mD.dpuf

Vox Bikol|04/25/2015

Aceh to Fell 1,000 Hectares of Illegally Planted Oil Palm Plantations

Banda Aceh. More than 1,000 hectares of illegal oil palm plantations in Aceh province on the western tip of Sumatra will be cut down and the area restored as a protected forest, an activist says.

Work to demolish the oil palm plantations in the Leuser Ecosystem Area in Tamiang district will start on Monday, according to Tezar Pahlavi, the coordinator of Leuser Conservation Forum (FKL). The Aceh Tamiang Forest Agency informed owners of the illegal plantations last week.

“Whether they like it or not they must give up the land because they have illegally converted protected forest and they have no permit,” Tezar told the Jakarta Globe on Tuesday.

About 1,071 hectares of the 2.6 million-hectare conservation area have been converted to plantations, Tezar said, and restoration was vital to protect the entire forest area.

“Of course it’s going to take some time, but so far the Aceh Tamiang [district] and Aceh’s provincial government are committed to it,” he said.

The Leuser Ecosystem stretches over 13 districts in Aceh and three in North Sumatra. The area contains an unknown numbers of invertebrates and plants, as well as tigers, orangutans, rhinos and elephants.

Tezar said at least 3,000 hectares of protected forest in Aceh needed to be restored due to illegal conversion to palm oil plantations.

Indonesia has the highest rate of deforestation in the world — almost twice that of Brazil, according to a recent study — with vast tracts of primary and secondary forest cleared for the plantation sector, notably oil palm plantations.

Nurdin Hasan|Sep 30, 2014

Global Warming and Climate Change

Heartland Institute Tells Pope Francis: ‘Humans Are Not Causing a Climate Crisis on God’s Green Earth’

The Heartland Institute announced that they will be sending a delegation to the Vatican today and tomorrow to explain to Pope Francis “why climate science does not justify the Holy See putting its faith in the work of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”

That’s right. They would like the Pope to reject the findings of the international body which merely assesses all of the world’s peer-reviewed scientific literature—which is in overwhelming agreement that climate change is happening and humans are causing it—and then makes recommendations based off of that literature.

The Heartland Institute is sending the delegation as a “prebuttal” to the Vatican’s “Climate Summit,” which will take place on Tuesday. The reason they are bringing “real scientists,” as they claim, is to “dissuade Pope Francis from lending his moral authority to the politicized and unscientific climate agenda of the United Nations,” said the Heartland Institute.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, both of whom will speak at the Pope’s climate summit, “refuse to acknowledge the abundant data showing human greenhouse gas emissions are not causing a climate crisis and there is no need for a radical reordering of global economies that will cause massive reductions in human freedom and prosperity,” says the Heartland Institute.

“The Holy Father is being misled by ‘experts’ at the United Nations who have proven unworthy of his trust,” said Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast. “Humans are not causing a climate crisis on God’s Green Earth—in fact, they are fulfilling their Biblical duty to protect and use it for the benefit of humanity. Though Pope Francis’s heart is surely in the right place, he would do his flock and the world a disservice by putting his moral authority behind the United Nations’ unscientific agenda on the climate,” said Bast.

One of those who will speak at the “prebuttal” is Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, founder and national spokesman for
the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. He will expound on the declaration, Protect the Poor: Ten Reasons to Oppose Harmful Climate Change Policies, which the Cornwall Alliance issued last year.

Beisner admits that carbon dioxide emissions are warming the planet, but says the impact is “so tiny as to be insignificant. “Trying to reduce our emissions will neither protect the earth nor dignify humanity.” Beisner believes simulations by computer climate models are simply wrong and “the grave danger to the world, and especially to the poor, isn’t global warming, but the poverty that would be induced or prolonged by policies meant to fight it,” says Beisner.

Beisner, a seminary professor of historical theology and social ethics when he founded the Cornwall Alliance in 2005, received the “Outstanding Spokesman on Faith, Science, and Stewardship Award” from the Heritage Foundation at the Ninth International Conference on Climate Change last year. Beisner believes “Christian ethics requires protecting the poor from harm, since they lack the means to protect themselves.”

“Requiring the world to abandon the abundant, reliable, affordable energy provided by fossil fuels in the name of fighting global warming oppresses the poor,” says Beisner. “They desperately need that energy, and for now and the foreseeable future no other energy source can give it to them.”

It will be very interesting to see what the Pope has to say about all of this. Pope Francis has consistently taken a strong stance on the need for immediate action on climate change, and at the same time, has been an ardent defender of the poor and marginalized. He evenly personally witnessed those on the front lines of climate change when he met with survivors of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines.

Cole Mellino|April 27, 2015

Polar Bears to People: Momentum on Climate Change

In the past several months, there has been much troubling news for all who are concerned about polar bears. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations hit 400 parts per million, higher than any time in perhaps 3 million years. The global average air temperature for all of 2014 was the highest on record. The maximum extent of Arctic sea ice this winter was the lowest ever recorded. My colleagues and I published papers showing that: land-based foods cannot sustain polar bears forced off the melting ice; the key to polar bear survival is adequate sea-ice access, a finding that reaffirms my earlier conclusions; the polar bear population in northern Alaska, which I have studied for most of my adult life, declined 40% in the first decade of the 2000s. Yet, there are reasons to celebrate!

A new study showed that the peak warming influence from greenhouse-gas emissions occurs within a decade of their release into the atmosphere. Because our earlier work had shown a linear relationship between sea-ice extent and temperature, this new finding provides exciting confirmation we can stop rising temperatures in time to save much of the sea ice on which polar bears depend.

States have started to introduce legislation that would establish a fair price for carbon emissions, and Congress has held preliminary discussions of similar national efforts. If enacted, these laws no longer would allow us to hide the costs of emissions for our children to discover. Owning the costs of current carbon emissions is a critical step toward reducing them. The U.S. and China, the worlds’ greatest carbon emitters, finally entered serious talks and developed a preliminary agreement to reduce emissions. And, even without formal international agreements in place, growth in renewable-generation capacity has now surpassed growth in generation from all fossil fuels combined.

Perhaps most important, influential voices in our society are speaking out about the need to stop global-temperature rise. Our military is pushing for recognition that continued warming multiplies security risks here and abroad. The Pope is speaking out about the humanitarian costs of continued warming. He and other religious leaders increasingly recognize that allowing developed societies to force ever-greater food and water insecurity onto the worlds’ poor is incompatible with the concept of loving thy neighbor. At the same time, current multi-year droughts in the western U.S. and elsewhere force policy leaders to recognize that the challenge is not just for poor people living in faraway places. Challenges of food and water security are here now. Our leaders are awakening to the fact that, even if scientists cannot attribute current drought entirely to human-caused climate change, this is what climate change looks like — and we don’t like that look.

In 2010, my colleagues and I concluded that stopping temperature rise to save polar bears will benefit the rest of life on earth — including people. Many challenges lay before us. We need national and international policy changes to prevent the worst of climate-change disasters. But, the conversations, statements, and yes, actions, of the last year offer greater hope than ever that we may get there. Some events of the past year indeed are worthy of celebration!

Dr. Steven C. Amstrup|Chief scientist|Polar Bears International|04/20/2015

Vatican and U.N. team up on climate change against sceptics

VATICAN CITY, April 28 (Reuters) – The Vatican and the United Nations teamed up to warn the world of the effects of climate change on Tuesday, coming down firmly against sceptics who deny human activities help change global weather patterns.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon discussed climate change with the pope before opening a one-day conference of scientists and religious leaders called “The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Development”.

The pope, who is due to make a major address on sustainable development at the United Nations in September, has said he believes man is primarily responsible for climate change and is writing an encyclical on the environment.

Ban, opening the conference of some 60 scientists, religious leaders and diplomats hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, urged industrialized countries to invest in clean energy and reduce their carbon footprints.

“Mitigating climate change and adapting to its effects are necessary to eradicate extreme poverty, reduce inequality and secure equitable, sustainable economic development,” he said.

The gathering’s final joint declaration said “Human-induced climate change is a scientific reality, and its decisive mitigation is a moral and religious imperative for humanity.”

The Paris summit on climate change in December “may be the last effective opportunity to negotiate arrangements that keep human-induced warming below 2 degrees C,” adding that the “current trajectory may well reach a devastating 4degrees C or higher,” it said.

Ban said he and the pope discussed Francis’ keenly awaited encyclical, which will be addressed to all of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics and which the pope has said he hopes will influence the Paris conference.

“It (the encyclical) will convey to the world that protecting our environment is an urgent moral imperative and a sacred duty for all people of faith and people of conscience,” Ban said.

Jeffrey Sachs, Colombia University professor and director of the U.N. Sustainable Solutions Network, told reporters companies that invest in fossil fuels stand to lose money.

“Everybody needs to understand that policies are going to change to make it unprofitable if you wreck the planet,” he said. “Those companies that continue exploring and developing fossil fuel resources for which there is no safe use are going to pay a very heavy cost for that”

The Heartland Institute, a Chicago think tank that says climate change is not human-induced, sent a delegation to Rome to contest the premise of the conference.

Heartland member Christopher Monckton of Britain, told reporters that the pope “should listen to both sides of the scientific argument … not only people of one, narrow, poisonous political and scientific viewpoint”.

Philip Pullella|Reuters|28 Apr 2015|Editing by Tom Heneghan/Hugh Lawson

Net Zero Carbon Emissions: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

 “You can resist an invading army; you cannot resist an idea whose time has come.” —Victor Hugo

So here’s an idea you’re going to be hearing a lot of both in the lead-up to the UN climate talks in Paris and beyond: net zero carbon emissions. Admittedly, net zero emissions isn’t a concept you find most people tossing around during happy hour or mentioning in the same breath as the latest Modest Mouse album (which has its moments, by the way). But, to borrow a phrase from Victor Hugo, it’s an idea whose time has come—and if you want to know what the practical steps to addressing climate change look like, it’s one you should know.

So what does net zero emissions actually mean? In a nutshell, it sets a target of completely cutting the planet’s effective carbon pollution. Step back and imagine for a minute: millions commuting to work, billions heating their homes, and companies everywhere doing business—all without polluting the atmosphere and contributing to climate change. Kind of hard to argue with that one. How do we get there? There are a number of ways scientists, policy makers, and groups like us are discussing, and to be honest, some are better than others. Technically, the “net” part of the equation leaves a little wiggle room for some continued but drastically reduced level of emissions, so long as they’re balanced out by natural factors like forest carbon sinks and technologies like carbon capture and storage that keep the pollution from entering the atmosphere.

Here at Climate Reality, we’re setting our sights on a practical path to net zero. We’re working for a climate agreement in Paris that points the planet in this direction with specific but realistic targets for each nation, based on where it’s at and what it can fairly do. We’re also working to ensure the agreement includes a way for nations to regularly review and raise their targets as technologies improve and cutting emissions becomes cheaper and easier.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of nations adopting net zero as a goal. On one hand, it starts a policy shift with governments creating programs and legislation to get there. On the other, it sends a strong signal to industries and investors that the fossil fuel era is ending, kickstarting a kind of virtuous cycle with greater investment in renewables and efficiencies that in turn helps make these technologies increasingly affordable and accessible.

Who else is with us? While there are still different perspectives in the climate movement on whether to go straight 100-percent renewables or to permit some continuing but mitigated emissions as mentioned previously, the community as a whole is getting behind the idea that net zero emissions definitely is the way of the future—or rather, the way to the future we want.

Plus, it’s not just the usual suspects of green groups supporting the idea. A group of corporate leaders known as The B Team—with members like Sir Richard Branson (Virgin Group), Arianna Huffington (Huffington Post Media Group) and Paul Polman (Unilever) who know a thing or two about what makes companies successful—is developing a new vision for business with net zero emissions by 2050 at the core. And with enough TED-level influence and star power in the group to illuminate small galaxies, it’s a good bet that much of the business community won’t be too far behind.

Which is all to say, net zero emissions is an idea whose time has come in more and more sectors. And when civil society and business can agree that the road to net zero is the way to go to not only address climate change, but also ensure the health of our families and our economies, it’s time for world leaders to get on the bandwagon.

Want to help achieve net zero emissions? Subscribe at Climate Reality for ways you can make a difference.

The Climate Reality Project|April 29, 2015

Climate change is melting Arctic archaeological sites

f you think about it — bear with us here — the Arctic is basically a huge freezer full of history’s leftovers. There’s a millennium worth of crusty villages, a bunch of gnawed-on beluga bones, and don’t forget the last of that takeout mammoth wayyyy at the back.

What’s even grosser than that delightful mental image is the fact that, as the Arctic heats up, all that old stuff formerly frozen in permafrost is thawing out — i.e. your leftovers are starting to rot — threatening the integrity of archaeological sites around the Arctic. Here’s the story from Motherboard:

[With] global climates heating up, the Arctic’s active layer [the top layer of permafrost that melts and refreezes every year] extends deeper every summer, and one of the largest contributing factors to the destruction of arctic sites is thawing permafrost. This great thaw is leaving organic artifacts to rot — or, in some cases, wash into the ocean — forcing arctic archaeologists to survey and excavate the most important sites before they’re gone.

Those organic artifacts include entire centuries-old Inuit sod-houses, perfectly preserved in their deep-freeze … until now. Since they’re too big to be moved, archaeologists are trying to map digitally before they melt like so much ice cream left out on the counter.

One of the team’s excavation sites, what was once the village of Kuukpak, is a classic area for large scale beluga whale hunting in historic Inuit culture. The site is in an ecotone — an area where multiple ecozones overlap — making it an incredibly rich environment with over 50 species of mammals as well as numerous fish and bird species. Such generous conditions made Kuukpak home to some of the largest Inuit villages ever to have existed.

“This site had probably about 500 people, compared to an average [site] of about 150, this site is really a massive site by Northern standards,” [team leader] Dr. Friesen said.

Along with a wealth of artifacts, like animal bones and hunting tools, Dr. Friesen’s team excavated the first fully uncovered sod house, a traditional Inuit lodging that would have housed between 15 to 30 people in the 1400s.

But Kuukpak won’t last long. Like so many other rich arctic archaeological sites it is being destroyed by erosion at an alarming rate.

In places like Kuukpak, the coastline is moving inland 15 feet every year, as sea level rises and permafrost subsides into muck. Friesen explained that all that erosion can add up fast: “When you think of an average early Inuvialuit site that might be 100 metres by 30 metres, that means you can lose an entire site in a decade.”

To give my admittedly overstretched metaphor of the thawing freezer one last reach: I guess that means we better start digging into our leftovers — but in this case, literally digging.

Amelia Urry|29 Apr 2015

Regional Planning Council targets sea level rise

TREASURE ISLAND – The Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council has embarked on an effort to form a network to help communities plan long term for the ramifications of sea level rise.
Maya Burke, senior environmental planner of TBRPC, told members of the Barrier Islands Government Council April 29 that a two-year grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has enabled the planning council to form the One Bay Resilient Communities Working Group, which is designed to help coastal communities plan ahead.

Burke said the goal is to bring together city planners, developers, real estate professionals, elected officials, coastal managers and concerned citizens to develop a cohesive plan for the ultimate rise of sea level.

“It’s not going to happen tomorrow,” said Burke. “You have time to plan right now for infrastructure that’s going to have a life cycle that will go into that time period.”

NOAA projections, using the St. Petersburg tide flows, show a rise of 1/10th inch per year through 2100, or 8.5 inches over the next 85 years.

“We have local, reliable evidence that sea level rise is already here and I’m telling you with a degree of confidence that it will continue to 2100 and beyond,” said Burke. “But I’m also telling you it’s not too late and it’s too insurmountable, and your decisions today can deliver those social, economic built and natural systems that would change and improve quality of life for your residents.”

Burke said preparing for sea level rise differs greatly from other potential disasters.

“When we do our resilience planning for hurricanes, it’s just a short period of time,” she said. “Sea level rise is much different. It keeps going and it requires a different kind of approach. It will require greater capital outlays to address.”
OneBay’s goal is to provide local governments with practical strategies to withstand the effects of sea level rise.

“We’re not trying to do anything grand or sweeping,” Burke said. “We’re not trying to fundamentally change the way of life. We just want to give you a practical and pragmatic tool kit for you all to use – strategic investments that can make your communities safer and improve the quality of life for your residents.”

Since 1946, the sea level rise at the St. Petersburg tide station has increased 6 1/2 inches over a 69-year period. But other areas of the country haven’t fared as well.

Louisiana, for example, is seeing the fastest sea level rise and the Mid-Atlantic states are experiencing increases higher than the Tampa Bay area.

In this region, sea level rise is on par with the global average, Burke said.

“Local sea level change is important for you to understand when it comes to planning purposes in your communities,” she said. “It’s important to understand what your local sea level rise conditions are and be informed so that the messages you craft and share with your constituents are sensitive to your local conditions and not some narrative going on somewhere else.”

But while there is no immediate threat of sea level increase, the World Bank ranks the Tampa Bay area as the seventh-most vulnerable area in the world due to the number of structures and infrastructure so close to the coast.

According to NOAA, when sea level rise does take place along the Pinellas beaches, it won’t be on the Gulf side. It will happen first in the Intracoastal Waterway.

“So these are things to think about when you’re looking at capital improvement projects or where your residents are,” said Burke. “Just be understanding of the dynamics you’ll be faced with.”

OneBay has already partnered with two county governments on studies involving the impact of sea level rise, as well as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on a study of criminal infrastructure vs. climate hazards.

“They put together a technical support document for climate hazards specific to Tampa Bay,” said Burke. “They put out a document in January and conducted a seminar in February that was attended by 120.”

The three key findings were:

• Any projected changes in rainfall falls within the natural vulnerability. More data is necessary to understand if rainfall is something we need to plan for in the future.
• The area will experience hotter temperatures, especially in the summer months.
• The area will see more coastal flooding through sea level rise.

For additional information, visit www.onebay.org.

BOB McCLURE|May 1, 2015

Extreme Weather

California’s drought isn’t doomsday, but yes, it will change the state

As California parches, people in the state have begun to ask tough questions. Will we be talking about rationing drinking water at some point? Will technology rescue us? Will farmers abandon the state’s great Central Valley?

The simple answer to all these questions is: no. As California’s climate shifts, the impacts will be profound. They’re just not going to be as dramatic as our sci-fi imaginations, or the prohibition on restaurants automatically serving water, would lead us to believe. A lot of rain and snow falls on California — just not enough to give it away to everyone for every possible use. In a hotter California, competing uses will probably push some agriculture out.

Some climate models show the state getting wetter, others show it getting drier, said Dan Cayan, a climate researcher at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and the USGS. But, he said, “It’s all headed in the warmer direction. The central tendency is an increase of 2.5 to 3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.”

That’s a problem, because California relies on the mountain snowpack to store water from heavy winter storms until it’s needed, in the dry summer. Almost a third of the water California uses in an average year comes from snowmelt. Nearly all the state’s precipitation comes between November and March, but the snow evens out that distribution into a steady trickle. The climate models suggest at least a 50 percent decline in average snowpack by the end of the century, Cayan said. If the precipitation doesn’t linger as snow and the state starts getting an entire year’s worth of water coming down the rivers all at once, it’s going to be a big engineering challenge to manage it, he said.

Conveniently, there’s a new report out on California’s climate change prospects from Risky Business (a group of climate realists organized by Michael Bloomberg, Henry Paulson, and Tom Steyer). It contains plenty of useful information, and it also makes a good jumping off point to examine how the drought will shape California’s future

Some of the most serious risks detailed in the report have nothing to do with water: California will almost certainly see an increase in heat-related deaths, and a decline in productivity. Energy use will ratchet up to deal with rising temperatures, and the sea will rise. The report notes that water management will also become more difficult, and this will affect farm communities first.

Cities

I don’t generally make predictions, but I feel safe in making this one: People in cities will have enough water to thrive. That’s because each person needs a relatively small amount of water. It might be wise to enshrine the right to a minimum amount of water (perhaps 13 gallons per person per day) as a basic right, to protect the poor. We should have no problem meeting that need.

Cities currently use far more water than they need, but conservation efforts are reducing those amounts. In Los Angeles, total water use has been declining, even though the city grew by 150,000 residents since 2001. According to the USGS, total water use around the state has been declining since 1980.

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power

But, we have a long way to go. There are lots of places around the state where the average person uses 80 gallons a day at home (and a few where it’s north of 300 gallons a day). We could all have beautiful landscaping on 40 gallons a day, easy.

The real problem with water in cities is not going to be too little, but too much: Coastal cities are vulnerable to sea-level rises. The Risky Business report estimates that there is a 1-in-20 probability that we will see more than 4 feet of sea-level rise by 2100. In California, that sea-level rise “would put the following specific facilities at risk of inundation”:

• 140 schools
• 55 healthcare facilities
• 3,500 miles of roads and highways
• 280 miles of railways
• 330 EPA hazardous waste facilities or sites
• 28 waste water treatment sites
• 30 power plants with a capacity of 10,000 MW
• Oakland and San Francisco international airports

Agriculture

According to the Risky Business report, increasing heat will hurt certain crops in certain parts of the state — like the “Inland South” east of Los Angeles:

If we stay on our current emissions path, cotton in the Inland South region will see a likely decrease of 12% to 44% in yields by mid-century (with a 1-in-20 chance of more than a 55% decrease), and a 47% to 81% decline by late century (with a 1-in-20 chance of more than a 96% decline).

And:

Cherries, for example, are “unambiguously threatened by warming,” with average yield decline projections of over 10% by 2040, even with carbon emissions kept at a level below the “business as usual” pathway. Almonds, too, are sensitive to warming and show a strong negative response to high February nighttime temperatures, which shorten the trees’ critical pollination period. And though gains during warmer springs and summers can potentially offset this effect, adaptation will be necessary to avoid harmful winter warming. For a state that produces 80% of the world’s almonds, even a small percent decline could have major repercussions on local and global markets.

But these numbers assume no adaptation or changes on the part of farmers, and the authors of the report note: “Farmers have always adapted to changing weather
 and climate conditions, with adaptation and flexibility built into their business models.”

Philip Bowles, whose family farms near Los Banos, Calif., said they are changing and adapting every day. His family has idled a quarter of their land and planted more tomatoes. The tomatoes grow enthusiastically with drip irrigation — it’s the crop that maximizes profits best right now, Bowles said. But you can’t just grow tomatoes every year — the soil requires crop rotation. They are also growing cotton (though they’ve cut back on the acreage), cantaloupes, corn nuts (the corn that they make into those snacks), and alfalfa. The family is also putting in a “gigantic solar plant,” something more farmers are doing as the temperatures rise. This great Newsweek video, by Sachi Cunningham, has more on farmers who are shifting from almonds to solar:

I wanted to know why Bowles was still growing alfalfa — it takes even more water than almonds, and doesn’t provide the same profits.

“In times of drought, alfalfa is very useful,” he told me. The reason it takes so much water is that you can get four to seven crops in a single year. If the rains don’t come, you can turn off the water and it will go dormant, and then water it again when you are ready (one seeding will grow for three to six years) — so it provides tremendous flexibility. At the same time, it fixes nitrogen, enriches the soil, and provides habitat for birds and insects, Bowles said. So this year, the Bowles’ family got a couple cuttings of alfalfa, then stopped cutting.

Will ag move out of California?

The ag correspondent for Mother Jones, Tom Philpott, has been, in his words, “pushing a more regionalized, widely distributed scheme for filling our salad and fruit bowls, one less dependent on California and its overtaxed water resources.” Specifically, he’d like to see a produce boom in the soggy southeast.

That’s not a bad idea, and a lot of farmers have been thinking about that for years. Farmers who live in the South already grow a lot of produce, said Tim Coolong, a University of Georgia agricultural cooperative extension agent who knowledgeable friends pointed me towards as the produce guru of the South.

“Growing vegetables down here is done on a large scale ~180,000 acres (large wholesale growers shipping nationally and internationally) so it isn’t something that we aren’t doing or haven’t thought of,” he wrote in an email.

And farmers are already trying to capitalize on the lack of water in the west. “Our current vegetable growers are trying some new crops to try to fill market niches that may be left open by the California drought.”

So why don’t we grow more food where there is abundant water and less food in California? Drought or no drought, California’s environment is so good for farming that it makes up for the lack of water. California’s predictability — the fact that the state hardly ever gets rain during the summer — makes for consistently high yields. In the South, on the other hand, “high levels of rain, while helpful for filling our aquifer in Georgia, can wreak havoc on crops. Plus our fluctuating weather — one week it can be 45 F and the next 80 F — can be problematic depending on what is grown,” Coolong wrote.

Russ Parsons, food writer for the Los Angeles Times, found that the drought has barely affected food prices in aggregate, partially because farmers are still getting such good harvests. In some cases the dry weather is actually improving conditions. There’s a bumper crop of California strawberries, for instance.

Because California has such a good environment for growing food, it also has the systems to support it: refrigerated warehouses, tomato canning factories, and a regular tide of migrant laborers. In the South, people will invest in building those systems if they think they can make money. And they probably will. Because California’s farm economy is massively larger than any other state’s, even a small shift of food production out of California would change the face of farming in the South significantly, Coolong said.

Bowles thinks that, in the long run, irrigated agriculture in California will probably decline. But, he said, be careful what you wish for: “We have by far the strictest standards for labor protections, pesticide use, pollution.” A shift out of California would mean less competition for water, but it could also mean the food had a heavier environmental footprint.

If California does scale back its farming, most people probably won’t notice. “It would be super painful for the very rich and the very poor,” Bowles said. In other words, big farmers like him may lose money. And communities of agricultural laborers will suffer — that’s already begun.

California isn’t fighting for the last drops, but the drought is a real crisis. And according to Bowles, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. He was a friend of Marc Reisner, author of Cadillac Desert, a popular history of water struggles in California. “Marc always used to say, ‘Nobody every talks sensibly about water in California until there’s a drought’,” Bowles said.

And there’s no shortage of issues that require sensible talk. California water districts are currently hammering out plans to regulate groundwater use. The state’s markets for buying and selling water are tangled in red tape. And, as temperatures rise, we’ll need to figure out new ways of storing the water that used to sit in the snowpack. Californians need to be forced to work out these problems if they are going to find a future that doesn’t suck. The state isn’t imperiled by the drought; it needs the drought.

Nathanael Johnson|27 Apr 2015

Genetically Modified Organisms

Chipotle Becomes First Fast Food Chain to Go GMO-Free

This is probably just as awesome as getting burritos delivered straight to your door. Chipotle has removed genetically modified ingredients from its menu, making it the first major restaurant chain to take this momentous step.

“Chipotle is on a never-ending journey to source the highest quality ingredients we can find. Over the years, as we have learned more about GMOs, we’ve decided that using them in our food doesn’t align with that vision,” the fast-casual eatery announced. “Chipotle was the first national restaurant company to disclose the GMO ingredients in our food, and now we are the first to cook only with non-GMO ingredients.”

Starting today, Chipotle’s 1,831 restaurants are now using non-GMO corn and has made a switch from soybean oil to GMO-free sunflower oil and rice bran oil for their cooking.

In a statement, Chipotle noted that “93 percent of corn grown in the U.S. in 2014 was genetically modified. This includes 76 percent of corn that is both herbicide resistant and pesticide producing, with the remainder engineered for only one of those traits. Ninety-four percent of the soy grown in the U.S. in 2014 was engineered for glyphosate resistance.”

“Given the concerns surrounding these types of GMOs and the chemicals associated with them, we felt it was particularly important to seek out non-GMO ingredients when possible,” Chipotle added.

The health concerns about genetically modified food have been a contentious issue: many supporters say it’s safe, but many others have cried foul. The World Health Organization recently designated glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Environmental advocates are also concerned about the environmental destruction of farming genetically modified crops.

It’s important to note that while Chipotle’s meat and dairy products come from animals that are not genetically modified, they are still being given GMO-feed. Their beverages also contain genetically modified ingredients, including those containing corn syrup made from GMO corn. However, Chipotle said, “We are working hard on this challenge, and have made substantial progress: for example, the 100 percent grass-fed beef served in many Chipotle restaurants was not fed GMO grain—or any grain, for that matter.”

The health-concious company has been working for several years to remove GMOs from its offerings. In 2013, they disclosed all the ingredients on their menu that contained GMOs, the first restaurant chain to do so.

“This is another step toward the visions we have of changing the way people think about and eat fast food,” the company’s co-CEO Steve Ells told the New York Times. “Just because food is served fast doesn’t mean it has to be made with cheap raw ingredients, highly processed with preservatives and fillers and stabilizers and artificial colors and flavors.”

The restaurant has been taking many steps to feed its customers more consciously. Last December, Chipotle pulled pork from its menu in hundreds of its restaurants after an audit of its supply chain showed pigs raised in confined quarters.

Chipotle is not just concerned about providing better quality and ethically raised food to consumers, they are also aiming to protect the environment. In March, Chipotle warned customers and investors alike that climate change might eventually affect the availability of some ingredients that go into burrito toppings, like its signature guacamole.

“Industrial ranching and factory farming produce tons of waste while depleting the soil of nutrients,” the company’s Food With Integrity statement said. “These seem like bad things to us. So we work hard to source our ingredients in ways that protect this little planet of ours.”

Lorraine Chow|April 27, 2015

Court Declares Vermont’s Genetically Engineered Food Labeling Law Constitutional

Yesterday, after nearly a year of battling in court to defend Vermont’s law to label genetically engineered (GE) food, a federal judge in Vermont issued a decision affirming the constitutionality of Vermont’s GE food labeling law.

This is a major victory for Vermonters and citizens across the country: Vermont can now implement this hard-fought law and give its residents the right to know!

As we have been in so many states, Center for Food Safety was there when concerned consumers wanted to draft a GE food labeling bill in Vermont, and we were there when this historic legislation was signed into law. And when big food companies sued Vermont to stop GE labeling in the state, we stepped in to help defend it – and we won.

While this is a tremendous victory and critical step, mega food corporations will now push for further proceedings and/or appeal, so the work in Vermont will continue. And Vermont is not our only battleground. Right now, CFS is actively engaged in several other lawsuits defending several county ordinances restricting GE crops in both Oregon and Hawaii, and defending a county ordinance in Hawaii about pesticide spraying disclosure and buffer zones.

All across the country, food and chemical corporate giants are filing lawsuits challenging vital new laws passed directly by voters or through their elected representatives – laws set up to protect our farmers, our environment, and our right to know what’s in our food.

These corporations and their allies have been using some of the nation’s highest-paid lawyers, attempting to overturn positive progress across the country. We can’t let that happen. As we have in the past, we’ll be there every step of the way to defend these laws and the communities who worked so hard to pass them.

At CFS, we do all of our work, including our legal efforts, without charge, representing you, our members, and other nonprofits or local citizens. Instead, we count on donations from our members to support these critical efforts.

Andrew Kimbrell|Executive Director|Center for Food Safety|2/28/15

The existential crisis facing GMOs – they don’t work and we don’t want them

The GMO industry has legitimized itself via a vast network of lobbyists and the assiduous capture of the politicians, regulators and scientists that should be holding it to account, writes Colin Todhunter. But as the failure of the GM revolution and its disastrous impacts become ever more evident, the industry’s legitimacy is fast eroding away.

The pro-GMO lobby talks about choice, democracy and the alleged violence of certain environmental groups – but says nothing about the structural violence waged on rural communities or the devastating impacts of GMOs in regions like South America.

Author of ‘Altered Genes, Twisted Truth‘ Steven Druker recently talked of how back in the 1970s a group of molecular biologists formed part of a scientific elite that sought to allay fears about genetic engineering by putting a positive spin on it.

At the same time, critics of this emerging technology were increasingly depicted as being little more than non-scientists who expressed ignorant but well-meaning concerns about science and genetic engineering.

This continues today, but the attacks on critics are becoming more vicious. Former British Environment Minister Owen Paterson recently attacked critics of GMOs with a scathing speech that described them as a self-serving, elitist “green blob” that was condemning “billions” to misery.

Professor Anthony Trewavas has continued this theme by stating:

“Greenpeace notably decides its opinions must prevail regardless of others, so it arrogates to itself the right to tear up and destroy things it doesn’t like. That is absolutely typical of people who are unable to convince others by debate and discussion and in the last century such attitudes, amplified obviously, ended up killing people that others did not like. But the same personality type – the authoritarian, ‘do as I tell you’, was at the root of it all. Such groups therefore sit uneasily with countries that are democracies.”

According to this, critics of GMOs possess authoritarian personality types, are ignorant of science and unable to convince people of their arguments and thus resort to violence.

All voices against GMOs are ‘biased’

Part of the pro-GMO narrative also involves a good deal of glib talk about democracy. In an open letter to me, Anthony Trewavas says:

“It would be nice if you could say you are a democrat and believe that argument is better than destruction but argument that deals with all the facts and does not select out of those to construct a misleading program.

“Misleading selection of limited information is causing considerable problems in various parts of the world that leads some into very violent behaviour, particularly in religious belief. I am sure you agree that this is not a good way forward … Whatever their [farmers’] choice is … they must be allowed to make that decision … That is the nature of every democracy that I hope all will finally live under?”

Pro-GMO scientists have every right to speak on psychology, politics and democracy. However, let a non-scientist criticize GMOs and they are accused of self-serving elitism or ignorance. Indeed, let even a scientist produce scientific evidence that runs counter to the industry-led science and he or she is smeared and attacked.

Let a respected academically qualified political scientist, trade policy analyst or social scientist whose views are in some way critical of GMOs and the corporations promoting them express a coherent viewpoint supported by evidence from their specific discipline, and they are attacked for being little more than ideologues with an agenda, or their evidence or sources are described as ‘biased’.

Any analysis of the role of the IMF, World Bank and WTO and their part in restructuring agriculture in poor nations or devising policies to favour Western agribusiness is suddenly to be side lined in favour of a narrow focus on ‘science’, which the masses and ideologues could not possibly comprehend.

By implication, they should therefore defer to (pro-GMO) scientists for the necessary information.

‘Science’, ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ are what we say they are

The pro-GMO lobby talks about choice, democracy and the alleged violence of certain environmental groups – but says nothing about the structural violence waged on rural communities resulting from IMF / World Bank strings-attached loans, the undermining of global food security as a result of Wall Street commodity and land speculators, the crushing effects of trade rules on poorer regions or the devastating impacts of GMOs in regions like South America.

To discuss such things is political and thus ‘ideological’ and is therefore not up for discussion it seems.

Much easier to try to focus on ‘the science’ and simply mouth platitudes about ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom of choice’ while saying nothing about how both been captured or debased by powerful interests, including agribusiness.

By attempting not to appear to be ideological or political, such people are attempting to depoliticize and thus disguise the highly political status quo whereby powerful corporations (and some bogus notion of a ‘free market’) are left unchallenged to shape agriculture as they see fit, says Kevin Carson of Center for a Stateless Society:

“Anyone who’s seen the recent virally circulated Venn diagrams of the personnel overlap between Monsanto and USDA personnel, or Pfizer and FDA, will immediately know what I’m talking about … A model of capitalism in which the commanding heights of the economy are an interlocking directorate of large corporations and government agencies, a major share of the total operating costs of the dominant firms are socialized (and profits privatized, of course), and ‘intellectual property’ protectionism and other regulatory cartels allow bureaucratic corporate dinosaurs … to operate profitably without fear of competition.”

The ‘free market’ as an engine of hunger and poverty

If certain politicians or scientists and the companies they support really do want to ‘feed the world’ and are concerned with poverty and hunger, they should forget about GMOs and focus their attention elsewhere: not least on how the ‘free market’ system that they cherish so much causes hunger and poverty – whether for example through food commodity speculation by powerful banking interests or a US foreign policy that has for decades used agriculture to trap nations into subservience.

Rather than have the public focus on such things, such people try to mislead and divert attention away from these things with puerile notions of authoritarian personality types who reject some illusory notion of open debate, free choice and democracy.

But even with this power and political influence at its disposal, the GMO agritech industry is far from being a success. Much of its profits actually derive from failure: for example, Andrew Kimbrell notes that after having chosen to ignore science, the industry’s failing inputs are now to be replaced with more destined-to-fail and ever-stronger poisonous inputs.

The legacy of poisoned environments and ecological devastation is for someone else to deal with. In his book, Steven Druker has shown that from very early on the US government has colluded with the GMO agritech sector to set a ‘technical fix-failure-technical fix’ merry-go-round in motion.

This system is designed to stumble from one crisis to the next, all the while hiding behind the banners of ‘innovation’ or ‘research and development’. But it’s all good business. And that’s all that really matters to the industry.

If you’re going to tell a lie, make sure it’s a whopper!

There’s always good PR ground to be made from blaming critics for being ‘anti-science’, and money to be made from a continuous state of crisis management (‘innovation’ and bombarding farmers with a never-ending stream of new technologies and inputs). Part of the great con-trick is that it attempts to pass off its endless crises and failures as brilliant successes.

For many promoters of the GMO cause, it is a case of not even wanting to understand alternative approaches or the devastating impacts of GMOs when their lavish salary or consultancy fees depend on them not wanting to understand any of it.

When it comes to labelling unsafe and untested GM food in the US, the pro-GMO lobby grasps at straws by saying too much information confuses the public or sends out the wrong message.

When it says sound science should underpin the GMO issue, it does everything it can to circumvent any science that threatens its interests.

When it says its critics have a political agenda, it side lines debates on how it hijacks international and national policy making bodies and regulatory agencies.

When it talks about elite, affluent environmentalists robbing food from the bellies of the poor, its private companies are owned by people who form part of a privileged class that seek to turn their vested interests into policy proscriptions for the rest of us.

The fraudulent ‘consensus’ is breaking down

The pro-GMO lobby engages in the fraudulent notion that it knows what is best for humanity. Co-opting public institutions and using science as an ideology, it indulges in an arrogant form of exceptionalism.

The world does not need GMO food or crops, especially those which have not been proven safe or whose benefits are questionable to say the least. There are alternative ways to boost food production if or when there is a need to. There are other (existing) ways to tackle the impacts of volatile climates.

However, the alternatives are being squeezed out as big agritech and its captured policy / regulatory bodies place emphasis on proprietary products, not least GMOs and chemical inputs.

The pro-GMO lobby has a crisis of legitimation. No amount of twisted truths or altered genes, expensive PR or attacks on its critics can disguise this.

Colin Todhunter|21st April 2015

Hillary Clinton Hires Former Monsanto Lobbyist to Run Her Campaign

Hillary Clinton has just appointed Jerry Crawford, a long-time Monsanto lobbyist, to be her advisor. He is always placed with politicians who support Monsanto so does this mean Hillary will be backing this evil company as well?

Hillary Clinton recently announced that she will be appointing long-time Monsanto lobbyist Jerry Crawford as adviser to her “Ready for Hillary” super PAC.

Crawford has mostly worked with Democratic politicians in the past, but has also put his support behind Republican candidates as well. Anyone who was willing to support Monsanto’s goals would receive support from Crawford.

In the past, Crawford has worked with Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and Bill Northey. Over the years, Crawford has been instrumental in fighting against small farmers in court and protecting Monsanto’s seed monopoly.

Just last week it was reported that Hillary Clinton is attempting to re-polish her image and paint herself as a champion of the common people. She is planning to make “toppling the 1%” one of her primary campaign selling points, although she is obviously a part of the same ruling class that she is speaking against, and receives massive contributions from some of the most corrupt aristocratic organizations in the world.

In 2014, Clinton was paid to speak at the Biotechnology Industry Organization where she openly expressed her support for GMO crops.

In her speech, she said that “I stand in favor of using seeds and products that have a proven track record….And to continue to try to make the case for those who are skeptical that they may not know what they’re eating already. The question of genetically modified food or hybrids has gone on for many many years. And there is again a big gap between what the facts are and what perceptions are.”

John Vibes|True Activist|April 26, 2015

Deep Pockets

$63.6 million. That’s how much the gene giants and junk food companies spent in 2014 to keep you in the dark about the GMOs in your food.

These are the same companies that want you to buy their story that it would cost too much to make a routine label change on their food products. Right.

We all know the real reason Monsanto and PepsiCo don’t want labels on GMO foods. Because contrary to their propaganda, they know as well as you do that GMO foods are not only not “equivalent” to non-GMO foods, but since more than 80 percent of them are grown with glyphosate (recently declared a carcinogen by the World Health Organization) they’re not safe, either.

Now that a federal judge has cleared the way for Vermont to enact its GMO labeling law in 2016, the biotech and food industries are going into overdrive to pressure Congress to pass a federal law that would strip Vermont (and any other state that passes a similar law) of the right to pass GMO labeling laws. Talk about “unconstitutional.”

We’re going to do everything we can to stop this outrageous overreach in D.C. At the same time, we are in the thick of a fight right now to pass a GMO labeling law in Maine. And we are pitching in to help Massachusetts and other New England states as well.

Monsanto’s Roundup Linked to Cancer – Again

A brilliant and celebrated inventor, John Franz, gave us an herbicide, Roundup, which has changed the face of agriculture. This herbicide has become the foundation for an entirely novel approach to farming – biotech agriculture – that has expanded rapidly throughout the globe.

Monsanto makes seeds for soy, corn, canola, cotton, alfalfa and sugar beets that are genetically engineered to be tolerant to Roundup. The seeds are marketed in 120 countries. Throughout the world, Roundup is sprayed heavily as a weed killer without fear of damaging the cash crops, which have been engineered to survive the herbicide’s effects.

“The change in how agriculture is produced has brought, frankly, a change in the profile of diseases. We’ve gone from a pretty healthy population to one with a high rate of cancer, birth defects and illnesses seldom seen before.”

Roundup seemed, at first, to be the perfect herbicide. It blocks the ESPS synthase enzyme, which prevents the synthesis of amino acids that plants need for growth. Since animals don’t have this enzyme, it was initially hypothesized that they would be safe from Roundup’s effects.

Unfortunately, Roundup has now been shown to affect much more than the EPSP synthase enzyme. The herbicide has been proven to cause birth defects in vertebrates, including in humans, and it may also be the cause of a fatal kidney disease epidemic.

An increasing number of studies are now linking the herbicide to cancer.

Roundup Linked to Increased Cancer in “Soy Republic”
Roundup is now heavily sprayed in what is known as the “Soy Republic,” an area of Latin America larger than the state of California. This region has undergone a profound transformation since genetically modified (GM) crops were first introduced in 1996. Some 125 million acres in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay and Paraguay are now devoted to GM soy production.

Doctors serving these areas have documented an alarming increase in cancers. A group of dedicated physicians formed an organization, Doctors of Fumigated Towns. They held a national conference in August of 2010 in Córdoba, the center of Argentina’s soy region. The Department of Medical Sciences of the National University at Córdoba sponsored the conference. An estimated 160 doctors from throughout the country attended.

Dr. Medardo Avila Vazquez, a pediatrician specializing in environmental health, explained his concerns:

“The change in how agriculture is produced has brought, frankly, a change in the profile of diseases. We’ve gone from a pretty healthy population to one with a high rate of cancer, birth defects and illnesses seldom seen before. What we have complained about for years was confirmed and especially what doctors say about the sprayed towns and areas affected by industrial agriculture. Cancer cases are multiplying as never before in areas with massive use of pesticides.”

Dr. Avila Vazquez blamed the biotech agricultural corporations for placing their profits over the public’s health:

“The tobacco companies denied the link between smoking and cancer, and took decades to recognize the truth. The biotech and agrochemical corporations are the same as the tobacco industry; they lie and favor business over the health of the population.”

It was the health of the population that concerned Dr. Damian Verzeñassi, professor of social and environmental health from the National University at Rosario. In 2010, he began a house-to-house epidemiological study of 65,000 people in Santa Fe, also in Argentina’s soy region. He found cancer rates two to four times higher than the national average, with increases in breast, prostate and lung cancers.

Dr. Verzeñassi commented on his findings: “Cancer has skyrocketed in the last fifteen years.”

Much the same was found in Chaco, Argentina’s poorest province. In 2012, two villages were compared, the heavily sprayed farming village of Avia Terai and the non-sprayed ranching village of Charadai. In the farming village, 31 percent of residents had a family member with cancer while only 3 percent of residents in the ranching village had one.

Carlos Fria lives in Avia Terai. He has complained about glyphosate spraying in close proximity to his home:

“If the wind changes, the agrochemicals come into the house. My uncle just died of cancer. My wife too, passed away from cancer. Now many, many people are dying of cancer. It didn’t used to be like that. In my opinion, this has to do with the poison they put on the fields.”

Roundup Linked to Lymphoma

Research has also been done in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand investigating possible links between glyphosate, Roundup’s active ingredient, and cancer. A large number of studies have focused on glyphosate’s possible association with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Scientists from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) have analyzed studies spanning almost three decades. The IARC is the branch of the World Health Organization that promotes cancer research. Scientists throughout the world with skills in epidemiology, laboratory sciences and biostatistics are brought together to identify the causes of cancer so that preventive measures may be instituted. The agency views cancers as linked, directly or indirectly, to environmental factors.

The research shows that Roundup is linked to a host of cancers in those living in the heavily sprayed regions of Latin America. It has also been linked to B cell lymphoma, and to brain cancer.

In April of 2014, scientists at the IARC published their review of twenty-five years of research on the relationship between pesticide exposure and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. They found a positive association between organo-phosphorus herbicides, like glyphosate, and this cancer. The B cell lymphoma sub-type, in particular, was strongly associated with glyphosate exposure.

Roundup Linked to Brain Cancer
The linkage to lymphoma is the most recent research raising concerns about glyphosate’s connection to cancer. Scientists from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a branch of the US Department of Health and Human Services, specialize in illnesses caused by toxic substances. They published the results of the US Atlantic Coast Childhood Brain Cancer Study in 2009. Children with brain cancer from Florida, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania were compared to age matched controls. The researchers found that if either parent had been exposed to Roundup during the two years before the child’s birth, the chances of the child developing brain cancer doubled.

Roundup and Cancer: Human Observations Summarized

The research shows that Roundup is linked to a host of cancers in those living in the heavily sprayed regions of Latin America. It has also been linked to B cell lymphoma, and to brain cancer.

While the epidemiological studies show close correlation, they cannot prove causality. The gold standard for scientific proof is a randomized controlled trial, which would be unethical in this instance. You cannot ethically expose humans to an herbicide. Scientists therefore use a variety of experimental models to assess cancer risk.

Roundup Causes DNA Damage,  Errors During Cell Division

Cancer risk can be evaluated by experiments that measure Roundup’s ability to induce DNA damage.

One of the initial steps in the development of cancers is often damage to our DNA. Each of our cells gets its operating instructions from its DNA. If the DNA is damaged, the faulty operating instructions can re-program cells to divide rapidly and chaotically. When this happens, cells become transformed into cancers.

A number of experiments have been done using various animal models, all showing the same results: after exposure to Roundup, cells exhibited DNA damage. This was true in fruit fly larvae, in mice, in the blood cells of the European eel and in the lymphocytes of cows.

Another experimental model that has been used to judge glyphosate’s cancer risk focuses on the herbicide’s impact on cell division. Cells are vulnerable to being turned into cancers if an error is made during this delicate process. In the process of cell division, the DNA must be copied precisely. Each daughter cell must receive from its parent cell an identical copy of the DNA. If a mistake is made, the daughter cells will receive faulty DNA copies. Cells with damaged DNA can turn into cancers.

In a 2004 study done at the National Scientific Research Center and the University of Pierre and Marie Curie in France, Roundup caused significant errors in the cell division of sea urchin embryos. The scientists commented that these abnormalities are hallmarks of cancer and delivered a particularly chilling warning: The concentration of Roundup needed to cause these errors was 500 to 4,000 times lower than the dose to which humans may be exposed by aerial spraying or handling of the herbicide.

Roundup Damages Human DNA

The most worrisome of the DNA studies are the ones that show DNA damage in humans.

Dr. Fernando Manas, a biologist at the National University of Rio Cuarto in Argentina, has been investigating the effects of pesticides for years. He believes that glyphosate spraying is causing cancer by inducing DNA damage. His research has documented genetic damage in those exposed. When Dr. Manas studied pesticide sprayers working in the soy industry in Córdoba, he found significantly more DNA damage in their lymphocytes than in those of an unexposed group of controls. Roundup was one of the most commonly used pesticides.

The pesticide sprayers in Córdoba, the Ecuadorians living in Sucumbíos, and the normal volunteers all developed Roundup-induced DNA damage in their lymphocytes.

Genetics researchers from the Pontifical Catholic University in Quito, Ecuador evaluated Ecuadorians living in the Sucumbíos district in northern Ecuador for evidence of DNA damage. This area was heavily sprayed with Roundup by the Colombian government to eradicate illicit crops. Those exposed to the herbicide developed a number of acute symptoms, including abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea, fever, heart palpitations, headaches, dizziness, numbness, insomnia, depression, shortness of breath, blurred vision, burning of eyes, blisters and rash. When compared to a control group, they also showed significantly more DNA damage.

Interestingly, scientists have known since 1998 that when normal human lymphocytes were exposed to Roundup in a test tube, the lymphocytes developed DNA damage.

The pesticide sprayers in Córdoba, the Ecuadorians living in Sucumbíos, and the normal volunteers all developed Roundup-induced DNA damage in their lymphocytes. A cancer of the lymphocytes is known as a “lymphoma,” the very same type of cancer that the International Agency for Research on Cancer showed to be strongly associated with glyphosate exposure.

Roundup Boosts Cancer in Tissue Culture Studies

Another method that scientists have used to assess Roundup’s cancer risk is to expose cells grown in “tissue culture” to the herbicide. Sheets of cells are grown on a small dish with nutrients. Glyphosate is added and its effects are observed.

In 2010, researchers in India exposed mouse skin cells grown in tissue culture to Roundup. When the herbicide was added, the cells became cancerous.

Scientists in Thailand studied the impact of Roundup on human estrogen-responsive breast cancer cells in tissue culture. They published their results in 2013. Hormone-responsive breast cancer cells are known to grow when exposed to estrogen. Roundup also stimulated these cells to grow. The herbicide was able to bind to the cancer’s estrogen receptors, thus mimicking the effects of estrogen and accelerating tumor growth.

Roundup Causes Cancer in Test Animals

Roundup’s effects have been assessed in studies with a variety of test animals for more than three decades.

One of the earliest studies was done in 1979-1981, under the auspices of the United Nations Environmental Program, the International Labor Organization and the World Health Organization. Rats exposed to low levels of the herbicide developed testicular cancer. A larger dose did not produce the cancer. Unfortunately, at the time of the experiment, it was not understood that certain substances have more potent effects at lower doses than at higher doses. The evaluators erroneously dismissed the results showing the low-dose effect.

In a study from the Institute of Biology at the University of Caen in France, researchers studied glyphosate’s effects on rats. Originally published in 2012, the resulting report was retracted after the biotech agriculture industry complained. After extensive review failed to show any fraud or problem with the data, the report was re-published in 2014. In this study, Roundup was shown to double the incidence of mammary gland tumors. These cancers developed much faster in rats exposed to Roundup than in controls. There was also an increase in cancers of the pituitary gland.

Rounding Up the Evidence

Epidemiological studies in humans, in the soy regions of Argentina and in Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have shown Roundup to be linked to an increase in cancer risk. There is a strong association between Roundup and B cell lymphoma, brain cancer and a variety of other cancers in those living in heavily sprayed areas.

In addition to these epidemiological observations, laboratory studies have shown that Roundup causes DNA damage, disturbs cell division, increases cancer growth in tissue culture and induces cancer when fed to test animals.

Proving Causality
Does the evidence linking Roundup to cancer prove causality? In the 1964 landmark Surgeon General’s Report, which for the very first time linked tobacco to cancer, Surgeon General Dr. Luther Terry presented criteria for the establishment of a cause and effect relationship in a scientific study.

To meet Dr. Terry’s criteria, an association must be strong, specific and consistent. Cause must precede effect. And the association must be biologically plausible.

Biotech agriculture’s most powerful backer, it seems, is the government of the United States.

How well does the association between Roundup and cancer fit these criteria?

Roundup exposure is consistently and specifically associated with precancerous abnormalities in a wide variety of experimental settings. Epidemiological observations show a tight linkage between glyphosate and cancer. In the laboratory research, as well as in the epidemiological studies in the field, exposure to the herbicide precedes the development of the abnormalities. There are plausible biological mechanisms that explain how glyphosate can transform cells into cancers.

In citing the Surgeon General’s report, Drs. Wild and Seber, in their highly regarded statistics textbook, Chance Encounters, provide an example of a strong association. If an “illness is four times as likely among people exposed to a possible cause as it is for those who are not exposed,” the association is considered strong.

Most of the glyphosate exposure experiments and epidemiological observations show a doubling of cancer risk. This leaves some room for doubt.

But who, given the science, would want to expose their loved ones to Roundup?

The State of the Science vs. the Science of the State
Roundup has now been conclusively proven to cause birth defects and to be closely linked to cancer. If we do not want this herbicide to accumulate in our water, land, and food, we need to stop using it.

In the final sad irony, when the cancer cells reach their growth peak, they kill their host and die in the process.

The science is clear, but powerful economic interests have, thus far, prevailed. The executives of the biotech agricultural corporations and their backers have ignored or denied the science documenting Roundup’s harm.

Biotech agriculture’s most powerful backer, it seems, is the government of the United States.

This official policy was explained in a 2010 US State Department cable from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

“Our biotech outreach objectives for 2010 are to increase access to, and markets for, biotech as a means to help address the underlying causes of the food crisis, and to promote agricultural technology’s role in mitigating climate change and increasing biofuel production.”

The US government has been willing to exercise its muscle in support of the biotech agricultural corporations.

In El Salvador, for example, the United States recently pressured the government to buy Monsanto’s GM seeds or risk losing $277 million in development aid. El Salvador refused and stood firm, preferring to buy the seeds from its own struggling farmers.

Cancer’s Lessons

There is a disturbing parallel between the exponential growth of biotech agriculture and the spread of a cancer in the human body.

Cancers are cells that reproduce rapidly and haphazardly with no regard for the greater good of the organism. Cancer cells consume valuable energy, starving out normal cells. They grow so wildly and so quickly that they crowd out their neighbors. They send off emissaries to start new cancer colonies. They make harmful substances that damage healthy cells. They spread relentlessly. In the final sad irony, when the cancer cells reach their growth peak, they kill their host and die in the process.

Like a cancer, biotech agriculture has crowded out its neighbors and is spreading relentlessly. Also like a cancer, it makes harmful substances. Roundup is one of them. As more acreage comes under GM cultivation, we can expect Roundup use to continue to increase.

Roundup kills plants, causes birth defects in vertebrates, and is linked to cancer. Can a living planet withstand the continuous assault from this poison any more than the human body can withstand the attack from an aggressive cancer?

Do we need to fight biotech agriculture with the same persistence, commitment and force that we bring to bear in battling cancers?

Jeff Ritterman|M.D.Truthout|News Analysis|06 October,2014|The author thanks Vivien Feyer for contributions to this article.

Non-GMO corn offers far more nutrition without the poison, study shows

An eye-opening investigation conducted by Canada’s only supplier of non-GMO corn seed has revealed that genetically modified “Frankencorn” is severely lacking in a number of vital nutrients. Compared to non-GMO corn varieties, Monsanto’s Roundup Ready corn contains only a small fraction of the amount of calcium, iron, magnesium, zinc, copper, manganese and carbon normally found in natural corn.

Shattering the myth that there’s no substantial difference between GMO and non-GMO crops, the report by De Dell Seed Company of London, Ontario, shows that GMO corn is nutritionally deficient and wholly unfit for human consumption. In nearly every vitamin and mineral category tested, GMO corn was found to contain only trace amounts of many key nutrients necessary for life.

According to the report, corn ears were selected from two adjacent corn fields in Iowa — one growing Roundup Ready corn and the other growing non-GMO corn. The corn ears were selected from multiple locations in each field two weeks prior to harvest to get a proper sampling, and they were then shelled from the cob and sent to a laboratory for testing.

When the results came back, researchers found that the Roundup Ready corn contained 13 parts per million (ppm) of glyphosate, the primary active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide that the WHO recently recognized as “probably carcinogenic to humans,” which is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established legal limit for this pesticide. The non-GMO corn, on the other hand, contained no glyphosate.

“The EPA standards for glyphosate in water in America is .7ppm,” explains Moms Across America. “European tests showed organ damage to animals at .1ppb (.0001ppm) of glyphosate in water. Our water levels allow glyphosate 7,000X higher than what has been shown to be toxic in animals. This corn has 13 ppm! 130,000 times higher than what is toxic in water!” (emphasis added)

Similarly, the GMO corn samples were found to have higher pH levels, higher sodium content and significantly less natural phosphate, potassium, calcium and magnesium compared to the non-GMO corn. The “Brix” quality measurement of the GMO corn, which gauges sucrose content, was also found to be only one-twentieth of the Brix score for non-GMO corn.

In each of the following categories, non-GMO corn was found to have significantly higher nutrient levels:

• Phosphate: more than 14 times higher in non-GMO corn
• Potassium: more than 16 times higher
• Calcium: more than 437 times higher
• Magnesium: more than 56 times higher

The soils of the non-GMO corn were also found to be superior in terms of their mineral content, presumably because they weren’t sprayed with nutrient-robbing glyphosate, which draws out the vital nutrients of living things:
The base saturation rates, which represent a measure of soil nutrient density, were also determined as follows:

• Sulfur: 14 times higher in non-GMO corn
• Manganese: 7 times higher
• Iron: more than 7 times higher
• Zinc: more than 6 times higher
• Copper: more than 6 times higher
• Cobalt: more than 7 times higher
• Molybdenum: more than 7 times higher
• Boron: more than 7 times higher
• Carbon: 30 times higher

GMO corn also contains dangerously high levels of toxic formaldehyde

Meanwhile, the GMO corn was found to contain extremely high levels of various chemicals, chlorides, glyphosate and even formaldehyde, which is normally metabolized into carbon dioxide through a process that is blocked by the spraying of glyphosate. Because glyphosate is a vital nutrient chelator, meaning it pulls out nutrients from the plants on which it is sprayed, experts believe the herbicide disrupts the normal enzymatic processes in plants that would otherwise break down formaldehyde.

Ethan A. Huff|staff writer|NaturalNews|April 28, 2015

Unmasking The GMO Humanitarian Narrative

Genetically modified (GM) crops are going to feed the world. Not only that, supporters of GM technology say it will produce better yields than non-GM crops, increase farmers’ incomes, lead to less chemical inputs, be better suited to climatic changes, is safe for human consumption and will save the lives of millions. Sections of the pro-GMO lobby are modern-day evangelists who denounce, often with a hefty dose of bigoted zeal, anyone who questions their claims and self-proclaimed humanitarian motives.

But their claims do not stack up. Even if some of their assertions about GMOs (GM organisms) appear to be credible, they are often based on generalizations, selective data or questionable research and thus convey a distorted picture. The claims made about GMOs resemble a house of cards that rest on some very fraudulent foundations indeed (see ‘Altered Genes and Twisted Truth’ by Steven Druker).

The fact that many of the pro-GMO lobby spend a good deal of their time attacking and smearing critics and flagging up the technology’s alleged virtues while ignoring certain important issues says much about their priorities.

If they care about farmers so much, indeed if they value food security, choice and democracy so much – as they frequently claim to – why do they not spend their time and energy highlighting and challenging the practices of some of the corporations that are behind the GM project and which have adversely impacted so many across the world?

For instance, consider the following.

1) There is a massive spike in cancer cases in Argentina which is strongly associated with glyphosate-based herbicides – a massive earner for agribusiness. Not only that but throughout South America smallholders and indigenous peoples are being driven from their lands as a result of a corporate takeover aimed at expanding this type of (GM) chemical-intensive agriculture. The outcome has been described as ecocide and genocide.

2) GM technology has not enhanced the world’s ability to feed itself and has arguably led to greater food insecurity (also see this).

3) Petrochemical, industrialized agriculture is less productively efficient than smallholder agriculture. However, the latter is being squeezed onto less and less land as a result of the expansion of corporate commodity crop farming and the taking over of fertile land by institutional investors and agribusiness concerns. As a result of this, the world is in danger of losing the ability to feed itself. Across the world, not least in Asia, peasant farming is being dismantled in favour of this type of corporate agriculture, which is unsustainable and associated with cancers, water contamination, soil degradation and falling water tables.

4) This is a model that from field to plate is causing obesity, diabetes and various other ailments and diseases. Facilitated and supported by trade agreements like NAFTA, people’s quality of food is being sacrificed and local farming devastated (see this to read about the situation in Mexico).

5) In India, 300,000 farmers have committed suicide over the past 20 years as farming has deliberately been made financially non-viable. The aim is to displace hundreds of millions who rely on agriculture to make a living and free up land for Western agribusiness to reshape farming. As NAFTA has done to Mexico, the agribusiness-backed Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture seems likely to do to India. The aim is to dismantle Indian agriculture for the benefit of corporate agribusiness.

We now witness grass-root responses to what is outlined above on a daily basis: farmer protests on the streets of Delhi and local movements from Ghana to Brazil resisting the corporatization of seeds, land, water, food processing, food retail and decision making/regulatory processes.

We also see the wrecking of traditional, productive rural economies and the attack on indigenous knowledge at the behest of global agribusiness, facilitated by compliant politicians. If corporate aims cannot be achieved via trade agreements or the machinations of international institutions like the WTO (whose rules agribusiness shapes), they are sought on the back of war or through strings-attached loans as is the case in Ukraine. Objectives are sought by various means.

The world can feed itself without GMOs. It is current policies and the global system of food production that militate against achieving global food security and which contribute towards hunger and poverty. No amount of gene splicing can rectify this.

How convenient it is for sections of the pro-GMO lobby to ignore, side-line or dismiss all of the above and offer a techno-fix supposed panacea that comes courtesy of the same companies whose practices are helping to undermine food security and which are fuelling much of the devastation in the first place. It betrays an ideological adherence to a pro-corporate neoliberal agenda.

Instead of attempting to dismiss the issues set out here as being based on ‘romantic twaddle’, the ramblings of wicked ideologues or the fads and inventions of some notional ‘green blob’ red in tooth and claw that hates humanity, science and freedom of choice (all of which have been levelled at critics), it would be better to acknowledge the issues described here and work to address them and challenge the practices that fuel them.

The pro-GMO lobby is fond of trying to discredit its critics and engages in pious, emotive rhetoric. They often ask them: ‘What are you doing to save the lives of millions?’

The question for them is: What are you?

Colin Todhunter|May1,2015

26 Organizations that Support GMO Labeling

You know all those biotech shills who still claim that there is no ‘science’ behind anti-GM claims? What if millions of members (PDF download) of the global medical community disagreed? There is no consensus on the safety of GMOs, though numerous organizations believe that they should be labeled at the very least.

As Environmental Sciences Europe explains:

“For decades, the safety of GMOs has been a hotly controversial topic that has been much debated around the world. Published results are contradictory, in part due to the range of different research methods employed, an inadequacy of available procedures, and differences

in the analysis and interpretation of data. Such a lack of consensus on safety is also evidenced by the agreement of policymakers from over 160 countries – in the UN’s Cartagena Biosafety Protocol and the Guidelines of the Codex Alimentarius- to authorize careful case-by-case assessment of each GMO by national authorities to determine whether the particular construct satisfies the national criteria for ‘safe.’”

Without a label, there is no traceability, no accountability, and no liability. Likely the way that Monsanto, Dow, Syngenta and others want it. But this is certainly not something we have to accept. GMO labeling is, in fact, doctor-recommended.

Read: The 64 Countries that Require GMO Labeling

Who exactly recommends GMO labeling, at the very least? Check out this list of some organizations, many of which collectively represent more than 8 million individuals:

• 1. American Public Health Association
• 2. British Medical Association
• 3. Australia Public Health Association
• 4. Bundesärztekammer (German Medical Association
• 5. National Environmental Health Association (NEHA)
• 6. Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH)
• 7. California Medical Association (CMA)
• 8. Pennsylvania Association of Staff Nurses & Allied Professionals
• 9. Ontario Public Health Association
• 10. Viennese Doctors’ Chamber (Ärztekammer für Wien)
• 11. Illinois Public Health Association
• 12. American Nurses Association
• 13. Indiana State Medical Association
• 14. American College of Physicians
• 15. Australian Medical Association (AMA)
• 16. Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE)
• 17. American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM)
• 18. Washington State Nurses Association
• 19. Dignity Health
• 20. Physicians and Scientists for Responsible Application of Science and Technology
• 21. Physicians and Scientists for Global Responsibility (PSGR)
• 22. Health Care Without Harm – Healthy Food in Health Care program
• 23. Irish Medical Organization
• 24. Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM)
• 25. Physicians for Social Responsibility
• 26. Council For Responsible Genetics

And the list goes on – it is replete with doctors, nurses, public health officials, and even geneticists. Yet Monsanto, Dow, Syngenta, Bayer, etc. want us to believe there is no science that proves GM foods are questionable? All those doctors, nurses, and health workers must be confused.

We aren’t mistaken, though. GM foods need to be labeled so that they can be avoided by those who don’t want to eat potentially carcinogenic, spontaneous abortion, organ-damaging crops.

Christina Sarich|May 2, 2015

[You can ad South Florida Audubon Society to that list, also.]

Energy

GOP says House bill regulates fracking; Democrats say it endorses it

The Florida House passed a hydraulic oil fracturing bill on Monday that ruling Republicans said would provide a framework to regulate the burgeoning industry and Democrats fiercely denounced as a welcome mat for fracking in environmental sensitive areas such as the Big Cypress Preserve.

The bill (HB 1205), which passed 82-34 mostly along party lines, would require the state to study the effects of fracking in Florida, particularly because of its unique geography. Proponents said fracking wouldn’t be allowed until after the study and until the state Department of Environmental Protection writes rules for the industry.

It also would prevent local governments from banning the oil and gas drilling practice, something that many local governments in other states have sought to do.

Democrats said the bill opens the door for widespread fracking — using high-pressured water, sand and chemicals to force oil and gas from deep within the earth. They said fracturing will poison the water supply and make the state vulnerable to earthquakes.

“Instead of regulating fracking, we need to ban fracking,” said Rep. Michelle Rehwinkel Vasilinda, D-Tallahassee. “Our aquifer is so sensitive and our lands are so sensitive that this is not the right answer.”

That was much the position of the Palm Beach County Commission, which last week directed its staff to draft a resolution supporting a Florida ban on fracking.

But Republicans said the bill was environmentally friendly and would put in place a regulatory scheme to stop what is the “Wild Wild West” culture of fracking in Florida.

“Fracking is allowed today without the extra regulation presented in this bill,” Rep. Jake Raburn, R-Valrico, said.

Jim Boyd, R-Bradenton, said he was perplexed about why Democrats opposed the bill. “This bill is about transparency, about regulatory abilities and about helping protect our environment,” he said.

Meanwhile, the House postponed a vote on an accompanying bill that would would allow drilling companies to keep secret their chemical mixture for competitive purposes. The Senate is scheduled to hear its versions of the bills today.

Democratic leader Rep. Mark Pafford, of West Palm Beach, said after the debate that he was just as concerned about that public-disclosure-exemption bill. Besides keeping that information from potential competitors, it would also keep it from residents living near fracking operations.

“When you are challenging to get that information, you have already been sick,” he said.

About both bills, he said, “Clearly, this is a move toward fracking,” he said. “It’s the state endorsing the practice as long as you can meet requirements.”

On the House floor, Pafford called the regulation bill one of the worst bills of the session and joked that fracking appears to be the Republicans’ alternative energy plan, referencing reports of gas coming out of water taps in North Dakota, where there is widespread fracturing.

“Forget about solar, forget about wind, forget about ocean currents and turbines,” he said. “This is a plan that you can cook an entire Thanksgiving dinner at home using that gas coming out of your tap.”

He said chemicals that make up toilet bowel cleanser and others that are used in leather tanning will be pumped by companies into the ground during the fracking process and could have unintended consequences, such as affecting cattle that will drink water polluted by the chemical process.

But Republicans said most of the criticism comes from counties that don’t produce oil.

“I’m proud I was able this morning to fill up with petroleum and I am proud you were able to fly a plane here today,” said Rep. Doug Broxson, R-Milton, adding that the production of oil fracking takes place three miles below the surface while the aquifer stops at 2,500 feet.

And not all Democrats opposed the bill.

Rep. Katie Edwards, D-Sunrise, said there has been unauthorized fracking in Collier County and the bill would put an important moratorium in place for two years.

“At least we’d have something in place that taps the brakes,” she said.

John Pacenti|Staff Writer|Palm Beach Post|April 27, 2015 

[The aquifer may stop at 2500 feet, but the cap is pervious limestone which presents no barrier to migration of fracking fluids, particularly as some of the constituent fluids are acids that dissolve limestone.]

Is the environmental risk from oil and gas “fracking” too high for Florida?

Consider a chilling future scenario. You live near a hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” operation in Florida, newly authorized and regulated by bills lawmakers now are considering. Fracking well operators pump water and chemicals underground under high pressure and break rocks to release oil and natural gas.

But a problem arises. The chemicals in the fracking solution invade your water supply, and make you and your family so sick you call for help.

Under House Bill 1209 and its Senate companion SB 1582, no one — not even first responders and medical personnel — can find out what chemicals are making you sick without lengthy court proceedings. These and two other fracking bills are in play in both chambers of the Florida Legislature this week.

True, the chemicals must be registered with FracFocus, a national website. But FracFocus does not have to reveal them because it already exempts “proprietary business information” from disclosure.

The Florida Department of Environmental Protection, neutered by Gov. Rick Scott, will have information on fracking chemicals when a well operator files a permit application and again two months after the fracking occurs. But the bills let well operators claim confidentiality for chemical information just by asking for it . The bills won’t let the DEP share it with the public.

If a citizen files a public records request, the well operator would have a 10- or 30-day window — depending on whether either the House or Senate time-frame prevails — to ask a Florida Circuit Court to determine if the chemical information can be kept secret for business reasons.

The exemptions to Florida’s public records laws put frackers above citizens. As David Cullen of the Sierra Club’s Florida chapter puts it, the law “prevents people from knowing what’s being done to them and prevents them from being able to do something about it.”

The public records exemption is only a part of the fracking story in the Florida Legislature.

The other bills —HB 1205 and SB 1468 — detail permitting and regulation and read as if the industry wrote them. Convoluted language seems to provide for a moratorium on fracking permits until rules are completed, and for a study to determine impacts on the environment and human health. In reality, no moratorium exists. Examining impacts to wildlife, air quality and of flowback from wells have been stricken from the proposed study, making it worthless. Worse, local governments would be pre-empted from regulating or banning fracking.

So here’s the question: Is fracking worth the risk?

Staff Report|Palm Beach Post|4/28/15

[Not at all.]

We have good news and we have bad news. First, the bad news: Shell’s Arctic drilling armada has begun to arrive along Seattle’s coast.

Now to the good news: this weekend, we joined local groups in Seattle in a big rally against Arctic drilling.

And, this week, with a coalition of partners, we’re running this ad in USA Today to make sure decision makers know how risky Arctic Ocean drilling will be for Arctic seals, whales, polar bears and walrus, as well as our planet’s climate.

Our ad is running in Seattle – where Shell’s Arctic fleet is headed – and in Washington, DC, but we need your help to spread the word far and wide and keep the momentum going! It’s as easy as a couple clicks.

The evidence that Arctic Ocean drilling would be disastrous is compelling.

Leah Donahey|Arctic Ocean Senior Campaign Director|Alaska Wilderness League|2/28/15 

America’s First Offshore Wind Farm Breaks Ground

America’s smallest state claimed a big spot in the country’s renewable energy development history. Monday Deepwater Wind broke ground on the country’s first offshore wind project, which will be built at Block Island, Rhode Island. The five turbines will produce 30 megawatts of power, enough to provide electricity to all the homes and businesses on the island as well as send power to the mainland through an undersea cable. The project, which will be operative next year, is expected to create 300 construction jobs.

“The importance of this day cannot be overstated,” said Emily Norton, director of the Massachusetts chapter of the Sierra Club. “The Block Island Wind Farm is our Apollo 11 moment. I am going to remember this day, and tell my kids and grandkids that I was there when the first U.S. offshore wind farm was built—that when we had a choice between bequeathing them a future powered by polluting fossil fuels that lead to extreme storms, heat waves and drought, we chose to power their future from the wind and the sun and smart technologies.”

The Sierra Club was one of a number of groups that lobbied for the project, including the National Audubon Society, National Wildlife Federation and labor unions, when it was first proposed in 2009. They helped mitigate concerns that construction could disrupt whales and other marine life and that the turbines could be a threat to seabirds.

Numerous officials and supporters were on hand for the Monday groundbreaking. They included Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a passionate advocate for clean energy who has made a weekly floor speech in the Senate on the climate under the banner “Time to Wake Up” for two and a half years.

“The Block Island Wind Farm will bring cleaner and more affordable energy to Block Island’s residents while helping Rhode Island access the tremendous economic and environmental potential of our offshore wind,” said Sen. Whitehouse when the project was cleared to begin. “It’s a milestone in our nation’s transition to a clean energy economy, and I’m proud that Rhode Island is leading the way.”

Anastasia Pantsios|April 28, 2015

Frack-Happy Texas Forced to Face the Reality of Fracking-Related Earthquakes

Texas is not known for using caution when it comes to oil and gas development. Fracking has swept the state like a hurricane, despite attempts by some environmental and community activists. The city of Denton passed a ban on new fracking operations in last November’s elections, and the Texas legislature is currently considering legislation that would overturn that vote and take away the ability of cities and towns to regulate virtually any aspect of drilling within their borders.

Swarms of earthquakes, tied to fracking injection wells, have rocked the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Image credit: City of Irving, Texas

So it’s kind of startling to hear that the conservative Texas Railroad Commission, which oversees oil and gas operations and has generally been very cordial toward them, has ordered companies operating two wastewater injection wells in Azle, just northwest of Fort Worth, to justify keeping their wells open. The commission has ordered four “show cause” hearings in June, where well operators must show why their permits should not be canceled.

It follows a report last week by a team of researchers from Southern Methodist University (SMU) saying that a swarm of earthquakes in the area in November and December 2013, including two magnitude 3.6 quakes, was likely caused by the injection wells activating fault lines millions of years old. The area had previously experienced no earthquakes.

“Pore-pressure models demonstrate that a combination of brine production and wastewater injection near the fault generated subsurface pressures sufficient to induce earthquakes on near-critically stressed faults,” said the study. “On the basis of modeling results and the absence of historical earthquakes near Azle, brine production combined with wastewater disposal represent the most likely cause of recent seismicity near Azle.”

According to the Dallas Morning News, “The Azle study is one of the most in-depth investigations of a Texas earthquake swarm. While earlier reports have linked quakes with wastewater wells based largely on timing and proximity, [study lead author Matthew] Hornbach and his colleagues sought to gain a clearer understanding of what was happening along the faults.”

The study also called for more sharing of geological information gathered by oil and gas companies in order to improve monitoring of potential seismic activity.

Texas Railroad Commissioner Christi Craddock said in a statement, “The Railroad Commission has in place strong rules addressing the issue of seismicity and disposal well activity, and it is incumbent upon us to apply these rules where and when appropriate for the protection of public safety and our natural environment. In light of SMU’s study linking disposal well activity to earthquakes in 2013, it is important to assess this new information in relation to the continued operational safety of the wells.”

The USGS has linked the proliferation of earthquakes in north Texas to fracking activity. Image credit: USGS

The Railroad Commission’s in-house seismologist Craig Pearson has not commented on the SMU study, except to question its methodology, says the Dallas Observer which noted that Pearson has “consistently resisted linking recent Texas quakes to drilling activity.”

Also expressing doubts about the study was EnerVest, one of the two companies involved in the Alze wells.

“We have serious questions about some of the assumptions made in that study, and we look forward to sharing those with the Railroad Commission when we come in June,” said EnerVest spokesman Ron Whitmire.

But the evidence is piling up. The U.S. Geological Survey also released a report last week suggesting suggesting a potential link between the Texas quakes in areas that had never experienced any and the increased number of injection wells, saying that the risk of damaging earthquakes has tripled since 2008 when fracking became widespread.

“All indications are that earthquake rates have increased significantly as a result of man-made activity,” said Mark Petersen, head of the USGS National Seismic Hazard Project.

But it wouldn’t be Texas if elected officials didn’t stick up for the oil and gas industry. Two weeks ago the Texas House passed a bill that would overturn Denton’s fracking ban, clarifying that only the state can regulate oil and gas drilling operations. House Democrats proposed an amendment allowing cities to regulate injection wells, but it was rejected. The bill now goes to the state Senate where a committee had approved a similar bill.

Anastasia Pantsios|April 29, 2015

Top 50 Communities at Risk of Mountain top Removal Coal Mining

Krypton, KY	Stopover, KY	Guyan, WV
Bishop, WV	Hampden, WV	Hartley, KY
Roaring Fork, VA	Monson, WV	Roda, VA
Wainville, WV	Nellis, WV	Garrison, WV
Decota, WV	Inman, VA	Baden, VA
Red Warrior, WV	Marthatown, WV	Edgewood, KY
Busy, KY	Montcoal, WV	Printer, KY
Lindytown, WV	Sundial, WV	Amelia, KY
Tiptop, KY	Stowe, WV	Balkan, KY
Yolyn, WV	Laurel Grove, VA	Fork Ridge, VA
Duty, VA	Peytona, WV	Oven Fork, KY
Oilville, WV	Penny, KY	Weyanoke, WV
Stonega, VA	Exeter, VA	Marting, WV
Simers, KY	Long Branch, WV	Opal, WV
Freeze Fork, WV	Board Tree, KY	Blackburn Bottom, KY
Saylor, KY	Hemphill, KY	Puritan Mines, WV
Monarch, VA	Dunlap, KY

Elon Musk: Tesla Battery Will ‘Fundamentally Change the Way the World Uses Energy’

Renewable energy sources like solar and wind have always been limited by their intermittency, but now Tesla CEO Elon Musk has unveiled a suite of batteries to store electricity for homes, businesses and utilities, saying a greener grid furthers the company’s mission to provide pollution-free energy, reports Bloomberg.

“We’ve obviously been working on building a world-class battery, a super-efficient and affordable way to store energy,” Khobi Brooklyn, a Tesla spokeswoman, told The New York Times. “It’s just that we’ve been putting that battery in cars most of the time.”

The Tesla P85D just won the 2015 AAA Best Green Car Award, marking the second year in a row an all electric Tesla Model S has taken top honors from AAA. But Tesla has been disrupting more than just the auto industry for a while now. In February, Musk announced a partnership with SolarCity to use rooftop solar panels fitted with Tesla’s batteries to allow customers to keep that energy in-house. It’s all part of Tesla’s plans to revolutionize the energy grid.

“Our goal here is to fundamentally change the way the world uses energy,” Musk told Bloomberg. “We’re talking at the terawatt scale. The goal is complete transformation of the entire energy infrastructure of the world.”

Tesla’s home battery, the “Powerwall,” is a rechargeable lithium-ion battery that mounts on the wall and comes in 7 kilowatt-hour or 10 kilowatt-hour versions, the company said in a statement. A larger product, the “Powerpack,” can store more energy to power businesses. Deliveries will begin in late summer at prices starting at $3,000.

“Our goal here is to fundamentally change the way the world uses energy,” says Elon Musk.

Battery storage for renewable power is finally coming of age. “The battery is designed to enable so-called ‘load-shifting’ by charging during times when electricity prices are lower due to less demand, and discharging when demand and prices are high,” says Bloomberg. It can also store solar power generated during daytime and release it at night, and serve as backup during outages, Tesla says.

Tesla hopes that its $5 billion “gigafactory” under construction near Reno, Nevada will drive down the cost of the batteries for both cars and energy-storage products through mass production. More such factories will be needed to help make the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, Musk said.

Tesla’s batteries are already being used by companies such as Wal-Mart, Cargill and Jackson Family Wines, and Green Mountain Power plans to sell its home batteries to customers. Tesla has also partnered with Southern California Edison to install batteries for utilities, while Amazon and Target will pilot the batteries.

Cole Mellino|May 1, 2015

Mapping the Dangers of Fracking

It feels like spring only just arrived, but as of tomorrow we’re less than a month away from the official start of summer: Memorial Day. National parks and forests across the country will welcome millions of hikers, campers, photographers “picnic-ers,” and others this summer: people looking to leave home for a while and enjoy America’s natural beauty.

But oil and gas corporations want to visit U.S. public lands for a very different reason: to profit off their oil and gas reserves via fracking.

Did you know that about 20 percent of U.S. oil and gas reserves and resources are beneath federal public lands? Some of these public lands are next to our most beautiful national parks, including Glacier National Park in Montana, or national forests like George Washington and Jefferson National Forests in Virginia and Shawnee National Forest in Illinois, to name a few.

But it can be hard to visualize the scope of the danger that fracking poses to our public lands. That’s why Food & Water Watch created a map to help illustrate the vast span of public lands across America, and illuminate where Big Oil and Gas corporations aim to drill and frack through it.

The yellow areas are U.S. federal lands. The red areas in the map are where—given inconsistent data—there are oil and gas deposits. Lands in red are where there’s already been a wave of drilling and fracking for oil and gas, or where companies envision fracking before long. The overlapping orange areas are public lands that are either being fracked now, or could be soon. Check out the blue pins to learn about specific public lands and how they’re at risk from fracking.

Fracking on public lands such as these is dangerous on many levels: it introduces toxic chemicals to water; it disrupts the habitats of millions of animals, including endangered species; it poses serious risks to human health, such as breast cancer; and it spurs on climate change. The production of oil and natural gas in 2013 from federal public lands led to more than 292 million tons of carbon-dioxide equivalent greenhouse gas emissions, or about what 61 million cars emit in a year.

No amount of regulation will protect our public lands, health, drinking water and climate from the impacts of fracking. About 90 percent of federally managed lands are available for oil and gas leasing, while only 10 percent are reserved for conservation, recreation, wildlife and cultural heritage.

If we want to preserve our nation’s natural heritage for future generations, we must act. The Protect Our Public Lands Act was recently introduced to Congress, and is the strongest piece of federal legislation against fracking to date. No amount of regulation will protect our public lands or communities from the impacts of this dangerous practice.

Briana Kerensky|Food & Water Watch|May 1, 2015

The New Keystone XL Pipeline: Jordan Cove

A quiet cove at the edge of the Pacific Ocean is heir apparent to the raging debate over the Keystone XL pipeline. With a massive natural gas terminal and its own power plant, the pipeline that’s proposed to end at Coos Bay is slated as one of the next lavish investments in our nation’s continuing commitment to fossil fuels that propel the climate crisis.

Forget the compelling mantra of “energy independence.” That goal has driven the engine of mining, drilling and pumping across the coal, oil and gas fields of America ever since the Arab oil embargo of 1973. Who would disagree that we should be less-dependent on foreign oil? It drains our balance of payments, precipitates wars, and feeds the specter of terrorism. For energy independence, we sacrificed American landscapes, waterways, and communities from permafrost at Prudhoe Bay to BP blowouts on the Gulf Coast, not to mention the scourge of Appalachian mountaintop removal and the fracking of gas in pockmarked well-fields poisoning groundwater from Colorado to Pennsylvania.

But now, in a move that could define the phrase “bait-and-switch,” the mantra is “export” by corporations that will profit more by selling home-grown fuel abroad than by selling it here.

For export at Jordan Cove we would slice a pipeline swath through whole mountain ranges and enclaves of ancient forests for 230 miles from the West’s interior drylands to the Pacific. Crossings will put 400 streams at risk including Oregonians’ cherished waters of the Klamath, Umpqua, Coquille and Rogue Rivers—all vital to endangered salmon and steelhead trout.

Coos Bay fingers through more acreage than any other West Coast estuary between the Columbia River and San Francisco. Water here pulses with Pacific tides that nourish commercial and sport fisheries renowned for generations, but 5.6 million cubic yards would be dredged from those rich waters and fertile wetlands for the berth of one gas-tanker alone.

Federal approval of this corporate project would prescribe the condemnation of private land in ranches, woodlands, and neighborhoods. Nearly 700 private parcels—not to mention the human lives and legacies attached to them—would be sliced into pieces by the pipeline route. Corporate powers would condemn this property in a way that’s now criticized for even the most legitimate of public needs—let alone for the private profits of Jordan Cove’s chief investor in Alberta, Canada. All this would be sacrificed for export of gas from a thousand countrysides disabled by fracking across the interior of America where toxic well-water might be expected for decades if this pipeline is built.

It’s a lot to give up so that the industrial-military engine of China can thrive.

For this plan—incidentally at ground-zero of the West Coast’s tsunami zone and at a seismic hotspot where earthquakes exceeding any yet recorded in America are predicted—the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission speciously gave a green light in November 2014 by ruling that “some limited adverse environmental impact…would be reduced to less-than-significant levels.” Not to mention the possibility of accidents. And regarding terrorism, Chairman Lord Levene of Lloyd’s of London—the giant British insurer that covers natural gas facilities—said that an attack on an LNG tanker “would have the force of a small nuclear explosion.”

Millions of Americans and the core of our nation’s leadership—minus those members of Congress who are bankrolled by the fossil fuel industries—got the message that Keystone XL promised only more of the same in fossil fuel dependence while ignoring the fact that renewable energy has become economic. Jordan Cove and its pipeline deserve the same veto—literal and symbolic—by a nation that must change its course if we are to face a challenging future with hope for the generations to come.

Tim Palmer and Bill Bradbury|April 28, 2015

ReThink Energy: ‘We Will Ensure Florida Keeps Fracking Out of Our State’

In 2013, ReThink Energy Florida was one of the few organizations fighting pro-fracking bills in the Florida Legislature in reaction to public attention on drilling near the Everglades. The bills failed to garner enough votes to make it into law. Each year since, state legislators have attempted to pass similar meaningless, pro-industry regulations. Each year, they have failed. But 2015 will mark the year that the tide turned in the battle to keep fracking out of Florida.

We were among the Floridians shocked in 2014 upon learning that, while we’d been going to public hearings on one well permit, another had been secretly and illegally fracked. With this illegal procedure, a more dangerous form of unconventional drilling called “acid fracking” was introduced to the Everglades. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) issued a cease and desist, but the oil company continued in defiance. DEP fined the company for $25,000—an amount that seemed like couch-change to the public.

As ReThink Energy Florida and its allies began to build public awareness, and leaders began to scrutinize the process, DEP got firmer with the company. Eventually, after the company failed to meet several simple demands, DEP revoked their permits.

By 2015’s legislative session, ReThink Energy Florida was one of the organizations in the Florida Anti-Fracking Coalition, which called for a ban on fracking in Florida. This coalition consisted of health and environmental groups, including Stonecrab Alliance, Food & Water Watch, Physicians for Social Responsibility of Florida, Florida Clean Water Network, Our Santa Fe Rivers, Environmental Caucus of Florida, Florida Progressives, and many other grassroots activists and organizations.

Due at least in part to its work educating and engaging the public, bans on fracking were filed in the Florida Legislature by Senators Soto and Bullard, and Rep. Jenne. Unfortunately, other legislators filed fracking regulation bills again, along with trade secrets exemption bills, which required a 2/3 majority in each chamber of the Legislature to pass. While these other legislators claimed to have worked with DEP, industry, and environmental groups, the few environmental groups that they invited to the table eventually withdrew their support because the legislators refused to amend the bills to meet their bottom-line requirements.

While the bans sat unmoving, the regulatory bills began moving quickly through committees. The coalition drove phone calls, emails, press events and public awareness across the state. The primary focus was that we need to ban, not regulate, fracking. The coalition spoke to many of the issues with the bills: they would have kept cities and counties from banning fracking and they were full of loopholes, including trade secret exemption rules written by and for industry. The public testified about these bills in committee, and reminded the legislators that a ban was another option. We knew we were getting better at speaking as a unified body when the opposition attempted to address our points. Still, we knew it was an uphill battle, as we were not only arguing against industry, but also against DEP.

We did hope we could kill the trade secrets exemption bill on the Senate side, and keep it off the Governor’s desk. Our conversations with Senators indicated that even if they felt the fracking regulation bill could be fixed, they didn’t see the need for the trade secrets exemption bill.

The tide began to turn the penultimate week of session, as several leaders in the Senate expressed grave concern about the bills. These leaders told the sponsor they were disappointed in the few changes they’d seen so far.

The last week of session, the bills were scheduled for final debate on both floors. The House voted for the fracking regulatory bills but tabled the trade secrets exemption bill, perhaps because they were unsure it would have the votes to pass in the Senate.

No one expected what happened next, except maybe comedians who enjoy making fun of Florida politics. Because of disagreement between the Republican-led House and Republican-led Senate over Obamacare, the Speaker of the House ended session three days early, but without passing a budget—the one thing that they are constitutionally required to do. The move was a jab at the leadership in the Senate, and left several bills, good and bad, in limbo.

The House had passed the faux regulatory bills on Monday before they went home. While we were overjoyed that the House had not passed the trade secrets bill, rendering it dead on the table, we were worried that the regulatory bill could still pass. It was clear the House had thrown the Senate into chaos right as a final debate on the fracking regulatory bill came up in a hearing. As a result, the bill was “temporarily postponed” while its sponsor determined how to proceed.

The Senate had three options: 1) let the bad regulatory bill die a natural and well-deserved death; 2) amend the bill and send it back to the House—who was not present to hear the amended bill, thereby killing it; or 3) Pass the bill as passed in the House, which would send it on to the Governor.

In these final days of the Senate, very few people still believed the bill should pass as written; seemingly only the head of the Florida Petroleum Council still supported it. Most importantly, several leaders in the legislature had expressed concern about the bill and had worked to come up with “fixes.” However, because the House had ended their session, any amendments would render the bills dead.

Wednesday, after ReThink Energy Florida and its partners had burned the phone lines, held press conferences and written even more op-eds (such as this one from Our Santa Fe River), the Senate bill’s sponsor acknowledged that the bill would not pass.

Our work is not done. Next week, we will begin doubling down on our efforts to create the necessary groundswell for a permanent ban on fracking. But today, we celebrate a victory in the end of this legislative session: the birth of a new movement that calls on leaders to take our concerns about Florida’s Energy Policy and Environment into account. We will keep moving to ensure Florida does the right thing and keeps fracking out of our state forever.

Kim Ross|ReThink Energy Florida|May 1, 2015

Land Conservation

Lawmakers ignored voters’ will on environment

This has been an awful legislative session for Florida’s environment. But it wasn’t supposed to be that way. The future looked so bright just a few months ago.

After years of the Legislature shortchanging popular environmental programs like Florida Forever and Everglades restoration, citizens who care about protecting and managing our natural resources put a constitutional amendment on the ballot that would guarantee those programs would be funded.

It passed with an overwhelming 75 percent of the vote. Gov. Rick Scott was re-elected with 49 percent of the vote.

The amendment changed the Florida Constitution to commit hundreds of millions of dollars annually to conservation programs for land acquisition and management. It set a specific percentage of an existing real estate tax to be applied to underfunded programs like Florida Forever, Everglades restoration and springs protection.

This year that documentary stamp revenue is estimated to be $750 million. That is less than 1 percent of the state’s $80 billion budget.

It would take $300 million to fully fund Florida Forever, the state’s extremely popular land acquisition, restoration and recreation program. That would leave $450 million for other environmental purposes, including management of lands already in public ownership.

But legislators decided early on to ignore the will of the pesky voters who had the gall to restore the environmental funding that politicians had been withholding for years.

In the House plan, smug legislators threw a paltry $10 million to Florida Forever, while the Senate started with $2 million and increased the funding to $17 million.

Not all legislators were practicing the art of deception. There were some honest brokers. Many Democrats argued for respecting the voters’ wishes and doing what’s right for the environment. Sen. Thad Altman, R-Rockledge, stands out as the strongest Republican voice for fully funding Florida Forever and using the remainder of the dedicated funding in accordance with the constitutional intent.

Those who pushed for the amendment feared this was a redo of the lottery shell game, when the Legislature used lottery funds to replace existing education funds. The House and Senate have proposed nearly 30 percent of the Amendment 1 dollars for existing state agency expenses.

To add insult to injury, the House pushed a major overhaul of water policy that was written by developers, business groups and agriculture interests like U.S. Sugar — virtually everyone who could financially benefit. Left out of the discussions were environmental experts whose goal would be protecting the resource, the aquifer and the ecosystem.

Additionally, the Legislature rolled out a long-awaited springs protection bill that more closely resembles a public works project. While the plan has merit, the funds for it should not come from Amendment 1 funding.

So it would be fair to say that those who care about our environment, our parks, our natural resources and our quality of life have seen their dream turn into a nightmare over the past few months. It has indeed been a tough session for the environment.

Actually, it’s been an awful session all around.

The House and Senate, both controlled by the same party, have had a difficult time seeing eye-to-eye on several big issues. And with a major battle over Medicaid expansion keeping them from agreeing on the parameters of a budget deal, it became apparent the session was not going to end on time.

With three days left in session, the House abruptly adjourned. Since the budget is the one and only bill the Legislature must pass, legislators will be coming back before the next fiscal year starts on July 1 to agree on a spending plan.

In the meantime a lot of bills that have been making their way through the process will die due to the House’s hasty departure. It’s a shame that some good bills like prison reform and opportunities for people with special needs will die. But there is a silver lining — bad bills died, too, including those detrimental to the environment.

In a strange twist of fate, the meltdown in the Florida House has given new hope to environmental issues.

Paula Dockery|Tampa Bay Times|April 30, 2015

Air Quality

Air Pollution Can Shrink Brain, Lead To Dementia

Research indicates long-term exposure to air pollution may cause the brain to shrink and lead to dementia or stroke. The research dealt with fine particle air pollution — less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter — which comes from burning wood or coal, car exhaust and other sources.

“We found that people who live in areas where there are higher levels of air pollution had smaller total cerebral brain volume and were more likely to have evidence of covert brain infarcts,” lead author Elissa H. Wilker, a researcher in the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Research Unit at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, said in a press release.

“Long-term exposure to air pollution showed harmful effects on the brain in this study, even at low levels, particularly with older people and even those who are relatively healthy.”

The decade-long study, which began in 1995, involved 943 adults in New England and New York. The researchers used magnetic resonance imaging to analyze the effect of long-term air pollution on brain structure and found small particulate pollution was associated with a 0.32 percent decrease in brain volume — equal to one year of aging — and a 46 percent higher risk of neurological abnormalities, poorer cognitive function and dementia.

The World Health Organization has noted fine particulate matter affects more people than any other pollutant, and chronic exposure can lead to serious disease and death. The pollutants can contribute to narrowing of the arteries that supply blood to the brain. WHO estimates air pollution caused 3.7 million premature deaths worldwide in 2012, with 88 percent occurring in low- and middle-income countries, mostly in the western Pacific and Southeast Asia.

The research was published in the American Heart Association journal Stroke earlier this week.

Marcy Kreiter|ibtimes.com|April 25 2015

The most (and least) polluted cities in America

 

Every year for the past 16, the American Lung Association has released a State of the Air report, ranking the least- and most-polluted cities in the U.S. This year, as you might expect, the report contains bits of good news for us to cling to, but mostly, the state of the air in the United States is pretty dreary. I’ll start with the good:

Over the past year, the U.S. saw an overall reduction of ozone (a.k.a. smog, or noxious gases produced when fossil fuels are burned or certain chemicals evaporate) and particle (exhaust fumes) pollution. The change is partly due to better regulations on power plants and cleaner diesel engines. (Three cheers for tougher pollution standards!)

As far as the national cities rankings go, you’ll find much of the freshest air west of the Mississippi:

Top 5 least ozone-polluted cities

1. Bellingham, Wash.
2. Bend-Redmond-Prineville, Ore.
3. Bismarck, N.D.
4. Blackburg-Christiansburg-Radford, Va.
5. Brownsville-Harlingen-Raymondville, Texas

Top 5 cities least polluted by year-round particle pollution

1. Prescott, Ariz.
2. Farmington, N.M.
3. Cheyenne, Wyo.
4. Casper, Wyo.
5. Flagstaff, Ariz.

Let’s take a moment to celebrate by taking a nice, big breath of slightly-less-soot-and-smog-than-past-years air. Ahh. Feeling sufficiently oxygenated? Good, because here’s the bad news: The report revealed that, despite the overall reduction in air pollutants, an astounding 44 percent of Americans live in areas with dangerous levels of ozone pollution. Yikes.

And health risks are dictated by your physical distance from pollution sources: If you happen to live closer to a major highway (as many poorer populations and some racial and ethnic groups do), you’ve also been handed a higher chance of contracting asthma. But your vulnerability is also affected by your age, health, and socio-economic status.

And then there’s climate change, which makes absolutely everything worse. (As we’ve reported before, the California drought is also an incubator for pollution, as warmer weather creates a literal hotbed for smog and soot.) Here’s Harold P. Wimmer, president and CEO of the American Lung Association, in a special message about the report:

While our report shows steady improvement since our first “State of the Air” 16 years ago, it also shows evidence that the changing climate will make it harder to keep up this trend and protect human health. Bearing the greatest burden will be children with asthma and the elderly, and other vulnerable populations.

With that, I bring you the list of cities where you’re most apt to want a gas mask while out for your morning jog, which are also west of the Mississippi — way west:

Top 5 most ozone-polluted cities

1. Los Angeles-Long Beach, Calif.
2. Visalia-Porterville-Hanford, Calif.
3. Bakersfield, Calif.
4. Fresno-Madera, Calif.
5. Sacramento-Roseville, Calif.

Top 5 cities most polluted by year-round particle pollution

1. Fresno-Madera, Calif.
2. Bakersfield, Calif.
3. Visalia-Porterville-Hanford, Calif.
4. Modesto-Merced, Calif.
5. Los Angeles-Long Beach, Calif.

Sorry, Cali. But good news on that front, too! Looks like your air might be a little fresher by 2030.

Liz Core|29 Apr 2015

How Air Pollution is About to Get Much Worse

Air pollution is about to get a whole lot worse.

That’s bad news if you spend a lot of time outdoors, suffer from asthma or other respiratory problems, or are 65 years old or older.

What’s going on? The onset of summer has a lot to do with it. As temperatures heat up, common air pollutants from power plants and exhaust from buses, trucks and cars,  can react with heat and sunlight to produce ground level ozone. Ozone poses a serious health risk for individuals with heart and/or respiratory disease like asthma and COPD.

The problem is significant. In the Washington-Baltimore region, for example, air quality affects the health of more than 7.5 million people (in other words, almost everyone) in the greater metro Washington-Baltimore region. More than 53,000 adults and 15,000 children suffer from asthma, making the greater D.C. area one of the highest in the country for the number of asthma-related emergency room visits. But pretty much every city in the U.S. suffers from high levels of air pollution at some point in the summer.

I asked Clean Air Partners Board Member Dr. Janet Phoenix from Breathe DC to explain how air pollution affects asthma in particular and what we can do to protect ourselves.

DM: How does air pollution specifically impact asthma?

JP: Air pollution can both aggravate existing asthma and contribute to the development of asthma in people who don’t have it. Ozone is an irritant that can cause the lung to react in people who have asthma. Ozone is also associated with the development of asthma. Nitrates and particulate matter, byproducts of combustion engines, especially in buses and trucks can cause asthma attacks.

DM: Is air pollution deadly if you have asthma?

JP: It can be. Most people have symptoms that vary in severity, but for people with more than one condition, such as heart disease, along with asthma, air pollution can deal a crippling blow to their health.

DM: Do people with asthma suffer more in the summer or winter?

JP: Summer can be worse for people with asthma because of conditions called inversions.  This occurs when warm air that is filled with pollutants lingers close to the surface of the ground and doesn’t circulate.  These conditions happen more often in the summer months and they can trigger respiratory disease. The air quality alerts warn people about these conditions.

DM: If someone has asthma how can they protect themselves when they live in a city where the air is polluted?

JP: People living in polluted areas should pay attention to the alerts.  When air quality is poor they should stay indoors, avoid exercising outdoors, and use ventilation systems to clean the air.

DM: How can air quality color-coded ratings help people with asthma stay safe?

JP: The air color ratings help people with asthma and other respiratory or cardiac conditions stay safe because they can help them plan their activities better to avoid exposure to things like inversions. Knowing the air quality is poor can help you avoid things like outdoor exercise on poor air quality days.  It can also warn you about the need to limit time of day you’re outside, avoiding times when there is more traffic and the air quality may be at its worst.

Air Quality Color-Coded Ratings:

GREEN – Good; enjoy the outdoors!

YELLOW – Moderate; some pollution, which could be risky for highly sensitive groups.

ORANGE – Unhealthy for children, older adults, and anyone with a respiratory or heart condition. Limit physical outdoor activity.

RED – Unhealthy. EVERYONE should limit strenuous outdoor activity when the air is unhealthy to breathe.

PURPLE – Very Unhealthy. Pollution levels are very unhealthy for everyone. Avoid any physical outdoor activity.

DM: Do you have any other advice to help asthma suffers survive on poor air quality days?

JP: People with asthma should make certain that they carry their rescue medications, such as albuterol inhalers, with them at all times.  Even on good air quality days, asthma sufferers can have an attack and the albuterol can help save lives.

Limit your own contribution to air pollution this summer by riding your bike, making the effort to take public transportation and enjoying the many benefits of walking.

Diane MacEachern|April 29, 2015

Recycling

Surreal Photos Show Impact of Plastic Pollution on One of the World’s Most Beautiful Places

Brooklyn-based multimedia artist Alejandro Durán is bringing attention to the devastating environmental catastrophe of global waste and plastic pollution. In this ongoing project, Washed Up: Transforming a Trashed Landscape, the pristine beauty of Sian Ka’an—Mexico’s largest federally-protected reserve—is contrasted with colorful yet unsettling garbage collected from all over the world.

Derrame (Spill), 2010. Alejandro Durán artistically arranges colorful pieces of plastic in sites along Mexico’s Caribbean coast. Photo Credit: Alejandro Durán

“With more than 20 pre-Columbian archaeological sites, this UNESCO World Heritage site is also home to a vast array of flora and fauna and the world’s second largest coastal barrier reef,” the Mexico City-native said about the site of his installation. “Unfortunately, Sian Ka’an is also a repository for the world’s trash, which is carried there by ocean currents from many parts of the globe.”

Artfully strewn along Mexico’s Caribbean coast are countless pieces of waste and other disposables, including plastic bottles, bottle caps, toothbrushes, light bulbs and more.

Algas (Algae), 2013. About 8 million metric tons of plastic is dumped into the world’s oceans each year. Photo Credit: Alejandro DuránMar (Sea), 2013.

“At times I distribute the objects the way the waves would; at other times, the plastic takes on the shape of algae, roots, rivers or fruit, reflecting the infiltration of plastics into the natural environment.” Photo Credit: Alejandro Durán

Over the course of the project, Durán identified waste from 50 different countries across six continents that have surfaced along a single coastline of Sian Ka’an. As we previously reported, 8 million metric tons of plastic is dumped into world’s oceans each year, causing $13 billion in damages to marine ecosystems annually.

Vena (Vein), 2011 and Rayo (Ray), 2011. These photos bring much-needed attention to consumerism and its devastation to the environment. Photo Credit: Alejandro Durán

Durán uses this international debris to create color-based, site-specific sculptures. “Conflating the hand of man and nature, at times I distribute the objects the way the waves would; at other times, the plastic takes on the shape of algae, roots, rivers or fruit, reflecting the infiltration of plastics into the natural environment,” he said.

Brotes (Shoots), 2014. Durán’s work “examines the fraught intersections of man and nature, particularly the tension between the natural world and an increasingly overdeveloped one.” Photo Credit: Alejandro Durán

Durán hopes to “change our relationship to consumption and waste” with his project. “More than creating a surreal or fantastical landscape, these installations mirror the reality of our current environmental predicament,” he said. “The resulting photo series depicts a new form of colonization by consumerism, where even undeveloped land is not safe from the far-reaching impact of our disposable culture.”

The artist has collected thousands of plastics and other waste items from 50 nations across six continents that have surfaced on a single Mexican shoreline. Photo Credit: Alejandro Durán

The project recently received a Juror’s Award from CENTER, which recognizes outstanding photographers working in fine art series or documentary projects. “The singular focus applied to this project is unparalleled,” said juror and CNN Digital senior photo editor Bernadette Tuazon, who selected Durán’s project for the award.

Visit his website to see more of his work. The artist will be displaying his project at upcoming exhibitions and discussions. Go here for dates and locations.

Lorraine Chow|April 21, 2015

Plastic Pollution – Preventing an incurable disease

By now, many people know that the ocean is filled with plastic debris. A recent study estimates that the amount of plastic waste that washes off land into the ocean each year is approximately 8 million metric tons. Jenna Jambeck, the study’s lead author, helps us visualize the magnitude by comparing it to finding five grocery bags full of plastic on every foot of coastline in the 192 countries included in the study.

As someone who lives in a highly urbanized coastal city in California, this estimate didn’t shock me. I grew up watching loads of plastic trash spew from river outlets into our ocean. Our beaches are covered with things like plastic bottles, bags, wrappers, and straws – all mostly single-use “disposable” items.

For years, I’ve watched polluted water flow beneath the bridge at the end of the San Gabriel River, a channel that drains a 713 square mile watershed in Southern California. This bridge is special…it’s where my fascination with plastic waste began – it’s where our plastic trash becomes plastic marine debris.

As Algalita’s Education Director, it’s my job to help people wrap their heads around the complexities of this issue. Many times, it’s the simple questions that require the most in-depth responses. For example: “Why can’t we clean up the trash in the ocean?”

I won’t say extracting plastic debris from our ocean is impossible; however, I will say most plastic pollution researchers agree that its output is not worth its input. They believe our cleanup efforts are best focused on land and in our rivers. Here’s why:

The ocean is complex, and is influenced by an endless list of processes. It’s three-dimensional, interconnected, and unpredictable. It’s massive, dynamic, and acts as one giant imperious force. The fact that the ocean is ever-changing makes it impossible to fully understand.

Our experience of the ocean is entirely defined by our interactions with it. Most researchers who have studied plastic marine debris will tell you that, logistically, working in the open ocean is arduous and unpredictable. Some days you are completely powerless against its will.

Waste management ends at the end of the river.
Humans lose the ability to manage plastic trash once it enters the ocean and becomes marine debris. Ocean cleanup is not a form of waste management. It is simply an attempt to extract plastic debris from our complex ocean.

There are different types of plastic marine debris.

Our ocean is filled with all sorts of plastic – from fully intact items like bottles and toothbrushes to plastic fragments, filaments, pellets, film, and resin. Recently, a team of researchers from six countries calculated that an astounding 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic weighing 269,000 tons can be found floating in the global ocean. Most of the 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic are small, between just 1mm and 4.75mm in size.

Each piece of debris is unique, with its own shape, size, and chemical composition. Its structure and buoyancy change as communities of organisms adhere to its surface. Some pieces have been completely transformed into artificial habitats that harbor dozens of species.

Some plastics, like fishing nets, line, and film have a tendency to snag and accumulate other pieces of debris. Imagine a kind of snowball effect as tangled debris rolls around in the ocean’s currents. These composite mixtures come in all shapes and sizes, from massive ghost nets to tiny clusters of monofilament fibers invisible to the naked eye.

The heterogeneous nature of the debris poses critical challenges that, if not addressed properly, can have significant negative consequences and potentially jeopardize the health of the ocean.

As you can imagine, ocean cleanup is a controversial issue. Let me try to simplify things – think of ocean plastic pollution as a type of cancer.  The cure for ocean plastic pollution is eliminating disposable plastics all together. I’ll be the first to admit that this is never going to happen. So let’s see what prevention and treatment look like.

Redesigning plastic products to be valuable and sustainable is our biggest leap toward prevention. When designed in cradle-to-cradle systems, plastic products have a much better chance of being recovered and recycled. Also, better product design may ease many of the challenges plastic recyclers face. Waste reduction also falls into the prevention category as it helps scale down the amount of waste to be managed.

Waste management can be viewed as treatment for the disease. This is how we keep things under control.

Ocean cleanup is comparable to invasive surgery – and that’s why it’s so controversial.

Most plastic pollution researchers agree that ocean cleanup is a radical approach to the issue. Many will even denounce it as impractical and overly idealistic. However, this engineering challenge should not be ignored completely….just as surgery for a cancer patient is sometimes our last-ditch effort.

Surgery is most successful when done by a specialist with a great deal of experience in the particular procedure. The problem is, ocean plastic pollution is a relatively new disease and therefore, there are no specialists in this type of “procedure”- there are no textbooks, courses, or degrees related to ocean cleanup. Experience starts now.

An understanding of the ocean and this “disease” is best gained through experience. If we are to attempt ocean cleanup, our best approach is to connect the proponents of clean-up schemes with people who understand the complexities of the disease – experienced plastic pollution researchers.  And if these plastic pollution experts denounce certain methods of cleanup, we should pay close attention to what they’re saying. Those who propose ocean clean up schemes should embrace the critiques of these individuals, as there is immeasurable value in their scrutiny.  After all, isn’t that science?

Katie Allen|Education Director|Algalita Marine Research and Education|4/28/15

A Not-So-Beautiful Ode to Plastic Bags

Marine debris is man-made waste that either directly or indirectly is disposed of in oceans, rivers or other waterways.  Most trash reaches the sea via rivers, and 80 percent of that originates from landfills or other urban sources. In the Florida Keys where we are surrounded by water, a blowing plastic bag has a high likelihood of reaching the ocean within just days, or sometimes immediately. We’ve all seen plastic bags blowing across the bridges as we cross, haven’t we? This waste often ends up in huge ocean gyres, and along coastlines like those in the Florida Keys, that are home to numerous threatened, protected and endangered species.  Plastic bags are consumed by fish, sharks, sea turtles, birds, and can cause life-threatening entanglements to wildlife. In the Florida Keys, we also have the only coral reef in the continental United States; studies indicate that even our reefs are becoming contaminated by plastic bags and the chemicals released by them.

The Worldwatch Institute claims that Americans alone use 100 billion plastic bags per year… Less than 1% of these are recycled.

There are 5 major ocean gyres worldwide or in the world’s oceans. The Pacific Ocean is home to the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” an area now twice the size of Texas, extending at least 20 feet down into the water column.  Scientists estimate that for every 2.2 pounds of plankton in this area there are 13.2 pounds of plastic.

Plastic bags choke and entangle wildlife, wrap around boat propellers, and get sucked into boat engines.  Californians Against Waste estimates that plastic marine debris kills over 100,000 sea turtles and marine mammals every year.

All plastic products, including plastic bags, are made from polymers or polymer resin that require oil or natural gas to manufacture. According to the New York Times, the 100 billion bags used per year in America require an estimated 12 million barrels of oil for their production.  Since approximately 25% of plastic bags used in the West are made in Asia, even more fossil fuels have to be used to transport the bags to their destination.

Plastic bag pollution is a global problem in all oceans, and the waters of the Florida Keys are not exempt. Fortunately, we are home to The Turtle Hospital, a rescue/rehab/release sea turtle facility. The Turtle Hospital treats a large number of sea turtles with entanglement injuries and impactions from ingesting plastic bags, although many are too sick to save. Another significant cause of sea turtle mortality are fibropapillomas, large tumors that inhibit a turtle’s ability to see, eat and swim.  These tumors are caused by a virus that often affects internal organ functions.  In Florida, fibropapillomas have become an epidemic.  Scientific studies are trying to determine if human activities on land are related to the development of fibropapilloma tumors.

Plastic bags take 500-1000 years to degrade but they don’t really “go away.” Instead, the plastic eventually breaks down into minute bits of plastic which are ingested by sea turtles and other marine life. As the plastic bags break down, they are releasing toxic chemicals into the water and being ingested by many animals that may eventually find their way into our own food chain and onto our dinner plates.

Article borrowed from Florida Keys GLEE

Miscellaneous

Huge News for Toxic Chemicals Reform ‏

On a partisan vote of 15-5, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee passed the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act out of committee.

The vote came one day after the bill’s sponsors, Senators Tom Udall (D-NM) and David Vitter (R-LA), secured the backing of three key Democrats on the committee Sheldon Whitehouse (RI), Jeff Merkley (OR), and Cory Booker (NJ)—after intense weekend negotiations resulted in key amendments to strengthen the bill.

This is a huge step in our fight to reform the 40-year old Toxic Substances Control Act, a law so dated and flawed that it provides no real protection from the toxic chemicals all around us.

While the Lautenberg Act already created new authorities and mandates for EPA to review new and existing chemicals, the compromise secured over the weekend strengthens more than a dozen technical details.

These include several provisions to preserve key authorities of states to regulate chemicals through deadlines and waiver provisions. The agreement also clarifies that states may co-enforce federal restrictions on chemicals.

Some of the other key areas improved through compromise include:

• Making clear that all state chemical disclosure laws and clean air and clean water laws are permanently protected from preemption.
• Streamlining the process for EPA to regulate chemicals in finished products, such as formaldehyde-laden flooring.
• Providing checks on chemicals designated as “low-priority” to avoid misuse of the category and allowing 90 days of public comment for all chemical listing decisions.

The bill is now ready to move to the Senate floor. Meanwhile, we expect the House to take up bi-partisan legislation in the coming weeks, and will keep you posted.

It’s been 40 long years. But thanks to continued public activism and support, we are closer than we’ve ever been to reforming the badly broken Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) and finally bringing our chemical safety protections into the 21st century.

Heather Shelby|Action Network Manager|Environmental Defense Fund|2/28/15

[Maybe we can use this as a tool to prevent secrecy in fracking fluids.]

The US is finally about to update its toxic chemical protections, after 39 years

Chemical companies have long marketed themselves as delivering “better living through chemistry,” and there’s some truth to that: From cleaning products to plastics to the chemicals that make touch-screen cellphones possible, chemicals are used to make 96% of products and materials in America—it is hard to imagine life without them.

But convenience comes with a cost. Any baby born in America today is likely to carry hundreds of synthetic chemicals in his or her body at birth. According to a 2008-2009 report by the US Department of Health and Human Services, traces of nearly 300 pollutants, “such as chemicals used in fast-food packaging, flame retardants present in household dust, and pesticides,” have been found in the umbilical cord blood of newborns. And some chemicals in common use today are linked with certain cancers, Parkinson’s, developmental disorders and other illnesses. Any baby born in America today is likely to carry hundreds of synthetic chemicals in his or her body

So it is a national scandal that the United States’ primary chemical safety law hasn’t been updated since the day it was enacted, back when America’s No. 1 song was “Disco Duck” and appointment TV meant “Charlie’s Angels.” Since the day it passed in 1976, the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) hasn’t protected anyone. The chemicals in products you buy at the store—from clothes to couches to cleaning supplies—are essentially untested and unregulated.

For decades, Congress has been trying to fix TSCA, but the lawmakers have gotten nowhere.

There have been hearings since 1994, and several proposed bills, but industry opposition kept the reform effort from advancing. Meanwhile, thousands of chemicals have come on the market. They permeate every aspect of American life. And the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been all but powerless to police them.

In recent years, however, some companies have begun to realize the current system isn’t good for their bottom lines either. As one DuPont executive testified before Congress in 2010:

“In the absence of reforms to TSCA we are seeing a plethora of state actions that are serving to create tremendous uncertainty in our markets…we think a robust reformed TSCA would remove the motivation for state by state regulation of chemicals.”

She went on to describe the hundreds of millions of dollars her company had spent to reformulate products after the market moved away from a particular chemical in response to consumer pressure. Now, after years of denial, many in the industry are now willing to accept more federal regulation to secure a predictable system that will restore consumer confidence in the safety of their products. The Lautenberg Act would let EPA do the things most Americans assume it can already do

Companies such as Walmart—which announced a robust chemicals policy in 2013—began to step up and do their own testing on household products. That helped nudge chemical companies to the negotiating table—and so did new state laws. Although states have only restricted about a dozen chemicals or chemical groups for health reasons in 40 years—providing little protection to most Americans—the threat of 50 different local regulators was enough to get industry to see the benefits of a  single strong federal regulator, empowered to offer a final “yay” or “nay.”

That realization provided an opening for longtime public health champion Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) to negotiate with chemical industry ally Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) in 2013. After Lautenberg passed away, Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico took over on the Democratic side, continuing the negotiations.

The bill Udall and Vitter came up with, known as the Lautenberg Act,  would let EPA do the things most Americans assume it can already do. These include a mandate to review the safety of all chemicals in commerce, a required safety finding before a new chemical can enter the market, powerful new authority to require testing of chemicals, and explicit requirements to protect the most susceptible—infants and pregnant women— from harmful chemicals, along with concrete deadlines, a new source of funding, and more. Cutting a deal with big bad interest groups can lead to progressive change

Rare political circumstances have forced the industry to make major concessions, so the result is a strong bill that has 11 Democratic and 11 Republican sponsors. It actually might pass—yes, something big might pass Congress and become law—and it would be the most important environmental law since the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. (The House also seems to be working on a bipartisan basis.)

But laws are never perfect. The big trade-off here is that some decisions by EPA on chemicals will supersede some state actions and restrictions.  As David Vitter put it, “Republicans agree to give EPA a whole lot [of] new additional authority, which we’re not in the habit of being excited about, to state the obvious. In exchange, that leads to … a common rulebook.”

Even so, there are limits to the preemption of state authority in the bill. For example, all state actions taken before 2015 remain intact, and, after enactment, states can restrict a chemical until and unless EPA takes up that same chemical and addresses the same uses.

This week, three progressive Democrats announced their support for the bill after negotiations yielded changes that allow states to “co-enforce” federal requirements on chemicals and better ensure EPA can restrict chemicals in finished products (such as formaldehyde-laden floor boards). Still, there is no question the bill remains a compromise. In many ways, the dynamic here is like Obamacare, where the President had to cut deals with Big Pharma and the insurance industry to get legislation passed. That bill wasn’t perfect, but nine out of ten Americans have health insurance and the other benefits of the law.

In other words, cutting a deal with big bad interest groups can lead to progressive change.

Of course, to some that’s heresy. They see the strange bedfellows as being more important than the substance. In my view, we’ve got a classic case of the perfect vs. the good—and in an era when precious little good has come out of Washington, I’ll take it.

After decades of inaction and several “ideal” bills that couldn’t attract the bipartisan support necessary to pass, it’s time to move forward. We can let this moment pass and leave American families vulnerable to the dangerous chemicals that surround us, or we can forge ahead with a dramatic improvement over current law.

Eric Pooley|Senior Vice President|Environmental Defense Fund|April 28, 2015

Is 2015 The Year Soil Becomes Climate Change’s Hottest Topic?

Environmental groups want to make soil a red hot climate change issue.

Last week, 650 people from 80 countries gathered in Germany for a week-long discussion about an increasingly important topic in climate change: soil. Dubbed Global Soil Week by the Global Soil Forum – an international body dedicated to achieving responsible land use and soil management – the conference brought together scientists and environmental advocates from all over the world who hoped to translate scientific research about soil into tangible policies for its management.

2015 is shaping up to be a big year for soil – in addition to being Global Soil Week’s third year running, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has declared it the International Year of Soil. José Graziano da Silva, director of the FAO, has called soil a “nearly forgotten resource,” and has implemented more than 120 soil-related projects around the world to mark the International Year of Soil. Farming First, a global agriculture coalition with more than 150 support organizations, has also called for soil health to be a top priority in the UN’s new Sustainable Development Goals.

So why is soil so important?

“If you look at the global carbon created in nature under land-based systems, soil and trees are the two dominant reservoirs where carbon is,” Rattan Lal, director of the Carbon Management and Sequestration Center at Ohio State University, told ThinkProgress.

Soils – and the microbes that live within them – store three times as much carbon as is in the atmosphere, and four and a half times as much as in all plants and animals. “If the soil carbon reserve is not managed properly,” Lal said, “it can easily overwhelm the atmosphere.”

Climate change can stimulate the release of carbon from soil in a few different ways. Normally, carbon is bonded to minerals in the soil, which helps keep carbon locked in the soil and out of the atmosphere. A recent report by scientists at Oregon State University, however, found that when chemicals emitted by plant roots interact with minerals in soil, it can cause carbon to break free. This exposes the carbon to decomposition by microbes in the soil, which pass it into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. As the climate warms, the scientists found, more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will stimulate the growth of plants, which will in turn stimulate the production of the root compounds that breakdown carbon and soil minerals.

“We thought for many many years if you just increase plant productivity, soil carbon will just go up,” Kate Lajtha, professor of biogeochemistry at Oregon State University, told ThinkProgress. “What more and more models are seeing now is that the opposite is true.”

The microbes that break down stored carbon are also likely to become more active in a warmer world, according to a 2014 study published in Nature. The study looked at microbes in 22 different kinds of soil from along a climatic gradient, testing samples of soil from the Arctic to the Amazon. They found that as temperature increased, the respiratory activity of the microbes in the soil also increased, releasing more carbon dioxide – and that effect was most pronounced in northern soils, which tend to store more carbon than soils at other latitudes.

Soil isn’t just useful for storing carbon – it also grows 95 percent of the food we eat, according to the FAO. But even beyond climate change, agriculture is the number one cause of soil disruption.

“What we’re seeing is probably the biggest drivers aren’t going to be those direct effects of climate,” Lajtha said. “Really, the big driver of soil carbon change is what humans are doing to the soil, and a lot of that is agriculture.”

The UN estimates that nearly a third of the world’s soil is degraded – in sub-Saharan Africa, that figure is closer to two-thirds. Degraded soils are less effective for growing crops, threatening food security in places where most of the population lives off of subsistence farming. According to the Montpellier Panel – an international group working to support national and regional agricultural development and food security priorities in sub-Saharan Africa – soil degradation costs sub-Saharan Africa $68 billion per year. If soil degradation continues at its current rate, the UN estimates that all of the world’s topsoil could be gone in 60 years.

Topsoil, Lajtha says, is where most soil carbon is stored – it’s where decomposed plant matter and plant roots are deposited – so losing topsoil means losing a huge amount of carbon currently stored in the soil.

But soil degradation isn’t irreversible. “If we manage the soil properly, we can reverse the degradation and some of that carbon that we lost can be put back,” Lal said.

Conservation practices like no-till agriculture can help minimize soil degradation, according to Lal. Other practices – like planting cover crops in the winter season or continuously applying compost to soil – can also help boost soil’s ability to retain carbon.

“In some ways, it’s as simple as a disrupted soil loses carbon and intact soil with vegetation retains carbon,” Lajtha said.

But conservation practices aren’t widely adopted yet – in Ohio, according to Lal, cover crop use and no-till agriculture is practiced on just one-third of the cropland. Worldwide, such conservation practices account for only 10 percent of cropland.

For some farmers, switching to no-till agriculture means replacing seed drills, which can cost upwards of $100,000.

“Even though the community as a whole benefits, there might be a reduction in yield that is prohibitive to farmers that adopt it,” Lal said, noting that the adoption rate of no-till agriculture has been almost zero in places like Africa and Southeast Asia. “We have a long way to go,” he said.

Scientists have also seen promise in the practice of agroforestry – combining trees with cropland or livestock systems. Elizabeth Teague, senior associate for environmental performance at Root Capital, an investing fund that works with small agribusinesses in Africa and Latin America, have seen a slew of benefits associated with agroforestry, mostly with coffee and cocoa crops.

“Trees can help enrich the soil, and if done properly you can help avoid erosion, which is a big problem in coffee producing environments,” Teague told ThinkProgress. “Many studies have also shown that the agroforestry system can help mitigate climate change by helping with carbon sequestration. compared to other type of cropping systems, the trees are sequestering carbon and increasing above and below ground carbon stocks.”

Like no-till and cover crops, however, certain barriers still exist between small-hold farmers in developing countries and agroforestry. Planting trees alongside crops requires a certain level of finesse – plant too many trees and the crops won’t thrive; plant too few, and the environment suffers.

“Farmers have to figure out what this sweet spot is where they are maintaining a diverse, robust agroforestry system that also allows them to have a commercially viable farm,” Teague said. “For small farmers without education, resources, and technical assistance, that can be very difficult.”

To Lal, who contributed to the Montpelier Panel’s 2014 report on soil restoration, agriculture might be the problem – but it can also be the solution.

“Most of the time the perception is that agriculture is a big time problem,” he said. “Yes, agriculture done improperly can definitely be a problem, but agriculture done in a proper way is an important solution to environmental issues including climate change, water issues, and biodiversity.”

NATASHA GEILING|April 29, 2015

Environmental Links

SFAS International Wildlife News Audubon Advocate Audubon Restore Eco-Voice South Florida Wildlife Care Center Sawgrass Nature Center & Wildlife Hospital The Turtle Hospital The Marathon Wild Bird Center Climate change info Audubon’s Coastal Strand Audubon of Florida News Blog Bioenergy News Climate Progress – climate science, politics and solutions Collins Center for Public Policy Comprehensive Everglades Restoration News EcoWatch – feeds from the WaterKeeper Alliance Everglades Foundation – press releases Everglades Hub Fort Myers News – Press Green Front Pages from Florida Newspapers Herald Tribune Newspapers –  Environmental News KeysNews.com Naples Daily News  – Environmental News National Public Radio Eco-News Riverwatch News about the Caloosahatchee Sierra Club Sierra Club Florida South Florida Watershed  Journal South Florida Water Management District Union of Concerned Scientists – news Yahoo News Search: Everglades NASA Climate Information American Littorial Society log NASA Climate Information Sun Newspapers – Lake Okeechobee News Everglades City News  – Mullet Wrapper IFAW’s World of Animals Magazine

dubon

ConsRep 1504 D

There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before. ~Robert Lynd

Announcements

FWC, NASBLA encourage boaters to take a boating education course ‏

          From April 20-26, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC)

and the National Association of State Boating Law Administrators (NASBLA) encourage boaters to “Spring Aboard” by enrolling in a boating education course.

          Working in partnership with the states, some providers are offering discounts for students who enroll in or complete a course during the Spring Aboard campaign.

It is a unified effort to remind boaters to prepare for boating season.

          “An informed and knowledgeable boat operator is more likely to recognize hazardous conditions on the water and avoid a boating mishap,” said NASBLA President Eleanor Mariani.

“Classroom courses are offered through local boating safety organizations, such as the Coast Guard Auxiliary and United States Power Squadrons.

Online courses are also available and provide state-specific information.

Completion increases your chances for having fun on the water.”

          Florida law requires completion of an approved course, verified by NASBLA as meeting the national boating education standard,

for individuals born on or after Jan. 1, 1988, who operate a motorboat of 10 horsepower or greater.

          “Florida’s boating accident statistics indicate that 70 to 80 percent of vessel operators involved in fatal accidents never completed a formal boating education,”

said FWC Capt. Tom Shipp. “We’re hoping to decrease those numbers across the board.”

          For a summary of Florida’s available courses, please visit: http://myfwc.com/boating/safety-education/courses/

April, 2015

MENTORS NEEDED

We are seeking experienced adult birders who enjoy interacting with and inspiring youth.

Mentors will help teams of young people who will compete to identify the most species of birds over a 24 hour period,

Friday, October 9th at 5:00 p.m. to Saturday, October 10th at 5:00 p.m., 2015. 

ALSO NEEDED – PLANNERS

If you are interested in contributing to the planning of the FIRST South Florida Race 4 Birds event,

you are invited to the next planning meeting.

DATE / TIME:  May 5th at 3.30 pm

LOCATION:     Broward County Government Bldg, 

  3rd floor.  

WHAT IS RACE 4 BIRDS?

A Race 4 Birds or R4B is an event that occurs over a defined time frame in which teams of young

people compete in a geographic area to identify the most species of birds.

Some teams compete for 24-hours, others spend less time.

Some sponsors and teams use an R4B event to raise money for themselves or for other conservation organizations.

The R4B event typically occurs from 5:00pm on Friday to 5:00 PM Saturday –

although a Saturday-Sunday format is also possible depending upon local preferences.

Participating teams may use as little or as much of this 24-hour period as they like,

as long as their checklist is submit ed to the Judges at the Finish Line by 5:00pm on the second day.

Launched in July 2014, R4B provides organizations with the tools and resources necessary to initiate

youth birding competitions throughout the United States.

Focusing on K-12 students, R4B utilizes the internet,
social media, and other forums to promote youth birding competitions and reach potential sponsors.

The R4B Board of Directors includes renowned
birding author Richard Crossley, Nikon TV producer James Currie,

Georgia Youth Birding Competition Founder Tim Keyes, and Economist/Educator Rusty Pritchard.

Constance Campanella serves as President.

Check out the R4B website for more information.

Join SFAS on Facebook and the Eagle Forum

Were you aware that we maintain two Facebook pages? 
One is the general SFAS Facebook Page and the other is the Burrowing Owl Cam Facebook Page, maintained by the sponsors of the Cam. 
Dr. Kenneth Schneider coordinates the Eagle Forum for both of our Broward County Bald Eagle Nests.
If you don’t follow them, you are missing out.  Try joining us on a regular basis, and you won’t be disappointed!

AmazonSmile

You can contribute to South Florida Audubon Society while making routine purchases through Amazon. 

How does AmazonSmile work?

Start at smile.amazon.com to support Broward County Audubon Society Inc. (We do business as South Florida Audubon Society.)

When first visiting AmazonSmile, customers are prompted to select a charitable organization from almost one million eligible organizations.

In order to browse or shop at AmazonSmile, customers must first select a charitable organization. For eligible purchases at AmazonSmile,

the AmazonSmile Foundation will donate 0.5% of the purchase price to the customer’s selected charitable organization.

Remember to go to AmazonSmile and select Broward County Audubon Society (we d/b/a South Florida Audubon Society).

You only need make this selection once, and SFAS will receive a donation whenever you make a purchase through AmazonSmile.  See link below.

Broward County Audubon Society Inc

Email or Mailing Address Changes

Please send email or mailing address changes to editor@southfloridaaudubon.org. 

We are also interested in your feedback, questions and story ideas.
Sincerely,

Doug Young
President
South Florida Audubon Society

South Florida Audubon Society | communication@southfloridaaudubon.org | http://www.southfloridaaudubon.org
PO Box 9644
Fort Lauderdale, FL 33310

Conference on Laurel Wilt and Natural Ecosystems

Impacts, mitigation and the Future

June 16 – 18, 2015

11775 Heron Bay Boulevard
Coral Springs, FL 33076
PHONE: 954-753-5598
FAX: 954-753-2888
TOLL FREE: 800-311-8018

Laurel wilt is one of the most damaging invasive exotic tree diseases to affect forests in North America.

Current estimates show that hundreds of millions of trees have died,

with multiple significant radiating effects on ecosystem structure and function, endangered species and cultural impacts. T

he disease continues to expand into new areas affecting diverse resources

(sassafras in Louisiana and the swamp bay tree islands of the Everglades, for example).

A concerted effort between the research community, agencies, and land and natural resource managers is needed to address this rapidly expanding threat. 

In particular, the objectives of this conference are to:

• Increase the understanding of disease dynamics at the landscape level among stakeholders and the research community;
• Enhance awareness about the scale of the economic, ecologic and cultural impacts of the disease among media and agency representatives;
• Outline results of recent and ongoing research on landscape-level solutions for the management of the disease for state, federal and tribal representatives;
• Communicate recent improvements of monitoring methods;
• Review research and technology transfer efforts into the research community;
• Identify gaps of information;
• Promote collaboration for research and management;
• Demonstrate the significance of early detection and disease control;  and
• Instill a sense of urgency to support future research, management, prevention and restoration.

May 1, 2015
Early Registration Deadline

http://www.conference.ifas.ufl.edu/

Of Interest to All

Happy Earth Day from World Wildlife Fund

April 22 is Earth Day, a time for us all to honor and give back to nature. To celebrate this special day, WWF activists are standing up for forests. Join them and make a statement today by participating in our #hugatree awareness campaign!
We also invite you to discover a deeper appreciation our world’s forests. Check out just a few reasons why they matter:

Eight out of 10 land-dwelling species live in forests. A square kilometer of forest may be home to more than 1,000 species.

Forests provide a vast array of resources to many of us, including food, wood, medicine, fresh water, and the air we breathe.

Trees soak up and store carbon dioxide from our atmosphere. Tropical forests alone hold seven times the carbon dioxide emitted each year by human activities.

But threats to forests are growing. Expanding agriculture and illegal and unsustainable logging are responsible for most of the deforestation and degradation of the world’s forests. The threats are so severe that we are losing forests at a rate equivalent to 48 football fields per minute. WWF is working to address the threats to forests.

For Earth Day, help us spread awareness about our forests and the threats they face by participating in  #hugatree for Earth Day. Thousands of people around the world are showing their support for trees, will you?

9 Easy Earth Day Tips You Won’t Find Anywhere Else

You don’t have to buy a hybrid car or install solar panels to make changes that have a significant environmental benefit, save money, and are easy to do. Here’s a list of 9 Earth Day tips you probably won’t find anywhere else. Altogether they could put several hundred dollars back in your pocket due to lower utility bills while preventing around a ton of climate change pollution per household annually. After all, cutting electricity waste means we don’t need to run as many fossil fuel-burning power plants, which are America’s largest source of climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions.

1. Buy LED light bulbs – On your way home from the local Earth Day celebration or from work, stop at your local big box store and pick up some LED light bulbs. Why use 60 watts for the everyday light bulb when an LED bulb only uses 10 to produce the same amount of light? Today’s LED bulbs last up to 25 times longer and have really come down in price, with some costing only $8. Due to their long life and efficiency, LED bulbs will easily save you more than $100 over their lifetime.

2. Adjust your TV’s settings (turn Auto Brightness Control on, and Quick Start off) – Many digital TVs come with a feature called Automatic Brightness Control (ABC), which if enabled causes your TV to automatically adjust the screen’s brightness to the room’s light levels. So if you’re watching “Mad Men” or the ballgame at night in a dimly lit room, the screen doesn’t need to be as bright and your TV will use less power. Also some smart (Internet-connected TVs) come with a Quick Start feature. While the TV will power up a few seconds faster when selected, this feature can be incredibly wasteful as some TVs chug away at more than 20 watts 24/7 rather than 0.3 watts without the feature enabled. So turn this feature off if you can wait the few extra seconds.

3. Wash clothes in cold water and use the fastest spin speed available – Today’s clothes washers and detergents are designed to effectively clean clothes in cold water. This avoids having to heat the 15 or so gallons of water used per load. If you have a front-loading washer, select the machine’s highest spin speed, which will remove more of the moisture from your clothes. That way your dryer won’t have to work as hard and you’ll cut dryer time and save money, too.

4. Turn off the Instant-on setting on the Xbox One – This game console is shipped with the Instant On feature enabled, which causes it to continuously use 12.5 watts even when turned off. Selecting the Energy-Saving mode instead can cut your Xbox’s total annual energy use by more than a third.

5. Don’t stream videos through your game console – Video game consoles such as the Xbox and PlayStation can suck 25 to 50 times more power to stream a movie from the Internet compared to a dedicated device such as Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, or a Google Chromecast stick. If you have an Internet-connected TV, stream the movie directly from your TV and avoid using the game consoles interface, which is essentially an energy-wasting remote control in this case.

6. Upgrade the aerators on your kitchen and bathroom sinks – If you have an older faucet, install a new water efficient aerator for under $5 and you can cut its water use by up to 40 percent. Simply unscrew the current one on the tip of your faucet and replace it with one that uses no more than 1.8 gallons per minute for the kitchen faucet and 1.2 gallons per minute for the one on your bathroom sink. You probably won’t notice the difference but your water bill will. Check with your local water agency as some provide efficient aerators free or at low cost.

7. Recycle your old consumer electronics properly – Millions of tons of electronic waste are generated each year and are still put into landfills in some states, or shipped to developing countries for recycling without proper safeguards for workers who are exposed to dangerous chemicals. Make sure you use recyclers who are certified E-Stewards and follow high standards. Best Buy accepts almost all used consumer electronics, including TVs, regardless of where they were purchased, and recycles them with E-Steward certified recyclers at no charge. Staples offers similar services but doesn’t accept televisions.

8. Turn off your furnace when the cold weather ends – Like many other modern appliances, home central heating systems, also called furnaces, use electricity even when they’re not operating. According to a Home Energy article, many furnaces draw 8 to 12 watts of standby power 24/7 when not in use. To eliminate this waste during the six or more months when you don’t need heat, switch off the power to the furnace.

9. Buy a new toilet that uses no more than 1.28 gallons per flush – If you’re remodeling or have an older toilet that uses 1.6 gallons per flush , or worse yet a 40-year-old avocado green one that might be using 5 gallons per flush, swap it out for a more water- efficient one. Look for models with a Water Sense label because they’re not only efficient, they also meet various flushing performance requirements. A family of four can save six gallons of clean drinking water per DAY, simply by switching from a toilet that uses 1.6 to 1.28 gallons per flush.

Earth Day only comes once a year in April, but these tips can help our planet and your wallet year-round.

Celebrate Wilderness this Earth Day ‏

This Earth Day, there are almost 109 million reasons to celebrate. That’s how many acres are permanently protected as Wilderness, thanks to everyday people like you who made their voices heard.

When Earth Day was created 45 years ago by former Wilderness Society counselor Senator Gaylord Nelson, it was part of a movement to leave the planet better than the way we found it. That meant cleaning up our rivers and streams, cutting pollution out of our air, and protecting the wildest places in the nation as Wilderness.

It was everyday people — people just like you and me — who made Earth Day happen. It was our voices that reached Capitol Hill and the White House and saw a new generation of environmental protections become law.

Since then, millions of acres of wildlands have been protected and we know that we can take part in conserving the legacy we leave for our children.

There is still much to do to protect our nation’s wild places. Threats to the very laws that resulted from the first Earth Day lurk in the halls of Congress and behind millions of dollars of lobbyist money. Bills aimed at weakening the bedrock of environmental laws like the Endangered Species Act, the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and even the Antiquities Act have already been introduced. We’ve beaten them before, and with your help, we will do it again.

But today, let’s celebrate every lungful of air, every drop of clean water, every towering pine tree, and every elected official who stands up for conservation. Today is a great day!

Jamie Williams|The Wilderness Society|4/22/15

Update from the Non-human Rights Project

On Monday, we shared with you the news that a Manhattan Supreme Court Justice had granted an Order to Show Cause& Writ of Habeas Corpus on behalf of NhRP petitioners Hercules and Leo, two chimpanzees being used in biomedical experiments at Stony Brook University on Long Island, New York. Yesterday, the Court amended the Order by striking “& Habeas Corpus” from the caption of its Order. The Order to Show Cause remains in the caption.

A writ of habeas corpus in New York State is a two-step process. The first step requires that a court order someone who is imprisoning a “person” to come into court and give a legally sufficient reason for doing so. That is what the Nonhuman Rights Project sought in its Petition and that is what it received. The second step involves determining whether the someone doing the imprisoning has given a legally sufficient reason for the imprisonment. That question will be argued before the Court at the time of the step-two hearing.

It is of no practical consequence to the lawsuit whether the court styles its order as an Order to Show cause or as a Writ of Habeas Corpus. Either way the Court is ordering the University into court to provide a legally sufficient reason why they are detaining Hercules and Leo, whom we argue should be freed and released into the care of Save the Chimps’ sanctuary in Ft. Pierce, Florida. The hearing is great news not just for Hercules and Leo, but for all chimpanzees who have been unjustly deprived of their fundamental right to bodily liberty.

The hearing has been rescheduled for Wednesday, May 27 at 10:30 a.m. at the New York County Supreme Court, 80 Centre St., New York, NY 10013. It is open to the public. As always, we will keep you posted on any developments.
In the meantime, please keep sharing this news with your friends! Here are a few of the many recent articles about Hercules and Leo’s case:

• In The New York Times, Harvard Law School scholar Laurence Tribe “said he believed habeas corpus ought to be available to test the treatment and confinement of ‘other beings whose capacities are limited but who are potentially capable of bearing rights,’ a category he contended ought to eventually include chimps like Hercules and Leo.”
• Primatologist Mary Lee Jensvold, who wrote an affidavit for the NhRP’s cases, told WIRED, “Wow. Wow. Wow. This is incredible. I didn’t think this would happen so soon. It takes so long for attitudes to change. It’s a great piece of news, just to know that a judge wants to hear the case.”
• The Guardian’s Alan Yuhas writes, “For the first time in US history, a judge has granted two chimpanzees a petition—through human attorneys—to defend their rights against unlawful imprisonment, allowing a hearing on the status of ‘legal persons’ for the primates.”

Many thanks for your support from the entire NhRP team!

Steven M. Wise|President|The Nonhuman Rights Project

Optimism feels strange, but I think it’s warranted now. ‏

Every once in a while I let myself be optimistic for a minute, and this week is one of those times. I never get too giddy — scientists said yesterday that the earth’s atmosphere had nudged above 404 ppm CO2 for the first time in millions of years — but recent events convince me it’s worth keeping up the fight long term. Which we can do, with your help.

It’s not because President Obama is talking about climate. The speech he gave today was fine, but talk goes just so far — and we’re still waiting for him to say the words that really count: “I’ve denied the permit for Keystone XL.”

No, it’s other things.

The amazing rise of the divestment movement, for instance — so far this spring there have been sit-ins from Swarthmore to Tulane to Colorado. (Just today, Tufts University students started another sit-in!) I spent last week in Harvard Yard, some of it in a sleeping bag, where students, faculty and alumni came together for a whole week to demand that the university finally divest from fossil fuels. And it’s the same all over the world: just read the daily coverage in The Guardian, which has worked with 350.org to send 200,000 messages to the world’s biggest charities calling for divestment.

Something similar is happening wherever a new coal mine or fracking well is proposed — right now people are fighting hard to keep Shell’s oil rigs out of Seattle, to persuade banks everywhere not to fund Australia’s largest coal mine. Scotland, Wales and Tasmania, have banned fracking so far this year — and this week the beer drinkers of Britain added their voice to the campaign!

And while we hold the fossil fuel industry at bay — well, the world is changing. Every month the price of a solar panel drops another percent or two, and that means that the planet is now installing more renewable capacity than new coal, oil, and gas. Countries like Bangladesh are on the way to having solar panels on every home by decade’s end. The economics are breaking our way.

The bad guys know that, of course, so they’re banning state regulators from talking about climate change, and fighting for things like the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which would give them new tools to fight off serious climate action. The Koch Brothers alone have pledged to spend $900 million in the next election, which guarantees more ignorance and resistance to action in Washington.

We don’t need $900 million.

We have things they don’t, like data. Also passion, spirit, creativity. But we do need enough to keep the momentum going. I think it’s worth fighting for the long-term, and if you do too then I hope you’ll become a regular contributor. You don’t need to give a lot, but do give regularly — it gives us not just resources but heart to keep battling.

Bill McKibben|350.org|4/22/15

Chimps Will Get Their Day in Court for Case Seeking Personhood

Unbeknownst to two privately-owned chimpanzees being used for biomedical research in New York, their legal advocates are making progress in a case seeking to have them recognized as legal persons and freed.

Earlier this week, news broke that Judge Barbara Jaffe of the New York County Supreme Court had made history by issuing a writ of habeas corpus for nonhuman animals for the first time ever, essentially declaring they are legal persons.

The case was brought by the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) on behalf of Hercules and Leo, two chimpanzees who are being used in locomotion research at Stony Brook University to explore how humans evolved to walk on two feet.

The NhRP is working on several such cases seeking to break down the legal wall that separates us from nonhuman animals. Using the writ of habeas corpus, which has historically been used to challenge imprisonment, they are attempting to get the courts recognize them as legal persons who are entitled to a basic legal right not to be imprisoned, as opposed to recognizing them as property, which is how the law now sees them.

They argue that these chimpanzees, and other nonhuman animals, have been scientifically-proven to possess intelligence, self-awareness and autonomy and should therefore have the right to bodily liberty and bodily integrity – something we, as humans, are automatically granted just by being born human.

In this case, the NhRP is seeking to have Hercules and Leo moved to Save the Chimps, a Florida-based sanctuary, where the organization believes they will be able to live out the rest of their days in an environment that’s as close to their natural one as it gets here in the states.

They’re Not Legal Persons …Yet

While the ruling would have marked the first time in U.S. history nonhuman animals were granted a writ of habeas corpus, Jaffe later amended it and crossed out ‘writ of habeas corpus’ from the order.

The NhRP clarified what the original ruling and update means in a statement, writing:

The Order does not necessarily mean that the Court has declared that the two chimpanzees, Hercules and Leo, are legal persons for the purpose of an Article 70 common law writ of habeas corpus proceeding…

The issuance of the Order means, we believe, that the Court believes at minimum that the chimpanzees could possibly be legal persons for the purpose of Article 70, without deciding that they are, and that the issue will be determined only after it is fully briefed and argued at the adversarial hearing that is step 2 of the Article 70 proceeding.

This is still the first time an Order to Show Cause has been issued, meaning Stony Brook University will now have to appear in court next month with a good legal reason for keeping Hercules and Leo. If it can’t justify keeping the two, they will have to be moved and the door will be left wide open for other cases challenging our use of nonhuman animals.

In addition to working on behalf of Hercules and Leo and other great apes, including Tommy and Kiko, the NhRP also has plans for cases that will establish legal personhood for other species including elephants and cetaceans.

As for Hercules and Leo, they will now get their day in court. Their hearing, which will be open to the public, is now scheduled for May 27 at 10:30 am at the New York County Supreme Court, 80 Centre St., New York, NY.

Alicia Graef|April 23, 2015

Solar Industry Makes Commitment to Employ 50,000 Veterans by 2020

WASHINGTON, D.C. – As part of Joining Forces, an initiative launched by First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden to rally support for U.S. service members, veterans and their families, the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) today committed to having 50,000 veterans working in solar by 2020. The First Lady shared the news at an event this afternoon in Manassas, Virginia, which was part of a commitment made by several high-growth sectors of the U.S. economy, including solar. Among those attending the event were SEIA Board Chairman Nat Kreamer, who also serves as president and CEO of Clean Power Finance.

“As an industry, we are completely committed to hiring more veterans,” said Kreamer, who is a veteran himself, having served in the Special Forces in Afghanistan where he was awarded the Bronze Star. “Today, America’s solar energy companies already employ twice as many veterans as the average U.S. business. We hire veterans because they come trained, ready and passionate. The solar industry is filled with people who are motivated to build our economy, improve our environment and strengthen our national security.”

As examples of veterans working to build a stronger solar industry in America, Kreamer pointed to Colonel Thom Besch (Ret.) and Captain Michael Baskin (Ret.). Former Army Captain Baskin is working with military bases across the nation to certify service members under guidelines established by the North American Board of Certified Energy Practitioners (NABCEP). This rigorous program is considered the “gold standard” for PV and solar heating installation certification.

Earlier this year, the first classes of NABCEP-certified veterans graduated and started jobs in solar. Colonel Besch is one of those putting veterans to work in solar.  He retired from the U.S. Army, after serving for 30 years, and took a job leading solar installations for a New England solar integrator. After a few years, he started his own company – Veteran Solar Systems (“Still Serving: Country, Community, and You”) – where he sells and installs distributed solar systems in upstate New York.

“We salute the efforts of Colonel Besch, Captain Baskin and many others like them,” Kreamer continued. “Solar, like the military, is not just about the paycheck; it is also about working for something larger than oneself.”

Today, solar is the fastest-growing source of renewable energy in America, with more than 20 gigawatts (GW) of installed capacity – enough to power more than 4 million homes – and those numbers are expected to double by the end of 2016.

“We’re very excited about bringing more and more veterans into our ranks, and applaud the efforts of First Lady Obama, Dr. Biden and Joining Forces,” said SEIA President and CEO Rhone Resch.  “Today, solar employs 174,000 Americans nationwide – including veterans from all branches of the U.S. military – making solar one of the fastest-growing industries in America.  This remarkable growth is due, in large part, to smart and effective public policies, such as the solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC), Net Energy Metering (NEM) and Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS).  By any measurement, these policies are paying dividends for our economy – and our military veterans.”

SEIA News|4/24/15

Plastic garbage in the ocean is mysteriously disappearing

Scientists theorize that the plastic is being broken down into tiny, undetectable particles or that it is being carried into the deep ocean. 

A vast amount of the plastic garbage littering the surface of the ocean may be disappearing, a new study suggests.

Exactly what is happening to this ocean debris is a mystery, though the researchers hypothesize that the trash could be breaking down into tiny, undetectable pieces. Alternatively, the garbage may be traveling deep into the ocean’s interior.

“The deep ocean is a great unknown,” study co-author Andrés Cózar, an ecologist at the University of Cadiz in Spain, said in an email. “Sadly, the accumulation of plastic in the deep ocean would be modifying this mysterious ecosystem – the largest of the world – before we can know it.”

Researchers drew their conclusion about the disappearing trash by analyzing the amount of plastic debris floating in the ocean, as well as global plastic production and disposal rates. [Photos: Trash Litters Deep Ocean]

Age of plastic

The modern period has been dubbed the Plastic Age. As society produces more and more of the material, storm water runoff carries more and more of the detritus of modern life into the ocean. Ocean currents, acting as giant conveyer belts, then carry the plastic into several subtropical regions, such as the infamous Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch.

In the 1970s, the National Academy of Sciences estimated that about 45,000 tons of plastic reaches the oceans every year. Since then, the world’s production of plastic has quintupled.

Missing mass

Cózar and his colleagues wanted to understand the size and extent of the ocean’s garbage problem. The researchers circumnavigated the globe in a ship called the Malaspina in 2010, collecting surface water samples and measuring plastic concentrations. The team also analyzed data from several other expeditions, looking at a total of 3,070 samples.

What they found was strange. Despite the drastic increase in plastic produced since the 1970s, the researchers estimated there were between 7,000 and 35,000 tons of plastic in the oceans. Based on crude calculations, there should have been millions of tons of garbage in the oceans.

Because each large piece of plastic can break down into many additional, smaller pieces of plastic, the researchers expected to find more tiny pieces of debris. But the vast majority of the small plastic pieces, measuring less than 0.2 inches (5 millimeters) in size, were missing, Cózar said.

Unknown impact

So what exactly is happening to the debris?

One possibility is that it is being broken down into tiny, undetectable particles, whose impact on the ocean is unknown. Another possibility is that it is being carried into the deep ocean.

Whether that’s good or bad isn’t clear.

Less trash at the surface may mean less wildlife comes into contact with plastic.

“The plastic pollution in surface waters can more easily interact with the ocean life, because the surface layer of the ocean hosts most of the marine organisms,” Cózar said.

On the other hand, small fish – particularly lanternfishes – may be eating some of these small plastic pieces, dubbed microplastics, and breaking them down even more. Because small fish are the ecological link between plankton and small vertebrates, and because commercial fish such as swordfish and tuna eat these small fish, it’s important to understand whether the absorption of toxins from the plastic will impact these animals’  health, he said.

The findings were published on June 30 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Consumer Reports Finds 60% of Raw Shrimp Tested Positive for Bacteria

There are now more reasons to consider skipping your next shrimp cocktail. In a startling new Consumer Reports study, bacteria was detected in more than half the raw shrimp that was tested, with some also tainted with illegal antibiotic residues.

For the study, How Safe is Your Shrimp?, scientists analyzed 342 packages of frozen shrimp—284 raw and 58 cooked samples—purchased at Albertsons, Costco, Fry’s Marketplace, Hy-Vee, Kroger, Sprouts Farmers Market and Walmart in 27 cities across the U.S.

The study found that 60 percent of raw shrimp tested positive for bacteria, including salmonella, E. coli and listeria. In seven raw shrimp samples, scientists detected the antibiotic-resistant superbug MRSA, or Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, that could potentially lead to a dangerous infection.

The country currently consumes about three times more shrimp than it did 35 years ago, with the average American chomping down nearly 4 pounds of shrimp per year. While the crustacean is clearly America’s favorite seafood, most of the country’s supply comes from faraway countries such as India, Indonesia and Thailand, where shrimp is squeezed into industrial tanks or shallow, man-made ponds where they’re fed commercial pellets, sometimes containing antibiotics to ward off disease, the study pointed out.

“Bacteria and algae can begin to grow and disease can set in, prompting farmers to use drugs and other chemicals that can remain on the shrimp and seep into the surrounding environment,” said Urvashi Rangan, Ph.D., executive director of the Consumer Reports Food Safety and Sustainability Center, in the report.

Not only is there the possibility of bacteria and viral infections swarming in these Asian shrimp farms, a recent investigation from the Associated Press revealed participation of forced labor from Burmese migrants in Thailand’s shrimp processing chain.

Lorraine Chow|April 24, 2015

World’s Top Zoo Association Kicks Japan Out Over Cruel Dolphin Drives

This week, animal advocates are celebrating news that the world’s top zoo association has finally suspended its Japanese member over its ties with the brutal dolphin drives that take place every year in Taiji.

Conservationists have been working for years to get the World Association for Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA) to take a meaningful stand against member facilities that support the live capture of dolphins, but it had yet to take any real action until now.

WAZA announced that after failing to reach an agreement regarding its policies addressing the acquisition of animals, it voted unanimously to suspend the Japanese Association of Zoos and Aquariums (JAZA) because of its continued involvement with controversial drive hunts.

Whale and dolphin advocates have brought these hunts into the public’s view, most notably with the award-winning documentary “The Cove,” and have raised international outrage over the mass slaughter and captures of dolphins that continue to take place annually.

While thousands are butchered and sold for their meat, more are torn from their families and sold to zoos and aquariums for public display. Many have continued to argue that if it weren’t for the money brought in by sales for captivity, the drives would have ended by now.

WAZA has said it condemns the drives and is not involved in any way, but it had continued to allow JAZA to violate its Code of Ethics and Animal Welfare without consequence. Now JAZA is finally being held accountable.

WAZA said in a statement that it “requires all members to adhere to policies that prohibit participating in cruel and non-selective methods of taking animals from the wild.” It added: “The basis for the suspension is a determination that JAZA has violated the WAZA Code of Ethics and Animal Welfare. Moreover, WAZA Council re-affirmed its position that members of WAZA must confirm that they will not acquire dolphins from the Taiji fishery.”

“We congratulate and applaud WAZA Council for doing the right thing,” said the Dolphin Project‘s Ric O’Barry. “Their credibility with their peers has been destroyed. This is a big win for all wild dolphins swimming past the shores of Taiji.”

The suspension also comes on the heels of a lawsuit that was filed last month by Australia for Dolphins (AFD), which hoped to get WAZA to uphold its Code of Ethics, or give JAZA the boot.

“The suspension of JAZA following AFD’s legal action is great news. It is a significant first step towards ending the horrific annual dolphin hunts in Taiji,” said Sarah Lucas, CEO of AFD. “Up to 40% of total demand for Taiji dolphins comes from WAZA network aquariums. WAZA’s decision to suspend its Japanese member for involvement in the hunts is a major blow to the world’s largest dolphin trade.”

According to AFD, JAZA facilities are home to more than 600 dolphins, while more half of JAZA’s 65 members acquire dolphins from the Taiji drive hunts. Whale and Dolphin Conservation, which is also applauding the move, added that since 2004, over 1,200 dolphins caught in the hunts have been sent to dolphinaria in Japan and other countries, including the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, China, Iran, Palau, the Philippines and Turkey.

AFD says it will continue with its legal action on behalf of dolphins who end up in other countries and, following the exposure of other serious abuses last month, hopes to get WAZA to enforce its animal welfare policies at all of its member facilities.

While the announcement is a huge step towards ending the drive hunts, captivity itself is still a major problem for dolphins and cetaceans. The demand won’t end until we stop supporting facilities that keep them.

Alicia Graef|April 24, 2015

Calls to Action

1. Stop playing politics with sea turtles – here

Birds and Butterflies

ROOKERY BAY RESERVE AND AUDUBON PARTNER TO PROTECT SHOREBIRDS

~New Bird Stewardship Project Manager Position Established for Collier County~

NAPLES – Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve manages 40 percent of Collier County’s coastline, which serves as crucial habitat for many species of migratory and nesting birds. Rookery Bay Reserve, in partnership with Audubon Florida and Audubon of the Western Everglades, is pleased to welcome new Shorebird Monitoring and Stewardship Project Manager Adam DiNuovo.

DiNuovo will work with research and stewardship staff at Rookery Bay Reserve to monitor seasonal beach-nesting bird colonies, over-wintering shorebird population trends, spring/fall migratory events, and habitat on mainland beaches as well as on remote, offshore islands. He will also recruit and train bird stewards as part of a wider education and outreach initiative within Collier and Lee Counties. Audubon Florida has funded this position for a minimum of two years.

“The reserve will greatly benefit from this enhanced monitoring and stewarding effort to support regional management and protection of beach-nesting birds and their habitat,” said Rookery Bay Reserve’s Research Coordinator Kevin Cunniff.

During the breeding season, which runs from March through August, DiNuovo will be responsible for performing beach-nesting bird monitoring and protection work. Post breeding season, his role will shift to assisting regional monitoring efforts directed at assessing shorebird population status and trends.

“This new position will not only help all of us better understand the regional status and trends of nesting and migratory birds, but will also enable us to better engage the public around coastal bird conservation,” said Marianne Korosy, Audubon Florida’s important bird area coordinator. “We’re grateful to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s Gulf Environmental Benefit Fund for the funding to help us support Rookery Bay and the region’s devoted bird stewards.”

Rookery Bay Reserve, Audubon Florida and Audubon of the Western Everglades are all members of the Collier County Shorebird Partnership, which has been working collaboratively and meeting semi-annually since 2000. The partnership also includes members from local, state and federal agencies, as well as local non-profit organizations.

In Collier County, 99 percent of all shorebird nesting is on beaches. Least tern and black skimmer nesting data has been recorded in Collier County since 1972 as part of a long-term coastal waterbird monitoring effort. The Big Marco Pass Critical Wildlife Area’s least tern and black skimmer colony is consistently ranked as one of the largest colonies in Florida.

To get involved in the bird steward program in Collier County contact the Shorebird Monitoring and Stewardship Project Manager Adam DiNuovo at adinuovo@audubon.org This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or 413-896-4751.

Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve encompasses 110,000 acres of coastal lands and waters on the southwest Florida coast. It is managed by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection in cooperation with NOAA. Click here for more information about the Reserve’s beach-nesting bird monitoring program.

Press Releases|18 April 2015

Millions of Iowa chickens infected in bird flu outbreak hitting 12 states

Iowa, the top U.S. egg-producing state, found a lethal strain of bird flu in a flock of millions of hens at an egg-laying facility on Monday, the worst case so far in a national outbreak that has now prompted Wisconsin to declare a state of emergency.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture said the Iowa flock numbered 5.3 million birds while the company that operates the farm said it was 3.8 million. It was unclear why there was a discrepancy.

Iowa was already among the 12 U.S. states to have detected bird flu infections since the beginning of the year. The other states with infected poultry flocks are Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Washington and Wisconsin.

Bird flu, also called avian influenza or AI, is a viral disease of birds. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers the risk for human infections to be low, and no human cases have been found yet.

The infected Iowa birds were being raised near Harris, Iowa, by Sunrise Farms, an affiliate of Sonstegard Foods Company, the company said. The farm houses 3.8 million hens, according to the company, which sells eggs to food manufacturers, government agencies and retailers.

“We went to great lengths to prevent our birds from contracting AI, but despite best efforts we now confirm many of our birds are testing positive,” Sonstegard said in a statement.

The flock has been quarantined, and birds on the property will be culled to prevent the spread of the disease, the USDA said. The virus can kill nearly an entire flock within 48 hours.

In Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker on Monday declared a state of emergency after three poultry flocks became infected in the past week, according to a statement from his office. The infected birds were chickens at an egg-laying facility, turkeys and a backyard flock of mixed-breed birds, comprising more than 326,000 birds in all.

He has authorized the state’s National Guard to help contain the disease, citing “thin” resources available from the federal government. The Guard will disinfect trucks exiting infected premises, a state spokeswoman said.

The USDA has spent $45 million so far responding to the U.S. bird flu outbreak and has deployed about 60 people to Minnesota, the top U.S. turkey-producing state, which has found more infected flocks than any other state.

The infections have hurt trade in the $5.7 billion U.S. export market for poultry and eggs.

Reuters|20 Apr 2015|(Reporting by Tom Polansek|Additional reporting by P.J. Huffstutter|Editing by Alan Crosby and Matthew Lewis)

Video Diary: One Tiny Hummingbird Family

DROUGHT JEOPARDIZES WESTERN BIRDS

Even before the drought, loss of streamside habitat pushed the Southwestern Willow Flycatcher to the brink.

An unprecedented 15-year drought is drying out the Colorado River Basin, threatening the birds and people that live there. The Colorado River provides drinking water for millions of people, world-class recreation, irrigation on working lands, and life-sustaining habitat for hundreds of species of migrating, nesting, and wintering birds. With less water in the Basin, birds will be in trouble as habitat simply begins to fade away. We are calling on people across the country to contact their U.S. Senators, urging them to address this critical situation.

In the water-scarce West, birds rely on ribbons of rivers and streams, essential wetlands, and the vegetation they nourish. Many nesting species are already in serious trouble due to the loss of habitat from the drought. The Western Yellow-billed Cuckoo and Southwestern Willow Flycatcher have been pushed to the brink and were recently listed under the Endangered Species Act.

The health of the Colorado River is vital to the well-being of the West and the nation. It provides drinking water for more than 36 million people, irrigates 15 percent of US crops, and sustains hundreds of species of birds and other wildlife. Numerous federal programs can help provide short-term and long-term solutions, such as WaterSMART, which supports locally-driven efforts to save water across the West, and the Multi-Species Conservation Program, which helps restore thousands of acres of vital habitat for birds and other wildlife in the Colorado River Basin.

David Yarnold|President & CEO|National Audubon Society

Tamarind Park in Cooper City Installs Artificial Burrows for Burrowing Owls

On Sunday, April 19th, volunteers from the area surrounding Tamarind Park and Cooper City got together and installed six artificial burrows for the purpose of relocating burrowing owl populations that have few places left to call home.

The project was initiated and coordinated by Kelly Heffernan of Project Perch, which is sponsored by South Florida Audubon Society.

Some materials for the burrows were supplied at a discounted price by Lowe’s of Pembroke Pines.

Other supplies were provided by a Captain Planet Grant that Griffin Elementary won in partnership with Project Perch, Cooper City and NatureScape Broward and that provided the funds ($1,900) for the fences, burrows, signs, books and give-aways.

This is the second time this group of volunteers got together for an installation, having previously installed burrows at Forest Lake Park, also in Cooper City.

Installation consists of digging a hole for a nesting chamber and an entry trench and burying the starter burrow with the entrance at ground level. The entry is then surrounded by play sand to give the owls a feeding area clear of obstructions and to serve as a visual invitation to explore the residence.

The starter burrows consist of a section of 6” PVC pipe with a section removed so the owls feet can contact the soil beneath the pipe, and with a nesting chamber with an extra hole to provide the owls with the option of expanding the burrow as they would in a natural situation.

The site work was capably supervised by Kelly along with Jacqueline Sanchez of Broward County Schools and Jeanette Wofford, Certified Arborist for Cooper City.

Student participants will be given a Certificate of Appreciation proclaiming them as Burrowing Owl Stewards.

Photographs taken by Jeanette can be viewed here

Grant Campbell|South Florida Audubon Society|4/22/15

Feds Back Away From Plan to Protect Nevada, California Grouse

Disappointing news: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Tuesday abandoned its plan to give Endangered Species Act protection to Mono Basin sage grouse, a small and isolated population of prairie birds that live in eastern California and western Nevada.

Only about 2,500 of these birds remain, and they’re threatened by grazing, habitat loss, fire, invasive plants and mining development. The Service proposed protecting the animals as “threatened” in 2013, citing their small population size, myriad threats, and inadequate measures to protect them. But the agency changed course this week, ignoring scientific recommendations for reversing the birds’ steep decline and relying on unproven conservation agreements with local and state communities.

“These birds are in serious trouble, and yet the government is doing nothing to restrict destructive hard-rock mining, geothermal development or off-road vehicle races,” said the Center for Biological Diversity’s Randi Spivak. “Half-measures may delay extinction, but they won’t prevent it.”

Read more in our press release.

First Bald Eagle Family in New York City in 100 Years

1782: The bald eagle becomes the national symbol of the United States.

1963: Thanks to centuries of shooting, habitat loss, and a few decades of widespread DDT use, bald eagle populations are seriously depleted in the lower 48 states, with only 487 nesting pairs remaining.

1967: The bald eagle is one of the first species to receive protections under the precursor to the Endangered Species Act.

1972: DDT is banned in the United States.

2007: Due to population rebounds, bald eagles are declared recovered and removed from the endangered species list.

April 16, 2015: The Audubon Society announces the first active bald eagle nest reported in New York City in 100 years. It anticipates that eagle chicks could hatch within a month.

Read more at Audubon.

   Invasive species

Huge Carnivorous Nile Lizards Invade Florida

Roaming Florida in increasing numbers, the massive carnivorous Nile monitor lizard is making sensational headlines across the nation:

These giant reptilian beasts typically grow to about 5 feet long, but can reach 8 feet, and they’re considered a threat to smaller animals such as burrowing owls, tortoises and small mammals. They have been known to eat cats in their domestic habitat in Africa.

Nile monitor lizards live partly on land and partly in the water, and they are often seen basking and foraging along canal banks. If encountered, these mottled yellow and brown lizards usually flee into the water, according to the FCW. Once in the water, they use their powerful rudder-like tails to swim swiftly away or stay submerged for extended periods of time. They are primarily active during daylight hours and spend nights sleeping in burrows.

David A. Steen, a conservation biologist who included the lizard on a list of the “worst invasive reptiles” published on Slate.com, describes the reptile as a “hulking beast” that’s “a voracious predator of any creature smaller than itself.”

Native to sub-Saharan Africa, the Nile lizards were brought to Florida as part of the exotic pet trade. People typically buy them when they are small, but when the novelty wears off and the lizard becomes more than they can handle, irresponsible owners dump them in areas they figure they can survive.

The problem with Nile lizards, along with two other exotic species Burmese pythons and the more aggressive African rock pythons, is that they not only survive, they thrive in Florida’s tropical ecosystems and while doing so, wreck havoc on the native species.

The Nile monitor lizard, a cousin of the huge and poisonous monitor lizard, the Komodo dragon, has been multiplying across the state since at least 1990. Hundreds are now thought to be running amok and concerted efforts have begun to eliminate the lizards in the area before they establish a firm claw hold.

According to the Sun Sentinel, wildlife officials armed with shotguns are increasing patrols of Palm Beach canals from once a month to four to six times a month to try to hunt the reptiles down. So far 20 lizards have been eliminated in Palm Beach since July.

Florida officials are caught between the tough decision of killing the lizards or letting the reptile destroy native species and threaten small domestic animals. This is yet another sad textbook example of what can happen when people release exotic species into a new environment. It’s also a cautionary tale against irresponsible pet ownership.

According to the Florida Fish and Wildlife, the Nile Monitor lizard is a conditional species in Florida and cannot be acquired as a pet in the state without a special permit, but unfortunately people find ways around these laws or bring the lizards in from other states. 

To help combat the problem of pet owners wanting to unload unwanted exotic species, Florida does have an exotic pet amnesty program.  Amnesty events are held periodically around the state as a penalty-free and free-of-charge opportunity for people to surrender their exotic pets in a responsible manner. Pre-approved adopters with permits are then allowed to adopt surrendered exotic animals at these events. Since the amnesty program started, 2340 exotic animals have been surrendered.

Cherise Udell|April 18, 2015

[I know of Nile Monitors in Northwest Miami that were present in the mid 1980’s.]

Florida python hunt didn’t help control threat

CORAL SPRINGS, Fla. — As Florida prepares to unleash the public in another hunt for Burmese pythons in the Everglades, an analysis of data from the first Python Challenge shows that the 2013 spectacle didn’t do anything to curb the invasive snake’s population in the wetlands, a scientist said Monday.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission calls the 68 pythons turned in during the month-long Python Challenge in early 2013 a success for raising public awareness about the threat invasive species pose to native wildlife.

Most of those snakes were caught by experienced hunters with permits to regularly hunt pythons on state lands. The contest gave them incentives to capture more pythons in a month than any previous study, but it did nothing to control Florida’s python population, said Frank Mazzotti, a University of Florida scientist who studied the 68 snakes captured.

Mazzotti presented his findings at an invasive species workshop opening the annual Greater Everglades Ecosystem Restoration conference in Coral Springs.

It’s unknown exactly how many pythons live in the wild in Florida. Most of the captured pythons were adult males, which may have inadvertently reduced competition for the adult breeding females remaining in the wild, and most were found along roads and levees where pythons previously were captured, Mazzotti said.

Their stomach contents raise new questions about what pythons are eating. Scientists have blamed pythons for alarming drop-offs in native mammal populations in the Everglades, but the prey consumed by the 68 snakes caught in the 2013 hunt was almost evenly split between small mammals, such as rats and rabbits, and wading birds. A few also made room for alligators.

The python’s diet may be shifting to birds as mammals decline, or pythons may just eat more birds during the winter nesting season, Mazzotti said.

Florida is planning another Python Challenge in early 2016. About 1,600 people signed up for the first hunt, but it’s not clear that so many will return.

In another presentation at the workshop, Bryan Falk of the U.S. Geological Survey said eager volunteers who want to help capture pythons in Everglades National Park quickly lose interest when they realize how difficult it is to find one snake.

A python easily vanishes in an overgrown lawn, and volunteers face vast, watery stretches best traversed in airboats.

“We’re still struggling to answer basic questions like how many are there? Where are they?” Falk said.

“We’re so, so bad at finding pythons. Unless they’re moving across a road, we won’t know,” he added.

MyPalmBeachPost.com|April 20, 2015

Endangered Species

Photo proof of snow leopards in newly created refuge in Siberia

Camera trap images have been taken of snow leopards in the newly created National Park of Sylyugem National Park in the Altai mountains of Siberia.

Aleksei Kuzhlekov, a national park researcher, reports that, “four pictures of snow leopard were taken at different times, probably of three or four individuals”.

The Saylyugem National Park was created five years ago to protect wildlife in that region of Siberia, especially the snow leopard and argali mountain sheep, in an area totaling 118,380 hectares.

The creation of the reserve was much needed, because poachers had killed more than 10 snow leopards in the area in the 1990s alone, to sell their pelts and body parts on the black market for Chinese medicine.

The snow leopard is in the endangered category on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species with as few as 4,000 left in the world, of which only 2,500 are likely to be breeding.

The head of the local conservation department, Igor Ivanitsky, adds: “We were able to place the cameras in the right place by painstakingly working out the movements routes of the cats.

“Being then so successful with our camera trapping efforts tells us that the park is their main home and hunting ground.

“Park staff have also found snow leopard tracks and scats (droppings) in several places around the national park, giving further evidence that the big cats are thriving in their newly created refuge.”

Dr. Matthias Hammer, Executive Director of Biosphere Expeditions, which assisted in the creation of the new National Park says he is delighted with the news.

“We spent ten years working in the Altai, researching snow leopard presence, building local capacity and trying to create economic incentives for local people to keep their snow leopard neighbours alive.

“When we started, there was no national park, little awareness, research or infrastructure, and rampant poaching.

“Now we have a national park, national park staff, anti-poaching patrols, several research initiatives, much more awareness and many ways for local people to benefit from the presence of the snow leopard.

“Poaching continues to be a threat, as is the Altai gas pipeline, but all in all this is a remarkable turnaround and success story, and we are very proud to have played our part in this.

“We’ve had many successes through citizen science voluntourism over the years and this is yet another excellent illustration of how citizen science-led conservation expeditions can make a genuine difference.”

For more information visit Sailugemsky National Park and Biosphere Expeditions

Wildlife Extra|20/04/2015

New species of gecko lizard found at Indian World Heritage Site

A new type of gecko, a lizard found in warm climates, has been identified having been found in the ruins of Hampi, the World Heritage Site in Karnataka, India, reports The Hindu.

The lizard has been named Cnemaspis adii after Aditya Srinivasulu, a young herpetology researcher from Hyderabad who was involved in the discovery.

The animal belongs to the family of day geckos which are distinguished by the round pupils in their eyes which differ from the vertical pupils found in more common geckos.

Zoologists have identified the area around Hampi as having great potential for a rich biodiversity and more new species of smaller vertebrate and invertebrates.

“The discovery is significant because other species of day geckos have been, so far, reported only from the Western Ghats and southern Eastern Ghats in peninsular India,” says lead author Dr Chelmala Srinivasulu.

“This is the first time that day geckos have been found in the central regions of peninsular India between Eastern and Western Ghats.”  

Dr Srinivasulu, along with G Chethan Kumar and Bhargavi Srinivasulu, all from the zoology wing of Osmania University in Hyderabad, published their findings  in the journal Zootaxathis.

This new day gecko species was first discovered by Dr Bhargavi Srinivasulu in 2012 while doing research on bats in the Hampi complex.

This latest team of zoologists studied photographs of live animals and researched on known species of day geckos reported from other parts of India. It is this work that has led to the current confirmation of the new species. 

Wildlife Extra|20/04/2015

Only 3 wolves remain on Isle Royale

Only three wolves remain on Michigan’s Isle Royale, down from nine wolves last year, Michigan Technological University scientists reported Friday.

The discovery was made during Michigan Tech’s annual winter survey of the nearly undisturbed, 206-square-mile island, a U.S. National Park in northwest Lake Superior. Michigan Tech ecologist John Vucetich, part of the wolf survey team, said he would not be surprised if no wolves remain by next winter.

“It’s like asking if a person on their deathbed is going to die tomorrow or the next day,” he said. “I don’t know, but the important point is they are on their deathbed.”

Wolves came to the island more than five decades ago by crossing a frozen Lake Superior in winter. The island’s wolf population once reached 50 wolves and has averaged 25 wolves over decades before a population crash in recent years because of the physical and reproductive impacts of inbreeding.

“What’s really important here is not the presence of wolves, per se,” Vucetich said. “But the wolves need to be able to perform their ecological function — predation. Predation has been essentially nil for the past four years now.”

That’s led to a 22 percent increase in the moose population for each of the past four years, he said, taking the island population from 500 to 1,200. A moose eats up to 40 pounds of vegetation a day.

“One of the most basic lessons we know in ecology, wherever creatures like moose live, you have to have a top predator,” he said. “If you don’t, the herbivore can cause a great deal of harm to the vegetation.”

The wolf losses over the past year all appear to involve natural causes that aren’t unusual, Vucetich said. One of the wolves that died was 11 years old, an “alpha female” leading a small pack of three wolves, he said.

“She left behind two wolves that were adults but never had to fend for themselves,” he said. “For them to have died was not unusual.”

The other three wolves were young, between 1 and 2 years old. “When wolves are that age, if things aren’t going well for the pack, their survival can be affected,” Vucetich said.

The three wolves on the island are likely a mated pair and their offspring, he said. But wolves on the island haven’t been breeding with great success.

Vucetich and his colleague at Michigan Tech, Rolf Peterson, both support a “genetic rescue” of the island’s wolf population — bringing in wolves from elsewhere to bolster island wolves and help facilitate breeding. The U.S. Forest Service is studying the concept, but that process may take years.

KEITH MATHENY|MICHIGAN.COM|4/20/2015

Breaking: historic victory for chimpanzees ‏

Exciting news! We are thrilled to be able to tell you that a Manhattan Supreme Court Justice has granted an order to show cause and writ of habeas corpus on behalf of NhRP plaintiffs Hercules and Leo, two chimpanzees being used in biomedical experiments at Stony Brook University on Long Island, New York.

This is the first time in history that a judge has granted an order to show cause and writ of habeas corpus on behalf of a nonhuman animal.

The ruling also implicitly recognizes Hercules and Leo as legal persons, since only legal persons may be granted a writ of habeas corpus under New York common law.

Needless to say, this is huge news, and we are beyond grateful for [humanity’s] commitment to the pursuit of freedom and justice for these imprisoned chimpanzees. Whether you’ve donated, helped to raise awareness of our work, or written in to let us know that you stand behind our mission, the NhRP would never have gotten this far without your support.

Next up: a hearing in which Stony Brook University—represented by the Attorney General of New York—must appear in court and provide a legally sufficient reason for detaining Hercules and Leo, whom we argue should be freed and released into the care of Save the Chimps’ sanctuary in Ft. Pierce, Florida.

To read the judge’s order and the press release we issued earlier today, visit our website. We’ll be sure to keep you updated on any developments via our newsletter and social media sites. In the meantime, please share this news with anyone you know who supports nonhuman rights!

Natalie Prosin|Executive Director|The Nonhuman Rights Project|4/20/15

Federal Government Protects Bat, Angers Industry

They may not be the most attractive creatures in the world, and they scare the life out of many people, but you have to feel bad for the bat.

Millions of them are dying across the Northeast, the Midwest and parts of the South, from a disease called White Nose Syndrome, named for a white fungus that crusts their faces.

Seven species of bats are being decimated by White Nose Syndrome; the hardest-hit species is the northern long-eared bat. Last week, the federal government listed it as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.

Tony Sullins, an endangered species expert with the Fish and Wildlife Service, says the bat falls just shy of being listed as endangered. He says the northern long-eared bat is not on the brink of imminent extinction.

“But within the foreseeable future, we anticipate that the species will become endangered due to White Nose Syndrome, and that’s the very definition of threatened under the Endangered Species Act,” he says.

Designating the northern long-eared bat as threatened triggers new regulations and protective measures, such as restricting some tree removal from forested area, especially in the summer months when newborn bats are nesting.

But oil and gas, timber and farming associations say adhering to those rules could drive up costs and limit new projects. Mark O’Neill, spokesman for the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, says the new regulations could prevent farmers from putting wind turbines or natural gas wells on their property, and affect components of how they grow crops, including the legal application of pesticides.

“We want to make sure that it’s very clear that any decision that has been made does not impact [pesticide use], because that obviously would be something of major concern to farmers here in Pennsylvania and across the nation,” says O’Neill.

O’Neill says businesses are being unfairly targeted by the new protections for the northern long-eared bat.

“We recognize there is an issue with the bat population, but agriculture has nothing to do with that. We want to make sure what’s best for the bats, but we also want to make sure that we’re not threatening the livelihood or the potential economic viability of farmers,” he says.

The rules are set to take effect next month. O’Neill says the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau and other organizations will continue to voice their concerns to the Fish and Wildlife Service over these protections for the northern long-eared bat.

Beaten ocelot successfully recovers from jaw surgery

Alik, the 8-month-old female ocelot that veterinarians believe was beaten with a metal pipe, is successfully recovering from surgery to repair her broken jaw.

Last week a group of six veterinarians and specialists performed the surgery to reconstruct her broken jaw using titanium plates and screws in a procedure that lasted some two and half hours.

Alik is recovering well from the surgery, biologist Rodolfo Vargas Leitón, who works with the Refugio Herpetológico, told The Tico Times. The wildlife refuge took in Alik after police spotted her in a cage, in poor condition, on a family’s property in San Juan de Mata, southwest of San José.

The family had apparently beaten and caged the animal, a threatened species, after finding her inside their henhouse.

“The jaw has held in a good position and she has already started to eat,” Vargas said. “Currently we are only feeding her prepared meals and ground beef, but her overall health condition is very good.”

Refuge staff said they would have to wait at least eight weeks for the broken bones to fully heal before trying to feed Alik solid food.

The ocelot will have to remain at least four months at the refuge to ensure full recovery. Experts will monitor her to assess whether the titanium parts are causing any discomfort.

Still, Vargas said the animal’s evolution has been very positive, and the shelter’s team believes that, pending evaluations, Alik could be released into the wild again and live a normal life.

But not without a lot of work. Wildlife experts will have to train her so she can be confident hunting again and get re-accustomed to living on her own.

Donations helped pay for the titanium components to fix Alik’s jaw. The animal shelter is still fundraising to pay for the animal’s daily maintenance and recovery.

The Refugio Herpetológico currently houses 70 species of rescued animals, many of which are unable to return to their natural habitats due to aggressions from humans.

To help Alik and other animals at the shelter you can donate through the shelter’s bank account (921387056) at BAC San José or through the PayPal account listed on the shelter’s website.

Bees ‏

The EPA has just announced a moratorium on approving any new bee-killing neonicotinoid pesticides.

This shows that the EPA is hearing our voices, listening to the science, finally paying attention to the massive global bee die-off.

But to save the bees, the EPA needs to also do something about all the bee-killing pesticides ALREADY on the market—and they’ve been dragging their feet on a comprehensive plan for months.

Last June, President Obama created a task force to develop a strategy to save the bees. And even though they were supposed to have a plan ready last December, the moratorium is one of the only serious steps they’ve taken.

In fact, in recent months, the EPA has approved new bee-killing pesticides and increased the allowable threshold on others.

And that comprehensive plan to save the bees? We’re still waiting for it.

The moratorium on new bee-killing pesticides is a good step—but it’s not nearly enough.

Elizabeth Ouzts|Regional Program Director|Environment Florida|4/22/15

Breaking news: Bees ‏

A blockbuster new report has found that the pesticides killing millions of bees all over the world might be even more harmful than previously thought.

The new report finds that neonicotinoids—the pesticides linked to the global bee die-off—may be not only deadly to bees but also addictive to them.

You see, neonicotinoids are derived from nicotine, the powerfully addictive stimulant in tobacco. And it turns out that bees love it. Even though it kills them.

We need to convince the Obama administration to get these pesticides off the market, so we can save the bees before it’s too late.

Previously, it was thought that bees were repelled by neonicotinoids. Scientists knew that they were harmful to bees, but at least the bees weren’t attracted to them, right?

Wrong. This new study finds that bees actually prefer food sources treated with these nicotine-like pesticides to natural alternatives like sugar water.

The good news is that the Obama administration is already taking the threat to bees seriously. They recently announced a moratorium on approving new neonicotinoid pesticides. And last June, President Obama created a special task force to develop a strategy to save the bees.

But especially in light of these new findings, the EPA needs to do more and act faster.

We’re demanding immediate action to ban bee-killing pesticides to help stop the massive global bee die-off.

Thanks for making it all possible.

Elizabeth Ouzts|Regional Program Director|Environment Florida|4/24/15

Illinois Wants to Start Killing Bobcats Again

Despite opposition and past efforts to keep bobcats protected, hunters and lawmakers are pushing legislation that could make killing bobcats legal again in Illinois for the first time in more than 40 years.

Bobcats once ranged the throughout the entire state, but by the mid-1900s their population had been decimated by unregulated hunting. In the 1970s, hunting was banned and bobcats were protected as a threatened species in state until they were removed in 1999.

Today, based on studies conducted by Southern Illinois University, the Department of Natural Resources estimates there could be as many as 5,000 throughout the state.

While bobcats have rebounded since efforts began to protect them, conservationists argue that the work to help ensure their future survival is far from complete and hunting them now would undo all that has been done to keep them from disappearing forever.

In January, former Governor Pat Quinn agreed and vetoed recent legislative efforts to open a hunting season before he left office, stating, “We all have a responsibility to protect and maintain Illinois’ wildlife. Allowing people to hunt bobcats in Illinois violates that responsibility.” He added that, “[B]obcats are a valuable part of Illinois’ ecosystem and continue to need protection.”

Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped efforts to open season on these vital predators for trophies and their fur. Now legislation that will legalize hunting is currently making its way through the legislature yet again.

Opponents are continuing to argue that like the previous efforts, the bills in the works wouldn’t just harm conservation efforts and the valuable role bobcats play as top predators in the state’s ecosystem, but will put them in danger of inhumane hunting methods, including the use of dogs, bow hunting and trapping – which could leave bobcats and other animals who are unintentionally caught languishing in traps before they’re checked.

The Illinois Environmental Council and Sierra Club Illinois, which are among the organizations opposing the latest efforts to legalize hunting for bobcats, say the numbers are closer to 3,000 and hunting them now could put them back where they started on the threatened species list.

They argue that even though the current measure is allegedly being pushed to “manage” bobcats, state wildlife officials aren’t using the best available science and have no management or sustainability plan in place for them, and that there is no provision for an emergency procedure to shut the season down if too many are killed.

They further argue that the timing of the season could put kittens at risk of being abandoned if their mothers are killed, which would add even more pressure to their population.

Alicia Graef|April 21, 2015

Fatal White-nose Epidemic Spreads to Iowa Bats — 26 States Now Afflicted

The deadly fungal disease that has killed millions of bats across the eastern United States has been confirmed in Iowa bats, the state announced last week. Biologists first detected the fungus itself in an Iowa cave in 2011, but they hadn’t found afflicted bats until this winter, when the disease was found in seven individual bats of two species: little brown bats and northern long-eared bats.

Populations of northern long-eareds have plummeted by as much as 99 percent across their core range in the eastern United States, yet industries such as timber, oil and gas have opposed the species’ protection. The Fish and Wildlife Service backed off its original recommendation for “endangered” listing and instead protected the species under the weaker “threatened” category earlier this month.

“The fact that white-nose has now spread to bats in more than half our states should be a wake-up call to federal regulators,” said Mollie Matteson, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity. “Our bats are running out of places to live. Whether or not industry wants these bats protected, we need to get it done.”

Read more in our press release.

250 Native Tule Elk Die Inside Fenced-in Area at Point Reyes National Seashore

More than 250 tule elk died inside a fenced area in California’s Point Reyes National Seashore between 2012 and 2014, National Park Service surveys show. While nearly half the elk inside the fenced area died, free-roaming elk outside the fence, with year-round access to water, increased by nearly a third.

Tule elk are native to California and live nowhere else in the world. From about 500,000 in the 1800s, only 28 animals remained before a reintroduction program brought their numbers up to a safer 4,300 elk in 25 herds. The fence at Point Reyes is a concession to livestock operators, who are now pushing the Park Service to even further expand their rights and subsidies — at the expense of the native elk — on this exceptionally beautiful piece of public land.

“Free-roaming Point Reyes elk are in jeopardy to benefit a few cattlemen,” said the Center for Biological Diversity’s Jeff Miller. “The loss of nearly half the Pierce Point elk herd highlights how important it is that the Park Service not cave to commercial interests on this precious national seashore.”

Read more at National Parks Traveler.

Legal Filing Fights to Protect Utah Prairie Dogs, Endangered Species Act

The Center for Biological Diversity joined allies in filing a legal brief Monday in a crucial case not only for protecting Utah prairie dogs but for all wildlife that need the help of the Endangered Species Act.

Last year property-rights groups for the first time won a case in federal court in Utah arguing that the Fish and Wildlife Service was constitutionally barred from protecting these prairie dogs — which have been on the endangered species list since 1973 — on private or state lands because they occur in only one state and don’t involve interstate commerce. If allowed to stand, the case would undermine the federal government’s ability to protect endangered species across the country and stymie its ability to regulate other activities that threaten public safety and the environment.

Fortunately the U.S. Department of Justice has appealed the decision, with our support.

Read more about Utah prairie dogs.

These 3 Countries Have More Endangered Mammals Than Any Other

If you had to guess which countries are losing the greatest number of endangered mammals to extinction, which would you pick? Actually, you don’t have to guess. There’s a new map that will show you, in no uncertain terms, where in the world we’re losing animals the fastest.

The top three “winners” of this unfortunate contest are Indonesia (184), Madagascar (114), Mexico (101), with India following close behind at 94.

The map below comes from information compiled by Eco Experts, using information gathered from the World Bank. The numbers spring starkly to life when presented as an image:

Countries in red have the highest losses of threatened mammal species. Image credit: Eco Experts

Why are these particular countries losing so many mammals so quickly? It’s a combination of factors. Each location is particularly high in biodiversity. There are vast numbers of animals living in these areas of the world. Indonesia, for example, is the country with the highest number of mammal species at 670. Brazil is second with 648. China follows with 551, and Mexico has 523.

Notice a trend? Lots of animals, but for each of these countries, lots of animal losses as well. This incredible richness of mammal life is no match for the voracious killing machines known as deforestation, habitat destruction and human encroachment. Many species, with no place to live, simply die off.

In some cases, such species exist nowhere else in the world. Eight of 101 threatened mammals in Mexico, for example, will be extinct if they disappear from that country. The same is true for 111 mammals in Madagascar.

Indonesia is a rich rain-forested area — the third largest in the world — containing more biological diversity than anywhere else. The Rainforest Action Network notes that even though its land area comprises only 1 percent of the Earth’s surface, Indonesia is home to 12 percent of all mammals, 10 percent of all plant species and 17 percent of all bird species. Among the threats to these animals’ survival is the pulp and paper industry, which is driving extensive rainforest loss.

Madagascar, about the size of Texas, is the world’s fifth largest island. Its lemurs are the single most endangered vertebrate animal on earth. Of 103 lemur species, a staggering 91 percent are considered threatened, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

In Mexico, agricultural practices directly threaten nearly half of its 101 endangered species, according to the IUCN. Logging is nearly as bad, followed by human development.

“This new data is really alarming and suggests we need to do something urgently if we are going to prevent the extinction of these species,” Jon Whiting of Eco Experts said.

“The most depressing element is that each of these threats are a direct result of human activity and our impact on the natural world,” Whiting added. “Many of our most beautiful species are just silently slipping away, so it is incredibly important to raise awareness and pressure nations to be more responsible.”

Yes, this crisis is man-made. Of course it is — and the world’s governments must act quickly if it is to stop.

Susan Bird|April 22, 2015

Canada’s Seal Hunt Is Happening and It’s Awful As Ever

Animal advocates from around the world have been working to stop Canada’s commercial seal hunts for decades, yet the government continues to insist on propping this dying industry up and perpetuating the indisputable cruelty that takes place on the ice floes every year during what has become the largest slaughter of marine mammals on earth.

Even though there’s virtually no market left for seal products, this year the government issued a quota of 400,000 harp seals, 60,000 grey seals and 8,200 hooded seals for their fur. Government officials continue to justify the hunt, saying it is highly regulated and “conducted safely and humanely.”

Even with regulations in place, advocates for seals continue to argue they’re impossible to enforce. And the conditions the of the hunt’s environment, combined with the speed at which sealers work, cause inexcusable suffering.

Despite the continued defense of this industry and millions wasted on subsidies, animal advocates are still proving to the world it continues to be anything but humane. These seals are dying needlessly for a product that’s no longer a wanted. The Humane Society International/Canada just released photos and video footage taken from the air off the coast of Newfoundland this month exposing the brutal violence that continues to take place out of the public’s view.

Rebecca Aldworth, executive director of HSI/Canada describes the scene during her 17th year in a row witnessing this horror:

On the ice, a baby seal is shot but then opens her mouth and cries. A sealer reaches over the side of the boat with a long gaff and impales her, dragging her onto the deck to club her. Another pup is shot and desperately tries to crawl away as the blood spills out of him. A baby seal covered in blood thrashes around until she slips into the water.

Despite the ongoing brutality, deaths and waste of lives, there are many reasons to hope we will see the end. Globally, 35 nations have closed their doors to seal products, prices for pelts are dropping and fewer sealers are taking part every year.

Carino Processing Ltd, Canada’s largest buyer of seal pelts, just announced it won’t be buying anything this year, because it still has a stockpile from last year it can’t sell. This week, the Canadian Sealers Association also announced it would be scaling back because of financial challenges.

Now, organizations including HSI/Canada and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, which have both been working to shut the commercial hunts down, are calling on the government to do the only logical thing it can at this point: support a federal buyout of sealing licenses and end commercial hunts once and for all.

“Commercial sealing has been kept alive through government subsidies for decades. It is not in the best interests of sealers and their communities to offer hollow promises of markets that will never exist. Instead, our government should invest in a fair transition program for sealers and the development of viable economic alternatives. HSI/Canada would like to work with sealers to convince the government to act,” said Aldworth in a statement.

For more info on how to support bringing this slaughter to an end, visit the International Fund for Animal Welfare and the Humane Society International/Canada.

Alicia Graef|April 22, 2015

Wild & Weird

Famous Cougar That Was Holed Up Under L.A. House Returns to Wild

Cougar made famous by National Geographic photo has spent three years in urban area.

The most famous cougar in Hollywood doesn’t work in television. And he’s male. For the past three years, a male mountain lion has been living in the center of bustling Los Angeles, crossing 10-lane highways, getting his picture taken near the Hollywood sign, and attracting worldwide attention.

On Tuesday morning, the cat was holed up in a crawlspace in a home in Los Feliz, attracting a new round of attention, with news crews staking out the property. But by about noon local time the cougar was confirmed back in its wilderness home in Griffith Park, says Janice Mackey, a spokesperson for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The cat was no longer visible in the home’s crawlspace by around 9 a.m. but it wasn’t until a few hours later that biologists were able to pinpoint its exact location, using telemetry equipment to track the animal’s radio collar, which was previously purchased with a grant from the National Geographic Society. Officials were concerned that the mountain lion was still hiding in the neighborhood, but the radio collar confirmed it was a mile and a half into the park’s wilderness.

Workers installing a security system at the house had come face to face with the predatory cat on Monday and then reported it to state wildlife officials, who tried to scare it off Tuesday morning by pelting it with tennis balls and bean bags.

“People really need to get out of the way so the cat will move,” Steve Winter, a National Geographic photographer who made the cat famous by photographing it with camera traps for a December 2013 magazine article, said earlier Tuesday morning. The cat is known as P-22 by biologists.

In fact, officials kept media and neighbors away from the crawlspace, which was in the back of the house, says Mackey, in order to encourage the animal to flee.

And that’s just what happened. “The cougar has left the area,” says Mackey, though no one saw it slink off.

Elusive Cat

P-22 ended up in Griffith Park about three years ago, says Winter, who has spent many days over the past several years photographing the animal. At more than 4,000 acres, the area is the largest municipal park with urban wilderness in the United States.

This file video explains how the mountain lion known as P-22 was tracked across Los Angeles.

To get there, the cat “crossed two of the busiest freeways in the U.S. and walked right by Century City, where George Clooney lives,” Winter says.

In Griffith Park, the cat has thrived, thanks to an abundance of game, especially deer. The animal is active primarily at night and has been rarely seen by the public.

The cougar looks healthy, says Jeff Sikich, a biologist with the National Park Service that helped track him Tuesday. “He has been eating well, and he has recovered from mange,” says Sikich.

P-22 had been captured by biologists last year and treated for the disease. He’s thought to be about five years old, Sikich added.

Because the park is surrounded by development and the edges aren’t smooth transitions, the mountain lion occasionally wanders down roads and through yards, according to the movements recorded on his radio collar.

The fact that the cat did not attack the workers when they ended up eye to eye with him suggests that he is not a danger to people, Winter argues.

As far as his adventure in the crawlspace, “he’s going to learn not to do that again,” Winter predicts.

To help make sure of that, area homeowners should seal up any holes around their property, says Sikich. If you do encounter a wild mountain lion, don’t run, he adds. Make yourself look bigger and yell, and back away slowly if you need to.

Brian Clark Howard, National Geographic |April 14, 2015

Wild chimps look both ways before crossing roads

 

Screech! Bang! It’s the sound we all dread when crossing busy roads. Now, it turns out that like us, wild chimpanzees learn to respect roads, adopting the same cautious drills as humans, including looking both ways to check for traffic.

Hopefully, by studying how chimpanzees cope with roads, we can find ways to make them safer for wildlife, especially since road-building in Africa is on the increase.

In a 29-month survey, researchers observed and recorded 20 instances of wild chimps crossing a busy road in Sebitoli, in the northern part of Uganda’s Kibale National Park. They watched 122 chimps cross the highway used by 90 vehicles an hour, many speeding at 70 to 100 kilometres an hour.

It’s the first report on how chimpanzees behave crossing a very busy asphalt road, says Marie Cibot of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. “We’ve described chimpanzee behaviour facing a dangerous situation never described before,” she says, pointing out that earlier studies looked at narrower, unpaved and less busy roads.

Extra vigilance

Chimps are exceptionally cautious when they cross the road. Ninety-two per cent of them looked right, left, or both ways before or during crossing, and 57 per cent ran across – showing that they knew the value of reaching the other side as quickly as possible.

Alpha males led and organised 83 per cent of the road-crossing posses, compared with only 51 per cent of tree-climbing expeditions in the forest studied in parallel. This implies that they recognised the importance of extra vigilance during road crossings.

There was also evidence that healthy and dominant chimps often made sure that stragglers or more vulnerable members of the group crossed safely. Some 86 per cent of the healthy chimps looked back or stopped when at least one vulnerable individual, such as an infant or injured chimp, trailed behind.

Chimps behaved differently crossing a quiet road in an earlier study in Bossou, Guinea, led by Kimberley Hockings of the Centre for Research in Anthropology in Lisbon, Portugal.

“At Sebitoli, chimpanzees tended to split into smaller subgroups when crossing, whereas chimpanzees at Bossou often, but not always, crossed in progression lines,” says Hockings. “This might be down to a higher intensity and speed of traffic at Sebitoli, forcing chimpanzees to split up.”

Cibot now hopes to work with the Ugandan authorities to test new safety measures. “We aim to test mitigation measures such as bridges, underpasses, reduced speed limits, speed-bumps and police patrols in the area,” she says. “Road infrastructure is spreading throughout Africa to support regional development, industry and tourism, and studying chimpanzee adaptation facing roads represents a way to reduce the risk of collisions.”

Video: Wild chimps take care before crossing the road

Andy Coghlan|17 April 2015

Everglades

Caught in the Act: Anti-Conservation Forces Hire Actors for Fake Everglades Protest

From the perpetually busy “We Are Not Making This Up Department” here at the Florida Earthjustice office, we bring you an odd news item: It seems that opponents who don’t want the state to buy Everglades conservation land from Big Sugar actually hired actors to pretend to be protesters outside a government meeting.

The actor-protesters were exposed when a political group called Progress Florida released a screen shot of a local acting association’s “help wanted” posting on Facebook, offering $75 a day for folks to pose as protesters. The ad called for “Background Talent” and spelled out the job:

“Details: Basically to stand behind fence, holding banners or signs that will be provided. Clothing is almost anything!! Use common sense and don’t wear “club” outfits or gym clothes. Just wardrobe for a Political Rally…We will pay CASH of $75 at end of shoot.”

The post has since been taken down, but here’s the screen grab:

This Facebook group advertised for actors to protest a government purchase of Everglades land for conservation.

Photo courtesy of Facebook

The Palm Beach Post reports that the protest was sponsored by Tea Party of Miami and a group called Florida Citizens Against Waste.

It’s not clear who, exactly, paid the actors to show up outside the South Florida Water Management District, which is under pressure from actual local citizens who want the government to buy the land and use it as a place to store polluted agricultural runoff to help clean up the great marsh. This runoff is the same phosphorus and nitrogen-laden water I’ve written here, here and here about before in this space—the source of the green slime outbreaks on Florida’s east and west coasts.

“Big Sugar supporters hiring actors to pretend to protest is pathetic,” said Progress Florida executive director Mark Ferrulo. “Someone should ask who is paying for artificial sweetener to make polluting the Everglades and our drinking water easier to swallow.”

That’s a good question.

David Guest|Managing Attorney|Earthjustice|April 07, 2015

Water Quality Issues

Pesticides are polluting our waters — and we often don’t even know it

Most of the time, we lack any data at all on insecticide levels in waters near agricultural fields, a new study finds

Pesticides bring major benefits to modern agriculture, keeping dangerous bugs and fungi and pathogens at bay while boosting yields and making farming more efficient. But what about risks? Like any chemicals — manmade or not — pesticides can be bad for human health and ecosystems if they’re toxic enough and the amount that ends up in the environment is high enough. It’s often tough, however, to get a clear picture of the full array of problems a pesticide may cause.

A new “meta-analysis” — a review of existing scientific studies — provides some answers, but raises even more questions in the process. In water bodies near agricultural sites across the world where scientists have detected certain bug-killing pesticides, these substances exceed regulators’ allowed levels more than half the time, the analysis found. But even more concerning, the researchers report Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is that most of the time we lack any data at all on insecticide levels in waters near these agricultural fields.

Sebastian Stehle and Ralf Schulz of the University Koblenz-Landau in Germany focused their study on 28 common agricultural insecticides. These range from organophosphates, older substances that generally target insects’ nervous systems, to pyrethroids, a relatively new class of pesticides that in many cases have replaced organophosphates and other old pesticides. Many of these pesticides, while toxic to the bugs they’re meant kill, may also be capable of causing harm to “non-target” organisms such as humans.

The toxicity is just one part of the equation, though. Just because pesticides are toxic doesn’t mean they’ll actually pose risk — of causing a disease or damage to the environment. Creatures’ exposures to these pesticides need to be high enough as well. Regulators typically set limits on the amount of a substance that can occur in various settings, including in surface waters, to keep the risk to human health and the environment below a certain level.

So the researchers checked the scientific literature for any data they could find on levels of these 28 insecticides in “surface waters” (such as lakes, ponds, streams and creeks) near agricultural fields across the globe. Their analysis uncovered 838 studies, capturing data from 2,500 aquatic sites across 73 countries between 1962 and 2012. In these studies, the researchers found about 11,300 measurements for pesticide concentrations in surface waters, and compared these values to risk limits set by regulators in the U.S. and the European Union.

In the end, out of these 11,300 values, more than half of them (52 percent) breached U.S. or E.U. limits, the researchers found. These breaches occurred not just in countries with weak regulatory systems but, in similar amounts, in countries with well-established regulatory systems such as the United States, Canada, Australia, EU nations and Japan.

The researchers also raise concerns about what they didn’t find in the scientific literature: Measurements of insecticide concentrations were non-existent in surface waters near 90 percent of agricultural sites. That doesn’t mean that these lands’ surface waters are tainted with pesticides, much less that the pesticide levels are too high. But as the authors put it, we won’t know what the answer is until we get the data.

And in the cases where we do have data, the researchers say, “our results seriously challenge the protectiveness” of the current measures that regulators take to assess and reduce pesticides’ risks.

That doesn’t mean we should pull the plug on pesticides. But it does mean that in many cases, we may not be doing as good a job of keeping these risks in check as we’ve sought to do.

 Puneet Kollipara|April 13, 2015

Massive Swarms of Jellyfish Are Wreaking Havoc on Fish Farms and Power Plants

As the oceans get warmer, jellyfish are causing pain beyond their sting. 

The marine animals have shut power plants from Sweden to the U.S. while killing thousands of farmed fish in pens held off the U.K. coast. GPS devices normally used to track the behavior of house cats were attached to 18 barrel-jellyfish off the coast of northern France. The study upended previous assumptions about their movement. 

Climate change may be one reason more jellyfish are congregating in large numbers known as blooms, which can encompass millions of the creatures over tens of kilometers. Researchers are seeking to develop a system, akin to weather forecasting, to help predict their movement and prevent fish deaths, such as the loss of 300,000 salmon off Scotland last year, or power outages that shut a Swedish nuclear plant in 2013. 

“Jellyfish blooms may be increasing as a result of climate change and overfishing,” Graeme Hays, the leader of the group from Deakin University in Australia and Swansea University in the U.K. that did the research, said by phone Jan. 28. “They have a lot of negative impacts — clogging power station intakes, stinging people and killing fish in farms.” 

The study was conducted in 2011 with results published online in January by the journal Current Biology. Hays plans to replicate the work in Tasmania, Australia, where salmon farming is an industry valued at about A$550 million ($430 million) a year. 

Warmer Oceans 

Combined land and ocean surface temperatures have warmed 0.85 of a degree Celsius since 1880, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group established in 1988 by the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization to review information relevant to climate change. Global warming is “unequivocal” and many observed changes since the 1950s are “unprecedented over decades to millennia,” it said in a 2014 report. 

“Warmer water is a dream come true for jellyfish,” Lisa-ann Gershwin, a marine scientist who has studied the creatures for about 25 years and author of Stung!: On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean, said by phone Feb. 4. “It amps up their metabolism so they grow faster, eat more, breed more and live longer.” 

Diablo Canyon 

A bloom of jellyfish from the genus Aurelia, known as Moon Jelly, that can grow as large as 40 centimeters (16 inches) in diameter, shut Sweden’s biggest nuclear reactor on the Baltic coast for two days in 2013 after blocking the cooling water inlet. The creatures caused similar outages in the U.S., Japan and Scotland, including at Electricite de France SA’s Torness plant in 2011. 

“It’s a very rare phenomenon and on average has affected us only once every ten years,” Sue Fletcher, a spokeswoman for EDF, said by e-mail Feb. 6. 

While local fisherman helped EDF clear the jellyfish that halted Torness, power plants employ a number of methods to try and stop marine creatures. Diablo Canyon, a nuclear station on the California coast operated by PG&E Corp., has automated screens that remove the animals at the intake, and can deploy an air bubble curtain system to disperse and deflect incoming hordes, the company said in an e-mail Feb. 20. 

The lack of long-term data makes it difficult to conclude if blooms are increasing as oceans warm, according to scientists Hays and Gershwin. While more study is required, jellyfish continue to disrupt operations, contributing to the death of salmon at a Loch Duart Ltd. farm off Scotland in November. 

Fish Farms 

“Once the bloom is at the net, you’ve really got a problem,” Nick Joy, the managing director of Loch Duart, which lost almost 20 percent of its stock after a horde of Pelagia noctiluca invaded pens and stung the fish, said by phone Feb. 13. “A prediction system would be as useful to us as a weather forecast, it would be crucial.” 

Jellyfish of various sizes affect aquatic farms. Smaller creatures can slip through the mesh of a pen and clog or sting gills, while larger animals can push up against a net and restrict the flow of water, starving the fish of oxygen, Marine Harvest, the world’s largest grower, said by e-mail Feb. 14. 

The research group that monitored the barrel-jellyfish off France established that the marine creatures can swim against the current, rather than drift passively, providing an insight into how they form blooms, according to Deakin University’s Hays. Further study is required to determine if this is a feature of all, or only some species, Hays said. 

The ocean globally will continue to warm during the 21st century and marine organisms will face progressively lower oxygen levels, the UN panel said in its report. Jellyfish have the ability to store oxygen in their tissue, allowing them to survive in a deficient environment, according to Gershwin, director of the Australian Marine Stinger Advisory Services. 

“Blooms are our best visible indicator that something is wrong with the ocean,” she said. “Stinging is the least of our worries.” 

Ben Sharples|Bloomberg.net|4/21/15

Duke Energy Coal Ash Ponds Contaminate Wells, Residents Told Not to Drink the Water

Consequences of Duke Energy’s massive coal ash spill into North Carolina’s Dan River last February are still being felt, as dozens of residents near the site have been warned by state officials Tuesday not to drink or cook with the water from wells after tests results showed toxic contamination, according to a report from the Associated Press.

Eighty-seven private wells near eight of Duke’s plants showed results that failed to meet state groundwater standards, the state’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources said. In documents received by the AP, test results showed readings for vanadium—a possible carcinogenic to humans, and a chemical linked to neurological and developmental problems in lab animals—as high as 86 times the state groundwater standard of 0.3 parts per billion.

This unsettling report comes after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Duke both announced the cleanup’s completion in July.

The AP also reported that three Duke Energy employees supplied bottled water for some residents in November and allegedly told them to keep it secret from their neighbors.

“They asked us to not say anything,” Levene Mahaley, 83, who has lived near Duke’s Buck power plant since 1954 told the AP. “Just don’t mention it, that we’re getting water. I was surprised, but we didn’t ask any questions at the time.” Test results from Mahaley’s well showed readings for vanadium as high as 26 parts per billion.

When the AP asked Duke about the incident, spokeswoman Erin Culbert said the company was “not aware of any expectation” that the Mahaley residence was to stay quiet.

Test results came from private wells near Duke’s Buck, Allen, Asheville, Belews Creek, Cliffside, Marshall, Roxboro and Sutton power plants, where coal ash is stored. Several residents near the plants received a state letter about contamination in their well water.

Duke believes that chemicals found in the private wells are occurring naturally. “Based on the test results we’re reviewed thus far, we have no indication that Duke Energy plant operations have influenced neighbors’ well water,” the company said in a statement.

Environmental advocates, however, are crying foul. “For more than a year, Duke Energy has repeatedly denied even the possibility of drinking water contamination from its leaking coal ash dumps.” Pete Harrison a staff attorney for Waterkeeper Alliance told EcoWatch. “Now we’re learning that Duke has known at least since last October that toxic heavy metals associated with coal ash is showing up in the water people are drinking.”

Despite the test results and advice to not use the water for drinking or cooking, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources said the well water would still meet federal standards for municipal water supplies in nearly all cases.

“All the while, Governor McCrory’s administration has been complicit in sweeping this critical information under the rug, so it’s no surprise that his Department of Environment and Natural Resources is refusing to take control of the situation and ensure that all affected residents have clean, safe water to drink,” Harrison added.

Lorraine Chow|April 22, 2015

Offshore & Ocean

Whales Blow Hole in Sonar Plan

Whales, dolphins, sea turtles and many other marine mammals, not to mention everyone here at Earthjustice, are celebrating a court ruling that promises relief from harmful Navy weapons and sonar testing in the Pacific Ocean.

On March 31, a federal judge ruled that the National Marine Fisheries Service broke the law when it approved the U.S. Navy’s five-year Pacific weapons testing and training plan. The agency had concluded that the Navy’s use of sonar, explosives and vessel strikes would threaten thousands of ocean dwellers with permanent hearing loss, lung damage and death—but approved it anyway.

How loud is sonar?

Earthjustice

Ever wonder what sonar sounds like out on the water? To humans, it’s unpleasantly reminiscent of nails on a chalkboard, but it can spell disaster for marine mammals that depend on hearing for survival. A single “ping” of the Navy’s most powerful sonar is capable of permanently deafening some whales. According to the government’s own estimates, the Navy’s plan would cause an estimated 9.6 million instances of harm to marine mammals over the plan’s five-year duration.

Earthjustice filed this lawsuit in 2013 in the U.S. District Court of Hawai‘i, representing Conservation Council for Hawai‘i, the Animal Welfare Institute, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Ocean Mammal Institute, alleging violations of the National Environmental Policy Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act and Endangered Species Act.

The National Environmental Policy Act requires that federal agencies consider a range of alternatives to their proposed plans, including alternatives that can reduce the threat of environmental harm. We sued because the Fisheries Service and the Navy failed to evaluate alternatives that would protect biologically sensitive areas from training and testing.

Having failed to require such protections, the Fisheries Service authorized harm to what the court described as a “stunning number of marine mammals,” violating its legal duties under the Endangered Species Act. This law exists to ensure that activities like Navy training would not push endangered whales to extinction.  The Fisheries Service also violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which serves to prevent harm to marine mammal populations.

The Fisheries Service has already identified vital areas to protect for whales, dolphins and other marine mammals around the Hawaiian Islands and off the coast of Southern California. In 2004, Navy sonar training near Hawai‘i was implicated in a mass stranding of up to 200 melon-headed whales in Kaua‘i’s Hanalei Bay. Given events like this, it is shocking that the agency gave the Navy free rein to train throughout the Pacific without protecting biologically sensitive areas. The court’s ruling serves as an important reminder that the federal government has a responsibility to protect both our national security and our natural heritage.

The court’s decision recognizes that the Navy doesn’t need every inch of the Pacific for training. There is plenty of ocean for the Navy to carry out its mission and also to avoid severe harm to marine mammals by staying out of a small number of biologically sensitive areas. 

David Henkin|April 15, 2015

Click here to listen to David Henkin speak about this case on Hawai‘i Public Radio.

Runoff from Lake Tarpon still clogs tip of Old Tampa Bay

TAMPA — While the quality of water in most of Tampa Bay continues to improve with expanding beds of seagrass and robust life above and below the surface, the northernmost tip of Old Tampa Bay remains choked with muck and unpredictable algae blooms.

It’s a situation the Tampa Bay Estuary Program and other water resource agencies have been grappling with for years, and a recently released study may give some guidance on how to make the northern portion of the bay well again.

The noose around the upper expanse of Old Tampa Bay includes the Courtney Campbell Causeway, which cuts off the natural flushing flow of water. Contributing to the problem: the nutrient-rich water flowing into the northern bay from a variety of wastewater treatment plants and a canal that drains Lake Tarpon into the bay.

Nutrients in the water cause oxygen-gobbling algae to bloom, clouding the water. Cloudy water in turn blocks out sunlight, which kills the seagrass beds critical to the life cycle of a healthy estuarine system.

Some tarpon fishermen have given up angling there because they can’t see the game fish in the murky water. Some fishing guides say that when algae blooms in summer, the bait dies of asphyxiation before it can be snapped up by game fish.

All of this didn’t stop John Blauvelt of Odessa and Kim Singleton of Oldsmar from grabbing their fishing poles and heading out to the Upper Tampa Bay Park late Friday morning to wade along the mangrove-clogged shoreline in search of reds and snook.

“This is our first time fishing here,” Blauvelt said. “We’ve heard a lot of good things about this spot.”

He said they often fish along the Pinellas side of the upper portion of the bay and have had good luck.

“It’s a little murkier than Fort DeSoto,” he said, “but that’s OK.”

Environmentalists say seagrass beds have all but disappeared along the northern expanse of Old Tampa Bay and the summer algae blooms leave oily, brownish slicks on the surface, though much of the shoreline remains scenic and undisturbed, making it a popular spot for kayaking and canoeing.

In fall 2011, the estuary program spearheaded a $2 million, three-year study to identify the causes of the problems and offer possible solutions.

The study utilized a sophisticated computer model that incorporated environmental elements such as wind and water circulation, sediment composition, salinity, nutrients and other factors. The study determined a few reasons why the upper expanse of Old Tampa Bay is the way it is:

♦ water treatment plants in Hillsborough and Pinellas counties discharge treated water into the bay;

♦ nutrient-rich water from Lake Tarpon, a basin for stormwater runoff from much of the area east of U.S. 19 in northern Pinellas County, flows directly into the bay via a man-made canal;

♦ the Courtney Campbell Causeway, built eight decades ago, prevents the natural flushing motion from reaching the northern part of the bay, with the only connections to the lower bay being the main bridge near Tampa and a much smaller bridge to the west, close to Clearwater.

The study’s solutions: add more bridges and culverts to the causeway; divert flow from Lake Tarpon to other areas away from the bay; and better treatment for the discharges from wastewater treatment plants or use of reclaimed water programs.

None of these fixes is cheap, said Nanette Holland O’Hara, public outreach coordinator with the estuary program, which has made the restoration of the upper portion of the bay a priority.

A summary of the exhaustive report states: “The biggest boost … would come from a combination of reducing nitrogen loadings from storm-water runoff by 25 percent and reusing the treated wastewater … that is currently discharged to Old Tampa Bay.

“Together, those changes would cut current nitrogen loading rates substantially, resulting in clearer water and fostering sea grass growth. The price tag of this option ranges from $508 million to nearly $1 billion, but water managers note that plans to redirect some wastewater discharges to reclaimed water systems already are on the horizon.”

O’Hara said eliminating the nutrient-laden runoff from Lake Tarpon alone could cost an estimated $400 million. Diverting the water coming down the canal — perhaps even to supplement drinking water supplies — would improve water quality and reduce muck buildup in the Safety Harbor/Oldsmar area, she said.

“It will cost lots of money for all these things,” O’Hara said. “This is something for the communities and elected officials to look at when they do their long-range planning. These are not projects that are going to happen overnight, but maybe over the next decade or 20 years. We’ve learned that it doesn’t take a long time between reducing the source of pollution and seeing a response in the bay.”

Overall, she said, the goal remains the same: reduce nitrogen, storm-water runoff and wastewater discharges, with the flow from Lake Tarpon via the large canal the main concern.

“Continuing to reduce nitrogen is the most cost-effective thing we can do,” she said.

The three-year study that evaluated water quality was conducted by Janicki Environmental, a St. Petersburg consulting firm, and funded largely through a grant from the Southwest Florida Water Management District. It examined nutrient influxes, hydrologic changes and water circulation patterns and how those factors affected the region.

Hydrologists for a long time figured the biggest problem was the flow patterns being obstructed by the causeway, which links Tampa and Clearwater. But that was disputed in the report, which said the causeway’s shunting of the flow of water doesn’t compare to the ills brought about by the nutrient-rich water flowing into the bay from the wide variety of sources.

While the northern tip of the bay struggles, the lower portion is healthier than it has been in more than a half century. Last year was the third consecutive year that water quality goals were met, a first.

“Overall, water quality from 2011-2014 remains as good as it was in the 1950s and we are within 3,350 acres of reaching our goal of 38,000 acres of sea grass baywide,” said estuary program executive director Holly Greening in a statement last month. “Tampa Bay is widely viewed as a national model of regional cooperation to achieve environmental results. The progress we have made together is also reaping economic dividends, with a recent study by the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Council showing that one in every five jobs in the watershed depends on a healthy bay.”

The watershed covers most of Hillsborough and Pinellas counties and parts of Pasco and Manatee.

The most recent annual analysis shows a robust ecosystem in all four major bay segments: Lower Tampa Bay, Middle Tampa Bay, Hillsborough Bay and part of Old Tampa Bay that is south of the Courtney Campbell Causeway. Good quality water means continued recovery of seagrass beds, which provide home to small fish, shrimp and crabs, all food for larger game fish.

Since 1999, seagrasses have been expanding along the lower portions of the bay at a rate of 738 acres per year.

“The mission of our program is to recover seagrasses in the bay, to control the amount of nitrogen in the water,” O’Hara said. Nitrogen comes from industrial pollution, emissions of vehicles, fertilizers that wash into the bay, power plants and other sources, she said.

Industries are working to reduce pollutants and public awareness of how to fertilize lawns and crops is taking hold, she said. More fuel-efficient cars on the road also make a difference, she said.

The goal of 38,000 acres of seagrass in Tampa Bay could be realized by the end of this year, maybe next year, O’Hara said.

“None of Tampa Bay is ever going to be like it was before anyone lived here,” she said. “Our goal is to get it back to what it looked like in the 1950s. We have data from then and we know the seagrass acreage then and the number of people who lived here. That provides good baseline data.

“Getting the bay to look like it did in 1950 is a very realistic goal.”

Keith Morelli|Tribune Staff|April 19, 2015

TAMPA BAY FACTS

♦ Tampa Bay is the largest open-water estuary in Florida, covering nearly 400 square miles and bordering three counties: Hillsborough, Manatee and Pinellas. The bay’s sprawling watershed covers a land area nearly five times as large, at 2,200 square miles.
♦  More than 100 tributaries flow into Tampa Bay, including dozens of meandering, brackish-water creeks and four major rivers: the Hillsborough, Alafia, Manatee and Little Manatee.
♦  A single quart of bay water may contain as many as 1 million phytoplankton — microscopic single-celled plants that are an essential thread in the marine food chain.
♦  More than 200 species of fish are found in Tampa Bay.
♦  Mangrove-blanketed islands in Tampa Bay support the most diverse colonial waterbird nesting colonies in North America, annually hosting 40,000 pairs of 25 different species of birds, including white ibis, great blue heron and reddish egret, the rarest heron in the nation.
♦  Each square meter of bay sediment contains an average of 10,000 animals, mostly tiny, burrowing worms, crustaceans and other mud-dwellers that are known as benthic invertebrates.
♦  On average, Tampa Bay is only 12 feet deep. Man-made shipping channels have been dredged to allow large ships safe passage to Port Tampa Bay and other bay harbors. The largest of these, the main shipping channel, is 43 feet deep.
Source: The Tampa Bay Estuary Program

Most Humpback Whales Will Lose Protection Under New Proposal

This week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced some big changes for humpback whales with a proposal to remove federal protection for most of their populations around the world. Conservationists fear the move is premature and could jeopardize their future.

Humpback whales, which were once severely threatened by commercial whaling, were protected globally under the under the Endangered Species Conservation Act in 1970 before it was replaced by the Endangered Species Act in 1973.

Now, according to NOAA, that protection, along with a global moratorium on whaling, have helped them recover to the point where most of their populations can be delisted.

Under NOAA’s proposal, humpback whales will be divided into 14 distinct population groups around the world. Of those, ten will be removed from protection. Two populations who live in Central America and the Western North Pacific will be listed as “threatened” and two populations in the Arabian Sea and Northwest Africa would remain listed as “endangered.”

“The return of the iconic humpback whale is an ESA success story,” said Eileen Sobeck, assistant NOAA administrator for fisheries. “As we learn more about the species — and realize the populations are largely independent of each other — managing them separately allows us to focus protection on the animals that need it the most.”

Even though they’re successfully continuing to return from the brink and would still be protected from hunting and harassment under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, some conservationists are worried that the move to delist them is being made far too soon.

“It’s heartening to see that some humpback whales are recovering, but it’s premature to remove protections when so many threats, like climate change and ocean noise, are increasing,” said Miyoko Sakashita, oceans director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Since commercial whaling ended, humpbacks have enjoyed protection, but they’re still drowning in fishing gear and getting hit by ships.”

In addition to climate change, noise and entanglement, humpbacks also continue face threats from pollution, habitat degradation, overfishing and ocean acidification, which could affect their food sources.

Ship strikes that can be fatal are another major ongoing and growing worry. After recent petitions were filed by Alaska and Hawaii to delist them in the Pacific, scientists raised concerns that even more of these collisions will happen as more ships and species of whales, including humpbacks, head farther north into newly-ice free arctic waters.

Still others argue that splitting them up and declaring recovery successful for some groups is more complicated than it sounds.

Regina Asmutis-Silvia, executive director and senior biologist for Whale and Dolphin Conservation also said the move is premature, telling the The Gaurdian, “It’s not so simple as drawing a line and saying: ‘They belong to this population and there’s a lot of them so we are going to take them off the list.’”

She added that we should all be concerned. Not only do these whales play a valuable role in maintaining healthy marine ecosystems, but they also have an economic value as one of the top species sought out by whale watching ventures.

NOAA will be holding public hearings in Hawaii, Alaska, Massachusetts and Virginia this May and June and has opened a 90-day public comment period. Concerned individuals wishing to submit a comment can do so at the Federal Register.

A Record Number of Sea Lion Pups Starve as Humans Continue Overfishing

Starving California sea lion pups are washing up on the state’s beaches in unprecedented numbers this year, overwhelming marine mammal rescue centers and alarming scientists.

A record 2,250 sea lions have inundated the coast after being prematurely abandoned by their mothers. This number is 20 times the average of the last decade for the first three months of the year, according to Reuters.

Scientists believe that overfishing of sardines, whose numbers are at about 1% of what they were in the 1930s, has forced mother sea lions to venture farther out to sea to look for food. When the mothers don’t return soon enough, the pups must resort to taking to the sea on their own without the proper skills to survive.

About 70% of the sea lion pups born this year are expected to die of starvation, Geoff Shester, the California campaign director of Oceana, wrote in the SacBee.

Warmer water due to global warming is also to blame for the scarcity of forage fish.

Smithsonian Magazine featured a few ecologists in an article questioning the logic behind rescuing these sea lion pups and releasing them back into an ecosystem that already failed them.

“Where are those sea lions going to go? Right now, there just isn’t enough food out there,” consulting ecologist in San Francisco Josiah Clark told the magazine. “Clark says starving predators like the sea lions are a clear symptom of serious problems lower down on the food chain. In this case, climate change may be disrupting essential weather patterns – and bottle-feeding baby sea lions is not helping,” the magazine reported.

Pelagic Shark Research Foundation Sean Van Sommeran suggested in the same article that “a better use of time would be to simply pick up trash – especially plastic – off the beach, and let nature have its way with sea lion pups.”

It’s hard to image feeling good about our overfed selves as we step over thousands of starving babies to gather plastic we put there in the first place.

Then there is the irony of the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission, which is charged with protecting ailing salmon runs on the Columbia River in Oregon, where adult California sea lions have flocked en masse to get a share of the populous smelt.

Biologists working to protect the salmon, which are expected to be next on the menu for the sea lions once the smelt season dissipates, must also manage sport and commercial fishermen, who for some inexplicable reason are still allowed a take of the endangered salmon.

Most concerning for humans with an interest in taking more salmon are the sea lions who make their way up the river to forage at the base of the Bonneville Dam, where salmon congregate before making their trek up the fish ladders.

Since 2008, NOAA Fisheries has granted Washington and Oregon permission to kill 55 of the sea lions attempting to survive on fish that has kept them persisting for millennia.

“This year, NOAA will continue to help pay for lethal removals of sea lions below Bonneville, even as the agency funds the rescue of sea lions dying on California beaches,” according to the Seattle Times.

Tina Page|April 22, 2015

Ocean ‘economy’ heading for collapse

(CNN)The world’s seventh-largest economy is heading toward collapse. An economic powerhouse conservatively valued at $24 trillion, one that annually churns out the equivalent of $2.5 trillion, is under assault. However, I am not referring to one of the G8 economies, but to the “super economy” of the ocean. It’s one that for far too long has been ignored and taken for granted — and it is going downhill fast.

The health and wealth of the ocean are assessed in a WWF report released Thursday, Reviving the Ocean Economy. The report is the result of a hard economic analysis performed by The Boston Consulting Group built on a foundation of the latest ocean science provided by the Global Change Institute of the University of Queensland.

True, the enormity of the ocean can complicate any single appraisal. But it is still important to try to understand its value if global leaders are ever going to sustain it for future generations.

The fact is that the ocean feeds us, employs us, offers protection and plays a direct role in the lives and livelihoods of people throughout the world. The ocean also provides intangible but essential services to humanity, such as climate regulation and oxygen production, that are difficult to put in monetary terms. And while we all may look at the ocean from different perspectives, no one can escape the fact that it is a shared resource that provides for each and every one of us.

A figure that may get lost in the headlines generated by our report is perhaps most telling: Seventy percent of the ocean’s overall economic value relies on its continued health. Ocean assets like fisheries, coral reefs, mangroves and seagrasses that produce goods and services rivaling the world’s top 10 economies will lose their value if we continue to over-exploit and outright destroy them.

That may seem like a far-off possibility to some, but it is a future foretold by the many details in this report. For example, 90 percent of the world’s fish stocks are either fully exploited or over-exploited. And that is not all. By 2050 — only a few decades from now — it is possible that the ocean could lose its coral reefs, which have already been halved in the last few decades. This isn’t just a concern for dive enthusiasts, but to the hundreds of millions of people that rely on ocean resources for their daily meals and their weekly paychecks.

The ocean is truly too big to fail. The loss of the ocean’s critical habitats and species would have a devastating ripple effect on global food security and economies that no government bailout could salvage. Fortunately, our report identifies actions that would revive the ocean economy, three of which are critical this year.

First, the international community must rally around a set of sustainable development goals that clearly reflect the link between the environment — including the ocean — and human well-being. Also, negotiators meeting in Paris later this year must agree on an ambitious global climate deal that sets us on the path to avert the worst impacts of climate change. And finally, leaders must commit to conserving increasing amounts of coastal and marine areas over the course of the next 15 years.

The economic case for why the ocean is so critical to livelihoods around the world is clear, and we will not be able to plead ignorance if we collectively preside over the collapse of the ocean economy. Reviving the Ocean Economy is dedicated to helping us avoid that outcome, but it will require political vision and courage among policymakers.

All this said, and as terrifying as it is that the deterioration of the ocean’s health has been its fastest in millions of years, there is actually some (potential) good news: If we act swiftly and with determination, marine resources can recover — and recover quickly. Many local examples — from the Mediterranean to the Mozambique Channel, from the Fiji archipelago to the Arctic — show us that conservation, restoration and sustainable-use approaches mean the ocean, and the people who depend on it, can both prosper.

Ultimately, the ocean bridges continents, connects cultures and offers equal opportunity inspiration and we should therefore work together in support of this vital shared resource. But if we are to have any chance of avoiding the point of no return, we must find ways of reaching genuine global commitments on sustainable development and climate. After all, it’s far better to avoid an economic collapse than be forced to scramble to pick up the pieces.

Marco Lambertini|April 23, 2015

Wildlife and Habitat

Three new havens for tigers

In a move that comes soon after the tiger census in January showed an overall rise in numbers of the big cat, the Centre is set to form three new tiger reserves.

In-principle approval has been accorded by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) for creation of reserves in Ratapani in Madhya Pradesh, Sunabeda in Odisha and Guru Ghasidas in Chhattisgarh, Union Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar informed the Lok Sabha on Tuesday.

Odisha is among the States where the tiger population has dwindled. The NTCA also accorded final approval to a proposal to declare Kudremukh National Park in Karnataka and Rajaji National Park in Uttarakhand as tiger reserves. Seeking to provide more protected spaces for the endangered species, State governments have been asked to send conservation proposals for the following areas: Suhelwa in Uttar Pradesh, Mhadei in Goa, Srivilliputtur Grizzled Squirrel Wildlife Sanctuary/ Meghamalai Wildlife Sanctuary/ Varushanadu Valley in Tamil Nadu, Dibang in Arunachal Pradesh and Cauvery-MM Hills in Karnataka.

Punishments for violation of tiger reserve rules and hunting or altering the boundaries of tiger reserves have been enhanced. As per the Ministry’s country-level assessment, India hosted an estimated 2226 tigers in 2014.

Diverted for mining

However, in reply to another question, Mr. Javadekar revealed that over one lakh hectares of forest land has been diverted for mining projects. Chhattisgarh witnessed the largest such diversion.

Vidya Venkat

5 Big Environmental Wins of 2014

One of the great challenges of our time is saving the natural environment and the rich array of life it supports on land and in the sea.  Every day,  Pew is working across the globe to preserve wilderness, restore biodiversity, and increase understanding of ocean ecology. In 2014, we joined our partners in celebrating successes around the world that will help conserve wildlife habitat and pristine landscapes for future generations.

Bristol Bay:  Beauty and Bounty

Home to millions of birds and 25 species of marine mammals, Alaska’s Bristol Bay is one of the most magnificent seascapes in the world—and the heart of a region that accounts for more than 40 percent of U.S. seafood. After working with the people of the region and the commercial fishing industry, Pew was thrilled when the Obama administration put more than 52,000 square miles of Bristol Bay off-limits to energy development in December 2014.

The Australian Outback—Managed by Those Who Know It Best

The land down under is a place of overwhelming beauty; a place ecologically threatened by wildfires, invasive species, and development; and a place sacred to indigenous populations. Creating Indigenous Protected Areas—large tracts of wilderness managed with a combination of cultural knowledge and contemporary scientific methods  by the descendants of people who lived on these lands for centuries—is vital to conserving the Australian Outback.  In 2014, the federal government created three new Indigenous Protected Areas, covering 27.3 million acres in Western Australia.

When It Comes to Marine Reserves, Bigger Can Be Better 

The world should welcome the first generation of large marine reserves, extending the idea of national parks to the sea. Last September, Pew supported the expansion of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, originally created by President George W. Bush in 2006. The enlarged reserve doubles the amount of highly protected U.S. ocean territory.

News From the North: On the Way to Protecting 1 Billion Acres

Canada’s boreal forest cleanses the air we breathe and is home to a rich array of wildlife. Last year, the government of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador agreed to conserve 9.8 million acres of intact boreal forest for at least 10 years. Manitoba and Quebec protected another 1.3 million acres. And the Northwest Territories preserved 18.9 million acres of parks and refuges. With more than 740 million acres now protected, committed for protection, or pledged to be sustainably developed, Pew is making great progress toward our goal of saving 1 billion acres of the boreal by 2022.

This Land Is Your Land

The Wilderness Act turned 50 in 2014 and, in bipartisan votes, Congress celebrated the conservation milestone by designating seven new wilderness areas. Additionally, President Barack Obama continued the more than century-old tradition in using the Antiquities Act to designate two national monuments: The 500,000-acre Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument in New Mexico and the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument that safeguards 350,000 acres near Los Angeles. Pew worked on behalf of all these national treasures alongside policymakers, local community leaders, and scientists to determine which public lands should be priorities for conservation and how best to protect them. By the end of 2014, more than 1.1 million acres of U.S. land had been newly preserved.

Justin Kenney|Senior Director| Communications|The Pew Charitable Trusts|April 22, 2015

Forestry

Rainforests are being destroyed but the Earth is getting GREENER: Researchers reveal huge expansion in world’s trees

Thousands of square miles of rainforest is cleared in the Amazon each year to make way for farming land – a pattern of destruction that takes place all around the world.

But despite this, the planet has got greener in the past decade, with the total amount of plant coverage increasing overall.

The increase is so noticeable that the world’s trees and plants now store almost four billion more tons of carbon than they did in 2003. 

Thousands of square miles of rainforest is cleared in the Amazon (pictured) each year to make way for farming land – a pattern of destruction that takes place all around the world – but despite this, the planet has got greener in the past decade, with the total amount of plant coverage increasing overall

This is thanks to tree-planting in China, forest regrowth in former Soviet states because of abandoned farms, and more lush savannas because of higher rainfall.

Scientists analysed 20 years of satellite data and found an increase in carbon, despite ongoing large-scale tropical deforestation in Brazil and Indonesia, according to research published on Monday in Nature Climate Change.

Carbon flows between the world’s oceans, air and land. 

It is present in the atmosphere primarily as carbon dioxide (CO2) – the main climate-changing gas – and stored as carbon in trees.

Through photosynthesis, trees convert carbon dioxide into the food they need to grow, locking the carbon in their wood.

The greening of Earth is thanks to tree-planting in China, forest regrowth in former Soviet states because of abandoned farms and more lush savannas because of abandoned farms and higher rainfall. An an image of a family on a farming collective in the USSR in 1935 is shown

WHY IS EARTH GETTING GREENER? 

The researchers say that Earth is getting greener thanks to a combination of environmental and financial factors.

There are more trees in China because of planting programs that have been running for a few decades.

Vegetation has increased on the savannahs of Australia, Africa and South America as a result of increasing rainfall.

Russia and former Soviet republics have seen the regrowth of forests since huge collective farms have been abandoned.

The increase of carbon in the atmosphere over the past decade has caused the ‘CO2 fertilization effect’ which has improved the growing conditions for plants a little.

As Earth gradually warms up and ice and permafrost melts in the Arctic, the ‘tree line’ is moving north, meaning there are more pine forests springing up.

While the four-billion-ton increase is helpful, it is small compared to the 60 billion tons of carbon released into the atmosphere by fossil fuel burning and cement production over the same period, said Yi Liu, the study’s lead author and a scientist at the University of New South Wales.

‘From this research, we can see these plants can help absorb some carbon dioxide, but there’s still a lot of carbon dioxide staying in the atmosphere,’ Dr Liu said by telephone from Sydney.

‘If we want to stabilize the current level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – and avoid the consequent impacts – it still requires us to reduce fossil fuel emissions.’

Dr Liu, who specialises in observing the water cycle, including rainfall and soil moisture, used a new technique of collecting satellite data on radio frequency radiation naturally emitted by the Earth to calculate the amount of vegetation in a given area.

Before, scientists measured vegetation through satellite images and other techniques, looking at canopy greenness and plant height.

He had expected to find increased forests in China, which has had tree-planting projects for two to three decades, as well as on abandoned farmland in former Soviet countries. 

China has had tree-planting projects for two to three decades and is now boosting the Earth’s greenery, researchers say. Here, two giant pandas rest on the outskirts of Chengdu in China’s Sichuan province

But he was surprised to discover the large expansion in vegetation due to higher rainfall on tropical savannas and shrublands in Australia, Africa and South America.

But these fragile gains may be easily lost, as weather patterns shift with climate change, he warned.

‘Savannas and shrublands are vulnerable to rainfall – one year can be very wet, and more carbon will be fixed in plants, but the next year can be very dry, and then we will lose the carbon fixed in previous years,’ Dr Liu explained. 

Louis Verchot, a research director at the Indonesia-based Centre for International Forestry Research, said Dr Liu’s findings were ‘by and large what we would expect in the warmer and wetter world that results from climate change’.

Declines is rainforest vegetation has been particularly dramatic in the Amazon and Indonesia’s provinces of Kalimantan and Sumatra. This image shows slash-and-burn agriculture in Mozambique

Researchers found a large expansion in vegetation due to higher rainfall on tropical savannas and shrublands in Australia, Africa and South America. The Savannah, Serengeti National Park, Tanzania pictured

DEFORESTATION IN THE AMAZON 

Over 2,300 square miles (6,000 square km) of Amazon Rainforest was destroyed in the 12 months to the end of July 2013, according to statistics from the Brazilian government.

This means that deforestation was up by 29 per cent and the most activity was seen in the states of Para and Mato, where more than 390 square miles (1,000 square km) of land was cleared in each location, the BBC reported. 

Before these figures, there was some decline in the clearing of the precious resource to make room for grazing animals and crops.

The increase is thought to be because of illegal logging and the building of new infrastructure such as roads and dams, as well as making space for farmers.

‘As ice and permafrost melt, they are being replaced by vegetation, and the tree line is moving north as the Arctic warms,’ he said by email.

Vegetation growth is also expected to increase due to rising CO2 in the atmosphere, known as the ‘CO2 fertilization effect,’which has improved the growing conditions for plants a little.

Dr Verchot said the value of Dr Liu’s study is that it puts a number on the contribution of vegetation to moderating greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere.

‘Hopefully this will lead to greater efforts to stop tropical forest loss and to promote sustainable use of ecosystems in ways that preserve enough of the carbon absorption function as we continue to pump CO2 into the atmosphere through fossil fuel burning,’ Dr Verchot added.

Declines is rainforest vegetation has been particularly dramatic in the Amazon and Indonesia’s provinces of Kalimantan and Sumatra.

Scientists are particularly alarmed by land clearances in these areas because the forests are richer and more diverse habitats than grassland, for example, and absorb more carbon per hectare than savannah and croplands.

While total plant cover may have increased over the past decade, it is arguably of lower quality than that found in rainforests, which also support networks of rare inter-dependent species.

The report said that only half of rainforest loss has been offset by growth in other types of forests.

Mark Prigg and Sarah Griffiths|MailOnline|6 April 2015

Ten Favorite Trees for Wildlife

McDonald’s Pledges to Eliminate Deforestation From Its Entire Supply Chain

In the face of declining sales, McDonald’s has been making a number of moves to bolster its market share—and its reputation. Over the last few months, the world’s most profitable fast food chain announced that it will stop selling chicken raised with antibiotics, raise its U.S. employees’ salaries by at least $1 an hour, and bring back “third pounders” to compete head-to-head with its premium burger rivals.

But the company saved what could amount to be its most important announcement for today. It pledged to only buy food and raw materials from around the world that don’t contribute to deforestation, a significant contributor to global warming. Given McDonald’s reach, that’s a potential game-changer.

Two other top fast food chains—Dunkin’ Brands, parent of Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins, and Yum! Brands, owner of KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell—have made commitments to stop buying palm oil linked to deforestation. That’s a big deal. Palm oil, which is used in a wide range of baked goods, packaged foods and personal care products, is the world’s most popular vegetable oil, mainly because it’s cheap, naturally saturated, and free of trans fat. But oil palm trees only grow in the tropics, where unscrupulous growers have been leveling forests for oil palm plantations, releasing massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. In Southeast Asia, where 85 percent of the plantations are located, those forests provide critical habitat for elephants, orangutans, rhinoceros and tigers.

McDonald’s commitment could be an even bigger deal. The company pledged to eliminate deforestation from its entire global supply chain. Specifically, the company singled out beef, coffee, fiber-based packaging, palm oil and poultry. Like palm oil, cattle production is a major driver of deforestation.

The company is expected to announce a timetable for its product procurement later this year, but there is room for skepticism given it has made similar promises before. For some time, its website has stated that its goal is for 100 percent of its palm oil to be “verified as supporting sustainable production by 2020,” for example, but its plans to meet that goal were inadequate.

“As that old Russian proverb goes, ‘Trust but verify,’” said Lael Goodman, an analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). “If McDonald’s wants its golden arches to become a symbol of environmental sustainability, it needs to become a lot more ambitious and provide details on how it is going to fulfill its pledge.”

McDonald’s announcement comes less than a month after UCS released a report, co-authored by Goodman, analyzing top international companies’ palm oil commitments. It was a follow-up to the organization’s March 2014 scorecard rating the 10 largest companies in the packaged food, personal care and fast food sectors on their plans to use deforestation-free palm oil that is traceably and transparently sourced. At the time, the packaged food companies had the strongest standards. Fast food companies had the weakest.

The new report tracked the 30 companies’ progress over the last year and added a fourth category, the house brands sold by the 10 largest supermarket, pharmacy and discount store chains. Only eight of the 40 companies surveyed this year have adopted palm oil commitments that fully protect forests and peatlands, swampy areas that store even more carbon. Those companies are ConAgra, Danone, Kellogg’s, Nestlé and PepsiCo from the packaged food sector, and Colgate-Palmolive, Henkel and Procter & Gamble from the personal care sector.

Despite the Yum! Brands and McDonald’s announcements, which they made after the UCS report was published, fast food chains are still lagging far behind. And Yum! Brands only pledged to buy deforestation-free palm oil for oil it uses for frying. That leaves out the oil in its sauces and biscuits and other baked goods, which the chain buys from other suppliers.

None of these three fast food Goliaths—Dunkin’ Brands, Yum! Brands or McDonald’s—would have made deforestation commitments without public pressure. Over the last year, hundreds of thousands of people petitioned them to buy only deforestation-free palm oil. But that still leaves seven other fast food chains in UCS’s survey without a responsible palm oil procurement policy. It’s time to step up pressure on Burger King, CKE Restaurants (owner of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s), Domino’s Pizza, Dairy Queen, Starbucks, Subway and Wendy’s. To send them a message, click here.

Elliott Negin|Union of Concerned Scientists|April 21, 2015

Global Warming and Climate Change

Bigger than Everything Else’

When you think of climate change and global warming, do visions of coal-fired power plants and solar panels come to mind?

If so, that’s because policy discussions and personal action usually revolve around hybrid cars, energy-efficient homes and debates about the latest technological solutions.

But it’s actually the global agriculture system that is at the heart of both the problem, and the solution, to global warming.

Industrial agriculture is a key driver in the generation of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, heavy machinery, monocultures, land change, deforestation, refrigeration, waste and transportation are all part of a food system that generates significant emissions and contributes greatly to global climate change.

Author and activist Rebecca Solnit famously said of climate change that “It’s bigger than everything else.”

She’s right. Climate change is at the intersection of many social and environmental justice issues. It’s forcing us to question every aspect of our society and economy, including how we produce and distribute our food.

The stakes are certainly high—and the window of opportunity is quickly closing.

Read the essay

Pope Francis to Host Major Summit on Climate Change

The Vatican announced Tuesday that it will host a major conference on climate change on April 28, featuring some of the world’s leading climate scientists and an opening address by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The conference, Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity: The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Development, will also feature Jeffrey Sachs, a prominent American economist and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

The summit hopes to “help build a global movement across all religions for sustainable development and climate change throughout 2015 and beyond,” and to highlight “the intrinsic connection between respect for the environment and respect for people—especially the poor, the excluded, victims of human trafficking and modern slavery, children and future generations,” says the Vatican.

The one-day summit will also include participants from major world religions and aims to “elevate the debate on the moral dimensions of protecting the environment in advance of the papal encyclical,” the Vatican says. The Pope’s much-anticipated encyclical on the environment is scheduled for release this summer. Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana, a top Vatican official who is leading the drafting process of Francis’ encyclical on the environment, will also speak at the conference.

This event is just the latest in what many are calling Pope Francis’s “green agenda.” He has become an outspoken advocate on environmental issues, saying acting on climate change is “essential to faith”  and calling the destruction of nature a modern sin. He has vowed to only increase pressure on world leaders after his disappointment with the Lima climate talks. He is hoping that his encyclical will influence the climate talks in Paris at the end of the year.

He has also made plans to address Congress during his visit to America in September. It will be interesting to see what Pope Francis, who is wildly popular among both Catholic and non-Catholic Americans, has to say to one of the most powerful governing bodies on Earth about the issue of climate change.

Cole Mellino|EcoWatch|April 18, 2015

250,000 People Call for Action on Climate Change and an End to Extreme Poverty

In celebration of the 45th anniversary of Earth Day, Earth Day Network and The Global Poverty Project joined forces to expand the movement to end extreme poverty and solve the climate crisis. Global Citizen 2015 Earth Day was a free event Saturday on the National Mall in Washington, DC where more than 250,000 people gathered to engage in these issues and enjoy an all-star concert.

No Doubt, Usher, Fall Out Boy, Mary J. Blige, Train and My Morning Jacket, with special guests Common and D’Banj, headlined Global Citizen 2015. The event was hosted by will.i.am and Soledad O’Brien. The all-day concert coincide with the spring meetings of the World Bank Group, which brought global policymakers, finance ministers, environment and development NGOs, industry executives and high-profile artists together in participation in the event.

The more than 250,000 people at the event and the 2 million people that watched it live via YouTube were asked to download the Global Citizen 2015 Earth Day app and take action on these critical issues by letting their elected officials know they care about ending extreme poverty and solving climate change.

The crowd exploded when Train took the stage. Train’s Patrick Monahan spoke to the crowd encouraging everyone to get active and make a difference in the world. In addition to performing their top songs, including Drops of Jupiter, they rocked out Aerosmith’s Dream On which had the crowd roaring and singing at the top of their lungs, “Dream on, dream on, dream until your dreams come true.”

The day was filled with dignitaries announcing 33 critical commitments, including United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and President of the World Bank Group Jim Yong Kim.

Huge commitments were made by the world’s most influential leaders, including Ki-moon announcing a plan to end poverty through the collaboration between international organizations and civil society.

“Will you support women’s empowerment? Will you speak up to bring all the children to school? Will you raise your voice for people and our planet?,” asked Ki-moon. “It’s our best chance to end global poverty. It’s our last chance to tackle climate change before it is too late. You have the power. Your generation can make it happen. Be a global citizen. Take your passion and compassion to make this world sustainable, prosperous. And, let’s make that our global reality!”

U.S. Reps Betty McCollum (D-MN), Ed Royce (R-CA), Dave Reichert (R-WA) and Sen. Isakson (R-GA) stood together to announce bipartisan support for the Global Food Security act and the intention to bring the bill to a vote next week.

“Next week, when the Foreign Affairs committee votes on the Global Food Security Act, we’ll get a second chance,” said Rep. Royce. “And with your help we can get this important bill through Congress and to the President’s desk without further delay.”

Rovio Entertainment, whose Angry Birds game has been downloaded 2.8 billion times, announced Angry Birds’ “Champions for Earth,” in cooperation with the Earth Day Network.

“I am now committing, on behalf of Rovio and Earth Day Network, to bring an amazing game experience to Angry Birds in time for Climate Week and the UN General Assembly in September. Stay tuned, get ready!,” said Patrick Liu, creative director of Rovio Entertainment.

Ahmad Ashkar, CEO of the Hult Prize, a partnership with President Clinton and the Clinton Global Initiative that has invested $25 million dollars in the next generation and mobilized hundreds of thousands of youth to solve our planet’s most crippling challenges through new and innovative business approaches that are both profitable and sustainable, made a huge announcement Saturday.

“Today, we are excited to announce an incredible new partnership with Earth Day Network enabling 500,000 high school students from across the world to dream up innovative ideas and global solutions,” said Ashkar. “We will pair their ideas with a million dollars of seed funding so that these students, our future, can make their dreams of a better world a reality.”

And, the day would not have been complete without hearing from Denis Hayes, one of the organizers of the first Earth Day in 1970.

“Climate justice is the issue facing this generation. Ruthless, powerful carbon companies are buying votes and lying like the cigarette industry did for so long. So far, they are winning. The main power on the other side is you—you and billions of other people who actually care about tomorrow,” said Hayes.

As part of the days festivities, Connect4Climate and Earth Day Network organized a roundtable to engage world leaders and influencers in a candid conversation on climate communication. The roundtable brought together a diverse group of business and nonprofit leaders that discussed the most pressing issues around communicating climate change and ways to get more people engaged.

Later in the day, actor and United Nations Goodwill Ambassador Don Cheadle took the stage and introduced Connect4Climate’s program manager Lucia Grenna.

Grenna acknowledged the winners of the Action4Climate documentary competition, which received submission of 230 videos from 70 countries, bringing to life the serious consequences of climate change across the world and highlighting the actions taken by local communities to tackle it. 

Grenna then introduced Monica Ord, the producer of the soon-to-be released film Chloe & Theo, which had its world premier at the World Bank Group headquarters on Wednesday. Ord’s mission to bring Theo’s message to the world came true as this video was shown to the crowd and live streamed on YouTube:

The closing act was No Doubt with a stellar, high-energy performance by Gwen Stefani and her band, which were reunited for this performance.

Stefanie Spear|April 20, 2015

Obama Says ‘Climate Change Can No Longer Be Ignored’ as Jeb Bush Admits He’s ‘Concerned’

In honor of Earth Day this Wednesday, President Obama’s weekly Saturday morning address to the nation was titled “Climate Change Can No Longer Be Ignored.”

He opened with an oblique dig at Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, head of the Senate Environment Committee, who “disproved” global warming on the floor of the Senate by throwing a snowball.

“2014 was the planet’s warmest year on record,” said Obama. “Fourteen of the 15 hottest years on record have all fallen in the first 15 years of this century. This winter was cold in parts of our country—as some folks in Congress like to point out—but around the world, it was the warmest ever recorded.”

“The fact that the climate is changing has very serious implications for the way we live now,” he reminded us. “Stronger storms. Deeper droughts. Longer wildfire seasons. The world’s top climate scientists are warning us that a changing climate already affects the air our kids breathe. The Pentagon says that climate change poses immediate risks to our national security.”

He boasted about the growth of wind power in the U.S., more fuel-efficient cars and more energy-efficient buildings. He touted some of the things his administration is already doing to address climate change, including his events last week on the health impacts of climate change.

But he called climate change “an issue that’s bigger and longer-lasting than my presidency.”

“It’s about protecting our God-given natural wonders and the good jobs that rely on them,” said Obama. “It’s about shielding our cities and our families from disaster and harm. It’s about keeping our kids healthy and safe. This is the only planet we’ve got. And years from now, I want to be able to look our children and grandchildren in the eye and tell them that we did everything we could to protect it.”

He also announced that on Earth Day he will visit Everglades National Park “to talk about the way that climate change threatens our economy.”

“The Everglades is one of the most special places in our country,” he said. “But it’s also one of the most fragile. Rising sea levels are putting a national treasure—and an economic engine for the South Florida tourism industry—at risk.”

Obama advisor Brian Deese revealed that during the week, the White House will be announcing natural landscapes to be targeted for conservation efforts, along with new funding to help farmers and ranchers reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It will also invite social media followers to submit photos of their favorite natural areas that are threatened by climate change.

“This Earth Day, we’re far beyond a debate about climate change’s existence,” said Deese. “We’re focused on mitigating its very real effects here at home, preparing our communities where its impacts are already being felt and leading an international effort for action.”

One Floridian who seems to be trying to stake out a position on climate change that will sound reasonable to most Americans yet align with the climate denial of many Republican primary voters is former Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

Joining the pack of 2016 presidential hopefuls in the early primary state of New Hampshire, Bush appeared to be trying to edge away from the full-throated climate deniers in the field like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.

“The climate is changing, and I’m concerned about that,” he said, before falling back on the false choice between addressing climate change and a strong economy. But he hasn’t walked back on his statement that “It is not unanimous among scientists that it is disproportionately man-made,” technically accurate but misleading in light of the fact that 97 percent of scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities. Bush embraces, as does President Obama, increasing natural gas extraction which has shown huge growth due to fracking.

And in February Bush told a meeting of the conservative Club for Growth that the Clean Air Act had “stifled the ability for people to rise up,” and that the country’s priority should be “growth at all cost.” It seems that his “concern” for the climate only goes so far.

Anastasia Pantsios|April 20, 2015

Clinton Takes on Climate Change

Hillary Clinton is rolling out her campaign strategy, and the intelligent politician is cutting to the heart of an issue that’s of growing importance to millions of Americans: climate change. From the get-go, she’s made it clear that climate change will be a big part of her campaign, and that she’ll be rolling out a proposal for addressing the issue during her presidency. It’s likely that a Clinton administration would build on the legacy Obama left behind — a prospect with mixed connotations given President Obama’s positions on Keystone XL and some other key issues — but she’s also going to force the hand of other politicians on the issue if they want to engage in the complicated dance of electoral politics with any degree of success.

By laying down the gauntlet on climate change, Clinton indicated that those participating in the 2016 race are going to have to talk about the issue. Her positions on climate change occupy four important areas of concern and interest, illustrating how wide-spanning the issue of climate change has become in the modern world.

Given her previous record, it doesn’t come as too much of a surprise. In her memoir Hard Choices, she explored the topic in detail from a number of angles. Her book and public appearances have demonstrated that she understands the complex science behind climate change and, unlike many conservative politicians, considered it to be a real and valid concern — she’s not in denial. That’s important in a political landscape where many scientists and environmental agencies are concerned that they won’t get political support for pushing for action on climate change. A smart candidate who understands science and is willing to learn more is likely to gain the backing of the scientific community.

Hard Choices and other public comments have illustrated something else about climate change and Hillary: She specifically understands how it connects with women’s rights. She’s aware that issues like clean fuel and access to water hit women harder than others, because they’re the ones tasked with cooking, cleaning and related tasks. Mandates for better living conditions that also improve environmental conditions will help women from all over the world, like African women struggling to prepare meals on polluting stoves and Indian women seeking sources of clean water for cooking and cleaning.

Additionally, Clinton sees climate change as a domestic policy concern, just like President Obama does. She understands the value in committing to clean energy to improve quality of life for Americans, and to reduce dependence on foreign sources of energy. Like Obama, unfortunately, she’s still open to non-clean energy sources, with a record of supporting fracking and fossil fuel use. This is one area where she may lose favor with environmental advocates concerned about the implications of a Clinton presidency. They want assurances that Ms. Clinton will address these issues before they’ll be ready to sign on to her campaign.

There’s another aspect of her positions on climate change that’s important, though, and she’s discussed it in public and delved into it in her books as well. Climate change isn’t just an environmental or domestic problem. It’s also a national security issue. The military and other agencies have already begun warning that climate change contributes to global instability and will become a growing problem, especially for large and powerful players on the international stage like the U.S. Her experience at the State Department is already an asset for her presidential run, but so is her innovative take on foreign policy — for every conservative claiming that climate change is a distraction, she can fire back with comments about how it’s actually a huge part of the solution for national security threats.

In the coming months, we’re likely to see Clinton solidify her position on climate change, get more active in the debate, and hopefully develop and release a coherent platform with proposals on the issue. That means that other politicians are going to have to scramble to match her if they want to appeal to voters who are concerned about the issue — and the United States may see an important national conversation about the environmental responsibilities of the next president of the United States.

s.e. smith|April 19, 2015

EPA Head McCarthy Pledges To Get Climate Rules ‘Over The Finish Line’ In Obama’s Term

WASHINGTON — The head of the Environmental Protection Agency says the final rules for reducing U.S. power plant emissions will be done by mid-summer, and she’s not particularly worried about legal and political attempts to block them.

The draft rule, released in June 2014, calls for a 30 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants by 2030. The EPA received more than 2 million comments on the proposed rules from citizens, states and private companies.

“We’re really comfortable that we can get this rule done in mid-summer and do justice to a full evaluation of all those comments, so that we can make sure that it gets over the finish line really solid,” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy told The Huffington Post. “It’s going to be solid legally, and it’s going to get some tremendous progress moving forward to address carbon pollution that’s fueling climate change.”

Though the rule has not yet been finalized, there are already legal challenges underway. Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit heard a case against the rules for existing power plants.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has been personally appealing to state governors to challenge the validity of the EPA’s carbon-reduction blueprint, urging them not submit compliance plans.

McCarthy said she’s not worried about McConnell’s campaign.

“I don’t see this call for inaction gaining momentum. In fact, just the opposite. The states are recognizing that EPA has never really crafted a rule that was so respectful of the role of states, where the federal government just says the standard and allows the states to develop their plans,” said McCarthy. “They know we’re serious about this. They know climate change is serious business and concern. They know they’re best positioned to design a plan that’s going to work for them.”

McCarthy also said the agency is taking extra time to consider the comments it’s received — a process that has pushed back the timeline on delivery of the final rules. Some states have expressed concern that the required emissions reductions for 2020 may force certain states to switch from coal power to natural gas, rather than investing in solar or wind, which might take longer to deploy.

“This is not an energy policy,” said McCarthy. “We do not want to tip the scale for states in how they do their plans. We want to allow every fuel to be available. So there was some concern that we were projecting a lot of increase in natural gas, which may have decreased investment in renewables. So we’re looking really closely at that, because again, we want every fuel to be available and competitive.”

She noted that even coal — the largest source of power-sector emissions in the U.S. and the main target of the EPA’s new rules — is still projected to account for 30 percent of electricity generation in the country by 2030.

This Wednesday marks the 45th anniversary of Earth Day, an event that McCarthy said was pivotal to her personal involvement in environmental issues.

“It was a moment in time when we realized that all the things that we were seeing weren’t acceptable. There were people who were willing to fight for a better planet and a cleaner environment,” she said. “It got me started in what I’m doing for a living.”

Though the environmental movement’s earliest targets were more conventional air and water pollution, McCarthy said she believes climate change will be a mobilizing issue for citizens as well.

“I’m hoping the issues of climate are going to be embraced in a similar way. It’s a big challenge, but it presents tremendous opportunities for us to grow a future that is really meaningful for our kids, but also is meaningful for us in terms of allowing us to continue to grow, think and innovate — develop new technology, innovate, grow jobs of the future,” said McCarthy. “I’m hoping that it will be embraced the same way.”

Video

Kate Sheppard|huffingtonpost.com|04/21/2015

EPA Chief Defends Forthcoming Fracking Study, Says It Will ‘Add To’ Dialogue

WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to release a much-anticipated draft study this spring that will examine whether hydraulic fracturing can contaminate ground water supplies. While the topic of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for natural gas has generated a lot of attention, it’s not clear whether the agency’s study will clear up any of the major lingering questions about the safety of the process.

Fracking uses a high-pressure stream of water, sand and chemicals to tap into oil and gas reserves in rock formations, and has become increasingly common in recent years in many parts of the United States. There are a number of indications that the EPA’s study will not resolve many of the key concerns communities have raised about fracking’s impact on the safety of their drinking water supplies. As InsideClimate News reported last month, the agency’s ability to gather data has been limited, due to both resistance from the oil and gas industry and legal limitations on the information the EPA was able to demand.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy defended the study, arguing that it will be helpful to state oil and gas regulators.

“I think EPA will really add to this dialogue,” McCarthy said. “We have people already working with states to make sure that when we lay this study out, that they’ll be able to absorb what it says, learn from it, and move forward to ensure that they can continue to protect their drinking water supplies and all of their other water resources they rely on.”

She said the study will come out later this spring as planned, and will go to an EPA science advisory board for additional peer review. The study is not expected to include policy or regulatory recommendations.

Although states are the main regulators of oil and gas development on private land, Congress tasked the EPA five years ago with studying potential concerns about the effect of fracking on drinking water.

“We’re excited to put it out, because we do think it will be another lens for states to look at this issue,” McCarthy said of the study. “They are the primary audience for this. And let me explain to you why. States really are the primary regulator of water supplies. And they have been individually looking at the issues of hydrofracking because they care about their water supplies.”

The EPA chief also said that assessing concerns about hydraulic fracturing is a priority for the Obama administration, which has touted the benefits of natural gas as a lower-emissions alternative to electricity generation.

“The president cares about continuing to see the benefits that fracking provides in terms of low natural gas [prices], increasing national security, but he always says it has to be done safe and responsibly,” McCarthy said.

McCarthy also argued that officials know fracking can be done safely, as long as the proper precautions are taken. “The good news about drinking water is that we really do know how to construct a well,” she said. “These are not out-of-the-loop new technologies we’re seeking to identify. This is standard engineering practice.”

“We can develop best management practices that actually address these issues and work with states on how to get that information out, and how they can begin to rely on that to ensure they’re using EPA science to their best advantage.”

Kate Sheppard|huffingtonpost.com|04/21/2015

Guardians Appeals to Overturn Public Lands Fracking in Idaho

Boise—Standing up to protect clean air, the climate, and wildlife, WildEarth Guardians earlier this week filed an appeal to stop plans by the federal government to auction off more than 6,000 acres of public lands for fracking in Idaho.

“This is about keeping Idaho’s public lands safe from the devastating impacts of fracking,” said Jeremy Nichols, Climate and Energy Program Director for WildEarth Guardians.  “For our future, we simply can’t afford the massive influx of industrial development, including more air pollution, more water contamination, and lost wildlife habitat that comes with oil and gas development.”

Responding to pressure from industry, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has proposed to sell five oil and gas leases totaling 6,474 acres on May 28.  The parcels are located east of Payette in the Little Willow Creek drainage upstream of the Payette River.  While Idaho is not a major oil and gas producer, the advent of fracking has made the state the target of industry.

Although the Bureau of Land Management claims that the leasing is necessary to prevent industry from illegally draining federal minerals from nearby private lands, there are no producing wells in the area.  While the agency admits there is only a “risk” of future drainage, by law the Bureau of Land Management cannot auction off public lands to the oil and gas industry unless drainage is actually occurring. 

What’s more, leasing is the most extreme way of dealing with drainage.  Because leasing conveys a right for a private company to develop, the Bureau of Land Management could open the door for wholesale industrialization of public lands.  Given that the agency has other options for dealing with drainage, including assessing royalties against private companies, there is no need to lease.

By leasing, the Bureau of Land Management could be enabling full-field oil and gas development.  Even with protective stipulations, the area could be extensively impacted.

“This isn’t an effort to protect the value of federal oil and gas, it’s about catering to the greed of a private company that believes our public lands should only serve its profit motives,” said Nichols.  “The Bureau of Land Management is not over a barrel here, yet they’re still moving to sacrifice our public lands.”

If successful, Guardians’ appeal will prevent the Bureau of Land Management from moving forward with its proposed leasing.  A response is expected before May 28.

Protest Filed to Stop Federal Auction of Oil and Gas Leases Near Boise
Contact: Jeremy Nichols (303) 437-7663

DOI, EPA, NOAA announce Resilient Lands and Waters Initiative to prepare natural resources for climate change
Sites in southwest Florida, Hawaii, Washington, and the Great Lakes selected to showcase climate resilience approach

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Department of the Interior (DOI), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) today recognized four collaborative landscape partnerships across the country where Federal agencies will focus efforts with partners to conserve and restore important lands and waters and make them more resilient to a changing climate. Building on existing collaborations, these Resilient Lands and Waters partnerships – located in southwest Florida, Hawaii, Washington and the Great Lakes region – will help build resilience in regions vulnerable to climate change and related challenges. They will also showcase the benefits of landscape-scale management approaches and help enhance the carbon storage capacity of these natural areas.

The selected lands and waters face a wide range of climate impacts and other ecological stressors related to climate change, including sea level rise, drought, wildfire, and invasive species. At each location, Federal agencies will work closely with state, tribal, and local partners to prepare for and prevent these and other threats, and ensure that long-term conservation efforts take climate change into account. Additionally, the initiative will focus on conserving coastal wetlands and marine conservation areas, protecting drinking water for urban areas, and providing habitat for wildlife. These collaborative efforts will include the use of existing tools to benefit the entire landscape as well as the development of new tools. For example, in the Great Lakes, partners are developing a coastal wetland prioritization tool that will help determine where restoration efforts are most needed. And in the He’eia watershed on the island of O’ahu, organizations are using NOAA’s Sea Level Rise Viewer to see maps of the potential impacts of sea level rise on the region.

Efforts in each region are relying on an approach that addresses the needs of the entire landscape. Over the next 18 months, Federal, state, local, and tribal partners will work together in these landscapes to develop more explicit strategies and maps in their programs of work. Developing these strategies will benefit wildfire management, mitigation investments, restoration efforts, water and air quality, carbon storage, and the communities that depend upon natural systems for their own resilience.

For example, southwest Florida is home to large tracts of open and working lands with diverse ownership, and partners in the region are working to identify and apply incentives to meet important conservation targets. And in Washington, as part of efforts in the Puget Sound, partners are collaborating on several projects that affect the entire Snohomish River watershed, including the restoration of important tidal wetland habitats, which will have major climate mitigation benefits. The landscape-scale approach demonstrated through this initiative, a hallmark of this Administration, allows agencies and partners to identify shared priorities and improve their future conservation efforts. Additionally, by tracking successes and sharing lessons learned, the initiative will encourage the development of similar resilience efforts in other areas across the country.

“Climate change is impacting every corner of the nation – from the Everglades to the Arctic – which has ramifications for our natural and cultural heritage, public health and economic activity,” said Interior Secretary Sally Jewell. “Through increased collaboration, we can pool resources and bring the best available science to bear as we take a landscape-level approach to make these treasured lands and waters more resilient to the impacts of climate change.”

”Building climate resilience on a regional scale is essential for meeting environmental protection goals in the long-term,” said EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy. “Partnering with other Federal agencies in this initiative we will ensure that our latest research plays a central role in protecting our nation’s most precious natural resources and keeping our economy strong.”

“The well-being of our families and our communities is closely tied to the health our landscapes and seascapes,” said Kathryn Sullivan, Ph.D., assistant secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator. “The lands and waters initiative will help our partners better understand the climate change risks and uncertainties in these geographies, and provide decision-makers with actionable information to make their environment, community and economy more resilient to these changes.”

The Resilient Lands and Waters initiative is a key part of the Administration’s Climate and Natural Resources Priority Agenda, a first of its kind, comprehensive commitment across the Federal Government to support resilience of America’s vital natural resources. When President Obama launched his Climate Action Plan in 2013, he directed Federal agencies to identify and evaluate approaches to improve our natural defenses against extreme weather, protect biodiversity and conserve natural resources in the face of a changing climate. The Climate Action Plan also directs agencies to manage our public lands and natural systems to store more carbon.

More on the selected landscapes:

Southwest Florida: The southwest region of Florida includes a number of diverse habitats such as Everglades’ wetlands, coastal mangroves, sea grasses, oyster reefs, and estuary. Home to endangered species like the Florida panther, the region faces threats on multiple fronts – from increasing urbanization and land use changes to invasive species, rising seas, and shifting weather and temperature patterns. Recognizing Southwest Florida as a resilient landscape will tap into the work of the Cooperative Conservation Blueprint for Florida and Peninsular Florida Landscape Conservation Cooperative, which are leading efforts to address these threats, in partnership with Federal and state agencies, private landowners, the Southwest Florida regional planning council and NGOs. The focus of the project is on the creation and use of voluntary and non-regulatory conservation incentives that can be applied to a comprehensive vision of conservation and restoration priorities across Florida.

Hawai‘i: In Hawai‘i, projects will take place in West Hawai‘i, West Maui, and He’eia (O’ahu), where the improving coastal reef resilience is a major priority. Involving robust community engagement and multi-sector partnerships, projects at each location will rely on climate vulnerability data and tools to inform decision-making. In addition to improving reef resilience, such as through West Maui’s Ridge-to-Reef effort, projects will focus on addressing shoreline erosion, removing invasive species, restoring streams, wetlands, and fishponds, and preventing wildfire impacts. Each location is already designated a priority location by the State of Hawai‘i and NOAA.

Washington: In Puget Sound, Federal, state, and county partners are implementing an innovative approach to accelerate conservation and resilience of natural resources and communities in coastal watersheds. The collaborative effort will help better align financial resources and authorities of Federal and agencies behind large-scale projects that deliver multiple benefits to the ecosystem and the communities that depend on it. Specific efforts include using flooding hazard scenarios and predictions to inform project selection and planning efforts for agriculture and other land uses. And in the Snohomish River watershed, Federal agencies are working with state, tribal, and NGO partners to restore tidal wetland habitats, increase flood storage capacity and restore floodplains, and identify the climate data resources floodplain managers need to make informed decisions.

The Great Lakes: In the Great Lakes region, efforts will focus on restoring coastal wetlands. Higher quality wetlands are essential to improving climate resilience, including through flood mitigation and storm water storage as well as serving as carbon sinks that mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. The Upper Midwest and Great Lakes Landscape Conservation Cooperative is leading the effort, which spans Lakes Huron and Erie Coastal wetlands in Saginaw Bay to the Maumee River. Through the project, partners will develop a coastal wetland prioritization tool that will use wetland health and quality monitoring data collected over the past 5 years throughout the entire Great Lakes basin. When completed, this tool is expected to inform the selection of locations where restoration, enhancement, and protection of wetlands should occur.

Release Date: 04/21/2015
Contact Information: press@epa.gov

Obama in Everglades: Threats from climate change ‘can’t be edited out’ of conversation

For the 45th annual Earth Day on Wednesday, President Obama will elevate global warming to the top of the list of environmental threats currently facing Americans, in a speech at the Everglades National Park. The trip, his first to the fragile but vital ” river of grass ” that, following decades of human interference now occupies a fraction of its former sprawling range in southern Florida, also comes with a heavy dose of politics. Winning the state will be key for any presidential candidate in the 2016 race, and two leading contenders for the Republican nomination, former governor Jeb Bush Senator Marco Rubio, hail from the state and have expressed skepticism about the existence and seriousness of manmade global warming.

With a sawgrass prairie at his back and spring rain clouds darkening the sky, President Barack Obama on Wednesday cast the beleaguered Everglades as the poster child for climate change.

Obama called for quick and aggressive action in a speech that pivoted between touting the administration’s efforts so far and calling out Republicans for not doing enough.

“If we don’t act, there may not be an Everglades as we know it,” Obama said on his first trip to the vast marshlands that provide habitat to a rich array of wildlife and supply much of the freshwater used by about 8 million South Florida residents.

Obama’s visit came at a critical time for both the Everglades — scientists holding a separate meeting this week warned that impacts from rising sea levels threaten to collapse coastal marshes faster than the ecosystem can adapt — and for Florida politics. State lawmakers and water managers have resisted appeals to buy a huge tract of sugar fields that environmentalists say is needed to store water to revive the wilting southern Everglades and stop polluted water from fouling estuaries near Lake Okeechobee.

Underlining that partisan divide, the audience at Wednesday’s speech held outside the Ernest F. Coe Visitor Center at Everglades National Park consisted largely of Democrats and environmentalists.

Obama also took a jab at Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who prohibited state staff from using the term “climate change,” according to several former employees and academics. Scott has said no such ban exists.

“Climate change can no longer be denied. It can’t be edited out. It can’t be omitted from the conversation,” Obama said, without naming the governor.

Scott, who has greeted Obama on past trips to Florida, turned down the White House’s invitation to do so Wednesday. The governor’s office said Scott had to stay in Tallahassee for the legislative session — though he traveled to Orlando on Monday and West Palm Beach on Tuesday, and plans to visit Fort Myers on Thursday.

In a statement Tuesday, Scott noted the state has spent more on Everglades restoration so far than the federal government.

“President Obama needs to live up to his commitment on the Everglades,” he said, noting the federal government has yet to pay for a $58 million maintenance backlog at the largest national park east of the Mississippi. “This has caused critical maintenance delays in the Everglades to linger for over a year.”

On Wednesday, Obama called on Congress to step up funding for restoration efforts that have dragged on for nearly 15 years.

“This is not a problem for another generation. Not anymore. This is a problem now. It has serious implications for the way we live right now. Stronger storms. Deeper droughts. Longer wildfire seasons,” he said.

Those risks are particularly evident in the low-lying Everglades, where mangroves have already started to retreat inland and scientists are still trying to understand damage from Hurricane Wilma nearly 10 years ago, that led to an increase in harmful salinity levels in peat that supports the marshes. Environmentalists say that had more progress been made on restoration work, the wetlands would be better positioned to survive seas expected to rise by about 3 feet in the next century.

“This is not just about birds and alligators and panthers,” said Everglades Foundation CEO Eric Eikenberg, who attended Wednesday’s speech. “It’s about the future of Florida.”

Staging the president’s remarks at Everglades National Park appeared a calculated political move. Voters will elect a new president in 18 months — and the Republican field is teeming with would-be candidates who question whether climate change is man-made, despite scientific scholarship concluding that it is. That includes U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio and, to a lesser extent, former Gov. Jeb Bush, both Miamians.

Obama ticked off a list of Republican presidents — Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, George H.W. Bush — who championed important environmental causes, and he mentioned that local political leaders of both parties had agreed to form the four-county Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact, calling it “a model not just for the country, but for the world.”

“This is not something that historically should be a partisan issue,” he said.

Before his speech, the president and park rangers walked the Anhinga Trail, the park’s most popular tourist stop, passing baby alligators, sleek cormorants and a pair of black vultures, infamous for periodically eating the rubber off of visitor vehicles. There was no chance to take an iconic photo of the president on an airboat; a possible ride didn’t happen because of a storm threat.

Obama arrived at the Everglades aboard Marine One, taking a 20-minute helicopter ride from Miami International Airport, and hopped on the presidential motorcade inside the park. He also left via helicopter — but police shut down South Dade streets to make way for the empty motorcade anyway, leaving stuck motorists to wave unknowingly at cars that weren’t carrying the president.

In his speech, Obama also highlighted the National Park Service, which celebrates its 100th anniversary next year. A new report found national park land stores more than 14 million tons of carbon every year. The Everglades stores enough to absorb half the emissions from South Florida vehicles, said park service director Jon Jarvis, who visited with Dante B. Fascell Elementary fourth-graders before the speech.

National parks also drew 300 million visitors last year, who spent about $16 billion on nearby communities that supported 277,000 jobs, Obama said.

Hoping to draw more visitors, Obama said $25 million will be spent to spruce up parks. Starting in the fall, fourth graders and their families nationwide will also get free admission for a year.

In a move some consider long overdue, Obama also announced the national landmark designation of Marjory Stoneman Douglas’ Coconut Grove cottage. The journalist who penned The Everglades: River of Grass in the 1940s is credited with redefining the vast marshland from a useless, buggy swamp to an essential and vulnerable ecosystem that nourishes South Florida.

While environmentalists were happy to see the Everglades in the spotlight, some say that chronic delays that have stalled restoration make it a poor model for climate change solutions.

“This is not a model for climate change. Saving this place requires a huge leap of optimism and a huge amount of effort,” said Eric Draper, executive director of Audubon Florida.

There were some signs, at least locally, of an emerging dialogue.

If any work is to be done, however, politics will have to be set aside, said U.S. Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a Miami Republican who flew with Obama on Air Force One after having been snubbed from the plane in the president’s last visit. U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy of Jupiter, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, also rode along. And Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez, who is also a Republican, also met the president at Miami International Airport.

“There’s some bipartisan solutions out there we can employ,” Curbelo said.

Jenny Staletovich and Patricia Mazzei|MiamiHerald.com|04/22/2015

Obama’s executive action rollouts increase in pace

Moves allow him to bypass a hostile GOP Congress

WASHINGTON – As President Barack Obama visited the Florida Everglades on Wednesday to give a speech on climate change, the White House announced eight executive actions, implemented by seven government agencies, to “protect the people and places that climate change puts at risk.”

The announcement contained no executive orders, sweeping directives, legislative proposals or bill signings.

Instead, the actions are smaller-bore staples of Obama’s “pen-and-phone” strategy that shows no sign of letting up: a report on the value of parks to the environment, a proclamation declaring National Parks Week, and conservation efforts in Florida, Hawaii, Puget Sound and the Great Lakes.

White House officials say such actions are also part of a broader political strategy to stay on offense and have the new Republican Congress respond to the president’s agenda — and not the other way around.

“Since the election, the president has had a pretty explicit strategy,” said Brian Deese, a senior Obama adviser. “And it has consisted of trying to stay on offense, trying to push where he can to move the agenda through executive action. You’re going to keep seeing the president in that posture going forward.”

“Executive action” — a phrase Obama never uttered publicly in the first 21⁄ 2 years of his presidency — has now become part of his daily lexicon.

‘YEAR OF ACTION’

The actions can take many forms, from formal executive orders and presidential memoranda to much more routine and bureaucratic changes. That makes any definitive count of lower-level executive actions difficult.

But by one measure, such policy rollouts are actually increasing in pace. The White House often announces executive actions with a fact sheet from the press office, and those spiked last year during what Obama called the “Year of Action.” The White House issued 228 fact sheets in 2014, more than the first three years of his presidency combined.

The Obama strategy on executive actions closely parallels that of the Clinton White House. In Bill Clinton’s last two years in office, Chief of Staff John Podesta launched what would become known as “Project Podesta.” In an effort to flex presidential authority, Podesta canvassed executive agencies for actions Clinton could take without going to Congress.

“One of the ways that the White House plays a role is to think forward and challenge the agencies to be proactive in saying, ‘What more can we do? And what more can we do that’s consistent with certain themes?’ ” Deese said.

THIS YEAR’S THEME

This year, the major theme is “middle-class economics.” The Obama White House has also used executive action to lower mortgage insurance premiums and regulate retirement accounts. And coming soon: new overtime regulations from the Department of Labor, which Obama ordered in a presidential memorandum last year.

Executive action wasn’t part of Obama’s strategy when he first came into office.

“I sort of see it as flowing from the failure of the grand bargain negotiations in 2011,” said Andrew Rudalevige, a presidency scholar at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. That’s when Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, tried to reach a permanent budget agreement but instead came up with a “Super-committee” that failed to reach agreement, triggering across-the-board budget cuts.

Gregory Korte|USA TODAY4/23/15

Pope: Climate a moral imperative

As the world celebrated Earth Day on Wednesday, Pope Francis planned to use one of the highest forms of papal expression — an encyclical — to promote climate action to save the planet as a moral and religious imperative.

In recent weeks, Vatican officials have outlined what the document will say and are choreographing its release — perhaps as early as June — for maximum global impact beyond the Roman Catholic Church’s 1.2 billion members.

First on the promotional agenda is an April 28 Vatican conference where United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon will be a keynote speaker. The goal is to advance the morality argument that is a theme of the document.

Then on successive days starting Sept. 23, the pope will visit the White House, address a joint session of Congress — the first pontiff to do so — and address the U.N. General Assembly at the beginning of a summit on sustainable development.

“The timing of the encyclical is significant,” Cardinal Peter Turkson told a university audience in Ireland last month. “2015 is a critical year for humanity.”

The cardinal, who leads the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and helped draft the document, said all events lead to Paris in December, when nations will gather to debate how to slow or reduce global warming.

He described the core message as “human ecology,” arguing that global economic inequality is linked to climate change.

The document will urge that saving the environment is saving humanity, particularly the poorest who are disproportionately affected by warming, he said. It will be passed down through Catholic university teaching and parish ministries.

Climate scientists say the document will help raise awareness about dangers to the planet.

“I think it has the potential to be seismic,” said Thomas Lovejoy, professor in the environmental science and policy department at George Mason University.

Skeptics are apprehensive. Pope Francis has fallen into “apocalyptic alarmism,” Maureen Mullarkey wrote in the conservative Catholic publication First Things in January.

Gregg Zoroya|USA TODAY|4/23/15

Fact-checking Rick Scott and Marco Rubio on sea-level rise, climate change

With President Barack Obama scheduled to visit the Everglades for Earth Day, it seems like a good day to look back at some of PolitiFact Florida’s fact-checks about climate change and the environment including claims by or about Gov. Rick Scott and Sen. Marco Rubio.

Here are a few from our archives:

Scott said during an October debate “We have spent $350 million to deal with sea-level rise” in the Miami area and “hundreds of millions dollars to deal with coral reefs.”

Scott was exaggerating. The state has spent $100 million to help the Keys upgrade to a sewer system, which should improve water quality — a benefit for coral reefs. But Scott omitted that it was under Gov. Charlie Crist that the Legislature passed a law paving the way for the money. For the sea-level rise portion of his claim, his spokesman pointed to a variety of projects that related to flood mitigation or beach protection. While those are worthy projects, they don’t address future sea-level rise. We rated that claim Mostly False.

Scott said during his 2014 State of the State speech that “we have invested record funding in protecting our environment.” That’s not correct. Scott’s spokesman said that he was referring to his “record” proposal to fund springs protection. The budget for the state Department of Environmental Protection was not a record under Scott. We rated the claim False.

We have also rated several of Scott’s promises related to the environment including about oil drilling, environmental penalties and springs restoration.

In the spring of 2014, scientists issued reports warning about climate change.

Just a day before those reports were released, Rubio said, “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it.” (That wasn’t the first time that Rubio had disputed the basic science of climate change.)

A May 2013 report analyzing all scientific papers that address the causes of climate change showed 97.1 percent of scientists’ findings that took a position agree that there’s been a negative human impact on the atmosphere. We rated Rubio’s statement False.

Amy Sherman|in Florida Environment|Apr. 22, 2015

[Heads will likely come out of the sand when the fumes from fracking become over-powering.]

Will Florida’s coastal economy adapt to rising sea levels?

Florida is a coastal state. Nearly 80% of its 20 million residents live near the coast on land just a few feet above sea level, and over a hundred million tourists visit the beaches and stay in beach-front hotels every year. The coastal economy in Florida is estimated to account for 79% of the state’s gross domestic product, a measure of direct revenue into the economy.

People living and working on the Florida coast face threats from hurricanes and storm surge, sometimes more than once a year. Scouring of beaches by wind and waves takes away sand, and beaches must be nourished with new sand, as often as yearly, in areas with high erosion. Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties now have problems obtaining near-shore, low-cost sand. This means that they will have to use considerably more expensive alternatives to native sand that may negatively impact sea turtles or beach plants, diminish the quality of the beach environment and have adverse impacts to local communities that pay for beach re-nourishment.

The threats aren’t reserved just for coastal residents. People in south Florida who live farther inland have homes and businesses on former wetlands that were drained in the middle of the 20th century. After a heavy rainfall, canals carry water to the sea. Should those canals fail, there would be massive flooding. Those canals also maintain a freshwater “head,” or buffer, that prevents salt water from intruding into the well fields that supply drinking water to the millions of residents.

In this precarious situation, how is sea-level rise affecting coastal Florida, and what can we expect in the future?

Inches matter

An important reality is that sea-level rise is not a future phenomenon. It has been happening slowly over the past decades, at about one inch every ten years. That’s a half foot since the 1960s and already it is taking a toll. Areas of Miami now have flooding at high tide—a situation not observed in the past. The drainage system in south Florida is starting to fail. Flood control structures that take away rainwater by gravity sometimes cannot flow when the ocean side of the flood gates have a higher level of salt water than the upstream fresh water sides.

Why does one inch matter? When I lived in coastal Florida, one time a major rain event coincided with high tide, which made it difficult for water to quickly exit to the ocean. When water levels rose one half of an inch from the storm, my entire neighborhood flooded and water nearly entered my house. As we hastily tried to block all of the doors with tape and towels, it hit home what a difference one more inch of sea level would have meant – the difference between no damage and perhaps thousands of dollars of damage to our home. However, over many decades, we are looking at feet, not inches of rising sea levels.

What we know now

Three years ago, leading researchers convened at a climate change summit hosted by Florida Atlantic University, the research program Florida Sea Grant and the University of Florida to discuss the future of Florida under projected climate change and sea-level rise conditions. The picture these researchers paint is bleak. Between now and 2100, floods that happen every 100 years are projected to start happening every 50, then every 20, then every 5, until large areas of coastal Florida are under water.

These experts’ discussions considered such dire things as: how to strategically abandon large areas of the Florida Keys; how animals that now live in low-lying areas will move to higher ground when human populations are vying for the same territory; and even how to reconfigure Miami into a series of islands on a historical ridge along the southeast Florida coast, knowing that at some point, even those ridges will be part of the ocean.

A report by the Florida Oceans and Coastal Council, a body established by the state’s legislature and on which I serve, developed a comprehensive report on the probable and possible effects of sea-level rise on coastal Florida. Major findings of that report included:

• Sea level is likely to rise by 20 to 40 inches by 2100. If there is major melting of polar and glacier ice, sea level could rise as much as 80 inches this century
• During hurricanes, higher sea levels may boost storm surge, causing greater scouring of beaches and in the worst case scenario, inundation of barrier islands and loss of coastal properties
• There will be increased pressure to armor shorelines with seawalls to protect buildings from waves, but at some point this may not be effective because of escalating costs and the porous rock that underlies most of Florida, which will allow sea water to seep under seawalls.
• Rising seas will shift the beach inland, imperiling coastal roads, homes and businesses.
• Rising seas will stress coastal infrastructure (buildings, roads and bridges) because salt water will affect structural integrity.
• Saltwater intrusion will become more common in freshwater well fields near the coast. A sea rise of just six inches will require water conservation, waste water reuse, stormwater storage facilities and alternative water supplies including desalinization.

It now is widely accepted that climate change is causing an unprecedented rise in sea levels around the world, and that locations such as Florida, where huge infrastructure and large populations live right on the coast, are especially vulnerable.

As noted in the Oceans and Coastal Council report, the risks compel us to seek a more thorough understanding of the impacts, and provide current and future generations with the information needed to adapt. Ignoring climate change or dismissing it as ‘not settled science’ will only lead to more costly and complex decisions in the future and cause greater harm to our people and our economy.

Future communities

While the challenges presented by climate change and sea-level rise are great, challenges also bring opportunity.

As Florida seeks to adapt to the changing future, it is an opportunity for us to engage in vibrant discussions at the local, regional, state and federal levels about the nature of our communities, how we want them to look in the future, and how to achieve our goals. Engaging in such conversations will help us learn and work together for the best possible future for our communities.

Many communities around the state are already doing this. Southeast Florida has its Climate Change Compact, northeast Florida is working together under the Public Private Regional Resilience Initiative, southwest Florida and Punta Gorda as far back as 2009 developed the City of Punta Gorda Adaptation Plan. With such work, we can move towards a future which, while filled with challenges and different than the past, need not be only about loss, but also about what we can accomplish.

Karl Havens|Director|Florida Sea Grant|April 20, 2015

Heed the Everglades’ warning on climate change

Of all the voices calling for action against the dangers of climate change, none can match the Florida Everglades for a fierce and urgent testament to the damage already happening and the threat of further harm to come.

Rising seas are turning freshwater wetlands into saltwater lagoons along Cape Sable. Droughts threaten the seasonal rains that recharge the Everglades, the source of drinking water for one in every three Florida residents. Warming temperatures are extending the range of insects that bear such illness as West Nile virus, dengue fever and Lyme disease.

All of that gets worse from here — for the Everglades, the nation and the world — unless we act now to cut the dangerous carbon pollution that’s driving climate chaos.

That’s the message coming out of the Everglades.

President Barack Obama drew on that authority on Wednesday, taking an Earth Day trek to the Everglades to make the case for action now.

Last year, after all, was the hottest since global record-keeping began in 1880. The 17 hottest years on record have all occurred since 1997. And the first quarter of this year was the hottest yet.

We’re on track for further warming in the coming decades. And scientists say sea levels could rise another 2 feet or more by the end of the century — a level that would put much of the Everglades under seawater — if we fail to act.

At risk is not only the Everglades but Florida’s diverse economy, more than $200 billion worth of coastal real estate. And for the health of our people, especially seniors, children and those who work outside in extreme heat, that means extra hardship for those who suffer from asthma, heart conditions or many other ailments.

Climate change is a global problem. Fixing it will take global solutions.

By leading the way in protecting future generations from worsening climate change, though, we’re doing what’s right for our country. As we do, we’re seeing progress from others around the world, including China, India, Mexico and the European Union. That’s building real momentum toward global cooperation when leaders from more than 190 countries gather for critical climate talks this fall in Paris.

The heart of Obama’s climate-change agenda is a plan to help clean up the dirty power plants that account for about 40 percent of our carbon footprint, nationwide. Astonishingly, there’s no limit on how much of this pollution these plants may cough up.

The president’s Clean Power Plan would change that. Over the next 15 years, it would cut carbon emissions from our power plants by 30 percent, compared to 2005 levels.

We can do even better than that, but we have to get started now.

Under the plan, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will tailor specific reduction targets to match each state’s energy mix. States then work with local power companies to find the most cost-effective way to get the job done.

In Florida, for example, power companies may promote energy efficiency to help families and businesses do more with less waste — the quickest and cheapest way to cut our carbon footprint. They may get more power from the wind and sun, tune up aging generating equipment or some combination of all of this.

By cleaning up its dirty power plants, Florida can create thousands of good-paying jobs in the clean energy sector, reduce electric bills for its residents and strike a blow against the central environmental challenge of our time.

Tallahassee, though, is wasting time, dragging its feet on a plan that deserves our support, and standing up for fossil-fuel polluters instead of the people of Florida. It’s time to stop pretending we can escape climate change and its rising toll by telling folks not to talk about it.

Nature has a way of speaking with a kind of power and eloquence that can transcend words. The Everglades is telling us every way it knows how that we must cut the dangerous carbon pollution that’s driving this widening menace. When a voice like that cries out to us, it’s time to heed the call.

Rhea Suh|president|Natural Resources Defense Council|April 23, 2015

US battles agricultural carbon emissions

Federal officials unveil new plans, programs

DETROIT — Federal agricultural officials announced Thursday voluntary programs and initiatives for farmers, ranchers and foresters meant to build on President Barack Obama’s efforts to combat global warming — and don’t require congressional approval.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack unveiled the plans at Michigan State University, where Obama signed the sweeping farm bill into law last year. The efforts, many of which have their roots in that law, aim to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions, boost carbon capture and storage and come with various enticements, including grants, low-interest loans and technical assistance.

Vilsack said that the agriculture industry accounts for about 9 percent of U .S. emissions, adding that compares favorably with the rest of the globe but can be improved.

“American farmers and ranchers are leaders when it comes to reducing carbon emissions and improving efficiency in their operations,” he said in prepared remarks. “We can build on this success in a way that combats climate change and strengthens the American agriculture economy.”

Before the event, Vilsack said officials “want to do this in a way that will help not only the environment but also improve agricultural productivity with improved yields, and we can also improve the bottom line of producers with greater efficiency.”

Obama administration aides have said the issue of climate change became even more attractive after the November election, because the Democrat has considerable leverage to act without Congress. Such actions, though, have drawn fierce objections from Republicans and the energy industry.

Specific actions include reducing the unnecessary use of fertilizer and methane emissions from cattle and swine, reforesting areas damaged by wildfire and disease and encouraging tree planting in urban areas. For methane reduction in particular, the federal program promotes installing more anaerobic digesters, which use naturally occurring bacteria to break down organic waste to produce biogas, a fuel similar to natural gas.

Vilsack’s department estimates that if all steps are followed, it would reduce emissions and enhance carbon sequestration by roughly 120 million metric t ons of carbon dioxide equivalent — akin to taking 25 million cars off the road a year.

Already, Obama has moved to cut U.S. emissions through tougher fuel economy standards and has set a target of reducing overall greenhouse gas emissions by up to 28 percent below its 2005 level by 2025.

Last year’s landmark agreement that commits the U.S. and China — the No. 1 and No. 2 greenhouse gas emitters — to dramatic action on carbon emissions in the coming years drew sharp criticism. Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma who’s the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, called that agreement “hollow and not believable,” and has previously vowed to block Obama’s moves.

JEFF KAROUB|ASSOCIATED PRESS4/24/15

Thawing permafrost feeds climate change

 Carbon, held in frozen permafrost soils for tens of thousands of years, is being released as Arctic regions of the Earth warm and is further fueling global climate change, according to a Florida State University researcher.

Assistant Professor of Oceanography Robert Spencer writes in Geophysical Research Letters that single-cell organisms called microbes are rapidly devouring the ancient carbon being released from thawing permafrost soil and ultimately releasing it back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Increased carbon dioxide levels, of course, cause the Earth to warm and accelerate thawing.

“When you have a huge frozen store of carbon and it’s thawing, we have some big questions,” said Robert Spencer, assistant professor of oceanography. “The primary question is when it thaws, what happens to it? Our research shows this ancient carbon is rapidly utilized by microbes and transferred to the atmosphere, leading to further warming in the region and therefore more thawing. So we get into a runaway effect.”

Spencer and a team of researchers first began looking at this issue of what happened to the carbon as permafrost thawed several years ago. There was a gap in the scientific literature because terrestrial scientists had found that permafrost was thawing and thus releasing long-stored carbon. But, aquatic scientists found no evidence of that ancient carbon at the mouths of major rivers leading to the Arctic Ocean.

So, where did the carbon go?

The simple answer is that it became food.

The more complex answer provides an interesting glimpse into how some of the smallest living organisms can have a major effect on the planet. Microbes, single-cell organisms that are too small for the human eye to see, are the oldest form of life on Earth and carbon is a rich food source for them.

Scientists weren’t finding carbon at the mouth of major Arctic rivers because it was already consumed and released into the atmosphere.

“This material is very attractive to these microbes as a food source,” Spencer said. “As permafrost thaws, microbes are going to use this carbon with clear ramifications for climate change.”

To conduct this study, Spencer led a team of researchers who spent more than three months between 2012 and 2014 studying thawing permafrost in Siberia. Permafrost in the region is extremely deep-more than 100 feet in some places-and has remained frozen for tens of thousands of years.

At 19 different sites in the Siberia region, Spencer and his colleagues collected hundreds of water samples and conducted experiments to determine what portion of the carbon pool microbes were using as a food source-the ancient carbon coming from the thawed permafrost or new sources.

Spencer acknowledged it is exceptionally difficult for scientists to capture that process in real time, but future research will take his team to small streams dominated by permafrost thaw to see if they could quantify permafrost carbon inputs before microbes gobble it up.

“We have to capture this material as soon as it thaws because that’s where we see its unique compositional features which make it so attractive to microbes,” he said.

Phys.org|April 23, 2015

Vermont Becomes First to Have Mandatory GMO Labeling

Will other states dive in by 2016?

After months of consumer and activist comments, picketing at the Attorney General’s Office, and winning a lawsuit against Monsanto who tried to overturn the original law, Vermont has just become the first state to have mandatory GMO labeling.

Vermont became the first state to become GMO-labeled (a step toward becoming GMO-Free) in 2014, but Monsanto, Dow, Bayer and other biotech interests decided that consumers had no rights at the state level to determine what they wanted to eat. Vermont was brave enough to uphold the voted-upon law anyhow, and even put money aside for the legal fight they knew would ensue when the new legislation passed.

On Friday, the Legislative Committee on Administrative Rules formally filed with the Secretary of State’s Office to uphold the new GMO labeling rule, which will become effective July 1, 2016.

Attorney General Bill Sorrell said that the formal adoption of the GMO labeling law gives ample time to food manufacturers to change their products or lose an entire state’s business.

I’m proud of Vermont for standing strong against biotech, and we need to do the same now as members of Congress will vote this week on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). If this ‘Nafta-on-steroids” bill wins the vote, then it would take away state’s rights to ban or label GMOs, and all the effort Vermont has put into cleaning up its food supply will have been for naught.

Christina Sarich|Infowars.com|April 24, 2015

Extreme Weather

What Cyclone Pam and Typhoon Maysak Tell Us About the Future of Island Communities

Last month, I visited the Solomon Islands to meet with Global Greengrants’ Pacific Islands Advisory Board. I had naively imagined hot sun and wide beaches, with tropical forests at the shorelines. Instead, it rained torrentially for several days. This is because Cyclone Pam was forming off the coast of the Solomons and storming its way toward terrible devastation in Vanuatu.

There were no beaches in Honiara, where I was staying. The shorelines are eroding away due to sea rise and storm surges. Sea level around the Solomons has been rising by 8 millimeters per year, more than twice the global average.

In Honiara, I observed waves crashing just short of a seaside restaurant and onto the floor of an open-air coffee shop and bar. An employee calmly mopped the water away, as if this would stop it from flooding again.

Global Greengrants advisor in the Solomons, Willie Atu, who works for The Nature Conservancy, says, “The Pacific Islands’ small population, limited resources, remoteness and economic dependence on foreign aid increase their vulnerabilities, making them more susceptible to the onslaught of natural disasters, including that of climate change.”

Island peoples’ lives are now constantly disrupted by extreme weather and natural disasters. The frequency and occurrence of Category 4 and 5 storms in the Pacific region more than doubled since 1975. Climate change has both short-term and long-term impacts for island peoples. Not only is the frequency and intensity of cyclones—also known as hurricanes or typhoons—increasing, but so is the duration of the cyclone season. These extreme weather events, in combination with sea level rise—which is conservatively projected to upsurge from one to four feet globally by 2100—are already catastrophic for island communities.

According to Jonathan Gregory, lead author on the subject for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “It is virtually certain that global mean sea level rise will continue for many centuries.”

Island peoples know best what adaptation and mitigation techniques are most appropriate for their needs. Global Greengrants’ Pacific Island Advisory Board delivers small amounts of money into the right hands at exactly the right moment. It empowers local leaders to take actions that effectively manage the unavoidable impacts of climate change.

Take a $5,000 Greengrant we made last December to Resource Management Trust Board in the Solomons. The group focuses on improving food security during the cyclone season and works with rural women to preserve nuts, fruit and root crops using traditional methods. Having access to enough local food during the monsoon season allows communities to be self-sufficient, preserve their traditional diet and save money. This can be the difference between life and death for a community dealing with devastating storms such as Cyclone Pam and Typhoon Maysack.

Four months later, Global Greengrants responded to an urgent plea to help communities in Vanuatu that were wrecked by Cyclone Pam, the strongest storm ever to hit the South Pacific. Emergency Greengrants will provide temporary shelter for 100 people on the Vanuatu island of Erromango, where many people are homeless and are still awaiting aid.

Barely two weeks after that, we received reports from former grantees about the destruction and urgent need for support in communities in the Federated States of Micronesia, which were slammed by Typhoon Maysak.

The photographs from the area are heartbreaking. Ulithi Island lost all of its crops and most people’s homes have been destroyed; people are building shacks from the very little corrugated iron they can recover. In Chuuk, over 6,760 people have been forced from their homes and 80 percent of the breadfruit, banana and taro crops were damaged. Local food production is vital to the Pacific Islands, where the majority of rural people still depend on subsistence agriculture. Without these crops, people will starve.

Global Greengrants is not an emergency and disaster relief organization. But because we can quickly deliver support to grassroots groups that international and government aid has a hard time reaching, we are being asked again and again to help. Most times, we get there well before large aid agencies arrive with supplies and relief.

I can’t say this doesn’t worry me. Our area of expertise is emboldening people to create change. We never intended to be a reactionary aid group. But our grantees in the Pacific, many of whom receive no other source of funding, are facing a dire future. We must acclimatize to their realities.

Importantly, this means supporting Pacific communities to look ahead and manage the aftermath of climate change well before the cyclones or super storms strike. An example is the Reef Islands, in Northern Vanuatu. In January of 2014, we supported the Ngala’a Indo Project with a $5,000 Greengrant to plant mangroves and set up rainwater collection tanks. The new tanks provided more than 300 people with safe drinking water after their wells were contaminated during natural disasters.

Colonialism and globalization have all but destroyed the cultures that the famous cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead chronicled. Many tribal peoples are trying to hold on to their traditions. But mounting threats to food and water security, infrastructure, health, and safety are expected to lead to increasing human migration.

Climate change will likely lead to few or no islands left in this part of the Pacific Ocean.

My few days in the Solomons helped me see the questions more clearly: Will we in the North—the clear source of the globe’s climate problems—continue to pursue dead-end policy solutions that will not turn around the climate crisis and might even perpetuate it? Or will we look to the future with clear eyes and see what must be done? Will we understand that as much as we wish climate change wasn’t happening, there may simply be no way around it?

I believe mitigation has a role to play. But Pacific Islanders, and, indeed, many underserved communities around the world, face a bleak future unless we start to elevate that most reviled word, adaptation, to the international stage. If we don’t start talking more about adaptation in addition to mitigation, soon we will all be focused on compensation.

Terry Odendahl|April 16, 2015

Genetically Modified Organisms

Nice Try, Monsanto

On Tuesday (April 14, 2015), Maine’s Senate referred, to the state’s agriculture committee, a bill that would require mandatory labeling of foods containing GMOs sold in Maine.

Finally. We say that because the bill should have, and would have, been referred weeks earlier, if not for Monsanto lobbyists doing their best to hold it up.

OCA is leading the effort to pass LD 991, An Act To Amend Maine’s Genetically Modified Food Products Labeling Law. In 2013, Maine passed a GMO labeling law, but the law can’t be enacted unless five New England states, including New Hampshire, also pass a law.

Maine consumers don’t want to wait. Neither does the national GMO labeling movement, which knows how critical it is to press forward with state GMO labeling laws in order to show Congress (and Monsanto) that this issue is not going away until all of us have the right to know if our food has been genetically modified.

Monsanto will do its best to kill Maine’s LD 991. Because with the bipartisan support already lined up for the bill, and a new poll showing that 97 percent of Maine voters want the right to know, the bill poses a credible threat to Monsanto and Big Food.

We will have to out-maneuver Monsanto every step of the way. With your support, we will. Just as we’ll continue to help other New England states join Vermont in passing bullet-proof, trigger-free mandatory GMO labeling laws. It’s time!

Organic Consumer”s Association|April 2015

U.S. regulators may recommend testing food for glyphosate residues

Amid rising public concern over possible links to disease, U.S. regulators may start testing food products for residues of the world’s most widely used herbicide, the Environmental Protection Agency told Reuters on Friday.

Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup herbicide, has come under intense scrutiny since a research unit of the World Health Organization reported last month it was classifying glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

The herbicide is considered safe by the EPA, as well as many foreign regulatory agencies, including in the European Union.

Still, a number of companies, consumer groups and advocacy organizations have been sampling foods, as well as human urine and breast milk, to try to determine the pervasiveness of glyphosate residues.

Glyphosate is used on corn, soybeans, sugar beets and other crops genetically altered to withstand it. It is also used by farmers growing wheat and other crops. Its use has surged with the advancement of genetically engineered crops.

The U.S. government, which annually tests thousands of foods for pesticide residues, does not test for glyphosate, in part because it has been considered safe.

That could change, the EPA said in a statement Friday.

“Given increased public interest in glyphosate, EPA may recommend sampling for glyphosate in the future,” the agency said in an email response to a Reuters inquiry.

Monsanto Co, the maker of Roundup, on April 1 posted a blog seeking to reassure consumers about glyphosate residues, saying trace amounts are safe. It did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The EPA said the ultimate decision rests with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its Pesticide Data Program. In the past, the EPA has advised the USDA that “glyphosate residues do not pose a risk to human health,” the EPA said.

USDA spokesman Peter Wood said, however, that the “EPA makes the determination which commodities and pesticides are tested.”

Since 1991, the USDA’s testing program has tested thousands of food samples each year for residues. It informs the U.S. Food and Drug Administration if residues exceed tolerance levels for the pesticides set by the EPA.

In 2013, the USDA tested for about 400 different pesticides on a variety of foods as well as in groundwater and drinking water.

Only in one year – 2011 – did the agency conduct testing for glyphosate. Those tests, done on 300 soybean samples, found 271 of the samples had residues. All of them fell below the EPA-set tolerance level of 20 parts per million, with residues ranging from 0.26 to 18.5 ppm.

Carey Gillam|Reuters|April 17, 2015|Editing by Dan Grebler and Christian Plumb

Farmers turn to GMO-free crops to boost income

WASHINGTON –When Justin Dammann enters his southwestern Iowa cornfield this month, the 35-year-old farmer will sow something these 2,400 acres have not seen in more than a decade — plants grown without genetically modified seeds.

The corn, which will head to a processor 20 miles down the road this fall, will likely make its way into tortilla shells, corn chips and other consumable products made by companies taking advantage of growing consumer demand for food without biotech ingredients.

For Dammann and other Midwest farmers, the burgeoning interest in non-GMO foods has increased how much they get paid to grow crops in fields once populated exclusively with genetically modified corns and soybeans. The revenue hike is a welcome benefit at a time when lower commodity prices are pushing farm income down to what’s expected to be the lowest level in six years.

“We never really thought we would go back to (non-GMO). But the consumer, in my opinion, has sent a clear message that a certain percentage of our customers are willing to pay more for the non-GMO lines,” Dammann said. “This non-GMO thing has seemed to take hold and gain a lot of traction.”

Tim Daley, an agronomist at Stonebridge Ltd., said the Cedar Falls company is getting flooded with calls from income-hungry farmers all over the Midwest looking for crops such as non-GMOs that could pay them a premium for their corn and soybeans.

Recently, a farmer growing a non-GMO soybean crop could get as much as $2 a bushel for soybeans and $0.35 a bushel for corn over the market price. Daley estimated growers could save $150 for each bag of corn seed they buy that lacks the traits embedded in genetically modified crops, a difference that could help a farmer reach profitability.

Stonebridge works with major food producers that manufacture energy bars, veggie burgers, soy milk and other products from non-GMO and other niche crops to ensure there will be enough grown by farmers to meet demand.

“Usually I don’t turn people away, and I’m making the calls trying to find the acres,” Daley said. But with lower grain prices “all my acres are filled, as far as my needs go, and I’m pretty much turning farmers away because the demand for the food-grade side hasn’t increased as fast as the interest to produce them.”

The overwhelming majority of corn and soybean crops in the Corn Belt, including Iowa, are grown using genetically modified crops.

Producers have embraced the crops — first commercially introduced in the United States in 1996 with the launch of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soybeans — because they boost yields and reduce the need for costly chemicals to rebuff bugs and weeds.

Last year, an estimated 97 percent of soybeans and 95 percent of corn grown in Iowa were from biotech seeds, figures that were both higher than the national average.

DuPont Pioneer, based in Johnston, Ia., said the agri-business giant best known for its genetically modified seeds hasn’t wavered in its support for non-GMO products. Pioneer, which touts itself as the largest seller of non-GMO corn and soybean seeds, estimates about 4 percent of its soybean seed sales and 5 percent of its corn are non-GMO.

Morrie Bryant, senior marketing manager at DuPont Pioneer, said the company views non-GMO seeds as a niche product.

“We’re very involved in traits, and we believe in traits and the importance of traits, but we also believe in the importance of offering choice. We certainly believe that non-GMOs aren’t going to leave us. It’s going to endure,” Bryant said. “There is a domestic demand for non-GMO, albeit pretty small right now.”

Exactly how many acres of non-GMO crops are grown in the United States for food is difficult to estimate because it is a specialized product and often contracted out to meet changing demand by food manufacturers. Further growth for non-GMO corn and soybeans could come if more livestock producers move toward raising chickens and hogs given GM-free feed. If it comes to fruition, those involved with non-GMO seeds are optimistic more land would go toward animal feed than is going for products found on supermarket shelves.

As much as 80 percent of packaged foods contain ingredients that have been genetically modified, according to the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents more than 300 food and beverage companies, including Kellogg and H.J. Heinz.

Christopher Doering|gannet.com|April 18, 2015

Neil Young Takes on Monsanto

There’s a cliché about people getting more conservative as they get older. But with 69-year-old musician Neil Young that opposite seems to be true. He keeps getting more passionate and outspoken about the things he believes—including the environment, Keystone XL pipeline, small-scale agriculture and taking on big corporations like Monsanto.

The unflaggingly productive Young has a new album coming out June 16 called The Monsanto Years. It’s all about the multinational chemical giant that has been a leader in the development of genetically modified seeds and pesticides. That includes the widely used Roundup herbicide, which has been linked to cancer. He mentioned the album in January in an interview with Rolling Stone executive editor Nathan Brackett but according to the magazine he appeared to be joking.

Young has been outspoken against the spread of genetically modified crops. Last November, he announced on his website that he would be boycotting Starbucks for their membership in the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), which has been one of the main funders, along with Monsanto, of successful efforts to derail state GMO-labeling ballot initiatives.

“No latte for me,” he said. “I used to line up and get my latte every day but yesterday was the last one. Starbucks has teamed up with Monsanto to sue Vermont and stop accurate food labeling. Hiding behind the shadowy ‘Grocery Manufacturers Association,’ Starbucks is supporting a lawsuit that’s aiming to block a landmark law that requires genetically modified ingredients be labeled. Amazingly, it claims that the law is an assault on corporations’ right to free speech.”

Starbucks has denied their involvement in the Vermont lawsuit, but it seems like Young isn’t letting them off the hook. At a pop-up gig at SLO Brewing Co. in San Luis Obispo last weekend featuring mostly environmentally focused material, he debuted several new songs, including “The Monsanto Years,” “Too Big to Fail,” “New Day for the Planet” and “Rock Starbucks.”

Young will hit the road this summer with his band Promise of the Real, which features the songs of another passionate advocate for the old-fashioned family farm: Willie Nelson. His guitarist/singer sons Micah and Lukas will be part of Young’s Rebel Content tour, kicking of July 5. The tour will include Young’s first headlining show in Vermont (he performed there once before 50 years ago as an unknown guitarist in an obscure, short-lived band). The state’s Burlington Free Press speculated that the concert might be connected to the state’s support for GMO labeling.

Anastasia Pantsios|April 23, 2015

GMO labeling bill stalls amid interagency, committee tussle

House Agriculture Committee lawmakers want more control over deciding which government agency — the Agriculture Department or the Food and Drug Administration — would control the regulation of labels for genetically modified foods.

This leaves a much-publicized bill to create labeling standards in limbo.

The “Safe and Accurate Labeling Act,” H.R. 1599, was reintroduced with bipartisan support last month, garnering cheers from agriculture commodity groups and criticism from environmental organizations pushing for mandatory disclosure of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on food packaging.

But beyond the burst of pronouncements for or against the bill, H.R. 1599 appears to have stalled. This frustrates members of the Agriculture Committee, which has some jurisdiction over the bill but less control than the Energy and Commerce Committee, which has oversight of FDA.

“There doesn’t seem to be a lot of enthusiasm to move the bill in that committee, not as much enthusiasm as there is in the Ag Committee; that’s the problem,” said Agriculture Committee ranking member Collin Peterson (D-Minn.).

The bill, introduced by Reps. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) and G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.), would pre-empt state initiatives to affix labels on GMOs by reaffirming FDA’s role in regulating food labels, allowing the agency to develop guidelines for a voluntary labeling system. The legislation would also allow USDA to certify non-GMO products, in a manner similar to its program for certified organic goods.

From “low fat” to “juice from concentrate,” FDA is the authority on labeling foods for nutrition information, potential allergens, health claims and other statements on packaging.

On the other end of the food supply chain, USDA approves and regulates crops from genetically modified seeds. A GMO plant’s DNA has been altered in a laboratory to express certain traits, like the ability to withstand herbicide applications or kill off pests. GMO crops are an important part of many farmers’ production schedules; more than 90 percent of the country’s corn, soybean, sugar beet and cotton acres is planted with genetically modified seeds.

“I think [USDA] would be better suited to deal with inputs into agricultural products than FDA would be,” said House Agriculture Chairman Michael Conaway (R-Texas). He added that there would be “risks” that FDA would not work in agriculture’s favor, but he declined to elaborate on that point.

Though mainstream scientists say there is little evidence that GMOs are harmful to health, consumer concerns over the safety of GMO foods remains high. More than 90 percent of people in a 2013 New York Times survey supported GMO labeling. More than 70 bills on the issue have been introduced across state legislatures, according to the Center for Food Safety, and Vermont successfully passed a law last year to require labeling by July 2016.

And Peterson is worried that popular opinion might influence FDA more than USDA.

“They get distracted by some of these people [who might promote] emotional things that are not scientific,” he said.

Agriculture backers in the House see USDA as bringing a softer touch to labeling than FDA.

“The idea, I think, is not to be punitive but to [have an] educative orientation,” said Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.), who gave up his high-ranking spot on the Agriculture Committee earlier this year to join Energy and Commerce. “So far, it seems like FDA has been a little more punitive.”

“USDA would be better, but if it’s FDA, so be it,” he added.

The tussle between committees is not the only thing stalling H.R. 1599. While Senate agriculture supporters like Senate Agriculture Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) say they support a law to pre-empt state labeling initiatives, no one has come forward with a bill.

“It’s just now starting to pick up steam,” Grassley said last week, after meeting with the Iowa Biotechnology Association.

In a statement, Pompeo’s spokeswoman said the congressman expects to get the House bill passed by this summer, without needing to cede to the Agriculture Committee.

Pompeo “looks forward to the Agriculture Committee marking-up this section of the bill,” wrote spokeswoman Heather Denker. “However, given the importance of the core issue — federal pre-emption of food labeling — to the entire food supply chain, the Congressman will work aggressively to see that provision signed into law.”

Mike Gruber, senior vice president of federal affairs for the Grocery Manufacturers Association, said the FDA component — and therefore, Energy and Commerce’s involvement — is critical for the most important part of the bill: preventing state efforts from going into effect.

“We need to make sure there is expressed pre-emption at FDA so that we don’t have this patchwork across the United States,” he said. The Grocery Manufacturers Association is a key backer of the bill and has sued the Vermont government for passing its labeling law.

Meanwhile, the difficulty in passing H.R. 1599 so far is apparent to many, especially those in favor of labeling GMOs.

“There’s a steep hill to climb for Mr. Pompeo and his bill,” said Colin O’Neil, director of government affairs for the Center for Food Safety

Tiffany Stecker|E&E reporter|E&E Daily|Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Monsanto sued in Los Angeles County for false advertising

Today a class action lawsuit (Case No: BC 578 942) was filed in Los Angeles County, California against the Monsanto corporation. The suit alleges that Monsanto is guilty of false advertising by claiming that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, targets an enzyme only found in plants and not in humans or animals. Monsanto makes this claim to support the contention that glyphosate is harmless to humans.

In the lawsuit, the argument is made that the targeted enzyme, EPSP synthase, is found in the microbiota which reside in our intestines and therefore this enzyme is found in humans and animals. It is further stated in the lawsuit that there are many human and animal health problems associated with the disruption of our intestinal microbes.

“Because it kills-off our gut bacteria, glyphosate is linked to stomach and bowel problems, indigestion, ulcers, colitis, gluten intolerance, sleeplessness, lethargy, depression, Crohn’s Disease, Celiac Disease, allergies, obesity, diabetes, infertility, liver disease, renal failure, autism, Alzheimer’s, endocrine disruption, and the W.H.O. recently announced glyphosate is ‘probably carcinogenic’.”

The International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization (WHO), last month declared that glyphosate is Group 2A carcinogen. The American Cancer Society quickly followed suit, also listing glyphosate as a Group 2A carcinogen.

An Environmental Protection Agency memo dated October 30, 1991 states that the EPA classified glyphosate as a possible carcinogen in 1985. In this 1991 memo, without any justification, this classification was changed to Not Carcinogenic. Three scientists refused to sign, two of whom wrote beside their name: Do Not Concur. This document contains data that clearly shows a statistically significant increase in tumors in laboratory animals treated with glyphosate. But because there weren’t more tumors in the group of animals who received a higher dose of glyphosate than there were in the group that received a lower dose, Monsanto made the claim that the tumors could not be related to glyphosate.

Today’s lawsuit may be the beginning of an avalanche. Earlier this month, Beijing resident Yang Xiao-lu filed a lawsuit against the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture requesting information disclosure of the toxicology report submitted to the Chinese government for glyphosate pesticide registration in China. The case has been accepted and the collegiate panel of the court has informed the plaintiff that, considering that Monsanto is a stakeholder to the case, they have added Monsanto as an involved party to the case. Chinese citizens had previously petitioned the Ministry of Agriculture for this toxicology report but were denied. The Ministry cited “trade secrets” as the reason for denial. It is difficult to comprehend how a toxicology report would contain trade secrets since trade secrets generally constitute ingredients or a recipe for a compound or manufacturing procedure.

In today’s lawsuit, Monsanto is accused of deliberate falsification to conceal the fact that glyphosate is harmful to humans and animals. “Defendant intentionally misleads consumers by misrepresenting and concealing the true and correct facts concerning glyphosate…” Attorney T. Matthew Phillips says, “We are not trying to prove that Roundup is harmful or carcinogenic, we are merely pointing out that Monsanto is lying about the enzymes that Roundup targets. Roundup kills the weeds in your backyard and the weeds in your stomach.”

Judgment is sought against Monsanto to prohibit the company from continuing to make the claim that glyphosate targets an enzyme not found in humans and for compensation to the plaintiffs, including attorney fees.

T. Matthew Phillips|April 21, 2015

Energy

  Where did the oil go?

Five years after the spill and its still around Video

5 years after BP spill, drillers push into riskier depths

ON THE GULF OF MEXICO — Five years after the nation’s worst offshore oil spill, the industry is working on drilling even further into the risky depths beneath the Gulf of Mexico to tap massive deposits once thought unreachable. Opening this new frontier, miles below the bottom of the Gulf, requires engineering feats far beyond those used at BP’s much shallower Macondo well.

But critics say energy companies haven’t developed the corresponding safety measures to prevent another disaster or contain one if it happens — a sign, environmentalists say, that the lessons of BP’s spill were short-lived.

These new depths and larger reservoirs could exacerbate a blowout like what happened at the Macondo well. Hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil could spill each day, and the response would be slowed as the equipment to deal with it — skimmers, boom, submarines, containment stacks — is shipped 100 miles or more from shore.

Since the Macondo disaster, which sent at least 134 million gallons spewing into the Gulf five years ago Monday, federal agencies have approved about two dozen next-generation, ultra-deep wells.

The number of deepwater drilling rigs has increased, too, from 35 at the time of the Macondo blowout to 48 last month, according to data from IHS Energy, a Houston company that collects industry statistics.

Department of Interior officials overseeing offshore drilling did not provide data on these wells and accompanying exploration and drilling plans, information that The Associated Press requested last month.

But a review of offshore well data by the AP shows the average ocean depth of all wells started since 2010 has increased to 1,757 feet, 40 percent deeper than the average well drilled in the five years before that.

And that’s just the depth of the water.

Drillers are exploring a “golden zone” of oil and natural gas that lies roughly 20,000 feet beneath the sea floor, through a 10,000-foot thick layer of prehistoric salt — far deeper than BP’s Macondo well, which was considered so tricky at the time that a rig worker killed in the blowout once described it to his wife as “the well from hell.”

Geophysicists estimate oil companies can unleash Saudi Arabian-like gushers at these unprecedented depths from fields capable of yielding up to 300,000 barrels of oil a day.

Temperatures and pressures — the conditions that make drilling so risky — get more intense the deeper you go. And the ancient salt layer brings extra wild cards.

Technology now allows engineers to see the huge reservoirs beneath the previously opaque salt, but the layer is still harder to see through than rock. And it’s prone to hiding pockets of oil and gas that raise the potential for a blowout.

“It’s not rocket science,” said Matthew Franchek, director of the University of Houston’s subsea engineering graduate program. “Oh, no, it’s much, much more complicated.”

By comparison, the Macondo well did not involve drilling through salt, and the “play” — an industry term for a reservoir — lay about 13,000 feet under the seafloor. The drillers aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig were teasing oil from prehistoric sludge dating back 23 million years, whereas the hydrocarbons in what’s called the Lower Tertiary zone are found in rock formations that go back 66 million years.

One post-Macondo engineering study found that the Macondo well rated a 3-plus on a 5-point scale of complexity. Thirteen wells in the 5 category had been drilled by the start of 2010.

The study also noted that Macondo was only the 43rd complex deep-sea well in the Gulf when it blew out. In that context — one blowout out of 43 similar wells — the industry cannot say it has a good safety record when it comes to complex deep wells, said David Pritchard, a Texas petroleum engineer who did the study.

A co-author on the study was Kevin Lacy, a former BP drilling executive for the Gulf who quit the company shortly before the Macondo disaster. Lacy testified in court that he quit in part because of cost-cutting measures BP was demanding.

“We’re generations behind the airline industry,” Pritchard said. He worries his industry has not done enough to make sure another catastrophic spill does not happen. “There is a management culture that wants to make money. It counts speed over reliability.”

Geoff Morrell, a BP spokesman, said his company has vastly improved its safety culture. “Ultimately the proof is in the results, and our safety metrics since the spill put us in line with or leading the industry,” he said.

A blowout at one of these super-deep wells could likely also look worse than the 2010 explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which engulfed the high-tech platform in flames, killed 11 men and injured hundreds.

Oil, natural gas and toxic sludge poured into the Gulf for 87 days as regulators, industry and the White House struggled to contain the offshore disaster. The Obama administration ordered a six-month halt to deep-water drilling, but lifted it sooner under pressure from the industry and Gulf Coast officials.

A slew of problems surfaced during the response, among them:

— It became apparent that the Coast Guard and other federal agencies were heavily dependent on the industry for the equipment and expertise to cope with a deep-water blowout.

— Authorities determined they didn’t have nearly enough floating boom to contain a spill that size.

— Emergency plans on file were outdated and irrelevant. They included contact information for a dead expert, as well as tips for saving walruses, which aren’t found in the Gulf.

A blowout in deeper water, farther from shore and containing even larger amounts of oil, would pose major challenges.

“We’re setting the stage for the next Macondo blowout, and even worse,” said Richard Charter, a senior fellow with the Ocean Foundation and a longtime industry watchdog.

The industry and regulators acknowledge the difficulties encountered at these new depths.

“Going to greater depths, greater pressures, does present greater challenges,” said Stephen Colville, president and CEO of the International Association of Drilling Contractors. “We have this desperate need for energy and we have to go after it wherever it is.”

BP PLC remains at the vanguard of ultra-deep exploration, and with its “Project 20K” it is developing the tools to handle the extremes of these deep reservoirs. The project’s name is a reference to the 20,000 pounds of pressure per square inch the equipment must withstand.

Other companies, among them Chevron, Statoil, Shell, and Conoco-Phillips, are developing these deep fields, with the blessing of federal authorities.

“We believe absolutely that it is safe to drill these reservoirs,” said Lars Herbst, the Gulf of Mexico regional director of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, the agency that oversees offshore drilling.

Since the BP spill, regulators and the industry publicly have said increasing safety is now a top priority. And they’ve taken a number of steps to make offshore drilling safer — including developing better cleanup equipment, hiring more inspectors, demanding tougher safety audits and setting better standards for drilling.

But critics say the improvements hardly go far enough and that engineering advances in drilling have far outpaced developments in safety and response technology.

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board recently found serious, even “fatal,” design flaws with blowout preventers used throughout the Gulf. A blowout preventer is the last line of defense against a blowout, and a device that failed in the Macondo disaster.

Under blowout conditions encountered in these depths, investigators said, the drill pipe inside the preventers could be bent and render the machines ineffective.

“We will always push the frontier,” said Ken Arnold, a petroleum engineer who served on the National Academy of Engineering panel that studied the Macondo disaster. “When I started in the industry, we seriously wondered if we could produce oil under 600 feet.”

Last week, the Department of Interior released long-waited new proposed changes for blowout preventers calling for changes that in theory would resolve flaws with those now in use. The rules, if adopted, would take effect in another five years at the earliest.

Meanwhile, drilling is resuming to pre-Macondo levels, and the number of reports about drilling trouble is again creeping up. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement records show drillers have been hit by a steady string of “well losses,” reportable incidents when a drilling operation temporarily loses control of a well. Since the Macondo blowout, 22 such incidents have been reported to authorities.

The loss of well-control incidents occurred in both shallow and deep waters.

CAIN BURDEAU|MyPalmBeachPost.com|The Associated Press|April 20, 2015

[About the Deepwater Horizon spill, President Obama said, in words to this effect, since we have never had a spill of this magnitude at this depth, we must know all the facts before we can allow deepwater drilling again. Obviously, we don’t know all the facts, yet we are about to begin drilling deeper wells at even greater water depths than the Macondo Well, in the environmentally sensitive Gulf of Mexico, to extract oil that would be much better left in place. If the wells are successful, burning the oil will add even more pollutants to our already overloaded atmosphere exacerbating global warming and sea level rise.]

Core samples show parallel between Deepwater Horizon and 1979 spill that also used dispersant

After the offshore rig sank into the sea, the oil flowed for months before anyone could stop it. Millions of gallons of crude tainted the Gulf of Mexico. To try to dissipate it before it reached shore, the rig’s owner sprayed an unprecedented amount of chemical dispersant on the slick.

That’s what happened with the Deepwater Horizon disaster that began five years ago today off the coast of Louisiana. That spill of BP oil has continued causing ecological damage such as a die-off of dolphins and lesions on redfish, among other marine species.

But that same scenario also happened with an earlier offshore disaster: the explosion and sinking of the Ixtoc 1 rig off the coast of Mexico in 1979.

Now scientists from a Florida-based scientific consortium have found a disturbing parallel between the two disasters. In both cases, the use of a dispersant on the gushing oil left a thick layer of slime lying on the ocean bottom, where it disrupted normal marine life in the gulf.

“What happened in the northern gulf seems to be exactly what happened in the southern gulf,” said David Hollander, a University of South Florida chemical oceanographer who has been studying the Deepwater Horizon spill since it began in 2010.

In both cases, he said, “a substantial amount of oil” remained on the gulf floor for years after the spill. With Deepwater Horizon, that amount is between 4 and 10 percent of the oil spilled, he said.

That apparently happened because of the use of a dispersant, which blocks oil droplets from joining together into big slicks.

With the approval of the Environmental Protection Agency, BP sprayed more of the dispersant, known as Corexit, than had ever been used. BP also used it deeper by spraying it directly at the oil erupting from the broken pipe 5,000 feet below the gulf’s surface.

All told, it used 1.84 million gallons of Corexit — just barely breaking the prior record, held by Ixtoc, and creating a controversy that continues today.

“The decision to use dispersants was made based on decades of research and real-world experience, and the best available science and data,” BP vice president Geoff Morrell said in a statement emailed to the Tampa Bay Times. “Dispersants played an important role in reducing the amount of oil that reached the Gulf’s beaches and marshes and limiting damage to coastal habitat and marine life.”

Ideally all of the dispersed droplets would be consumed by oil-eating bacteria that live throughout the gulf. Instead, plumes of the nearly invisible droplets floated through the gulf’s deep canyons, spreading the impact of the disaster through some of the most important areas for marine life.

A study released by Temple University researchers this month found that BP oil alone wasn’t as damaging to the gulf’s deep corals as that same oil mixed with Corexit was.

Yet the offshore oil industry still swears by the stuff.

In a news conference this month, oil industry representatives touted new technology for preventing another offshore rig disaster from happening. When a reporter asked whether they would still use Corexit on another spill, the reply was, “It’s allowed under the law.”

That’s because the EPA’s studies show Corexit is no more toxic than any of the alternatives.

As for the Temple study and another from the University of Alabama at Birmingham that found Corexit caused abnormalities in animals and humans, BP’s Morrell says findings produced in a lab “are not comparable to conditions and exposures that existed in the gulf.”

But now the consortium — a partnership of 13 institutions that includes USF’s College of Marine Sciences, Eckerd College and Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota — is going back to Ixtoc and Deepwater Horizon sites and taking samples to find parallels between the two.

“The comparison of Ixtoc I and Deepwater Horizon blowouts may give sound knowledge about the evolution of big oil spills,” said Alfredo Gracia [sic] of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, who is working with the Americans on the study.

They have already found that core samples dug up from the ocean floor after the 1979 spill greatly resemble ones from the vicinity of the Deepwater Horizon. The similarity is the thick, dark layer of oil and dispersant that blocked any of the small creatures living on the ocean floor from penetrating it or stirring it up, the way they would normally.

Three years after Deepwater Horizon, USF scientists found that the oil on the gulf floor had killed millions of amoeba like creatures that form the basis of the gulf’s aquatic food chain. Did that also happen during Ixtoc? No one knows for sure — yet.

“It was considered that oil lost during the Ixtoc blowout … impacted severely the phytoplankton and zooplankton communities mainly nearby,” Gracia said.

But when the Ixtoc spill at last went away, pushed off by heavy coastal rains, so did research grants. So while the shrimp fishery collapsed, that might have been because of the oil or it might have been because of overfishing, Gracia said.

Thus, for scientists like him, the $20 million effort by the consortium to compare the two spills is a chance, at last, to solve that old mystery along with the newer one.

CRAIG PITTMAN|Tampa Bay Times|April 19, 2015

Florida is about to allow an unusual type of fracking to go completely unregulated

Legislation that will likely allow fracking to proceed in Florida cleared committees in the state’s house and senate this week.

In their current forms, the bills will indicate that the most common form fracking, which involves shooting hundreds of thousands of gallons of water into rock formations to free up oil and gas, won’t be permitted until the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) completes a study on its impact. That’s according to bill sponsor Rep. Ray Rodrigues, per a report by the Naples Daily News’ Jenna Buzzacco-Foerster.

But according to Jennifer Hecker, director of natural resource policy for the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, the bills will not only allow fracking to eventually proceed, they will fail also to regulate two other types of unconventional oil and gas extraction that are likely to occur in Florida.

Because the rock beneath the state is not very thick, conventional fracking, may not be needed. The last instance of conventional fracking in the state was recorded in 2003.

Instead, the oil and gas can be accessed through acidization. This involves the same basic technique as regular fracking, except a diluted acid is used to dissolve limestone and other carbonate formations. Such formations are common in Florida.

Acidization occurred for the first time in the state in 2013, but was halted by the DEP over concerns about groundwater contamination, although no evidence of this has been found. The drilling company, Hughes, is suing the state over the stop order.

This type of fracking, along with a form that uses less than 100,000 gallons of water, go virtually unregulated in the package of bills proposed, Hecker says.

“This [legislation] is basically giving false assurances and doing very little to regulate the techniques that are most likely to be used in our region,” Hecker told Fusion.

According to a Florida House of Representative staff analysis of one of the bills, chemical disclosure requirements would only apply to the most conventional form of fracking.

While the conservancy initially worked to push through the legislation once they recognized that a statewide ban was not going to work, it has withdrawn its support after legislators turned down their proposals to include language regulating the two other forms of well stimulation.

There are currently 161 active conventional oil and gas wells in the state, concentrated in the southwest near the Everglades, and its western panhandle.

But Hecker says oil companies do not have to give advanced notice to the state if they change their operations to unconventional extraction — and that the new bills don’t change this.

Oil production in Florida peaked at 48 million barrels in 1978, but has steadily declined over the years, producing only 2.2 million barrels in 2014. Natural gas production has also decreased, from 52 billion cubic feet (BCF) in 1978 to approximately 21 BCF in 2014.

“We cannot stop advances in technology, but what is responsible to do is to regulate,” Senate bill sponsor Garrett Richter told Buzzacco-Foerster of the Naples Daily News. “As has been clearly established today, this increases regulation.”

Rob Wile|Fusion|April 17, 2015

Divest From Fossil Fuels Movement Explodes Across the U.S.

Many students have vowed to ramp up their divestment campaigns at universities across America this spring. One group who has garnered much media attention is Divest Harvard, which is wrapping up a week-long campaign known as “Harvard Heat Week.” Harvard has the largest endowment of any university in the world at $36.4 billion, and hundreds of alumni including Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, and former Colorado Senator Tim Wirth are participating in the group’s efforts this week.

After a week of sit-ins that have shut down administration offices at Massachusetts Hall, President Faust finally reached out directly to students with Divest Harvard. ”I would be happy to meet with you and a representative group of your student colleagues when you have ceased disrupting university operations,” wrote President Faust in an email.

The students however were not pleased with the offer for another closed door meeting and called for a more open process on divestment that schools like MIT have convened. Divest Harvard has made multiple requests for a more transparent process involving the entire student body, faculty and alumni. The group knows there is strong support for divestment because the student body voted 72 percent in favor of divestment and hundreds of faculty and thousands of alumni signed a letter supporting the initiative.

Divest Harvard has agreed to the meeting with the president, but explained that they would not stop protesting as long as Harvard continued to invest in fossil fuel companies. “Recent SEC filings revealed that the university septupled its investments in oil and gas companies last fall,” says Divest Harvard.

Cole Mellino|April 17, 2015

Five years later, not much has changed—including the impulse to drill.

Leading scientists tell NRDC science scribe Perrin Ireland what happened to BP’s oil and what they know about its impact on the Gulf.

When BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20, 2010, and sank to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, it killed 11 workers and spewed millions of gallons of crude across a huge swath of ocean and coastline. It took 87 days before the flow of oil could be stopped, but the devastation to wildlife and livelihoods continues to this day.

With the support of its allies in Washington D.C., the oil industry has avoided reforms that would make drilling safer. Despite a long chain of failures that led to the blowout, Congress has yet to pass a single law to help prevent future offshore-drilling disasters—even as industry efforts expand in the Gulf and the administration considers opening Atlantic and Arctic waters.

The nation’s costly and dangerous dependence on fossil fuel continues to endanger the lives of U.S. workers, the health of our waters, the lifeblood of coastal economies, and the survival of wildlife. There is a better way—putting necessary safeguards in place while also converting to clean energy sources that can’t spill or run dry. Former offshore-drilling regulator Liz Birnbaum is right: “We have long since reached the point where we should stop drilling for new supplies of oil.”

Five years later, NRDC looks back on the people and places that endured the worst of the disaster, and whose lives continue to be harmed by its impact—and the ongoing blight of the fossil-fuel industry in their waters and on their shores.

Natural Resources Defense Council|April 20, 2015

Will New FERC Chair Protect People or the Fossil Fuel Lobby?

From the time I walked yesterday into the FERC building—that’s the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the most powerful and dangerous federal agency most people have never heard of—things felt and looked different.

First were the cops. There are always FERC security personnel at the front entrance, but it seemed like there were twice as many yesterday as I’d ever seen before in past visits. In addition, and ominously, there were also a couple of Department of Homeland Security/Federal Protective Services police prominently stationed where they could not be missed.

Then there was the atmosphere in the auditorium where the five FERC commissioners were soon going to be having their monthly meeting. There was a noticeable tenseness, a lot less smiles, more uptight FERC staff faces than I’ve seen before, and this was about my seventh time at one of these monthly meetings.

Of course, it is true that last month during the March meeting Beyond Extreme Energy did what has never before been done inside FERC: a loud and boisterous, though nonviolent, sit-in. I suppose they had reason to be uptight wondering what we were going to do yesterday.

Yesterday was day one of Norman Bay’s tenure as Chair of FERC. It was also the sixth straight monthly meeting where Beyond Extreme Energy has had a visible presence, calling them out for their rubber-stamping of permits for the gas industry to expand its fracking infrastructure—pipelines, compressor stations, storage terminal and export terminals. Our activities since last summer, combined with the growing and inspiring resistance in frontline communities to this tsunami of infrastructure expansion, led then-Chair Cheryl LaFleur in late January to publicly call attention to the “situation” that FERC now has.

Bay has an interesting background. Unlike most of the other FERC commissioners, he does not have an extensive background of work with or for the fossil fuel industry. Prior to coming to FERC in 2009 he was a federal prosecutor in U.S. Attorneys’ offices in DC and New Mexico and a professor of law at the University of New Mexico Law School. Since 2009 he has been the director of enforcement at FERC, and his record seems somewhat hopeful.

U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein said of Bay’s work that “(his) market oversight unit at FERC has taken significant actions to crack down on the type of Wall Street energy speculation and market abuse that led to the energy crisis and allowed traders to rob American consumers and darken cities. He has used authority that I worked to pass in 2005—prohibiting fraud and manipulation in electricity and natural gas markets—in order to catch major financial institutions manipulating California’s electricity markets.”

And in explaining his opposition last summer to Bay being named as FERC chair, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell said, “There are factors that lead us to believe that Mr. Bay would reliably serve as a rubber stamp for this administration’s extreme anti-coal agenda.”

When Norman Bay began speaking to open the meeting yesterday, Beyond Extreme Energy activists, one by one, six of us, spoke up from where we were sitting throughout the room. Using Bay’s own words from a statement released the day before, we called for him to support “the public interest,” not the interests of the fossil fuel industry. We also called for FERC to stop threatening the futures of young children, to stop its rubber stamping ways and for Bay to lead efforts to transform this industry-cozy, industry-financed agency.

As we each did so, Bay stopped speaking and let the ample security in the room move into the rows where we were sitting and drag us out of our seats and out of the building. None of us were seriously injured, but some of us were handled by Federal Protective Service police in a pretty tough way.

Next up for the movement to stop and transform FERC: the Beyond Extreme Energy FERCus, beginning on May 21st, the date of FERC’s next monthly meeting, followed by stepping-it-up nonviolent but strong actions at their front doors every day they are open from then until May 29th. Let’s do it!

Ted Glick | April 17, 2015

Nation’s Strongest Fracking Ban Bill Introduced to Protect Public Lands

Congress members Jan Schakowsky of Illinois and Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, both Democrats, have made no secret of their strong opposition to fracking. Last December, for instance, as new rules were being formulated on the opening new areas of public lands to energy exploration and extraction, they introduced a bill to ban fracking entirely on public lands.

“Federal lands should be preserved for the public good,” said Pocan at the time. “We should not allow short-term economic gain to harm our environment and endanger workers.”

Today they upped the ante with the reintroduction of the Protect Our Public Lands Act, which they announced at a press conference in Washington DC. H.R. 1902 would prohibit fracking, the use of fracking fluid and acidization for the extraction of oil and gas on public lands for any lease issued, renewed or readjusted. The bill is being touted as the strongest bill against fracking introduced in Congress so far.

“Today is Earth Day‚ a time to renew our commitment to protecting the air we breathe, the water we drink and the planet we all call home,” said Schakowsky. “Our public lands have been preserved and protected by the federal government for over one hundred years. We owe it to future generations to maintain their natural beauty and rich biodiversity. I believe the only way to do that is to enact the Protect Our Public Lands Act, and I will continue to fight to see that happen.”

Schakowsky and Pocan were joined by environmental leaders, including Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, Hilary Baum of the American Sustainable Business Council, Andrea Miller of Progressive Democrats of America and Bill Snape, senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity. The legislation is also endorsed by Environment America and Friends of the Earth.

“Our public lands are a shared national heritage and shouldn’t be polluted, destroyed and fracked to enrich the oil and gas industry,” said Hauter. “Ironically, the President is speaking in the Everglades today, a unique and fragile ecosystem that is threatened by nearby fracking on public land. Congress must follow Congressman Pocan and Congresswoman Schakowsky’s bold leadership and ban fracking on these land, so that future generations can enjoy these special places.”

“We’ve seen fracking contaminate our drinking water, put our families health at risk and turn our treasured open spaces into industrial zones,” said Environment America’s Sarah Frost. “Environment America applauds Representatives Pocan and Schakowsky and the co-sponsors of POPLA on their effort to protect our country’s most precious and protected public lands from fracking. Some places are just too precious to drill and frack, and that includes our parks, canyons, and forests.”

Co-sponsors include Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva, who is the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler, Rhode Island Congressman David Cicilline and California Congressman Mark DeSaulnier. All are Democrats.

The reintroduction of the bill follows the new rules for fracking on public lands, which were announced by the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management in March. Their release followed a comment period that solicited more than a million responses, including more than 650,000 supporting a ban on oil and gas operations. While those rules strengthened some environmental and public health protections, for instance, requiring companies to disclose chemicals used within 30 days of completing operations, Schakowsky called them only “a step in the right direction.”

H.R. 1902 proposes to take another giant step.

“Our national parks, forests and public lands are some of our most treasured places and need to be protected for future generations,” said Pocan.“It is clear fracking has a detrimental impact on the environment and there are serious safety concerns associated with these type of wells. Until we fully understand the effects, the only way to avoid these risks is to halt fracking entirely.”

“Fracking is dangerous to human health, massively contributes to global warming and simply should not be occurring on U.S. public lands owned by all Americans,” said Snape. “This historic bill will help lead us to a better future.”

Anastasia Pantsios|April 22, 2015

French banks reject Galilee coal

French banks BNP Paribas, Societe Generale, and Credit Agricole have joined the investing boycott against coal mines in the Galilee Basin in Queensland, and the coal ports in the Great Barrier Reef.

The French banks join eight other international banks that have declared they will not fund Australia’s biggest potential coal assets, Julein Vincent Market Forces campaigner said.

Over half of the world’s biggest financiers of the coal industry have publicly stated they won’t be financing part or all of the Galilee coal export supply chain, he said.

“We’ve just finished an assessment of over $130 billion in loans to the Australian fossil fuel industry and it turns out that France is the fifth biggest source of debt for the coal, gas, and oil sector,” he said.

“In fact, all three French banks that have made statements today rank among the top 20 lenders to Australian coal mining,” he said.

It also means companies like Indian-based Adani, who are trying to secure finance this year in order to build Australia’s biggest coal mine, are seeing there funding options reduce rapidly.

A spokesperson for Adani said the miner had “not formally requested any financing from the French banks”, according to news reports.

“An institution ruling out something it was not requested to do has no bearing on this company,” the Adani spokesperson said.

Other would-be funders of the coal development “now need to think about whether they would be comfortable entering into a deal that so many of their peers have publicly rejected,” Vincent said.

The other boycott banks are: Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan.

Market Forces and Greenpeace have renewed their push to get Australia’s major banks to join the commitment against the development of coal mines in the Galilee Basin.

Ross Kendall|April 16, 2015

Confirmed: Oklahoma Earthquakes Caused By Fracking

Despite the enormous increase in earthquakes in Oklahoma that started at the same time as heavy fracking began there—with the number of earthquakes over 3.0 magnitude skyrocketing from an average of less than two a year to 585 last year—the state has been in official denial about the cause.

“Oklahoma experienced 585 magnitude 3+ earthquakes in 2014 compared to 109 events recorded in 2013.” Note: Only Earthquakes with a magnitude of 3.0 and higher are displayed.

Map credit: Oklahoma Office Of The Secretary Of Energy & Environment

Now the state has not only admitted that the injection into deep underground wells of fluid byproducts from drilling operations is behind the quakes, but it put up a website titled Earthquakes in Oklahoma that is a “one-stop source for information on earthquakes in Oklahoma.” The site includes an interactive map that displays the dramatic change not only in the number of earthquakes but in their distribution. Instead of a scattering around the state, they’re clustered heavily in areas where drilling operations are disposing of fracking wastewater.

The new website says, in a post dated April 21, “The Oklahoma Geological Survey announced today the majority of recent earthquakes in central and north-central Oklahoma are likely triggered by the injection of produced water in disposal wells.”

“Oklahoma experienced 585 magnitude 3+ earthquakes in 2014 compared to 109 events recorded in 2013,” it says on the front page. “This rise in seismic events has the attention of scientists, citizens, policymakers, media and industry. See what information and research state officials and regulators are relying on as the situation progresses.”

Click on that and you get this: “While we understand that Oklahoma has historically experienced some level of seismicity, we know that the recent rise in earthquakes cannot be entirely attributed to natural causes. Seismologists have documented the relationship between wastewater disposal and triggered seismic activity. The Oklahoma Geological Survey has determined that the majority of recent earthquakes in central and north-central Oklahoma are very likely triggered by the injection of produced water in disposal wells.”

“There is broad agreement among seismologists that the disposal of water into or in communication with basement rock presents a potential risk for triggering seismicity.”

That’s a big turnaround from recent years in which the state has officially ignored or denied this connection under pressure from the oil and gas industry. Last month, media outlets, including Bloomberg and Energy Wire, revealed that a trove of official emails released by the Oklahoma Geological Survey in response to a public records request showed that Oklahoma City oil and gas billionaire Harold Hamm, who is known as the father of the U.S. fracking boom, became involved in conversations about what was causing the earthquakes. State seismologist Austin Holland was called to a meeting with Hamm and University of Oklahoma president David Boren, who sits on the board of Hamm’s company, Continental Resources.

In the article Big Oil Pressured Scientists Over Fracking Wastewater’s Link to Quakes, Bloomberg reported, “Hamm requested that Holland be careful when publicly discussing the possible connection between oil and gas operations and a big jump in the number of earthquakes, which geological researchers were increasingly tying to the underground disposal of oil and gas wastewater, a byproduct of the fracking boom that Continental has helped pioneer.”

While the state has done an official about-face, the Oklahoma Oil and Gas Association (OKOGA) continued to deny that there was solid proof that the quakes were connected to wastewater injection.

“There may be a link between earthquakes and disposal wells,” said OKAGO president Chad Warmington. “But we—industry, regulators, researchers, lawmakers or state residents—still don’t know enough about how wastewater injection impacts Oklahoma’s underground faults. We don’t know enough about what’s really going on in the subsurface to know how to mitigate some of this risk.”

Luckily, the new website has diagrams explaining it. If that’s not enough for him, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) released a report today outlining models that forecast the potential earthquake damage in areas of induced seismicity. The USGS says bluntly, “Earthquake activity has sharply increased since 2009 in the central and eastern United States. The increase has been linked to industrial operations that dispose of wastewater by injecting it into deep wells.”

“This new report describes for the first time how injection-induced earthquakes can be incorporated into U.S. seismic hazard maps,” said Mark Petersen, chief of the USGS National Seismic Hazard Modeling Project. “These earthquakes are occurring at a higher rate than ever before and pose a much greater risk to people living nearby. The USGS is developing methods that overcome the challenges in assessing seismic hazards in these regions in order to support decisions that help keep communities safe from ground shaking.”

Anastasia Pantsios|April 23, 2015

Solar Capacity in the U.S. Enough to Power 4 Million Homes

In 1970, the first ever Earth Day was held to demonstrate broad global support for environmental protection. At the time, the world’s population stood at 3.63 billion. Today, that number has more than doubled.

Well, guess what? Greenhouse gas emissions have doubled since then, too. Simply put, the world is in real danger, locked in on a collision course with disaster.

It’s time to be honest with ourselves. We’re facing a watershed moment in our nation’s history. Today, climate change is a real and growing threat to America and the rest of the world. It’s indisputable. Sea levels are rising. We’re experiencing more intense and unpredictable storms. And droughts plague the world. Clearly, climate change threatens our economy, our future progress, our health and safety, and even our way of life. Every day, the Earth suffers a little more from human neglect. We can’t wish this problem away, and pointing fingers won’t solve it, either.

In celebration of today’s 45th annual Earth Day, the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) plans to mark the historic occasion every 2.5 minutes of every hour of the day, as a new solar installation is completed in America. What’s more, new figures from the U.S. Solar Market Insight 2014 Year in Review show a record amount of new, clean solar energy coming online over the next 20 months, greatly benefitting the environment.

When the very first Earth Day was held, there was virtually no solar energy powering the grid in the U.S. How times have changed. Today, there are 20 gigawatts (GW) of installed solar capacity in the U.S.—enough to power more than 4 million American homes—and we’re going to double both of those numbers by the end of next year. That’s our commitment to America—and to our planet. By the end of 2016, solar is expected to offset nearly 45 million metric tons of harmful carbon emissions, the equivalent of removing nearly 10 million cars off U.S. roads and highways, or shuttering 12 coal-fired plants. That’s a pretty impressive “high five” for our environment.

Consider what’s happened. It took 40 years for the U.S. to install its first 20 GW of solar, but the nation will add another 20 GW by the end of 2016. Here are some of the other projections from the latest SEIA/GTM Research report:

• 16 states will install more than 100 megawatts (MW) of solar in 2016. In 2010, only two states did.
• In 2016, California is expected to install as much solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity as the entire country did in 2014.
• The U.S. will surpass 1 million residential solar installations during the next two years.
• Solar will be close to generating 2 percent of America’s electricity needs by the end of 2016. In 2010, solar represented just 0.1 percent of capacity.
• All solar market sectors—residential, non-residential and utility scale—are expected to grow by 25 to 50 percent over the next two years.

Today, the U.S. solar industry employs 174,000 Americans nationwide—more than tech giants Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter combined—and pumps nearly $18 billion a year into our economy. This remarkable growth is due, in large part, to smart and effective public policies, such as the solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC), Net Energy Metering (NEM) and Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS). By any measurement, these policies are paying huge dividends for both the U.S. economy, as well as for the environment. For our industry, this truly is an exciting and promising time to be celebrating Earth Day. As the old saying goes, “actions speak louder than words,” and every new solar system that comes online today represents a win for the future of our planet.

Rhone Resch|April 22, 2015

Remember Mayflower? Exxon Slapped with Paltry Fine for Tar Sands Pipeline Spill

Arkansas suit against oil giant ends with $5 million agreement

Two years after a ruptured pipeline poured 134,000 gallons of tar sands oil into the suburban streets of Mayflower, Arkansas, creating a toxic mess that devastated both the community and the environment, ExxonMobil has been ordered to pay a $5 million fine for its role in the disaster, the state announced on Wednesday.

According to Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge and Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) Director Becky Keogh, a “consent decree” (pdf) has been reached in the suit over the March 29, 2013 rupture, in which the state charged that the oil giant had violated the Clean Water Act as well as state laws pertaining to the storage of hazardous waste during the cleanup of the massive spill. 

“ExxonMobil will pay $1 million in State civil penalties, $600,000 toward water quality-based Supplemental Environmental Projects and $280,000 to the Attorney General’s Office for litigation costs. ExxonMobil will also pay $3.19 million in federal civil penalties and perform measures to improve pipeline safety and spill response,” reads the statement from the Attorney General’s office.

As Mollie Matteson, senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity, told Common Dreams, “When you look at the fine and consider that Exxon makes a profit of close to $9 million every day, this fine is about half a day’s worth of profits. 

“I think the real question here,” Matteson continued, “is this fine sufficient to actually change Exxon’s behavior or any oil company’s behavior? And I think the answer is a pretty strong ‘no.’ Half a day’s profit lost is not going to be anything but a blip on their operations.”

Further, should Exxon chose to restart the pipeline which has laid dormant since the spill, it is required to pursue additional safety measures as well as improve its spill response capabilities. 

In addition to its use of aging and unfit pipelines to transport the tar sands oil, Exxon was widely blamed for a slow and unfit response and for failing to communicate the extent of the spill—going so far as to institute a no-fly zone disallowing journalists and others to investigate the matter.

Following the spill, Mayflower residents were forced to evacuate and for months complained of smelling fumes as well as other negative health effects. The nearly 5,000 barrels of tar sands oil contaminated a local watershed, leaking an untold number of chemicals into the water supply.

Lauren McCauley|staff writer|Common Dreams|April 22, 2015

Michael Brune: BP Oil Disaster Was Not an Accident, It Was a Crime

April 20, 2010 should be, to borrow a phrase from Franklin Roosevelt, “a date that will live in infamy.” Today is the anniversary of the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history: the explosion of Deepwater Horizon and subsequent oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. I don’t like to call it a spill, because spills are accidents. What happened that day was not an accident; it was a crime.

BP, the giant oil company most responsible for the disaster, pleaded guilty in 2012 to 11 felony counts related to the deaths of 11 workers. Last year, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier ruled that “BP committed a series of negligent acts or omissions that … together amount to gross negligence and willful misconduct under the Clean Water Act.” (The operator of the Deepwater rig and contractors like Halliburton also share some of the blame, although they were found “negligent” rather than “grossly negligent.”)

BP, meanwhile, attempted to minimize its financial liability by, for instance, claiming that “only” 2.5 million barrels worth of oil (more than a hundred million gallons) were dumped in the Gulf. (The amount of the fine BP must pay under the Clean Water Act is based on the number of barrels discharged. The actual number was north of 4 million barrels).

No matter how many billions BP ends up paying out, of course, it can never undo all the damages caused by its crime. It can, however, pretend they didn’t happen. The company launched a PR campaign claiming that the Gulf has rebounded. Reality, of course, begs to differ. Ten million gallons of oil remain on the seafloor. Multiple studies have found that the harm to fish and wildlife was not only horrific five years ago (800,000 birds; between 20,000 and 60,000 sea turtles), but is ongoing. Concentrations of toxic chemicals in Gulf marshes may persist for decades.

No wonder people question why BP is spending money to soft pedal the consequences of its crime, when it could be using those dollars toward actual restitution.

Five years on, though, what lessons have been learned? Don’t trust oil companies to act responsibly? That seems to be the main takeaway for the Obama administration. Last week it announced tighter regulations for offshore oil rigs that it claims should help prevent oil-well blowouts. Those tighter regulations are directly based on what happened in the Gulf in 2010.  Does that mean future disasters don’t happen? Of course not.

Yet the administration has also announced that it will allow oil and gas drilling off the coast of Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia for the first time since the 1980s, as well as three areas for leasing in Alaska, including the Beaufort and Chukchi Sea, where the administration estimates that there is a 75 percent chance of one or more spills. Astounding. Back east, the administration was getting ready to announce oil and gas leases for the Atlantic coast five years ago, along with the usual platitudes about “drilling responsibly” and “minimizing risk.” Then Deepwater Horizon happened.

The bottom line is that we don’t need the oil that can be found off our Atlantic Coast, no matter what those state governors might tell you. And even if you manage to reduce the risks, and even if no oil company ever again acts with gross negligence for the sake of profits (a bet I wouldn’t recommend taking), the consequences of drilling in sensitive marine environments are just too great.

Michael Brune|April 20, 2015

8 States Dealing With Huge Increases in Fracking Earthquakes

A new report, released Thursday from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), identified eight states in the eastern and central U.S. where fracking operations have led to dramatic increases in earthquakes, primarily from the injection of the wastewater byproduct of drilling operations into underground wells. This process can activate faults that in some cases were previously unknown.

The injection of fracking wastewater into underground wells has exploded the amount of earthquake activity in previously inactive regions of the county. Image credit: USGS

“Earthquake activity has sharply increased since 2009 in the central and eastern United States. The increase has been linked to industrial operations that dispose of wastewater by injecting it into deep wells,” the report says bluntly, in a rebuke to the earthquake deniers in the oil and gas industry, such as fracking founder Harold Hamm, who pressured Oklahoma officials to stay silent about the connection.

While Oklahoma, Texas and Ohio have gotten much of the attention for increases in seismicity in areas where earthquakes were once rare, they aren’t the only states in danger of more and larger earthquakes. The USGS report also pointed to Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas and New Mexico and identified 17 zones within the eight states in particular danger from an increased number of what it calls “induced” quakes.

The report, Incorporating Induced Seismicity in the 2014 United States National Seismic Hazard Model, analyzed these seismic activity increases and developed the models to project how hazardous earthquakes could be in these in these zones, taking into account their rates, locations, maximum magnitude and ground motions.

“This new report describes for the first time how injection-induced earthquakes can be incorporated into U.S. seismic hazard maps,” said Mark Petersen, chief of the USGS National Seismic Hazard Modeling Project. “These earthquakes are occurring at a higher rate than ever before and pose a much greater risk to people living nearby. The USGS is developing methods that overcome the challenges in assessing seismic hazards in these regions in order to support decisions that help keep communities safe from ground shaking.”

The USGS has previously released National Seismic Hazard maps, used for insurance purposes, building codes and emergency response plans, outlining the hazards of naturally occurring earthquakes. They projected the likelihood of a quake over 50 years, the average lifespan of a building.

Seventeen zones in eight states in in increased jeopardy from fracking-induced earthquakes. Image credit: USGS

“However, these new induced seismicity products display intensity of potential ground shaking from induced earthquakes in a one-year period,” said the study. “This shorter timeframe is appropriate because the induced activity can vary rapidly with time and is subject to commercial and policy decisions that could change at any point.”

That’s a reference to the varying state regulations about allowing injection or accepting wastewater byproducts from other states. For instance, because of lax regulation in Ohio, the state receives millions of gallons of wastewater from heavily fracked Pennsylvania where injection wells are subject to stricter rules.

The report also states, “Many questions have been raised about whether hydraulic fracturing—commonly referred to as ‘fracking’—is responsible for the recent increase of earthquakes. USGS’s studies suggest that the actual hydraulic fracturing process is only occasionally the direct cause of felt earthquakes.” But it says, “Large volumes of wastewater can result from a variety of processes, such as a byproduct from energy production. Wastewater injection increases the underground pore pressure, which may lubricate nearby faults thereby making earthquakes more likely to occur.”

Anastasia Pantsios|April 24, 2015

[Makes one wonder if fracking is all its fracked up to be.]

Land Conservation

Temperince Morgan: Protecting Florida’s rural lands

As the Florida Legislature debates how to allocate Amendment 1 dollars to protect land and water resources, Floridians should be aware of a cost-effective program that conserves lands and preserves Florida’s rural way of life.

The Florida Rural and Family Lands Protection Program is a valuable conservation program that ties together our state agriculture community and conservationists in a way that brings Floridians together to preserve our rural economy, water resources, and habitat. During the heated debate over how to allocate taxpayer funds, it is important for the Legislature to remember this essential program.

Amendment 1 specifically identifies the protection of rural landscapes and working lands as an allowable purpose for tax revenue set aside for land and water resource protection purposes. While Speaker Steve Crisafulli’s House budget contains $25 million for this important program, the Senate budget omits funding for the program.

This is how the program works:

Instead of purchasing lands, which can sometimes be costly to acquire and manage, the state purchases conservation easements on these lands — for a fraction of the cost. The land remains with the owner, under agreement that it may not be developed. It provides savings to the taxpayer in protecting habitat and water resources, while allowing the landowner to continue to provide management of the land.

It also assists local governments by keeping the land on the tax roll. This safeguards valuable conservation lands while guaranteeing Floridians will have fresh agricultural products available to them for years to come.

During the past year, the governor and cabinet utilized the Rural and Family Lands Program to approve the purchase of over 7,900 acres of easements on Adam’s Ranch in Osceola County, a rapidly growing county struggling to contain its development and sprawl.

In addition, it has also purchased easements to protect the military mission of Avon Park Air Force Range in Highlands County.

These purchases were smart, cost effective, and provide a practical tool to protect these critical lands.

Other conservation easements such as those in Glades County along the Caloosahatchee River were acquired to protect 1,278 acres of prime habitat for the Florida panther, while retaining the use of the land for cattle ranching — a win for agriculture and our environment.

In addition to protecting habitat, these purchases also provide a strategic approach for water resource protection.

This program protects land, forests, habitat, water, and our rural way of life.

As the Legislature embarks on what may be a contentious budget conference process, The Nature Conservancy is hopeful that it will fully fund the Rural and Family Lands Protection Program. It has become an integral part of Florida’s land and water protection framework so Floridians can continue to bolster our agriculture community while enjoying and preserving nature for future generations.

Temperince Morgan is executive director of The Nature Conservancy Florida Chapter, based in Altamonte Springs.

Jill Yelverton|April 18, 2015

Five Recreational Trail Projects to Begin

TALLAHASSEE – The Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s Florida Recreational Trails Program announces that contracts have been executed and work can begin to develop and renovate trails around the state.

“These projects help communities meet the needs of both land and water trail enthusiasts, build on previous investments and develop new facilities,” said Bryan Bradner, acting director of DEP’s Office of Operations. “Issuance of the contract agreements allows our partners to begin work on these diverse projects funded through the Recreational Trails Program.”

The five contracts are as follows:

• The city of Wilton Manors – Funding will be used for construction of approximately 1,846 linear feet of 8-foot-wide hard surface at Mickel Field Park, as well as the installation of outdoor fitness stations, covered benches and a six-foot tall fence for safety separation. Mickel Field Park is located along State Road 845.
• Leon County – Funding will be used to renovate phase-three of the Miccosukee Canopy Road Greenway’s existing trail, beginning at the Fleischman Road Trailhead. Improvements include the design and construction of 1.5 to two miles of 10-to-12 foot wide compacted stone dust multi-use trail and the installation of benches, a drinking fountain, directional markers and an interpretive kiosk.
• South Florida Water Management District – Funding will be used to construct the DuPuis Trailhead. Elements of the project include an access road, a parking area, an informational kiosk, an accessible walkway, signage and related support facilities.
• Okeechobee County – Funding will be used to construct 5,300 linear feet of 12-foot-wide asphalt trail and the installation of two shade structures at Okee-Tantie Park. Okee-Tantie serves as a major connection to the Lake Okeechobee Scenic Trail, the Florida National Scenic Trail and the Kissimmee River Blueway.
• Lake County Water Improvement Authority – Funding will be used for improvements to the Crooked River Trailhead and paddling trail, which include installing of a restroom and kiosk, constructing a canoe/kayak launch structure and walkway, and enhancing accessibility to the facilities.

A federally funded assistance program of the United States Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration, the Recreational Trails Program enables local communities to renovate, develop or maintain recreational trails and trailside facilities. A portion of the grant awards must be matched by the grantee. In Florida, the competitive-grant program is administered by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s Land and Recreation Grants section within the Office of Operations.

nataliarodriguez2015|April.16.2015

150,000 Stand With Peruvian Woman in Fight Against World’s Largest Gold Mine

Community activists from Cajamarca, Peru appeared at the annual shareholders’ meeting of Denver-based Newmont Mining Corporation this week to deliver a petition bearing 150,000 signatures protesting the company’s practices in the region, and demanded that it live up to its own goals for human rights and sustainability.

Newmont is majority owner of the massive Peruvian gold mine Yanacocha, the second largest gold mine in the world, and its planned Conga gold and copper mine nearby would be even larger, requiring a farming community to move and the four lakes they rely on for irrigation to be drained.

But the community has so far refused to relinquish its treasured land and lakes, and in response activists say the company has reacted with intimidation and harassment.

One person particularly in the company’s cross-hairs is Máxima Acuña de Chaupe, says activist Mirtha Vásquez, a Peruvian lawyer at Wednesday’s meeting. Acuña de Chaupe’s land abuts one of the four lakes but after de Chaupe refused to sell her land in 2011, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) like Earthworks reported that her family became the target of harassment and violence in the form of beatings and destruction of the family home. Then Newmont sued her for “land invasion” and violent retaliation, which it lost on appeal in December 2014.

Despite this legal victory, activists say that intimidation and threats against Acuña de Chaupe have continued, reporting that the family’s home was demolished again in February 2015, this time by a group of 200 armed men.

“Newmont’s leadership must publicly renounce its harassment of Máxima Acuña de Chaupe and other Cajamarca residents who oppose the Conga mine,” said Vásquez in a prepared statement. “Otherwise Newmont will become globally infamous for discarding their commitments to human rights and community engagement as soon as they become inconvenient.” A Cajamarca resident, Vásquez is director of a local NGO called Grufides and is also legal counsel to Acuña de Chaupe, who declined to travel to the U.S. citing fears of what would happen to her farm and family in her absence.

Keith Slack, manager of Oxfam America‘s global extractive industries team, which tracks the impacts of mines on local communities, agreed with Vásquez. “The company needs to listen to the local population and not move forward with the Conga mine. It should find ways to address Máxima’s situation that are conciliatory and don’t rely on brute force. From the beginning there’s been an unwillingness to listen and take measures that build trust.”

For its part, Newmont maintains that it and Yanacocha always strive to be respectful of neighboring communities, and that they will not proceed without clear social acceptance. But in the case of Acuña de Chaupe, spokesman Omar Jabara continued to maintain that the family is illegally squatting on the company’s land. “On many occasions, the company has tried to resolve the dispute through direct dialogue, and remains open and willing to doing so. In the meantime,” he said by email, “Yanacocha is obliged to continue pursuing judicial avenues to re-establish its legal right to the property, while making every effort to reduce tensions and minimize conflict.”

However, Earthworks International Program Director Payal Sampat maintains that it’s too late to build bridges or reduce tensions. “The community of Cajamarca has said loud and clear—and repeatedly—that they reject the Conga mine. Instead of listening to the community and respecting their wishes, Newmont has employed security forces to intimidate and harass those who oppose them. This ‘scorched earth’ approach is hurting not only the people of Cajamarca, but Newmont’s reputation and business as well.”

Whether or not Newmont’s shareholders agreed with her on Wednesday, actions like it will continue to educate the world on the incredibly high cost of gold mining for both people and planet in places like Cajamarca.

Erik Hoffner|April 23, 2015

DEP cancels trails deal after N.Y. company fails to deliver sponsors

A year after signing a concession agreement with a New York company to deliver state bike trail sponsorships with advertising signs, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection has canceled the deal.

The reason: Bikepath Country of Mahopac, N.Y., didn’t deliver any sponsors or money to the state after lobbying for legislation in 2012 to provide sponsorships.

SB 268 in 2012 authorized DEP to seek sponsorship agreements at seven paved trails. The bill faced opposition from trail users who said the commercial signs would intrude on the outdoors experience.

Bill sponsors, though, said they expected the legislation to result in big bucks — perhaps in the millions of dollars — to provide needed maintenance for state trails.

Those expectations began fading in 2013, though, after a DEP request for trail sponsorships resulted in no sponsorship offers.

Instead, Bikepath Country Florida LLC provided the only response, offering to take over the program and pay the state 30 percent of revenue after expenses. The projected payment would be $28,305 the first year and $32,040 the following year.

Bikepath Country never provided any of the quarterly payments required for in the contract after it was signed on April 1, 2014, a DEP spokeswoman said Tuesday. In March, less than a year after DEP issued a press release announcing the contract, the department informed the company that it was canceling the agreement.

“The contract was not renewed because it was not successful,” DEP spokeswoman Mara Burger said. “We do not know why the contractor was not successful in securing sponsorships.”

Ivan Bellotto, president of Bikepath Country in New York state, on Wednesday declined to comment in response to questions that he requested in writing. Bikepath Country Florida still has four lobbyists registered with the Legislature.

Rep. Irv Slosberg, a Democrat from Boca Raton, sponsored the House version of the bill named in honor a 50-year-old Boca Raton firefighter John Anthony Wilson who was killed while bicycle riding. Slosberg said Tuesday he still thinks trail sponsorship is a great program.

“How come you can’t get sponsorships to sponsor rails to trails?” he said. “It just sounds like someone to me isn’t doing their job.”

Asked whether he was blaming the company or DEP, Slosberg responded, “It’s the state of Florida’s money.”

“Why shouldn’t someone go and try to get sponsorships?” he said. “I made it the law.”

Sponsorship signs for the trails in the legislation were limited to 16 square feet in size. The legislation faced opposition from Citizens for Scenic Florida and the Florida Trail Association, said the signs would intrude upon the outdoors experience.

The seven trails made available for sponsorship by DEP were Florida Keys Overseas Heritage Trail, Blackwater Heritage Trail, Tallahassee-St. Marks State Trail, Nature Coast State Trail, Withlacoochee State Trail, General James A. Van Fleet State Trail and Palatka-Lake Butler State Trail.

DEP will wait until the 2015 Legislative Session is over to determine how to proceed with the sponsorship program, Burger said.

Those seven state trails would be transferred from DEP to the Florida Department of Transportation under SB 918, a comprehensive water bill that also creates the SunTrail non-motorized trail network at DOT. DEP still would have authority to enter into sponsorship agreements at other trails.

Bruce Ritchie|April 22, 2015

State has obligation to buy sugar land for Everglades

As an elected representative of the people of Southwest Florida for a cumulative 30 years, including serving as mayor of Sanibel, chairman of the Lee County Commission and as a member of the U.S. Congress, I found it rare to be offered such an opportunity as Gov. Rick Scott and legislators have today to purchase lands south of Lake Okeechobee.

The state has the funding — thanks to the overwhelming voice of the electorate in supporting Amendment 1 in November. The state has a contract, and all the science it needs in determining that moving water south is preferable to moving water east and west during high flows.

This is the perfect confluence of events for our policymakers, yet I see heel-dragging in Tallahassee. I would be grateful if the Florida governor, the speaker of the House of Representatives, or the Senate president would articulate a legitimate reason why now is not the time to move forward with the purchase.

If that reason is because the seller is no longer “willing,” due to an escalation in property valuation, then go ahead and say that. But remember that your responsibility is to the taxpayers of Florida and not to the seller. This is a great deal for taxpayers — and your constituents have a legally binding contract.

If you don’t want to proceed because you were caught unaware by Amendment 1, which supplanted your priorities with those of the voters and created holes in your budget, then explain that to the voters who supported the amendment. As a former legislator, I am not sympathetic to that argument. I doubt the voters will be, either.

If your argument is that you are focusing on other projects and want to finish them before you start anything else, I suggest that Florida, which has an economy larger than that of many nations, is capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time.

This is a time-sensitive opportunity that will never again be available. So arguments of bureaucratic ineptitude are not the ones we want to be making as we strive to attract businesses to Florida to grow our economy.

Our state is proud to be the Sunshine State. Our “Sunshine Laws” are second to none. Let’s have this debate — in the sunshine. Shady deal-making in Tallahassee is not the way.

PORTER GOSS, SANIBEL|in MyPalmBeachPost.com|April 23, 2015

Editor’s note: Porter Goss became a U.S. representative in 1988. He served for 16 years until he was appointed director of the Central Intelligence Agency by President George W. Bush, a position he held from September 2004 to May 2006.

Air Quality

Toxic Smog Puts Cancer as Leading Cause of Death in China

Beijing’s 21-million residents live in a toxic fog of particulate matter, ozone, sulphur dioxide, mercury, cadmium, lead and other contaminants, mainly caused by factories and coal burning. Schools and workplaces regularly shut down when pollution exceeds hazardous levels. People have exchanged paper and cotton masks for more elaborate, filtered respirators. Cancer has become the leading cause of death in the city and throughout the country.

Chinese authorities, often reluctant to admit to the extent of any problem, can no longer deny the catastrophic consequences of rampant industrial activity and inadequate regulations. According to Bloomberg News, Beijing’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention says that, although life expectancy doubled from 1949 to 2011, “the average 18-year-old Beijinger today should prepare to spend as much as 40 percent of those remaining, long years in less than full health, suffering from cancer, cardiovascular disease and arthritis, among other ailments.”

China’s government also estimates that air pollution prematurely kills from 350,000 to 500,000 residents every year. Water and soil pollution are also severe throughout China. The documentary film Under the Dome, by Chinese journalist Chai Jing, shows the extent of the air problem. The film was viewed by more than 150 million Chinese in its first few days, apparently with government approval. Later it was censored, showing how conflicted authorities are over the problem and its possible solutions. The pollution problem also demonstrates the ongoing global conflict between economic priorities and human and environmental health.

Rather than seeing China’s situation as a warning, many people in Canada and the U.S.—including in government—refuse to believe we could end up in a similar situation here. And so U.S. politicians fight to block pollution-control regulations and even to remove the power of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, or shut it down altogether! In Canada, politicians and pundits argue that environmental protection is too costly and that the economy takes precedence.

Some people even point to China as a reason for Canada not to do anything, arguing that what we do or don’t do to confront climate change and pollution will make little difference because our contributions pale in comparison to countries like China and India. But while Canada’s air quality is better than many places, half of us live in areas where we are exposed to unsafe levels of air pollution. According to the Heart and Stroke Foundation, “Short and long term exposure to air pollution are estimated to result in 21,000 premature deaths in Canada in 2008 as well as 620,000 doctor visits, 92,000 emergency department visits, 11,000 hospital admissions and an annual economic impact of over $8 billion.”

And, as we know, air doesn’t stay within national boundaries. The global atmosphere is being loaded with the sum of all nations’ activities.

As for greenhouse gas emissions, Canada may contribute less than two percent of overall global emissions, but we have the highest emissions per capita—more than the U.S. and Russia and close to three times the global average. Even with a small population compared to many countries, we’re in the top 10 for overall emissions. Don’t we have a moral responsibility to reduce our share?

We can and should do more to curb pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, especially as demands from industry and a growing population continue to increase. That means making homes and workplaces more energy-efficient and driving less. Transportation is a major contributor to air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. But, despite the fact that a large percentage of the emissions and pollution come from SUVs, trucks and vans, sales of those vehicles are rising while car sales are decreasing.

As individuals, we can take action to reduce pollution and emissions, but greater gains should be made at the policy level. Creating good transit and transportation infrastructure that gets people out of their cars is a huge step, as is offering incentives to improve energy efficiency in homes and buildings. Regulations to limit industrial pollution are also necessary.

We may never experience the kind of deadly pollution China is struggling with, but we can do a lot to make sure our air, water and soil are as clean as possible, now and into the future. We must do our part.

Dr. David Suzuki|April 15, 2015

Beijing’s air is now a little less toxic

Finally, there might be some good news for people inhaling Beijing’s famously filthy air: It’s getting a bit cleaner, according to a new analysis released by Greenpeace on Monday. Pollution levels in the Chinese capital have shown significant improvements, due in part to strict new pollution controls, says the environmental group, which based its analysis on new government numbers.

Beijing’s concentration of the fine airborne particles known as PM2.5 — the toxic brew of industrial exhaust and chemicals that contribute to smog — declined by more than 13 percent in the first quarter of 2015 compared to the same period last year, according to the study. Cities in the neighboring province of Hebei, home to extensive heavy industries like steel production, saw their PM2.5 concentrations decrease by an average of 31 percent. Xi’an, the capital of a major coal-producing province, slashed its concentrations by 48 percent, according to the figures supplied by Greenpeace.

Why such steep declines in pollution over the past year? It’s important to keep in mind how awful the starting point was. 2014 was an especially terrible period for skies across China’s northeastern provinces, resulting in unfavorable comparisons to a nuclear winter. The air got so bad that in March 2014, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang declared “war” on smog. A year earlier, my colleague Jaeah Lee and I traveled to China to investigate its push to develop natural gas, and we saw for ourselves the extent of the environmental catastrophe playing out across the country:

While there’s room for some optimism in the new numbers, the picture painted is still pretty grim: 90 percent of the 360 Chinese cities studied by Greenpeace failed to meet the national air quality standard (that number hasn’t shifted since Greenpeace analyzed similar data from 2014). Forty percent of the cities registered air pollution levels that were twice the national standard. And even in Beijing, there’s a long way to go. The World Health Organization recommends a maximum daily concentration of 25 micrograms per cubic meter of PM2.5. That makes Beijing’s average concentrations of more than 90 micrograms per cubic meter alarmingly high.

Still, it’s a step in the right direction. “I think these trends are very positive,” said Angel Hsu, an assistant professor at Yale University who studies China’s environmental performance. But she warned that any statistics emanating from the Chinese government — the source of the pollution data analyzed by Greenpeace — should be taken with a grain of salt. “When you talk about any Chinese data, you’re always a little bit suspicious,” said Hsu, who was not involved in the Greenpeace study.

Hsu attributes the drop in Beijing’s pollution in part to the new air quality controls — the “most comprehensive to date,” she said — enacted by the city’s government, which placed curbs on vehicle use as part of a $21 billion effort to slash pollution levels 25 percent by 2017. “On the vehicle side, I think that has been potentially driving air improvement in Beijing,” Hsu said.

Last month, Beijing shut down the third of four coal-fired power plants inside the city in an effort to clear the air, though Hsu is more doubtful that the drop in pollution levels can be directly tied to reduced coal use: “Perhaps that could also be a source of the drop in PM2.5, but I’m very, very cautious about the coal consumption numbers,” she said, referring to China’s official numbers.

While Hsu said Beijing “can serve as a model for what other cities can do,” she also warned that marginal improvements in one big city could simply be pushing the problem further out into the country, as industry seeks other cities in which to set up shop.

It’s a concern Greenpeace shares. “Armed with this information, the government must now ensure that pollution is not simply relocated to other regions, and that the same strict measures enacted in cities like Beijing are actually enforced across the country,” said Zhang Kai, a Greenpeace climate and energy official, in an emailed statement.

Clean air will continue to be a crucial matter for China’s image on the world stage, as Beijing once again pitches itself as a great place to host an Olympic games — this time, the 2022 winter games. Organizers of the bid recently said $7.6 billion will be spent to fight smog.

Beijing has reported improvement in air quality comes amid a well-publicized efforts to tackle the problem, directed from the upper echelons of the Communist Party, which sees the pall of smog across the county as a threat to the economy and to social stability for a population increasingly anxious about the environment. Awareness of the problem is on the rise: Under the Dome, a searing documentary about China’s pollution crisis, went viral in March. It attracted hundreds of millions of views before China’s official censors began playing a cat-and-mouse game of trying to ban its various online incarnations.

There’s good news elsewhere, too. Bloomberg reported over the weekend that China has recently scrapped a number of small coal plants, avoiding the release of 11.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. That has helped the country cut its emissions for the first time in a decade, according to Bloomberg.

James West|21 Apr 2015

World’s Largest DIY Retailer to Phase Out Phthalates in Vinyl Flooring by Year’s End

The world’s largest home improvement retailer today confirmed it would be doing its part for the planet and our health by phasing out a class of toxic chemicals, phthalates, from vinyl flooring sold by the chain. The phaseout will be complete by the end of the year. Sadly, other retailers we talked to were not so committed.

What are phthalates? 

Phthalate chemicals are plasticizers, and considered hazardous. The Consumer Product Safety Commission banned them from toys in 2009, but they continue to be used in other products. Flooring is especially a problem because children can play on the floor for hours at a time.

A growing body of credible scientific evidence has linked exposure to phthalates with serious threats to human health including asthma, as well as, harm to male reproductive organs, brain development, and the immune system. Phthalates can migrate out of flooring materials and get into the air and dust inside homes. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 90 percent of Americans have measurable levels of phthalates in their bodies.

Phthalates common in vinyl flooring

A new study released today by our partners at the Ecology Center found that most vinyl flooring they tested contained toxic phthalates. The flooring samples tested were purchased from major home improvement retailers including Lowe’s and Lumber Liquidators. Researchers found that, of 65 vinyl flooring tiles tested, 38 of them or 58 percent, contained phthalates.

The study also surveyed major retailers to assess whether they have adopted policies to eliminate phthalates in flooring. The survey found that Home Depot is far ahead of its competitors by requiring its suppliers to eliminate ortho-phthalates in all virgin vinyl flooring by the end of 2015.

The Home Depot announcement is a big deal, and could lead the whole industry to safer flooring. As the world’s largest home improvement retailer, Home Depot’s new policy sends a strong signal to the marketplace that retailers want healthier building materials free of harmful chemicals like phthalates. If we speak out, Lowes, Lumber Liquidators and others will be compelled to follow. That’s the power we have as customers in the marketplace.

What to do? 

Our partners at Healthy Stuff recommend the following if you want to avoid exposing you and your family to phthalates in flooring:

• Avoid vinyl flooring containing phthalates. Use these ratings to find flooring doesn’t contain phthalates.
• Only purchase flooring that the manufacturer or retailer has indicated is “phthalate-free.” Double-check with the company that it does not contain recycled vinyl, which is often contaminated with phthalates and heavy metals (e.g. lead and cadmium).
• Many retailers surveyed sell non-vinyl flooring alternatives. Healthier flooring options included bio-based linoleum, natural rubber and ceramic tile.

Tony Iallonardo|Safer Chemicals Healthy Families|April 23, 2015

Recycling

Adidas Wants to Turn Ocean Plastic Into Sportswear

Would you buy shoes or clothes made from trash that is recovered from the ocean?

Adidas has partnered with Parley for the Oceans to develop materials made from ocean plastic waste to use in its products starting in 2016. The sportswear giant will also phase out plastic bags in its 2,900 retail stores around the world. Parley for the Oceans is a team of artists, musicians, actors, directors, fashion designers, journalists, architects, product inventors and scientists that addresses major threats to the world’s oceans.

“The conservation of the oceans is a cause that is close to my heart and those of many employees at the Adidas Group,” said Eric Liedtke, Adidas Group executive board member responsible for global brands. “By partnering with Parley for the Oceans we are contributing to a great environmental cause. We co-create fabrics made from ocean plastic waste which we will integrate into our product.”

As we previously mentioned, plastic—from plastic bags and bottles to tiny microbeads of plastic broken down from larger sources—is a major threat to marine life and marine ecosystems. The staggering 8 million tons of plastic tossed into the oceans every year also causes about $13 billion in damages annually.

“Our oceans are about to collapse and there is not much time left to turn it around. Nobody can solve this alone. Everyone has to be part of the solution. And collaboration is the magic formula,” said Cyrill Gutsch, founder of Parley for the Oceans. “We are extremely excited about this partnership. There is no other brand that carries the culture of collaboration in the DNA like Adidas. Together, we will not only focus on creating the next generation of design concepts, technologies, materials and products. We will also engage consumers, athletes, artists, designers, actors, musicians, scientists and environmentalists to raise their voice and contribute their skills for the ocean cause.”

Besides Adidas, many other major clothing companies are ramping up their sustainability practices. Outdoor clothing company Patagonia is making efforts to get rid of toxic chemicals in their materials. Additionally, fast fashion retailer H&M is the world’s largest purchaser of organic cotton and has set up an in-store recycling program, which has brought in around 13,000 tons of clothing.

The announcement from Adidas coincides with the publication of their 15th annual sustainability report, which highlighted the company’s efforts to green up their gear. According to the report, the iconic sportswear brand has used more sustainable cotton than ever before, with 30 percent of all its cotton coming from sustainable sources, exceeding the originally planned 25 percent target. The company has committed to 100 percent sustainable cotton by 2018 and has also increased quantities of recycled polyester into their product line.

Adidas, along with Nike and Puma, made a major commitment to eliminating all discharges of hazardous chemicals throughout their supply chain and across the entire life cycle of their products by 2020. However, environmental groups such as Greenpeace criticized the sportswear brands last May for failing to take the critical steps needed to meet its target.

But now, in its most recent Detox Catwalk report, Greenpeace praised the clothing brand for its latest environmental initiatives. “Adidas is now back on track as a Detox leader. Two years after it crossed the line as one of the original Detox pioneers, Adidas began failing to meet its commitment. That was until global pressure from the Detox movement helped it get back on side in June 2014,” Greenpeace said. “Adidas has delivered on its commitment to ensure that 99 percent of its wet processing supply chain facilities in China publicly report data via the credible Institute for Environmental Affairs platform. It also publishes its list of suppliers and encourages facilities to divulge their respective customers when reporting data.”

Lorraine Chow|April 21, 2015

[I would buy and encourage others to do so.]

Miscellaneous

9 Easy Earth Day Tips You Won’t Find Anywhere Else

You don’t have to buy a hybrid car or install solar panels to make changes that have a significant environmental benefit, save money, and are easy to do. Here’s a list of 9 Earth Day tips you probably won’t find anywhere else. Altogether they could put several hundred dollars back in your pocket due to lower utility bills while preventing around a ton of climate change pollution per household annually. After all, cutting electricity waste means we don’t need to run as many fossil fuel-burning power plants, which are America’s largest source of climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions.

1. Buy LED light bulbs – On your way home from the local Earth Day celebration or from work, stop at your local big box store and pick up some LED light bulbs. Why use 60 watts for the everyday light bulb when an LED bulb only uses 10 to produce the same amount of light? Today’s LED bulbs last up to 25 times longer and have really come down in price, with some costing only $8. Due to their long life and efficiency, LED bulbs will easily save you more than $100 over their lifetime.

2. Adjust your TV’s settings (turn Auto Brightness Control on, and Quick Start off) – Many digital TVs come with a feature called Automatic Brightness Control (ABC), which if enabled causes your TV to automatically adjust the screen’s brightness to the room’s light levels. So if you’re watching “Mad Men” or the ballgame at night in a dimly lit room, the screen doesn’t need to be as bright and your TV will use less power. Also some smart (Internet-connected TVs) come with a Quick Start feature. While the TV will power up a few seconds faster when selected, this feature can be incredibly wasteful as some TVs chug away at more than 20 watts 24/7 rather than 0.3 watts without the feature enabled. So turn this feature off if you can wait the few extra seconds.

3. Wash clothes in cold water and use the fastest spin speed available – Today’s clothes washers and detergents are designed to effectively clean clothes in cold water. This avoids having to heat the 15 or so gallons of water used per load. If you have a front-loading washer, select the machine’s highest spin speed, which will remove more of the moisture from your clothes. That way your dryer won’t have to work as hard and you’ll cut dryer time and save money, too.

4. Turn off the Instant-on setting on the Xbox One – This game console is shipped with the Instant On feature enabled, which causes it to continuously use 12.5 watts even when turned off. Selecting the Energy-Saving mode instead can cut your Xbox’s total annual energy use by more than a third.

5. Don’t stream videos through your game console – Video game consoles such as the Xbox and PlayStation can suck 25 to 50 times more power to stream a movie from the Internet compared to a dedicated device such as Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire TV, or a Google Chromecast stick. If you have an Internet-connected TV, stream the movie directly from your TV and avoid using the game consoles interface, which is essentially an energy-wasting remote control in this case.

6. Upgrade the aerators on your kitchen and bathroom sinks – If you have an older faucet, install a new water efficient aerator for under $5 and you can cut its water use by up to 40 percent. Simply unscrew the current one on the tip of your faucet and replace it with one that uses no more than 1.8 gallons per minute for the kitchen faucet and 1.2 gallons per minute for the one on your bathroom sink. You probably won’t notice the difference but your water bill will. Check with your local water agency as some provide efficient aerators free or at low cost.

7. Recycle your old consumer electronics properly – Millions of tons of electronic waste are generated each year and are still put into landfills in some states, or shipped to developing countries for recycling without proper safeguards for workers who are exposed to dangerous chemicals. Make sure you use recyclers who are certified E-Stewards and follow high standards. Best Buy accepts almost all used consumer electronics, including TVs, regardless of where they were purchased, and recycles them with E-Steward certified recyclers at no charge. Staples offers similar services but doesn’t accept televisions.

8. Turn off your furnace when the cold weather ends (for you Northerners) – Like many other modern appliances, home central heating systems, also called furnaces, use electricity even when they’re not operating. According to a Home Energy article, many furnaces draw 8 to 12 watts of standby power 24/7 when not in use. To eliminate this waste during the six or more months when you don’t need heat, switch off the power to the furnace.

9. Buy a new toilet that uses no more than 1.28 gallons per flush – If you’re remodeling or have an older toilet that uses 1.6 gallons per flush , or worse yet a 40-year-old avocado green one that might be using 5 gallons per flush, swap it out for a more water- efficient one. Look for models with a Water Sense label because they’re not only efficient, they also meet various flushing performance requirements. A family of four can save six gallons of clean drinking water per DAY, simply by switching from a toilet that uses 1.6 to 1.28 gallons per flush.

Earth Day only comes once a year in April, but these tips can help our planet and your wallet year-round.

This article was originally published on NRDC and was republished with permission.

Killings of environmental activists jumped by 20 percent last year

The assassination, murder, and extrajudicial killing of environmental activists rose by 20 percent last year, according to a new grim report by Global Witness. The organization documented 116 killings in 2014 across 17 countries with the highest number in Brazil, which saw 29 environmental and land defenders killed. Still, the report is a major understatement of the problem as data across much of Africa, China, the Middle East, and Central Asia remains scarce to non-existent.

“Across the world environmental defenders are being shot dead in broad daylight, kidnapped, threatened, or tried as terrorists for standing in the way of so-called ‘development’,” said Billy Kyte, a campaigner with Global Witness. “The true authors of these crimes—a powerful nexus of corporate and state interests—are escaping unpunished. Urgent action is needed to protect citizens and bring perpetrators to justice.”

Most of the deaths last year—116 of them—were related to disputes over land. But mining was linked to 25 deaths, and hydroelectric dams and agribusiness to 14 each. Indigenous people also remain among the most targeted.

“In 2014, 47 indigenous people were killed defending their natural resources, 40 percent of the total deaths of environmental and land defenders,” reads Global Witness’s new report, entitled How Many More?. This year’s report follows a landmark document last year that tracked environmental activist killing—all 908 of them—over a dozen years.

Environmental activist killings by sector. Image courtesy of Global Witness.

“Environmental defenders are being branded as ‘anti-development’ because the defense of their natural resources often clashes with the notions of development pushed by governments in league with powerful business,” explained Kyte, as the last five years has seen a significant uptick in the number of murdered activists.

Kyte added that “[activists] are stigmatized and criminalized in order to silence their opposition.”

While Brazil had the highest number of environmental activist murders in 2014, the most dangerous place to be an environmental activist was actually Honduras, according to Global Witness. During the last five years (2010-2014), Honduras lost 101 activists, giving it the highest rate of environmental activist killings per capita.

“People defending their rights to land and the environment in Honduras are subject to systematic targeting and face severe risks to their lives,” said Kyte, adding that “conflict over land, extractives and dam projects are the main drivers of violence against activists. Many attacks occur against indigenous leaders defending their land and natural resources, often in the context of the development of mega-projects without prior and informed consent.”

The report also notes that Honduras already has one of the world’s highest murder rates and one of the highest poverty rates in the Western Hemisphere.

“The police are ineffective and responsible for serious human rights abuses, including unlawful killings, whilst the judiciary is compromised by political interference,” according to the report. “In environmental terms, Honduras is plagued by illegal logging and has one of the highest deforestation rates in the world.”

In order to begin tackling the global problem, Kyte said the first thing was for governments “to recognize it as a problem.”

“A UN Human Rights Council resolution addressing the heightened risk posed to environmental and land defenders would be a start,” he added. “But, in the end, governments themselves have to take responsibility and ensure impartial, exhaustive investigations into killings of these activists. And they have to bring perpetrators to account. Many targeted assassinations of activists are being passed off as ‘common’ murders and are going unnoticed.”

Arrests and convictions related to environmental and land homicides continue to be rare. Many of the murders of environmental activists may be going unnoticed entirely. For example, Global Witness was only able to report on murders in two African countries—Uganda and South Africa—despite the fact that there were likely more activist killings on the continent last year. Central Asia, the Middle East, and China are three additional areas where data is lacking.

“There are also relatively few known cases of killings from African and South Asian countries even though reports indicate the climate for human rights defenders is dangerous in these regions,” said Kyte. “This may be due to a limited presence of civil society organizations and other local groups monitoring the situation of environmental and land activists.”

Environmental activist killings by country. Those in red were indigenous people. Image courtesy of Global Witness.

Here are 4 big pollution problems EPA has (mostly) fixed already

 

Acid rain. Toxic leaded gas fumes. Dangerous DDT. Rampant air pollution. These environmental challenges once seemed impossible to meet, and they put our nation’s air, water, and land at risk — not to mention our families’ health. The dangers they posed were real, but you probably haven’t heard about them in a while. There’s a good reason for that: We put smart policies in place to fix them.

So this Earth Day, here’s a reminder of a few of the environmental challenges our nation has conquered with EPA leading the way, and a look at where we’re headed next.

Acid rain

Caused by air pollution mixing with water vapor in the atmosphere, acid rain was once poisoning our rivers and lakes, killing fish, forests, and wildlife, and even eroding our buildings. The 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act gave EPA the authority to regulate sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, the pollutants causing acid rain, from power plants. The EPA developed the first market-based cap-and-trade pollution reduction program, and guess what — it worked.

Despite the doomsday warnings from some in the power industry that the regulations would cause electricity prices to spike and lead to blackouts, over the last 25 years, acid rain levels are down 60 percent — while electricity prices have stayed stable, and the lights have stayed on. Thanks to hard work by EPA, states, and industry, our nation has put policies in place to solve the problem over the long haul.

Leaded gasoline

For decades, leaded gasoline threatened the air our kids breathed. Lead from polluted air was absorbed into their bloodstreams, endangering their brain development and risking consequences like permanent nerve damage, anemia, and mental retardation. So EPA phased out leaded gas. Back in the late 1970s, 88 percent of American children had elevated levels of lead in their blood. By the mid-2000s, that number had dropped to less than 1 percent.

DDT

The bald eagle once faced extinction. The culprit was DDT, a powerful pesticide that made birds’ eggshells too weak for the chicks to survive, and also caused liver cancer and reproductive problems in humans. EPA banned the use of DDT in 1972, and since then, bald eagles have made a huge comeback — they were removed from the Endangered Species List in 2007 — and our families are safer from harmful chemicals.

Air pollution

A newspaper headline once called the smog shrouding Los Angeles “a dirty gray blanket flung across the city.” L.A. and many other cities were choked by severe air pollution — leading to asthma, respiratory illness, and certain cancers. But over the last 45 years, we’ve cut air pollution 70 percent, while our nation’s economy has tripled. It goes to show that a strong economy and a safe environment go hand in hand. One recent study found that thanks to the strides we’ve made in cutting air pollution in just the last two decades, children’s lungs in Southern California are 10 percent bigger and stronger today than they were in children 20 years ago.

Last fall, we built on that success by proposing stricter standards for ozone pollution to protect those most vulnerable — children, the elderly, and those already suffering from respiratory illnesses like asthma. For our kids, that means avoiding up to a million missed school days, thousands of cases of acute bronchitis, and nearly a million asthma attacks. Adults could avoid hundreds of emergency room visits for cardiovascular reasons, up to 180,000 missed work days, and 4 million days where people have to deal with pollution-related symptoms. Every dollar we invest in these standards would return $3 in health benefits.

Looking ahead …

And now, EPA is taking action on another major environmental challenge: climate change. The carbon pollution driving it comes packaged with other dangerous pollutants like smog and soot that can cause asthma and certain cancers, especially for those living in the shadow of polluting industries.

When we finalize our Clean Power Plan this summer, we’ll not only cut carbon pollution from power plants, our nation’s largest source, but we’ll also reduce those other dangerous pollutants and protect our families’ health. When we act, we also help safeguard communities from the impacts of climate change — like more severe droughts, storms, fires, and floods.

Time after time, when science has pointed to health risks, EPA has obeyed the law, followed the science, protected public health, and fortified a strong American economy. We’re doing the same thing today. Our track record proves that when EPA leads the way, there’s no environmental challenge our nation can’t meet.

See some videos here, here, here, here and here

Gina McCarthy|administrator|U.S. Environmental Protection Agency|21 Apr 2015

Judge Allows Uranium Mining at Sacred Native American Site

A preexisting uranium mine, located about six miles from the Grand Canyon, will be allowed to reopen, according to a judge’s ruling last week. Conservationists decried this move, which they say is being done without proper tribal consultation or environmental impact studies.

The court case was between the Sierra Club, The Havasupai Tribe, The Grand Canyon Trust, The Center for Biological Diversity and Energy Fuels Inc. The Havasupai Tribe, which has been in the area for over 1,000 years, says the mine will infringe on one of their most sacred cultural sites.

In a statement from the Center for Biological Diversity, they argue that the decision “fails to protect Red Butte Traditional Cultural Property,” which the Forest Service designated in 2010 for its critical religious and cultural importance to several tribes, especially Havasupai. As a “traditional cultural property,” Red Butte is eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.”

Havasupai Chairman Rex Tilousi said:

We are very disappointed with the ruling by Judge Campbell in the Canyon Mine case. We believe that the National Historic Preservation Act requires the Forest Service to consult with us and the other affiliated tribes before they let the mining company damage Red Butte, one of our most sacred traditional cultural properties. The Havasupai Tribal Council will meet this week to talk about appealing this ruling.

Many involved in the lawsuit see the National Forest Service as enabling Energy Fuels Inc. to restart the mine, choosing extraction profits over preserving the natural wilderness. The National Forest Service does have a policy which allows for mineral and oil extraction as long as its done in an environmentally responsible manner. This seems to be one of the major issues for conservationists: Will Energy Fuels Inc. extract in a responsible way?

Energy Fuels Inc. says that not only do they have environmental plans in place, but they have already carried out a variety of impact studies. They also claim to have consulted local tribes, and refer back to the initial study on use of the land.

However, a look at the initial impact study from 1986 shows an incredibly dismissive tone when it comes to Native American land use. They readily admit that just the shaft and facilities will disturb 17 acres of land, not including hauling roads and various transportation needs. Yet, despite protests by Havasupai and Hopi Tribes insisting that this area contained one of their most revered and sacred sites, the study blithely states that “development of the mine could slightly reduce the amount of land available for Indian religious practices.” They also spare less than a paragraph on how natural food sources for hunting tribes would absolutely be affected by the creation of the mine.

In a press release, President and CEO of Energy Fuels Inc, Stephen P. Antony, said:

We are pleased that the federal court rejected the plaintiffs’ challenges to the Canyon mine, which allows us to continue our development of this high-grade deposit…the government engaged in extensive environmental analysis and consultations regarding this project. The Canyon mine has been heavily studied, and the technical and geologic characteristics of the project are well-understood. Energy Fuels is absolutely committed to operating the Canyon mine in a responsible manner.

However the promise of responsible mining is doing little to appease conservationists or tribal leaders.

The decision is expected to be appealed within the next 90 days, and could start another long contentious court battle. The mine, which was constructed in the 1980s was put on “stand-by status” when uranium prices fell in 1992. However, just because the company withdrew does not mean it lost its rights to that land, which was a main crux of the judgment. Yet conservationists stress that this case is just another instance of big business influencing the destruction of the local environment.

Lizabeth Paulat|April 20, 2015

Canada must find another site for nuke dump

As you know, the Canadian government is poised to approve construction of a permanent, underground nuclear waste dump less than a mile from Lake Huron. We are rightly concerned about the risk this site would pose to our region and the entire Great Lakes basin.

I’m writing today to inform you about recent developments and potential next steps.

Last year, the Michigan Senate unanimously approved a resolution urging the Great Lakes Commission to study this issue and ensure the protection of Lake Huron. Established by a compact between the eight Great Lakes states, the GLC’s mission is to promote conservation of Great Lakes water resources.

Sadly, the GLC has reneged on its initial promise to take action. This body, created to study and protect the shared interests of the Great Lakes states and provinces, has refused to investigate and advise despite the proposal’s significance to the region and the precedent it will set. It is disappointing the GLC is shirking its duty and professed vision to help the states and provinces “collectively fulfill their vision for the region.”

Meanwhile, the Joint Review Panel within the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission is set to make their recommendation about the project on May 6. Upon submission of that report, the Canadian environment minister will decide if the project may proceed.

Many of you have asked what you can do to help. I encourage you to call the Great Lakes Commission, let them know you oppose storing nuclear waste so close to Lake Huron, and urge them to take action. The GLC, based in Ann Arbor, can be reached at (734) 971-9135.

I also urge you to contact your congressional representative, who along with President Obama can ask Canada to halt this reckless plan. In the 1980s, the American government honored Canada’s request not to build a nuclear waste site close to shared watersheds. The Canadians should now return the favor, and find another location to store their own nuclear waste.

PHIL PAVLOV State Senator, April 14/15

Environmental Links

SFAS International Wildlife News Audubon Advocate Audubon Restore Eco-Voice South Florida Wildlife Care Center Sawgrass Nature Center & Wildlife Hospital The Turtle Hospital The Marathon Wild Bird Center Climate change info Audubon’s Coastal Strand Audubon of Florida News Blog Bioenergy News Climate Progress – climate science, politics and solutions Collins Center for Public Policy Comprehensive Everglades Restoration News EcoWatch – feeds from the WaterKeeper Alliance Everglades Foundation – press releases Everglades Hub Fort Myers News – Press Green Front Pages from Florida Newspapers Herald Tribune Newspapers –  Environmental News KeysNews.com Naples Daily News  – Environmental News National Public Radio Eco-News Riverwatch News about the Caloosahatchee Sierra Club Sierra Club Florida South Florida Watershed  Journal South Florida Water Management District Union of Concerned Scientists – news Yahoo News Search: Everglades NASA Climate Information American Littorial Society log NASA Climate Information Sun Newspapers – Lake Okeechobee News Everglades City News  – Mullet Wrapper IFAW’s World of Animals Magazine

ConsRep 1504 C

Every day is Earth Day. ~Author Unknown

 

Announcements

45th anniversary of Earth Day.

April 22, 1970.

Twenty million Americans took to the streets to participate in a national teach-in to force environmental protection into the spotlight. Earth Day was born!

In the spirit of that very first Earth Day 45 years ago, we’re posting facts related to our precious planet

on each of the 45 days leading up to this year’s celebration.

Check out some of our recent posts (you might learn something new!) and embrace the original purpose of Earth Day

by sharing your own facts and joining the conversation.

Thanks|David Chrystal

Statewide Earth Day Events

The Florida Department of Environmental Protection is participating in each of the following events:

Central Florida:

Discover Wekiva Rock Springs at Run State Reserve. Saturday, April 18. 9 a.m. – 3 p.m.

Earth Day Recycle Crafts at Lake Kissimmee State Park. Saturday, April 18. 11 a.m. – Noon.

Environmental Roundtable with the UCF School of Public Administration at the DEP Central District Office. Wednesday, April 22 from Noon – 1:30 p.m.

Northeast Florida:

Celebrate Earth Day Every Day! At O’Leno State Park on April 18 from 9 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Earth Day Fair at Anastasia State Park on April 18 from 10 a.m. – 3 p.m.

Earth Day and Ecology Fair at Jacksonville Landing. Saturday, April 18 from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.

Environmental Education Event with Jacksonville Police Athletic League at R. L. Brown Elementary School. Monday, April 20. For more information contact Russell Simpson at 904-256-1653 or Russell.Simpson@dep.state.fl.us

Earth Day Event at Dudley Farm Historic State Park. Saturday, April 25 from 10 a.m. – 3 p.m.

Party for the Planet at Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens. Saturday, April 25 from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.

Northwest Florida:

Wakulla Wildlife Festival at Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park. Saturday, April 18 from 10 a.m. – 3 p.m.

Earth Day Bay County at McKenzie Park in Panama City. Saturday, April 18 from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.

Earth Day 2015 North Face Forest Hike at Grayton Beach State Park. Thursday, April 23 from 9 – 11 a.m. CDT.

Beach Clean Up at Henderson Beach State Park. Saturday, April 25 from 8 – 10 a.m. CDT.

Comcast Cares Day Coastal Cleanup at St. Andrews State Park. Saturday, April 25 from 8 a.m. – Noon.

Healthy Communities Festival at Cascades Park in Tallahassee. Saturday, April 25 from 9 a.m. – 3 p.m.

South Florida:

Earth Day 2015 at Conservancy of Southwest Florida. Saturday, April 18 from 10:30 a.m. – 4 p.m.

Hendry County Call of the Wild at the Captain Hendry House in LaBelle. Monday, April 20 – Thursday, April 23. 9 a.m. – 1 p.m.

Collier County Reuse and Recycle Round-Up. Wednesday, April 22 from 9 a.m. – 4 p.m.

America Recycles/Operation Medicine Cabinet at the Collier County Recycling Center 9950 Goodlette Frank Road North, Naples, FL 34109. Saturday, April 25 from 10 a.m. – 2 p.m.

Southeast Florida:

Great American Cleanup at John D. MacArthur Beach State Park. Saturday, April 18 from 8 a.m. – Noon.

Invasive Plant Removal at Barnacle Historic State Park. Monday, April 20. For more information contact Michelle Piccolo at 561-681-6662 or Michelle.M.Piccolo@dep.state.fl.us

Beach and Park Clean-Up at John U. Lloyd Beach State Park. Tuesday, April 21. For more information contact Michelle Piccolo at 561-681-6662 or Michelle.M.Piccolo@dep.state.fl.us

Earth Day Celebration at Broward College. Tuesday, April 21 from 11 a.m. – 2 p.m.

Park Clean-Up at Jonathan Dickinson State Park. Thursday, April 23 from 9 a.m. – Noon.

Air Potato Round-Up at Okeechobee Battlefield Historic State Park. Friday, April 24. For more information contact Michelle Piccolo at 561-681-6662 or Michelle.M.Piccolo@dep.state.fl.us

20^th Annual Earth Day Celebration at Bahia Honda State Park. Saturday, April 25 from 9 a.m. – 2 p.m.

Southwest Florida:

Island Earth Days at Honeymoon Island State Park – Saturday and Sunday, April 18-19, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. (park closes at 5 p.m. on Sunday.)

Swallowtail Kite and Wildlife Festival at Dade Battlefield Historic State Park. Saturday, April 18 from 8 a.m. – 2 p.m.

26th Annual Earth Day Celebration at Oscar Scherer State Park – Sunday, April 19, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The DEP will have a booth at the Hillsborough County College Earth Day Event on April 21, 2015.

Earth Day Celebration at Crystal River Preserve State Park. Saturday, April 25 from 10 a.m. – 3:30 p.m.

mburgerdep

Of Interest to All

NASA Awards Architect-Engineer Services Contract for Launch Infrastructure

NASA has selected BPRH Architect and Engineers, Inc., of Melbourne, Florida, and Jones Edmunds and Associates, Inc., of Gainesville, Florida, to provide architect-engineer services to rehabilitate, modernize and develop new and existing civil infrastructure and facilities at Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and other NASA assets, launch or landing sites worldwide.

Two indefinite delivery indefinite quantity contracts will be awarded, one for each of the respective firms. Each contract will be for five years and will not exceed $20 million. 

The scope of work includes architect-engineer services for complex civil infrastructure including preparation of studies, designs, specifications, reports and other contract documents for construction, roadways, parking facilities, traffic signalization, specialized ground transportation infrastructure for flight hardware, railroads, airport runways and hangars, wharf facilities and dredging, security systems and force protection, water distribution, wastewater collection, storm-water management, coastal management, and geotechnical evaluations. Services also include the study and design of new facilities, refurbishment of existing facilities, and deconstruction of existing facilities.

These facilities may vary from small to large scale commercial buildings, industrial facilities, and/or laboratories. The architect-engineer services also include the application of sustainability concepts through an integrated design approach and designing in accordance with various Executive Orders and the U.S. Green Building Council, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green building rating system. The architect-engineer services will be performed across all project phases including planning and feasibility studies, environmental studies, environmental permitting, preliminary design, final design, engineering services during construction, activation and commissioning.

Press Release|Source|Kennedy Space Center|April 10, 2015

For more information about NASA programs and missions, visit: http://www.nasa.gov

Ocean Acidification: History Suggests it Could Kill Us All

If you pay attention to the environment, by now you’ve probably heard about ocean acidification, but it’s probably too abstract to understand completely. What’s the big deal about carbon being absorbed into the oceans anyway? To answer that question, scientists at the University of Edinburgh studied a previous period of intense ocean acidification and found that it coincided with the most lethal mass extinction in the history of the world.

The acidification-related extinction was no joke: 90 percent of marine species were eliminated entirely. The ripple effect harmed land animals, as well, causing approximately two-thirds of existing land species to go extinct. Essentially no ecosystem went undisturbed during the 10,000 year period of acidification.

Researchers have known about this mass die-off for a long time, but only recently could link it to ocean acidification after finding rocks in the United Arab Emirates that demonstrated oceanic changes from millions of years ago.

The acidification transpired because of mass releases of carbon, though, obviously, humans were not to blame at this point. Instead, successions of volcano eruptions let loose lots of carbon dioxide which wound up in the oceans. The rate at which he carbon was released from the volcanoes is roughly equivalent to the carbon humans are releasing from burning fossil fuels, so there’s definitely reason to fear similar consequences, volcanoes or not.

It’s important to note that just because ocean acidification has happened before doesn’t make it a common event. The acidification that scientists discovered occurred 252 million years ago, and clearly had catastrophic consequences for life on the planet. The fact that humans are prompting this major oceanic change even though it’s preventable is perhaps more alarming.

Based on information from 252 million years ago, it’s hard to say whether this new round of ocean acidification will be as deadly for life on the planet. As the oceans slowly acidify, however, we are seeing how it can negatively impact marine life in general. We’d be foolish to think that we’ll go unscathed, yet the United States has done next to nothing to address this mounting problem.

Although there’s no easily solution for ocean acidification, if you want to at least try to do your part to combat the issue, see Care2’s article “How Your Community Can Fight Ocean Acidification.”

Kevin Mathews|April 11, 2015

New rules proposed as 5-year anniversary of oil spill nears

WASHINGTON — A week shy of the fifth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the Obama administration proposed new regulations Monday aimed at strengthening oversight of offshore oil drilling equipment and ensuring that out-of-control wells can be sealed in an emergency.

The explosion of the Deepwater rig on April 20, 2010, killed 11 people and dumped as many as 172 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Federal safety investigators blamed a faulty blowout preventer for the spill and called for stronger regulations of the equipment that prevents oil and gas from rushing to the surface and triggering a spill.

The proposed rule would require that blowout preventers in wells have two shear rams, which cut through the drill pipe and allow the well to be sealed in an emergency. In the Deepwater Horizon spill, a single shear ram failed to operate properly.

The redundancy is already an industry standard. The rule also requires an annual review of maintenance and repair records by government-approved inspectors.

Many offshore drillers already have the capability to monitor from afar their drilling operations. The regulation would require that government workers have access to those facilities when necessary.

Interior Department Secretary Sally Jewell said the rule was needed to allow regulation to keep up with quickly evolving technology.

“Those things take time and we want to make sure that when we come out with a regulation like this it’s been done very thoughtfully in consultation with a lot of different parties,” Jewell said during a conference call.

Industry officials said they would be reviewing the proposed regulation, which is estimated to cost about $880 million over 10 years, but emphasized that companies have already taken steps to prevent future spills.

“Our industry is committed to meeting the nation’s energy needs while maintaining safe and environmentally responsible operations,” said Erik Milito of the American Petroleum Institute.

The rule didn’t go as far as some had anticipated.

The department said it would request comments on whether to require additional sheering capability that would ensure the equipment could cut through anything, such as debris around the pipe.

“We went back and forth on that,” said Brian Salerno, director of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. “We decided to put that out there as a question and to specifically seek comment on whether that is a realistic requirement and whether it’s achievable.”

There was little immediate pushback to the 264-page proposal from individual oil and gas companies, or from Republican lawmakers who have regularly criticized the administration of regulatory overreach.

“Before the critics start their predictable calls of ‘burdensome’ and ‘unnecessary,’ they should think about the ongoing costs of the spill,” Democratic Rep. Raul Grijalva said in a press release. Grijalva is the ranking Democratic member of the House Natural Resources Committee.

The public has 60 days to comment on the proposal before it is finalized. Other steps that have been taken over the years to improve safety include increasing the number of inspectors in the Gulf from 55 in April 2010 to 92 currently and requiring that government inspectors observe testing of blowout preventers before drilling can commence.

KEVIN FREKING|The Associated Press|April 13, 2015

Damming Tibet: China’s destruction of Tibet’s rivers, environment and people

When Michael Buckley took a white water rafting trip in Tibet in 2005, he had no idea of the adventure he was embarking on – a ten-year investigation of China ruthless exploitation of Tibet’s mineral and hydroelectric resources, and its systematic attack on indigenous Tibetans, their culture and their survival on the land.

The wild yak has gone the way of the bison in 19th-century America. Similar to native American peoples like the Blackfoot Indians, Tibetan nomads have become beggars in their own land, with their culture decimated by the Chinese policy of resettlement.

Sometimes you just fall right into a story.

In late 2005, I returned to Tibet intent on updating my guidebook to the troubled region, and to check out the completion of the new railway linking China with Tibet for the first time.

The new Golmud-Lhasa line was completed at a cost of over US$4 billion, more than the entire budget spent in Tibet on education and healthcare since the Chinese invasion in 1950. This railway was not built for philanthropic purposes.

My railway investigation got derailed when, out of curiosity, I decided to take a one-day rafting trip from Lhasa. This was a pure adrenaline rush: riding the wildest whitewater I’d ever been on. But the rafting guides lamented the fact that the rivers were being compromised by the building of massive dams by Chinese engineers.

I’d never heard of major dam-building in Tibet. And yet it made perfect sense: the biggest drops of any river in the world are in Tibet, so there’s huge hydro potential. The more I delved into this hydro development, the scarier it became.

It soon became evident that China had its hand on the tap for the water that feeds most of Asia through Tibet’s mighty rivers-the Mekong, Salween and Yarlung Tsangp (Brahmaputra) in particular.

I took as much undercover video footage as I could on this trip not knowing what I would do with it, but shooting anyway. I figured, as a guidebook writer, if I didn’t know anything about these new mega-dams, few Westerners would know about them either.

Video: Plundering Tibet TRAILER from ThunderHorse Media on Vimeo.

China’s reign of terror over Tibet

China severely restricts access to foreign journalists entering Tibet, and imposes a reign of terror to silence Tibetans within Tibet. Despite this, Tibetans have bravely protested against dams and mining at great risk, with a number killed, injured or locked away for long prison terms.

Under the highly repressive Chinese regime, Tibetans have been given sentences of five years or more for simply writing an email, making a phone-call or singing a song critical of Chinese policy.

Back in 1986, when I cycled from Lhasa to Kathmandu, I had been dazzled by Tibet’s incredible wide-open spaces, drinking in the towering snowcaps, the ethereal lakes, and huge grasslands. When you are on a mountain bike, you feel rather insignificant next to the highest peaks on earth.

Our small group of mountain-bikers had skirted Lake Yamdrok Tso, a turquoise beauty that is highly revered by Tibetans. But ten years later, the lake had been defiled by a highly controversial pumped-storage hydro system, supplying energy to Lhasa. Tibetan protest to save the sacred lake fell on deaf ears.

I assumed that Tibet’s incredible natural beauty would always be there for future travellers to enjoy. But instead, I found it changing right before my eyes. What struck me was the incredible speed of change accelerated by the arrival of the new railway in Lhasa.

The building of that railway was facilitated by the involvement of Montreal-based Bombardier and Power Corporation (building special high-altitude rail-cars), Nortel (communication network for the Lhasa railway), and other corporations from Canada.

That railway makes it possible to exploit Tibet’s resources on a large scale, by bringing Chinese migrants workers in by the train-load, and by shipping minerals out economically. The migrant workers build dams or work at mining sites. Up to 20,000 Chinese migrant workers might descend on a remote valley in Tibet to build a mega-dam.

The documentary I had to make

Returning to Vancouver in 2006, I could find very little about damming Tibet’s rivers in Western media, so I set out to make a short documentary about it-a film called Meltdown in Tibet. I didn’t know how to put a film together, but in the digital age, you can basically do it all on a laptop.

There is a steep learning curve involved in mastering the software. One skill transferable from years of writing was the ability to edit video to forge a storyline. Cutting and pasting of video, stills and music came naturally to me. The documentary was finally completed in 2009.

It screened on the fringes of the UN Climate Change Conference, in Copenhagen, in December that year, and at dozens of other venues worldwide. It didn’t screen as a great visual experience. It screened because few people had heard of the environmental issues portrayed.

In 2010, I went back to Tibet to shoot video for another short documentary about the sad demise of Tibetan nomads who have been forcibly shifted off their traditional grassland habitat and moved into concrete ghettoes.

Paper ‘national parks’ to expel nomads, make way for development

On an earlier trip, my guide Dorje told me that Chinese officials created massive national parks in Tibet, but these were ‘paper parks’ – made as an excuse to get rid of nomads.

Tibetan nomads are the stewards of the vast grasslands of Tibet. Over the course of 4,000 years, they have developed an ingenious culture that depends on their herds of yaks, sheep and goats.

The yak provides everything from milk, cheese and curd to shelter (yak-hair tents), clothing (yak-skin boots) and ropes. The comical yak resembles a cow with dreadlocks. They derive from wild yak stock.

Wild yaks are double the size of domesticated yaks, and your chances of spotting one are rare: there are thought to be fewer than a thousand wild yaks remaining on the Tibetan plateau.

Their numbers were annihilated by Chinese settlers and military, who machine-gunned them for food and for sport. The wild yak has gone the way of the bison in 19th-century America. Similar to native American peoples like the Blackfoot Indians, Tibetan nomads have become beggars in their own land, with their culture decimated by the Chinese policy of resettlement.

The great Tibetan mining disaster

As an excuse to settle Tibetan nomads, Chinese propagandists blame deteriorating grassland quality on overgrazing by nomads, but the fact is that extensive Chinese mining is the main culprit. Tibet has huge reserves of lithium, copper, gold and other precious metals.

And here, Canadian mining corporations have been at the forefront. These mining companies are exploiting mineral, oil and gas resources in a region occupied by an invading force (China), without regard for the environment, and without consulting the Tibetans – who vigorously oppose mining because it poisons their rivers, their livestock and their crops.

The poisoning of rivers due to extensive mining in Tibet now has the potential to go all the way downstream into Asia, threatening the lives of millions of people stretching from Vietnam to Pakistan.

A handful of Canadian mining corporations, mostly based in Vancouver, set up operations in Tibet: they were needed for their advanced technology and know-how. These included Continental Minerals, Sterling Group; and Inter-Citic, El Dorado Gold Corp and Tri-River Ventures.

But as the mines moved closer to production, Chinese officials stonewalled on permits, and most of those companies were forced to sell out to state-run mining ventures.

This has not happened to China Gold International Resources, based in Vancouver because it is essentially owned by the Chinese Communist Party, which is using the Canadian stock market to raise revenue to exploit Tibet’s valuable resources.

In 2010, China Gold acquired the extensive copper-gold mining site of Gyama, east of Lhasa. The venture was touted as a model mine, using the best mining practices. But on March 29, 2013, a massive mud-rock avalanche buried 83 miners at a mountain location near Gyama. Critics of the operation claim this tragedy occurred due to hasty mining done without concern for safety.

The story of Tibet’s destruction must be told!

Security is very tight at remote mining locations. I couldn’t go to Tibet to get video footage of mines. Instead I dropped in on mining sites from 400 kilometres overhead, virtually riding a satellite relaying Google Earth satellite imagery.

After obtaining permission from Google Earth to use flyovers, I put together a short documentary about mineral exploitation in Tibet, called ‘Plundering Tibet‘, released for film festival screenings in conjunction with the new book.

With the mountain of research accumulated from making these three short documentaries, I starting thinking about a book. I approached a literary agent who shopped it around and landed a major publisher in New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.

Nine years after that rafting trip in 2005, the book version of ‘Meltdown in Tibet‘ has finally been published. It took the legwork of three documentaries to pull all the research together. The challenge was to take the mass of information and distill it and make the situation clear to the average reader. That’s a skill I learned from writing guidebooks.

The story of the devastation of Tibet’s environment, and the tremendous impact this will soon have on the nations downstream in Asia, simply must be told.

This environmental horror story has been under-reported by Western media or not reported at all, hence the necessity of an unusually long subtitle for the book: China’s reckless destruction of ecosystems from the highlands of Tibet to the deltas of Asia.

The story chose me. I fell into it. It has been a wilder and scarier ride than any rafting trip.

Michael Buckley|13th April 2015

Nestlé has been pumping water from a national forest with an expired permit for over 25 years

The lack of regulation here is stunning. The U.S. Forest Service in Southern California just caught wind of the fact Nestlé’s permit to pump water out of a national forest expired over 25 years ago.  

An investigation by the Desert Sun found that Nestle Waters North America’s permit to transport water across the San Bernardino National Forest expired in 1988. The water is piped across the national forest and loaded on trucks to a plant where it is bottled as Arrowhead 100 percent Mountain Spring Water.

Nestlé is the #1 bottle water producer in the country and own the brands Arrowhead and Pure Life. The company’s response? Don’t worry, folks. Nestlé “monitors its water use and the environment around the springs where water is drawn.”

The California drought has gotten so bad we’ve been warned there is only a one-year supply left in the reservoirs. In Sacramento, Nestlé has recently been under fire from environmental activists, calling the company’s unregulated tapping of California aquifers a “corporate giveaway”:

“The coalition is protesting Nestlé’s virtually unlimited use of water – up to 80 million gallons a year drawn from local aquifers – while Sacramentans (like other Californians) who use a mere 7 to 10 percent of total water used in the State of California, have had severe restrictions and limitations forced upon them,” according to the coalition.

“Nestlé pays only 65 cents for each 470 gallons it pumps out of the ground – the same rate as an average residential water user. But the company can turn the area’s water around, and sell it back to Sacramento at mammoth profits,” the coalition said.

In Southern California near Coachella Valley, Nestlé also has a bottling plant inside the Morongo Reservation.

In 2013, the most recent year for which Morongo submitted reports, nearly 600 acre-feet of groundwater was tapped in the area, which translates to about 200 million gallons a year, the Desert Sun reports. That’s enough water to supply the needs of around 400 homes in the Coachella Valley.

What is the U.S. Forest Service back in San Bernardino poised to do now that they know Nestlé has been bottling water with an expired permit for 27 years.

The Forest Service faces a backlog of expired permits. In recent years, it focused on high-priority projects including permits for power lines, pipelines and a new water supply tunnel for the Metropolitan Water District, Southern California’s water wholesaler that serves more than two dozen cities and agencies.

[San Bernardino National Forest Supervisor] Noiron said Nestle’s expired permit is now a higher priority.

“Now that it has been brought to my attention that the Nestle permit has been expired for so long, on top of the drought . it has gone to the top of the pile in terms of a program of work for our folks to work on,” Noiron said.

Faith Gardner|4/12/15

Audubon Florida Naturalist – The Gulf Issue ‏

Audubon_Naturalist_Spring_2015.pdf

Dear Audubon Chapter Leaders,

Please find the attached copy of our latest Audubon Florida magazine. This issue focuses on our Gulf work.  Since the Deepwater Horizon disaster five years ago Audubon has focused on getting people involved in coastal bird habitat recovery.  I am proud of our progress and the support we enjoy from our board, chapter leaders and volunteers. I hope this issue of the Naturalist makes you feel proud to be part of the Audubon Florida network.  Thanks to all the chapters that participate in coastal bird conservation work.

Please pass this issue on to others. It is a great way educate friends and family about Audubon’s work on the Gulf and an easy way to introduce a request for support.  

Please note that on the contact page we included a message:  Find an Audubon Chapter Near You.  I am open to ideas about how Audubon Florida can use our communications tools to better promote your work.

Thanks,

Eric Draper|Executive Director|Jonathan Webber|Communications Manager|Audubon Florida

Florida RESTORE group submits preliminary plan

The Gulf Consortium, comprised of representatives from Florida’s 23 affected counties, submitted a planning state expenditure plan (PSEP) last week to the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council, which is responsible for spending oversight for the five Gulf States receiving funds under the RESTORE Act.

With the five-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill looming, a group tasked with managing a portion of Florida’s recovery dollars has submitted a preliminary plan for how those funds will be administered.

The Gulf Consortium, comprised of representatives from Florida’s 23 affected counties, submitted a planning state expenditure plan (PSEP) last week to the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council, which is responsible for spending oversight for the five Gulf States receiving funds under the Resources and Ecosystems Sustainability, Tourist Opportunities, and Revived Economies of the Gulf Coast States (RESTORE) Act.

Cragin Mosteller, spokeswoman for the Florida Association of Counties, which serves as the administration for the consortium, said the document represents the first step in what will be a two-year process to develop a final expenditure plan for the funds.

“What we have submitted is the plan to plan,” Mosteller said. “Because it’s such a big undertaking, it’s going to take two years and it’s going to be an investment.”

In the planning expenditure plan, the consortium outlines the need for nearly $4.9 million to develop the full state plan, which will be requested through a grant application to the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council.

The initial submittal also calls for four phases over the 24-month period, including funding and goal setting, project nomination, project evaluation and final plan development.

“Ultimately, this is a slow process,” Mosteller said. “Everyone involved … wants to make sure this is done correctly, judiciously, transparently. That means you have to set up the processes and the rules for that to happen.”

VALERIE GARMAN|News Herald Writer|THE ASSOCIATED PRESS|April 13, 2015

BP Oil Spill: 5 Years Later

Five years ago, on April 20, 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, killing 11 people, spilling more than 4 million barrels of oil, and killing at least 800,000 birds. BP’s grossly negligent actions caused both a human tragedy and the largest environmental disaster in our nation’s history, and the region, its people and its vulnerable wildlife are still feeling the effects.

Audubon staff and members took immediate and unprecedented action. We established an emergency volunteer response center to monitor beaches and estuaries, and to locate and identify birds and wildlife injured or damaged by the millions of barrels of oil spilled. In the end we received over 30,000 requests to volunteer and we deployed thousands of them to the front lines to help recover and save wildlife affected by the spill. The disaster brought out the best in Audubon’s staff and members.

Our policy staff immediately went to work with the five Gulf States, the Obama Administration, and Congress. Ultimately, through our collective efforts and those of other partners, the RESTORE Act was passed and signed into law by the President in July 2012. This landmark legislation set aside 80 percent of any Clean Water Act penalties that BP pays to restoring the ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico (as opposed to sending the fines to the general treasury). Per the legislation, a stand-alone federal agency was set up to select and oversee restoration projects. Unfortunately, with billions of their dollars at stake, BP continues to employ stalling tactics in the courts and a massive PR campaign that paints the Gulf as just fine. A final penalty—which could be as large as $14 billion—has yet to be levied. We continue to urge BP to end their stalling tactics and pay what they owe to the region and to the American people.

In a more positive development the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) received $2.6 billion in criminal fines from BP and has begun funding major restoration activities in all five states through its Gulf Environmental Benefits Fund. Audubon is working closely with NFWF to identify the best restoration projects for birds and wildlife.

Five years after the spill there are many reasons for hope. Congress, the Administration, and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation are working hard to restore and repair the damages caused by BP. Unfortunately, BP has been less cooperative and has yet to fully own up to their negligent actions. Restoration of the Gulf and the wildlife and local economies that depend on it will be years in the making, but Audubon will never relent in ensuring a positive outcome for the region’s people and the environment.

Watch this just-released video to learn more about our work along the Gulf Coast:

Audubon Advisory

RoundUp, cancer & the future of food

If you’ve been following the recent big news about Monsanto’s infamous weedkiller RoundUp and cancer, you’ll have heard that industry’s “dirty little secret” just got dirtier.

In case you missed it: the international scientific community sent us two very loud wake-up calls last month. First, the UN World Health Organization’s prestigious International Agency for Research on Cancer released a consensus report that glyphosate, the active ingredient in RoundUp, is a “probable carcinogen.” A few days later, a team of international scientists based in New Zealand reported that widely available commercial formulations of RoundUp, 2,4-D and dicamba can lead to the development of antibiotic resistance in common disease-causing bacteria.

In addition to these findings, there’s a growing body of evidence on health impacts associated with exposure to glyphosate or RoundUp, such as endocrine disruption, organ damage and birth defects.

Who should be concerned? Every single one of us. For one thing, exposure to this probable carcinogen is virtually unavoidable at this point. Since Monsanto introduced its RoundUp-Ready seeds engineered to be resistant to its top-selling herbicide 20 year ago, herbicide use in this country has skyrocketed. More than 500 million additional pounds — most of it RoundUp — have been applied since then. Not surprisingly, the US Geological Survey has found RoundUp in our air, rain, streams and surface water.

And it’s showing up in our food, reports Reuters: in honey, soy sauce, flour and breast milk, for starters. The fact that we don’t even know what other foods are contaminated or how much glyphosate we carry in our bodies is simply because we’re not looking for it, explains Consumer Reports.

It’s our food and farming system that’s at stake — not Monsanto’s.

But it’s not just about RoundUp. Many other pesticides commonly used in U.S. agriculture have been linked to cancer, birth defects, hormone disruption, neurological and developmental damage and other harmful health and environmental effects. Atrazine, for example — the 2nd most widely used pesticide in the U.S. — is a possible carcinogen, endocrine disruptor and groundwater contaminant.

And 2,4-D (the ingredient which, along with glyphosate, is in Dow’s Enlist Duo weedkiller) is a reproductive and developmental toxicant, suspected endocrine disruptor and probable carcinogen, with links to non-Hodgkins lymphoma and birth defects of the heart and circulatory and respiratory systems.

I say “every one of us” should be concerned for another reason as well: it’s our food and farming system that’s at stake. It belongs to us — to ordinary rural and urban families, farmworkers and communities across the U.S., not to Monsanto. The ubiquitous presence of hazardous pesticides — in our food and on our farms, in the air we breathe and water we drink, in our children’s bodies — is not something that any of us ever asked for.

In point of fact, pesticide-intensive agriculture is not even working for farmers. RoundUp resistance and the epidemic of “superweeds” infesting over 60 million acres of American farmland is but one indicator of the utter failure of this model to provide food, jobs or livelihoods in an ecologically sustainable, economical or equitable way.

Most importantly, this disaster is definitely not something we have to put up with.

No farmer should have to choose between cancer striking his or her family and making a decent living. But apparently EPA and USDA consider this a reasonable choice. I consider it obscene, and I hold our public agencies responsible for the disastrous predicament that American farming is in.

In reality, this is a false choice. It is possible to grow corn, soybeans, small grains and all manner of fruit and vegetable crops in biologically based, diversified farming systems. Agroecological practices such as ecological weed and insect pest management, combined with smart soil and water conservation practices are being employed by innovative farmers all over the U.S.

The problem we’re facing, however, is not about lack of sustainable solutions. The problem is that Big 6 pesticide companies like Monsanto — supported by USDA and backed by the U.S. government’s export-driven trade agenda — have built up an agricultural economic system that puts multinational corporations’ profits above people’s well-being, and locks farmers into these unsustainable practices.

As Iowa corn and soybean farmer George Naylor explains:

“Farmers are trapped in an economic system that forces them to keep producing corn and soybean in very destructive ways. It’s all about converting bushels of corn and soybean into pounds of oil, carbs or protein for agrofuels and livestock feed. This system of all-out production at any cost will only change if sensible people demand different policies and create new markets.”

EPA will decide whether or not to re-register glyphosate later this year; the two recent scientific reports on the direct and indirect health harms associated with glyphosate raise the stakes of this decision dramatically. PAN is calling on EPA to fulfill its obligation to protect public health and produce an action plan within the next 45 days, with an expedited timeline to phase out our farmers’ dependence on and exposure to glyphosate. The agency must also, as a matter of highest priority, immediately cancel its recent approvals of Dow’s new 2,4-D and glyphosate-containing product, Enlist Duo, and deny Monsanto’s application for dicamba use in GE cotton and soybean production.

Meanwhile, USDA must stop greenlighting Monsanto and Dow’s products, and instead develop its own action plan — complete with timeline and benchmarks — for how the agency will spearhead a country-wide transition to least-toxic ecological weed management. The new plan must break the cycle of weed resistance that keeps farmers on a pesticide treadmill, and phase out reliance on health-harming herbicides like glyphosate, atrazine and 2,4-D.

Now more than ever, American farmers need support in shifting from today’s toxic, ineffective and unsustainable model of agriculture into one that is productive, ecologically resilient, healthy and safe. Such system-wide changes cannot happen overnight. But getting this urgently needed process started is essential, and requires leadership and a serious commitment at the highest level. 

Marcia Ishii-Eiteman|Apr 16, 2015

Selecting Plants for Pollinators

Calls to Action

1. Demand Costco Commit to Reducing Deforestation – here
2. Stop Shell From Drilling in the Arctic – here
3. Demand Costco Commit to Reducing Deforestation – here
4. Tell EPA to pass strong new regulations on oil dispersants – here
5. Stop a Massive Construction Project in the Heart of the Grand Canyon – here
6. Keep 350 million tons of coal in the ground – here
7. Ban Mountain Top Removal Coal Mining – here

 

Birds and Butterflies

Rusty Blackbird Spring Migration Blitz Starts April 11

From April 11 through May 31, you can use your binoculars to help birds—by reporting sightings of Rusty Blackbirds for the Rusty Blackbird Spring Migration Blitz in the online database called eBird.

This is the second year of the three-year project. Researchers across North America are teaming up with citizen scientists to help solve the mysterious decline of the Rusty Blackbird. This species has suffered one of the steepest declines of any bird in North America, 88–98% since 1966. Audubon Alaska is coordinating the Alaskan effort this year.

Whether you’re an experienced birder or just beginning, citizen science projects like the Rusty Blackbird Blitz are a great way to help answer important questions about the birds that flood back to Alaska each spring. Since you can report your sightings in the online database called eBird, anyone can participate from anywhere in the state. Starting observations this early in migration season in Alaska will help document first arrivals of Rusty Blackbirds within the state.

Find more information about Rusty Blackbird ID, sounds, and how to participate in the Rusty Blackbird Blitz.

Welcome the Ospreys back to the nest! ‏

Ospreys Rachel and Steve are back!

Our favorite ospreys have landed on Hog Island! The Osprey Nest cam is back live for a brand new season, and Dr. Steve Kress of Audubon’s Project Puffin suggests Rachel and Steve are the love birds making it their home. Join them on their lofty perch as they lay eggs, swoop over Muscongus Bay, and raise their family.

Last year, Rachel and Steve raised three osprey chicks: Pia, Pan, and Poole, each of whom successfully fledged out on their own. Don’t miss any of this year’s beautiful, stunning moments as we watch their new family from a uniquely intimate perspective. Gather, chat, and share your snapshots of a whole new osprey season!

Follow the explore.org blog for news and updates about the raptors.

Global Big Day: birding to support conservation ‏

The time of year has come when migratory birds cross continents and even hemispheres to return home to their nesting grounds. Because long-distance migrants face many hazards during their journeys, Team Sapsucker, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s top birding team, has chosen to spend 24 hours of non-stop birding in Panama, a region critical to the travels of migratory birds in the Western Hemisphere.

Big Day is the Cornell Lab’s biggest conservation fundraiser of the year, as we focus attention on the conservation concerns birds encounter. It’s also a celebration of the diversity of birds as Team Sapsucker birds along a route to find as many species as possible in one day.

This year’s Big Day raises the bar for what we can do for birds. For our first Global Big Day, we’re sending Team Sapsucker outside of the United States, and inviting you to join us on May 9 by adding your checklist to the team’s list of species found. Our goal is to raise $500,000 for conservation and, with help from bird watchers everywhere, collectively tally 4,000 species—40 percent of the world’s bird species—on eBird.org in 24 hours.

Your donations and species checklists provide the Cornell Lab with the resources and data needed to make smart land management decisions that benefit birds in your region and across the world.

With your help, we can support birds and their habitats through on-the-ground research and conservation across these species’ full life cycle, as they cross hemispheres between nesting grounds and wintering habitats.

Please make a donation today as we count down to Global Big Day.

Cornell Lab of Ornithology|4/14/15

Black flamingo, possibly unique, spotted in Cyprus

A black flamingo is seen in a salt lake at the Akrotiri Environmental Centre on the southern coast of Cyprus April 8, 2015.

AKROTIRI, Cyprus (Reuters) – An extremely rare black flamingo has been spotted on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, exciting nature lovers who said it may be the only bird of its type ever seen.

The flamingo, seen on the banks of a salt lake on Wednesday morning, is thought to have a genetic condition known as melanism, which causes it to generate more of the pigment melanin, turning it dark, rather than the usual pink color.

“From what have seen on the Internet, there was only one other sighting … in Israel, so maybe this is the second one,” said Pantelis Charilaou, head of the environmental department of the British Sovereign Bases, territory under the control of former colonial power where the bird was seen.

The flamingo, entirely black, save for a tuft of white feathers on its rear, was feeding with others on the banks of the lake on Wednesday afternoon. Experts said it may be the same one that was spotted in Israel in 2014.

The sighting in Cyprus happened during a flamingo count at a sprawling salt lake at the Akrotiri environmental center on the southern coast of Cyprus.

“A melanistic individual is a very, very rare sighting … basically its the opposite of an albino when the individual produces more melanin than normal,” Charilaou told Reuters Television.

Up to 20,000 greater flamingos descend on Akrotiri salt lake each year.

Michele Kambas|Marinos Meletiou|Reuters|4/14/15

Rookery Bay Reserve and Audubon Partner to Protect Shorebirds

NAPLES – Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve manages 40 percent of Collier County’s coastline, which serves as crucial habitat for many species of migratory and nesting birds. Rookery Bay Reserve, in partnership with Audubon Florida and Audubon of the Western Everglades, is pleased to welcome new Shorebird Monitoring and Stewardship Project Manager Adam DiNuovo.

DiNuovo will work with research and stewardship staff at Rookery Bay Reserve to monitor seasonal beach-nesting bird colonies, over-wintering shorebird population trends, spring/fall migratory events, and habitat on mainland beaches as well as on remote, offshore islands. He will also recruit and train bird stewards as part of a wider education and outreach initiative within Collier and Lee Counties. Audubon Florida has funded this position for a minimum of two years.

“The reserve will greatly benefit from this enhanced monitoring and stewarding effort to support regional management and protection of beach-nesting birds and their habitat,” said Rookery Bay Reserve’s Research Coordinator Kevin Cunniff.

During the breeding season, which runs from March through August, DiNuovo will be responsible for performing beach-nesting bird monitoring and protection work. Post breeding season, his role will shift to assisting regional monitoring efforts directed at assessing shorebird population status and trends.

“This new position will not only help all of us better understand the regional status and trends of nesting and migratory birds, but will also enable us to better engage the public around coastal bird conservation,” said Marianne Korosy, Audubon Florida’s important bird area coordinator. “We’re grateful to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s Gulf Environmental Benefit Fund for the funding to help us support Rookery Bay and the region’s devoted bird stewards.”

Rookery Bay Reserve, Audubon Florida and Audubon of the Western Everglades are all members of the Collier County Shorebird Partnership, which has been working collaboratively and meeting semi-annually since 2000. The partnership also includes members from local, state and federal agencies, as well as local non-profit organizations.

In Collier County, 99 percent of all shorebird nesting is on beaches. Least tern and black skimmer nesting data has been recorded in Collier County since 1972 as part of a long-term coastal waterbird monitoring effort. The Big Marco Pass Critical Wildlife Area’s least tern and black skimmer colony is consistently ranked as one of the largest colonies in Florida.

To get involved in the bird steward program in Collier County contact the Shorebird Monitoring and Stewardship Project Manager Adam DiNuovo atadinuovo@audubon.org or 413-896-4751.

Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve encompasses 110,000 acres of coastal lands and waters on the southwest Florida coast. It is managed by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection in cooperation with NOAA. For more information about the Reserve visit www.rookerybay.org.

nataliarodriguez2015|April.14.2015

 Florida Panthers

Panther depredation update ‏

The FWC has updated the “Panther Pulse” page with depredation information  through April 13, 2015. Panthers are a top predator and prey on a variety of wildlife such as deer, hogs, raccoons, armadillos and rabbits. Unfortunately, they sometimes prey on domesticated animals such as goats, sheep, calves and even pets. When a panther or other wild animal preys upon or injures a pet or domestic livestock it is called a depredation. Depredation information can be viewed at: http://www.floridapanthernet.org/index.php/pulse/

People can protect pets and other backyard animals from panthers and other predators by following the advice available at: http://www.floridapanthernet.org/index.php/handbook/LivingInPantherCountry/.”

  Invasive species

How a Handful of Goldfish Are Choking an Entire Ecosystem

It might seem to be a wonderful act of kindness. Why not set your pet free to live life in the wild, as nature intended? There are a lot of reasons that’s usually a bad idea. As it turns out, “setting free” even a few innocent goldfish sets in motion a damaging series of impacts.

About two years ago, wildlife officials believe, some folks released their goldfish into Teller Lake near Boulder, Colo. You might think a few goldfish tossed into a big lake couldn’t possibly pose a serious problem. You’d be wrong. The aftermath of loosing these fish into a habitat in which they didn’t belong has become a cautionary tale worth heeding.

Why? Because two years later, Teller Lake is teeming with 3,000 to 4,000 goldfish. That’s why.

Yes, somehow — even though the goldfish you bring home inevitably die no matter how well you care for them — these guys learned to thrive in the lake.  That hardy little group of pet fish had themselves a party, breeding and multiplying happily until they became a swarm that’s literally choking the life out of the lake ecosystem. Before they find their way into additional state waters,  wildlife officials now have to come up with a plan to remove them before any further harm is done.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) has its hands full. Species native to the lake — sun fish, blue gill fish, channel catfish — are being crowded out by the goldfish, which are considered an invasive species in this context.

“Most people don’t realize the far-reaching effects of introducing exotic species to the environment,” said CPW’s senior aquatic biologist Ken Kehmeier in a press release. “Non-native species can be devastating to native populations by causing disease outbreaks and creating competition unbalance. It’s an issue that anyone concerned with our environment should know about.”

The lesson to be learned here is simple. Never allow non-native species into an ecosystem. When you do, you can set in motion a domino effect you may never realize was your fault.

“Dumping your pets into a lake could bring diseases to native animals and plants as well as out-compete them for resources,” CPW representative Jennifer Churchill told ABC News. “Everything can be affected. Non-native species can potentially wipe out the fishery as we’ve put it together.”

Watch a USA Today video report about this problem here:

This isn’t the first time officials in Colorado have had to deal with non-native fish. In 2012, CPW had to remove koi from Thunderbird Lake. Dealing with that problem uncovered 2,275 non-native fish inhabiting that lake alone. In 2008, officials found zebra mussels and quagga mussels in eight Colorado reservoirs.

The problem isn’t limited to people setting their pet fish free. In many cases, people who love to fish attempt to stock their favorite fishing spot with the type of fish they prefer, whether or not it belongs there.

CPW now must decide what to do to rescue Teller Lake. Options, unfortunately, include stunning the fish with electroshocks or draining the lake and collecting them up. Either way, they’re likely headed to a local raptor rehabilitation center where they’ll end up as bird food.

There’s apparently no kinder way to deal with them. Though some locals have said they’d take some of the fish as pets, CPW worries that allowing that would be a bad idea.

“I’m going to talk to Boulder County, who owns the lake to see what they think, but I don’t want to send the message that collecting fish for personal fun is okay,” Churchill told ABC News.

Sadly, what may have been a well-meant act has created a serious problem. Think twice before doing something like this and discourage anyone who might mention releasing non-native species where they don’t belong. Every act has ramifications. Some are terrible.

Susan Bird|April 15, 2015

Endangered Species

Population of Endangered Amur Tigers Rising in Northeast China

The population of the endangered big cats is rising again in Northeast China, a forest ranger in Heilongjiang Province said.

The government said that the many villagers from the provinces of Heilongjiang and Jilin that have long traditions of hunting are now devoted to protecting the endangered Siberian tigers, also known as Amur tigers.

Studies show that the endangered species, which all but disappeared from China for decades, is making a comeback in the northeast.

The Amur tiger is the largest cat living in the wild, which was abundant in the northeastern region before the 1960s, but by the 1990s not fewer than 20 only remained in the wild.

According to the latest government data, the number of wild tigers in Jilin has now risen to 27, with 12 to 14 roaming the wilds of Heilongjiang, roughly double the number reported in 2010.

Experts from the World Wide Fund for Nature, the Wildlife Conservation Society, Northeast Normal University in Changchun, wildlife NGO KORA and the University of Montana conducted a study from 2008 to 2010, which showed that about 130 Amur tigers could be accommodated in the tiger’s potential habitat in Northeast China, the report said.

Shi Quanhua, senior manager of WWF, China’s Asian big cats program, said that long-term monitoring revealed two major trends. One, the tigers are moving from the China-Russia border to inner areas of northeastern China; and two, they are breeding.

The report said that the WWF have video footage of Amur tigers traveling between China and Russia, as well as families of tigers with cubs spotted in the Wangqing area of Jilin.

As this developed, Jilin and Heilongjiang officials have vowed to enhance the protection of tigers, leopards and the environment.

Lan Hongliang, director of the provincial forestry authority in Jilin, said that they have banned commercial logging in the area to boost the recovery of wood resources and wildlife habitats, and establish three to five nature reserves to protect Amur tigers and their habitats with the aim of slowly forming a tiger protection network on Changbai Mountain.

Many residents of Suiyang in Heilongjiang have also been relocated out of key protection zones after the nature reserve was established and commercial logging was banned.

Zhao Shucong, director of the State Forestry Administration, said last month that the protection of the tigers is a priority of the government as national protection plan is expected to be implemented soon. He added that China is cooperating with regional authorities, as well as university and academy experts, to formulate a strategy, starting with a national survey of wild tigers.

Despite this promising discovery, conservationists said that the problem now is the unbalanced food chain in the area which makes it difficult for the tigers to find their prey or food.

Manny Salvacion|Apr 11, 2015

First Black Bear Hunting Season in 20 Years Planned in Florida

The state of Florida is going to open bear hunting season in October for the first time since 1994, with a planned “harvest objective” of 275 black bears.

Black bears were placed on Florida’s threatened animals list back in 1974, at a time when the bear population was around 300 to 500. In 1994, a statewide ban on black bear hunting was issued in order to protect the species, and since then, numbers have steadily increased to around 2,500.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission are reviewing the ban on April 14, with plans to have a killing season this fall, claiming that black bear numbers are now becoming problematic to human populations.

Why Bring Back Barbaric Bear Hunting After 21 Years Without It?

Around the globe, humans have endangered and wiped out thousands of native species of animals due to hunting and poaching. The ban on black bear hunting in Florida has given the bears the opportunity to thrive once more in their natural environment, and this ban should be permanent, not something on a limited time scale until their numbers have recovered.

Sadly, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission have the power to decide whether animal populations are worth protecting or not, and in this instance they have deemed it necessary to start murdering animals once more.

The Director of the commission’s Division of Hunting and Game Management, Dianne Eggeman, stated that “the bear population has grown for the last 15 years or 20 years, steadily and pretty rapidly, based upon all the information that we have. So our job, of the agency, is to manage that growing population and the best tool to manage that population growth across the board is to use hunting…The more the (bear) population grows, the more likely bears move out of the wildlife and into neighborhoods.”

The proposals will allow hunters to buy a permit ($100 for Florida residents, $300 for non-residents) and to murder one bear per permit using crossbows, bows, revolvers, pistols, shotguns and muzzle loading guns, until the quota of 275 bears have been killed.

Who Are We to Decide How Many Bears Is Too Many?

As humans we have allowed ourselves to believe that we’re the most important species on the planet, rather than just one of millions, equally as important and deserving of life. Unlike other animals who kill for survival, we have taken it upon ourselves to do so for convenience, pleasure, and out of a strange idea that nature requires us to in order to maintain the right balance of animals.

We invade and destroy the natural habitats of others, and then decide that it’s our right to kill them at will, to ensure that their numbers do not affect our lives in a negative way. The black bears of Florida do not deserve to be murdered this year just because the authorities have decided that there are now too many.

Abigail Geer|April 11, 2015

One in 10 bee species faces extinction

The first-ever assessment of all European wild bee species shows that 9.2% are threatened with extinction, while 5.2% are considered likely to be threatened in the near future.

A total of 56.7% of the species are classified as Data Deficient, as lack of experts, data and funding has made it impossible to evaluate their extinction risk. 

The assessment was published as part of The IUCN European Red List of Bees and the Status and Trends of European Pollinators (STEP) project, both funded by the European Commission.

It provides – for the first time – information on all 1,965 wild bee species in Europe, including their status, distribution, population trends and threats.

“This assessment is the best understanding we have had so far on wild bees in Europe,” says Jean-Christophe Vié, Deputy Director, IUCN Global Species Program. “However, our knowledge about them is incomplete as we are faced with an alarming lack of expertise and resources.

“Bees play an essential role in the pollination of our crops. We must urgently invest in further research in order to provide the best possible recommendations on how to reverse their decline.”

The report shows that 7.7% of the species have declining populations, 12.6% are stable and 0.7% are increasing. Population trends for the remaining 79% of bee species are unknown.

Changing agricultural practices and increased farming intensification have led to large-scale losses and degradation of bee habitats – one of the main threats to their survival.

For instance, intensive silage production – at the expense of hay-cropping – causes losses of herb-rich grasslands and season-long flowering, which constitute important sources of forage for pollinators.

The widespread use of insecticides also harms wild bees and herbicides reduce the availability of flowers on which they depend. The use of fertilizers promotes rank grassland, which is low in flowering plants and legume species – the preferred food resources for many bee species.

Intensive agriculture and farming practices have caused a sharp decline in the surface area of dry steppes, which house the Vulnerable Andrena transitoria bee – a formerly common eastern Mediterranean species that spreads from Sicily to Ukraine and into Central Asia.

Ploughing, mowing or grazing of flowering plants, as well as the use of insecticides have led to a 30% population decline of the species over the last decade, and its extinction in certain countries.

Climate change is another important driver of extinction risk for most species of bees, and particularly bumblebees.

Heavy rainfalls, droughts, heat waves and increased temperatures can alter the habitats that individual species are adapted to and are expected to dramatically reduce the area of its habitat, leading to population decline.

A total of 25.8% of Europe’s bumblebee species are threatened with extinction, according to the assessment.

Urban development and the increased frequency of fires also threaten the survival of wild bee species in Europe, according to the experts.

The report also includes an assessment of the Western Honeybee (Apis mellifera) – the most well-known pollinator. The Western Honeybee has a native distribution through much of Europe but it is uncertain whether it currently occurs as a truly wild, rather than domesticated species.

As the Red List only covers wild – not domesticated – species, it has been assessed as Data Deficient. Further research is needed to distinguish between wild and non-wild colonies, and to better understand the impacts of malnutrition, pesticides and pathogens on honeybee colonies, according to IUCN.

“Public and scientific attention tends to focus on Western Honeybee as the key pollinator, but we must not forget that most of our wild flowers and crops are pollinated by a whole range of different bee species,” says Simon Potts, STEP project Coordinator.

“We need far-reaching actions to help boost both wild and domesticated pollinator populations. Achieving this will bring huge benefits to wildlife, the countryside and food production.”   

Distinctive genitals indicate new monkey species in Tibet

A new species of monkey has been discovered in south-eastern Tibet , in the  biodiverse yet poorly studied forests in the politically volatile area, the New Scientist has reported.

The results of  camera traps in four Tibetan gorges enabled scientists to distinguish it from the other four macaque species in the region by its rounded glans penis and a dark, hairy scrotum.

Called the white-cheeked macaque, Macaca leucogenys, its habitat ranges from tropical forests at an altitude of 1395 metres to mixed forests of broad-leaves and conifers at 2700 metres altitude.

“The forest in Modog is like a nature library, and we know very little about it,” says Chao Zhao, a researcher at China’s Dali University’s Institute of Eastern-Himalaya Biodiversity Research, who worked on the study. “Discovery of the new macaque species suggests that there may be some species that still remain undiscovered in this area.”

“Our photos clearly showed some morphological differences between the new species and other known species,” says co-author Peng-Fei Fan, also at Dali University.

However Michael A. Schillaci, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, in Canada says that pictures aren’t enough to classify this as a new species yet and. Only DNA can prove the monkey’s distinction from other macaques.

The macaque, whether a new species or not, faces threats from hunting by local tribes and planned construction in the region, the researchers say.

“Construction of hydropower stations would result in destroying and flooding extensive areas of forest along the rivers, the potential habitat for white cheeked macaques,” they write. “The immigration of a large number of people into the area to construct the hydropower stations also will result in an increase in the bushmeat trade, deforestation, new roads, and the construction of housing for workers, all of which will have a negative impact on white-cheeked macaque conservation.”

Captive bred rare sturgeon released into the wild in China

Boat traffic, pollution and human development in the Yangtze River are thought to have driven the Chinese sturgeon to the brink of extinction

Researchers in China have released 3,000 captive-bred Chinese sturgeons, a rare fish that dates back to the dinosaurs, into the country’s longest river, the Yangtze, to save the species from extinction reports the Global Times.
Estimates by experts say that due to development in and around rivers, heavy boat traffic and water pollution, the number of wild Chinese sturgeons which migrate to Gezhouba, Hubei Province, to breed has fallen from about 1,000 in 1982 to about 50.

In this latest release, staff at the Chinese Sturgeons Research Institute transferred 500 fish born in 2011 and with a body length of 80cm, and 2,500 fish born in 2013, which had reached about 40cm in length from their holding pens to the river.
According to Gao Yong, the Deputy Head of the Research Instituted, they are also employing advanced methods to track the two age groups simultaneously to monitor their progress and see which group fares best.
This was the Institute’s 57th release of the rare fish, which scientists have nicknamed ‘aquatic pandas’, as they are highly endangered and are listed as a ‘wild creature under State protection’. They have not been detected reproducing naturally in the Yangtze River for more than two years.

This Rhino Is Guarded 24 Hours A Day Because There Is No One Else Like Him Left On Earth

is being guarded by armed rangers at every moment of the day because he is the last of his kind on Earth. Sudan is the only male of the northern white rhino subspecies remaining, thanks to ruthless poaching that has reached catastrophic levels in recent years. His relatives and ancestors have been slaughtered for their horns, which are sold for huge amounts of money in Asia, where they’re believed to cure a range of ailments.

Fixed with radio transmitters to increase security, Sudan is surrounded by armed rangers at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, who work day and night to keep the 40-year-old Sudan and two female rhinos of his subspecies alive. (There are only two other northern white rhinos in the world, two females also in captivity.)

And they took an extra precaution: removing his horn. “The only reason his horn has been cut off is to deter poachers,” Elodie Sampere, of the conservancy, told The Dodo. “If the rhino has no horn, he is of no interest to poachers. This is purely to keep him safe.”

“With the rising demand for rhino horn and ivory, we face many poaching attempts and while we manage to counter a large number of these, we often risk our lives in the line of duty,” Simor Irungu, a ranger who guards Sudan and other rhinos at the conservancy, said in an interview with UK’s World of Animals.

Sudan and three other rhinos came to the conservancy from a zoo in the Czech Republic in 2009, with the hope of breeding the rhinos in a climate and environment more natural to them. But by 2014, no baby rhinos had been born. The other male rhino, Suni, died at age 34 in October of last year, leaving Sudan and the two females left at the conservancy. Attempts to breed Sudan, the last male breeding rhino of the subspecies in the world, have been unsuccessful.

Surrounded by guards day and night, the conservancy participated in a #RunningForRangers fundraising campaign to help sustain Sudan’s security team.

The lengths humans have gone to keep this rhino alive underscore just how merciless other humans have been.

Sarah V Schweig|April 10, 2015

FWC moves forward with comprehensive draft bear management rules

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) continues to build on its long-standing, proactive approach to bear management. At its April 15 meeting in Tallahassee, FWC Commissioners approved several proposed bear-related rules that will be presented for final action in June. The draft rules address a wide variety of tools to manage bear populations and help reduce human-bear conflicts.

Staff were directed to refine changes to the feeding rule by making a new sub-section specifically for bear feeding and adding coyotes to rule 68A-4.001(3). In responding to feeding violations, staff will focus on written warnings as a key component.

Commissioners also approved draft language to the bear conservation rule which includes the depredation permit that can be used in appropriate situations. Depredation permits would authorize a landowner to remove bears if they are causing property damage, if protective measures like electric fencing have failed or are not feasible, and if FWC staff have been unable to trap the bear within four nights.

Additionally, the Commission approved draft rules that would allow for the scaring of bears in appropriate settings.

The Commissioners asked staff to continue the educational approach to help people understand how to live with bears in ways that minimize conflicts.

“Education is key. We know that bear feeding is an issue, so we need to continue to be proactive and responsive with our efforts,” said FWC Chairman Richard Corbett. “Properly securing garbage and other attractants is the single most important action for reducing conflict situations with bears.”

As directed by Commissioners in February, staff is also in the process of drafting a policy paper on the need for comprehensive waste management to reduce human-bear conflicts. The report and an accompanying resolution should be ready for Commission review at its June 2015 meeting. 

Finally, the commission also approved proposed rules which, if passed at the next commission meeting in June, would allow limited hunting of black bears in four of the state’s seven bear management units.

“Bear populations have grown over the last 15 to 20 years. It is our responsibility to manage these populations, and hunting is an important and effective tool to help us do so,” Corbett said.

The four proposed units contain the state’s largest bear populations, which include all three national forests and the southern-most portion of Florida. The proposal includes a seven-day season in late October on private and public lands. The season may end sooner in any given bear management unit if the harvest objective for that unit is reached. Hunting bears with bait or dogs would not be allowed, and everyone who wanted to participate would need a bear permit ($100 for a resident permit and $300 for a nonresident permit) as well as a hunting license and any other related permits.

For the presentation outlining these amendments, go to http://myfwc.com/media/3013519/11B-Revisions-Bear-Rules.pdf.

For more details on the proposed bear hunting rules, view the presentation at http://myfwc.com/media/3013407/11a-rules-limited-bear-hunting.pdf.

Before the final discussion during the June Commission meeting, people can provide comments regarding these and other bear-related topics at MyFWC.com/Bear. This link will also provide information about Florida black bears and how to avoid conflicts with them. Please report any threatening bear behavior to the FWC Wildlife Alert Hotline at 888-404-FWCC (3922).

Four Species Clear First Hurdle to Endangered Species Act Protection

Four species — a fish, a snail, a turtle and a tree — moved closer to Endangered Species Act protection this week in response to legal work by the Center and allies when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agreed with us that they may warrant protection.

The Clear Lake hitch, a large minnow that lives in Northern California, is threatened by dewatering and drought; the Mohave shoulder band snail is threatened by an open-pit gold mine in its desert home; the western pond turtle, a mostly river-dwelling species in Washington, Oregon and California, is threatened by habitat destruction caused by agriculture and development. And the yellow cedar, threatened by climate change and logging, would be the first Alaska tree species protected by the Act.

The species’ futures will be decided within the next year.

Read more about the yellow cedar victory in the Los Angeles Times, and get details on the other three species (plus some wins for even more imperiled species) at KCET News.

Suit Launched to Save East Coast Seabird From Offshore Oil Drilling

The black-capped petrel, a cliff-dwelling seabird surviving in just a few colonies off the Atlantic Coast, was once believed to be extinct — and could soon get there if Big Oil has its way. Oil companies are champing at the bit to drill in its last foraging habitat offshore, so the Center for Biological Diversity has filed a notice of intent to sue challenging the feds’ failure to decide whether this bird receives Endangered Species Act protection.

The Obama administration recently opened the Atlantic Coast to seismic exploration activities for oil and gas, is reviewing 10 applications for drilling permits, and has proposed to offer an area off the mid-Atlantic for drilling in its five-year plan for offshore oil leases. The black-capped petrel is especially vulnerable to possible oil spills because it’s nocturnal, with an attraction to oily surfaces.

But the Fish and Wildlife Service still hasn’t made a decision on a petition to protect it filed back in 2011. The Center announced Monday we’ll sue if the agency doesn’t respond within two more months.

Get more from the Haiti Sentinel.

South Africa Weighs Legalization of Rhino Horn Trade

A Committee of Inquiry established by South Africa’s Department of Environmental Affairs will begin hearing expert testimony tomorrow on the subject of legalizing the rhino horn trade as the Southern African country, home to more than 80 percent of the world’s rhinos, grapples with a rhino poaching crisis.

Based on its own investigation and testimony given by experts at the three-day meeting, the Committee will eventually make recommendations on whether South Africa, a signatory to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), should submit a proposal to legalize rhino horn trade at CITES’ 17th Conference of Parties meeting in Cape Town next year. Any move to legalize the trade in rhino horn, however, will do more harm than good, says African Wildlife Foundation (AWF).

“Legalizing trade in a product belonging to an animal that is highly threatened would prove disastrous and accelerate rather than curtail rhino poaching in all of Africa,” says African Wildlife Foundation’s senior director of conservation science, Dr. Philip Muruthi. “We understand South Africa’s sense of desperation and the government’s desire to test any strategy to protect its rhinos. We know from the experience with the ivory trade, however, that rhino horn will continue to be trafficked under cover of a legal trade, complicating our efforts to crack down on the illegal trade.” 

AWF opposes any move to legalize trade in rhino horn for the following reasons:

• There are fewer than 25,000 rhinos remaining in Africa, compared to the tens of millions of existing and prospective rhino horn consumers in demand countries such as Vietnam, a country of 90 million, and China, a country of 1.4 billion. Hence, there is no realistic scope for achieving a sustainable balance between the supply of and demand for rhino horn.
• A decision to legalize rhino horn trade could be interpreted as an endorsement of the erroneous belief that the horn contains medicinal properties. A rhino’s horn is made up of keratin, the same material found in human hair and nails. Consumers in many Asian countries, however, believe it can cure everything from a headache to cancer.  If legalization is perceived as an endorsement, it could stimulate, rather than curtail, demand.
• Based on the experience with the elephant ivory trade over the last 25 years, legalization as a strategy has proven ineffective in stopping elephant poaching. The only thing that legal trade has done in the case of ivory is complicate law enforcement efforts in combating the illegal trade and removed the stigma once attached to owning, buying and selling ivory. AWF urges simplifying the job of law enforcement with regard to wildlife crime.
• Given CITES’ one-country/one-vote procedure and the rhino’s highly threatened status, a proposal to legalize rhino horn trade is highly unlikely to pass. Pursuing a proposal to legalize rhino horn is therefore a distraction and a waste of political capital, and it divides conservation stakeholders at a time when there should be unity.

“South Africa has played a central role in African rhino conservation over the past century and is to be commended for its efforts in bringing the white rhino back from certain extinction,” says Muruthi. “We hope the government will continue to lead on this front by heavily investing in those rhino protection strategies that are known to work when they have the full support and political will of the government.”

Through its US$10 million Urgent Response Fund, AWF has been supporting the anti-poaching efforts of two South African reserves with critical populations of black and white rhino. Funds have underwritten the purchase of an anti-poaching helicopter and motorcycles in an effort to increase monitoring and protection coverage in each of the reserves.

“While South Africa is uniquely burdened by the poaching crisis, it need not bear this burden on its own,” says Muruthi. “They have friends; they have partners; and they have the support of the international community, which is mobilized and ready to assist.”

March 24, 2015|Nairobi, Kenya

A big step for a tiny endangered species ‏

The Mexican government has just announced a new plan to protect vaquitas. These tiny porpoises on the brink of extinction now have a real chance of survival.

More than 470,000 people from around the world united to call on the Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto to protect this little porpoise from destructive fishing. With just an estimated 97 of them left in the wild, the fate of a species rested on his decision.
Thanks to global pressure, the President acted, enforcing a two-year ban on destructive gillnet fishing in vaquita habitat. These nets are responsible for entangling and drowning so many vaquitas, that they’ve pushed them close to extinction.

This decision means the vaquita is safe for now from these death-traps. This important commitment from the Mexican government will also increase the size of their protected habitat by 11 times, strengthen surveillance and enforcement, and compensate local fishermen. If nothing was done, scientists estimated the vaquita could have been extinct in just three years.

There’s still work to be done, but this is a giant step towards saving the species from extinction and it couldn’t have happened without all of us working together. A two-year ban on destructive fishing gives us time to work on longer-term strategies to protect the vaquita for good.

Greenpeace Australia

Blog, Environment

Manatee Harassment Is On The Rise At Florida Springs, Environmentalists Say

When it comes to congregating peacefully with manatees, visitors at a pair of Florida’s national parks could care less, according to a group representing civil stewards of public land.

On Monday, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, called on the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to ban swimmers from using the Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge and 30-odd neighboring springs known as the Kings Bay Manatee Protection Area to prevent the harassing of manatees, a crime in Florida that is punishable by six months in jail and a $500 fine.

But dive shop operators who offer “swim with manatees” experiences to tourists say prohibiting swimmers would kill a cottage industry that takes great care to protect the endangered marine mammals.

“Everybody who comes to Crystal River wants to swim with the manatees,” said Victor Oestreich, whose family operates a 27-year-old tour shop in the refuge. “It is the only place you can experience being with these gentle giants. There would be a lot of lost jobs.”

Terry Natwick, marketing and sales director for Plantation on Crystal River, a golf resort that hugs several springs in Kings Bay, echoed Oestrich’s concerns. “It would be a hard hit for us,” Natwick said. “Swimming with manatees is what we focus our marketing on. They bring us our bread and butter.”

The refuges, located in the Town of Crystal River in Citrus County, attract thousands of tourists a week who want to swim the narrow, shallow warm water springs that serve as a manatee habitat. The wildlife service has been issuing permits to dive shop operators to use the refuges for commercial purposes since the 1980s. But since 2010, the number of operators has doubled, with 44 companies offering a swim with the manatees experience.

As a result of more people going in the springs, manatee molestings are on the rise, says PEER staff counsel Laura Dumais.

“The volunteers who patrol the area will tell you it has gotten really out of control,” Dumais said. “Visitors are chasing manatees, standing on them, picking up calves and separating them from their mothers.”

Last month, PEER sent a letter to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service threatening a lawsuit against the federal agency due to its lax enforcement of manatee protection laws while allowing rampant human contact with the animals. “The increase of special use permits brings thousands of people in close proximity with manatees,” Dumais said. “Putting them in the water to have physical contact with the animals and disrupt their natural habitat is going way too far. There are other ways to make interaction with the manatees enjoyable for the tourists.”

Andrew Gude, the refuge manager at Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge, said wildlife service staff is reviewing PEER’s letter and is taking proactive steps to improve manatee conservation and address concerns raised by citizens and wildlife employees. “After seeking public input, the Service enacted additional protection measures to prevent disturbance of manatees within the springs,” Gude said. “These include continuing the temporary full spring closure policy during extreme cold weather events; limiting in-water visitor access to, from, and within the springs; and broader, unrestricted spring run access for manatees.”

The manatee population has dwindled from 5,077 in 2010 to 4,824 in 2014, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute. Crystal River and Kings Bay have existed specifically for manatee protection and conservation since 1983, Dumais contends. The 177-acre preserve contains 40 acres of winter sanctuaries for manatees that includes 70 natural springs producing a constant flow of water at 72 degrees Fahrenheit or warmer. Because they have low levels of body fat (despite their bulky appearance) and very slow metabolisms, manatees are extremely vulnerable to cold temperatures and become susceptible to heart diseases and other stress-related illnesses. When coastal waters dip below 68 degrees Fahrenheit during the winter, manatees seek out warmer habitats.

Dumais said Crystal River and Kings Bay have the largest concentration of manatees in the state between November and March, the peak tourist season.

According to statistics provided to PEER by wildlife regulators under the Freedom of Information Act, the number of swimmers at the springs grew from 67,000 in 2010 to 265,000 in 2014. A google search turned up numerous deals offering people the chance to swim with manatees at the two refuges. It’s a lucrative business, with prices ranging from $30 to $70 per person.

Plantation’s Natwick said the problem lies with “fly-by night” tour operators who set up in the refuge illegally and visitors to the springs who enter the water on their own. “It can get out of hand,” Natwick said. “But we not only educate our guests. Our captains are diligent about keeping an eye on others. If they see something wrong, they will report it. It’s a case of one bad apple spoiling the whole bunch.”

Oestreich’s family operates Birds Underwater, a dive shop that has existed in Kings Bay since 1988 and charges $55 a customer (the same as Plantation) to swim with the manatees. “We do not disturb the animals,” Oestereich said. “We are as quiet as can be.”

The wildlife service requires operators to inform customers that state and federal laws restrict how much contact humans can have with the marine mammals. For instance, they have to instruct customers not to pursue, isolate, or disturb manatees by pulling or tugging them. Swimmers are also supposed to know how to avoid making excessive noises, like loud splashing, when near a manatee. The wildlife service also mandates tour operators show customers a video called “manatee manners.”

By nature, manatees are curious animals that will swim toward humans and initiate contact. “Some will come to you and roll over to rub their bellies against you,” he said. “But that is only five percent of the manatees that come through here.”

At the same time, they are skittish about being approached by people, Oestreich explained. “When we come up on a manatee, we float at a distance,” he said, noting customers are instructed by tour guides to maintain a six foot distance from the sea cows.

“Manatees don’t see very well,” Oestreich added. “They never see us unless they swim up to us. We tell people they cannot touch a sleeping or a swimming manatee. We only do passive observation.”

He also said the wildlife service is enacting new restrictions on operators that will reduce the number of dive shops in the refuges. “New laws are requiring everyone to have a dive master’s license and personal insurance,” Oestreich said. “That will knock a lot of guys out of the water. Some people won’t follow through.”

The wildlife service’s precautionary measures are not enough, Dumais said. She argued the increase in human activity at the refuges will drive manatees out to colder waters.

Federal wildlife officers received 70 complaints of manatee harassment at Crystal River and Kings Bay between Jan. 1, 2012 and Feb. 6, 2015, according to statistics provided to PEER by the service. More than half of the offenders were let off with a verbal or written warning, 10 received citations, six were referred to the service’s law enforcement office for criminal review, and two were referred to Florida’s wildlife commission. The remaining 13 cases were deemed unfounded.

Since Jan. 12, the wildlife service has received 7 reports of manatee harassment through a new email address (manateemannersnot@fws.gov ) set up to handle complaints. Four were determined to be unfounded and one was referred to the service’s law enforcement office.

Dumais blamed the wildlife service for not putting more resources into enforcing manatee protections aside from offering visitors an instructional online video on how to interact with manatees without disturbing them. Dumais also noted, and Gude confirmed, the service only has two law enforcement officers patrolling the springs in Crystal River and Kings Bay, in addition to the neighboring 31,000-acre Chassahowitzka National Wildlife Refuge.

“Relying on web videos as its principal strategy to protect these beleaguered animals from growing hordes of tourists obviously does not work,” Dumais said.

Francisco Alvarado|Florida Center for Investigative Reporting|April 16, 2015.

A Milestone in the Race to Save the Critically Endangered Yangtze Finless Porpoises

The critically endangered Yangtze finless porpoise received a lifeline this week when the Chinese government executed a plan to move a small group of the species to a new home.

Four finless porpoises were moved from Poyang Lake to holding pens March 21, under a strategy developed by the Ministry of Agriculture. They will be released into a secure new habitat in the He-wang-miao/Jicheng-yuan oxbow March 27. Four other individuals will be moved to Tian-e-zhou oxbow to boost the genetic diversity of the existing population in that location.

These eight finless porpoises—part of an estimated population of just over 1,000—were captured earlier this month using the safe, scientifically approved “acoustic drive netted method.”

“China’s people and prosperity are linked to the fate of the finless porpoise,” Karin Krchnak, director of WWF’s freshwater program, said. “Like all river dolphins, they require healthy river ecosystems for survival, and so do the millions of people who live in the Yangtze River basin. Solutions to what threatens the finless porpoise will also help solve China’s food- and water-security issues.”

The finless porpoise faces seemingly overwhelming odds in the wild; unsustainable fishing and farming, poorly planned dams and infrastructure, and the mining and shipping industries are just a few of the activities impacting their health and degrading the fresh water in which they live. WWF’s 2014 Living Planet Report shows freshwater species are declining at a rate of 79 percent each year—much faster than their terrestrial or marine counterparts. The finless porpoise is no exception; its numbers are declining at around 13.7 percent per year. Without intervention, the species could go extinct in as little as five years.

By relocating the porpoises, the government, WWF and partners are creating a better opportunity for the species to thrive. These oxbows provide more secure waters away from the main Yangtze River, and limit the impacts of harmful human activities.

This translocation is the first step in a multi-year process. Later in 2015, four more porpoises will be moved from Tian-e-zhou oxbow—which is nearing capacity—to the He-wang-miao/Jicheng-yuan oxbow. Another four will make the same journey in 2017.

Learn more about the Yangtze finless porpoise.

World Wildlife Fund|April 2015 

Everglades

‘Tea party’ holds protest against Everglades conservation. There’s just one problem…

The Tea Party of Miami put up a convincing demo last week to oppose a ‘land grab’ that would see 46,000 acres of sugar farm land restored for Everglades conservation. Just one problem – the ‘protestors’ were actors each being paid $75 for the two-hour shift.

Last week, South Florida Water Management District held a meeting about the possible purchase of 46,000 acres of land that sits to the south of Lake Okeechobee, currently owned by U.S. Sugar and residents.

The intention is to use the land to recreate a large area of the Everglades ecosystem on the former farmland, and create a 26,000 acre system of lakes to store and remediate seriously contaminated run-off water from sugar farms, and so keep the nitrogen and phosphorus-rich water out of lakes, water courses, wetlands, springs and public water supply.

Thanks to the surfeit of nutrients, huge areas of open water and wetlands are regularly afflicted by outbreaks of stinking green slime – and the water district has come under growing pressure to act to stop the pollution and its severe consequences on local people and the Everglades.

The protest took place last Thursday outside the South Florida Water Management District and was staged by the Tea Party of Miami and Florida Citizens Against Waste—a group that, according to the Palm Beach Post, “has no contact information on its website and is not registered to do business in Florida.”

The call for actors to appear at the protest originally appeared on Facebook—although they have since deleted it. Luckily, some folks took screenshots before the post was taken down.

Cue a mysterious post on the Facebook page of the Broward Acting Group headed “Political Really Protestors Needed!!” and offering $75 each (no breakfast) for up to 40 actors to show up at the water district on 2nd April from 8.30 to 10.30 am:

“Details: Basically to stand behind fence, holding banners or signs that will be provided. Clothing is almost anything!! Use common sense and don’t wear ‘club’ outfits or gym clothes. Just wardrobe for a Political Rally…We will pay CASH of $75 at end of shoot.”

This stunt is almost laughable—but the environmental problems the area is facing are no joke.

According to Earth Justice: At present, polluters are legally discharging 300 tons of phosphorous over the legal limit, and the legislature is proposing a plan that will only reduce pollution by 100 tons over 10 years.Here’s a video of the “protest,” complete with a bizarre stunt lighting fake money on fire in a barbeque.

Faith Gardner|Apr 09, 2015

Water Quality Issues

NEW CLEAN WATER RULE WILL PROTECT AMERICA’S HERITAGE OF HUNTING, FISHING, FARMING, AND FORESTRY

Sportsmen can be optimistic that the final rule will restore protection for wetlands and headwater streams

 

WASHINGTON, D.C. – On Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took a critical next step toward finalizing a clean water rule that clearly defines protections for headwater streams and wetlands important to trout, salmon, and waterfowl, while keeping farming practices exempt. Taking into account the genuine concerns of hunters, anglers, farmers, manufacturers, and business owners, who submitted more than one million public comments between April 2014 and November 2014, the agencies sent the most recent draft of the rule to the Office of Management and Budget for review.

“The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership would like to commend the EPA and Army Corps for their continued commitment to this rulemaking process and to clarifying language that will benefit fish, wildlife, habitat, and anyone who values clean water,” says TRCP President and CEO Whit Fosburgh.

Without any corrective action, 60 percent of stream miles and nesting habitat for the majority of the waterfowl in America are at risk of being polluted, compromised, or destroyed. “The seasonally-flowing streams clearly protected by the proposed rule are often where trout and salmon go to spawn and where juvenile fish are reared,” says Steve Moyer, Trout Unlimited’s Vice President for Government Affairs. “All anglers benefit from the water quality and fish habitat provided by these streams, and we applaud the agencies for moving forward to restore protections to these incredibly important waters.”

As much as this review process is a behind-the-scenes step, it marks a milestone in the evolution of the clean water rule, especially for the growing coalition of organizations fighting to restore protection of our headwaters and wetlands. “Although the full draft hasn’t been released, from what we’ve seen, the comment period has had an impact and the final rule will be better than the proposal from last year,” says TRCP Center for Water Resources Director Jimmy Hague.

According to an April 6 blog post penned by U.S. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy and Assistant Secretary of the Army (Civil Works) Jo-Ellen Darcy, the new draft of the rule will clarify how protected waters, like streams and wetlands, are significant, and how the agencies make this determination. It will also better define tributaries and protect farming practices. Special consideration has been given to “other waters”-including prairie potholes, the regional waters where 50 to 80 percent of North America’s duck production takes place-that qualify for protection under the Clean Water Act. “We’ve thought through ways to be more specific about the waters that are important to protect, instead of what we do now, which too often is for the Army Corps to go through a long, complicated, case by case process to decide whether waters are protected,” McCarthy and Darcy wrote. The TRCP was one of 185 sportsmen’s groups to address agency leaders in a letter of support for the rulemaking process on the heels of the Clean Water Act’s 42nd Anniversary in October 2014.

“Sportsmen have been actively engaged on this issue and will continue to combat efforts to derail the clean water rule,” says Fosburgh. “Anyone concerned with the rampant loss of wetlands, the health of spawning areas for trout and salmon, or the future of our hunting and fishing traditions should be pleased with the effort to restore protections for these resources.”

Under normal procedures, the Office of Management and Budget has at least 90 days to review the draft. It can recommend changes or leave the rule as proposed, at which point the rule can be finalized and put into effect. Read more about the original rule proposal, public feedback for the rule, and the letter of support from sportsmen’s groups across the country.

Inspired by the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt, the TRCP is a coalition of organizations and grassroots partners working together to preserve the traditions of hunting and fishing.

A Partial Solution To California’s Water Problems

A new report offers some solutions to the severe drought in California, however, the problem will require much bigger thinking.

A new report, Clean Energy Opportunities in California’s Water Sector, offers what could be a partial solution to California’s water problems. The authors, Juliet Christian-Smith and Laura Wisland from the Union of Concerned scientists, primarily focus on the 20 percent of California’s electricity that is consumed by the water sector. They point out that most water and wastewater utilities own assets (land, reservoirs, ponds etc.) that could be used to produce renewable energy.

The California drought is increasing the state’s carbon emissions. There isn’t as much water available for hydroelectricity and production has been halved.  California’s 19 proposed desalination plants will produce water, but they also need around 2,800 GWh per year. As the groundwater tables have fallen, water agencies have had to pump water from greater depths. Every one of these examples calls for more electricity, which primarily is based on fossil fuels. This “both causes increased carbon emissions and exposes customers to price volatility.”

One of the alternative examples the report holds up is Sonoma County Water Agency, which is now “carbon free” because of its extensive use of solar and hydro electricity.

“That means that no fossil fuels are burned in order to provide water services (including capturing, cleaning, and delivering drinking water to taps along with treating wastewater). This achievement is a powerful proof of concept, showing how the water sector can be a part of the state’s ambitious climate efforts,” explained Christian-Smith.

Although these are viable solutions, they unfortunately will not solve California’s main problem. A recent article in the ECOreport revealed there is no snowpack on much of the Sierra Nevada. The Truckee River, which brings life to most of California’s Great Basin, is almost empty. Governor Jerry Brown confirmed this on April 1 stating: “We are standing on dry grass where there should be five feet of snow.” He announced that communities must reduce their water consumption by 25%. There is no record of the state’s snowpack ever being lower. A senior water scientist, at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech, announced the state may run out of water in a year.  

Some question why he waited so long to impose restrictions. A few ask why the state’s agribusinesses is exempt from the cuts.  

“While urban water conservation measures are desperately needed, Governor Brown is not calling for shared sacrifice,” said RTD Executive Director Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla. “What he is enacting is sacrifice by 98 percent of Californians, and the sacrifice of the most magnificent estuary on the west coast of the Americas, for the top 1 percent of water and land barons on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley.”

According to Restore the Delta, an outreach organization, there is not enough water to supply the state’s massive agribusiness sector and the inhabitants of an area that stretches from Sacramento to San Francisco Bay.  

These are not the issues Clean Energy Opportunities in California’s Water Sector addresses. The authors suggest there “may not be a one-size-fits-all solution.” They offer viable solutions for water and wastewater utilities, but much more may be needed to prevent an environmental disaster in California

Roy L Hales|Contributor|April 10, 2015

Insecticide Contamination Of Global Surface Waters Substantially Higher Than Expected

A study performed at the Institute for Environmental Science of the University of Koblenz-Landau evaluated for the first time comprehensive global insecticide contamination data for agricultural surface waters using the legally-accepted regulatory threshold levels (RTLs) as defined during the official pesticide authorisation procedures. The results are alarming: more than 40% of the water-phase samples with a detection of an insecticide concentration, exceeded respective RTLs. Concerning the exposure of sediments (i.e., deposits at the bottom of the surface water bodies), more than 80% of the insecticide concentrations exceeded RTLs, which, however, often are less binding from a regulatory perspective. Overall, the results of this study indicate that insecticides pose substantial threats to the biodiversity of global agricultural surface waters and that the current regulatory risk assessment schemes and pesticide authorisation procedures fail to protect the aquatic environment.

The results of this study fundamentally challenge the current regulatory risk assessment procedures for pesticides and indicate threats to the freshwater biodiversity at the global scale. “Potential reasons for these findings are failures of current risk assessment procedures or farmers` non-adherence to pesticide application prescriptions“ says Ralf Schulz, one of the authors of this study. Fundamentally reforming global conventional agricultural systems and the adoption of promising approaches from organic farming are possible ways to meet the twin challenges of providing sufficient food for a growing human population and reversing the adverse impacts of agricultural pesticides on global ecosystems such as surface waters.

The environmental risk assessment for pesticides, which is mandatorily conducted by regulatory agencies prior to their authorisation, is generally perceived as highly elaborated. These risk assessment procedures should ensure that the agricultural pesticide applications do not lead to unacceptable adverse effects on aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems or on the human health. During the authorisation procedure of a given pesticide, a specific concentration level (i.e., the RTL) is defined at which the ecological effects are considered to be acceptable, e.g., at which no unacceptable effects on the ecological integrity of surface waters and aquatic organisms are expected to occur. After a pesticide is authorized and in use, farmers must adhere to specific application prescriptions, e.g. a 20 m no-spray buffer zone next to a surface water body. These prescriptions should ensure that the RTL is not exceeded in the field. In essence, pesticide registration in the US or the EU is granted only if all risk assessment requirements are met and assuming that farmers adhere to the respective application prescriptions. However, it is important to note that the RTLs defined during the prospective pesticide authorisation procedures do not denote official water quality criteria as the regulatory risk assessment is based on the assumption that these RTL are never exceeded in the field due to the comprehensive risk assessment schemes and farmers application prescriptions.

The meta-analysis performed by the researchers from the University Koblenz-Landau considered 28 insecticide compounds, of which the majority is currently authorized in the EU or the US, respectively, and it comprised in total 11,300 insecticide concentrations detected in more than 2,500 surface water sites located in 73 countries and that were reported between 1962 and 2012 in 838 peer-reviewed, scientific studies. Overall, 8,166 insecticide concentrations were detected in the water-phase and 3,134 in sediments of global water bodies. However, out of all 11,300 insecticide concentrations, more than 52% (5,915 cases, more than 68.5% of the surface water sites analysed) exceeded the RTL, in parts up to a factor of 10,000 and beyond. According to the authors, these findings indicate substantial threats to global surface waters as insecticide concentrations equaling the RTL (i.e., those considered still acceptable from a regulatory perspective) already led to a 30% reduction of freshwater biodiversity.

The researchers from the University Koblenz-Landau list in their study several reasons why the actual situation in the field potentially is even worse: First, insecticide contamination data could be retrieved for only about 10% of global agricultural surface waters, which indicates that there is no scientific knowledge on the insecticide contamination of surface waters in large parts of the world, especially concerning Russia or large parts of South America. Moreover, insecticide concentrations in surface waters are very hard to detect as they occur even in highly contaminated surface waters only very briefly, i.e. only during a few days per year. However, due to the high toxicity of insecticides for aquatic organisms, these short-term peak concentrations, which occur repeatedly each year in agricultural surface waters, lead to substantial and long-lasting adverse effects on aquatic communities. Further on, in more than 80% of the samples that were analysed for various pesticide compounds, more than one, in some cases even up to 30 further pesticides were detected. Although the resulting adverse effects of these pesticide mixtures potentially are substantially higher compared to those of single compounds, they are, however, not considered in the regulatory risk assessment procedures. In general, aquatic organisms are highly susceptible already to insecticide surface water concentrations far below benchmark levels defined, for example, those for drinking water. However, as stated above, legally binding environmental quality criteria are available for only very few insecticide compounds.

Great Lakes & Inland Waters

US’ 10 Most Endangered Rivers 

1.Colorado River in the Grand Canyon
A proposed industrial-scale construction project threaten the Grand Canyon’s wild nature and unique experience that belongs to every American.
2. Columbia River
Outdated dam operations are putting healthy runs of salmon and other fisheries at risk.
3. Holston River
Toxic chemicals from the Holston Army Ammunition Plant are putting local water supplies and the community’s health at risk.

4. Smith River
A proposed copper mine could harm a nationally-renowned wild trout fishery.
5. Edisto River
Excessive agricultural water withdrawals are putting water supply, water quality, fish and wildlife habitat, and recreation at risk.
6. Chuitna River
A proposed mine threatens to destroy 30 square miles of irreplaceable wild river habitat.

7. Rogue-Smith Rivers

Strip mining, road construction, and metal processing would devastate this fragile, precious wild area.
8. St Louis River

Mining could destroy or degrade thousands of square miles of pristine forested wetlands and streams.
9. Harpeth River

Sewage pollution and water withdrawals are putting clean water, fish and wildlife, and recreation at risk.

10. Pearl River

A new dam threatens to ruin healthy wetlands and wildlife habitat

Jeff Wiedner|American Rivers|April 2015

Colorado River Named America’s Most Endangered River

For the third year in a row, the Colorado River has been named the Most Endangered River in the United States, according to the advocacy group American Rivers.

The River faces immediate development threats along its iconic 277-mile stretch through the Grand Canyon. At the same time, the entire Colorado River Basin, along with much of California and regions across the West, is facing a one-two punch of unprecedented long-term drought and growing demand for water.

The Colorado River is the lifeblood of the Southwest, providing drinking water for over 36 million people, world-class recreation, irrigation for fruits and vegetables, and is critical for sustaining the habitat for more than 300 species of birds, including the Western Yellow-Billed Cuckoo and Southwestern Willow Flycatcher. Past and ongoing threats to their riparian habitat has led to the listing of these species under the Endangered Species Act.

There is an urgent need to ramp up further water conservation initiatives in the Colorado River Basin and throughout the West. While long-term solutions will require collaboration at the state, city, and federal levels, the federal government should support innovative efforts that save water resources, contribute to healthy stream flows, and restore riparian habitat for birds and other wildlife.

Congress is now determining the funding levels for these vital programs, and Audubon is working to ensure they receive the funds they need. Your elected officials also need to hear from you, so look for an opportunity to take action with Audubon on this pressing issue very soon.

Audubon Advisory

Offshore & Ocean

Clam Cancer Spreads Along Eastern Seaboard

Not every clam is, as the expression goes, happy as a clam. Even shellfish, it turns out, can get cancer. And it just might be that this cancer is spread from clam to clam by rogue cells bobbing through the ocean, scientists reported Thursday in the journal Cell.

You might be surprised to hear that clams can get blood cancer. “But the fact is they have a circulatory system, and they can get leukemia,” says Stephen Goff, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at Columbia University.

The leukemia kills the clams, but Goff says it poses no risk to people who eat clams, like the soft-shell clams that are harvested along the Eastern Seaboard. “I love them,” he says. “They’re what you get as fried clams and steamers.”

But Goff’s relationship with clams has just changed dramatically. He usually studies viruses that cause cancer in mice. Recently he was contacted by Carol Reinisch, a biologist at the Marine Biology Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. She studies leukemia in soft-shell clams, and she asked Goff to look for signs of a cancer-causing virus in these clams.

He didn’t find a virus, but what he found instead was a shock. Each of the cancer cells he looked at, in clams from New York to Prince Edward Island, Canada, had a similar genetic fingerprint. That strongly suggests the cancer is spread when these cells replicate and spread through the water, he says.

“We know the cells can survive in seawater quite long,” Goff says. “And we can only guess that they would be picked up somehow by another healthy clam.”

This could be because clams feed by filtering enormous volumes of seawater. They might simply siphon up these free-floating cancer cells and literally catch cancer.

There are only two other cancers known to spread by cells, like this. One is devastating populations of Tasmanian devils, meat-eating marsupials in Australia. Another is spread sexually in dogs. Goff thinks this might be the third example.

“It’s very clear that something unusual is going on here,” says Michael Lesser, a marine biologist at the University of New Hampshire.

But he says this isn’t an open-and-shut case. Nobody has yet done the critical lab experiment to show that this cell-based transmission actually occurs. He wants firsthand evidence that a clam, by eating a cancer cell, can actually contract the disease.

Scientists who study these clams are eager to get going on these experiments, Lesser says, to see whether they can prove this transmission is actually happening.

However this turns out, Goff says, surprises like this can really move science forward.

“I’m a big fan of the idea that when something really intriguing comes along, it’s great to follow your lead and see where it’s going to take you,” he says.

This opens up a host of questions about how diseases might spread through the marine environment. And it might have implications for human health as well.

“Learning how these cells are evolving, learning how they manage to spread will be very interesting,” Goff says. “I think it could inform our understanding of how metastasis occurs.”

Richard Harris|April 10, 2015

Maine has a disappearing carbon sink for 10,000 cars in the ocean

Along the coast of Maine, from the Piscataqua River to Passamaquoddy Bay, eelgrass populations are declining. What is eelgrass and why should we care? Eelgrass is a flowering marine plant that essentially defines the coast of Maine. It grows in thick beds that provide shelter to commercially important fish and shellfish species and other organisms that make up nearshore food webs. The underground stems and roots of the plant help to stabilize bottom sediments, thus preventing erosion and promoting water clarity.

As if that weren’t enough, eelgrass also acts as a carbon sink. In other words, eelgrass uses CO2 in the process of photosynthesis and stores carbon in the ocean sediment. In Maine alone, eelgrass meadows sequester approximately 51,000 (+/-14,000) tons of carbon dioxide a year, or the equivalent of the carbon dioxide emitted from approximately 10,000 cars annually. Thus, eelgrass plays an important role in reducing the impact of human-made carbon dioxide emissions and mitigating ocean acidification in Maine’s coastal waters.

Oceans ‘Dead Zones’ Are on the Rise

What is an oceanic dead zone? Well it’s an area in the ocean that has so little oxygen that creatures begin to die off. We’ve known about these hot spots since the 1970s, but according to a recent study, the ocean’s dead zones are growing and are now taking up nearly 10 percent of our oceans.

The reasons for dead zones are complex, but many attribute them to global warming, toxic run off and garbage pollution. A byproduct of many of these issues is the over-stimulation of plant life and chemicals, which tend to suck up oxygen on sea beds, leaving sea creatures struggling to survive on dangerously low levels.

There are also natural causes to oceanic dead zones. For instance we saw a large die off in marine life at the end of our last great ice age, when oceanic temperatures rose substantially over a short period of time. A University of California study which looked into this massive loss of life came to some chilling conclusions regarding our own future: “The global ocean inventory of oxygen is predicted to decline between 1% and 7% by the year 2100, and modeling predictions reveal extensive oceanic deoxygenation, on thousand-year timescales, under ‘business-as-usual’ carbon emission scenarios.”

Meaning that if we don’t change what we’re doing, the survival of all oceanic creatures is at risk. That’s because for many oceanic creatures, life is not a matter of big vs. small, all these creatures work together. Whales eat tiny krill and mollusks provide filtering systems that help circulate nutrients and oxygen. Every creature plays a part in keeping the ocean, as a whole, healthy.

In the past, the study shows that creatures were wiped out for not just hundreds of years, but thousands of years. Although the study mentions that this happened much faster than the current rates, there is no doubt that our oceans are beginning to deoxygenate again, and at a rapid pace.

Right now the major areas of oceanic dead zones are off the coast of Peru, Somalia and parts of West Africa. There are also rising dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and the Indian Ocean.

So how do we stop dead zones from occurring? Well a major school of thought is that runoff from agriculture and industry has the biggest effect on oceanic dead zones. This is because the nutrients and fertilizers high in phosphorus and nitrogen help speed up the growth of oxygen eating algae.

So it stands to reason that if we want to keep these plants to a minimum we need to start being far more careful about what’s allowed to wash down our drains, through our rivers and out into the oceans. Programs have been instituted in areas such as Chesapeake Bay, which has tried to solve their ‘dead zone’ issues for decades.

The Baltic Sea has also been identified as a major ‘dead’ area, which the EU is attempting to combat. Especially since the algae that has bloomed in the Baltic Sea is a noxious plant, which can be toxic for humans and marine life.

Yet the University of California study has the final word on what this actually means for our ecosystems: “This archive reveals that global climate change disturbs seafloor ecosystems on continental margins and commits them to millennia of ecological recovery.” Meaning that this recovery will not take decades, it will take centuries. If our oceans can hold out that long.

Lizabeth Paulat|April 13, 2015

Wildlife and Habitat

President Supports Wilderness for Arctic Refuge

Great spring news! On April 3, President Obama sent his official Wilderness recommendation for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Coastal Plain to Congress. This recommendation is a critical step toward a congressional Wilderness designation and establishes the Obama administration’s support for permanent protection for the Coastal Plain. The next step is for Congress to pass Wilderness legislation.

Audubon Alaska will celebrate the Arctic Refuge throughout this year. This spring, we’ll follow the migration of five “posterbirds” as they move across the country to gather in the incredibly rich nesting grounds of the Arctic Refuge.

Atlantic Flyway: Tundra Swans gather in large flocks along the East Coast, migrating across Canada to reach the tundra ponds of their Arctic Refuge nesting grounds.

Mississippi Flyway: Smith’s Longspurs winter in the Great Plains of the Mississippi Flyway then head to the edge of the tundra in the refuge.

Central Flyway: American Golden-Plovers have the longest migration of the bunch, spending winters in South America. They move up through the Central Flyway on their way to the refuge.

Pacific Flyway: Pacific Brant nibble on marine eelgrass beds all winter from Baja to South-central Alaska before heading north.

All flyways: Northern Pintails from all four flyways converge on the Arctic Refuge in spring.

Major Egg Producer to Reduce Water Pollution Discharges at Mississippi Facility    

ATLANTA – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division announced today a settlement with Cal-Maine Foods, Inc., one of the nation’s largest egg producers, that resolves Clean Water Act violations at the company’s poultry egg production facility in Edwards, Miss.  Under the settlement, Cal-Maine will bring the facility into compliance with its state-issued water discharge permit, significantly reduce nutrient pollution discharges, and improve environmental data collection and reporting practices. The company will also pay a $475,000 penalty to be split evenly between the U.S. Federal and Mississippi governments. 

“Clean Water Act violations from agricultural facilities can impair drinking water sources, transmit disease-causing bacteria, and endanger our lakes and rivers,” said Cynthia Giles, assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. “When concentrated animal feeding operations discharge pollutants into U.S. waters, the law requires them to have a permit and comply with it. We’re committed to enforcing the law to protect water quality for communities like the one where this facility is located.”  

“The Justice Department is committed to protecting clean water for all Americans, and ensuring large concentrated animal feeding operations are good neighbors to those communities living near them like Edwards,” said Assistant Attorney General John Cruden for the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division. “This settlement will bring Cal-Maine into compliance with state and federal laws and cut nutrient pollution discharges into area waterways.” 

“This is good news for water quality and health for the residents of Edwards by requiring that Cal-Maine’s facilities operate in accordance with state and federal laws,” said U.S. Attorney Gregory K. Davis for the Southern District of Mississippi. “The settlement also represents the commitment by the Justice Department and our federal and state partners to protect water, air and land from health hazards and pollution.”

Today’s settlement, a consent decree filed in federal court in the Southern District of Mississippi Northern Division, resolves alleged violations of Cal-Maine’s Clean Water Act National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit at its facility in Edwards, Miss., a large concentrated animal feeding operation that houses more than 2 million chickens. Cal-Maine discharged pollutants from the production area into a tributary of a nearby creek without NPDES permit authorization, and applied nitrogen-laden wastewater on fields at the facility during winter months when land application was prohibited and sometimes at rates that exceeded their permit requirements. Cal-Maine also committed hundreds of water sampling, recordkeeping and reporting violations. 

The facility is located in a community where close to half of the households have an annual income of less than $25,000. One of EPA’s top priorities is to protect communities that are disproportionately affected by pollution.  

Too much nitrogen and phosphorus in the water causes algae to grow faster than ecosystems can handle. Large growths of algae, known as algal blooms, contribute to the creation of hypoxia or “dead zones” in water bodies where oxygen levels are so low that most aquatic life cannot survive. Excessive nitrogen and phosphorus that washes into water bodies and is released into the air are often the direct result of human activities, and agricultural operations are one of the major sources of nutrient pollution.

Under the settlement, Cal-Maine is already developing and implementing: procedures for its egg production and land application areas to achieve compliance with its NPDES permit, an employee training policy, and improved recordkeeping and reporting practices. The procedures were submitted to, and reviewed and approved by EPA and Mississippi officials over the course of settlement negotiations. Cal-Maine has begun implementing these procedures and must comply with all the terms of the settlement by April 30, 2016. 

Once the pollution controls required by the settlement are implemented, EPA estimates Cal-Maine will cut discharges of nitrogen by 89,000 pounds and phosphorous by 20,000 pounds per year. EPA estimates it will cost Cal-Maine approximately $418,000 to implement the settlement requirements and bring the Edwards, Miss., facility into compliance with state and federal clean water laws. 

Cal-Maine Foods, Inc. and Cal-Maine Farms, Inc. merged into one corporate entity called Cal-Maine Foods, Inc., effective January 1, 2015.

This case is part of EPA’s National Enforcement Initiative to prevent animal waste from contaminating surface and ground water. For more information on that initiative, visit http://www2.epa.gov/enforcement/national-enforcement-initiative-preventing-animal-waste-contaminating-surface-and-ground.

Once the proposed consent decree is lodged with the Court, it will be subject to a 30-day public comment period. A copy of the consent decree is available at http://www2.epa.gov/enforcement/cal-maine-foods-inc-clean-water-act-settlement.

Davina Marraccini|404-562-8293 (direct|404-562-8400 (main)|marraccini.davina@epa.gov

The world’s largest marine reserve given green light

The UK government has announced the creation of the Pitcairn Islands Marine Reserve in the southern Pacific Ocean.

The Pitcairn Islands is one of the remotest places in the world, and protecting its 322,000 sq miles (over 834,000 sq km, or roughly three and a half times the area of Britain) of pristine waters will safeguard countless species of marine animals – mammals, seabirds and fish.

The government’s decision was endorsed by two leading organisations working to preserve the world’s oceans, the Pew Charitable Trusts and the National Geographic Society, both of which joined the local elected body, the Pitcairn Island Council, in 2013, to submit a proposal calling for the creation of a marine reserve to protect these spectacular waters.

“With this designation, the United Kingdom raises the bar for protection of our ocean and sets a new standard for others to follow,” said Jo Royle, Global Ocean Legacy, a project of Pew and its partners that advocates for the establishment of the world’s great marine parks.

“The United Kingdom is the caretaker of more than 6 million sq km of ocean — the fifth-largest marine area of any country. Through this designation, British citizens are playing a vital role in ensuring the health of our seas.

“The Pitcairn Islands Marine Reserve will build a refuge of untouched ocean to protect and conserve a wealth of marine life. We celebrate members of Parliament for pressing for this action.”

National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, Enric Sala, head of the Society’s Pristine Seas project, says: “Our scientific exploration of the area revealed entirely new species as well as an abundance of top predators like sharks. It was like travelling to a new world full of hidden and unknown treasures, a world that will now be preserved for generations to come.”

In a statement, the Pitcairn Island Council said: “The people of Pitcairn are extremely excited about designation of the world’s largest marine reserve in our vast and unspoiled waters of the Pitcairn Islands, including Ducie, Oeno, and Henderson Islands. We are proud to have developed and led this effort in partnership with Pew and National Geographic to protect these spectacular waters we call home for generations to come.”

A March 2012 scientific survey of Pitcairn’s marine environment, led by the National Geographic Pristine Seas project in partnership with Pew, revealed a vibrant ecosystem that includes the world’s deepest-known living plant, a species of encrusting coralline algae found 382m (1,253ft) below sea level.

The reserve will also protect one of the two remaining raised coral atolls on the planet as well as 40 Mile Reef, the deepest and most well-developed coral reef known in the world.

In conjunction with the designation, the Bertarelli Foundation announced a five-year commitment to support the monitoring of the Pitcairn Islands Marine Reserve as part of Pew’s Project Eyes on the Seas, using a technology known as the Virtual Watch Room.

With this satellite monitoring system, developed through a collaboration between Pew and the UK-based company Satellite Applications Catapult, government officials will be able to detect illegal fishing activity in real time.

This is the first time any government has combined creation of a marine reserve with the most up-to-date technology for surveillance and enforcement of a protected area.

Ivory Coast primates being wiped out because of world demand for chocolate

Cocoa plantations do not provide suitable habitat for primates

Researchers from Ohio State University have discovered that much of the protected land in the country’s national parks and forest reserves in the Ivory Coast have been turned into illegal cocoa farms.

Between 2010 and 2013 the researchers surveyed 23 protected areas, they say in a recently published report, and found that about three-quarters of the land had been turned over to cocoa production.

The Ivory Coast is the world’s largest producer of cocoa beans, the main ingredient in chocolate, which represents more than one-third of the available supply.

There is a growing worldwide demand for chocolate and Ivory Coast produced a record 1.7 million metric tons of cocoa last year.

Many of the older, legal cocoa plantations in the country have been blighted by disease or are not producing at earlier levels as previously, which has led some growers moving on to create new farms.  Migrants from outside the country have moved into Ivory Coast and have turned to farming to survive.

“The world’s demand for chocolate has been very hard on the endangered primates of Ivory Coast,” says W Scott McGraw, co-author of the study and professor of anthropology at Ohio State.

McGraw said the original goal of this research was just to do a census of the monkeys in these protected areas.

“But when we started walking through these areas we were just stunned by the scale of illegal cocoa production. It is now the major cause of deforestation in these parks,” he says.

“There are parks in Ivory Coast with no forests and no primates, but a sea of cocoa plants.”

The study (available here) appears in the March 2015 issue of the journal Tropical Conservation Science.

McGraw and his co-authors, working for Ivory Coast research institutions, spent a total of 208 days walking transects through nationally protected areas, most in the central and southern regions of the country.

In each area, they noted the amount of forest that had been cut down or degraded and how much of this was replaced by cocoa or other types of farming.

They also recorded the presence of 16 primate species, including monkeys and chimpanzees.

They found their results depressing. Of the 23 protected areas, 16 of them had more than 65 per cent of their forests degraded by farms, logging or other human disturbance.

Although a variety of agricultural products were grown illegally in the parks, cocoa constituted 93 per cent.

Unauthorised villages have also sprung up within these parks, with one housing nearly 30,000 people.

“I’ve been doing survey work in these parks for 20 years, and it wasn’t nearly this bad when I started. This is a relatively recent development,” McGraw says.

The study found that the impact on primates in these areas has been dramatic. Overall, 13 of the protected areas had lost their entire primate populations, while another five had lost half.

Two monkeys – the Roloway monkey and the White-naped mangabey – were seen in only two reserves and are critically endangered. Miss Waldron’s red colobus was not seen and has not officially been sighted since 1978. It is probably extinct.

“The Roloway monkey may be the next to go extinct,” McGraw says. “It is not able to live in the degraded habitats that are left in many of these protected areas.”

“There is little, if any, real active protection given to these parks and reserves,” McGraw says. “People have moved in and settled with essentially no resistance, cut down the forest, and planted cocoa. It is incredibly blatant.”

McGraw said that while the results are disappointing, there is still time to halt the disappearance of more primates and other wildlife.

Outside these lands, growers should move toward shade-cocoa farming, which keeps some of the large existing trees, with cocoa plants interspersed among them. This would at least preserve some suitable habitat for monkeys that live in the country, he said.

In addition, there should be efforts to connect the many fragmented forest reserves in the country. “We need to view the protected areas not as individual islands, but as a matrix,” he says.

One promising development is the establishment of community-based bio-monitoring programs that involve foot patrols conducted by local villagers.

McGraw says his co-authors on this paper established a patrol in the Dassioko Forest Reserve and it has succeeded in reducing illegal activity in the area. Encounter rates with primates has risen in the area as a result.

New Death Tally for Wildlife Services: 2.7 Million Animals in 2014

The U.S Department of Agriculture’s misnamed “Wildlife Services” program apparently has no interest in changing its deadly ways. New data reveals this secretive program killed more than 2.7 million animals during fiscal year 2014. Despite increasing calls for reform, the program last year wiped out 322 gray wolves; 61,702 coyotes; 580 black bears; 305 mountain lions; 796 bobcats; 22,496 beavers and nearly 3,000 foxes.

It’s an ugly killing campaign carried out every week of the year with aerial snipers, exploding poison caps and cruel traps. The Center for Biological Diversity is pushing for a sweeping reform of this rogue program, which is also under investigation by the Agriculture Department’s inspector general.
“Wildlife Services continues to thumb its nose at the growing number of Americans demanding an end to business as usual,” said the Center’s Amy Atwood. “This appalling and completely unnecessary extermination of America’s wildlife must stop.”

Read more in our press release.

The Week in Wildlife  in Pictures

Jaguar Cubs Proudly Unveiled to the Public for the First Time at Leningrad Zoo

Forestry

Fire Shapes Young Longleaf Pine Forests

Many landowners the past five to 10 years have planted longleaf pine in the Southeast, due in part of cost-share incentives offered by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). This increase in young longleaf forests across the region is a great start to restoring the longleaf pine ecosystem, but much more has to be done.

See, longleaf pines grow like any other tree; give them light, nutrients and water and they will grow. What sets longleaf apart from other tree species is its adaptation to fire. But as I drive through the countryside of the Southeast I see young longleaf pine forests that are starving for fire!

So, to work towards truly restoring longleaf in the Southeast, we need to start burning all of those young longleaf stands planted over the last decade. Let’s go back to the fire adaptation for a second. Longleaf in its natural setting dominated the uplands because of its resistance to fire. Fire inhibits other tree species from becoming widespread, and as a result, longleaf become dominant. Now, in an artificial state, we as land managers have to try and replicate the natural system in order to achieve restoration.

Well how do we burn young longleaf without killing them, you might ask? Young longleaf, in the dormant season, have a very hard and protected terminal bud that allows them to resist fires. This allows for fires to carry across them without any internal damage. Every needle can be burned off of a seedling and easily survive a burn. This does not mean that you will have 100 percent survival. If there are weak trees or diseased trees, then you may lose a couple. But this is probably a small price to pay when looking at the big picture of restoring longleaf and improving wildlife habitat.

Burning some young longleaf stands can be challenging simply because there is not enough fuel to carry a fire. If that is the case, make sure to get fire in the stand as soon as possible. It may take two or three years, and that’s ok, just don’t let it get out of hand. Many stands can be burned one year after establishment. When burning a young longleaf stand, make sure that there is adequate soil moisture and that there is no “candling” or new growth on the seedlings. Strip head fires are recommended to reduce residence time on the seedlings, further reducing the risk of mortality. Picking a day with cool temperatures and consistent winds will help execute the burn.

Planting longleaf is great, but restoring an ecosystem is the ultimate goal and we cannot accomplish that without fire. The longleaf pine ecosystem is a sub-climax ecosystem that was and is very active, so without active management such as prescribed fire, it will never reach its full potential.

Ricky Lackey|regional biologist|National Wild Turkey Federation in Florida

California Salmon and Wildlife Win Court Protection from Old-Growth Logging

Endangered fish and wildlife and old-growth forests in northern California receive the protection they deserve. 

Here’s what happened: KS Wild filed suit two years ago against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service for their approval of a timber company’s Habitat Conservation Plan that encouraged accelerated logging across 150,000 acres over the next 10 years. The plan would have harmed old-growth forests and federally protected fish and wildlife species – including the northern spotted owl, Coho salmon, and Yreka phlox. 

The Fruit Growers Supply timber company sought permission to ‘take’ (harm or kill) endangered species, including up to 83 northern spotted owls in the Klamath and Scott River watersheds in Northern California. Just last week, we received the good news that the federal district court halted those plans. You can check out all the details in our press release. 

This is a big victory for northern California’s old-growth forests and its endangered wildlife. The court’s decision means that Fruit Growers Supply will not be given a blank check to harm struggling salmon populations, destroy endangered species habitat, and decimate old-growth forests. Huge thanks to our allies, the Klamath Forest Alliance, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Washington Forest Law Center, and the Western Environmental Law Center. 

This is good news, but there are still a few legal hurdles to jump through before the decision is final. Our attorneys are hard at work preparing for the next stage of the fight, including exactly what details the timber company must change in their plan for it to move forward.

Morgan Lindsay|KS Wild|4/15/15

Global Warming and Climate Change

NASA Battles Rising Sea Levels To Protect Kennedy Space Center

Sea level rise is beginning to affect the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. A protective dune not too far from the launchpads has collapsed and waves have washed over railroad tracks built in the 1960s. Now NASA is taking steps to protect its launch infrastructure.

Read more

Amy Green|April 06, 2015

China Poised To Top U.S. As Biggest Cause Of Modern Global Warming

OSLO, April 13 (Reuters) – China is poised to overtake the United States as the main cause of man-made global warming since 1990, the benchmark year for U.N.-led action, in a historic shift that may raise pressure on Beijing to act.

China’s cumulative greenhouse gas emissions since 1990, when governments were becoming aware of climate change, will outstrip those of the United States in 2015 or 2016, according to separate estimates by experts in Norway and the United States.

The shift, reflecting China’s stellar economic growth, raises questions about historical blame for rising temperatures and more floods, desertification, heatwaves and sea level rise.

Almost 200 nations will meet in Paris in December to work out a global deal to fight climate actions beyond 2020.

“A few years ago China’s per capita emissions were low, its historical responsibility was low. That’s changing fast,” said Glen Peters of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research, Oslo (CICERO), who says China will overtake the United States this year.

Using slightly different data, the U.S.-based World Resources Institute think-tank estimated that China’s cumulative carbon dioxide emissions will total 151 billion tons for 1990-2016, overtaking the U.S. total of 147 billion next year.

The rise of cumulative emissions “obviously does open China up to claims of responsibility from other developing countries,” said Daniel Farber, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley.

In a U.N. principle laid down in 1992, rich nations are meant to lead in cutting greenhouse gas emissions because their wealth is based on burning coal, oil and natural gas since the Industrial Revolution began in the 18th century.

Emerging nations, meanwhile, can burn more fossil fuels to catch up and end poverty. But the rapid economic rise of China, India, Brazil and many other emerging nations is straining the traditional divide between rich and poor.

“All countries now have responsibility. It’s not just a story about China — it’s a story about the whole world,” said Ottmar Edenhofer of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-chair of a U.N. climate report last year.

India will overtake Russia’s cumulative emissions since 1990 in the 2020s to rank fourth behind China, the United States and the European Union, according to the CICERO calculations.

Beijing says the best yardstick for historical responsibility is per capita emissions since the 18th century, by which measure its emissions are less than a tenth those of the United States.

But stretching liability so far back is complicated.

Should heat-trapping methane gas emitted by rice paddies in Asia in the 19th century, now omitted, count alongside industrial carbon emissions by Europe? Should Britain be responsible for India’s emissions before independence in 1947?

Lawyers say it is difficult to blame people living today for emissions by ancestors who had no inkling that greenhouse gases might damage the climate.

“I feel very uneasy about going back more than a generation in terms of historic responsibility,” said Farber, arguing that Berlin could hardly be blamed if someone died by setting off a rusting German World War One landmine in France.

All governments are now working out plans for a climate summit in Paris in December that will set targets for 2025 or 2030. Beijing set a goal last year of peaking its rising emissions around 2030, perhaps before.

“China is acting. It has acknowledged its position as a key polluter,” said Saleemel Huq, of the International Institute for Environment and Development in London.

And historical responsibility is at the heart of talks on solving the problem.

The U.N. panel of climate scientists estimated last year that humankind had emitted 1.9 trillion tons of carbon dioxide since the late 19th century and can only emit a trillion more before rising temperatures breach a U.N. ceiling of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.

Any fair formula for sharing out that trillion tons, or roughly 30 years of emissions at current rates, inevitably has to consider what each country has done in the past, said Myles Allen, a scientist at Oxford University.

“Until people start thinking about blame and responsibility they are not taking the problem seriously,” he said.

Alister Doyle|Environment Correspondent|Reuters|04/13/2015|Editing by Catherine Evans

Pope Francis to Host Major Summit on Climate Change

The Vatican announced Tuesday that it will host a major conference on climate change on April 28, featuring some of the world’s leading climate scientists and an opening address by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The conference, Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity: The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Development, will also feature Jeffrey Sachs, a prominent American economist and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

The summit hopes to “help build a global movement across all religions for sustainable development and climate change throughout 2015 and beyond,”  and to highlight “the intrinsic connection between respect for the environment and respect for people—especially the poor, the excluded, victims of human trafficking and modern slavery, children and future generations,” says the Vatican.

The one-day summit will also include participants from major world religions and aims to “elevate the debate on the moral dimensions of protecting the environment in advance of the papal encyclical,” the Vatican says. The Pope’s much-anticipated encyclical on the environment is scheduled for release this summer. Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana, a top Vatican official who is leading the drafting process of Francis’ encyclical on the environment, will also speak at the conference.

This event is just the latest in what many are calling Pope Francis’s “green agenda.” He has become an outspoken advocate on environmental issues, saying acting on climate change is “essential to faith”  and calling the destruction of nature a modern sin. He has vowed to only increase pressure on world leaders after his disappointment with the Lima climate talks. He is hoping that his encyclical will influence the climate talks in Paris at the end of the year.

He has also made plans to address Congress during his visit to America in September. It will be interesting to see what Pope Francis, who is wildly popular among both Catholic and non-Catholic Americans, has to say to one of the most powerful governing bodies on Earth about the issue of climate change.

Cole Mellino|April 16, 2015

 Extreme Weather

9 States Report Record Low Snowpack Amid Epic Drought

California gets most of the attention in drought news coverage because so much of the state is in exceptional drought—the highest level—but 72 percent of the Western U.S. is experiencing drought conditions, according to the latest U.S. Drought Monitor data.

72 percent of the West is experiencing drought conditions and 25 percent is in extreme or exceptional drought. Photo credit: U.S. Drought Monitor

When California’s snowpack assessment showed that the state’s snowpack levels were 6 percent of normal—the lowest ever recorded—it spurred Gov. Brown’s administration to order the first-ever mandatory water restrictions. California’s snowpack levels might be the lowest, but the Golden State is not the only one setting records. A new report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) finds that nine states reported record low snowpack. The report states:

The largest snowpack deficits are in record territory for many basins, especially in the Cascades and Sierra Nevada where single-digit percent of normal conditions prevail. Very low snowpacks are reported in most of Washington, all of Oregon, Nevada, California, parts of Arizona, much of Idaho, parts of New Mexico, three basins in Wyoming, one basin in Montana and most of Utah.

Only high elevation areas in the Rocky Mountains and Interior Alaska had normal or close to normal snowpack levels. “The only holdouts are higher elevations in the Rockies,” said Garen. “Look at the map and you’ll see that almost everywhere else is red.” Red indicates less than half of the normal snowpack remains. Dark red indicates snowpack levels are less than 25 percent of normal.

Much of the West is in dark red, which indicates snowpack levels are below 25 percent of normal. Photo credit: USDA NCRS

And not only is the snowpack drastically reduced in many states, but it’s melting earlier now, too. “Almost all of the West Coast continues to have record low snowpack,” said David Garen, a hydrologist for USDA’s National Resources Conservation Service. “March was warm and dry in most of the West; as a result, snow is melting earlier than usual.”

Historically, April 1 is the peak snowpack. But this year, the peak came earlier because there was very little snow accumulation in March and much of the existing snow had already melted. Streamflow will be reduced even sooner in spring and summer, leaving reservoirs—already well below average in many areas—that much more depleted, the report finds. As of April 1, reservoir levels are below average in at least five western states: Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon and Utah,” according to Reuters. That doesn’t include California, which NASA scientist Jay Famiglietti said has about a year’s supply of water in its reservoirs.

Cole Mellino|April 14, 2015

Record Temperature in Antarctica

Two weeks ago, the temperature in Antarctica hit 63.5 degrees.

Sixty-Three Degrees. In Antarctica.

A temperature that high has never been recorded in Antarctica. Ever. And it’s yet another wake-up call that we need to take action on global warming now.

The good news is that President Obama’s EPA is setting the first-ever limits on global warming pollution from power plants—the biggest source of climate pollution in the U.S.

But polluters have launched a series of lawsuits to block him, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is urging states to ignore the rules, and Congress is pushing legislation to strip his ability to limit these emissions at all.

Record Low for Winter Sea Ice in the Arctic

Following the Earth’s warmest year since records began in 1880, Arctic sea ice has shrunk to its lowest winter extent recorded. This loss of sea ice is estimated to be nearly 174,000 square miles as compared to previous years and represents an area larger in size than the State of California.

This record measurement is a sign of thin, slow-growing ice. In the summer months, sea ice in the Arctic melts, reaching its “smallest extent” in September. These waters then refreeze through winter, where the US National Snow and Ice Data Center tracks the rebound of sea ice to its “largest extent” in March.

With less ice available to reflect the sun’s heat, more warmth is absorbed by the darker open waters of the Arctic Ocean and melts the remaining ice more quickly. Thin ice is also particularly susceptible to melting, and the proportion of thick, multi-year ice in this region is dwindling. A recent study showed that Arctic sea ice has thinned by 65 percent since 1975.

“Today’s news is not only about record low levels of winter Arctic sea ice, it’s about the unraveling of the Arctic and the impact of climate change on the wildlife and people that call the region home,” said Margaret Williams, WWF Managing Director of Arctic Programs. “This is yet another signal that bold leadership is needed to address the climate crisis. As the US assumes chairmanship of the Arctic Council next month, we need a vision that redefines business-as-usual in the rapidly changing Arctic—one that embraces renewable energy, sustainable development and healthy communities.”

These impacts together could mean the Arctic faces an even warmer year ahead, affecting weather patterns globally.

An enormous web of life depends on Arctic sea ice, as is acts as a seasonal refuge for many species that feed and rest as they migrate the vibrant marine waters. Species from walrus, narwhal, and polar bears to seals and beluga whales all depend on the ice. The sea ice is also critical for the coastal indigenous communities whose cultures and food security are reliant on the sea ice and its biodiversity.

As the US takes over the chair of the Arctic Council in late April, it is important that steps are taken to create a network of resilient marine areas in this region. WWF and partners have identified those special places that will be increasingly important in a future with less ice. These areas should be protected from unsustainable activities, such as oil and gas development and shipping, both of which are increasing in the region as more of the Arctic Ocean opens up as sea ice diminishes.

World Wildlife Fund|April 2015

Genetically Modified Organisms

Unprecedented Indian River Lagoon study finds herbicides in water

At a slow-moving stream near a highway bridge, two marine researchers donned protective gloves and dipped jars into green, algae-coated water littered with plastic cups, wrappers and other trash.

After finding out a study on chemicals sprayed to kill weeds and invasive species in local canals had ever been conducted, Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers worked with the Ocean Research and Conservation Association on testing whether herbicide runoff was affecting local waterways.

Water collections and sediment samples were taken from in and around the lagoon. Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers/TCPalm and WPTV NewsChannel 5 paid SunLabs in Tampa to test 18 samples for three chemicals used as herbicides. All three chemicals were detected at one site, and one chemical was found at another.

ORCA said the positive results will allow the organization to pursue funding for more extensive studies of the lagoon’s herbicide pollution.

The water samples they took in late 2013 from the south relief canal, which flows under U.S. 1 in Vero Beach and into the Indian River Lagoon, tested positive for three different herbicides that could compound pollution in the blighted estuary.

Matt Dixon|Scott Wyland|April 13, 2015

The PR War Continues: Monsanto and the myth of peaceful coexistence

Last month, due to public pressure, an advertisement by agribusiness giant Monsanto scheduled to appear in the February or March issue of Oprah Winfrey’s O Magazine was removed from the publication. An online petition on the website change.org criticized Oprah, a frequent advocate of organic agriculture and owner of an organic farm in Maui, for aligning herself with Monsanto. The successful campaign represents a victory for the anti-GMO movement against Monsanto’s latest public relations salvo.

In the advertisement, a group of friends or family members sit down at a table to share a home-cooked meal. Proclaiming “different perspectives make the meal better and more interesting,” the ad invites the public to share their opinions about food and agriculture. The ad goes on to say that “growing enough food for a growing world requires a broad range of ideas”—presumably allowing for the inclusion of everything from large-scale input-intensive monocultures to small and medium agroecological family farms.

By sending a message of inclusivity and pretending to welcome a “wide range of ideas,” Monsanto implies that industrial agriculture—which uses an array of Monsanto’s chemical inputs and genetically modified seeds—can coexist peacefully with diversified, agroecological smallholder agriculture. However, this conciliatory approach obfuscates the fundamental and irreconcilable conflict between these agricultural and development models. In reality, Monsanto’s fossil fuel intensive, biotech and monoculture model is antithetical to the biodiversity, land and resource base, local knowledge, and social relations that agroecological approaches are founded upon.

The crux of Monsanto’s PR strategy is to scare the public into thinking that unless agricultural production is increased—using their proprietary technologies—feeding a ballooning population will be impossible.  Monsanto perpetuates the assumption that hunger is caused by scarcity and, thus, increasing yields using (supposedly) yield-enhancing GMOs and chemical inputs is the only solution to hunger. However, the world already produces enough food to feed 10 billion people. The reality is that one billion people still go hungry today because of poverty, inequality, and maldistribution of wealth and resources—not because there is too little food.

In our global capitalist food system, agribusiness monopolies exert their will with impunity, while consumers, farmers, women, and people of color rarely have a seat at the table.

The family or group of friends in Monsanto’s ad is deliberately diverse—as though carefully constructed by focus group research. An African American woman and man happily serve up a variety of brightly colored cherry tomatoes and salad fixings to three intent, smiling children–two white children and an African American boy. Within this depiction of a friendly, diverse family dinner, Monsanto hides the disproportionate power that certain “dinner guests” hold over others in the conversation about food and agriculture. In our global capitalist food system, agribusiness monopolies exert their will with impunity, while consumers, farmers, women, and people of color rarely have a seat at the table.

Industrial agriculture is held up by neoliberal policies like free trade agreements and US agricultural policies that have supported 60 years of research for industrial production and subsidies biased towards large corporations.  Meanwhile, US organic research receives roughly 1% of the funding that is spent on conventional ag research. Globally, diversified smallholders must compete against economies of scale and are vulnerable to the whims of financial speculation, land grabbing, and volatile global markets.

And yet, Monsanto wants the public to believe that it “partners with farmers.” But this partnership is defined by “technology use agreements” it requires farmers to sign in order to use their seeds and through international seed patent agreements. Such agreements often outlaw the age-old farmer practice of seed saving and sharing. For example, under the 2012 US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, Colombia is obligated to protect the interests of agribusiness by giving US corporations legal monopoly rights over seeds. It is illegal for farmers to save or sell any of these varieties or even to sell and use non-registered seeds.

With the advent of plant patents in the 1980s (Diamond v. Chakerberty; Ex Parte Hibberd), agricultural biotechnology and chemical firms such as Monsanto, DuPont, Sygenta, Bayer, and Dow spent billions of dollars to purchase and consolidate at least 200 independent seed companies. Today these five corporations control over half of the world’s total seed sales. Monsanto alone accounts for 27% of global commercial seed sales and provides the seed technology for 90% of genetically engineered crops worldwide. In the US, 86% of corn, 88% of cotton, and 93% of soybeans are genetically-engineered varieties. Monsanto has effectively privatized and monopolized the overwhelming majority of a previously renewable and commonly held resource.

The extent of such market domination is felt globally by farmers who have fewer and fewer options and face ever-increasing seed and input prices. For instance, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports that from 1995 to 2011, the price of soybean seeds increased by 325%, cotton seeds by 516%, and corn seeds by 259%.  This calls into question the nature of Monsanto’s “partnership” with farmers when the company’s control over germplasm and seed markets so profoundly shapes the choices and practices farmers have at their disposal.

Finally, Monsanto implies that industrial monocultures and agroecological practices are compatible with one another and with the natural environment. However, agroecological farming is based on enhancing natural ecosystem functions rather than extracting and replacing them with external inputs and processes; it depends on the integrity of the environment.  Industrial agriculture actively depletes the resources, ecological services, and functional biodiversity that are required for agro-ecosystems to operate sustainably.

Monsanto’s claim of “peaceful coexistence”—as portrayed in the ad recently pulled from O Magazine—is a myth. The pretense of friendly dialogue between diverse opinions is only a smokescreen behind which Monsanto continues with business as usual, vilifying those who insist that our differences are irreconcilable and who refuse to sit down at the table with a company that has so regularly and consistently violated our food sovereignty.

Laetitia Benador|04.02.2015

Why I keep writing about Monsanto vs. Maui

 First, an important development in the case I’ve just become aware of. There has been virtually no discovery process.

Meaning: The people of Maui want to know specific details of Monsanto’s years of experiments with unapproved pesticides and GMOs in their county. They want records, files, internal communications; the whole nine yards.

They’re getting nothing.

Monsanto’s history of unbridled human experimentation is still obscured in a cloud of mystery. And danger.

And this is five months after the people of Maui voted in favor of putting a temporary ban on all such experimentation.

That vote has been suspended in a void, while Monsanto and its allies have been suing Maui.

I keep writing about this case because, for one, the people of Maui voted for something far stronger than labeling GMOs. They voted to ban Monsanto’s experiments, until a complete independent investigation could be done that would unearth the range of those ongoing pesticide/GMO experiments, thus assessing the danger and the harm.

The vote last Election Day was a victory. It wasn’t an “almost.” It wasn’t “we’re getting there and we’ll do better the next time,” it was: We Won.

And because Monsanto sued immediately and hung up the case in federal court, the result of the legitimate vote was not implemented.

I keep writing about Maui vs. Monsanto because the people of Maui are acutely aware they’re the targets of Monsanto experiments, and they did something about it, against all odds.

I keep writing about the case because Maui County, the Big Island, and Kauai are very important Monsanto research centers, and a blow against those centers is a blow against the whole GMO empire.

I write about this case because the old tradition in Hawaii is respect and love for the land. In a half-sane world, that land would never have been taken by force, in the first place, from the native people who made it their home.

A monstrosity of a corporation, Monsanto, backed up by the US federal government, has seen fit to spray toxic chemicals and deploy experimental GMOs in Hawaii, for its own profit, with no benefits for anyone anywhere.

This is a case with enormous implications. It isn’t about labeling poisons and health hazards; it’s about banning them and opening up Monsanto’s secret records and finding out exactly what they’ve been doing.

Time is of the essence, because Monsanto is undoubtedly shredding and transferring its documents, just in case it loses this legal battle.

International pressure is necessary. International outrage is necessary.

The result of the Maui vote is on the record. That vote established new law. The vote has been denied—and the County Government of Maui has joined the case on the side of Monsanto, thus betraying its own people.

From a simple journalistic perspective, if this isn’t a “lead paragraph,” nothing is.

Sometimes, the future hangs by a thin thread. What will happen and what won’t happen depends on what people become aware of, and what they do about it.

Mainstream reporters, if they are paying any attention at all, cover the case as a puzzle of complexities stemming from arguments on both sides. They stand back and paint a thin veneer on the whole proceeding. They invoke their tradition of “well, we’ll see what happens next.”

Of course, striking a deep blow against Monsanto is forbidden because, after all, the world of biotech intersects with the world of media corporations.

In the Monsanto vs. Maui case, there is a great deal of gibberish about “jurisdiction.” Which government entity—county, state, federal—controls the regulations on agriculture.

The answer to that question is simple: jurisdiction is in the hands of the people on the ground who are harmed.

The other answer is: this is not a case about agriculture and farming at all. It’s about massive human experimentation with unapproved non-commercial GMOs and chemical pesticides. With no informed consent.

If you lived in a neighborhood where a giant corporation was spraying chemicals whose names you didn’t even know, you wouldn’t be delighted to let the experts diddle each other over the fine points.

You would want action. A ban. An independent and full investigation. A prosecution of crimes. If you could vote for all that, you would.

The people of Maui did.

That’s exactly what they did.

And they’ve been denied.

Simple enough?

Jon Rappoport|Apr16, 2015

Energy 

Senate bill amended to ban fracking during study, rule-making

A bill that would regulate oil and gas hydraulic fracturing was amended by a Senate Committee on Tuesday to place a moratorium on the activity until after a study is completed 2016.

Hydraulic fracturing, also known as “high-pressure well-stimulation” or “fracking,” is a process involving the use of water, sand and chemicals to extract oil and gas from rock.

Supporters say SB 1468 is needed to provide regulation for fracking like which occurred in 2013 in Collier County. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection says fracking is allowed and that more regulations are needed.

Opponents say the bill could open the door for more fracking in the Florida, which they say threatens drinking water supplies. They support bills that would ban fracking, but they are likely dead because they haven’t been heard in committees.

SB 1468 was amended Tuesday to require a study by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to be completed by March 1, 2016 and implement rules. A DEP representative said the bill would prohibit fracking until the study and rule-making are complete.

“I’ve seen rule-makings go as quickly as three to four months,” DEP Deputy Secretary Paula Cobb said. “I’ve seen rule-making take years. I think it’s going to depend upon when we open this up for rule-making: What does this look like? What are the concerns? What are the protections that are required?”

But the bill, and a bill that prevents disclosure of proprietary business information related to fracking, continue to face opposition from Sierra Club Florida and ReThink Energy Florida. And the Conservancy of Southwest Florida now is opposing the bills after previously supporting votes to move them through committees so they could be amended later.

SB 1468 as amended passed the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on General Government by an 8-0 vote and has one more committee stop. Meanwhile, the House version of the bill, HB 1205, passed its final committee stop, the House State Affairs Committee, by a 12-5 vote.

HB 1205, which calls for a study to be completed by June 30, 2016, does not provide for a moratorium during the study. The House bill does state there will not be a moratorium on conventional oil and gas drilling while the study is conducted.

Sen. Garrett Richter, a Republican from Naples, said he didn’t know the details of the House bill related to the study and moratorium.

“We had a difference in the study from the onset,” Richter said. “I’m not interested in doing things fast; I’d rather them right.”

Rep. Ray Rodrigues, a Republican from Estero who is sponsor of HB 1205, said his bill would establish a “de facto ban” by setting up a separate permitting process for fracking.

“I believe the moratorium exists under either bill,” Rodrigues said. “Once you have established differentiated permitting and fracking requires a separate permit, then no one can do it without a DEP permit.”

He previously told Floridapolitics.com that he is concerned that a moratorium on fracking could hamper permitting for conventional oil drilling.

After the Senate subcommittee amended the Senate companion bill to include the moratorium, Rodrigues said he would have to look at the language to determine whether he would support it.

“The study was the major difference between the bills,” Rodrigues said. “Since they adopted the study as an amendment, I think the bills are very close together.”

Meanwhile, the Conservancy of Southwest Florida says it no longer supports the bills. The group supports the study but also wants amendments to clarify the definition of fracking, and require bonds and insurance to ensure drillers are responsible for accident cleanups rather than taxpayers.

Groups supporting the bill include the Florida Petroleum Council and Associated Industries of Florida. AIF’s Brewster Bevis said the bill would provide regulatory certainty for the oil and gas industry.

Maryland Passes 2.5 Year Fracking Ban

Today, the Maryland House of Delegates passed legislation, voting 102 – 34, that would prohibit fracking permits in the state until October 2017. The bill will head to Republican Gov. Larry Hogan’s desk in the coming days.

Earlier this week, the Maryland State Senate passed the legislation, voting 45-2, to prohibit fracking permits in the in the state. The governor’s position on the bill is unknown, but the Senate and House passed the bill with a veto-proof majority.

“After months of campaigning, a bill that prohibits fracking for two and a half years passed overwhelmingly in the Maryland legislature today,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. “This is a testament to the growing movement to protect our communities from the dangers of fracking. Conventional wisdom in the state was that we could never get a moratorium passed in Maryland, just as we were also told we could never get a ban in New York. But naysaying just inspired us all to work harder in bringing the voice of the people to Annapolis in this grassroots initiative. Now it is time for Governor Hogan to heed the call of the people and sign the bill that gives Marylanders more time to examine the impacts of fracking.”

Business owners in Western Maryland have expressed concern that fracking would greatly impact the booming tourism industry in that part of the state. More than 100 Western Maryland business owners signed a letter to the leadership of the General Assembly in support of the fracking moratorium.

“Maryland’s more sustainable businesses, like farming, tourism and restaurants would be devastated by fracking,” said Eric Robison, owner of Eagle Rock Construction, LLC and president of Save Western Maryland. “We don’t need a short term boom and bust economy, we need to maintain a strong economic foundation for future generations.”

Don’t Frack Maryland has sent more than 25,000 messages supporting a moratorium. Letters signed by more than 100 health professionals, and more than 50 restaurant owners, chefs, winemakers and farmers from across the state have also been delivered to the General Assembly. And last night, the Friendsville Town Council, whose city is the center of a thriving white-water rafting industry in the state, sent a letter supporting a moratorium to President Miller, urging him to encourage a vote in the Senate.

Earlier this week, actor and Maryland native Edward Norton lent his support to the Maryland fracking moratorium in a radio ad. The ad, paid for by Food & Water Watch, features Norton speaking out about how fracking could harm Maryland’s environment and public health, as well as tourism in the state.

Polling has also shown that a clear majority of Marylanders oppose fracking and support action from the General Assembly to prevent drilling in the state.

“This moratorium will give legislators more time to evaluate the public health, economic and societal dangers of fracking, and give our communities statutory protections against drilling in the meantime,” said Dr. Ann Bristow, a commissioner on Governor O’Malley’s Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission, on behalf of the Don’t Frack Maryland campaign.

According to Food & Water Watch, more than 425 peer-reviewed scientific studies on the effects of shale gas development now exist, and 75 percent of those have been published since January 2013. Of the 49 studies that investigated the health effects of fracking, 47—more than 96 percent—found risks or adverse health outcomes.

Stefanie Spear|EcoWatch|April 14, 2015

The arrival of man-made earthquakes.

In the fall of 2011, students in Katie Keranen’s seismology course at the University of Oklahoma buried portable seismograph stations around the campus, in anticipation of a football game between the Sooners and the Texas A. & M. Aggies. The plan was to see if the students could, by reading the instruments, detect the rumble of eighty-two thousand fans cheering for a touchdown. “To see if they can figure out if a signal is a passing train or a cheering crowd—that’s much more interesting for them than discussing data in theory,” Keranen, an assista0

nt professor of geophysics, told me.

But at 2:12 A.M. on November 5th, the day of the game, people in seventeen states felt an earthquake of 4.8 magnitude, centered near Prague, Oklahoma, a town of roughly twenty-five hundred, which is about an hour’s drive from Norman, where O.U. is situated. The students quickly packed up the seismographs and headed to Prague, hoping to measure the aftershocks. “Obviously, this was more worthwhile than a game,” Keranen said.

Outside homes around Prague and nearby Meeker, Keranen and her students, along with Austin Holland, the head seismologist of the Oklahoma Geological Survey, buried their equipment. Portable seismographs look like mini-kegs, or time capsules, and they need to be placed underground and on a level. The researchers wanted to install them quickly, since the ground was still shaking.

Shortly before 11 P.M., people in Prague heard what sounded like a jet plane crashing. It was another earthquake, this time a 5.6, followed, two days later, by a 4.7. (The earthquake scale is logarithmic, so a 5.0 earthquake shakes the ground ten times more than a 4.0, and a hundred times more than a 3.0.) No one was killed, but at least sixteen houses were destroyed and a spire on the historic Benedictine Hall at St. Gregory’s University, in nearby Shawnee, collapsed. Very few people had earthquake insurance; the five million dollars needed for the repairs at St. Gregory’s was raised through crowdfunding.

The earthquakes were big news, but the victory of the Sooners—the name comes from the term for those who broke the rules of the 1889 land run and staked claims in advance—was followed more closely. Few noticed that Keranen and her team had gathered likely the best data we have on a new phenomenon in Oklahoma: man-made earthquakes.

At the time, earthquakes were a relatively rare event for Oklahomans. Now they’re reported on daily, like the weather, and generally by the weatherman. Driving outside Oklahoma City one evening last November, I ended up stopped in traffic next to an electronic billboard that displayed, in rotation, an advertisement for one per cent cash back at the Thunderbird Casino, an advertisement for a Cash N Gold pawnshop, a three-day weather forecast, and an announcement of a 3.0 earthquake, in Noble County. Driving by the next evening, I saw that the display was the same, except that the earthquake was a 3.4, near Pawnee.

Until 2008, Oklahoma experienced an average of one to two earthquakes of 3.0 magnitude or greater each year. (Magnitude-3.0 earthquakes tend to be felt, while smaller earthquakes may be noticed only by scientific equipment or by people close to the epicenter.) In 2009, there were twenty. The next year, there were forty-two. In 2014, there were five hundred and eighty-five, nearly triple the rate of California. Including smaller earthquakes in the count, there were more than five thousand. This year, there has been an average of two earthquakes a day of magnitude 3.0 or greater.

William Ellsworth, a research geologist at the United States Geological Survey, told me, “We can say with virtual certainty that the increased seismicity in Oklahoma has to do with recent changes in the way that oil and gas are being produced.” Many of the larger earthquakes are caused by disposal wells, where the billions of barrels of brackish water brought up by drilling for oil and gas are pumped back into the ground. (Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking—in which chemically treated water is injected into the earth to fracture rocks in order to access oil and gas reserves—causes smaller earthquakes, almost always less than 3.0.) Disposal wells trigger earthquakes when they are dug too deep, near or into basement rock, or when the wells impinge on a fault line. Ellsworth said, “Scientifically, it’s really quite clear.”

The first case of earthquakes caused by fluid injection came in the nineteen-sixties. Engineers at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, a chemical-weapons manufacturing center near Commerce City, Colorado, disposed of waste fluids by injecting them down a twelve-thousand-foot well. More than a thousand earthquakes resulted, several of magnitudes close to 5.0. “Unintentionally, it was a great experiment,” Justin Rubinstein, who researches induced seismicity for the U.S.G.S., told me.

In recent years, other states with oil and gas exploration have also seen an unusual number of earthquakes. State authorities quickly suspected that the earthquakes were linked to disposal wells. In Youngstown, Ohio, in 2011, after dozens of smaller quakes culminated in a 4.0, a nearby disposal well was shut down, and the earthquakes stopped. Around the same time, in Arkansas, a series of earthquakes associated with four disposal wells in the Fayetteville Shale led to a ban on disposal wells near related faults. Earthquakes were also noted in Colorado, Kansas, and Texas. There, too, relevant disposal wells were shut down or the volume of fluid injected was reduced and the earthquakes abated.

But in Oklahoma, which has had more and stronger earthquakes than the other states, it was late 2013 before an owner of a disposal well was asked by the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which regulates oil and gas exploration, to temporarily reduce its operations—and that was because the well operator himself contacted the O.C.C. and the O.G.S., asking them to look into whether his well was causing problems. So far, there have been only eleven instances in which an owner has, by order, stopped injecting fluids or repositioned a well that was drilled into basement rock.

Driving through Oklahoma’s countryside, you see starlings and cows and nodding donkeys—also known as pumpjacks—and hundreds of disposal wells, of which there are around thirty-two hundred in the state. Disposal wells are generally simple structures: there may be trucks full of water parked nearby, and a typical wellhead is little more than a tank connected to a pump, with some knobs and a few meters visible. “You would be underwhelmed by the technology,” a well-operations engineer told me.

An area of oil and gas exploration is said to be “played out” when it no longer yields sufficient profits, and much of Oklahoma was considered to have been played out in the nineteen-nineties. One problem was the immense quantity of wastewater that was being brought up along with the diminishing yield of oil. “In the past, these wells that brought up so much water were abandoned,” Holland, of the O.G.S., told me. “They didn’t make economic sense. But then a new strategy came along, which was, basically, Let’s just pull up a lot of water.” Dewatering technologies and the rising price of oil made Oklahoma a rich business proposition again.

Although disposal wells have been used for decades, the new dewatering process has led to a dramatic increase in how much water is being disposed of. (In the state, the water used in the initial stage of fracking accounts for less than ten per cent of the water pumped down disposal wells.) In Oklahoma today, an average of about ten barrels of water comes up for every barrel of oil. Holland said, “We’re talking about billions of barrels, and it has to go somewhere.” Todd Halihan, a professor of geology at Oklahoma State University, in Stillwater, told me, “We’re injecting the equivalent of two Lake Hefners”—Oklahoma City’s four-square-mile reservoir—“into the ground each year, and we don’t really understand where that water is going.”

Read more

Rivka Galchen|Weather Underground|April 13, 2015

Gas pipeline in Northeast spurs praise, opposition

SCHOHARIE, N.Y. — New York landowners along the planned 124-mile Constitution Pipeline are getting details of a second major natural gas pipeline proposed to cut through their property, this one a 325-mile link from Pennsylvania to New England.

Construction workers in economically distressed southern New York are ecstatic about the job possibilities, but landowners who have been fighting the first pipeline for three years are dismayed at the prospect of going through the whole process a second time.

“You think about the worst things that can happen to you in a life and I’ve had some things happen to me in life, but this is right up on the scale,” landowner Dan Brignoli said last week at an open house held in New York for the $4 billion Northeast Energy Direct project planned by Kinder Morgan.

A right of way through the property where Brignoli and his wife built their home 40 years ago in Davenport was taken by eminent domain two weeks ago for the Constitution Pipeline. That pipeline is the furthest-along of a slew of projects to pipe cheap gas from the Marcellus Shale region in Pennsylvania to New York City and New England. A federal court will determine the Brignolis’ compensation.

Constitution plans to break ground this summer if a critical state permit is issued. Northeast Energy Direct, which would have to obtain a second right of way if it’s routed across Brignoli’s land, plans to file an application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission this fall and break ground in January 2017.

“Eminent domain is a very touchy subject, but in this country a lot of things were taken for the greater good, for the interstate highways and other projects,” said Josh Shaul, a member of the New York State Laborers’ Union who was among a large contingent of union members at the pipeline meeting in Schoharie. “This project is good for jobs, good for the community.”

Opponents say the pipelines will reduce property values, pose safety risks and environmental harms, and prolong dependence on fossil fuels. Many opponents also maintain the real goal is to sell the gas at higher prices overseas v ia export terminals proposed in Nova Scotia and northern Maine.
Kinder Morgan maintains the Northeast Energy Direct pipeline is being built to serve Northeast customers. But it says four proposed liquid natural g as export projects in Atlantic Canada and one in Maine could find the Northeast Energy Direct project useful.

MARY ESCH|ASSOCIATED PRESS

Florida proposals to regulate fracking face uncertain fate as legislative clock winds down

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – With only a few weeks remaining, the fate of proposals to regulate hydraulic fracturing in Florida remains unclear.

“We need to take advantage of the window of opportunity we have right now,” said Jennifer Hecker, director of natural resource policy at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida. “I think at this point I am fairly confident something will pass, but it’s not impossible that nothing passes because of the time constraints.”

Two Southwest Florida lawmakers are sponsoring legislation to regulate oil and gas resources. The proposals come as drilling faces increased scrutiny, due in part to the Collier-Hogan well, south of Lake Trafford, that was fracked in 2013.

The House measure (HB 1205), sponsored by Rep. Ray Rodrigues, R-Estero, cleared two of three committees. Both the main bill and a companion public records exemption (HB 1209) have to be heard by one more committee before it can be sent to the House floor.

The Senate measure (SB 1468) is moving, but at a slower pace. That measure, sponsored by Sen. Garrett Richter, R-Naples, is scheduled for its second of three committee hearings on Tuesday. The public records exemption (SB 1582) cleared its second committee last week.

“The Florida Legislature cannot stop technology, but we can safely and properly regulate the results of technology,” said Richter. “And that’s what this bill is intended to do.”

Both measures would, among other things, increase penalties, create a chemical disclosure registry and require companies to disclose the chemicals used in the fracking process to a public disclosure website. Rodrigues’ measure also requires a study to analyze fracking’s potential risks and hazards.

Both legislators have said they are hopeful the bill will pass.

“We’ll definitely get it to the floor,” said Rodrigues. “The previous two years when I ran this bill, it was a bill that was being run before a problem had developed. It was a theoretical exercise. After what happened at the (Hogan) well, this no longer is theoretical. This is real.”

In 2013, he proposed a measure to create an online chemical disclosure registry for chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing. That measure passed the House, but failed to progress in the Senate. He refiled the legislation in 2014, but it went nowhere. Rodrigues has said election year politics were to blame.

This year, he is “confident leadership understands the importance” of the measure.

“I think this year gives us our best opportunity,” said Rodrigues.

Hecker agrees that 2015 is the best chance to push legislation through, but she said her organization is concerned the proposals don’t go far enough.

“We’re in a Catch-22. We don’t want to see nothing passed,” she said. “But we’re concerned that we may end up with something so weak that it wouldn’t even regulate what would have happened at the Hogan well.”

The Conservancy of Southwest Florida is seeking several changes to the bill before it heads to a final vote, including broadening the definition of high-pressure well stimulation, prohibiting companies from using drinking water in the process and holding companies accountable for remediation associated with contamination.

Keith Arnold, a lobbyist for Collier County, said the measures may not be perfect, but they are steps in the right direction.

“If no bill passes, life continues as it has with unregulated drilling in Collier County. That’s why these bills are so important,” he said.

Penny Taylor, a Collier County commissioner, said she’s concerned that the final legislation won’t cover everything Southwest Floridians had hoped would pass.

Taylor said she plans to ask the county to consider bumping up lobbying efforts in the final weeks to make sure the measure reflects the desires of the board.

“I’m very happy with the efforts, but I think we can do a little more,” said Taylor.

jmbuzzacco|Naples Daily News reporter|Apr 11, 2015

Join the Movement to Ban Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining

Calling for a “national, coordinated response to the humanitarian disaster of mountaintop removal mining,” CREDO Action launched an extraordinary petition drive this past weekend for Congress to pass the Appalachian Community Health Emergency Act (ACHE Act) and place an immediate moratorium on “the deadliest and most destructive form of coal mining.” Within 24 hours, more than 50,000 signatures had joined the campaign.

Only days after President Obama referred to climate change as a public health issue, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton declared a “child from the hills of Appalachia” should have the same chances as her granddaughter, and former Mayor Michael Bloomberg kicked in an additional $30 million to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, long-time Appalachian advocates hope the CREDO campaign to ban the cancer-linked mining operations will be ramped up with major resources from national public health and cancer organizations, as well as climate and environmental groups.

“With the national petition launch from CREDO in support of the Appalachian Community Health Emergency Act (ACHE Act), an all-hands-on-deck is being called to all regional and national organizations to get behind and support the ACHE Campaign to put an end to the public health threat of mountaintop removal,” said Bo Webb, the Purpose Prize-winning West Virginia activist, whose family has lived under the fallout of mining operations. “Health science now confirms that children and people of all ages who are being exposed to air generated from mountaintop removal coal mining sites are at extreme high risk of incurring lung cancer.”

As the last banks withdraw support, law suits mount and regulatory pressures grow, Appalachian groups see mountaintop removal on the ropes, and the timing right to “finish off” the outlaw industry ways, in the words of Goldman Prize recipient Judy Bonds, the godmother of the movement to end mountaintop removal, who died from cancer in 2011.

Let’s be real: If we can’t end mountaintop removal, a cancer-linked extreme form of mining that only provides a fraction of our national coal production, how can we expect to move forward on climate change and public health?

The CREDO campaign carries the moral imperative from the Appalachian front lines—the voices of the actual residents paying the ultimate price for our reckless mining policies—and cites new scientific “evidence that dust collected from residential areas near mountaintop removal (MTR) sites causes cancerous changes to human lung cells.”

“Everyone must see mountaintop removal coal mining as inhumane and unnecessary,” said Maria Gunnoe, a community organizer for the West Virginia-based Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and recipient of the Goldman Prize, who also lives under the fallout of a mountaintop removal operation. “The killing of Appalachians for energy is no longer a dirty secret it is now the dirty truth. The ACHE Act enacts an immediate moratorium on the practice of blowing up the mountains over our homes because of the implications on human health.”

CREDO calls the ACHE Act campaign “a smart approach for beginning to deal with a public health crisis Appalachian communities have faced for far too long—but it needs national grassroots support to gain traction in Congress.” From the petition:

The coal industry is waging a war on Appalachia, detonating millions of pounds of diesel fuel and explosives daily to rip the top off of mountains and access seams of coal contained within.

Dozens of peer reviewed studies have documented the devastation mountaintop removal mining is wreaking on communities in West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee in the form of elevated rates of birth defects and cancer rates nearly triple the national average. Stunning new research also shows a direct connection between the dust from mountaintop removal mining and lung cancer.

It is time for Congress to intervene by passing the Appalachian Community Health Emergency Act (ACHE Act), which would place an immediate moratorium on new mountaintop removal mining permits.

Mountaintop removal is the deadliest and most destructive form of coal mining there is. Explosives are used to blow the tops off of mountains, sending fine particulates of silica, aluminum and molybdenum into nearby communities, and ultimately into the lungs of local residents.

New research from West Virginia University has for the first time shown a direct connection between the inhalation of this dust and cancer. As one of the study’s authors Michael Hendryx explained, “with this study we now have solid evidence that dust collected from residential areas near MTR sites causes cancerous changes to human lung cells.”

In the coming weeks, leaders in the fight to stop mountaintop removal meeting will bring the signatures on this petition to meetings with key congressional staff as they work to build support on Capitol Hill for the ACHE Act. Add your name to the petition today to join the growing campaign to put an end to the coal industry’s war on Appalachia once and for all.

We need a national, coordinated response to the humanitarian disaster of mountaintop removal mining. The ACHE Act, which is the preferred approach of Appalachian leaders who have been fighting mountaintop removal mining for decades, has three main provisions.

First, it would place an immediate, emergency moratorium on any new mountaintop removal mining permits and prohibit the expansion of any existing permits. Second, it would require the Department of Health and Human Services to launch a comprehensive, federal health study. No new permits will be allowed until and unless the U.S. Secretary of Health declares mountaintop removal does not present a harm to human health. Finally, it would require air and water monitoring at all existing mountaintop removal mining sites, with results reported to the Department of Health and Human Services.

It’s a smart approach for beginning to deal with a public health crisis Appalachian communities have faced for far too long—but it needs national grassroots support to gain traction in Congress.

Jeff Biggers|April 13, 2015

Big Coal Seeks Big Bailout Despite Strong Opposition

Activists in New Mexico are fighting back against a proposal by their utility, PNM, to continue burning coal at the dirty, expensive San Juan Generating Station for years to come. More than 1,300 New Mexico residents have sent petitions to the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission (PRC) urging them to reject PNM’s proposal to extend the utility’s commitment to the coal plant. Sierra Club is supporting their efforts with an aggressive online ad campaign calling on PRC board members to put public health and the interests of New Mexico ratepayers first by rejecting the plan.

Recent revelations about the plan to continue burning coal at the San Juan Generating Station have revealed serious financial risks for local ratepayers. Last month Farmington, New Mexico, home of the San Juan Generating Station, announced they were dropping plans to acquire an increased stake in the plant due to the huge costs that would be passed on to the community. The Albuquerque City Council recently adopted a resolution directing the city to withdraw support for PNM’s current proposal. Other New Mexico stakeholders have also pulled away from the agreement to continue PNM’s use of coal at the plant, citing overall uncertainty about San Juan’s operations.

PNM recently announced that due to an accounting error, the cost estimate for their plan to increase reliance on dirty coal and other expensive fuels has jumped by more than $1 billion, with those costs likely to be passed onto local ratepayers. Given PNM’s recently proposed rate hike that would cost the average New Mexico family $10 a month to fund the utility’s plans to continue burning coal, local utility customers are deeply concerned about the financial impact of PNM’s commitment to coal.

Renewable energy sources like wind and solar are now cost-competitive with coal. Communities impacted by the San Juan Generating Station are questioning why they should bear the financial burden and risk of sticking with coal on top of the devastating health impacts of living near a coal plant.

“There are moral and ethical issues involved in where we get our energy. The direct links to economic justice, care of creation and health of future generations mean that people of faith must pay careful attention to energy issues,” said the Rev. Dr. McNiel, Executive Director of New Mexico Conference of Churches and Advisory Board Member for New Mexico Interfaith Power and Light. “We must move to more renewable energy sources in order to reduce the economic and health consequences of power consumption. Our brothers and sisters who are economically poor and live in the shadows of coal fired power plants suffer the most here in New Mexico and around the world. PNM’s plans to continue burning coal will only continue to threaten them, and that is immoral.”

April Thomas|Sierra Club|April 8, 2015

Warren: Big Oil ‘Polluters’ Took $5B From Taxpayers in 2014

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren slammed what she sees as the hypocrisy of major oil companies that, she says, enjoy huge profits all the while taking taxpayer subsidies to keep themselves afloat, the National Journal reported.

Warren, in a speech delivered to the Good Jobs, Green Jobs conference in Washington, D.C., went after “corporate polluters” as she discussed issues related to climate change, the Journal said.

Citing ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron and BP, Warren said that the companies had combined profits of $90 billion last year while they “sucked down $5 billion in subsidies from the American people.”

Speaking to labor and environmental activists, Warren championed regulation as a fair solution, the Journal said. “A lot of people think that regulations bring higher costs,” she said. “But regulation is also about making sure that someone doesn’t get to beat out the competition because they’re dumping filth in the river or spewing poisons in the air.”

She added that without oversight, the outcome of unchecked pollution will harm future generations and end with “children who can’t drink the water,” the Journal said.

The harsh remarks come even as Warren, while famed for her assault on Wall Street greed, is not known for her environmental activism, the Journal said.

It added that her “criticism of the Keystone XL pipeline and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal that activists fear could weaken environmental protections, have made her a rising star in the environmental world.”

Warren, a populist darling, has been described as a middle class “dream candidate” for president, even as she insists she is not running, CNN said.

She seems content, however, to offer her own brand of fearless tough talk against the nation’s financial sector, the Daily Kos reported, citing her remarks at a Know Your Value Conference in Philadelphia.

“Do you think that if I smiled more at banking committee hearings, that Wall Street would put me on their Christmas card lists?” she said. “Give me a break.”

“They didn’t stop the train wreck happening right in front of them,” Warren said of the mortgage crisis of 2008. “What happened in the mortgage market wasn’t like a hurricane or a tornado.

“What happened in the mortgage market was a deliberate decision by the financial institutions to improve their profits by selling mortgages that were like grenades with the pins pulled out.”

Andrea Billups|14 Apr 2015

Could Seattle activists throw a wrench in Shell’s Arctic drilling plans?

As a Shell drilling rig advances ever closer to Seattle, activists from the city and beyond are hell-bent on foiling the oil giant’s plans.

Shell is preparing to drill for oil off the Northwest coast of Alaska this summer, undaunted by its notorious botched drilling attempts of 2012. The company plans to use the Port of Seattle as a staging ground for its operations up north, and is currently shipping the Polar Pioneer rig across the Pacific Ocean to Washington state waters. The rig and its carrier ship are set to arrive at the end of this week in Port Angeles, 60 miles northwest of Seattle, and could be docked there until May for inspections and other preparations, reports Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger. After that it will move on to Seattle ­– if activists don’t stop it first.

Though Seattle port commissioners approved Shell’s plan in January, that decision is not sitting well with many residents and leaders of this eco-conscious city. The mayor and city council members have launched an investigation into whether the port commission’s decision was legal. Meanwhile, grassroots activists are preparing to meet the Polar Pioneer in a flotilla of kayaks when it nears the city — a very Seattle form of protest.

Activists from Greenpeace International recently staged a showy protest of their own. Last week, six of them scaled and attached themselves to the Polar Pioneer while it was moving through the middle of the Pacific. They camped out on the underside of the main deck for nearly a week to protest and raise awareness about Shell’s plans. Shell responded by filing for a restraining order against Greenpeace. But before a judge could rule, the activists decamped over the weekend when the waters became too rough.

“I might be climbing off this oil rig, but this is merely a transition into the next step of saving the Arctic,” said Aliyah Field, one of the Greenpeace activists. “I can’t wait to join the millions of voices, the volunteers in Seattle, and all Americans who believe we deserve better, safer, cleaner forms of energy.”

A temporary restraining order was granted after the Greenpeace team vacated the rig. In future demonstrations, Greenpeace activists must stay 1,000 meters away from the Polar Pioneer and the drill ship Noble Discoverer, which is also on its way to Seattle, while the vessels are moving. In a separate decision, the Coast Guard announced on Tuesday that other protesters, like those would-be kayakers, will have to stay 500 yards away from the vessels while they’re moving and 100 yards away while they’re stationary.

Activists are also fighting Shell in court. Environmental organizations including Earthjustice, the Seattle Audubon Society, and the Sierra Club filed a complaint against the port in King County Superior Court last month. The complaint alleged the port violated its own terms by leasing out Terminal 5 as a homeport, rather than its intended use as a cargo lane, said attorney Patti Goldman, who is working on the suit. The port tried to get the case thrown out, but on March 20 the court decided to allow it to proceed.

“When we won the first round [of the lawsuit], that made us feel optimistic. Unfortunately, other parties have been stymieing us from moving forward. Hopefully we can break that soon,” said Goldman. She and her allies are crossing their fingers that the court rules in their favor before Shell’s drilling rigs arrive in Seattle.

Ana Sofia Knauf|14 Apr 2015

Coal is dying all by itself

Coal, the No. 1 cause of climate change, is dying. Last year saw a record number of coal plant retirements in the United States, and a study last week from Duke University found that Even China, which produces and consumes more coal than the rest of the world put together, is expected to hit peak coal use within a decade, in order to meet its promise to President Barack Obama to reduce its carbon emissions starting in 2030.

According to Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), this is all the fault of President Barack Obama’s “war on coal” — specifically the administration’s new limits for carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, which probably will force many power companies to burn less coal. If there is a war, McConnell has long been the field marshal of the defending army. His latest maneuver came last month when he called on state lawmakers to simply ignore the administration’s new rules, in order to resist Obama’s “attack on the middle class.”

His logic, apparently, is that if Kentucky can stave off Obama long enough, the coal industry still has a glorious future ahead. That logic is fundamentally flawed. While Obama’s tenure will probably speed up the country’s transition to cleaner energy, the scales had already tipped against coal long before he took office. Kentucky’s coal production peaked in 1990, and coal industry employment peaked all the way back in the 1920s. The scales won’t tip back after he leaves. The “war on coal” narrative isn’t simply misleading, it also distracts from the very real problem of how to prepare coal mining communities and energy consumers (i.e., everyone) for an approaching future in which coal is demoted to a bit role after a century at center stage.

That’s the conclusion of a sweeping new account of the coal industry, Coal Wars, authored by leading energy analyst Richard Martin. The book dives deep into a simple truth: As long as we’re still burning coal for the majority of our energy, all the solar panels, electric cars, and vegetarian diets in the world won’t do a thing to stop global warming. Saving the planet starts with getting off coal.

The good news, Martin reports, is that transition is already underway, regardless of stonewalling by congressional Republicans, and with or without Obama’s new regulations. Martin documents evidence of coal’s decline from the mountain villages of Kentucky to the open-pit mines of Wyoming, and from lavish industry parties in Shanghai to boardrooms in Germany. Everywhere he looks, market forces (for instance, natural gas made cheap by the fracking boom), technological advances, and environmental laws are conspiring to favor cleaner forms of energy over coal. At the same time, Martin writes, more and more financial institutions and private investors are starting to factor climate change into their investment decisions, which “would be a death blow that no EPA regulation could equal.”

Whether the transition will happen fast enough to limit the damage of climate change is a different story. China still gets nearly three-quarters of its energy from coal. The United States, while substantially reducing its own coal consumption in recent years, still has huge amounts of coal, especially in the West, that can be profitably mined and shipped overseas. Many billions of dollars have been sunk into mines, power plants, shipping terminals, and other infrastructure that can’t simply be shut down overnight, especially when all that stuff forms the backbone of a basic commodity like electricity.

Still, for coal, there is no resurgence on the horizon. “There’s no question which way the curve is headed, and it is down,” Martin tells Climate Desk.

Much less clear than the fate of coal is what will happen in the countless communities, from the American Southeast to northern China, that have long depended on coal to put food on the table. Martin has managed to locate dozens of compelling personal narratives that show the human face of a debate that is too often reduced — by environmentalists as much as by the coal industry — to numbers and yawn-inducing energy wonkery. These include the head of a small coal mining company in Kentucky who was forced to sell off the business he inherited from his father and lay off workers who were also friends and neighbors. The manager of a coal town coffee shop in Colorado is also facing closure. In China, self-contained cities are built around coal mines, but young people there are unable to get work and have no other employment opportunities.

The environmental imperative to get off coal is obvious, and even if you think climate change is a hoax, basic economics are already driving the coal industry to contract. But so far, according to Martin, the United States has done a terrible job of helping coal industry workers and their families find life after coal.

There are many guilty parties here, including coal barons like Don Blankenship (who is currently facing charges in federal court for flagrant safety violations) and profit-hungry utility company execs who are keen to squash competition from solar and wind energy. But Martin saves his most damning critiques for leaders like McConnell who are hung up on pointless political squabbling rather than finding innovative ways to revitalize former coal economies.

“The presence of the coal industry has kept these communities in a state of dependence, and not allowed them to develop a real economy beyond coal,” Martin says. “Whether we pine for the days of these jobs or not, they’re not coming back. We have to get beyond this state of dependency.”

Tim McDonnell|14 Apr 2015

Thanks To Conservatives, Florida Is Now One Step Closer To Making Solar Energy More Accessible

A pro-solar conservative group in Florida cleared a major hurdle this week in its journey to make solar more accessible in the state.

Floridians for Solar Choice reached 72,000 signatures on a petition that seeks to allow Floridians to purchase solar power directly from other consumers – something that isn’t currently allowed in the state. That number of signatures clears the way for the petition to be reviewed by the state’s Supreme Court, which will decide whether or not the petition’s language legally qualifies it to be a ballot initiative for Floridians in 2016. Getting its petition on the 2016 ballot is the main goal for Floridians for Solar Choice.

“We are thrilled to reach this important milestone,” Tory Perfetti, founder of Floridians for Solar Choice, said in a statement. “It shows broad support among Florida’ families and businesses for removing barriers to commerce in solar power.”

The petition for the initiative seeks to “encourage and promote local small-scale solar-generated electricity production and to enhance the availability of solar power to customers.” Under Florida’s current law, only utilities can sell electricity directly to consumers. Florida is one of only five states in the country with a law like that, and solar advocates say that it’s holding the Sunshine State back from its solar potential. If the ballot initiative is successful in 2016, businesses and property owners in the state would be able to produce up to 2 megawatts of solar power and sell it directly to consumers.

If the state Supreme Court does approve the petition’s language for a ballot initiative, Floridians for Solar Choice will still have some work to do. In order to get on the ballot in Florida, an initiative must collect 683,149 signatures from Floridians in at least seven congressional districts by February 1. Any delays in the Supreme Court’s approval of the petition means there’s less time for Floridians for Solar Choice to collect signatures. Already, supporters have expressed frustration that the state took too long to acknowledge that they had received enough signatures for Supreme Court review.

Perfetti’s group began circulating the petition in January, and he said at the time that he received “overwhelming” response to it. Perfetti and Debbie Dooley, a tea party activist who founded the original chapter of Conservatives for Energy Freedom in Georgia, say that they’re tackling solar in Florida because increasing access to the energy source makes sense from a conservative standpoint.

“Free market and the freedom to choose – those are core conservative principles,” Dooley told ThinkProgress in January. “Unless you cherry-pick your principles, if you’re a true conservative, this is something that resonates with you. I think the residents are fed up with the government telling them who to purchase their power from.”

Floridians from Solar Choice has gained multiple backers of the ballot initiative. The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) voiced its support of the initiative earlier this week, and it’s also gained the support of the Tea Party Network, the Christian Coalition, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, the Florida Retail Federation, the Sierra Club, and other groups.

“This fight is about consumer choice and private property rights – cherished, long-standing American principals that we strongly support as an organization and an industry,” Rhone Resch, president and CEO of SEIA, said in a statement. “We urge Floridians to sign this critically important, freedom-of-choice petition, allowing it to be placed on next year’s ballot.”

Conservative group Americans for Prosperity has attacked the initiative, however, saying that it’s “about money, and using government and taxpayers to prop up the solar industry.” Supporters reject that claim, saying the measure isn’t calling for solar subsidies or mandates; instead, it simply wants to make it easier for Floridians to gain access to solar.

Florida regulators ok plan to drop nuclear fee off bills

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — State regulators are approving a proposal by one of Florida’s largest power companies to drop a nuclear power fee now charged to customers.

The Florida Public Service Commission last October ordered Duke Energy Florida to refund $54 million it collected from ratepayers to pay for a failed nuclear plant in Levy County.

Commissioners on Thursday approved Duke’s proposal to end the average $3.45 a month charge starting in May.

Duke announced in 2013 it was abandoning plans to build the plant on Florida’s Gulf coast.

Duke and a company that was supposed to provide equipment for the plant are involved in lawsuits over the project. Duke officials wanted to wait until the lawsuits were resolved before crediting customers.

Those lawsuits are still ongoing and could result in additional charges in the future.

Duke has roughly 1.7 million customers.

MyPalmBeachPost.com|April 16, 2015

Land Conservation

Big sugar land buy for Everglades restoration hits road block

Calling the deal too costly with too little benefit, the South Florida Water Management District board on Thursday effectively canned a 2010 deal to buy 46,800 acres of U.S. Sugar land that it once considered critical to restoring the Everglades and coastal estuaries.

Instead, board members voted to back a $5 billion restoration plan mapped out by Gov. Rick Scott for the next 20 years that does not include the land.

“If we can get $5 billion in state dollars and match that with $5 billion in federal dollars and have $10 billion, to me that is the big huge goal we have to go after right now,” said board chairman Dan O’Keefe.

The vote followed weeks of rowdy protests by environmentalists, topped by a Tallahassee concert headlined by Jimmy Buffett this week demanding the state buy the land. Located just south of Lake Okeechobee, the cane fields would help fill what supporters say is a critical need to store and move water to the parched southern Glades, a major goal in fixing marshes and reviving Florida Bay and the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers.

On Thursday, board members listed a host of problems with the deal, from a purchase price estimated at between $500 and $700 million to restrictions that would prevent more than 11,000 acres being used for restoration over the next five years.

Frustrated with the West Palm Beach-based board’s inaction, environmentalists have shifted their efforts to Tallahassee, where Buffett’s concert this week drew big crowds.

“People along both coasts who have been ravaged by dirty polluted water want a solution,” said Everglades Foundation CEO Eric Eikenberg. “So the nine board members need to demonstrate leadership and come up with a plan.”

To fix the Everglades, more land is needed to store polluted water from Lake Okeechobee. When lake levels get too high and threaten its aging dike, phosphorus-rich water gets flushed down the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie to sensitive coastal surrounding estuaries. In 2013, the latest in a periodic string of massive algae blooms, the polluted water killed off seagrasses and oysters in the St. Lucie and left the river unhealthy for swimming for months. Critics say that current plans, including Scott’s proposal to finish 68 projects still incomplete after nearly 15 years, do not include enough storage space.

Riding a landslide November victory on a land preservation amendment, environmentalists hoped to buy the cane fields, which sugar growers tried to rezone late last year for residential and commercial development. Amendment 1 is expected to generate about $650 million its first year.

But to persuade legislators, who are now deciding how to spend the money, an appraisal needs to be done. Up until Thursday, despite requests from environmentalists, the board refused to include the matter on its agenda.

In voting to endorse Scott’s plan, board members — all appointed by the governor — and district staff argued that the land would provide far less use than environmentalists claim.

Only 11,000 acres could be used over the next 20 years for restoration under the terms of the deal, district Everglades policy director Tom Teets said. The remainder would be parceled out at 10,000 acres every ten years. Removing infrastructure would be costly, he said, as well as removing six to eight feet of muck to install levees.

“It’s not a simple solution to a complex problem,” O’Keefe said.

But environmentalists, who have packed meetings in recent months, presented a half dozen resolutions from South Florida counties and cities that back the deal and accused board members of over-complicating the matter in an attempt to thwart it.

“It’s a business contract. It’s not part of the U.S. Constitution or cast in stone,” said former St. Lucie County Commissioner Charles Grande. “These things can be reopened to negotiation any time.”

Scott, whose latest election campaign was heavily backed by the sugar industry, has avoided publicly stating his position on the deal. On Thursday, he said he was focused on his own plan when asked about the board’s decision or need for the land.

“I haven’t seen the vote,” he said. “What I’m focused on is my budget, a dedicated funding source.”

The district originally hammered out the land deal under former Gov. Charlie Crist, who initially proposed buying all 180,000 acres owned by the U.S. Sugar Corp. But Crist’s grand vision crumbled with the economic downtown.

In 2010, the district bought a small fraction of the land — 26,800 acres for $194 million — and negotiated options for the remaining land. In 2013, the district let expire an initial option to buy the 46,800 acres at $7,400 an acre. The current option would allow the district to buy the land at fair market value.

But without an appraisal from the district, backers say legislators won’t be able to use Amendment 1 money to make the purchase and would instead have to craft another deal for land to store water.

And without land to store water, supporters say Everglades restoration will continue to falter.

“How much faster would you be able to reach [your goals] with the land purchase,” asked Tropical Audubon executive director Laura Reynolds.

JENNY STALETOVICH|Miami Herald|April 10, 2015|Reporter Mary Ellen Klas contributed to this report.  

Over objections, Cabinet approves land sale for megamall

Gov. Rick Scott and the Florida Cabinet unanimously approved a deal Tuesday to sell state land near Hialeah for American Dream Miami, planned as the nation’s largest shopping mall, despite objections that the land should have been put up for bids and that the state got too low a price.

Under the deal, the state will sell about 82 acres at the corner of Interstate 75 and the Florida Turnpike for $12.3 million. The Miami-Dade County school system will get $8.25 million for a lease on part of the land.

The $4 billion project is proposed by developer Triple Five, owner of the Mall of America in Minnesota, now the nation’s largest. Triple Five is buying adjoining land from developer Graham Cos. for the 200-acre project at a per-acre price critics said is higher than the state’s.

“We don’t think the appraisal is adequate to assure you that you’re going to get full market value for the property,” said Bill Williams, a lawyer hired by South Florida opponents of the project. “It doesn’t seem fair to the taxpayers of Florida.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi said she had heard rumors of a much higher price for the adjoining land. Bob Gorlow, representing Triple Five, said the price for the private land is confidential.

Williams said that under state law the land should have been put up for bids, and other South Florida mall developers said they would have been interested in bidding.

But Cabinet members including Bondi said the law wasn’t clear, and the state’s land isn’t valuable for any other project. Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam said the state has made other, similar deals.

Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez, school Superintendent Alberto Carvalho and economic development advocates supported the deal. The developers have guaranteed 5,000 jobs within 10 years but say the number will likely be 25,000 or more.

WILLIAM MARCH|The Associated Press|MyPalmBeachPost|April 14, 2015 com

Air Quality

China’s disastrous pollution problem is a lesson for all

Beijing’s 21-million residents live in a toxic fog of particulate matter, ozone, sulphur dioxide, mercury, cadmium, lead and other contaminants, mainly caused by factories and coal burning. Schools and workplaces regularly shut down when pollution exceeds hazardous levels. People have exchanged paper and cotton masks for more elaborate, filtered respirators. Cancer has become the leading cause of death in the city and throughout the country.

Chinese authorities, often reluctant to admit to the extent of any problem, can no longer deny the catastrophic consequences of rampant industrial activity and inadequate regulations. According to Bloomberg News, Beijing’s Centre for Disease Control and Prevention says that, although life expectancy doubled from 1949 to 2011, “the average 18-year-old Beijinger today should prepare to spend as much as 40 percent of those remaining, long years in less than full health, suffering from cancer, cardiovascular disease, and arthritis, among other ailments.”

China’s government also estimates that air pollution prematurely kills from 350,000 to 500,000 residents every year. Water and soil pollution are also severe throughout China. The documentary film Under the Dome, by Chinese journalist Chai Jing, shows the extent of the air problem. The film was viewed by more than 150 million Chinese in its first few days, apparently with government approval. Later it was censored, showing how conflicted authorities are over the problem and its possible solutions. The pollution problem also demonstrates the ongoing global conflict between economic priorities and human and environmental health.

Rather than seeing China’s situation as a warning, many people in Canada and the U.S. — including in government — refuse to believe we could end up in a similar situation here. And so U.S. politicians fight to block pollution-control regulations and even to remove the power of the Environmental Protection Agency, or shut it down altogether! In Canada, politicians and pundits argue that environmental protection is too costly and that the economy takes precedence.

Some people even point to China as a reason for Canada not to do anything, arguing that what we do or don’t do to confront climate change and pollution will make little difference because our contributions pale in comparison to countries like China and India. But while Canada’s air quality is better than many places, half of us live in areas where we are exposed to unsafe levels of air pollution. According to the Heart and Stroke Foundation, “Short and long term exposure to air pollution are estimated to result in 21,000 premature deaths in Canada in 2008 as well as 620,000 doctor visits, 92,000 emergency department visits, 11,000 hospital admissions and an annual economic impact of over $8 billion.”

And, as we know, air doesn’t stay within national boundaries. The global atmosphere is being loaded with the sum of all nations’ activities.

As for greenhouse gas emissions, Canada may contribute less than two per cent of overall global emissions, but we have the highest emissions per capita — more than the U.S. and Russia and close to three times the global average. Even with a small population compared to many countries, we’re in the top 10 for overall emissions. Don’t we have a moral responsibility to reduce our share?

We can and should do more to curb pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, especially as demands from industry and a growing population continue to increase. That means making homes and workplaces more energy-efficient and driving less. Transportation is a major contributor to air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. But, despite the fact that a large percentage of the emissions and pollution come from SUVs, trucks and vans, sales of those vehicles are rising while car sales are decreasing.

As individuals, we can take action to reduce pollution and emissions, but greater gains should be made at the policy level. Creating good transit and transportation infrastructure that gets people out of their cars is a huge step, as is offering incentives to improve energy efficiency in homes and buildings. Regulations to limit industrial pollution are also necessary.

We may never experience the kind of deadly pollution China is struggling with, but we can do a lot to make sure our air, water and soil are as clean as possible, now and into the future. We must do our part.

Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor Ian Hanington.

Recycling

The Biggest Source of Plastic Trash You’ve Never Heard of

“Seed trays, drip tape, mulch film, water pipes, hoop house covers, twine, hose, fertilizer bags, totes, tool handles and everything we use to keep ourselves dry.” On a rainy March afternoon, Kara Gilbert, co-owner of Vibrant Valley Farm, rattles off how plastics are used on the farm as she stamps mud off her boots.

On a visit to the four-acre farm on lush Sauvie Island at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers near Portland, Ore., Gilbert gives me a tour de farm plastics. The fields are just being readied for the season, but black plastic is already laid out under a hoop house. PVC water pipes are being set into place and drip irrigation tape is ready to be deployed, as are plastic sacks of fertilizer. Out in the greening field, little orange-pink plastic plant tags on ankle-high stakes flap in the wet breeze to mark rows of just-sprouted peas.

By farming standards, this is a tiny operation. It sells organic produce to 15 or so local restaurants and through community-supported-agriculture shares, and grows flowers it sells wholesale. But even this small farm, Gilbert says, spends between $4,000 and $6,000 on plastic every year. Maybe more. It’s an environmental trade-off, she explains: Using plastic means saving water.

“In our very fickle climate, if we want to have a local food movement and want to compete with California and Mexico, it’s almost imperative that we have the black plastic,” Gilbert says. “Plastic film or road cloth is a weed suppressant,” explains farm co-owner Elaine Walker. “Black plastic can retain heat and moisture so you don’t need to water as much and you can grow things in the off season.”

Whether it’s this small organic farm coaxing an impressive yield out of a few acres in Oregon or a large conventional operation somewhere else in the world, plastic is a huge part of modern agriculture — a multi-billion-dollar worldwide industry, according to Penn State Extension. Billions of pounds are used around the world each year, with much of the plastic designed for one season’s use.

There’s a growing recognition by farmers and others in the agricultural community of the need for environmentally responsible disposal solutions for these materials. The question, though, is how to do that with materials that are designed to not break down in rain, sun and heat, and that can — if burned or left to degrade — pose environmental health hazards.

Big Numbers

Really good numbers on the amount of plastic used in agriculture are hard to come by, but experts in the field, including Gene Jones of the Southern Waste Information eXchange, estimate that U.S. agriculture alone uses about a billion pounds annually. This includes films — used for mulch, greenhouse covers, and to wrap bales, tubing and pipes. It also includes nursery containers, pesticide containers, silage bags, storage covers, twine and more.

Specialized products figure into the mix as well. Farmers in cooler regions use plastic to enhance warmth, for example, while in the southern U.S. farmers use plastic to cool soil and plants. “There’s some reflective, some colored plastic, but all deal with the sun at different times of year,” says Jeremy Nipper, sales representative for Kennco Manufacturing, a Florida-based farm machinery company whose products include equipment to deploy agricultural plastics and collect and dispose of used field plastics. Plastic films laid down on planting rows also helps keep fertilizer from running off fields when it rains. And, as Walker explains, plastic mulch films helps suppress weeds.

Worldwide, the agricultural plastic film market alone was estimated to be worth $5.87 billion in 2012. That year’s global demand, according to one market analyst, was more than 9.7 million pounds, with about 40 percent of this being used in mulching. China is estimated to be the world’s largest consumer of agricultural plastic films, using about 60 percent of all such plastic.

“Horticulture and vegetables use an astonishing amount,” says Nate Leonard, field coordinator for Cornell University’s Recycling Agricultural Plastics Program.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

What to do with all this plastic when it’s no longer useful is the ongoing challenge.

“There [is] lots of interest in reducing the impacts,” says Scott Coleman, vice president of strategic development for Delta Plastics, an Arkansas-based company that specializes in agricultural irrigation tubing.

Historically, discarded agricultural waste has been taken to landfills or been burned or buried, often on farm property. But most states have now enacted rules against outdoor plastics burning, and this has spurred interest in other options.

One is trying to use less plastic in the first place — often by extending use through more than one growing season. For example, Nipper explains that some growers can get two seasons out of one set of plastic mulch films by reusing with a different crop.

Currently only about 10 percent of farm plastics are recycled.Walker notes that instead of thin film that’s hard to reuse, Vibrant Valley Farms has been using sturdier road cloth that will last for several seasons for weed suppression and to retain moisture and heat. Similarly, while Florida watermelon growers use thin single-use plastics, strawberry growers get two seasons out of plastic not quite twice as thick.

By far the biggest opportunity to reduce farm plastic waste, however, is through recycling. Currently only about 10 percent of farm plastics are recycled. Increasing that number will depend on making drop-off more convenient and expanding options for giving plastic a second life.

In New York, where a statewide ban on backyard or farm burning of plastics was passed in 2009, the Cornell program worked with the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation to pioneer agricultural plastics recycling and do educational outreach about recycling options through extension programs and local soil and water conservation districts.

While collection for recycling is one challenge, preparing and processing agricultural plastics so they can be recycled and finding a market for the many different kinds of agricultural plastics add even more complexity.

“The solid waste [management] people thought we were crazy to get involved because there were no markets for this plastic,” says Leonard. “It was an exciting breakthrough when we found someone who would take this,” he says. One of the first companies Cornell’s recycling program found that could use this plastic was a manufacturer of plastic sidewalk and paving materials.

Another big issue in recycling agricultural plastics is dirt and debris. “The problem with high dirt content is that it’s really hard on machinery,” says Coleman. There can also be concerns about transporting contaminants such as pathogens with that debris.

Agri-Plas, an agricultural plastics recycler in Brooks, Ore., handles most kinds of plastics, from bale wrapping and fertilizer bags to hard plastics and drip tape. Enormous piles of sorted plastics stand at the Agri-Plas facility, located in the midst of Willamette Valley farm country: colorful cubes of twine, clusters of black drip tape and seed trays, white mounds of plastic wrap and bags, and, in a special area, blue and white pesticide buckets that have been triple rinsed before collection.

Agri-Plas is also one of the nine or so facilities around the country that are working with Ag-Container Recycling Council a take-back and recycling program for used pesticide containers started by 20 major agricultural chemical manufacturers in 1992. The member companies help support the program financially and designated contractors process the collected material into plastic products the program has approved as safe for “post-pesticide” use. These are typically things people won’t touch on a regular basis, like outdoor drain tile, says Mary Sue Gilliland, vice president of operations and business development. This precaution is taken even though according to ACRC tests, virtually no pesticide residues remain after proper cleaning and processing. The program is considered successful with a recycling rate of about 33 percent, says ACRC executive director Ron Perkins.

As complicated as pesticide container recycling sounds, plastic twine seems to pose even greater challenges. The material, Gilliland says, “is very abrasive and beats the heck out of machinery.” In one outdoor bay at Agri-Plas, workers are busy removing hay from plastic twine, by hand. “There’s no other way to do this,” says Gilliland.

Finding a Use

Agri-Plas does some processing on site, shredding and grinding. But that’s the comparatively easy part of plastics recycling, says Gilliland and others in this industry. The real challenge is finding a company that can use the recycled plastic.

A company called Encore in Salinas, Calif., is now making reusable grocery bags from recycled agricultural plastics. Delta Plastics is using ag plastics to make EPA-compliant trash-can liner bags and exploring ways to put used plastics into new drip tape.

“Twenty years ago, as we were producing [agricultural irrigation] pipe and saw the waste created from it, our founder saw there was a need to figure out a solution,” says Coleman. “Finally, we came up with a proprietary method for processing dirty pipe.” Delta Plastics uses much of this material itself, but it also sells it in pellet form to other manufacturers who mainly use it to make new plastic sheets and film.

Meanwhile, other companies are making products that include plastic pavers, outdoor building materials and other items that are less technically finicky than plastic sheeting.

Finding a company that can process any of this plastic domestically also remains a challenge, says Gilliland. She estimates that about 40 percent or more of the agricultural plastic collected for recycling goes to export, typically to China or elsewhere in Asia.

Another solution some companies — including one called Agilyx, which lists venture capital firms and Richard Branson among its investors — have been experimenting with is turning waste agricultural plastic into fuel oil. But this has proved problematic for a number of reasons, among them how federal and local governments regulate such processes, says Gilliland. Still she thinks this solution, if done properly, might pencil out as an environmentally preferable option given the logistical difficulties of repurposing the vast quantities of soiled, used agricultural plastics.

Out on Sauvie Island, a cloudburst has passed and a bald eagle and several honking geese have flown by. Kara Gilbert kneels down in the muddy spring ground next to a small orange plastic flag and picks a pea sprout. A few yards away, plastic sacks of soil amendments and last season’s black plastic road cloth is waiting to be laid out for 2015 planting — testimony to the complexity of inputs that need to be managed today to produce even the simplest of foods. “You have to taste this,” she says handing over the tiny leafy greens, “they’re awesome.”

Elizabeth Grossman|Ensia}11 April 2015

Miscellaneous

Vancouver Park Board to consider banning bottled water sales

Park board commissioner Michael Wiebe calls for more filling stations and water fountains

Bottled water in Vancouver parks, beaches and community centers could become a thing of the past as the Vancouver Park Board considers a proposal to ban sales and increase filling stations. (CBC)

Bottled water in Vancouver parks, beaches and community centers could become a thing of the past as the Vancouver Park Board considers a proposal to ban sales and increase filling stations.

Park board commissioner Michael Wiebe said he will put forward a motion next Monday. The rationale behind a ban is entirely environmental, he said.

“We have amazing tap water in Vancouver and the waste of actually creating water bottles and the waste of the water bottles has been a big factor in what’s taking up our landfills,” he said.

Coca Cola currently has exclusive rights to sell bottled water at all park board facilities, but Wiebe said the contract will be up in November 2016.

Under Wiebe’s proposal, there will be more fountains and filling stations at parks, and community centers would offer refillable water bottles to go with memberships.

“It’s a way to get people around the idea that our water is safe,” he said.

In 2009, the City of Vancouver eliminated the use of bottled water in civic offices. It had asked the Vancouver Park Board to follow suit, but the park board refused at the time because of concerns over revenue loss.

CBC News|Apr 09, 2015

Flexible aluminum battery charges fast, stable for over 7,000 cycles

Capacity on par with existing lithium batteries, but charges in 15 minutes. Doesn’t solve some battery problems, but it may point a way forward.

Lithium batteries are the reigning champion in a key category of performance: energy density. This density is why they’ve dominated applications like portable devices and electric vehicles, where size or weight matter. But there are reasonable doubts about how much energy density can be increased using lithium, so researchers have continued to look into alternative chemistries for batteries.

Solving two battery challenges—one for the electric grid, one for cars.

One of the more promising alternatives is aluminum. It’s abundant, cheap, and lightweight, and each atom has the potential to liberate up to three electrons during charge/discharge cycles. Lithium can manage only one. But the batteries themselves have been disappointing so far, with performance dropping radically after a few cycles. So it’s big news that researchers have now managed to craft an aluminum battery that is stable out to over 7,000 cycles—plus it’s flexible and poses no fire risk. But the battery doesn’t take advantage of some of aluminum’s more appealing properties, so there is clearly more work to be done.

One of lithium’s limitations is that on its own, as a pure metal, it makes a lousy battery material. Lithium metal electrodes have a tendency to deform and/or short-circuit over charge/discharge cycles, which is why we use lithium ion batteries—the lithium is complexed with other elements, keeping the metal from causing trouble. That requirement means you need to have a distinct material for the electrodes, which adds to the weight and complexity.

By contrast, the aluminum battery described here simply uses aluminum metal for the anode. In fact, it uses aluminum foil, which provides a high surface area for shuffling charges and contributes to flexibility of the battery. In this regard, the battery does represent a useful advance from lithium.

The electrolyte the researchers used was a solution of aluminum trichloride dissolved in an organic solvent that also contained chlorine. During charge/discharge cycles, electrons were donated to form AlCl₄^– and Al₂Cl₇^– ions. This chemistry did not take advantage of the three electrons that aluminum has to donate, so it doesn’t represent much of an improvement over lithium. In any case, these ions could slip in between layers of the cathode material—a process called intercalation—at which point they could hand over their spare electrons.

As for the cathode, the researchers decided to experiment with various forms of carbon. Graphite itself doesn’t work especially well, as its structure tends to get destroyed by the intercalation of ions. So the authors tried a different form of graphite (pyrolytic graphite) that has cross links between the different sheets of carbon in the material. This graphite added structural strength, but it slowed down the process of intercalating ions so much that the charging and discharge rates were limited.

The authors therefore turned to a material that had first been described by a different lab in 2012: graphene foam. Graphene foam is an open, flexible structure of interconnected graphene sheets and tubes. (It’s made by creating a metal foam, then catalyzing graphene formation on its surface.) It’s rugged and flexible, but it still provides a good surface area for the aluminum chloride ions to interact with.

The graphene foam electrode worked very well. Batteries based on it showed stable performance for over 7,000 charge/discharge cycles and could be charged quite quickly. But the capacity per weight is no better than a typical lead-acid battery, so it’s not going to compete with lithium any time soon. On the plus side, it’s a bit safer than lithium batteries; the authors drilled a hole through it while it was in operation with no ill effects.

So the results are a bit of a mixed bag. Getting aluminum to work well and have an all-metal electrode are both promising developments, and there are possibly things we can learn from this battery that can be applied to other systems. But the fact that aluminum atoms only transferred a single electron when they transited to the cathode is really not taking full advantage of the whole reason that people think the material would be good for batteries. And that leads to the low power density of these batteries.

All that said, there are battery applications—electrical storage on the grid, for example—where energy density doesn’t matter at all. If these batteries could be produced economically, they could still find a place on the market.

John Timmer|Nature|Apr 7, 2015

Bird flu hurting turkey processor, but not exports

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — The highly pathogenic strain of bird flu that has prompted the destruction of at least a million turkeys has taken a toll on South Dakota’s only commercial turkey processing plant, but its CEO said his export business is virtually unaffected.

Ken Rutledge said Dakota Provisions has lost about 5 percent of its total production because of the H5N2 strain of avian influenza that has infected farms that sell live birds to the Huron plant.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed last week that a second South Dakota farm, in Kingsbury County, had been hit with the highly contagious strain, one week after tests also showed it at a Beadle County operation. And North Dakota State Veterinarian Susan Keller said Friday the National Veterinary Services Laboratories in Iowa confirmed the H5N2 strain in a flock of 40,000 turkeys in Dickey County, which borders South Dakota in the southeast.

Once an infection is confirmed at a farm, all surviving birds on the property are typically killed to prevent it from spreading. Nearly 1.1 million birds in the Midwest have had to be destroyed since early March on at least 20 farms.

The USDA does not compensate farmers for birds killed by the disease itself but does reimburse them for birds that have to be destroyed as a precaution.

Rutledge said Dakota Provisions processes birds from the farms that have been affected in South Dakota and North Dakota. Its Minnesota farms haven’t been affected yet.

“In terms of sales revenue, it’s going to haven impact on us. No question,” he said.

Some countries have banned turkey exports from certain U.S. states, like Minnesota, and other countries, including China and Russia, have banned imports from the entire U.S, said Dr. Dustin Oedekoven, South Dakota’s state veterinarian.

Rutledge said his export business is almost fully intact because his trading partners that have banned imports — Hong Kong, Thailand and China — receive mostly smaller parts of the bird like gizzards, livers and hearts.

“Our major trade partner for Dakota Provisions … is Mexico,” he said.

Mexico is among the countries scaling back bans on imports to just include affected counties in Minnesota, which is huge because it’s by far the biggest foreign customer for U.S. turkey, said Jim Sumner, president of the USA Poultry and Egg Export Council.

“If Mexico were doing the same thing that the countries in the Far East are doing, then we would have a serious problem,” Rutledge said.

KEVIN BURBACH|ASSOCIATED PRESS

Bird Flu Outbreak In Midwest Spreads To More Turkey Farms

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — A bird flu outbreak that has puzzled scientists spread to three more Midwest turkey farms, bringing the number of farms infected to 23 and raising the death toll to more than 1.2 million birds killed by the disease or by authorities scrambling to contain it.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed on Saturday that the H5N2 strain of avian influenza was found among 38,000 birds at a commercial farm in Kandiyohi County in west-central Minnesota. It’s the third confirmed outbreak in Kandiyohi, which is the top turkey producing county in the country’s top turkey producing state.

This was after the USDA confirmed late Friday that bird flu was found at two more South Dakota farms, saying it had infected a flock of 53,000 turkeys at a farm in McCook County and in a flock of 46,000 turkeys at a farm in McPherson County.

South Dakota State Veterinarian Dustin Oedekoven said crews were working Saturday to begin euthanizing any birds not killed by the highly contagious strain to prevent the virus from spreading.

Once those birds have been destroyed, the 23 farms in Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, Missouri, Kansas and Arkansas will have lost more than 1.2 million turkeys, a small fraction of the 235 million turkeys produced nationally in 2014. Canadian officials also confirmed earlier in the week that a turkey farm in southern Ontario with 44,800 birds was hit, too.

Ken Rutledge, the CEO of Dakota Provisions, the only commercial turkey processing plant in South Dakota, said the more than 200,000 turkeys affected in the Dakotas so far account for about 5 percent of his total annual production.

“It probably will not impact our ability to service our customers, but is a serious impact in terms of lost volume at our plant and, obviously, is a severe impact to the growers themselves,” Rutledge said.

In Minnesota, turkey producers have now lost over 900,000 birds.

Scientists suspect migratory waterfowl such as ducks are the reservoir of the virus. They can spread it through their droppings. They’re still trying to determine how the virus has managed to evade the strict biosecurity that’s standard practice at commercial turkey farms. The virus can be carried into barns by workers or by rodents and wild birds that sneak inside.

Dr. Beth Thompson, assistant director of the Minnesota Board of Animal Health, said the reason Minnesota has had so many cases has a lot to do with the fact that it’s the country’s top turkey producing state, and that it has a myriad of ponds and lakes that are attractive stopover places for migrating waterfowl such as ducks.

“We have to think about what Minnesota is. It’s the Land of 10,000 Lakes bringing the wild waterfowl into Minnesota, and we’re also number one in turkey production. I think that answers the question, that we do have a lot of turkey barns out there, and that is why we are seeing the infection rate we are in those facilities,” she told reporters Friday.

Officials stress the risk to public health is low and that there’s no danger to the food supply. No human cases have been detected in the U.S.

Because trucks and equipment provide a potential way to carry the virus onto farms, Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton signed an executive order Friday lifting seasonal weight restrictions for poultry feed trucks and trailers, and for emergency equipment being used in the response. His order said tightening biosecurity by reducing the number of trips to poultry farms is critical to lowering the risk of introducing the virus to non-infected farms.

While South Dakota’s taken a drubbing in the last two weeks, Oedekoven, the state veterinarian, said tests on poultry living in the 10-kilometer quarantine zones of the state’s first two farms have almost all come back without any signs of the disease. They’re still awaiting a few results.

And he said for the time being, no other possible cases are pending confirmation in the state.

“If we can get a couple nice days of sunshine here and have everybody just wash their boots and blow their nose, we’ll hope for the best,” he said.

KEVIN BURBACH and STEVE KARNOWSKI||04/11/2015

Man Gets Prison Sentence For Collecting Rainwater On His Own Property

Collecting rainwater on your own property can now lead to jail time, as proven by a man from Oregon who was just sentenced to prison for doing just that.  Who owns the rain? The US government, apparently, now.  Not so long ago, it was common practice across much of the world to collect rainwater into man made wells on your property as a means of farming, irrigation, and having fresh clean water.  It was just as common as canning your own food, having knowledge of at least some basic survival skills, and being self-sufficient.

It wasn’t even that many generations ago that all of this was common practice – people born before WWII were pretty adept at these skills, as they were a necessity to survival.  One of the main (and easiest) ways to ensure survival? Collecting rainwater on your own property.  The practical uses for storing and collecting rainwater are numerous and many people across the world in rural areas still do it today for all of the reasons listed above.  However, over the past few years, laws making the collection of rainwater illegal have been causing an uproar across the US.

Now, a man from Grey Point, Oregon has been sentenced to thirty days in prison for storing collected rainwater on his very own property – and the public is outraged.

A rural Oregon man was sentenced Wednesday to 30 days in jail and over $1,500 in fines because he had three reservoirs on his property to collect and use rainwater.

Gary Harrington of Eagle Point, Ore., says he plans to appeal his conviction in Jackson County (Ore.) Circuit Court on nine misdemeanor charges under a 1925 law for having what state water managers called “three illegal reservoirs” on his property – and for filling the reservoirs with rainwater and snow runoff.

“The government is bullying,” Harrington told CNSNews.com in an interview Thursday.

“They’ve just gotten to be big bullies and if you just lay over and die and give up, that just makes them bigger bullies. So, we as Americans, we need to stand on our constitutional rights, on our rights as citizens and hang tough. This is a good country, we’ll prevail,” he said.

The court has given Harrington two weeks to report to the Jackson County Jail to begin serving his sentence.

Harrington said the case first began in 2002, when state water managers told him there were complaints about the three “reservoirs” – ponds – on his more than 170 acres of land.

According to Oregon water laws, all water is publicly owned. Therefore, anyone who wants to store any type of water on their property must first obtain a permit from state water managers.

Harrington said he applied for three permits to legally house reservoirs for storm and snow water runoff on his property. One of the “reservoirs” had been on his property for 37 years, he said.

Though the state Water Resources Department initially approved his permits in 2003, the state – and a state court — ultimately reversed the decision.

“They issued me my permits. I had my permits in hand and they retracted them just arbitrarily, basically. They took them back and said ‘No, you can’t have them,’ so I’ve been fighting it ever since,” Harrington told CNSNews.com.

The case, he said, is centered on a 1925 law which states that the city of Medford holds exclusive rights to “all core sources of water” in the Big Butte Creek watershed and its tributaries.

“Way back in 1925 the city of Medford got a unique withdrawal that withdrew all — supposedly all — the water out of a single basin and supposedly for the benefit of the city of Medford,” Harrington told CNSNews.com.

Harrington told CNSNews.com, however, that the 1925 law doesn’t mention anything about colleting rainwater or snow melt — and he believes that he has been falsely accused.

“The withdrawal said the stream and its tributaries. It didn’t mention anything about rainwater and it didn’t mention anything about snow melt and it didn’t mention anything about diffused water, but yet now, they’re trying to expand that to include that rain water and they’re using me as the goat to do it,” Harrington

But Tom Paul, administrator of the Oregon Water Resources Department, claims that Harrington has been violating the state’s water use law by diverting water from streams running into the Big Butte River.

“The law that he is actually violating is not the 1925 provision, but it’s Oregon law that says all of the water in the state of Oregon is public water and if you want to use that water, either to divert it or to store it, you have to acquire a water right from the state of Oregon before doing that activity,” Paul told CNSNews.com.

Yet Paul admitted the 1925 law does apply because, he said, Harrington constructed dams to block a tributary to the Big Butte, which Medford uses for its water supply.

“There are dams across channels, water channels where the water would normally flow if it were not for the dam and so those dams are stopping the water from flowing in the channel and storing it- holding it so it cannot flow downstream,” Paul told CNSNews.com.

Harrington, however, argued in court that that he is not diverting water from Big Butte Creek, but the dams capturing the rainwater and snow runoff – or “diffused water” – are on his own property and that therefore the runoff does not fall under the jurisdiction of the state water managers, nor does it not violate the 1925 act.

In 2007, a Jackson County Circuit Court judge denied Harrington’s permits and found that he had illegally “withdrawn the water at issue from appropriation other than for the City of Medford.”

According to Paul, Harrington entered a guilty plea at the time, received three years probation and was ordered to open up the water gates.

“A very short period of time following the expiration of his probation, he once again closed the gates and re-filled the reservoirs,” Paul told CNSNews.com. “So, this has been going on for some time and I think frankly the court felt that Mr. Harrington was not getting the message and decided that they’d already given him probation once and required him to open the gates and he refilled his reservoirs and it was business as usual for him, so I think the court wanted — it felt it needed — to give a stiffer penalty to get Mr. Harrington’s attention.”

In two weeks, if unsuccessful in his appeals, Harrington told CNSNews.com that he will report to the Jackson County Jail to serve his sentence.

“I follow the rules. If I’m mandated to report, I’m going to report. Of course, I’m going to do what it takes in the meantime to prevent that, but if I’m not successful, I’ll be there,” Harrington said.

But Harrington also said that he will never stop fighting the government on this issue.

“When something is wrong, you just, as an American citizen, you have to put your foot down and say, ‘This is wrong; you just can’t take away anymore of my rights and from here on in, I’m going to fight it.”

Royce Christyn|in  News|US|4/12/15  

1st Avian Flu Case Confirmed in U.S. Chicken Flock

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has confirmed a case of highly pathogenic avian influenza in a chicken flock, the first time the strain has infected commercial chickens in this country in more than 30 years.

The commercial layer flock of 200,000 birds is in Jefferson County, Wis., within the Mississippi flyway. The H5N2 virus first started to show up in the Pacific Northwest late last year, but has cropped up at a dozen farms stretching eastward to Minnesota and Missouri. Until now, all the infected commercial flocks were turkeys.

The risk to humans is extremely low, and the United States has the most rigorous avian-influenza monitoring program in the world.

Still, trading partners already have rejected some U.S.-grown turkey. An outbreak – or even a few highly publicized cases – could damage the chicken industry.

“Clearly, the finding of avian influenza on a commercial egg farm is of concern to egg farmers, who recognize the potential impact of the disease on their flocks and on the egg industry,” United Egg Producers President Chad Gregory said in a prepared statement. The virus has not affected people and can’t be transmitted in safely handled and properly cooked eggs.

“Providing excellent care of their hens and ensuring the safety of the eggs they produce are of critical importance to America’s commercial egg farmers, and the egg farming community is taking USDA’s identification of avian influenza (AI) on a number of poultry farms in the U.S. very seriously.

The chicken case might be tied to contamination from wild birds, after some work on a barn at the Jefferson County farm dislodged some old nests, said Steve Roney, a researcher at the University of Georgia Poultry Diagnostic Research Center.

“It’s still not as much of a human risk as a trade issue,” Roney said. “We can’t be sure what’s going on in Minnesota, where there have been 10 sites where the virus was confirmed.

Poultry producers in Alabama are paying attention, said Dennis Brothers, a poultry specialist with the Alabama Extension Service.

“I would say everyone is concerned, but not overly concerned,” Brothers said. “Integrators are reinforcing biosecurity and tightening rules.”

Very few poultry operations in Alabama have one of the big risk factors for spreading avian influenza: Using pond water. Most all either rely on municipal water or wells, Brothers said.

But producers also worry that a lapse in biosecurity not only would mean that one farm would lose all its birds; in the case of a positive test for high-pathogenic flu, all the birds within 3 kilometers must be euthanized.

“Most producers are afraid of the downtime that would be involved if one of the farms in their area tested positive,” Brothers said. “USDA has some money to compensate producers, but if a high-pathogenic strain appeared in one of the dense poultry production areas, that money wouldn’t go very far.”

Poultry experts can’t be sure how the virus is spreading, but suspect transmission is influenced by the flyways that birds follow when they migrate. The Mississippi Flyway (where the flock of laying hens is located), covers Arkansas, one of the largest poultry production states in the country.

The flyway traffic might become more of a factor in fall, as wild birds from the affected regions head south, said Joe Hess, another poultry specialist for Alabama Extension.

In the meantime, producers are working to protect their flocks.

“The virus strains have been identified as highly pathogenic, and in response, U.S. egg farmers have made significant increases to biosecurity measures on their farms to protect their flocks,” said Gregory, the egg producers executive.

“Comprehensive disease prevention protocols on commercial egg farms include, but are not limited to, restricting farm access, preventing hens from exposure to wild and migratory birds, increasing veterinary monitoring of flocks and using protective gear at all times.

“United Egg Producers is working closely with authorities as avian influenza surveillance proceeds, and we will keep our members updated on the findings of that testing. We will support our egg farmer members as they continue to be vigilant in keeping their hens free from disease and assuring the safety of the eggs produced for their customer.”

Allison Floyd|April 14th, 2015

Feral cats are literally eating all of Australia’s wildlife

Australia wants its cats dead. But not because it’s a nation of fanatical dog people — rather, the country’s enormous feral cat population now constitutes a major threat to its biodiversity. To save the country’s native wildlife, the cats need to go.

Due to hotter days, longer dry periods, and increasingly intense bush fires caused by climate change, Australia’s biodiversity is diminishing. Despite being one of the world’s 17 “mega-diverse” countries, Australia has not done a bang-up job of protecting its wildlife. As mammalian extinction rates go, Australia’s is pretty dang high: Twenty-one percent of Australian native land mammals are threatened.

But, shockingly, climate change is actually not the No. 1 enemy of koalas and kangaroos: Feral cats are the “single biggest threat” to protecting Australia’s wildlife, according to a new piece from VICE News. There are about 20 million of these little cutthroat barbarians pawing, nuzzling, and murdering (in equal measure) their way across the continent, eating three to 20 animals each day — which adds up to a loss of 80 million native animals per week.

So, in a cruel but necessary gesture to save the country’s wildlife, the Australian government has pledged $2 million to slow their biodiversity loss by 2020 by killing as many feral cats as possible. Eliminating feral cat colonies altogether won’t be possible because they reproduce at high rates and are difficult to catch, but dammit, they’re going to keep trying. Here’s more from Vice:

For now, poisoned baits are the weapon of choice for population control. The largest programs for this method use aircraft to scatter baits across Australia’s vast outback. The aircraft can drop upwards of 60,000 baits across areas of over 1,000 square kilometers.

Until a stronger solution is found, endangered animals will have to be kept alive by isolating them from the vast swathes of the country where the cats roam unabated.

An entire continent terrorized by herds of meaner, angrier house cats sounds like the plot of a David Lynch movie, but this is real life. Who knew Miss Fluffs had it in her?

Liz Core|13 Apr 2015

This Earth Day, Pledge to Ditch These 7 Toxic Chemicals

Why not make Earth Day matter this year? Pledge to ditch these 7 toxic chemicals in favor of more natural and healthy products.

1) Triclosan – Triclosan is an antibacterial agent found in soaps, shampoos, hand sanitizers, sanitary wipes and many cleaning products. Doctors worry that its overuse – and our overexposure to it – are reducing the effectiveness of antibiotics to fight germs. In fact, triclosan and other antibacterials may be giving rise to a group of “super bugs” that can’t be controlled with normal courses of treatment. Fortunately, the way to reduce the impact of most household germs is simply by washing our hands, bodies and surfaces with warm soapy water. Skip the antibacterial wipes and dispensers of antibacterial lotion that seem to be everywhere.

2) BPA – Bisphenol-A is a chemical compound that makes plastic soft and malleable, which is why for years it was used in baby products like baby bottles and nipples, water bottles, and water hoses. In animal studies, it’s been show to mimic hormones like estrogen. It’s also been linked to problems with the development of the reproductive and nervous systems. Many companies have phased it out of bottles, but it still shows up in the lining of cans used for canned food. To be safe, use a stainless steel or glass water bottle, glass baby bottles, and food that’s either frozen or in its natural state.

3) The Nail Polish ‘Toxic Trio’ – Many conventional nail polishes contain three chemicals that have been linked to birth defects, cancer and general malaise. The chemicals are toluene, dibutyl phthalate (DBP) and formaldehyde. Fortunately, it is now possible to find non-toxic nail polish that’s water and mineral-based, and some of those are “5-free,” meaning they also are free of formaldehyde resin and camphor. You can see a list of safer nail polishes here.

4) Glyphosate – Glyphosate is what’s called a “broad spectrum herbicide.” It’s used to kill weeds, especially broadleaf weeds and grasses that compete with agricultural crops, or lawns or ornamental plants around our homes. It’s marketed as Roundup, Rodeo or Pondmaster; you have probably heard of “Roundup Ready Seeds,” which are used to produce many of the foods we eat. Use of Roundup, or glyphosate, has become so widespread that it is now contaminating drinking water. The World Health Organization (WHO) has classified it as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” It is also leading to antibiotic resistance, reports Civil Eats. If your week-killer is either Roundup or contains glyphosate, stop using it and take it to your community’s nearest toxic waste drop-off facility. You can find safer, more natural weed control options here, or forego grass altogether in favor of native ground covers that require little maintenance to look beautiful.

5) Neonics – Neonics is a nick name for neonicotinoids, a class of insecticides that are chemically related to nicotine. They are toxic to insects and popular with farmers and gardeners because they can be applied to the soil and when the soil is watered, they will be taken up by plants. When an insect sucks on a treated plant, it will die. Neonics show up on an insecticide label as something like acetamiprid, clothianidin, dinotefuran, or imidacloprid. They kill wood boring pests, flies, and many other insects – including bees. In fact, the “colony collapse” being experienced by bees all over the U.S. could be directly attributable to bees feeding on nectar and pollen on plants that have been treated with neonics. The evidence has led Lowe’s to promise to phase out the sale of plants raised from seeds treated with neonics. Before you buy garden plants this year, make sure to inquire whether they have been treated with neonics in any way.

6) Lead – Even though lead is a toxic chemical, it is frequently found in the pigments used to color lipstick and make it shimmer. Lead has long been linked to harming the intellectual development of infants and children; women who unknowingly apply leaded lipstick and lick their lips all day could be susceptible, as well. Fortunately, there are some safe alternatives, including plant-based lip balms and products made by companies that are committed to safer cosmetics. No matter what you use, keep your lipstick out of the reach of kids, who might not just play with it. They might eat it!

7) Parabens – Parabens are a chemical compound used as a preservative in cosmetics, moisturizers, hair care products, some deodorants, and shaving products, among others. On a product label, you might see the ingredient listed as methylparaben, propylparaben, butylparaben or benzylparaben. Typically, only tiny amounts of parabens are added to a product. However, because consumers apply so many different products to their bodies, and those products are used every day, questions have been raised about the cumulative impact that parabens could have on human health. Parabens have been associated with certain forms of breast cancer, notes WebMD, which has prompted many people to switch to products that are parabens-free.

This Earth Day, take a moment to read the labels of the products you have around your home. Put aside those containing the chemicals listed above, and switch them out for safer, healthier options, many of which you can find in your local grocery store. You can definitely find them online!

Diane MacEachern|April 15, 2015

How to get an amendment on the ballot

Florida Constitution Ballot Amendment to Ban Fracking (PROCESS)

http://election.dos.state.fl.us/constitutional-amendments/init-peti-process.shtml

Initiative Petitions – Process and Procedures

What is an Initiative Petition?

The Florida Constitution grants the people the power to propose amendments to Florida’s Constitution. This can be accomplished by getting petitions signed by a number of voters equal to eight percent of votes cast in the last presidential election. The petitions must also come from at least one-half of the congressional districts of the state. For the number of signatures needed for the 2016 election and the breakdown by congressional district, please see Congressional District Requirements.

Steps in the Initiative Petition Process

1. Register as a Political Committee
   The first step in the initiative petition process is for the individual or group wishing to propose an amendment to register as a political committee with the Division of Elections, pursuant to Section 106.03, Florida Statutes.
2. Get Format Approval
   The sponsoring political committee is then required to submit the proposed initiative amendment petition form to the Division of Elections prior to the petitions being circulated for signatures. The division only reviews the initiative petition form for sufficiency of its format. (See Rule 1S-2.009.)  The division does not review the form for legal sufficiency. (See Constitutional Amendment Petition Form) The format is sufficient only if each petition form:
   • Is printed on separate cards or individual sheets of paper;
   • Is of a size between 3 x 5 inches and 8 ½ x 11 inches;
   • Is clearly and conspicuously entitled “Constitutional Amendment Petition Form” at the top of the form;
   • Includes adequate space for the signee’s name, address, city, county, date of birth, voter registration number, signature and date of signature.
   • Conspicuously contains in the following order:
     1. A ballot title not exceeding 15 in words in length;
     2. A ballot summary not exceeding 75 words in length;
     3. The article and section being created or amended; and
     4. The full text of the amendment being proposed.
   • The form must contain a space for only one voter’s information and signature. The division will not approve petitions providing for multiple signatures per page;
   • Contains a disclaimer that reads “Initiative petition sponsored by (name and address of the sponsoring political committee).”
   • Contains space for the name and address of a paid petition circulator in the event the petition form is gathered by a paid petition circulator, in accordance with Section 106.19(3), Florida Statutes.
3. Serial Number Assignment
   Once approved, the Division of Elections will assign a serial number to the approved form and notify the sponsoring committee. The serial number must be printed in the lower right hand corner of the petition form.
4. Circulation
   Once the petition has been approved, the sponsoring political committee may begin circulating the petitions for signature. No initiative petition circulated for signature may be bundled with or attached to any other petition form. Petition signatures are good for two years from the date signed.
5. Submit Petitions for Verification
   All signed petition forms shall be returned to the sponsoring political committee. The sponsoring political committee shall then submit the signed petition forms to the Supervisor of Elections in the county of residence of the signee for verification of signatures in accordance with Rule 1S-2.0091, Florida Administrative Code. It is the responsibility of the sponsoring political committee to ensure the signed forms are properly filed with, or if misfiled forwarded to, the Supervisor of Elections in the county in which the signee is a registered voter. Petition forms must contain all of the following when submitted to the Supervisors of Elections or they will be deemed invalid and the Supervisor will not verify the signature:
   • The voter’s name;
   • The voter’s address (including city and county);
   • The voter’s date of birth or voter registration number;
   • The voter’s signature; and
   • The date the voter signed the petition, as recorded by the voter.
6. The Supervisors of Elections are required to check the signatures within 30 days of receipt of the petitions. However, to ensure that all petitions are verified prior to the deadline, it is recommended that the sponsoring political committee submit petitions to the Supervisors of Elections as far in advance of the deadline as possible.
7. Pay for Cost of Verification
   For each signature checked, ten cents, or the actual cost of checking the signature, whichever is less, is to be paid to the Supervisor of Elections. This fee is paid at the time of submitting the petitions by the sponsoring political committee. If the committee is unable to pay the charges without imposing an undue burden on the organization, a written certification of such inability, given under oath, may be submitted to the Division of Elections to have signatures verified at no charge. (see Affidavit of Undue Burden). The Division will circulate the oath to each Supervisor of Elections in the state.
   Note: If the committee pays any person to solicit signatures, an undue burden affidavit may not be filed in lieu of paying the verification fee (see Section 106.191, Florida Statutes). Also, if an undue burden oath has been filed and payment is subsequently made to any person to solicit signatures on a petition, the undue burden oath is no longer valid and a fee for all signatures previously submitted and any submitted thereafter shall be paid by the sponsoring political committee. Furthermore, if any monetary contributions are received by the sponsoring political committee, they must first be used to reimburse the Supervisor of Elections for any signature verification fees that were not paid because of the filing of the undue burden oath (see Section 99.097(6), Florida Statutes).
8. Certification of Petitions
   Upon completion of the verification, the Supervisors of Elections must certify the total number of valid signatures to the Department of State no later than 5:00 p.m. on February 1 of the year in which the election is held.
9. Supreme Court Review
   Once a committee obtains signatures from 10% of the voters required from at least 25% of the congressional districts, the Division will send the petition to the Attorney General. Within 30 days of receipt, the Attorney General will petition the Supreme Court requesting an advisory opinion regarding the compliance of the text of proposed amendment with s. 3, Art. XI of the State Constitution and the compliance of the proposed ballot title and summary with Section 101.161, Florida Statutes.
10. Fiscal Impact Statement
    At the same time the petition is sent to the Attorney General, the Division sends a copy of the petition to the Financial Impact Estimating Conference. The Financial Impact Estimating Conference will review the amendment and complete an analysis and financial impact statement. If the amendment obtains ballot position, the financial impact statement will be placed on the ballot following the ballot summary.
11. Certification of Ballot Position
    Upon a determination that the constitutionally required number of signatures and distribution of signatures by congressional districts has been obtained by February 1 of the year of the election, the Secretary of State shall issue a certificate of ballot position to the sponsoring political committee. 

Environmental Links

SFAS International Wildlife News Audubon Advocate Audubon Restore Eco-Voice South Florida Wildlife Care Center Sawgrass Nature Center & Wildlife Hospital The Turtle Hospital The Marathon Wild Bird Center Climate change info Audubon’s Coastal Strand Audubon of Florida News Blog Bioenergy News Climate Progress – climate science, politics and solutions Collins Center for Public Policy Comprehensive Everglades Restoration News EcoWatch – feeds from the WaterKeeper Alliance Everglades Foundation – press releases Everglades Hub Fort Myers News – Press Green Front Pages from Florida Newspapers Herald Tribune Newspapers –  Environmental News KeysNews.com Naples Daily News  – Environmental News National Public Radio Eco-News Riverwatch News about the Caloosahatchee Sierra Club Sierra Club Florida South Florida Watershed  Journal South Florida Water Management District Union of Concerned Scientists – news Yahoo News Search: Everglades NASA Climate Information American Littorial Society log NASA Climate Information Sun Newspapers – Lake Okeechobee News Everglades City News  – Mullet Wrapper IFAW’s World of Animals Magazine

ConsRep 1504 B

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. ~Wallace Stegner 

Announcements

Evenings at the Conservancy Speaker Series

The Evenings at the Conservancy Speaker Series continues in April with a presentation by Sanibel author and lecturer Charles Sobczak.

He is the author of several best-selling titles including Living Sanibel-A Nature Guide to Sanibel & Captiva Islands, and a novel titled Six Mornings on Sanibel.

In his presentation, The Human Footprint, Sobczak will examine our intimate relationship with nature.

From preserving wilderness to climate change and adaptation, he will explore our impact on this spectacular place we all call home – Earth.

The presentation will be on Tuesday, April 14 in the Jeannie Meg Smith Theater, located inside Eaton Conservation Hall,

from 6:30-7:30 p.m. with an opportunity for questions and answers. 

The event is open to the public and all Conservancy members are encouraged to attend.

We will also be serving free wine, beer and food throughout the evening.

The lecture series frequently sells out. We encourage you to reserve your seat quickly.

To attend, please pre-register for the event by emailing Kelsey Hudson at kelseyh@conservancy.org or by calling 239.403.4228.

The Evenings at the Conservancy lecture series is sponsored by Arthrex and Vi at Bentley Village.

Members: FREE
General Admission: $10

Don’t miss these future Evenings lectures:

May 12
Conservancy Director of Natural Resource Policy Jennifer Hecker – “Oil Drilling and Water”

Conservancy of Southwest Florida – 1495 Smith Preserve Way,
Naples, FL 34102 – (239) 262-0304

DEP Expands Visitor Services at John U. Lloyd Beach State Park

HOLLYWOOD, Fla. – The Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s Florida Park Service is pleased to announce that BG John U. Lloyd, LLC,

the new concessionaire at John U. Lloyd Beach State Park, is offering food, beverages and ice at the newly-named Whiskey Creek Hideout restaurant.

By July 2015, BG John U. Lloyd, LLC plans to expand its services to include additional items on the menu,

a gift shop, recreational equipment rental, boat tours and special event planning, such as family reunions, weddings and corporate events.

“Visitors frequently request onsite services at this busy park,” said Donald Forgione, director of the Florida Park Service. 

“This agreement with BG John U. Lloyd, LLC enables the park to provide a spectrum of services to meet the needs of the thousands of visitors who visit the park each year.”

In fiscal year 2013-14, there were 557,421 visitors to the park, generating more than $42 million in direct economic impact.

BG John U. Lloyd, LLC expects this new agreement will support approximately 25 private sector jobs by July 2015.

nataliarodriguez2015|April.7.2015

Oppose Turkey Point Nuclear Expansion and Help Protect Biscayne! ‏

Join NPCA in our efforts to prevent two new nuclear reactors from harming Biscayne National Park.

If expanded, Florida Power & Light’s Turkey Point Power Plant would become one of the largest nuclear generating facilities in the country.

Located directly on the shores of Biscayne National Park, our country’s largest marine national park,

the expansion of Turkey Point could pose serious environmental and public health threats.

Turkey Point’s current operations already impact Biscayne Bay’s marine habitat and salinity, which are vital for the health and productivity of the bay.

Expanding the power plant would only intensify these negative impacts.

NPCA needs you voice at upcoming public meetings to tell the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to deny

the proposed plan to expand Turkey Point to protect our national parks, water supply, and public health.

Event Details

WHAT: Public meetings to discuss the proposed expansion of Turkey Point Power Plant

WHEN & WHERE:

Wednesday, April 22, 7 – 10 p.m.

Florida International University, Stadium Club Room, FIU Stadium, 11200 S.W. 8th St., Miami, FL 33196

Thursday, April 23, 7 – 10 p.m.

Hampton Inn and Suites, Miami-South/Homestead, Reef Room, 2855 N.E. 9th St., Homestead, FL 33033

WHO: The meetings will be hosted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

CONTACT: No RSVP is required.

Contact Caroline McLaughlin, 954.961.1280, ext. 403, with any questions or for additional information.

We hope you will join us in our efforts to protect Biscayne National Park.

Caroline McLaughlin|Biscayne Program Analyst

Earth Day Countdown: It’s Our Turn to Lead ‏

To commemorate the 45th anniversary of Earth Day on April 22, check out all the events and programs that drive our movement forward

Event Registry: What are you doing on Earth Day? Register your Earth Day event and search for events in your area! Almost 1,000 events have been registered

Green Cities:  EDN is calling on cities and their leaders to go 100% renewable by 2050. 

Climate Petition:  EDN has joined with other organizations in the promoting the largest climate petition ever, calling on all citizens to keep global temperature under the unacceptably dangerous rise level of 2°C.

Climate Education Week April 18-25:  Check out the free online Climate Education Toolkit for K-12 students around the globe.

MobilizeU: A higher-ed campaign led by concerned college and university students and administrators acting on climate. 

Faith Based Earth Day: Faith leaders as driving forces behind spiritually based care for our planet. EDN ‘s online and social media tools inspire congregations.

A Billion Acts of Green: This campaign inspires and rewards acts that reduce carbon emissions.

Over 1 billion acts have been registered. EDN aims to reach 2 billion Acts of Green by December 2015 and deliver this accomplishment at COP21 Paris.

Global Citizen 2015 Earth Day: Earth Day Network and The Global Poverty Project have joined forces for Global Citizen 2015 Earth Day, a free event on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, April 18, 2015. 

Global Citizen 2015 Earth Day will be headlined by No Doubt, Usher, Fall Out Boy, Mary J. Blige, Train, and My Morning Jacket, with special guests Common and D’Banj.

The Canopy Project: a campaign that plants trees that help communities – especially the world’s impoverished communities – sustain themselves and their local economies.  

The Sevenly Earth Day Collection: EDN has partnered with social enterprise Sevenly for this year’s official Earth Day apparel.

For every item purchased, 7 trees will be planted.

Make sure to place your order by April 13 to receive your items by Earth Day. Pick your design, pick your product, and wear how you care!

The Earth Day Network Team

1616 P Street NW STE 340

Washington, DC 20036

202-518-0044

info@earthday.net

Nuclear Regulatory Commission Public Hearing on FPL’s Proposed Turkey Point Reactors
April 22-23, 2015
Miami and Homestead, Florida
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is taking public comment on the draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for FPL’s licensing application to build two costly,

water-intensive new nuclear reactors at their existing Turkey Point plant in Miami-Dade County near Homestead, about 25 miles south of Miami.

Please attend one of the public hearings to voice your concerns.

This is likely the last opportunity before a final EIS is issued for this project that, if built, will impact surrounding communities, the Everglades, Biscayne Bay,

local water and land resources and your utility bills. These reactors are not the answer to Florida’s energy needs.

In the face of climate change, we need real solutions now.

Clean, safe, and affordable renewable energy along with energy efficiency and conservation will not endanger our health, environment, or future.

View our talking points on clean energy solutions and visit our website. For information from the NRC, click here.

Can’t attend any of the hearings? Please send in your comments on the draft EIS by May 22, 2015 by:

Mail: Cindy Bladey, Office of Administration
Mail Stop: OWFN 12 H8 U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Washington, DC 20555–000

E-mail: TurkeyPoint.COLEIS@nrc.gov

Details and hearing locations below.

Hearing in Miami, Florida

When: Wednesday, April 22, 7:00 – 10:00 p.m.

Where: Florida International University
Stadium Club Room
FUI Stadium
11200 S.W. 8th Street
Miami, FL 33196

More information here.

Hearings in Homestead, Florida

When: Thursday, April 23
First Session: 1:30-4:30 p.m.
Second Session: 7:00 – 10:00 p.m.

Where: Hampton Inn and Suites
Miami-South/Homestead
Reef Room
2855 N.E. 9th Street
Homestead, Florida 33033

More information here.

Questions? Contact Sara Barczak, sara@cleanenergy.org

Of Interest to All

HB 7003 and SB 918 House and Senate Water Bills

The Senate Environmental Preservation and Conservation Committee amended SB 918 to include the offensive Lake Okeechobee water quality program changes from HB 7003. Audubon now accepts that that it is likely that a final bill will include repeal of the requirement that discharges into Lake Okeechobee meet water quality standards. 

Agency leaders are united with sugar growers and Lake Okeechobee watershed agricultural landowners in concern that the requirement to meet water quality standards leaves the South Florida Water Management District vulnerable to litigation. They believe that the recently adopted Basin Management Action Plan’s projection of reducing 1/3 of the phosphorous entering the lake is enough. 

Audubon’s Eric Draper presented the committee with maps showing the structures that are discharging stormwater from as far away as the Orlando suburbs. Committee members seemed shocked to hear that along with the 1/3 phosphorous reduction that little of the 600,000 tons of nitrogen coming into the lake and being released to coastal estuaries is going to be reduced under the state’s plan. Audubon is now proposing that the Senate bill be amended to include deadlines for meeting the nutrient reduction targets.

Alligators, crocodiles get active this time of year

As spring weather replaces cold winter, Florida’s alligators and crocodiles become active. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) once again reminds state residents and visitors to be cautious when having fun in and around water.

Florida is home to two native crocodilians: the American alligator, which is found in all 67 counties; and the American crocodile, which may be found in coastal areas of the Keys and in southeast and southwest Florida. Both species have shared Florida’s waters with people for centuries.

The FWC recommends keeping pets away from the water. There are other precautionary measures people should take to reduce the chances of conflicts with alligators and crocodiles, and they are available in the Living with Alligators brochure at MyFWC.com/Alligator and the Living with Crocodiles brochure at MyFWC.com/Crocodile.

The FWC advises people who have concerns with an alligator or crocodile posing a threat to people, pets or property, to call the FWC’s Nuisance Alligator Hotline at 866-FWC-GATOR (392-4286).

Alligators and crocodiles are an important part of Florida’s heritage and play a valuable role in the habitats where they live. For more information on alligators and crocodiles, visit www.MyFWC.com/Alligator

Six Greenpeace Activists Climb, Camp Out on Shell Oil Rig Headed for Arctic

In the middle of the Pacific Ocean this Monday, six Greenpeace protesters from six countries — including the United States, Australia, Germany and Sweden — used rubber boats and climbing equipment to board the 400-foot Polar Pioneer oil rig that Royal Dutch Shell is sending to drill in Alaska’s icy waters.

The organization says its activists will not interfere with the drilling but will stay as long as they can, “determined to shine a white hot light on Shell’s reckless hunt for extreme Arctic oil. With them in spirit are millions of people from around the world who have joined the call for a global sanctuary in the Arctic.”

The Greenpeace action comes just after the Obama administration last week upheld a 2008 Bush-era lease of Arctic drilling rights to the multinational oil company (following a lawsuit by the Center for Biological Diversity and allies that had forced the feds to re-analyze the environmental impacts of the sale). We’re still waiting for a court decision on our challenge to Shell’s oil-spill plan — and we’ve filed another lawsuit challenging the Fish and Wildlife Service’s authorization for Shell to harass, and possibly harm, walruses in the Chukchi Sea this coming summer.

Read about the protest at U.S. News & World Report and follow the Greenpeace blog.

USDA invests in critical dam rehabilitation and assessment projects in 23 States

New assessments to focus on expanding water supply in drought-affected areas

WASHINGTON, April 9, 2015 – Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced today $73 million to be invested this year to rehabilitate and assess dams across the nation to ensure this critical infrastructure is protecting Americans from harm, securing public health and expanding water supplies in drought affected areas.  About 150 projects and assessments in 23 states will be funded.  

“Millions of people depend on watersheds and dams for protection from floods and to provide safe drinking water.  With a changing and shifting climate, dams are also vital to holding stores of water for use during drought,” Secretary Vilsack said. “By investing in this critical infrastructure, we are helping to ensure a safe, resilient environment for agricultural producers and residents of rural America.”

USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Assistant Chief Kirk Hanlin highlighted this round of watershed rehabilitation funding on Thursday near Alpine, Utah, where work is planned on Tibble Fork Dam to increase the water supply and improve flood damage protection for surrounding communities. This project is one of 19 in Utah that will receive nearly $30 million in overall funding.

Last year, NRCS made changes to the watershed rehabilitation program to allow for projects that also help increase water supply. Half of this year’s dam assessments, including 15 in drought-stricken California, will assess the feasibility of using watershed rehabilitation funds to mitigate drought.

“USDA continues to look for new ways to mitigate the impacts of drought across the West, and this change to the Watershed Rehabilitation Program allows us to use existing infrastructure to address water quantity issues,” Hanlin said.

This investment follows the Obama Administration’s call last year for federal agencies to increase investments in infrastructure to accelerate economic growth, create jobs and improve the competitiveness of the American economy.

There are nearly 12,000 dams across the United States.  In addition to nearly 50 rehabilitation projects, NRCS is conducting 100 dam assessments in 13 states through the Watershed Rehabilitation Program.

2015 projects include:

1. Tibble Fork Dam, Utah: Tibble Fork Dam is located in the American Fork-Dry Creek Watershed within US Forest Service lands of Utah County, Utah. The dam provides protection against flooding within American Fork Canyon, and the communities of Cedar Hills, American Fork, Highland and Pleasant Grove.  The rehabilitation project is expected to provide average annual benefits of $535,000 including water supply, recreation and flood protection.

2. Trinity River-East Fork above Lavon, Texas: Located in Collin County, this dam provides protection against flooding to an estimated 1,630 Texans who live and work downstream.  Additionally, it protects six city streets and one U.S. Highway that together support over 39,000 vehicles daily.  Among other critical infrastructure, the dam also protects power lines, water lines and fiber optic cables.  The rehabilitation project is expected to annually provide about $1.5 million flood damage reduction benefits.

3. Delaney Multipurpose Complex Dam, Mass.: The Delaney Multipurpose Complex consists of two dams, the Delaney Dam and the East Bolton Dam. Originally built in 1971, the Delaney Complex does not meet current dam safety criteria. Dam failure would result in damages to 272 buildings, nine roads, two bridges, other public infrastructure, public utilities and potential loss of life. The dam currently provides $382,130 in annual flood protection benefits to the downstream communities including recreational opportunities, water supply for irrigation, groundwater recharge and base flow for downstream wastewater assimilation.

The states and numbers of projects: Ala. (11), Calif. (15), Colo. (2), Ga. (4), Kan. (1), Ky. (1), La. (1), Mass. (1), Minn. (7), Miss. (2), Neb. (8), Nev. (1), N.C. (8), Ohio (3), Okla. (18), Ore. (4), Pa. (12), S.C. (4), Texas (26), Utah (19), Va. (3), W.Va. (1) and Wyo. (1)

See a full list of projects.

Watershed projects across the nation provide an estimated $2.2 billion in annual benefits in reduced flooding and erosion damages, as well as improved recreation, water supplies and wildlife habitat for an estimated 47 million Americans.

For more information on NRCS conservation assistance, visit www.nrcs.usda.gov/GetStarted or a local USDA service center.

Ciji Taylor|April 9, 2015

Victory for phase-out of lead ammunition ‏

The California Fish and Game Commission passed the regulations to phase-out lead ammunition at today’s hearing.

Today’s decision implements Assembly Bill 711, which Audubon California co-sponsored in 2013 with Defenders of Wildlife and the Humane Society of the United States.

The vote was unanimous and a great victory for vulnerable birds like the California Condor and the Golden Eagle. California is the first state to commit to protecting wildlife by phasing out lead.

[Let’s hope more states follow suit.]

EPA issues order to stop the sale of OxiTitan ‏

EPA Takes Action to Protect the Public from an Unregistered Pesticide 

ATLANTA – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued an order to EcoActive Surfaces, Inc. in Pompano Beach, Fla.; WellShield, LLC in Boca Raton, Fla.; and, BioRelief, Inc. in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. to stop the sale, use or removal of “OxiTitan.” The order includes other trade names such as “Bio Defender OxiTitan Anti-Microbial Treatment,” and any related products containing the same formulation. OxiTitan is being marketed by these companies for use in sites that include hospitals and schools.

The companies claim in advertisements and labeling that OxiTitan uses zinc nanoparticle as an active ingredient, to reduce and/or kill bacteria, viruses and fungi. The companies also make unsubstantiated efficacy claims that “OxiTitan” can last for 24 hours, 7 days a week, and as long as a year against harmful microorganisms and viruses when applied. Such public health claims can only be made on products that have been properly tested and are registered with the EPA.

Under federal pesticide law, products that contain a pesticide as an active ingredient or claim to kill or repel bacteria or germs are considered pesticides and must be registered with the EPA prior to distribution or sale. The Agency will not register a pesticide until it has been determined that it will not pose an unreasonable risk when used according to the label directions.

The EPA is committed to ensuring that products making public health claims in the marketplace meet stringent effectiveness and safety standards, since the public cannot readily determine with the naked eye the effectiveness and safety of antimicrobial pesticides. Due to potential human health implications if the pesticides are not effective or meet our safety standards, the EPA continues to place a priority on actions regarding non-complying pesticides.

For additional information about pesticides, visit: http://www.epa.gov/pesticides/.

Contact Information: Dawn Harris Young|FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE|April 9, 2015

Maryland Passes 2.5 Year Fracking Ban

Today, the Maryland House of Delegates passed legislation, voting 102 – 34, that would prohibit fracking permits in the state until October 2017. The bill will head to Republican Gov. Larry Hogan’s desk in the coming days.

Earlier this week, the Maryland State Senate passed the legislation, voting 45-2, to prohibit fracking permits in the in the state. The governor’s position on the bill is unknown, but the Senate and House passed the bill with a veto-proof majority.

“After months of campaigning, a bill that prohibits fracking for two and a half years passed overwhelmingly in the Maryland legislature today,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. “This is a testament to the growing movement to protect our communities from the dangers of fracking. Conventional wisdom in the state was that we could never get a moratorium passed in Maryland, just as we were also told we could never get a ban in New York. But naysaying just inspired us all to work harder in bringing the voice of the people to Annapolis in this grassroots initiative. Now it is time for Governor Hogan to heed the call of the people and sign the bill that gives Marylanders more time to examine the impacts of fracking.”

Business owners in Western Maryland have expressed concern that fracking would greatly impact the booming tourism industry in that part of the state. More than 100 Western Maryland business owners signed a letter to the leadership of the General Assembly in support of the fracking moratorium.

“Maryland’s more sustainable businesses, like farming, tourism and restaurants would be devastated by fracking,” said Eric Robison, owner of Eagle Rock Construction, LLC and president of Save Western Maryland. “We don’t need a short term boom and bust economy, we need to maintain a strong economic foundation for future generations.”

Don’t Frack Maryland has sent more than 25,000 messages supporting a moratorium. Letters signed by more than 100 health professionals, and more than 50 restaurant owners, chefs, winemakers and farmers from across the state have also been delivered to the General Assembly. And last night, the Friendsville Town Council, whose city is the center of a thriving white-water rafting industry in the state, sent a letter supporting a moratorium to President Miller, urging him to encourage a vote in the Senate.

Earlier this week, actor and Maryland native Edward Norton lent his support to the Maryland fracking moratorium in a radio ad. The ad, paid for by Food & Water Watch, features Norton speaking out about how fracking could harm Maryland’s environment and public health, as well as tourism in the state.

Polling has also shown that a clear majority of Marylanders oppose fracking and support action from the General Assembly to prevent drilling in the state.

“This moratorium will give legislators more time to evaluate the public health, economic and societal dangers of fracking, and give our communities statutory protections against drilling in the meantime,” said Dr. Ann Bristow, a commissioner on Governor O’Malley’s Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission, on behalf of the Don’t Frack Maryland campaign.

According to Food & Water Watch, more than 425 peer-reviewed scientific studies on the effects of shale gas development now exist, and 75 percent of those have been published since January 2013. Of the 49 studies that investigated the health effects of fracking, 47—more than 96 percent—found risks or adverse health outcomes.

Stefanie Spear|April 10, 2015

Calls to Action

1. We Can End Arctic Drilling Plans–For Good – here
2. Tell the EPA to Fight Fracking Now – here
3. Save New Whale Species from Extinction – here
4. Stop the destruction of our forests – here
5. Mining industry on track to destroy Sacred Lands – here
6. Stop Proposed Massive Klamath Salvage Timber Sale – here
7. Tell Confluence Partners to keep their hands off the Grand Canyon – here
8. Ban Fracking in Florida – here

Birds and Butterflies

The Annual Monarch Migration Is Underway!

Here’s How to Track It. 

Migration mysteries continue as songbirds return

It was like finding a needle in a haystack — if the haystack could be anywhere in about 17 countries.

A Golden-winged Warbler captured by Michigan Technological University bird researcher Amber Roth Jan. 25 had a small, silver band around its tiny leg. From its markings Roth learned the bird had been banded by a Rockford University researcher at a forest preserve in Illinois last Sept. 2. Roth at the time was at a private reserve created for Golden-winged Warblers on a coffee plantation in northern Nicaragua.

It’s believed to be the first time an individual Golden-Wing Warbler was observed on both ends of its annual fall migration, Roth said.

The bird was fitted with a geolocator — a data-collecting chip the small bird wears like a backpack — that records its location daily by measuring the earth’s rotation in relation to the sun. Researchers hope to learn more about exactly how the warbler makes its annual jaunt.

It’s one of about 5 billion migratory birds that every fall leave areas of North America, including Michigan, for an arduous journey of up to 3,500 miles or more, to winter homes in Central or South America. And right about now is when most start making their return to Michigan.

“You go outside, you can hear the robins that have moved back into the area. I’ve even heard killdeer,” said Don Burlett, president of the Oakland Audubon Society.

“In the next few weeks, birds will start pouring back into this area. It’s a bird-watcher’s favorite time of the year.”

But much about how the birds make that journey is still unknown, Roth said. For example, researchers believe some of the birds fly across large water bodies like the Great Lakes or Gulf of Mexico, while others of the same species will fly along the edge of the lakes and not risk it.

“You think about hummingbirds, warblers, little sparrows — all not very big — having to make that long water crossing, and not having many exits if something goes bad,” Roth said.

“Bird migration is still one of those fun mysteries we have. We have pieces of the puzzle, but we still don’t know what exactly goes on. With many of the birds, we don’t know the migratory paths they are taking.”
Golden-winged Warbler

The Golden-winged Warbler, a grayish, chickadee sized songbird colored black at its throat and around its eyes, with yellow patches on its crown and wings, has seen huge declines in its population over the past half-century. It spends its summers in the Midwestern U.S. — including Michigan — and surrounding areas of Canada, laying its eggs and raising its young. But every fall, the little bird makes a migration of up to 3,500 miles, to its winter home in Central or South America.

The bird’s twice-a-year migratory journeys remain a mystery, Roth said, because the birds are just so small — about 5 inches and weighing less than a half-ounce — nothing more than a simple geolocator chip can be attached to them. And that doesn’t transmit; the bird must be captured at some time in the future to retrieve data about where it’s been.

The bird seems to face particular risk during its migration, leading researchers to suspect loss of suitable stopover habitat as a factor — rest stops along the migratory way, Roth said.

“They need stopover habitat where they can find enough food to make the next leg of their journey — especially when they are going to be flying over water,” she said.

Bird migration researcher Frank Moore’s students from the University of Southern Mississippi have spent recent days along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, banding birds making the trip back to the U.S. and Canada. The birds tend to migrate at night, he said. Why is an interesting question.

“Birds likely have more than one compass,” he said. “They can use the stars to help find direction. The Earth’s magnetic field is thought to play a role in their ability to determine south from north, east from west. Even polarized light — something you and I can’t see — migratory birds are sensitive to.”

The warblers are highly susceptible to death from flying into the guide wires of large communication towers and the windows of tall buildings, Roth said.
Stopover habit
To understand why stopover habitat is important, imagine a Golden-winged Warbler on its trip back to Michigan from its winter grounds, Roth said.

“He’s probably on his way back from Nicaragua now,” she said. “He’s going to go to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, rest, and then make the trip across the Gulf of Mexico.”

The bird seeks open woodlands. But that’s not what it finds on key portions of its migratory flight.

“What’s the first thing he encounters on the north shore of the Gulf?” Roth said. “Oil refineries. Coastal development. Houses, beach resorts. His choice is, ‘Do I land in somebody’s backyard or at the oil refinery? Or do I keep f lying inward to find a place to stop and rest and feed for a few days?’” Areas such as the Ozark and Appalachian mountain ranges provide appropriate forest. But then, in the Midwest, the warblers encounter “nothing but agriculture,” Roth said.

KEITH MATHENY|Detroit Free Press|MICHIGAN.COM

Miami Blue Comeback

The Miami Blue butterfly, which appears on the Save Wild Florida license tag, is a small, brightly colored butterfly found only in Florida.

Not long ago, the Miami Blue, once flying across the entire southern half of Florida, teetered on the verge of extinction. Insecticide use in South Florida, as well as destruction of roadside vegetation, natural disasters and an invasive species of fire ant devastated the Miami Blue butterfly population, which, at its lowest point, dwindled to 35 individuals.

Because of timely and decisive efforts on behalf of the State of Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission through the Florida Museum of Natural History and the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity, the Miami Blue population was successfully restored through breeding and re-release. From 35 individuals, the beautiful and rare Miami Blue butterfly has been returned to South Florida by captively bred individuals in the thousands.

In 2006 alone, wildlife watchers spent $3.1 billion on wildlife-watching activities in Florida, not including hunting, fishing, and boating. The Miami Blue butterfly is one of many of Florida’s unique natural attractions. Despite its recent comeback, the butterfly is still listed as endangered in the state of Florida.

from: www.floridabiodiversityfoundation.com/Miami%20Blue%20Page/Miami%20Blue.html

Bird Slaughter Imminent

Federal sharpshooters are planning to slaughter more than 11,000 Double-crested Cormorants — 15% of the entire western North American cormorant population. Cormorants will be shot out of the sky with shotguns as they search for prey, or shot with rifles at close range as the birds tend to their nests.

The killing could start any day. Audubon is fighting this tooth and nail.

It’s a misguided effort to boost endangered salmon numbers in the Columbia River region of Oregon. There is no question that endangered salmon need a boost, but killing cormorants won’t do much to help the fish. And it will devastate the birds by dropping their numbers to levels the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has said are unsustainable.

The cormorants live and nest on East Sand Island, a globally-significant Important Bird Area (IBA) in the Columbia River estuary. It is currently the largest breeding colony of cormorants west of the Rockies, and this action could destabilize the entire population.

The birds do eat some salmon, but that’s not why the fish are in trouble. The real culprits are dams, pollution, habitat loss, and an array of other factors that the government has failed to address.

The cormorants are nothing more than scapegoats for a dysfunctional river system.

Members of the Audubon Society of Portland are leading efforts on the ground to protect the birds. With your help we’re:

• Mobilizing members nationwide to pressure the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to reconsider their plan to kill 11,000 cormorants — and pour lethal oil onto 26,000 nests to kill the eggs;
• Using news media and the Internet to keep the public spotlight on the planned slaughter; and

Double-crested Cormorants in western North America have been struggling for decades. Their population is well below historical levels and the recent abandonment of the second largest breeding colony in the West, at California’s Salton Sea, underscores the peril.

You are the last best hope to stop this wanton slaughter.

We need your help to fight this unconscionable attack on these beautiful birds.

Thank you for all you do.

David Yarnold|President and CEO|National Audubon Society

From Many, One: How Many Species of Redpolls Are There?

The Hoary Redpoll is one of those hard-to-get lifelist-adds that can turn birders into Captain Ahab seeking a little whitish bird. The allure of these little ghost finches has drawn many a lister to places like Minnesota’s Sax-Zim bog—in the dead of winter—just for a chance to lock into a Hoary.

But new research by two scientists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology presents genetic evidence that reopens questions about the species status of the Hoary Redpoll, long thought to be the frosty cousin of the Common Redpoll. In a paper published this week in the journal Molecular Ecology, Nicholas Mason and Scott Taylor of the Cornell Lab’s Fuller Evolutionary Biology Program show that Hoary Redpolls and Common Redpolls have no differences at all across much of their genomes.

“Based on the samples of DNA we examined for Common and Hoary Redpoll, they’re probably best treated as a single species,” Mason says.

In other words, should this new evidence similarly sway the American Ornithologists’ Union’s checklist committee, all the heroic efforts birders have made to add a Hoary to their life lists may be for naught.

The division of redpolls into different species dates back to before the Civil War. In 1861, legendary ornithologist Elliot Coues (one of the founding fathers of the AOU) described eight separate redpoll species based on their visual appearances. Over time the AOU consolidated Coues’ list, but Hoary Redpoll, which has a snow-white breast, was still considered a separate species from Common Redpoll, which has a brown-streaked breast.

The researchers compared the DNA of 77 redpolls. The evolutionary tree they reconstructed shows that the three redpolls intermixed extensively in their evolutionary past. If they were separate species the branches of the tree would be much more distinct, as shown for their close relative, the White-winged Crossbill. Adapted with permission from Mason and Taylor 2015, Molecular Ecology; White-winged Crossbill by Nick Saunders via Birdshare.

Mason and Taylor looked beyond the plumage into strands of the birds’ DNA in the most extensive look ever at the redpoll genome. Whereas previous genetic analyses of redpolls looked at just 11 regions of the genome (at most), Mason and Taylor examined 235,000 regions. (That impressive number is a testament to the exponential advances in DNA-sequencing technology, but the researchers are quick to note it’s still less than 1% of the total genome.)

In all, the duo compared DNA from 77 redpolls, including specimens from museums around the world, from the Museum of Vertebrates at Cornell University to the Natural History Museum of Geneva in Switzerland. They found no DNA variation that distinguishes Hoary Redpolls from Common Redpolls. Furthermore, another redpoll species found in Europe—the Lesser Redpoll—also had extremely similar DNA sequences. This extreme similarity among all the redpolls stands in marked contrast to studies of other groups of birds—such as Black-capped and Carolina Chickadees—which show differences at many regions of the genome.

In nature, one of the key differentiators among distinct species is assortative mating, that is, members of a group breeding with each other more often than they breed with members of another group. According to Mason, when it comes to Hoary, Common, and Lesser Redpolls, “There are no clear-cut genetic differences, which is what we would expect to see if assortative mating had been occurring for a long time.”

The three current species of redpoll—Common, Hoary, and Lesser—stretch around the Arctic in a continuous swath that isn’t necessarily apparent from a normal map projection. Adapted with permission from Mason and Taylor 2015, Molecular Ecology.

Instead, Mason says the world’s three redpoll species seem to be “functioning as members of a single gene pool that wraps around the top of the globe.”

But how could it be that Hoary and Common Redpolls look so different given that their genetic makeup is basically the same? For that answer, Mason and Taylor delved into the birds’ RNA. (A quick flashback to high-school biology: If DNA is like the body’s blueprints, RNA is like the construction foreman communicating the instructions to build physical features, like hair or feathers.)

The physical differences among redpolls are associated with patterns in their RNA, not their DNA. In other words, the variation we see in plumage and size is probably not a matter of genetic variation, but of genetic expression. It’s kind of like how two humans might have the same gene for brown hair, but one person’s might be lighter than the other’s—that gene is being expressed differently. In the same way, Hoary and Common Redpolls have remarkably similar sets of genes, but those genes are expressed differently, causing the plumage and bill-shape differences we see.

To look simultaneously at both DNA and RNA, Mason and Taylor sampled birds—some with highly streaked plumage, some with white plumage, and some with in-between markings— from a large flock that had gathered in a fellow Cornell Lab employee’s backyard in Cortland, New York. If Hoary and Common Redpolls had long been separate species, then the birds sampled should have mostly fit neatly into two categories, both by visual appearance and genetically. Instead, there were a few birds that definitely fit the visual description of what we call a Common Redpoll, a few birds that definitely fit the pattern for a Hoary Redpoll, and a lot of birds in the middle—with varying degrees of whitish breast and faint brown streaks.

“We didn’t find distinct characteristics to separate the redpoll types, but rather a continuum, or a progression, of physical traits,” Mason says. “And many redpolls were somewhere in the middle.”

Next, Mason and Taylor are planning to work their research into an official proposal for the AOU to lump Hoary, Common, and Lesser Redpolls into a single species, based on the genetic evidence. If accepted by the AOU’s Nomenclature Committee, the end result may sting for birders who see a Hoary Redpoll subtracted from their life list. But Taylor hopes his research will change the way people look at redpolls altogether.

“I think this makes them a more interesting bird,” he says. “It means they’re part of an exciting, complicated system that can make a single species look different across different parts of its range.”

Posted by victoria|March 30th, 2015|Written by|Gustave Axelson

Monsanto Donates $4Mln to Save Monarch Butterflies

After Monsanto Co.’s weed killer Roundup caused the decimation of the monarch butterfly population, the agribusiness giant announced it will commit $4 million to help stem the decline of the iconic creatures.

Monsanto said it will donate $3.6 million to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s Monarch Butterfly Conservation Fund.

The company also will pledge $400,000 to aid experts and groups working on the butterfly’s behalf.

Environmentalists and scientists say the species has experienced a 90 percent decline in population. Most of the decline is blamed on habitat destruction, due in part to weed killers and herbicide-resistant plants like those Monsanto and other agribusinesses offer.

Orange-and-black spotted monarchs – renowned for migrating thousands of miles over many generations from Mexico, across the United States to Canada, and then back again – have seen their numbers fall dramatically in recent years.

The monarch population has plunged from 1 billion butterflies in 1997 to 56.5 million, the second-lowest number ever recorded, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

The environmental group sued the EPA for failing to heed warnings about the dangers to monarchs posed by glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup and other herbicides.

The application of glyphosate to farm fields has destroyed the milkweed habitat that migrating monarchs rely on, the suit states.

Read more 

How to Stop 1 Billion Birds From Flying Into Windows and Buildings

A billion birds a year are accidentally flying into windows and buildings. The problem is particularly bad in the spring and fall, when birds are migrating across continents and hemispheres rather than staying put. Though birds have developed their migratory routes over thousands of years, evolution hasn’t prepared them for one particular obstacle: tall glass buildings.

Smaller birds are especially prone to crashing into glass windows and walls. When they’re flying, the birds get thrown off by lights left on inside buildings or get disoriented by smooth, transparent glass surfaces. They can slam right into a window and die upon impact.  Crews of volunteers in cities like Washington, D.C. have started monitoring fatalities by taking to the streets before dawn to collect and count all the dead birds they find on the sidewalk.

Fortunately, animal-friendly architects are starting to come to the birds’ rescue by designing structures to be less attractive to birds. For example, designers from the firm Kieran Timberlake built the new U.S. Embassy in London with an outer envelop that prevents birds from flying into the glass. The Aqua Tower in Chicago features wavy balconies to minimize its reflective surface and instead, provide places for birds to perch. In many cities around the world, citizens groups are trying to persuade building managers to adopt a “lights off” policy at night so that the birds won’t be attracted to the artificial night light.

At Swarthmore College, architects are installing “fritted” panes of glass in a new $71 million science building. The panes use small dots of opaque glass to impart a semi-frosted look, which hopefully will dissuade birds in flight. In Europe, some buildings may try using glass that looks opaque from just one side or that enables glass to easily switch from transparent to translucent.

If you’d like to make sure birds bypass your windows rather than crash land, you can do the following:

* Position bird feeders away from glass windows, so that birds won’t see a bird feeder reflected in the glass and aim for it instead of the actual feeder.

* Pull blinds or shades down in front of sunny windows to reduce reflections. This will also help keep the shaded room cooler during hot months.

* Plant trees where they can obscure glass somewhat and make bird strikes less likely.

* Install a slatted fixed screen like the one shown on Houzz.com. The slats eliminate glass reflections without impacting the view too much, and also help keep the building cool.

* If you’re building a home, angle the glass on walls or big picture windows so the glass reflects the ground, rather than the immediate surroundings.

* Use bird-safe glass. Ornilux bird-safe glass, invented by a German company, is embedded with a special layer that reflects a UV spectrum that birds can see but people cannot. The technology is similar to that found in spider webs, whose silky strands work similarly (and which is why birds don’t fly into webs).

* Use a patterned window film that allows light to enter a room, but will repel birds.

* During spring and fall migrations, affix temporary tape strips to your windows. ABC Bird Tape has been designed specifically for this purpose.

* Skip the decals. Bird specialists say putting decals on your windows doesn’t really work, since they don’t break up enough of the reflection from a whole pane of glass.

Diane MacEachern|April 7, 2015

Turn Your Yard into a Hummingbird Spectacular

Make smart plant choices and, with a little bit of work, your backyard can host these tiny miracles (and help scientists save them).

For creatures that weigh barely more than a penny, hummingbirds certainly give you your money’s worth—through their metallic colors, feats of aerobatics, and pugnacious, outsized personalities.

But for all their popularity, there is a lot that science still doesn’t know about the lives of even the most widespread hummingbird species. For example, what proportion of ruby-throats fly directly across the Gulf of Mexico twice a year, a nonstop trip of about 500 miles, instead of detouring around it? And why are many rufous and other western species of hummers expanding their winter range into the East and Southeast? (See “Rufous Hummingbirds Turning Up in Unusual Places,” March-April 2010.)

Climate change also poses serious threats. “Scientists are finding disturbing changes to blooming times of flowers and also to arrival times of hummingbirds,” says Gary Langham, Audubon’s chief scientist. “The potential mismatch of nectar sources and hummingbirds means we must monitor this closely and be thoughtful about what we plant in our yards and communities.”

Fortunately, it’s easy to make your yard a hummingbird haven even as you help scientists learn more about these feathered jewels.

Build a Habitat

Hummingbirds are attracted to flowering plants (see below), but they need more than just nectar. To draw hummers, create a complex, varied backyard with staggered blooms that also includes feeders, perches (dead saplings “planted” in the ground work well), a natural abundance of insects, and places to hide when predators are near. Avoid using toxic garden chemicals—after all, as much as 60 percent of a hummingbird’s diet is actually made up of tiny insects, spiders, and other arthropods, so the birds are providing some natural pest control. The hummingbirds will also appreciate a water mister that creates a fine spray in which they can bathe.

Feed ’em Right

Choose a hummingbird feeder that comes apart completely for regular scrubbing, inside and out, with a bottlebrush and hot water. Use only a mix of four parts water to one part plain white sugar—never use honey, which promotes dangerous fungal growth, molasses, or brown, raw, or organic sugar, which contain levels of iron that could be lethal. Plain white sugar perfectly mimics the chemical composition of natural nectar; don’t waste money on commercial mixes. It’s not necessary to boil the water, but keep any extra nectar refrigerated, and empty the feeder every few days, more often in hot weather. Never use red dye; nectar is naturally clear, and the coloring could be harmful.

Count Their Blessings

You can do your part by getting involved in a newly launched Audubon citizen science project called Hummingbirds at Home, which aims to provide details about which nectar sources hummers are using nationwide—and will give you a chance to explore these amazing, mysterious aerialists. Langham says, “The Hummingbirds at Home project asks people to help us determine what hummingbirds are feeding on in their communities, so we can better understand how to help.” Learn more at Audubon.org/citizenscience.

10 Plants for Hummingbirds

Trumpet creeper (Campsis radicans). A sprawling, aggressive vine, it produces large, bell-shaped blossoms with abundant nectar. Plant it where it can climb a fence or a dead snag.

Carolina jessamine (Gelsemium sempervirens). This vine is a reliable nectar source for rufous and other hummingbirds wintering along the Gulf Coast. But ruby-throats in the Southeast tend to avoid it.

Coralbells (Heuchera hybrids). Long a garden staple, coralbells come in a bewildering number of varieties. The masses of tiny flowers always draw hummingbirds.

Jewelweed/spotted touch-me-not (Impatiens capensis and I. pallida). One of the most important sources of late-summer nectar for migrant ruby-throated hummingbirds.

Scarlet gilia (Ipomopsis aggregata). Comes in shades from white and pink to orangish and purple, but the red form is most attractive to hummers.

Cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis). The quintessential hummingbird plant, this widespread native bears intense red blossoms in summer and early fall.

Trumpet honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens). Unlike the invasive Japanese species, this vine is not aggressive. It has long, tubular flowers (in yellow, orange, and red varieties).

Beebalm (Monarda). Available in a range of cultivars and colors; many native Monardas are also appealing to hummingbirds.

Penstemons. The genus Penstemon includes P. barbatus, which blooms in late summer when rufous hummingbirds are migrating.

Scarlet sage (Salvia coccinea). This tender Southern native is a Salvia, a genus that ranks among the very best for luring hummingbirds.

There’s An App for That

Audubon’s new Hummingbirds at Home project aims to enlist concerned citizens to help scientists understand how climate change, flowering patterns, and feeding by people are affecting hummingbirds. Get the app at Audubon.org/citizenscience.

Scott Weidensaul|May-June 2013

 Florida Panthers 

A Growing State Means Growing Threats for Florida’s Official State Animal

Florida is a pretty incredible place. It has some of the greatest biological diversity – the widest variety of plants and animals – in the entire country, and is home to many species found nowhere else in the world. It’s also home to people – lots of them. In fact, with nearly 20 million residents, Florida recently surpassed New York as the third most populous state in the entire country. The economy has picked up once again and development and road building are accelerating. Florida is also a top travel destination in the world, hosting 93.7 million visitors in 2013, and many visitors return to live in Florida, encouraging the building of more homes and highways. All this places the Sunshine State in the unique position of having both tremendous wildlife diversity and mounting pressure from development.

What’s At Risk

Among the many species threatened by this nonstop development is our state’s official animal, the Florida panther. With just an estimated 100-180 adults left in the wild, the Florida panther is one of the most endangered mammals in the country. Once ranging across the southeastern U.S., today it is restricted to south Florida, in just five percent of its historic home range. The greatest threat to panther survival is the loss of its habitat, which is continually being destroyed, fragmented and degraded. And it isn’t just the buildings, but also the roads that connect them that cause problems. Wide-ranging panthers have to cross dangerous roads and highways in their search for territory, food and mates, and collisions with vehicles take a toll on the small population. Vehicle strikes are the greatest source of human-caused mortality for Florida panthers. In fact, 2014 set a new and tragic record for panthers lost to vehicle collisions, with a total of 25 panthers killed.

 

florida panther, © Florida Fish and Wildlife

The Work Ahead

Fortunately, Florida’s Water and Land Legacy Conservation Amendment was passed by an overwhelming 75% of Florida voters in November. This constitutional amendment (Amendment 1) will set aside an estimated $18 billion over the next 20 years to fund water and land conservation, management and restoration, including protecting important habitat for Florida panthers and other wildlife. It takes a percentage of the existing documentary stamp tax revenues generated by real estate transactions and dedicates them to protecting and restoring important habitat on land and water. This source of funding was used for nearly two decades to fund the land acquisition program and because it is tied to development, the very thing that contributes to habitat destruction is also helping to prevent it.

Defenders is hard at work to make sure that elected officials will put that money to use in the way that the conservation amendment (and the Floridians who voted for it) intended, not on shopping lists of inappropriate projects brought to them by lobbyists. We are working with our members and supporters to remind their elected officials that they knew exactly what they were doing when they voted for the amendment, and that they expect their legislators to carry out the voters’ wishes. Amendment 1 funds could be spent to help secure, manage and restore important habitat and corridors for the panther and its prey, expanding and buffering protected areas, and protecting lands to enable construction of more wildlife crossings.

When the Florida legislature designated the third Saturday in March as Save the Florida Panther Day they said, “it is proper and fitting for all Floridians to pause and reflect on the plight of the Florida panther and the task of preserving this rare component of Florida’s diverse natural resources as a legacy to generations of Floridians yet to come.” If we’re truly going to do that, we need to be planning ways to give these endangered cats more room to roam so that they can remain a viable part of the wild Florida landscape.

Elizabeth Fleming|18 March 2015

[Is there really hope for a critical habitat designation for our Florida panther?]

Panther Pulse page updated

One Year With Yuma: DEP Celebrates Florida Panther Cub

Yuma, a Florida panther, lives at Ellie Schiller Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park.        

Photo by Ralph Bischoff.

HOMOSASSA – Throughout April, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s Florida Park Service will celebrate the first anniversary of Yuma’s arrival at Ellie Schiller Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park. This past weekend, the wildlife park celebrated the anniversary with more than 2,500 visitors who attended the park’s Earth Day Egg-stravaganza.

Park staff will highlight Florida’s Big and Little Cats including Florida panthers and bobcats.

• Park staff will present Yuma during the Wildlife Jeopardy program on Saturday, April 11 from noon to 12:30 p.m. in the Park’s Discovery Center (formerly called the Children’s Education Center). This program is presented by Barbara Cairns.
• The Florida’s Big and Little Cats program will be presented by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission’s panther biologist Jennifer Korn on April 17 at 1 p.m. in the Florida Room of the Visitor Center on US 19.  There is no charge to attend this program.
• The Wildlife Puppeteers will present a puppet show on Saturday, April 25 at 1 p.m. The puppet show is entitled “Yuma, Son of the Chief” and tells the story of our rescued Florida panther and stars Yuma, a Florida panther puppet.
• Visitors have the opportunity to “adopt” Yuma for a $20 donation to the Friends of Homosassa Springs Wildlife Park. The adoption packet includes a certificate, photos of Yuma and his story. Learn more about adoption kits online, here.

Yuma (meaning “Son of the Chief”) arrived at the park on April 3, 2014, as a three-month-old panther kitten. He was found barely alive on Jan. 23, 2014, by Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission biologists who were checking on the den of female panther in the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge in Naples. The kitten had apparently been abandoned and was dehydrated and non-responsive. The kitten received emergency care at Animal Specialty Hospital in Naples and rehabilitative care at Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa. Since he could not be returned to the wild, Yuma has been given a home at Ellie Schiller Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park where he serves as an ambassador for his species.

Now, almost 15 months old, Yuma is a healthy and active panther weighing about 80 pounds. He lives in an 8,500 square foot landscaped habitat with its own rock-bordered pond, bushes, rocks and logs to climb on. He has become a favorite of park visitors who can easily observe him in his habitat from the Wildlife Walk.

nataliarodriguez2015|April 8, 2015

  Invasive species

FWC removal efforts target Nile monitors; public can help

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) is on the lookout for Nile monitor lizards in Palm Beach County and is increasing efforts to locate and remove them. Biologists expect that these lizards will be breeding soon and may be more visible this time of year.

The FWC is surveying canals in the area and distributing fliers requesting the public’s assistance in locating these animals. Helping is easy. Just photograph and report any Nile monitor sightings; reports can greatly assist wildlife managers in directing removal efforts.

The Nile monitor is a species of lizard native to Africa. The color of its body can range from a light yellow to dark olive or brown. Nile monitors have a pattern of light yellow markings on the back, which appear as bands or stripes closer to the head and tail. A typical adult Nile monitor can grow to over 5 feet long and close to 15 pounds. Hatchlings are 7 to 12 inches in length. Nile monitors are semi-aquatic and can be seen basking or foraging near bodies of water. In Palm Beach County, this species is most frequently observed along canal banks near Southern Boulevard.

“Nile monitors eat a wide variety of food items including small mammals, reptiles, fish, amphibians and more,” said biologist Jenny Ketterlin Eckles. “Because their diet is so varied, we are assessing whether this species may have an impact on Florida’s native wildlife.”

Other lizards can easily be mistaken for Nile monitors, including green iguanas, spiny-tailed iguanas, curly-tailed lizards and more.

“Color and pattern variation is pretty common, so the most effective way to verfiy the species is to take a picture of the animal and submit it along with a report of your observation,” said Eckles.

Members of the public are advised not to attempt to capture a Nile monitor themselves. Monitors are not innately aggressive but like any wild animal they may defend themselves if aggravated or threatened.

How you can help:

• Take a picture of any Nile monitor sighting and immediately report it online to IveGot1.org or by phone at 888-Ive-Got1 (888-483-4681).

• If you own land in the identified area where this species lives, allow wildlife managers to survey or set traps on your property.

• Deter monitors from your property by cutting back vegetation, clearing debris and securing small pets.

Learn more about the FWC’s efforts to manage and minimize the impacts of nonnative species on Florida’s fish, wildlife and marine life at MyFWC.com/Nonnatives.

Endangered Species

Bats In Pennsylvania Threatened By White Nose Syndrome

PITTSBURGH (AP) — One of the most common bat species in Pennsylvania is being threatened by white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease that has killed millions of bats of that species and others in North America.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has listed the northern long-eared bat as a “threatened” species, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (http://bit.ly/1Cb0Nh3) reported Monday.

The agency was considering listing the species as “endangered” — a more serious designation — but decided on “threatened” because the bat’s population has not been affected outside areas where the fungal disease has caused problems, the newspaper reported.

The agency is proposing interim rules meant to safeguard the bat’s habitat, including limits on forest timbering. But the rules could also impact the wind energy and natural gas and oil drilling industries.

Lora Zimmerman, a project leader with the Fish and Wildlife Service, said the “threatened” listing in Pennsylvania might seem odd in light of the fact that the long-eared bat’s population in the state is only less than 5 percent of what it was before 2006, when the fungus that produces white-nose syndrome was discovered in a cave in upstate New York. Pennsylvania is an area hard hit by the white-nose syndrome, and the designation “will likely be re-evaluated regularly,” Zimmerman said.

The interim “threatened” listing was announced Thursday in the federal register and takes effect in 30 days along with interim environmental rules. The wildlife agency plans to take 90 days of public comment on those rules, in hopes of finalizing them by year’s end.

The Independent Petroleum Association of American has commented on the bat’s threatened designation, but it may not file comments on the accompanying environmental rules, spokesman Neal Kirby said. He said that’s because the bat’s habitat isn’t affected as much by drilling as it is by the fungus, and other industries, like timbering.

But Michael Gannon, a Penn State University bat expert and member of the Mammal Technical Committee for the Pennsylvania Biological Society, said rules to protect the bats are needed soon. That’s because bats feed on insects and pesticide use might have to increase if the bat population doesn’t rebound. Bats, in general, provide $22 billion worth of ecological services in the United States annually, including $292 million in Pennsylvania, he said.

“Shortsighted individuals that ignore the science and economics and feel protection of this valuable natural resource is not warranted will cost us considerably in the future,” Gannon said.

|04/06/2015

Florida considers first black-bear hunting season in two decades

TALLAHASSEE — Florida is considering opening its first black-bear hunting season since 1994, under a set of rules that will be reviewed April 14 by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Commission staff has proposed that about 275 black bears be killed in a season that would start Oct. 24 and continue for a week or less, depending on when the “harvest objective” is reached. The hunt is proposed to manage the state’s growing population of about 2,500 bears and to reduce the risk of dangerous interactions between bears and people, and a final vote could come at the commission’s June meeting.

Under the proposal, a bear permit would cost $100 for Floridians, $300 for non-Florida residents. The limit would be one bear per hunter, and hunters would be allowed to use bows, crossbows, muzzle loading guns, rifles, pistols, revolvers and shotguns. The daytime hunts would be prohibited within 100 yards of any game-feeding station. Dogs would be prohibited from hunting bear, but leashed canines could be used to trail shot bears.

Diane Eggeman, director of the commission’s Division of Hunting and Game Management, said, “The bear population has grown for the last 15 years or 20 years, steadily and pretty rapidly, based upon all the information that we have. So our job, of the agency, is to manage that growing population and the best tool to manage that population growth across the board is to use hunting.”

The Animal Rights Foundation of Florida and the Humane Society of the United States oppose the plan. Kate MacFall, the Humane Society’s Florida director, questioned how the hunt will reduce conflicts. “The bears being hunted are the big bears deep in the woods, because you can’t go hunting in the neighborhoods. That’s not how it works,” she said. “Those deep in the woods, those are not the problem bears. And the bears going into human trash are the problem. And those are the ones not being hunted.”

MyPalmBeachPost.com|April 6, 2015

American Airlines to Stop Shipping Shark Fins

Turtle Island learned that endangered scalloped hammerhead sharks were being exported from Costa Rican ports and flown to plates, restaurants and markets in Hong Kong by way of stop-overs on U.S. soil.

With this evidence in hand, Turtle Island’s Legal Program Director Doug Karpa entered negotiations with American Airlines and was able to successfully convince them to ban shark fin shipments on their planes.  

Today, American Airline made an official announcement on Twitter stating that they no longer ship shark fins.

This is a huge success story, and major victory for endangered scalloped hammerhead shark populations that are in desperate need of all the protection they can get.

Joanna Nasar|Communications Manager|Turtle Island Restoration Network

Tip-off uncovers tiger poaching near Tadoba

CHANDRAPUR: Forest officials on Monday busted a case of tiger poaching carried out inside the buffer zone of Tadoba Andhari Tiger Reserve (TATR). Officials of buffer and territorial forest nabbed a gang of tiger poachers in intelligence-based raids in Mul town and Bhadurna village inside the buffer zone. Five tiger nails and two canines along with some whiskers and handful of disposed of bones of a poached tigress were recovered during the daylong raids.

“The tigress was poached in compartment no. 485 in protected forest of Mul range around six months back, before Diwali last year. The poachers had laid electrified wire for herbivores, but a full-grown tigress got trapped in it and died. The poachers removed all 18 nails, four canines and whiskers from the body and hacked the animal into pieces. The body parts were later burned at the same spot and un-burnt remains were buried in the sandy bed of Uma river,” said ACF VW Morey, who was part of the investigating team.

The poaching came to light after officials got a tip-off from Umeshsing Jhire of Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI). Jhire informed the officials about one Dilip Madavi who was willing to sell the tiger nails and canines. Madavi, who hails from Bhadurna village, was then lured with a handsome offer for tiger nails and canines and summoned with the booty to Mul.

“As soon as he stepped out of the MSRTC bus on Mul bus stop, he was nabbed by sleuths led by RFO AM Pathan and forester Vinod Jambhule. Madavi was then taken to Mul range office, where, during interrogation, he revealed the names of his accomplices. Two more accused Ramprasad Gurnule and Vinayak Mallerwar was arrested Bhadurna village later in the afternoon,” Morey said.

Investigators took the accused trio to the place of poaching to re-create the crime scene. They were also taken to place in Uma river where they had buried the remains of poached tigress. The un-burnt remains, buried into the sandy bed by poachers, were retrieved on their identification.

“We have so far recovered only five nails and two canines of the tigress. The accused have claimed selling off the remaining nails and canines to five people. We have got their names and addresses and they will be arrested soon,” said deputy director, TATR (buffer), Gajendra Narwane. Raids were underway till late in the night to round up the customers who had purchased the tiger parts.

Mazhar Ali|TNN|Apr 7, 2015

The BP Oil Spill Continues to Hurt One of the World’s Most Endangered Whales

It’s been almost five years since millions of gallons of crude oil were spewed into the Gulf of Mexico during the Deepwater Horizon spill, and scientists are still finding out how badly the toxic aftermath is affecting wildlife in the area.

Among the numerous of species impacted by this disaster is a population of whales in the Gulf who could potentially be the most endangered group of whales on earth. Their advocates fear that without meaningful protection, they could soon disappear entirely.

The whales in question are a genetically distinct subspecies of Bryde’s whale who live solely in the Gulf  in the DeSoto Canyon, off the Florida panhandle very near the site of the Deepwater Horizon explosion. These whales are the only resident baleen whales in the Gulf, who fill an ecological niche.

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There is no exact count, but their population is now estimated to be fewer than 50 individuals, with possibly as few as 15. Conservationists worry the host of threats they face from ship strikes and oil and gas exploration to noise and the pollution that remains from the Deepwater Horizon spill threaten their future survival.

Following the spill, researchers found higher levels of DNA-damaging metals such as chromium and nickel in sperm whales in the Gulf. According to the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a sample taken from a Bryde’s whale in the area also found similar concentrations of these two metals, which raised more concerns for them because their calves are particularly vulnerable to toxic buildup that is passed on by their mothers when they’re pregnant and nursing.

Not only has the spill itself caused problems, but new research suggests the dispersants used during the cleanup effort are now causing problems of their own for wildlife.

According to a recent report from the National Wildlife Federation, although not much is known about the toxicity of dispersants, or their long-term health effects in marine mammals, a recent study found that the two dispersants used in the Deepwater Horizon spill―Corexit 9500 and 9527―were both found to be damaging to sperm whale cells and DNA. While the population of sperm whales is much higher in the Gulf, the few Bryde’s whales left may not be able to cope with the pollution.

In September, the NRDC filed a petition asking the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to add this population of Bryde’s whale to the Endangered Species Act, arguing that they are evolutionarily distinct and in desperate need of protection.

Following an announcement from the NMFS this week, these unique whales are now a step closer to getting much needed protection. The agency agreed the petition to grant them federal protection was warranted and will now need to conduct a one-year status review.

With more oil and gas exploration and extraction predicted for the Gulf and surrounding areas, along with the toxic mess they’ve already been forced to live in, protection for these whales can’t come soon enough. Hopefully it will help stem the slew of threats they and other marine life face in our increasingly industrialized oceans.

Alicia Graef|April 8, 2015

Lowe’s takes action on bee-killing pesticides ‏

Today, Lowe’s announced that it’s making a public commitment to phase out neonicotinoid pesticides.

Now that Lowe’s is making progress, we need to turn up the heat on their competitors to join them in protecting bees, not pesticide industry profits.

Thanks to a strong network of allies working on this campaign, Lowe’s has made the most significant public commitment so far for a retailer of its size. It has joined a growing number of retailers that are taking action on neonics — including Home Depot and BJ’s Wholesale Club. 

So what does this mean? Lowe’s will phase out neonics and plants pre-treated with them by the spring of 2019 (or sooner, if possible). It is also working with suppliers to minimize pesticide use overall and move to safer alternatives.

Lowe’s progress is encouraging, but we can’t stop now. The next-largest garden retailers, True Value and Ace, have yet to make any similar commitments on bee-killing pesticides. If we can get them to join Lowe’s, it would be a huge step forward in ensuring that all of us can plant bee-friendly gardens!

Thanks for all of your hard work in this fight so far. It’s paying off! With your help, we’ll get bee-toxic pesticides off the shelves, out of our backyards, and out of our communities.

Tiffany Finck-Haynes and Lisa Archer|Food futures campaigners|Friends of the Earth

Ruling Protects Whales, Dolphins From Navy’s War Games

Whales, dolphins and other marine mammals in the Pacific just caught an important break: A Hawaii district court judge has ruled that the National Marine Fisheries Service wrongly approved U.S. Navy testing and training activities that posed serious harm to sea animals.

The Navy’s use of explosives and sonar, along with vessel strikes, could result in thousands of animals suffering death or injuries over a five-year period — potentially causing an estimated 9.6 million instances of harm.

The decision results from a December 2013 lawsuit brought by a coalition including the Center for Biological Diversity. Noting the “stunning number of marine mammals” the Navy’s activities could hurt, the judge said: “Searching the administrative record’s reams of pages for some explanation as to why the Navy’s activities were authorized … this court feels like the sailor in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ who, trapped for days on a ship becalmed in the middle of the ocean, laments, ‘Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.’ “

“The Navy shouldn’t play war games in the most sensitive waters animals use for feeding and breeding,” said Miyoko Sakashita, the Center’s oceans director.

Read more from Miyo in The Huffington Post.

Crayfishes Proposed for Protection From Mountaintop Removal

Responding to a Center for Biological Diversity petition and lawsuit, the feds on Tuesday proposed to grant Endangered Species Act protection to two species of crayfish from Appalachia: the Big Sandy crayfish and the Guyandotte River crayfish.

Though these pincer-wielding, lobster-looking invertebrates aren’t the most conventionally charismatic species, this decision is historic: If their protections are finalized, they’ll be the first on the endangered species list due to the dangers of mountaintop-removal coal mining, which blows the tops off mountains to reach the coal inside. Resulting waste is dumped directly into surrounding streams and wetlands, where species like these crayfishes live. Both species have been lost from more than half of their ranges because of water pollution, primarily from coal mining — which also threatens human health in the region.

In 2011 the Center struck a landmark settlement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to expedite protection decisions for 757 imperiled species around the country. Now 142 have gained protection under the agreement, and another 12 have been proposed for protection, including these crayfishes.

Read more in The Courier-Journal.

Study: More Southeast Reserves Needed to Save U.S. Species

Saving species from extinction requires protecting the places where they live. But a new study finds that protected areas in the lower 48 states fail to safeguard some of the nation’s most important biodiversity hotspots: Protected areas, which occupy roughly 7 percent of the country, are found mostly in the western United States, but the Southeast commands the greatest concentration of species diversity.

The region is home to 493 freshwater fish species (62 percent of the U.S. total), more than two-thirds of North America’s species and subspecies of crayfishes, and more amphibians and aquatic reptiles than anywhere else. Rapid human population growth, pollution and lax regulation have taken a toll: The Southeast is not only the biodiversity capital of North America … but also its extinction capital.

The Center for Biological Diversity has been fighting to save Southeast species for years; this latest study is an important call for protecting the habitats that sustain them.

Read more about the study and check out some cool interactive maps at Buzzfeed.

[Could this include a critical habitat designation for the Florida Panther?]

Big Win for Endangered Owls, Salmon in Northern California

Whether they know it or not, 83 northern spotted owls in California’s Siskiyou County can breathe a little easier. A federal judge this week halted a logging plan that would have destroyed spotted owl habitat, hurt struggling salmon populations, and decimated old-growth forests on 150,000 acres near Yreka, Calif.

The Center for Biological Diversity and allies in 2013 sued the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service for approving a “habitat conservation plan” for Fruit Growers Supply Company that allowed logging for a decade, along with harming and killing endangered species (including nearly half the northern spotted owls believed to live in the area). This latest court decision stops that destructive logging plan in its tracks.

Read more in our press release.

There’s More Bad News For Polar Bears, And it’s Not Climate Change

Researchers studying polar bears in Greenland have identified plastic pollution as yet another threat to the survival of the species. Already threatened by climate change and shrinking sea ice, the study found that plastic pollution and pesticides are harming the endocrine systems and reproductive systems of these mammals.

Polar bears are classified as “vulnerable” (just one step away from “endangered”) by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Climate change still poses the biggest problem, but there are other factors contributing to declining polar bear numbers.

“The health of the arctic polar bear is being attacked from all fronts, but among many other factors is the exposure to environmental contaminants,” said María Jesús Obregón in a press statement. Obregón is one of the authors of a paper on the findings, which is published by the journal Environmental Research. The researchers studied muscle tissues, liver tissue and plasma to identify contaminants and their metabolites.

It’s easy to imagine plastic pollution as bottles, bags and food packaging floating in the water, but most plastic contamination spreads through the ocean as tiny bits. These microplastics come from larger items disintegrating, are shed from synthetic fabrics or come in the form of microbeads used in personal care products. Tiny bits of plastic containing toxic compounds are easily eaten by fish and birds. The toxins bind to fatty tissues and can move up the food web. Because polar bears sit at the top of the food chain, their intake of toxins may be particularly magnified, according to the IUCN. An earlier study found that similar bioaccumulation has caused polar bears to consume high levels of mercury.

The researchers have also created a new tool to help assess polar bear health. The tool uses a survey to address the many factors that impact polar bear health, including access to food, stress, exposure to competitors, diseases, and climate change. Researchers hope the tool will help provide more data that can be used in polar bear conservation efforts.

Margaret Badore|TreeHugger|April 9, 2015

This post originally appeared on TreeHugger.

Mountain Gorillas and Virunga National Park Still Need Protecting

Virunga National Park is the oldest and most biologically diverse park in Africa. Located in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the park is famously home to dozens of endangered species, including mountain gorillas. It’s also been plagued by armed conflict, and poachers are killing prized animals. Soco International, a British oil company, has tried to open the region to oil drilling. Care2′s Chris Wolverton launched a petition drive to stop that idea in its tracks. For the moment, Soco has agreed to end its oil exploration operations in Virunga. However, reports World Wildlife Fund, “for Virunga to be safe in the long-term, we need the DRC government to cancel ALL oil exploration permits.” You can still sign Care2′s petition and make a difference.

Virunga is truly extraordinary. It straddles both sides of the equator, and sports the wildlife to prove it: an incredible array of birds as well as lions, elephants, hippos, and chimps. A quarter of the world’s endangered mountain gorillas live here as well. Virunga is so special, it has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site by the United Nations.

Normally, UNESCO designation would protect a place from oil drilling and other industrial development. Augustin Matata Ponyo, DCR’s prime minister, has said that his government wants to find a way to explore for oil in the park and will try to negotiate with the UN body to “explore judiciously,” reports The Guardian here.

According to the UNESCO convention, exploration and exploitation of oil are incompatible with world heritage site status. To allow drilling for oil wells legally, the government would have to declassify parts of the park, or Virunga as a whole.

“It would not be a minor modification of the park limits. It would be a major modification that would impair the universal value of the park,” Leila Maziz, the coordinator for Congo Basin projects at UNESCO, told the Guardian.

Care2′s petition is aimed at specifically at DCR Prime Minister Ponyo because he supports oil exploration in the park.

Global outcry against this idea has been widespread. Nobel Peace Prize Winner Desmond Tutu, billionaire businessman Richard Branson, and a group of 21 countries all proclaimed that Virunga oil permits should be cancelled, World Wildlife Fund reported.

World Wildlife Fund says that, in place of oil development, Virunga should develop hydropower, fisheries and ecotourism to create a sustainable future.

Care2′s Wolverton agrees. “The Congo needs to work to preserve this precious ecosystem, not enable oil exploration which will harm it further.”

Diane MacEachern|April 10, 2015

Wild & Weird

After 80-year wait to flower, agave removed

Plant flowers once in its life cycle, then dies

ANN ARBOR, MI — An American agave’s job is to flower once and then die.

One of the plants that called the University of Michigan home for an unexpectedly long 80 years accomplished the former last year.

On Wednesday, its life came to an end.

Mike Palmer, the horticulture manager at the university’s Matthaei Botanical Gardens, used a hand saw to bring down the agave’s 20-plus-foot-tall stalk.

“It was time. It’s sad. Many people have said to me though they enjoyed the whole flowering that they were anticipating the sadness of its final days,” Palmer said after he and some workers carried the fallen stalk away, leaving a stump where it once stood.

Still, “the agave lives on,” said Palmer, who added new plants will be grown from its seedlings and sold. Plus, university music professor Michael Gould plans to make a flute from the stalk.

Once the new instrument is created, Gould and a colleague who plays the shakuhachi, or Japanese bamboo flute, plan to perform a concert at the botanical gardens “to give the plant a life again.

“There are instruments that are hundreds and hundreds of years old, so the agave can live on,” Gould said.

And a couple getting married this weekend at the botanical gardens have requested a seedling so they can use it as part of their wedding ceremony.

The agave had called Ann Arbor home since 1934. It grew to 28 feet after a rapid growth spurt in the spring of 2014 that preceded its flowering, which ended later in the year. The agave then went into rapid decline, which is normal for the species, Palmer said.

Although it is known as the century plant, the American agave typically lives up to 30 to 35 years. Palmer, who cared for the plant during the past 15 years, said he doesn’t know why it took this agave so long to bloom.

Regardless, “it was time to take it down. It was the natural process for the agave to die after it flowers and sets seeds,” he said.

“We have seedlings now, so they will create the circle of life.”

MIKE HOUSEHOLDER|ASSOCIATED PRESS

8 Smart Species Challenge How We Think of Animals

Animals are smarter than we thought.

This matters not just because it’s cool and fascinating. It matters because people use lack of intelligence as the reason to treat humans and non-human animals differently. It’s okay to eat animals and experiment on them, the rationale goes, because they are just dumb animals.

Science is biting itself in the butt on this one by continually discovering that animals aren’t so different from us after all, which will make it harder to justify experimenting on them.

These are some of the smartest animals in no particular order:

1. Dolphins

These thinkers have been named the second smartest species, after us, of course. They “co-operate with military precision to round up shoals of fish to eat.” They recognize themselves in mirrors. One dolphin was held captive for three weeks and was taught to tail-walk; after her release, “scientists were astonished to see the trick spreading among wild dolphins who had learnt it from the former captive.” They can learn “a rudimentary symbol-based language.” Dolphins “can solve difficult problems” and have “a high level of emotional sophistication.” Plus, they have really big brains. Things have gone so far that scientists have suggested “they are so bright that they should be treated as ‘non-human persons,’” protected from imprisonment in tanks, exploitation in amusement parks and slaughter.

When people can no longer point to a huge gap in intelligence between humans and other animals, it gets harder to justify torturing and using them.

2. Ravens

Ravens have incredible recall for their friends’ voices. After living together for three years, then being separated for three years (during which time their calls may have changed), the ravens responded with friendly calls to recordings of the voices of their old friends.

They also remembered which birds they liked and which they didn’t. Recordings of the voices of ravens they didn’t care for elicited different reactions in deeper voices. They had yet a third reaction for the calls of birds they did not know.

3. Grey Parrots

Grey parrots can reason as well as three-year-old humans, as Mindy Townsend has written on Care2. When presented with two canisters and shown that one was empty, then “given the chance to choose one or the other,” they reliably picked the other one. Scientists performed more complicated versions of this study with the same result. The birds were showing “abstract, inferential thinking” by figuring out that if one is empty, the other has food in it. Humans can’t do that before age three.

4. Squirrels

Yes, squirrels are smart. They “put on elaborate shows” in which they pretend they are hiding food “to thwart would-be thieves.” When squirrels saw human researchers stealing their peanuts, they faked hiding even more food. This deception involves planning and a concept of what is happening in others’ minds — the squirrels are thinking about what may happen in the future (theft of their food), and about what observers are seeing and deducing (that there will be food where the squirrel is digging).

So there to all the squirrel haters, and especially to the wing nuts who held the “Hazard County Squirrel Slam” last weekend in upstate New York, where they awarded prizes for shooting and killing squirrels.

5. Elephants

Of course elephants have to be on any list of smart animals. They have proved their intelligence time and again. But here is one you may not have heard: they can sniff out the scents “of up to 30 absent members of their family” and build a mental map of where they are. Can you keep track of where 30 of your relatives are at any given time?

6. Chimpanzees

The latest revelation: chimpanzees have better short-term memory than humans. Not just good short-term memory. Not even just as good as ours. Better. They have a stronger mental ability than humans do.

The study, reported in Huff Post Science, flashed the numbers 1 through 9 randomly on a screen. Chimpanzee Ayumu “was able to recall the exact sequence and location of each number.”

When researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa showed a video of the experiment “to a room of scientists and journalists, murmurs of amazement were heard. ‘Don’t worry, nobody can do it,’ Matsuzawa said… ‘It’s impossible for you.’”

Chimp Ayumu has also learned the numbers 1 through 19 and what order they go in.

7. Pigs

Pigs can learn to use a joystick to move a cursor to a target and can distinguish among a child’s various scribblings. Their intelligence is akin to that of chimpanzees. Comparing them to humans doesn’t come out that well for us: “even piglets only a few hours old will leave the nest to relieve themselves.” How long were your kids in diapers?

8. Crows

According to National Geographic, research now suggests that crows “share with humans several hallmarks of higher intelligence, including tool use and sophisticated social behavior.” Crows play tricks on each other, and different families have their own dialects. A nature writer describing one experiment on the birds writes that they are “in a class with us as toolmakers,” better even than chimps.

There is more going on behind animals’ eyes than we have given them credit for. Having learned more about their mental and social intelligence, it is time to reevaluate how we treat them.

Piper Hoffman|April 7, 2015

Everglades

Florida Activists Stand Up for the Everglades

More than 100 residents from all corners of Florida gathered recently at the headquarters of the South Florida Water Management District in protest of the Water Managers’ inaction on a land purchase deal to save the Everglades. 

Protesters held signs demanding the managers “BUY THE LAND” and two-sided signs with a healthy fish on one side and the same fish’s bare skeleton on the other. A protester dressed as a “Sugar Daddy” gave fake money to various “Florida Politicians,” with the face on the bills replaced with that of Governor Rick Scott.

The 48,600 acres of land to the south of Lake Okeechobee, currently owned by an agricultural business based in Florida called U.S. Sugar Corporation, could be used to store and naturally filter the heavily polluted overflow from the lake during storm season. This water could then be redirected to the Everglades to the south, delivering clean freshwater that the wetlands badly need. 

The Water Managers, appointed by Governor Rick Scott, faced a four-hour gauntlet of protester comments, rebuffing the managers’ list of constraints and calling on them to purchase the land.

“The real constraint is the lack of political will,” said Art Broughton, a Palm Beach County resident and Sierra Club activist.

The South Florida Water Management District has yet to take any of the preliminary actions that would allow for the purchasing of the land. They have had the contractual option to purchase the land from U.S. Sugar since 2009, an option which expires this coming October. Previously, the board of managers had said that it was waiting on a report from the University of Florida before it made a decision on the land purchase. The report found that buying the land would be beneficial, but no substantive decision has been made. 

Currently, overflow from Lake Okeechobee flows into nearby rivers and estuaries, spreading the fertilizers, pesticides, and other agricultural runoff in the habitats of a myriad of wildlife. In periods of heavy rains, the lake’s floodgates are opened, and a torrent of toxic water surges through these habitats with unnatural force. The Army Corps of Engineers has also expressed concern that the the dike that currently regulates water levels in the lake is falling into disrepair, and could allow a breach into the Everglades and nearby communities.

The purchase and use of the land would allow for the building of an earthen reservoir to contain the lake’s seasonal overflow, and due to the composition of the soil, this reservoir would filter most of the pollutants out of the water, allowing for it to be directed into the Everglades.

“The Everglades are shrinking and dying because Lake Okeechobee water is being redirected elsewhere,” said Broughton. “The buying of this land and the  building of this reservoir will enable the Everglades to live. Without it, the Everglades will die. It is that simple.”

Zach Moore|March 20, 2015

Water Quality Issues

Drought-Stricken California Exempts Big Oil and Big Ag from Mandatory Restrictions

The April 1 snowpack assessment in California, which set an all-time record for lowest snowpack levels in the state’s history, finally spurred Governor Brown’s office to issue an executive order to residents and non-agricultural businesses to cut water use by 25 percent in the first mandatory statewide reduction in the state’s history.

But some groups have been exempted from the water restrictions, specifically big agriculture, which uses about 80 percent of California’s water, and oil companies. Democracy Now! discussed on their show today the new mandates and the implications of exempting some of the biggest water users in the state.

Food & Water Watch California is one of the groups critical of Governor Brown for failing to cap water usage by oil companies and corporate farms, which grow water-intensive crops like almonds and pistachios, most of which are exported out of state or overseas, reports Nermeen Shaikh of Democracy Now! “In the midst of a severe drought, the governor continues to allow corporate farms and oil interests to deplete and pollute our precious groundwater resources,” says Adam Scow of Food & Water Watch California.

Shaikh and fellow reporter, Amy Goodman, then turn to Mark Hertsgaard, author of a new book, Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, and whose latest story is “How Growers Gamed California’s Drought.” Hertsgaard, an expert on big agriculture and the drought in California, discusses how the price of water is far too low and how we’re still wasting far too much water. “If we priced [water] properly, which means a little bit higher, there’s enormous strides California could be taking with water efficiency,” says Hertsgaard. “We could essentially wipe out the effects of the drought.”

But right now we have billionaire farmers like Stewart Resnick bragging about record profits and record production in water-intensive crops like pistachios, almonds and alfalfa, while poorer communities where farmworkers live “don’t have water coming out of their taps anymore,” says Hertsgaard.

Cole Mellino|April 2, 2015

Pacific water could quench thirst in Calif.

Amid deep drought, state is investing in desalination plants

California has a giant reservoir to its west that could supply the parched state. It’s called the Pacific Ocean.

To tap this salty resource, desalination plants and related technology are being introduced or revived in the state.

Part of Gov. Jerry Brown’s executive order last week to manage water included streamlining the permitting process for water infrastructure projects such as desalination facilities.

The $1billion Carlsbad desalination plant, south of Los Angeles, is scheduled to open in 2016.

Santa Barbara has a mothballed desalination plant from the 1990s that was built after California’s severe drought from 1986 to 1991. The City Council is considering whether to bring it back into operation.

Towns in Monterey County, including Carmel, are also exploring desalination plants.

The problem with desalination is that it’s energy-intensive and expensive.

The holy grail of desalination is to draw on renewable power to remove salt from ocean water. That’s where all natural fresh water comes from: Solar energy evaporates the water, which rises into the atmosphere — leaving the salt in the ocean — and falls as pure rain.

So far, no one has found an efficient way to mimic Mother Nature, but engineers are trying. A competition that gets underway Monday in Alamogordo, New Mexico, at the edge of the White Sands desert, is one attempt to find that particular grail.

Five teams of engineers will deploy machines they’ve built to run on renewable energy to provide clean water as part of USAID Global Development Lab’s Securing Water for Food initiative.

They are vying to win the Desal Prize by producing cost efficient, durable and easy-to-maintain water purification units.

Doyle Rice and Elizabeth Weise|USA TODAY

California Sees Dismal Water Savings In February, Following Driest January On Record

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California cities face mandatory targets to slash water use as much as 35 percent while regulators warn voluntary conservation hasn’t been enough in the face of a devastating drought.

Underlining their point was data released Tuesday showing a new low in saving water. Residents did less to curtail water use in February than any other month since officials started tracking conservation.

Along the south coast, home to more than a third of Californians from San Diego to Los Angeles, residents actually showed an increase in water consumption despite longstanding calls for cutbacks.

“These are sobering statistics and disheartening statistics,” said Felicia Marcus, chairwoman of the State Water Resources Control Board.

Overall, the numbers indicate that statewide water use fell by less than 3 percent in February as compared to baseline data established in 2013, the last year before Gov. Jerry Brown declared a drought emergency.

The figures mirrored preliminary reports that helped spur Brown last week to demand that urban water users statewide cut back their consumption by 25 percent.

To meet that goal, the water board on Tuesday released draft water reduction targets for more than 400 water agencies ranging from 10 to 35 percent. The targets are set based on per-capita water use.

Some cities must drastically improve water savings. San Diego and Los Angeles must cut water use by 20 percent after cutting only 2 percent and 7 percent since June.

Others such as Santa Cruz, which cut its water use by a quarter, are likely to easily meet smaller targets.

State officials say they’re prepared to slap large fines on agencies that don’t take steps to conserve or meet reduction targets, although they haven’t used similar powers earlier in the drought.

The newly released water use data show the difficulties of changing longstanding habits, such as watering lawns, washing cars and taking long showers, board members said at the Tuesday meeting. Also, they noted, that water use in February 2013 was already low because the weather was cooler that year.

Still, the governor should be able to use the figures to his advantage. His call for a mandatory 25 percent cutback goes beyond his request asking residents to voluntarily reduce their use by 20 percent when he declared the drought emergency in January 2014. Statewide conservation has been about 9 percent since then.

The board credited some already water-conscious communities, including Stockton, Santa Cruz and Mountain View, for slashing use in February.

Places such as Newport Beach expected to make drastic improvements. Water use must plummet by 35 percent in the wealthy beach town during the same months consumption fell only 7 percent.

Newport Beach has reduced lawn watering to four times a week, which is twice as often as state recommendations allow, and it prohibits residents from refilling their pools more than 1 foot a week.

Since July, Newport Beach residents used about 120 gallons a day, compared to about 100 for others who live along the southern coastline.

Newport Beach officials have spent months informing residents about new regulations and ways to cut back, and they’re now seeking new authority to issue fines.

“We liked the friendly approach, and it seems to be working well, but we aren’t afraid to issue citations,” said George Murdoch, the city’s utilities general manager.

The water board has given local water departments discretion to come up with their own conservation rules, but it has established some statewide regulations, such as banning lawn watering 48 hours after rain and prohibiting restaurants from serving water unless customers ask.

The agency also plans to have municipalities penalize overconsumption through billing rates.

Water use along the coast is expected to increase this summer as tourists and seasonal residents flock to beach homes.

Meanwhile, some water agencies are working on more drastic actions of their own. Southern California’s giant Metropolitan Water District will vote next week on a plan to ration water deliveries to the 26 agencies and cities it supplies, according to spokesman Bob Muir.

The cuts, which would take effect July 1, were proposed before the governor imposed the mandatory restrictions and are expected to drive agencies to curb demand and help meet the conservation goals.

  |FENIT NIRAPPIL|04/07/2015

Carly Fiorina: Environmentalists To Blame For ‘Man-Made’ Drought In California

WASHINGTON — Former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina on Monday blamed environmentalists for what she called a “man-made” drought in California, which has led to the state’s first water restrictions.

“With different policies over the last 20 years, all of this could be avoided,” Fiorina, a likely 2016 Republican presidential contender, said in an interview with radio host Glenn Beck. “Despite the fact that California has suffered from droughts for millennia, liberal environmentalists have prevented the building of a single new reservoir or a single new water conveyance system over decades during a period in which California’s population has doubled.”

Fiorina, California’s 2010 GOP nominee for U.S. Senate, said it was a “classic case of liberals being willing to sacrifice other people’s lives and livelihoods at the altar of their ideology. It is a tragedy.”

The drought, now officially in its fourth year, prompted Gov. Jerry Brown (D) last week to order a 25 percent reduction in water consumption. The order does not apply to the agriculture industry, which consumes nearly 80 percent of the state’s water.

Lawmakers in Congress and in the state legislature have proposed bills authorizing construction of new dams and reservoirs, citing the need to capture water that ends up in the ocean. They have been opposed by environmental groups, which argue the projects would endanger the state’s habitat and endangered species. Last year, House Republicans proposed pumping additional water to Southern California, but the bill failed under a veto threat from President Barack Obama.

There is significant debate about whether the state has enough water left, at this point, to justify the cost of building new dams and reservoirs. According to The Sacramento Bee, some new reservoirs, wouldn’t supply significant new water.

“There’s nothing magical in and of themselves to build a (reservoir) facility,” Lester Snow, the executive director of the California Water Foundation, told the Bee last year. “If we had two more surface storage facilities that we built 10 years ago — pick any of the two that people are talking about — they would both be very low right now. There’s a tendency to pull down our surface storage when we get mildly short of water.”

NextGen Climate, the climate-focused political group run by billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, on Monday evening called Fiorina’s comments “irrational.”

“For a science denier to opine that Democrats caused the drought in California is about as irrational as believing someone who failed at running a business in California and then failed as a candidate for office in California has any cause to be running for the highest office in the land,” Bobby Whithorne, the group’s spokesman, said in a statement.

The Sierra Club, a national environmental group, disputed Fiorina’s assertion that more dams and reservoirs would have lessened the impact of the drought.

“For more than 100 years, environmentalists have failed to stop the damming of nearly every significant river in California. And yet all of the hundreds of dams out there have done nothing to produce rain or snow pack over the last four years. That’s because you can’t store what’s not there,” said Kathryn Phillips, director of Sierra Club’s California chapter. “We simply don’t have rain or snow pack and are suffering the worst California drought since water agencies and weather trackers started keeping records.”

“What we are seeing is exactly what climate scientists have predicted would happen in California with the onset of human-caused climate disruption: Weather and precipitation would become less predictable and droughts would become more frequent and more severe,” Phillips added.

Igor Bobic|04/06/2015

Great Lakes & Inland Waters

Michigan wants dredging limit to help sturgeon

April 20 meeting set to discuss problem

SAUGATUCK TWP. — The state wants to limit the times of year when dredging is allowed in part of southwestern Michigan to protect lake sturgeon, officials announced Monday.

The Department of Natural Resources and the Department of Environmental Quality plan a public meeting April 20 at Saugatuck Township Hall to discuss dredging windows for Kalamazoo Lake and the Kalamazoo River aimed at protecting the threatened species.

Kalamazoo Lake is an important area for adult sturgeon migrating up the Kalamazoo River to spawn, officials said, and the lake also provides excellent habitat for juvenile sturgeon.

“The goal of this program is to open the lines of communication among the community, business owners and contractors on ways to protect lake sturgeon and their habitat,” Jay Wesley, DNR fisheries unit manager, said in a statement. “This protection effort will dovetail nicely with our other Kalamazoo River lake sturgeon rehabilitation efforts.”

The proposal would limit dredging between March 15 and June 30 to protect adult lake sturgeon and between Sept. 1 and Dec. 15 to protect juvenile sturgeon.

The DNR and DEQ noted, however, that they recognize the need to conduct dredging projects. If a dredging project needs to be completed within a no-dredging window, the state will discuss safeguards and work to determine whether lake sturgeon habitat is affected.

“These windows are meant to guide dredge operations on the best times to do so when lake sturgeon are less vulnerable,” the DNR said.

Sturgeon can grow to about 8 feet, weigh 200 pounds and live for 150 years. They once were abundant in the Great Lakes region and are the subject of decades- long restoration efforts.

JEFFREY SMITH|TIMES HERALD

Oil Spills Into Mississippi River After Ship Collision In Louisiana

CONVENT, La. (AP) — About 420 gallons of oil spilled into the Mississippi River and a nine-mile stretch of the waterway was closed after a ship broke free of its mooring in southern Louisiana and hit two other vessels, the U.S. Coast Guard said.

The Privocean, a 751-foot bulk carrier, broke free near Convent around 4:00 p.m. Monday, drifted downriver and struck a 98-foot towing vessel, the Texas, according to a statement from the Coast Guard.

The Texas began taking on water but was able to ground itself on the river bank before sinking, according to Petty Officer Carlos Vega.

The Privocean continued to drift downriver and hit the 816-foot tank ship Bravo, which was discharging crude oil, the Coast Guard said.

Initial assessments show about 420 gallons of oil discharged into the river, which is closed from mile marker 163 to 154, according to the statement. Another 126 gallons spilled on the deck of the Bravo but was contained and will be cleaned up.

All three ships have been secured. The cause of the incident is under investigation, and Coast Guard response teams and an environmental services company are responding to the spill.

The crew of the Texas was taken to a hospital for evaluation but no injuries were reported, the statement said.

Convent is about 60 miles west of New Orleans.

|04/06/2015

Offshore & Ocean

24 Utterly Bizarre Sea Creatures

New study enables detailed projections of coral reef bleaching

FRISCO — After issuing a general warning about the potential for widespread coral reef bleaching this year, federal scientists now say they have the ability to make more detailed projections about the timing and geographic distribution of such events.

The concerns this summer focus around emerging El Niño conditions, which could overheat parts of the world’s oceans that have already been hovering at near-record temperatures. Most coral reefs in  the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico will experience bleaching by mid-century, but if scientists can pinpoint the timing, it gives them more conservation options.

Coral bleaching happens when water is too warm and corals expel the algae living in their tissue, causing the coral to lose its vibrant colors and turn completely white. Bleached corals are under more stress and are more likely to die. Extensive coral bleaching events have increased in frequency and severity over the past two decades due to climate change.

There are regions within many countries where some reefs are projected to experience annual bleaching conditions 15 or more years later than neighboring regions. This applies to reefs in Florida, the Bahamas, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Turks and Caicos, and Mexico. Reefs projected to experience bleaching conditions later can be conservation priorities.

“Our new local-scale projections will help resource managers better understand and plan for the effects of coral bleaching,” said lead author Ruben van Hooidonk, a coral and climate researcher with the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School and NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory.

“At some locations, referred to in our study as ‘relative refugia,’ lower rates of temperature increase and fewer extreme events mean reefs have more time to adapt to climate change,” he said. “Managers may decide to use this information to protect these locations as refuges or protected areas. Or they may take other actions to reduce stress caused by human activities.”

The new research is published in Global Change Biology by NOAA scientists and colleagues.

The loss of coral reefs can have economic, social and ecological effects. Coral reefs provide rich habitat for valuable fisheries that people depend on for food. They serve as protective buffers to coastlines by absorbing wave energy from storms, and they boost local economies by attracting tourists who fish, dive and explore these underwater treasures.

Bob Glazer of Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said he welcomed the new research.

“Coral bleaching poses a grave threat to coral reefs and these high-resolution projections provide vitally needed spatial information about the degree of threat and will help us make better management decisions.”

Bob Berwyn|April 2, 2015

Study: Florida’s reefs will be seared by climate change by 2030

Parts of Florida’s vast coral reefs, including a pristine tract in the Dry Tortugas, might get seared by climate change as early as 2030 — about a dozen years sooner than scientists previously projected.

And that could mean that coral bleaching — a whitening that can be damaging and potentially deadly to colorful corals — might become an annual event in the Tortugas west of Key West but also in the middle Keys and reefs south of Turkey Point popular with divers.

The prediction comes from a just-released study by National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration climate scientists, who used a supercomputer to crunch piles of data on sea temperatures around the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean already identified as vulnerable to bleaching outbreaks. Their findings not only confirmed what they already knew — bleaching could be widespread by mid-century — but revealed it might start to show sooner in some areas than others, including swathes off the South Florida coast.

The findings are important because scientists consider reefs an important earlier indicator of more serious trouble.

“They’re the canary in a coal mine,” said the study’s lead author, Ruben van Hooidonk, a University of Miami coral expert and climate scientist at NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory.

On the flip side, the discovery that bleaching might happen more slowly in some places offered a rare bit of hope on the climate front. Where temperatures remain lower for longer, the living creatures that create coral reefs might have time to acclimate to rising sea temperatures, Hooidonk said.

Coral reefs have long been identified as one of the ecosystems most vulnerable to climate change. Years of pounding from polluted coastal run-off, fishing and anchors have already done heavy damage, shrinking Florida’s reefs to a fraction of their historic range. Swings in temperature, scientists say, just add to the stress.

Cold water can kill tropical reef gardens. But increases in temperature, even slight ones, can cause coral to spit out life-sustaining algae. Acidification, another malady linked to climate change and rising carbon in oceans, could also weaken reefs.

Up until now, bleaching has occurred periodically, but never regularly. The first documented wide-scale bleaching in the Keys occurred in 1983, followed by years of weakened reefs susceptible to diseases, said Billy Causey, regional director for NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. In 1997 and 1998, an El Niño fueled the first years of back-to-back bleaching. But in the years since, the region struck a kind of balance, with no more loss of reefs. But also no gains.

Cool weather, like the recent cool front, has always given reefs a respite and chance to rebound.

“The Tortugas has looked great,” said Frank Wasson, president of Spree Expeditions who captains the MV Spree to the remote islands some 70 miles west of Key West for dive trips in deeper waters where strong currents have helped keep reefs healthy. “Out on the bank, it has been incredibly healthy.”

But that could change under new climate conditions. Last year, divers documented widespread bleaching throughout the Keys that could be worsened by forecasts for another El Niño weather pattern, said Chris Bergh, the South Florida Conservation Director for The Nature Conservancy. Divers are just now starting to assess damage, he said.

By mid-century, Hooidonk said yearly bleaching will likely occur along large swaths of reefs at the south end of Biscayne Bay past Key Largo and from the middle Keys south to the Dry Tortugas. Corals can survive bleaching if waters cool quickly enough to allow algae to return. But prolonged temperature spikes like those predicted by climate models could spell doom.

“Obviously, we can’t go out there and move the corals out of the way, but there are a multitude of things we can do,” Causey said.

Scientists are already on the lookout for corals that do better in inhospitable conditions, which they could use to graft onto colonies to fortify valuable reefs that bring in tourism dollars and provide the first line of defense for coastal cities against rising seas. Knowing which areas remain tolerable to the colonies could also help determine where to locate nurseries.

“So while we may be having more frequent bleaching, we may start to see more coral colonies acclimate,” Causey said. “That’s the Pollyannaish side of me.”

More information could also improve existing conservation programs and heighten awareness about the dangers of coral bleaching, which is already a leading killer of Florida’s reefs, Bergh said.

“Those things are already important but they become even more critical knowing that coral bleaching is going to become more of a problem in the future,” he said.

Jenny Staletovich|MiamiHerald.com|04/03/2015

Wildlife and Habitat

Study ranks Florida among top places where rare wildlife not being protected

The Florida Keys and parts of the Panhandle rank among the most vulnerable places in the nation for wildlife in danger of disappearing, according to a new study published Monday.

By comparing protected lands to places where most rare and disappearing species live, scientists found the United States is doing a poor job of guarding the country’s biodiversity or even taking adequate steps to track where species live. Most national parks and conservation land are found in the west or areas, like the Everglades, inhospitable to human development. But the highest concentrations of potentially imperiled species — those rare lizards, fish and trees that live in small, specific ranges that can be found no place else— inhabit primitive forests and isolated waters in the Southeast that may face development threats.

National parks — long considered a key to conservation efforts — it turns out, may not be doing what you’d think.

“What we protected is the opposite of the patterns of species we should be most worried about,” said lead author Clinton Jenkins, a visiting professor at Brazil’s Institute for Ecological Research.

Pinpointing the mismatch is important, Jenkins said, because habitat loss is the leading cause of extinction on the planet. Species are now estimated to be going extinct at a yearly rate of between .01 and 1 percent — a massive acceleration due to human activity, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

To produce the study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jenkins and scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Duke University and the University of Maryland looked at 3,000 mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, freshwater fish and trees to create biodiversity maps. They then compared that to the nation’s portfolio of protected land in the lower 48 states. A substantial amount, about 8 percent, is protected and includes a large swaths in private ownership shielded with conservation easements, the study said. But areas set aside for conservation poorly reflect the needs of rare plants and animals found only in specific places like pine rockland and tropical hammocks in the Florida Keys.

“The U.S. has protected many areas, but it has yet to protect many of the most biologically important parts of the country,” Jenkins said.

The study was edited by E.O. Wilson, a Harvard University entomologist whose work helped define the importance of biodiversity. In a release, Wilson called the findings among the most important in the last decade with implications for better conservation measures and future policy.

National parks were created more than a century ago. But most were forged by a desire to preserve natural wonders like Yosemite’s grand granite cliffs, Jenkins said, and not wildlife. Unique wildlife, meanwhile, flourished in very old and isolated places like the Keys or Appalachia, where complex topography and sheltered watersheds led to fish and plant diversity.

Park boundaries also often fell on land still owned by the government or not useful for anything else. So the eastern United States, already in private ownership, got shorted. South Florida’s three largest conservation areas cover wetlands and Biscayne Bay.

In ranking hotspots, Jenkins and his team considered not just the distribution of the species, but whether any of their range was already protected.

The team targeted nine regions for concern, starting with the Blue Ridge Mountains, Sierra Nevada Mountains, the California Coast and watersheds in Tennessee, Alabama and north Georgia where thick forests and shallow pools hide a menagerie of salamanders and fish living in solitude for eons. The Florida Panhandle and Keys ranked five and six on the list, followed by Oregon’s Klamath Mountains, south-central Texas and the Channel Islands in California.

Jenkins, who researched parts of the Everglades for his doctoral study, said South Florida’s trees won it a spot on the list. Other unique species, like grasses, would probably qualify as well, he said, but not enough data was available for the kind of mapping the team conducted. The same applies to butterflies, he said — while rare, unique and well-studied, the team lacked the right kind of mapping data to include them.

“This emphasizes the plight of endemic species,” coauthor Kyle Van Houtan, a NOAA population ecologist, said. “While they may not all be rhinos, lions and pandas, it is these species that are essential in their ecosystems that compose the American landscape.”

Jenny Staletovich|MiamiHerald.com|04/06/2015

Environmentalists Sue to Tell the Feds: Hands Off Our Grizzly Bears

The Sierra Club, together with the Western Watersheds Project and a number of local tribes, is suing the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) for giving the go ahead to kill four grizzly bears so that people can safely hunt elk in Grand Teton National Park.

The lawsuit, which was filed by Earthjustice on behalf of the campaign groups and tribes, calls into question the legality of a 2013 decision by the FWS and the National Park Service to allow the “taking”–which is code for killing–of four grizzly bears over the next seven years so as to preserve fall elk hunts in Grand Teton, where hunters are given a license to kill certain elk within the park as a means of controlling overall elk numbers.

This perhaps surprising authorization to kill the bears came as a response to a Thanksgiving Day 2012 incident in which three hunters participating in the elk hunt that day shot and killed an adult male grizzly after attempts to ward off the bear had failed. There was no indication that the hunters had acted unlawfully and, after a thorough investigation, no criminal proceedings were brought against the three licensed hunters. Simply, it appeared that the male bear had tried to defend its food source and refused to back down when the hunters went to retrieve a fallen elk.

The federal agencies in question have noted that this kind of problem–while rare–could become more frequent, with the bears turning to hunter-caught and killed meat as part of their own survival strategy as other food sources have become scarce.

As a result, federal officials said that it was acceptable to kill up to four more grizzly bears in connection with future elk hunts in Grand Teton up to the year 2022. This doesn’t mean that they have authorized pro-active bear hunts, but it does mean that if these deaths occur that they will not be treated as criminal cases.

The suit claims that the federal agencies have issued this allowance and others like it without considering the total impact on grizzlies in the park, and in particular that they have failed to realize that other killings that they have authorized could add up to the killing of as many as 65 female bears in a single year–which the suit claims exceeds the agencies’ own so called sustainable level for female bears by more than than three times. The suit specifically says the federal agencies have violated section 7 of the Endangered Species Act (“ESA”) in order to exempt the grizzly bear killings in the park.

Allowing four additional grizzly bears – a threatened species – to be killed in one our nation’s most iconic national parks, without even requiring significant measures to reduce conflicts between people and bears, is inexcusable. The Fish and Wildlife Service has repeatedly increased the number of grizzly bears that can be killed, without looking at the broader impact on grizzly recovery in the region.

The suit aims to stop both the park’s elk reduction program until this matter is properly addressed.

While of course we might balk at any form of hunting, it’s undeniable that the elk hunt does bring in a valuable cash flow for the park. In fact, the park is considering higher fees on businesses operating within its borders that connect with the elk hunt, so that it can raise more revenue and keep its conservation efforts going. As such, anything that threatens the elk hunt could be detrimental to that cash flow. Yet grizzlies are by most standards a species under threat, so the threshold of what is acceptable is quite high and critics say both the park and the federal agencies have been handing out permits to kill the bears without being mindful of the overall impact, and without considering how the several states the park spans, like Wyoming, have been steadily trying to undermine the protections in order to court lucrative hunting programs.

For its part, Grand Teton National Park is aware of the suit but has said it doesn’t comment on pending legislation. With that in mind though, Grand Teton National Park spokeswoman Jackie Skaggs had this to say according to told Jackson Hole News & Guide:

“It’s important to note that the most common cause of deaths for grizzly bears in Grand Teton has resulted from vehicle collisions,” Skaggs said via email. “Park managers and staff take the loss of a single grizzly bear quite seriously, and we will continue to protect grizzlies in every way possible, including providing additional safety warnings for drivers or proper food storage alerts for campers, as well as implementing appropriate changes to management of the elk reduction program when necessary.”

This comes as wildlife agencies also continue to dither on whether grizzly bears should keep their endangered status, something that conservationists say is necessary because, even though the bear population is now relatively stable, it is in no way at a level that we could deem sustainable. They also point out that any relaxing of that status will essentially encourage wider hunting of the bears, leading to further and possibly devastating population reduction.

Steve Williams|April 9, 2015

Forestry

6,000 Acres of Old Growth Forests Slated for Logging, the Largest Sale in Decades

Two coalitions of conservation groups filed Notices of Appeal before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals last week from recent district court opinions approving old growth logging in the Tongass National Forest. In one case, four groups challenged the U.S. Forest Service’s Big Thorne old growth timber sale and associated road construction. In a separate lawsuit, a partially overlapping set of groups challenged provisions in the Tongass Land Management Plan that the Forest Service relies on when preparing old growth sales across much of Southeast Alaska.

The Big Thorne sale is by far the largest Tongass old growth sale in decades. The conservation groups argue that it undercuts the region’s $2 billion fishing and tourism industries while continuing an unsustainable log export industry. The groups are also concerned about damage to vital habitat for salmon, bears, Sitka black-tailed deer, goshawks and the Alexander Archipelago wolf, and impacts to sport and subsistence hunters as well as recreational use of the forest.

The Big Thorne sale would clearcut more than 6,000 acres of old-growth rainforest on Prince of Wales Island. Though the Forest Service estimates the sale would cost taxpayers $13 million, the economics of recent sales indicate taxpayer costs could eventually climb over $100 million. The Forest Service has been widely criticized for offering old-growth sales at an economic loss to American taxpayers and its Tongass timber program is currently under review by the federal General Accounting Office. Timber makes up less than 1 percent of economic activity in Southeast Alaska.

By contrast, economic reports value Southeast Alaska’s fishing and tourism industries at a combined $2 billion annually. Some reports suggest road building and industrial activity associated with Big Thorne would harm fish habitat and is inadequately analyzed by the Forest Service. Wild coho runs, an economic staple for the region’s troll fleet, are particularly sensitive to habitat impacts to headwater streams.

While concerns have been raised that the Big Thorne sale is vital to a local mill, the groups presented evidence to the court of ample timber supply from State of Alaska timber sales as well as existing sales under contract to maintain operations. Additionally, in seeking to halt the old growth sale, the groups exempted the project’s second-growth and stewardship components.

The separate suit over the management plan challenges its failure to ensure that adequate old growth is left after timber sales for stable populations of wildlife—including Sitka black-tailed deer. It also alleges that the Forest Service failed, when adopting the plan, to give the public an accurate picture of how plan implementation would affect wildlife and those – like subsistence hunters—who rely on healthy wildlife populations.

“We’re looking for a solution that keeps jobs in the woods without sacrificing key habitat for deer, bear, wolf and salmon. We support projects that will be compatible with the region’s fishing and tourism industries—as well as deer hunting opportunities—over the long run,” said SEACC executive director Malena Marvin. “For years, SEACC has worked with regional partners to advocate micro sales, develop community-scale forest projects that support local businesses, and promote the region’s small sawmills,” she continued. “Our organization remains opposed to industrial-scale clearcuts that rely on exports—curtailing the export of round logs to Asia would increase jobs per log cut on the Tongass while eliminating massive, controversial old-growth sales.

“Economic prosperity in Southeast Alaska depends on vibrant, healthy old growth forests to support the economic drivers of our region—world-class fishing, hunting, recreation, and tourism,” said Holly Harris, staff attorney with Earthjustice.  “While Southeast Alaska loses thousands of acres of irreplaceable old growth habitat in sales like Big Thorne, taxpayers are paying tens of millions of dollars a year to prop up the old growth timber industry. The Forest Service’s tired reliance on these kinds of massive, subsidized old growth sales devastates the environment and jeopardizes the future of our region.”

“Allowing massive sales like Big Thorne is yet another blow to the Tongass National Forest and southeast Alaska,” said Kristen Miller, Conservation Director at Alaska Wilderness League. “Continuing to subsidize sales like Big Thorne threatens the viability of the wildlife and scenery that bring one million people to hike, hunt, fish, kayak and tour the Tongass each year. Southeast Alaska’s economy has moved on from timber. Instead of continuing to pour money into massive old growth giveaways like Big Thorne, why not put taxpayer dollars where they will give us the largest return on our investment year after year, and allow us to preserve a national treasure in the process.”

“It’s clear that the Big Thorne sale is not the best path forward for taxpayers, for local communities, or for wildlife,” said Alli Harvey, Alaska Representative for Sierra Club’s Our Wild America campaign. “We should be safeguarding this amazing rainforest and its old growth trees, not clear-cutting the future.”

“The Big Thorne timber sale is bad for wildlife, birds, fish and the people who care about them,” said Jim Adams, Audubon Alaska’s Policy Director. “The science tells us it is long-past time for the Forest Service to transition away from large-scale old-growth timber sales on the Tongass.”

Appealing the Big Thorne decision are the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, Alaska Wilderness League, Sierra Club, and Audubon Alaska. Appealing a separate decision related to the Tongass Land Management Plan are Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, Natural Resources Defense Council, Alaska Wilderness League, and Sierra Club. Earthjustice represents the groups in both appeals.

Earthjustice|March 30, 2015

Iconic Alaskan Yellow Cedar Considered For Endangered Protection

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — An iconic Alaska tree may warrant protection as a threatened or endangered species due to climate warming, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Thursday.

The agency will begin a status review of yellow cedar, a tree revered and used by Native Alaska cultures and valued as of high value to the timber industry.

The decision is great news for the Tongass National Forest and for yellow cedar, said Rebecca Noblin, an attorney in Anchorage for the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the groups that petitioned to list the tree.

“We’re losing yellow cedar rapidly to climate change, and if we don’t start addressing our greenhouse gas emissions, we’re going to lose yellow cedars,” she said.

Owen Graham, executive director of the Alaska Forest Association, a timber industry trade association, said no listing is warranted.

“It’s kind of silly,” he said from Ketchikan. “Yellow cedar is not in any danger.”

Yellow cedar trees can live more than 1,000 years. Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian people use the rot-resistant wood for canoe paddles and totem poles. They can take a lengthwise strip of bark from a living tree for weaving baskets and hats, and as backing in blankets. The tree can compartmentalize the injury and continue growing.

However, the yellow cedar’s shallow roots make the tree vulnerable to changes brought on by climate warming, according to petitioners.

In a paper published in 2012, U.S. Forest Service researchers concluded that climate warming has meant less snow and less insulation for the ground. Elevated mortality began around 1880-1890 and peaked in the 1970s and 1980s, according to the study.

Across 781 square miles of Alaska’s Panhandle, more than 70 percent of yellow cedar trees have died because of root freeze induced by climate change, according to the listing petition.

Owen, of the forest association, disputed the Forest Service study and called its conclusions a hypothesis. Experts dispute the conclusions, he said. Die-off events are sporadic and “certainly not a crisis” that will affect all trees.

“It doesn’t prevent the young growth from coming in behind it and being healthy,” he said.

A listing would require federal agencies to consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service to make sure their actions don’t jeopardize the species. The law also requires designating critical habitat, and bans destruction or “adverse modification” of the habitat.

Under endangered species law, the agency has 12 months from submission of the petition to conduct a status review, which considers information and public comment to determine whether a species warrants listing.

If the management agency decides that a listing is warranted, it has one more year to collect additional public comment before making a final decision.

A yellow cedar listing would be the first for an Alaska tree and only the second plant listed for the state.

DAN JOLING| |04/09/2015

Global Warming and Climate Change

Antarctica Has Never Been This Hot: The Record Was Broken Twice Last Week

When you think of setting high temperature records, Antarctica might not be the first place that comes to mind. But because climate change is warming the poles of our planet faster than the rest (NASA explains: “energy in the atmosphere that is carried to the poles through large weather systems.”), records tend to fall rather quickly. Dr. Jeff Masters at Weather Underground writes that “the warmest temperature ever recorded on the continent of Antarctica may have occurred on Tuesday, March 24, 2015, when the mercury shot up to 63.5°F (17.5°C) at Argentina’s Esperanza Base on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.” (shown above)

When was the previous record? The day before: “the previous hottest temperature recorded in Antarctica was 63.3°F (17.4°C) set just one day previously at Argentina’s Marambio Base, on a small islet just off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula.”

Before that you have to go back to April 24, 1961, to hit 62.8°F (17.1°C), which was also recorded at Esperanza Base.

Note that the World Meteorological Organization has not yet had time to certify that last week’s temps are all-time records for Antarctica, but the Argentinian weather service has verified that the temperatures measured at Esperanza Base and Marambio Base were the highest ever measured at each site. A lot more details about temperature records in Antarctica can be found here.

But warm weather isn’t the only thing that the coldest continent has to contend with. All this heat is affecting the ice, and it is estimated that Antarctica loses about 160,000,000,000 tons of ice… every year. There’s also a hole in the ozone layer over there that is about the size of North-America. Oh, and there’s even a trash problem on King George’s island… Nowhere is safe!

Kara|Michael Graham Richard|TreeHugger|April 1, 2015

Thawing permafrost could be the worst climate threat you haven’t heard of

Some things get better when you take them out of the freezer. Ice cream, for example, is unarguably more delicious when it gets a little melt-y. (Unarguably, I say! Come at me, trolls.) But other things get remarkably worse. Take bananas — the next time you whip up a smoothie, leave the frozen banana to defrost on your counter and watch in horror as it turns into a yellowish brown pile of watery mucus.

And then there’s permafrost: You don’t even want to know what happens to [it] when it thaws … but actually, it’s pretty important when it comes to climate change, so let’s talk about it.

Permafrost is basically soil that stays frozen all year long. Because it never melts, it holds thousands of years worth of dead plants and their carbon. About 24 percent of land in the Northern Hemisphere is covered with the stuff. But here’s Chris Mooney at the Washington Post on what might happen to all that frozen dirt as the earth gets warmer:

As permafrost thaws, microbes start to chow down on the organic material that it contains, and as that material decomposes, it emits either carbon dioxide or methane. Experts think most of the release will take the form of carbon dioxide — the chief greenhouse gas driving global warming — but even a small fraction released as methane can have major consequences. Although it doesn’t last nearly as long as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, methane has a short-term warming effect that is many times more powerful.

So, Mooney explains, thawing permafrost would classify as one of those juicy “positive feedback” cycles that make climate change so exciting in that life-is-an-action-movie-and-someone-will-save-us-in-the-end-right?-RIGHT?!! sort of way:

More global warming could cause more thawing of Arctic permafrost, leading to more emissions of carbon into the atmosphere, leading to more warming and more thawing of Arctic permafrost — this does not end in a good place.

According to the National Academy of Sciences, the amount of carbon stored in northern permafrost (1,800 billion tons) is more than double the amount that’s currently in the atmosphere (800 billion tons).

Kevin Schaefer, a scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder, told Mooney that the latest IPCC climate projections didn’t account for thawing permafrost because this area of research is relatively new. Still, early estimates show that permafrost could be emitting an average of 160 billion tons of carbon per year by the end of the century.  Which would be bad since, according to the National Academy of Sciences, we need to keep atmospheric carbon below 1,100 billion tons if we want to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius.

Of course, this is climate science, so uncertainties abound. As Schaefer pointed out, scientists are only beginning to understand the implications of thawing permafrost. Still, it seems like something worth paying attention to … kind of like that pile of watery banana-mucus you left on your kitchen counter.

Suzanne Jacobs|3 Apr 2015

[Methane is estimated to be 30 times worse than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.]

Long-Awaited ‘Jump’ In Global Warming Now Appears ‘Imminent’

NASA temperature data dispel the myth of a recent slow-down

The fact that NOAA projects that the current El Niño could last most of 2015 means we are still on track for what is likely to be the hottest calendar year on record – very possibly beating 2014 by a wide margin (0.1°C).

And record global temps mean extreme temperatures and weather locally. So far this year, “five nations or territories have tied or set all-time records for their hottest temperature in recorded history,” explains meteorologist Jeff Masters.

in long-term warming trend. But there was a big jump in temps during the mid-1990s. Many scientists believe another jump is “imminent.’

We may be witnessing the start of the long-awaited jump in global temperatures. There is “a vast and growing body of research,” as Climate Central explained in February. “Humanity is about to experience a historically unprecedented spike in temperatures.”

A March study, “Near-term acceleration in the rate of temperature change,” makes clear that an actual acceleration in the rate of global warming is imminent – with Arctic warming rising a stunning 1°F per decade by the 2020s.

Scientists note that some 90 percent of global heating goes into the oceans – and ocean warming has accelerated in recent years. Leading climatologist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research explained here in 2013 that “a global temperature increase occurs in the latter stages of an El Niño event, as heat comes out of the ocean and warms the atmosphere.”

In March, NOAA announced the arrival of an El Niño, a multi-month weather pattern “characterized by unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific.”

How much of a temperature jump should we expect? Last month, Trenberth explained to Living on Earth:

Trenberth says it could mean a rise of two- or three-tenths-of-a-degree Celsius, or up to half a degree Fahrenheit. The change could occur “relatively abruptly,” but then stick around for five or 10 years.

I interviewed Trenberth this week, and he told me that he thinks “a jump is imminent.” When I asked whether he considers that “likely,” he answered, “I am going to say yes. Somewhat cautiously because this is sticking my neck out.”

Trenberth explained that it’s significant the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) “seems to have gone strongly positive” because that is “perhaps the best single indicator to me that a jump is imminent.” During a PDO, he explains, “the distribution of heat in the oceans changes along with some ocean currents.”

The PDO is a “pattern of Pacific climate variability similar to ENSO [El Niño Southern Oscillation] in character, but which varies over a much longer time scale.” While El Niños and La Niñas tend to last only 6 to 18 months, the PDO can remain primarily in one phase for a decade or even longer, as this figure from NOAA’s March “Global Ocean Monitoring” report shows:

“The positive phase of PDO [Pacific Decadal Oscillation] index has persisted 8 months since Jul 2014 with PDO index = + 1.6 in Feb 2015.” Via NOAA.

If you compare the PDO chart with the NASA global temp chart at the top, you’ll see that a negative PDO appears to temporarily offset the long-term global warming trend, whereas a positive PDO corresponds to a “catch up” phase (see discussion here). That is one reason, Trenberth explains, that global temperatures seem to look more like a staircase than a ramp (a steadily-rising straight-line or linear trend).

Making things even more confusing, the staircase-shaped rise in temperatures is further modulated by El Niños, which tend to set the record for the hottest years (since the regional warming adds to the underlying global warming trend) and by La Niña years, which tend to be cooler than normal years.

The fact that NOAA projects that the current El Niño could last most of 2015 means we are still on track for what is likely to be the hottest calendar year on record – very possibly beating 2014 by a wide margin (0.1°C).

And record global temps mean extreme temperatures and weather locally. So far this year, “five nations or territories have tied or set all-time records for their hottest temperature in recorded history,” explains meteorologist Jeff Masters.

Antarctica appears to have set its all-time temperature record – 63.5°F (17.5°C) – on March 24 at the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. That is “more than 30°F (17°C) above average.” This was actually part of a heat wave since the Antarctic record it broke was set the day before (63.3°F). Also in March, the Chilean desert was deluged by “over fourteen years of rain in one day.”

It was the hottest February on record in California, a full 1°F higher than the second-warmest February on record. And that followed California’s driest January ever recorded. These type of records are not good news.

“So it is a bad year for the Earth and an equally bad year for the politicians, talk show radio ‘scientists’, climate-denial funders, and second rate scientists who told us not to worry,” as climate expert Professor John Abraham told me. “They told us global warming had stopped nearly two decades ago. The problem is, science and climate change marched forward. Perhaps next time we will believe the real scientists.”

Indeed it will be a very bad year for the Earth and for climate science deniers if 2015 proves to be the beginning of the long-awaited temperature jump.

The last time global temps jumped sharply (see top chart), it was during an extended period of positive PDO, from 1992 and 1998. The super El Niño in 1998 at the end of that period set a new global temperature record by a wide margin. That was a high bar for subsequent years to match, which cherry-picking climate science deniers used – with some success – to persuade conservative politicians and media outlets that global warming had paused or slowed down. In fact we have merely been in an extended period of the PDO negative phase, with only occasional switches to a mild positive phase. And that, coupled with some recent La Niñas, gave an appearance of a short-term slowdown in warming in some datasets.

But the NASA chart at the top makes clear there has in fact been no slowdown in warming. Indeed the March study, “Near-term acceleration in the rate of temperature change” makes clear the only “pause” there has been was in the long-expected speed-up of global warming. The rate of surface warming should have started to accelerate in the past decade, rather than stay fairly constant.

The authors warned that, by 2020, human-caused warming will move the Earth’s climate system into a regime of rapid multi-decadal rates of warming. It projected that within the next few years, “there is an increased likelihood of accelerated global warming associated with release of heat from the sub-surface ocean and a reversal of the phase of decadal variability in the Pacific Ocean.”

That would be Trenberth’s imminent jump. And it may be starting now.

JOE ROMM|APRIL 2, 2015

Big Money, Big Politics, and Big Infrastructure: Florida’s Saga Illustrates Climate Change’s Deep Challenges

Investigative journalists reported earlier this month that top appointees at Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection and other state agencies ordered employees not to use the terms “climate change” or “global warming” in official communications. Politically coded euphemisms such as “climate drivers” and “climate variability” were to be used instead. “Sea-level rise” was to be replaced with “nuisance flooding.” The news swiftly went viral, with commentators noting the irony of such censorship occurring in Florida – essentially ground zero for climate change in the Global North.

Banning words does nothing, of course, to ward off the very real impacts of climate change, but the Orwellian move does illustrate one of the chief obstacles to preparing proactively for climate change. The dynamics at play in Florida – massive infrastructure projects with unintended consequences, intensifying effects of environmental change, and political resistance – are a microcosm of what makes adjusting to climate change such a vexing societal challenge.

A Perfect Storm

Florida has 8,400 miles of tidal shoreline and more than 75 percent of Floridians live in coastal counties. Southeastern Florida, in particular, is “uniquely vulnerable,” thanks to a perfect storm of environmental factors, development patterns and infrastructural legacies.

A microcosm of what makes adjusting to climate change such a vexing societal challenge

As a subtropical peninsula located within a major Atlantic hurricane alley, South Florida is already subject to extreme climate variability and unpredictability, which global warming will exacerbate. The pace of sea-level rise in the region is above the global average and appears to be accelerating. The U.S. Army projects a rise of three to seven inches by 2030 and 9 to 24 inches by 2060. Some 2.4 million people live less than four feet above the high-tide line, and highly porous limestone bedrock undermines the effectiveness of physical barriers, like those employed by the Netherlands.

These environmental vulnerabilities are amplified by dense urban development within the coastal zone, from Miami to Palm Beach. A 2008 OECD study ranking cities’ vulnerability to coastal flooding placed Miami first in financial assets and fourth in population exposure.

The final element of southeastern Florida’s vulnerability trifecta is infrastructural. Intense urban and agricultural development is a recent phenomenon here, made possible by a massive flood-control system built in the 1950s. Historically, almost the entire southern third of the peninsula was part of the greater Everglades ecosystem: a 3-million-acre marsh that was inundated for months every year. Now, a vast network of canals, levees, pump stations, and gates swiftly removes floodwaters and discharges them into the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico at an average rate of 1.7 billion gallons a day. This system has successfully carried out its mission for half a century, but with disastrous unintended consequences for both natural systems and people.

The Achilles Heel

Climate change is altering the calculus of an already-daunting hydraulic system. Some 6 million residents draw their potable water from the shallow Biscayne Aquifer, but decades of flood control have lowered the water table, allowing seawater to intrude. Several cities have had to move wells further inland, and sea-level rise is accelerating this process. If nothing changes, the region will increasingly have to rely on costly and energy-intensive desalination for drinking water.

The canals that discharge floodwaters from urban areas into the Atlantic are gravity-driven – that is, they flow downhill. As sea level rises above canal stages, pumps must be installed to keep flow moving. These can cost up to $70 million each plus fuel. According to a study by Florida Atlantic University, just three to nine inches of sea-level rise would incapacitate 70 percent of coastal floodgates.

A system of canals and levees have changed flows out of Lake Okeechobee (South Florida Water Management District)

The lowest-lying areas already experience “sunny-day flooding,” when high tides push seawater through storm drains into the streets. Miami Beach recently spent $15 million on two underground pumps, which successfully prevented street flooding during last fall’s biannual king tide. These were merely the first installment in a $300-500 million plan to install 80 more pumps by 2020, along with other structural measures such as raising streets and sidewalks. Yet this plan is designed to accommodate only six inches of sea-level rise; beyond that, city leaders place their faith in “human innovation.”

Recent stories in The New York Times, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and other high-profile outlets have drawn attention to the problems of seawater intrusion and coastal flood protection in southeastern Florida, but none have delved into the broader vulnerabilities of the flood-control system. The system’s lynchpin is the vast and shallow Lake Okeechobee, which serves as a multi-purpose reservoir. It is the primary site for storing floodwaters during wet periods but also supplies water for nearby agricultural irrigation. These two functions are at cross-purposes. Ensuring adequate water supply for dry years requires keeping more water in the lake, but higher levels mean less capacity for retaining floodwaters. This operational dilemma is particularly vexing in a subtropical setting already subject to unpredictable climate extremes – and lined up for more.

“A grave and imminent danger”

In southeastern Florida, climate change is expected to bring more droughts, but also more severe storms. Global reinsurance firm Swiss Re predicts annual storm-related losses in the area “to reach $33 billion by 2030, up from $17 billion in 2008.” A major hurricane striking an urban area would inflict staggering costs. The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 caused around $1 billion-worth of damage, according to The Economist (inflation adjusted). “Were it to strike today the insured losses would be $125 billion.”

A less widely recognized threat is the integrity of the 143-mile dike, built in the 1930s and 1950s, that encloses Lake Okeechobee. The lake now holds much higher water levels than the earthen berm was designed for, and an independent technical review in 2006 concluded that structural inadequacies and internal erosion render it “a grave and imminent danger,” with a one-in-six chance of failing in any given year. According to the Florida Division of Emergency Management, if a Category 4 or 5 hurricane were to hit Lake Okeechobee, the dike would certainly fail, forcing the evacuation of nearly 3 million people, while putting hundreds of miles of evacuation routes under two feet or more of water for weeks. Dike repairs are underway but not scheduled for completion until 2021. Until then, the dike remains “a gun pointed at South Florida,” according to one of the authors of the 2006 review.

Political Roadblocks

The only way to combat seawater intrusion is to retain more of the floodwater currently discharged to tide and use it to recharge the aquifer. Additional retention capacity would also greatly reduce the risks and trade-offs of Lake Okeechobee management. A multi-billion dollar state-federal program launched in 2000 seeks to do just that, but has yet to produce a viable strategy. The failure is due, in part, to the technical challenges of large-scale water storage in South Florida. The flat topography means there are no river canyons to dam. The heat subjects surface impoundments to large losses from evapotranspiration. The porous bedrock causes underground water seepage. And the unpredictable climate greatly complicates operational decision making.

But another key constraint is political. Highly influential agribusinesses have been largely unwilling to sell needed lands to the state, and the state has been unwilling to compel them through condemnation. At present, the governor and legislature are resisting calls to take advantage of a rare opportunity to buy available land.

Sea-level rise could inundate large swathes of Miami-Dade County (Peter Harlem/Florida International University)

The water-storage dilemma is one example of how politics stands in the way of proactive climate adaptation in Florida. Property insurance is another. The simplest and least costly way to reduce climate vulnerability is to discourage development in high-risk areas. It has long been recognized that subsidizing insurance in flood zones, as both the state and federal governments do, perversely encourages such development, often underwriting multiple rounds of re-building storm-flattened beachfront communities. Congress finally passed a law sharply reducing federal subsidies in 2012, but repealed the reforms two years later in the face of bipartisan backlash. In Florida, where heavy hurricane losses have led most private insurers to pull out, state programs offering below-market rates are now the largest insurers. According to Reuters, Florida leads the nation in the value of property covered by the National Flood Insurance Program. A single hurricane, thus, could bankrupt the state.

Nevertheless, according to a disaster-impact analyst quoted in Rolling Stone, “There is no serious thinking, no serious planning, about [climate adaptation] going on at the state level.” Governor Rick Scott was elected in 2010 as a climate-change denier and has made national headlines since by steadfastly refusing to discuss the issue, repeatedly stating, “I am not a scientist.”

Fortunately, given the lack of state and federal leadership, some of the most powerful tools for steering development are wielded by local governments. Southeastern Florida’s four counties recently joined forces to create a regional climate change compact that is encouraging municipalities to rewrite land-use regulations and building codes in order to “discourage new development or post-disaster redevelopment in vulnerable areas.” It remains to be seen how many will take up this challenge.

Meanwhile, Miami Beach, the most vulnerable municipality of all, is pursuing precisely the opposite strategy, actively promoting more high-end real estate. Twelve luxury condo towers are currently under construction, with another 20 proposed since 2011, largely by cash-rich South American developers “more concerned by currency instability in their home countries than encroaching saltwater,” as The Washington Post’s Danielle Paquette writes. In one of the most profound ironies of the Florida climate saga, the costs of new pumps and other defensive measures are motivating city officials to continue pro-growth policies in order to increase property-tax revenues.

Preparing for the Unspeakable

Local officials are generally more open to discussing climate change than employees of state agencies, but there is one word they rarely utter in public: “retreat.” The Southeast Florida Regional Climate Compact has been lauded by the White House as a national leader in climate action, but at its sixth annual summit in October 2014, amidst much discussion of pumps and other structural flood- and storm-protection fixes, I heard only one reference to the R-word, by an architecture professor who noted that it is never discussed because it is “too scary.”

“There’s going to be a lot of throwing money in the ocean”

Local officials have the regulatory authority to discourage development in, and even promote retreat from, vulnerable areas. But as long as developers believe they will find buyers for their properties, they are likely to resist any efforts to curb growth – and local politicians are often unduly influenced by such developers.

At the state and national level, as long as leaders continue to deny the existence of climate change, they are unlikely to press local officials to do more, or use the tools at their own disposal, such as insurance reform.

Unless the political landscape shifts substantially, the costs of climate change will eventually force a retreat – managed or otherwise. Unfortunately, vast sums will have been sunk by then into short-term fixes, devalued real estate, and avoidable expenses like desalination, leaving society with less capacity to adapt to the no-longer deniable realities of an altered climate.

Perhaps the most disturbing take-away from Florida’s experience is an extrapolation: If changing our way of thinking is such a challenge in the world’s richest democracy, how can we expect others to do better?

In the words of the University of Miami’s Hal Wanless, “there’s going to be a lot of throwing money in the ocean before we realize it’s time to move on.”

Katrina Schwartz|March 31, 2015

Wisconsin Bans Staff Of Public Lands Board From Talking About Climate Change

According to Wisconsin’s Board of Commissioners of Public Lands, working on climate change, or even just talking about it while at work, is a waste of public funds.

On Tuesday, the board voted 2-to-1 to prohibit staff “from engaging in global warming or climate change work” while on the clock at the Board of Commissioners.

The move comes as Republicans on the board expressed outrage that the board’s executive director, Tia Nelson, had served on a state global warming task force in 2007 and 2008, which was organized by former Gov. Jim Doyle (D).

“[Climate change is] not a part of our sole mission, which is to make money for our beneficiaries,” said state Treasurer Matt Adamczyk (R), the leader of the effort, according to a Bloomberg Business report on the hearing. “That’s what I want our employees working on. That’s it. Managing our trust funds.” Adamczyk, Secretary of State Doug La Follette (D) and Attorney General Brad Schimel (R) make up the board.

La Follette, the only vote against the measure, said Republicans are trying to “gag employees” on climate change. He also accused Adamczyk of having personal motivations on the subject.

“Part of it is he hates environmental people,” La Follette told the Wisconsin State Journal. “And that includes me.”

Nelson is the daughter of former Wisconsin governor, U.S. senator and Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson. “It honestly never occurred to me that being asked by a sitting governor to serve on a citizen task force would be objectionable,” said Nelson, according to Bloomberg.

Adamczyk, who took office in January, has made getting rid of official positions a major focus — including advocating for getting rid of his own role as state treasurer. He’s also tried to get rid of Nelson, and previously complained about the mention of climate change as a threat to ecosystems on the board’s website. “Why is the BCPL concerned with discussing the hot button issue of ‘global climate change,'” he wrote in an email to Nelson, according to The New York Times.

He also reportedly asked Nelson to end the office’s subscription to The New York Times, arguing that it was “simply a want and NOT A NEED.”

Kate Sheppard|huffingtonpost.com|04/08/2015

First Florida, Now Wisconsin, Bans the Words ‘Climate Change’

The idea that you can make climate change go away by not talking about it is spreading.

One month ago, we heard how officials and staff at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection were ordered not to use the terms “climate change” or “global warming” even when they were discussing the all-too-obvious impacts to their vulnerable state.

Now it’s Wisconsin’s turn. The staff of its Board of Commissioners of Public Lands (BCPL) has been told they can’t even discuss climate change, no matter what they call it. Staff members aren’t even permitted to respond to emails on the subject, following a vote this week by the three-member panel overseeing the agency. It includes two Republicans and one Democrat and the vote was 2-1.

“It’s not a part of our sole mission, which is to make money for our beneficiaries,” State Treasurer Matt Adamczyk, a Republican member of the panel, told Bloomberg Business. “That’s what I want our employees working on. That’s it. Managing our trust funds.”

He suggested any emails relating to climate change be forwarded to the oversight board.

The Wisconsin BCPL oversees income-producing land to help fund schools and communities. The lands include some that receive income from the timber industry, which can be affected by such climate change impacts as droughts, wildfires and harmful insects.

The BCPL’s own website explains that, as part of their benefit to citizens, “We contribute to Wisconsin’s sustainable timber economy, combat forest fragmentation, protect unique natural areas and secure public access to large blocks of northern forests.”

Adamczyk complained at the meeting this week that BCPL executive director Tia Nelson had devoted work time to global warming. She had, in fact, done so—in 2007-2008 when she was appointed co-chair of a global warming task force by a previous governor.

“It honestly never occurred to me that being asked by a sitting governor to serve on a citizen task force would be objectionable,” she told Bloomberg Business.

Wisconsin Secretary of State Doug La Follette, who chairs the oversight panel and voted against the measure, said afterward, “Having been on this board for close to 30 years, I’ve never seen such nonsense. We’ve reached the point now where we’re going to try to gag employees from talking about issues, in this case, climate change.”

Adamczyk called Nelson’s participation in the task force seven-eight years ago “a waste of time.” According to the meeting minutes, “[La Follette] thought it bordered on the ‘edge of an irresponsible witch hunt,’ which he did not want to be a part of.”

NextGen Climate, which announced its “Hot Seat” campaign earlier this week to hold Republican presidential candidates accountable for their statements and positions on climate change, jumped on the incident to call out Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, considered by some observers to be a promising candidate.

“This surely comes as good news to Koch-funded Governor Scott Walker who has signaled he wants to be the candidate for the Climate Change Denial Caucus,” said NextGen Climate. “Walker has signed a Koch-backed anti-climate pledge, raised money for the Heartland Institute, an organization that spreads climate misinformation, and even dislikes recycling. You can bet NextGen Climate will be putting Governor Walker on the ‘Hot Seat.’ NextGen Climate urges Scott Walker to lift the misguided restrictions on government workers. It is our hope that Republicans seeking the nomination for president won’t remain silent on this critical issue and will denounce these severe restrictions.”

Anastasia Pantsios|April 9, 2015

David Suzuki: Koch Brothers Continue to Oil the Machine of Climate Change Denial

Brothers Charles and David Koch run Koch Industries, the second-largest privately owned company in the U.S., behind Cargill. They’ve given close to US$70 million to climate change denial front groups, some of which they helped start, including Americans for Prosperity, founded by David Koch and a major force behind the Tea Party movement.

Through their companies, the Kochs are the largest U.S. leaseholder in the Alberta oilsands. They’ve provided funding to Canada’s pro-oil Fraser Institute and are known to fuel the Agenda 21 conspiracy theory, which claims a 1992 UN non-binding sustainable development proposal is a plot to remove property rights and other freedoms.

Researchers reveal they’re also behind many anti-transit initiatives in the U.S., in cities and states including Nashville, Indianapolis, Boston, Virginia, Florida and Los Angeles. They spend large amounts of money on campaigns to discredit climate science and the need to reduce greenhouse gases, and they fund sympathetic politicians.

In late January, 50 U.S. anti-government and pro-oil groups—including some tied to the Kochs and the pro-oil, pro-tobacco Heartland Institute—sent Congress a letter opposing a gas tax increase that would help fund public transit, in part because “Washington continues to spend federal dollars on projects that have nothing to do with roads like bike paths and transit.”

The letter says “transportation infrastructure has a spending problem, not a revenue problem,” an argument similar to one used by opponents of the transportation plan Metro Vancouver residents are currently voting on. Vancouver’s anti-transit campaign is led by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation—a group that doesn’t reveal its funding sources and is on record as denying the existence of human-caused climate change—along with Hamish Marshall, a conservative strategist with ties to Ethical Oil.

American and Canadian transit opponents paint themselves as populist supporters of the common people, a tactic also used against carbon pricing. Marshall told Business in Vancouver, “I love the idea of working on a campaign where we can stand up for the little guy.” The U.S. letter claims the gas tax increase “would disproportionately hurt lower income Americans already hurt by trying times in our economy.” Both fail to note that poor and middle class families will benefit most from public transit and other sustainable transportation options.

Although many organizations that promote the fossil fuel industry and reject the need to address climate change—including the Heartland Institute, International Climate Science Coalition, Ethical Oil and Friends of Science—are secretive about their funding sources, a bit of digging often turns up oil, gas and coal money, often from the Kochs in the U.S. And most of their claims are easily debunked. In the case of the U.S. Heartland Institute, arguments stray into the absurd, like comparing climate researchers and those who accept the science to terrorists and murderers like the Unabomber and Charles Manson!

In some ways, it’s understandable why fossil fuel advocates would reject clean energy, conservation and sustainable transportation. Business people protect their interests—which isn’t necessarily bad. But anything that encourages people to drive less and conserve energy cuts into the fossil fuel industry’s massive profits. It’s unfortunate that greed trumps the ethical need to reduce pollution, limit climate change and conserve non-renewable resources.

It’s also poor economic strategy on a societal level. Besides contributing to pollution and global warming, fossil fuels are becoming increasingly difficult, dangerous and expensive to exploit as easily accessible sources are depleted—and markets are volatile, as we’ve recently seen. It’s crazy to go on wastefully burning these precious resources when they can be used more wisely, and when we have better options. Clean energy technology, transit improvements and conservation also create more jobs and economic activity and contribute to greater well-being and a more stable economy than fossil fuel industries.

To reduce pollution and address global warming, we must do everything we can, from conserving energy to shifting to cleaner energy sources. Improving transportation and transit infrastructure is one of the easiest ways to do so while providing more options for people to get around.

Those who profit from our continued reliance on fossil fuels will do what they can to convince us to stay on their expensive, destructive road. It’s up to all of us to help change course

Dr. David Suzuki|April 8, 2015

Extreme Weather

Massive Tornado Hits Northern Illinois, Reports Of Heavy Damage

Multiple tornados were reported in Illinois on Thursday evening, with at least one massive twister touching down near the town of Rochelle causing damage in the nearby communities of Fairdale, Kirkland and Ashton.

At least two people were killed, including a 67-year-old woman in Fairdale, and around a dozen others were treated for injuries at local hospitals, according to the fire department from the nearby town of Rockford, which has been performing search and rescue operations in the community.

The department said on Twitter that every building in Fairdale had suffered damage:

The department also posted videos from the scene on its Facebook page:

The Red Cross has opened shelters in the area. Anyone seeking shelter can locate one on the organization’s website.

In addition to tornadoes, here have also been thunderstorms, hail and high winds throughout the area.

Images on social media showed some of the damage to buildings and homes:

“We have five people trapped inside a restaurant at 251 on Route 64,” Randy Travis, assistant fire chief in Oregon, Illinois, told the Chicago Sun-Times. “Several homes have been leveled near Flagg Center and Hillcrest, which is north of Rochelle. They are both little villages.”

Twelve people were later rescued from the restaurant, Grubsteakers, storm chaser Scott McClellan reported on Twitter. He added that there were only minor injuries.

However, the restaurant was severely damaged:

Heavy damage was also reported in the small town of Fairdale:

The Rockford Fire Department reported “significant damage” in the town of Kirkland and said it was searching for trapped victims.

The Summerfield Zoo in Belvidere was also hit by the tornado.

Ed Mazza|The Huffington Post|04/09/2015

Genetically Modified Organisms

EPA Approves GMO Weed Killer Enlist Duo in Nine More States

Ignoring the World Health Organization’s (WHO) conclusion that the crop chemical glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans,” the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has approved the glyphosate-containing herbicide Enlist Duo for agricultural use in nine more states. It had previously been approved for use on genetically engineered crops in six states.

Enlist Duo’s active ingredients are glyphosate and 2,4-D, both of which have been shown to increase the risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

“This poorly conceived decision by EPA will likely put a significant number of farmers, farm workers and rural residents at greater risk of being diagnosed with cancer,” said Scott Faber, senior vice president for government affairs at Environmental Working Group. “The agency simply ignored a game-changing new finding from the world leading cancer experts, and has instead decided the interests of biotech giants like Dow and Monsanto come first.”

Last month, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a branch of the WHO, elevated its risk assessment of glyphosate to “probably carcinogenic to humans” based on a review of the evidence by a panel of 17 leading oncology experts.

Glyphosate is the most used pesticide in the U.S. The bulk of it is applied to genetically engineered corn and soybean crops. It is also the main ingredient in Monsanto’s signature weed killer RoundUp.

EPA’s decision will allow Enlist Duo to be sprayed on fields of genetically engineered corn and soybeans in Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and Oklahoma. It was previously approved for use in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin.

“Instead of taking steps to protect the public from toxic chemicals, the EPA has only sped up the pesticide treadmill that will now put millions more people at risk,” added Faber. “These toxic herbicides easily make their way off farm fields and into the air and water we and our children breathe and drink.”

Environmental Working Group|April 2, 2015

World Health Organization Won’t Back Down From Study Linking Monsanto to Cancer

The scientists behind a recent World Health Organization study which concluded the herbicide glyphosate “probably” causes cancer, say they stand behind their assessment. The comments come in response to criticisms from Monsanto Co., who said the study was based on “junk science”. The main ingredient in Monsanto’s Round Up product is glyphosate. Monsanto executives said they are reviewing their options as they move forward.

Aaron Blair, a scientist emeritus at the National Cancer Institute and lead author of the study, told Reuters,“There was sufficient evidence in animals, limited evidence in humans and strong supporting evidence showing DNA mutations and damaged chromosomes.” The WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) published their study of glyphosate on March 20, finding that the popular herbicide may contribute to non-hodgkins lymphoma.

IARC report was published in The Lancet Oncology detailing evaluations of organophosphate pesticides and herbicides. The report concluded that there was “limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans for non-Hodgkin lymphoma.” The evidence for this conclusion was pulled from studies of exposure to the chemical in the US, Canada and Sweden published since 2001.

The researchers found “convincing evidence that glyphosate can also cause cancer in laboratory animals.” The report points out that the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) had originally classified glyphosate as possibly carcinogenic to humans in 1985. The IARC Working Group evaluated the original EPA findings and more recent reports before concluding “there is sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals.” Despite the WHO’s findings, the EPA approved Monsanto’s use of glyphosate as recently as 2013.

The battle around glyphosate is also closely linked to the debate around Genetically Engineered or Modified foods. The herbicide is typically used on GM crops such as corn and soybeans that have been specifically modified to survive the harmful effects of the herbicide. Corporations like Monsanto are heavily invested in the success of the chemical. The herbicide has been found in food, water, and in the air in areas where it has been sprayed.

In 2014 Anti-Media reported on a study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health which claims to have found a link between glyphosate and the fatal Chronic Kidney Disease of Unknown origin (CKDu), which largely affects rice farmers in Sri Lanka and other nations. In response Sri Lanka has banned glyphosate and Brazil is considering doing the same.

Sri Lanka’s Minister of Special Projects S.M. Chandrasena stated that President Mahinda Rajapaksa issued a directive to ban glyphosate sales in the country. “An investigation carried out by medical specialists and scientists have revealed that kidney disease was mainly caused by glyphosate. President Mahinda Rajapaksa has ordered the immediate removal of glyphosate from the local market soon after he was told of the contents of the report.”

The researchers believe glyphosate could be helping carry toxic heavy metals present in certain agri-chemicals to the kidneys. Chronic kidney disease of unknown etiology (CKDu)  was first seen in the north central areas of Sri Lanka in the 1990s and has taken an estimated 20,000 lives. Before being pushed by Monsanto for use as herbicide, glyphosate was a de-scaling agent to clean mineral deposits in hot water systems.

Although the paper did not offer new scientific evidence, the researchers proposed a theory for how CKDu is spread. The researchers believe that glyphosate is contributing to a rise of heavy metals in drinking water. Dr. Channa Jayasumana, lead author of the study said, “glyphosate acts as a carrier or a vector of these heavy metals to the kidney.” Glyphosate itself is not the toxic agent, however when combined with metals in the ground water the herbicide becomes extremely toxic to the kidneys.

In recent years there has been a spike in CKDu patients in farming areas of El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica.

The Minister stated that a new national program would be launched encouraging Sri Lankan farmers to use organic fertilizer. The Ministry of Agriculture is hoping to plant 100,000 acres of land throughout the country using organic methods.

Monsanto spokesman Thomas Helscher stated,“There are no epidemiologic studies suggesting that exposures to glyphosate-based products are associated with renal disorders either in Sri Lanka or elsewhere. The paper presents a theory, the theory has not been tested, and there are a significant number of publications supported by data that make the Jayasumana hypothesis quite unlikely to be correct.” Despite promises from Monsanto, the evidence indicating dangers related to glyphosate continue to pile up.

With the USDA’s decision late last year to approve a new batch of genetically modified corn and soybean seeds designed to be resistant to glyphosate, we should expect to see an increase in herbicide use overall, and with it, many disastrous health effects. In fact, the approval by the USDA now partners DOW Chemical and Monsanto together, a move which will only further entrench the control that corporate entities have over governments.

Derrick Broze|Global Research|March 31, 2015

Herbicide horror

Once thought safe enough to drink, the most popular weed killer on earth is increasingly difficult to avoid – and critics charge it’s contributing to chronic illnesses

The bestselling herbicide in Canada and the world, glyphosate was once promoted as safe enough to drink. But some critics are raising renewed alarm. One of them is Thierry Vrain, a plant pathologist and former head of biotechnology with Agriculture Canada, who says there is no safe intake level for this toxic chemical, which appears to be linked to a rising tide of chronic illnesses. Indeed, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer has just declared glyphosate a “probable carcinogen.” (More on IARC’s study here).

Farmers have used glyphosate to weed Ontario fields since 1978. But the introduction of genetically modified (GM) crops in 1997 – most of them designed to be glyphosate-tolerant – was a game changer. Farmers could now raze weeds with a single blanket spray of glyphosate without killing their crops. 

Though industry promised GM crops would drive down pesticide application, glyphosate use has risen dramatically, by some 76 per cent between 2003 and 2008 in Ontario. 

That helped reverse a decades-long decline in pesticide use that was already well under way before a single GM plant appeared in farm fields. By 2012, glyphosate had captured almost 53 per cent of the western Canadian herbicide market – more than the dozen next-most-popular herbicides put together.

But GM crops aren’t powering glyphosate’s growth single-handedly. 

Farmers are increasingly using the herbicide as a desiccant (dryer) on both GM and conventional plants, making harvesting easier or moving up a harvest threatened by bad weather. 

There are no official Ontario data on how widely desiccation is practiced, though Slumskie estimates it’s used on up to 15 per cent of GM soy. 

It’s increasingly difficult to avoid the most popular herbicide on earth. A recent study of U.S. honey found 59 per cent of samples contained glyphosate. Though a safe glyphosate level in honey hasn’t been determined, recent research suggests the current level of glyphosate exposure in general may constitute a health threat to the population.

You might think organic crops would be free of this chemical, but glyphosate has recently been discovered in samples of air and water, so all food may now be tainted.

Pesticide makers say their products have never been safer, and pesticide residues represent such a minute health risk that people need not worry. 

Well, critics disagree. They point to the chemistry behind the herbicide’s action.

Glyphosate was first thought to pose little threat because neither human nor animal cells have shikimate pathways, a metabolic route used by plants and bacteria. Glyphosate does its deadly work by binding to the metal atoms of enzymes in the plant’s pathways, preventing them from producing critical amino acids. Without those, the plant dies. 

New discoveries about the human microbiome – including the 100 trillion bacteria in the human gut – are starting to reveal the critical role microorganisms play in promoting human health. 

Don Huber, professor emeritus of plant pathology at Purdue University, says that just as it attacks plants, glyphosate can demobilize the bacteria on which humans and animals depend.

But Joe Schwarcz, director of the Office for Science & Society at McGill University, says the theories need to be proven under proper laboratory conditions before they should be believed.

On the issue of nutrition, Schwarcz agrees that glyphosate binds to minerals, which humans and animals need for health. He insists, though, that the chemical is applied in just the right strength to kill weeds but not enough to disable the minerals plants pull up from the earth. 

But some studies suggest the opposite is true. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture found herbicide-tolerant soy contained lower nutrient levels than conventional soybeans.

Further evidence might be the manganese and B12 deficiencies often found in the livers of slaughtered animals. Commercial packing houses are said to throw out 80 per cent of their livers because they are so damaged, says Huber.

But another possible health threat is glyphosate’s antibiotic action.

Monsanto patented the chemical as an antibiotic in 2010, a tacit acknowledgement of its effectiveness in killing microbes, though the pesticide industry maintains it’s applied to fields in concentrations too low to produce any serious antimicrobial effects in the animals, including us, consuming those crops. Schwarcz insists the antibiotic effect is “absolutely trivial.”

But Huber argues that increasing miscarriages, birth defects and chronic botulism in cattle, sheep and pigs are signs of glyphosate’s strong antibiotic activity against beneficial organisms. 

Backing up Huber, Vrain points to research from 2013 showing that, at a concentration of just one part per million, glyphosate killed all the beneficial bacteria in the guts of poultry. Only salmonella and clostridium survived – pathogens blamed for farm animal illness.

In the meantime, a recently published study by Nancy Swanson virtually twinned increasing rates of glyphosate use with rising incidence of a host of chronic diseases. They include liver, kidney and bladder cancers; Crohn’s and celiac disease; stroke, diabetes and autism, among others. 

Some shrug these correlational studies off as coincidence. But to dismiss them because they don’t prove cause “is a completely unscientific position,” says Vrain. The Swanson study’s close correlations are a hugely strong argument for more research, he says.

Huber goes so far as to call for a return to the precautionary principle until that research is done, but there are no signs of any curbs being contemplated for glyphosate use. 

New GM seeds resistant to glyphosate, as well as 2,4-D, are expected to start rolling out across Canada this year. The new seeds will help farmers battle glyphosate-resistant weeds.

While Vrain admits that biotechnology has been transformative for the just over 2 per cent of Canadians who farm, “One hundred per cent of people eat,” he says. 

Slumskie remembers when the herbicide atrazine was first introduced years ago. Farmers started applying it at 2 pounds per acre, which soon ballooned to 8. Nearby rivers became badly contaminated. 

“Now here we are with glyphosate, 40 or 45 years later, and the same thing is going on,” he says. “History will repeat itself when the lesson is never learned.”

Michelle Adelman|April 1, 2015

Monsanto Scientist Drops Bombshell: Entire Department Exists To “Discredit” Other Scientists

There’s nothing better than seeing those who work for the devil get their feet caught in their mouths. There have been two events recently that make one cheer for our side as Monsanto embarks on challenging the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) analysis of Roundup as a carcinogenic that was published in the March 2015 journal The Lancet Oncology.

Monsanto’s vice president of global regulatory affairs Philip Miller asserted the following:

“We question the quality of the assessment. The WHO has something to explain.” In other words, we think we have the clout to make sure the WHO discredits this finding as “unscientific”.

After all, Monsanto has managed to keep their false PR front up for a couple of decades while getting scientists who question Monsanto’s science discredited, their publications removed, and even fired from long term academic positions. Nasty bunch they are.

Interesting that Monsanto challenges independent studies while not producing their own funded research studies for scrutiny. A lot of scientists are on the dole with Monsanto. But it appears Monsanto’s bad karma may be catching up with them.

Monsanto’s Discredit Bureau

Daily Kos posted an article by occupystephanie where she attended a talk to agricultural students by Dr. William “Bill” Moar, whose mission it is to assure everyone of Monsanto products safety. Here’s what she revealed:

One student asked what Monsanto was doing to counter the “bad science” around their work. Dr. Moar, perhaps forgetting that this was a public event, then revealed that Monsanto indeed had “an entire department” (waving his arm for emphasis) dedicated to “debunking” science which disagreed with theirs. As far as I know this is the first time that a Monsanto functionary has publically admitted that they have such an entity which brings their immense political and financial weight to bear on scientists who dare to publish against them. The Discredit Bureau will not be found on their official website.

The challenge for Monsanto’s Discredit Bureau is steep in attacking the unimpeachably respected Lancet and the international scientific bodies of WHO and IARC. However, they have no choice but to attack since the stakes are so very high for them. Glyphosate is their hallmark product upon which the majority of their profits are based. Make no mistake, this is extremely bad news for Monsanto.

Monsanto holds up the sheer abundance of their own well-funded studies citing the safety of Glyphosate, done over only the past twenty years which is a short period of time in scientific inquiry particularly when dissenting research is actively suppressed.  They also hold up the findings of regulatory bodies, particularly in the United States where the revolving door between agrochemical corporations and government spins at high speed.

PAUL FASSA

Glyphosate’s under the spotlight

Pesticide Action Week 2015 had just started when I had read some interesting news: “Roundup weedkiller ‘probably’* causes cancer, says WHO study”

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) – an agency affiliated with the World Health Organization – had recently published the assessment of carcinogenicity of five organophosphate pesticides, among which glyphosate, the active ingredient on which Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup, is based.

And, thanks to Monsanto, of the five compounds, glyphosate is the most widely used, since it is the main herbicides against which crops have been genetically engineered (GE) to be tolerant to, as “GE Roundup Ready” crops.

When the GE crops were first introduced, one of the many claims was that they would need less chemicals to thrive. But, we have seen a dramatic rise in the number and extent of weeds that have become resistant to glyphosate and, as a consequence, the amount of this herbicide used by farmers has kept increasing too.

This is not the first study on glyphosate. Its toxicity has been studied both alone and in combination with the other ingredients used in the Roundup formulation.

In the US, where 73.1 million of acres are dedicated to GE crops, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has given its thumbs up on the use of glyphosate. The same authority also controls the residues of pesticides permitted in food. These same levels were raised in 2013 following a request by Monsanto.

Doubts have been growing even in the communities of users as witnessed by some US farmers after they’d been convinced that GE crops would improve their yields, assured this latest IARC assessment will add weight to arguments by those who believe that Roundup could be damaging their health.

For Monsanto the IARC assessment is bad news. The company’s representatives told Reuters they will seek a retraction of the report. After all, ‘Monsanto’s $15.9 billion annual sales are closely tied to glyphosate. And most of the company’s crops are designed to be used in tandem with it.’

Huge interests are at stake, but also huge responsibilities, and I am not referring to Monsanto’s stakeholders, but to the farmers and the consumers, and ultimately to the planet and its biodiversity.

“Probably” the time has come to make sure that what’s driving the decisions of the kind of agriculture that will feed the world in the future are not companies with a pocket-filling agenda.

Our planet has limited resources and we have many challenges to cope with.

Climate change is already heavily affecting agriculture.

What we need to do is to invest in an agriculture that can face the changing climate: reliable and achievable biotech improvements that don’t include GE crops. We need an agriculture that helps nourish our soil and protects biodiversity. An agriculture where farmers and consumers have their say and they are not just numbers in the great scheme of corporate agribusiness.

We need to invest in ecological-farming. We need to take ownership once more of the connection with our food. This is the first step if we want to be healthy humans living on a healthy planet.

Patrizia Cuonzo|Media Specialist|Greenpeace International|30 March, 2015

Profits of World’s Leading GMO Producer Monsanto Fell 15%

The company’s earnings fell about 15 percent as sales decreased to $5.2 billion in 2015 from $5.8 billion in 2014.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The leading producer of genetically engineered seeds and herbicides Monsanto reported lower earnings in the first half of 2015 caused by weaker sales, according to a press release issued by the company on Wednesday.

“The company’s second quarter earnings per share was $2.90 on an ongoing basis and $2.92 on an as-reported basis,” the press release said. “For the first half of fiscal year 2015, cash flow from operations was a source of approximately $1.5 billion, compared to $1.8 billion the same period last year.”

Monsanto second-quarter profit stood at $1.42 billion, compared to $1.67 billion, in the second quarter of 2014.

The company’s earnings fell about 15 percent as sales decreased to $5.2 billion in 2015 from $5.8 billion in 2014.

The industry-wide decline in corn plantings and a stronger US dollar influenced Monsanto’s performance, according to the press release.

US-based Monsanto is one of the world’s largest agricultural companies, producing genetically engineered seeds as well as herbicides.

In February 2015, the US environment watchdog Center for Food Safety issued a report saying that Monsanto’s signature herbicide Roundup Ready is leading to the decimation of Monarch butterfly populations.

In 2013, multiple protests started against Monsanto in about 400 cities around the world. The protesters accused the biotechnology giant turning a blind eye to the potentially deadly effects of its genetically modified organisms in crops and food that it sells globally.

Die Grünen Kärnten|01.04.2015

GMO Trees Approved in Brazil in Violation of National Law and International Protocols

Common Sense & Precaution Ignored

Montevideo, UY and New York, US (10 April 2015) – Yesterday the Brazilian Technical Commission on Biosafety (CTNBio) formally approved an industry request to release genetically engineered (GE) eucalyptus trees.  The application was made by FuturaGene, a company owned by Brazilian pulp and paper company Suzano. This is the first approval for commercial release of GE trees in Brazil or Latin America. Organizations in Brazil are exploring legal avenues to stop the commercial release of GE eucalyptus trees, pointing out that this decision violates national law.

An email from CTNBio member Paulo Pase de Andrade to the Campaign to STOP GE Trees dated 8 April, stated that the decision to approve GE eucalyptus was already made, indicating that yesterday’s meeting was merely a technicality where FuturaGene’s request would be rubber stamped.

World Rainforest Movement’s International Coordinator Winnie Overbeek stated, “CTNBio’s approval of GE eucalyptus trees was no surprise. Over the years, CTNBio has made many decisions in favor of releasing GMO crops in Brazil, ignoring – as also happened in this case – protests and valid concerns from a wide range of groups of society. They also ignored protest letters signed by more than 100,000 people.” 

He continued, “The Commission systematically disregards the precautionary principle, including the urgent need for detailed studies of the various impacts of this dangerous technology, even though this violates the 2008 decision on GE trees

made by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (UN CBD), to which Brazil is a signatory.” 

In his email, Paulo Pase de Andrade of CTNBio discounted the decision of the UN CBD, which he incorrectly referred to as the Cartageña Protocol, stated, “Trans-boundary movement of transgenic eucalyptus plantlets or seeds is highly improbable and accidental seed propagation elsewhere is even more improbable …Therefore the release of this GM tree is solely a Brazilian question and no other country or group of countries has the right to interfere in our decision.”

Geneticist Dr. Ricarda Steinbrecher, co-Director of EcoNexus and member of the Federation of German Scientists countered by explaining, “Regulation of GE trees at a national level will not be sufficient. The large-scale dispersion of reproductive material means GE trees are likely to cross national borders, and even continents given the extent of human activity, trade and travel,” adding, “A review of the scientific literature shows that currently there is insufficient data and understanding for meaningful risk assessments of GE trees. Both scientific literature and in-field experience show that contamination by and dispersal of GE trees will inevitably take place. The CBD decision was taken in the understanding of the risk to global forest ecosystems – and this is an international matter, both scientifically and judicially.” http://econexus.info/taxonomy/term/11

In Brazil, there are also major concerns about the impact of GE eucalyptus trees on the thousands of families that produce honey in the regions where eucalyptus are planted. These families risk losing the international markets for their honey if it is contaminated by GE eucalyptus pollen.

On Wednesday, the Brazilian Forum to Combat Agrotoxins, coordinated by the Public Prosecution Service and with participation of relevant groups and civil society, government and academia, warned that CTNBio has repeatedly violated the National Brazilian Policy of Biosafety.

In spite of the approval, the coalition of groups organizing to stop GE eucalyptus, are highlighting the many worldwide actions that have taken place against legalizing GE eucalyptus. In Brazil, organizations and activists mobilized to denounce the release during a public hearing on FuturaGene’s request last September in Brasilia.  

More recently, on 5 March 2015, about 1,000 women from several rural and urban social movements occupied the operations of FuturaGene in Brazil’s São Paulo state. At the same time, 300 peasants organized by La Via Campesina occupied and shut down the meeting of CTNBio in the country´s capital, where the decision on FuturaGene’s GE eucalyptus was supposed to be made. Outside Brazil, global weeks of action were organized at Brazilian Embassies and Consulates on five continents against the release of the GE eucalyptus of FuturaGene.

“Our challenge now is to continue to strengthen the movement against GE trees, in solidarity with Brazilian organizations and social movements, and also worldwide,” stated Anne Petermann, Coordinator of the International Campaign to STOP GE Trees. She added, “During the occupation of the FuturaGene operations on 5 March, A woman from the Brazilian MST pointed out ‘… this model of agribusiness is the model of death,
not of life,’ and ‘… we are here to defend a model of life, defend food sovereignty, and defend agrarian land reform.”

As Brazilians say: “A Luta Continua! – The struggle continues!”

Anne Petermann|Campaign to STOP GE Trees

Toxic Weed Killer Glyphosate Found in Breast Milk, Infant Formula

The widely-used herbicide glyphosate, now classified as probably carcinogenic to humans by the World Health Organization (WHO), has been found in a number of items, including honey, breast milk and infant formula, according to media reports.

“When chemical agriculture blankets millions of acres of genetically engineered corn and soybean fields with hundreds of millions of pounds of glyphosate, it’s not a surprise babies are now consuming Monsanto’s signature chemical with breast milk and infant formula,” said Ken Cook, president and co-founder of Environmental Working Group. “The primary reason millions of Americans, including infants, are now exposed to this probable carcinogen is due to the explosion of genetically engineered crops that now dominate farmland across the U.S.”

“Through their purchasing power, the American consumer is fueling this surge in GMO crops and the glyphosate exposure that comes with it,” added Cook. “It’s time the federal FDA require foods made with GMOs be labeled as such so the public can decide for themselves if they want to send their dollars to the biotech industry that cares more about profits than public health.”

According to a report by Carey Gillam of Reuters, laboratories are receiving a surge in requests to have everything from food to urine samples tested for glyphosate in the aftermath of last month’s announcement by the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer that the weed-killer is “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

“The requests keep coming in,” Ben Winkler, laboratory manager at Microbe Inotech Laboratories in St. Louis, told Gillam. Winkler said his lab is getting several testing requests a week since the announcement by the WHO, up from three to four requests a year for glyphosate, Gillam Reported.

“People should be concerned,” Cook said. “If a few lab tests have found glyphosate in honey, soy sauce, baby formula and breast milk, it’s a fair bet the herbicide is in a number of other products most Americans are consuming or in contact with daily.”

According to press reports, food companies have submitted a number of products, including breakfast cereals, for testing. Many mainstream cold cereals are made with genetically engineered ingredients, including GMO corn where the bulk of glyphosate is used.

“The food companies should come clean with their test results and let customers know if they’ve been buying and eating products that contain glyphosate,” said Cook. “People should be aware if the food they and their families are eating include a pesticide so strongly linked to cancer.”

Environmental Working Group|April 10, 2015

Energy

Fracking’s Most Wanted

How easy is it to get information about an oil or gas company’s legal violations in your state—any spills, contaminations or equipment failure that may have occurred?

In 33 of the 36 states with active drilling operations, it’s almost impossible. And in the three which do make information available to the public—Colorado, Pennsylvania and West Virginia—that information is often incomplete, hard to access and difficult to interpret.

That’s the conclusion of a new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and FracTracker Alliance, Fracking’s Most Wanted: Lifting the Veil on Oil and Gas Company Spills and Violations.

“People deserve to know what’s happening in their own backyards, but too often homeowners aren’t even informed if there’s a threat to their health,” said Amy Mall, report co-author and senior policy analyst at NRDC. “Our representatives have a responsibility to protect the people who elect them, not help keep a dangerous industry shrouded in secrecy. States are falling down on their responsibility to be a watchdog for the people who live there.”

Taking the famous 1914 statement by U.S. Supreme Court Justine Louis D. Brandeis that “Sunlight is said the be the best of disinfectants” as its jumping-off point, the report exposes how difficult it is for local communities to find out if fracking operations in their backyards are doing anything that might jeopardize their health or safety.

“Communities want to know whether a company interested in fracking in their neighborhoods is a good corporate citizen that abides by the rules established to protect public health and safety, the environment, and quality of life,” the report says. “A credible measure of a company’s compliance lies in the documented violations incurred from state or federal regulatory agencies. Public access to this information is particularly important in this context because, unlike other industries, oil and gas wells and associated infrastructure and equipment are widespread and often operate in the middle of residential, rural and agricultural areas.”

But, it says, “Sadly, in most of the U.S., neither state nor federal agencies are providing information on violations in a transparent, easily accessible or comprehensive way.”

The report evaluated such factors as whether the information was available online in an easy-to-use, downloadable format, whether the date, location and company incurring the violation were included, whether there was an understandable text description of the violation, and whether the regulation or code violated was cited. It found that even in the three states where information was readily available to the public, none complied with all these parameters for transparency.

It found, for instance, that while Pennsylvania frequently cited companies for filling toxic waste pits too close to the top, there’s no easy way to discover if the contents actually overflowed. Colorado provides no searchable data. And both Pennsylvania and West Virginia frequently group the violations in overly vague categories. Colorado and West Virginia both maintained multiple databases.

In all other states, there were steep obstacles to public access.

“In Ohio, citizens are required to submit a formal request for inspection and violation records for specific operators,” the report found. “Arkansas does not include a description of violations, but merely cites the legal code provision that was violated, and violation documents do not include the name of the responsible operator. In Texas and North Dakota, citizens must pay for access to data and the data are extremely cumbersome to analyze and may not capture all violation issues.”

The study’s analysis of just the limited data from three states offered a snapshot of why new ground rules need to be set for public disclosure and why such transparency needs to become standard in all states with oil and gas operations.

“The data that is available in each of these three states reveals significant violations—in number and severity,” it said. “Incidents include a wide range of dangerous infractions like spills, drinking water contamination, illegal air pollution, improper construction or maintenance of waste pits, failure to conduct safety tests, improper well casing and nonworking blowout preventers.”

It found an average of 2.5 violations per day in those states, minuscule fines for violations and companies continuing to operate after multiple violations. It discovered that landowners and neighbors were not informed when violations occurred. In fact, with enforcement resources so scanty, many violations were initially reported by citizens, making it clear that they were being underreported.

The report even offered a list of the worst players in the oil and gas industry in terms of the violations uncovered, which FracTracker dubbed “Fracking’s Most Wanted.” Chesapeake Energy lead the pack with 559 violations, followed by Cabot Oil and Gas (565), Talisman Energy (362), Range Resources (281), EXCO Resources (249), ExxonMobil (246), EQT Corporation (245), Anadarko Petroleum Corporation (235). Shell (223) and Penn Virginia Corporation (186).

The report concluded that all states should institute policies that require essential information to be available to the public, that violators be held accountable, and that repeat offenders should be shut down, all of which, it says, indicates the need increased enforcement resources. It also pointed out that violations don’t include potentially dangerous practices that are legal due to weak laws or special loopholes for the oil and gas industry, and suggests that both state and federal laws should be strengthened to close these loopholes.

“The limited information that is actually available is eye-opening, both in terms of frequency and the sometimes shocking nature of the impacts when things go wrong,” said Matt Kelso, FracTracker’s manager of data and technology. “This industry is already immense and rapidly growing. It develops in residential communities, sensitive ecological areas and everywhere in between. Our research shows the need for increased transparency about the compliance record of the industry, especially given those vulnerable areas and populations.”

Anastasia Pantsios|April 3, 2015

Staggering Rise in Fracking Earthquakes Triggers Kansas to Take Action

It seems unlikely that Kansas, known as one of the most conservative states in the U.S. and home to fossil fuel barons the Koch Brothers, would take action against the oil and gas industries. But in the face of a new wave of earthquakes attributed to the underground injection of fracking wastewater, its industry regulating body, the Kansas Corporation Commission (KCC), ordered a reduction of wastewater injection in two counties abutting Oklahoma, finding that increased earthquake activity correlated with increasing volumes of injected fracking water.

“Because individual earthquakes cannot be linked to individual injection wells, this order reduces injection volumes in areas experiencing increased seismic activity,” said its official report. It added, “The commission finds increased seismic activity constitutes an immediate danger to the public health, safety and welfare. The commission finds damage may result if immediate action is not taken.”

The commission’s report pointed to findings by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) that the number of earthquakes in Kansas has risen over the past several years.

“USGS data shows from 1981 through 2010, Kansas experienced 30 recorded earthquakes,” it said. “In 2013, there were four recorded earthquakes in Kansas. The number of recorded earthquakes reported in Kansas during 2014 increased to 127. From January 1, 2015, to March 16, 2015, Kansas has experienced 51 recorded earthquakes. The majority of the earthquakes have occurred in Harper and Sumner Counties. The increased number of recorded earthquakes in Kansas coincides with an increase in the number of injection wells and the amounts of injected saltwater in Harper and Sumner Counties.”

As a result of this jump in earthquake activity, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback convened a task force last year which delivered its Seismic Action Plan in September. The commission issued its order a few weeks ago. While it doesn’t ban injection wells, it limits them, imposing fines on companies that don’t comply. It will no longer issue permits for certain types of high-volume injection wells in the two impacted counties.

The Tulsa World reports that the Kansas Corporation Commission’s new order resulted from a complaint filed by a citizen, Frank Smith, who lives in the affected area. He said that earthquakes have damaged homes, businesses and a historic courthouse.

“Prior to the ruling, we had zero protection here in Kansas, and Oklahoma at least gave a bit more than lip service to looking out for the welfare of its residents,” said Smith.“The KCC has now taken a much more proactive stance than I feel Oklahoma has done.”

In Kansas’ heavily fracked neighbor to the west, regulators and scientists have been under pressure from its oil and gas industry to downplay the link between wastewater injection and its dramatic increase in earthquake activity.

A trove of state government emails obtained by media in response to a public records request revealed that Oklahoma state seismologist Austin Holland had been called into a meeting with Oklahoma City-based oil and gas tycoon Harold Hamm where Hamm expressed his “concern” that earthquakes were being linked to the fracking process. Holland called that meeting “intimidating.”

The Tulsa World reported that, when asked at a recent town hall meeting whether Oklahoma is learning from other states how to stop man-made earthquakes, Holland nodded and said  “Earthquakes don’t stop at state lines.”

Apparently, aggressive action does. The paper said that, in contrast to Kansas, whose report and order are posted online, Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin has convened an earthquake committee that is “holding meetings that are closed to the public. The committee does not plan to issue any reports or recommendations.”

Anastasia Pantsios|April 2, 2015

Fracking’s Most Wanted

How easy is it to get information about an oil or gas company’s legal violations in your state—any spills, contaminations or equipment failure that may have occurred?

In 33 of the 36 states with active drilling operations, it’s almost impossible. And in the three which do make information available to the public—Colorado, Pennsylvania and West Virginia—that information is often incomplete, hard to access and difficult to interpret.

That’s the conclusion of a new report from the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and FracTracker Alliance, Fracking’s Most Wanted: Lifting the Veil on Oil and Gas Company Spills and Violations.

“People deserve to know what’s happening in their own backyards, but too often homeowners aren’t even informed if there’s a threat to their health,” said Amy Mall, report co-author and senior policy analyst at NRDC. “Our representatives have a responsibility to protect the people who elect them, not help keep a dangerous industry shrouded in secrecy. States are falling down on their responsibility to be a watchdog for the people who live there.”

Taking the famous 1914 statement by U.S. Supreme Court Justine Louis D. Brandeis that “Sunlight is said the be the best of disinfectants” as its jumping-off point, the report exposes how difficult it is for local communities to find out if fracking operations in their backyards are doing anything that might jeopardize their health or safety.

“Communities want to know whether a company interested in fracking in their neighborhoods is a good corporate citizen that abides by the rules established to protect public health and safety, the environment, and quality of life,” the report says. “A credible measure of a company’s compliance lies in the documented violations incurred from state or federal regulatory agencies. Public access to this information is particularly important in this context because, unlike other industries, oil and gas wells and associated infrastructure and equipment are widespread and often operate in the middle of residential, rural and agricultural areas.”

But, it says, “Sadly, in most of the U.S., neither state nor federal agencies are providing information on violations in a transparent, easily accessible or comprehensive way.”

The report evaluated such factors as whether the information was available online in an easy-to-use, downloadable format, whether the date, location and company incurring the violation were included, whether there was an understandable text description of the violation, and whether the regulation or code violated was cited. It found that even in the three states where information was readily available to the public, none complied with all these parameters for transparency.

It found, for instance, that while Pennsylvania frequently cited companies for filling toxic waste pits too close to the top, there’s no easy way to discover if the contents actually overflowed. Colorado provides no searchable data. And both Pennsylvania and West Virginia frequently group the violations in overly vague categories. Colorado and West Virginia both maintained multiple databases.

In all other states, there were steep obstacles to public access.

“In Ohio, citizens are required to submit a formal request for inspection and violation records for specific operators,” the report found. “Arkansas does not include a description of violations, but merely cites the legal code provision that was violated, and violation documents do not include the name of the responsible operator. In Texas and North Dakota, citizens must pay for access to data and the data are extremely cumbersome to analyze and may not capture all violation issues.”

The study’s analysis of just the limited data from three states offered a snapshot of why new ground rules need to be set for public disclosure and why such transparency needs to become standard in all states with oil and gas operations.

“The data that is available in each of these three states reveals significant violations—in number and severity,” it said. “Incidents include a wide range of dangerous infractions like spills, drinking water contamination, illegal air pollution, improper construction or maintenance of waste pits, failure to conduct safety tests, improper well casing and nonworking blowout preventers.”

It found an average of 2.5 violations per day in those states, minuscule fines for violations and companies continuing to operate after multiple violations. It discovered that landowners and neighbors were not informed when violations occurred. In fact, with enforcement resources so scanty, many violations were initially reported by citizens, making it clear that they were being underreported.

The report even offered a list of the worst players in the oil and gas industry in terms of the violations uncovered, which FracTracker dubbed “Fracking’s Most Wanted.” Chesapeake Energy lead the pack with 559 violations, followed by Cabot Oil and Gas (565), Talisman Energy (362), Range Resources (281), EXCO Resources (249), ExxonMobil (246), EQT Corporation (245), Anadarko Petroleum Corporation (235). Shell (223) and Penn Virginia Corporation (186).

The report concluded that all states should institute policies that require essential information to be available to the public, that violators be held accountable, and that repeat offenders should be shut down, all of which, it says, indicates the need increased enforcement resources. It also pointed out that violations don’t include potentially dangerous practices that are legal due to weak laws or special loopholes for the oil and gas industry, and suggests that both state and federal laws should be strengthened to close these loopholes.

“The limited information that is actually available is eye-opening, both in terms of frequency and the sometimes shocking nature of the impacts when things go wrong,” said Matt Kelso, FracTracker’s manager of data and technology. “This industry is already immense and rapidly growing. It develops in residential communities, sensitive ecological areas and everywhere in between. Our research shows the need for increased transparency about the compliance record of the industry, especially given those vulnerable areas and populations.”

Anastasia Pantsios|April 3, 2015

Investigation Finds Dirty Coal Projects Being Financed by Climate Funds

Findings underscore the lack of rules designed to steer the United Nations’ ‘climate finance’ initiative

Close to $1 billion in funds meant to finance global climate-mitigation projects is going toward the construction of power plants fired by coal—the biggest human source of carbon pollution—according to an Associated Press investigation.

The findings underscore the lack of rules designed to steer the United Nations’ ‘climate finance’ initiative, through which rich countries funnel money to poor countries to help tackle global warming, Karl Ritter and Margie Mason wrote for the AP.

“The money for coal highlights one of the biggest problems in the UN-led effort to fight climate change: A lack of accountability,” they pointed out. “Climate finance is critical to any global climate deal, and rich countries have pledged billions of dollars toward it in UN climate talks, which resume Monday in Lima, Peru. Yet there is no watchdog agency that ensures the money is spent in the most effective way. There’s not even a common definition on what climate finance is.”

The news outlet reported Monday that Japan, a top contributor of so-called climate finance, gave $958 million to help build three coal-fired plants in Indonesia—plants they said burn coal more efficiently than older facilities.

“However, they still emit twice as much heat-trapping carbon dioxide as plants running on natural gas,” the AP noted. “Villagers near the Cirebon plant in Indonesia also complain that stocks of shrimp, fish and green mussels have dwindled.

Japanese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Takako Ito maintained that for countries “that cannot afford to have other methods than coal,” so-called ‘clean coal’ technology may be the best option.

But it’s not clear that they have institutional backing for that stance. The AP story continued:

UN climate chief Christiana Figueres, who was unaware that the Japanese-funded coal plants in Indonesia were labeled as climate finance, said “there is no argument” for supporting such projects with climate money.

“Unabated coal has no room in the future energy system,” she told AP. “Over time, what we should be seeing is a very, very clear trend of investment into clean renewable energy.”

Even the newly launched Green Climate Fund, a key channel for climate finance in the future, still only has vague guidelines on how to spend the money. Board member Jan Cedergren said he didn’t believe the fund would support fossil fuels but acknowledged no decision has so far been made.

Earlier this year, when 24 members of the Board of the Green Climate Fund met at that body’s headquarters in Songdo, South Korea, a coalition of more than 300 international civil society organizations urged against including dirty energy in climate finance agreements.

“We’ve seen first hand how international financial institutions include fossil fuel and other harmful energy projects in their climate and energy finance under the flawed logic of ‘lower carbon’ energy and switching to ‘lower emissions’ fuels,” said Lidy Nacpil, director of Jubilee South Asia/Pacific Movement on Debt and Development. “Financing any fossil fuels and harmful energy through the Green Climate Fund is unacceptable.”

Environmentalists are hopeful that this week’s climate talks in Lima will push governments to consider climate finance as a vehicle for a paradigm shift—rather than as merely a short-term solution.

“Climate finance is such a mess. It needs to get straightened out,” Karen Orenstein of Friends of the Earth told the AP. “It would be such a shame if those resources went to fossil fuel-based technologies. It would be counterproductive.”

The AP further explained: “Unlike Japan, the U.S. and many other rich countries have cut public funding for coal projects in developing countries. Germany still supports such projects, but doesn’t count them as climate finance.”

Deirdre Fulton|staff writer|Common Dreams|December 01, 2014

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Shell to buy BG Group in $70 billion energy deal

LONDON — Oil and gas company Royal Dutch Shell agreed Wednesday to buy Britain’s BG Group in a $69.7 billion cash and stock deal that creates a massive European energy giant in one of the biggest deals for the sector in more than a decade.

The mega-merger comes amid a slump in oil prices, prompting energy companies like Shell to seek girth to better compete.

The deal, which still needs to be approved by both companies’ shareholders, will see BG Group shareholders get $5.70 in cash, plus 0.4454 Shell B shares for each BG share.

BG shareholders will own around 19 percent of the combined group that will have a market capitalization of about $240 billion — or twice as big as British oil major BP but still smaller than Exxon-Mobil, the world’s largest oil company that has a market capitalization of $360 billion.

The announcement sent BG’s London listed shares rocketing 38 percent while Royal Dutch Shell’s stock price fell more than 2 percent on Britain’s FTSE 100 index, amid fears that Shell might have overpaid for BG.

Shell executives pitched the deal Wednesday as a positive — one that will add to earnings and cut costs during a period of uncertainty in pricing.

“The combination of our two businesses is a powerful one, which has sound strategic logic,” said Andrew Gould, chairman of BG Group in a conference call. “BG’s deep-water positions and strengths in exploration, liquefaction and (liquefied natural gas) shipping and marketing will combine well with Shell’s scale, development expertise and financial strength.”

Shell said the deal would produce financial gains of around $2.5 billion a year. It will add 25 percent to its proved oil and gas reserves, 20 percent to production, and provide it with new, undeveloped oil and gas projects in Australia, Brazil and East Africa.

The deal also represents an opportunity for both firms to cut overlapping costs at a time when the energy sector is vulnerable to low oil prices. Indeed, Shell executives said the merger will cut their spending on oil and energy exploration by close to half.

It won’t boost Shell’s earnings until at least 2017, however. In the conference call, executives said the deal will be “mildly accretive to earnings per share in 2017 and strongly accretive thereafter.”

JANE ONYANGA-OMARA, KIM HJELMGAARD AND KAJA WHITEHOUSE|USA TODA Y

Thanks To Conservatives, Florida Is Now One Step Closer To Making Solar Energy More Accessible

A pro-solar conservative group in Florida cleared a major hurdle this week in its journey to make solar more accessible in the state.

Floridians for Solar Choice reached 72,000 signatures on a petition that seeks to allow Floridians to purchase solar power directly from other consumers – something that isn’t currently allowed in the state. That number of signatures clears the way for the petition to be reviewed by the state’s Supreme Court, which will decide whether or not the petition’s language legally qualifies it to be a ballot initiative for Floridians in 2016. Getting its petition on the 2016 ballot is the main goal for Floridians for Solar Choice.

“We are thrilled to reach this important milestone,” Tory Perfetti, founder of Floridians for Solar Choice, said in a statement. “It shows broad support among Florida’ families and businesses for removing barriers to commerce in solar power.”

The petition for the initiative seeks to “encourage and promote local small-scale solar-generated electricity production and to enhance the availability of solar power to customers.” Under Florida’s current law, only utilities can sell electricity directly to consumers. Florida is one of only five states in the country with a law like that, and solar advocates say that it’s holding the Sunshine State back from its solar potential. If the ballot initiative is successful in 2016, businesses and property owners in the state would be able to produce up to 2 megawatts of solar power and sell it directly to consumers.

If the state Supreme Court does approve the petition’s language for a ballot initiative, Floridians for Solar Choice will still have some work to do. In order to get on the ballot in Florida, an initiative must collect 683,149 signatures from Floridians in at least seven congressional districts by February 1. Any delays in the Supreme Court’s approval of the petition means there’s less time for Floridians for Solar Choice to collect signatures. Already, supporters have expressed frustration that the state took too long to acknowledge that they had received enough signatures for Supreme Court review.

Perfetti’s group began circulating the petition in January, and he said at the time that he received “overwhelming” response to it. Perfetti and Debbie Dooley, a tea party activist who founded the original chapter of Conservatives for Energy Freedom in Georgia, say that they’re tackling solar in Florida because increasing access to the energy source makes sense from a conservative standpoint.

“Free market and the freedom to choose – those are core conservative principles,” Dooley told ThinkProgress in January. “Unless you cherry-pick your principles, if you’re a true conservative, this is something that resonates with you. I think the residents are fed up with the government telling them who to purchase their power from.”

Floridians from Solar Choice has gained multiple backers of the ballot initiative. The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) voiced its support of the initiative earlier this week, and it’s also gained the support of the Tea Party Network, the Christian Coalition, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, the Florida Retail Federation, the Sierra Club, and other groups.

“This fight is about consumer choice and private property rights – cherished, long-standing American principals that we strongly support as an organization and an industry,” Rhone Resch, president and CEO of SEIA, said in a statement. “We urge Floridians to sign this critically important, freedom-of-choice petition, allowing it to be placed on next year’s ballot.”

Conservative group Americans for Prosperity has attacked the initiative, however, saying that it’s “about money, and using government and taxpayers to prop up the solar industry.” Supporters reject that claim, saying the measure isn’t calling for solar subsidies or mandates; instead, it simply wants to make it easier for Floridians to gain access to solar.

Katie Valentine|March 26, 2015  

  Land Conservation

Florida lawmakers set aside little for environmental land acquisition

Local environmentalists are urging lawmakers to buy the sugar land just south of Lake Okeechobee. They want state leaders to use the money from the recently passed amendment one to purchase that land.

TALLAHASSEE — There’s money for rural lands, beaches and the Everglades. But as lawmakers prepare to negotiate details of the new state budget, debate continues over whether more money from Florida’s land and water conservation amendment should go toward buying property for conservation.

Amendment 1, sponsored by Florida’s Water and Land Legacy, passed with 75 percent of the vote in November. The measure sets aside one-third of money collected through taxes on real estate documentary stamps to protect environmentally sensitive areas for the next 20 years.

About $750 million is expected to be set aside in the first year, and Florida’s Water and Land Legacy had hoped the state would dedicate $170 million of that to Florida Forever, a state program to buy land for preservation, to protect and maintain conservation lands and local parks.

House and Senate leaders don’t appear to be close to that number. The state House set aside $10.5 million for Florida Forever in its budget, while the Senate initially put $2 million toward the land buying program.

“It’s an abysmally low figure compared to $750 million,” said Ray Judah, coordinator for the Florida Coastal and Ocean Coalition. “It’s really very distressing.”

Some lawmakers and Southwest Florida officials said there needs to be a greater focus on managing the land Florida already owns. They’re at odds with others who argue the intent of the amendment was clear — more money is needed to acquire land.

“Growth and development is starting to pick up again, and a lot of valuable lands that are either on the state acquisition list or have been identified are going to be increasingly threatened by development” said Will Abberger, chairman of Florida’s Water and Land Legacy.

The state Senate on Wednesday bumped up its Florida Forever spending to $15 million. But many environmental organizations said that funding level still doesn’t cut it, especially when there is believed to be about 2 million acres on the Florida Forever priority purchase list.

Neither the state House nor Senate allocated money to buy 46,800 acres from U.S. Sugar Corp., south of Lake Okeechobee to build a reservoir to move lake water into the Everglades and reduce discharges into the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers.

“The Legislature has been balking at purchasing it for lack of funds,” said Judah. “Now they have the option. They have the funds and they have the documentation from the Water Institute stating it needs to be taken advantage of.”

The state has an option to buy the property in the Everglades Agriculture Area at fair market value until Oct. 12. Legislative leaders have said they aren’t supportive of the purchase. The company has told lawmakers the purchase would be a waste of money and the state should focus on restoration projects already on the books.

But Rae Ann Wessel, the natural resources policy director for Sanibel Captiva Conservation Foundation, said that property “is the only project of all the projects” that will address high flows.

While the push to buy the U.S. Sugar property may be getting most of the attention in the battle over Amendment 1 dollars, there’s also a push to buy small parcels of property to complete the land preservation puzzle.

Jennifer Hecker, director of natural resource policy at the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, said while the U.S. Sugar property is important, the state needs to be setting aside money to help organizations across the state pursue executing smaller, local projects.

In Collier County, she said there are still inholdings in places like the Fakahatchee Strand that can be purchased as they become available. She also said there are spots near the Estero Bay and Charlotte Harbor that need to be funded.

“We’re missing certain pieces of the puzzle,” she said. “We don’t want to leave it unfinished.”

But not everyone believes the state needs more land in its inventory. Sen. Alan Hays, R-Umatilla, said 9.4 million acres, or 27 percent of the state, are publicly owned in Florida.

“We don’t want to be known as the land hoarding state,” he said last month as the Senate appropriations committee considered its budget.

Hays said money should be used to take care of the land the state already owns. The Senate has set aside more than $115 million for land management, while the House earmarked more than $144 million. The proposals also set aside money for rural lands, beaches, and agency operating and regulatory expenses.

Collier County Commissioner Tim Nance said more than 75 percent of the land in Collier County is in conservation or under public ownership. He said the county is anticipating “a lot of needs going forward” when it comes to maintaining and operating the land that is already publicly owned.

“Collier County has really dispatched its responsibility in putting its land in conservation,” said Nance. “I’m more concerned with taking care of that land than trying to acquire more. Collier County is loaded.”

But Alex Sulecki, coordinator for Conservation Collier, said it’s unclear how much money from Amendment 1 will help out when it comes to land management in Collier. While money could help manage state owned lands, Sulecki said it’s unlikely the state will fund land management on land local governments own.

Environmental groups are still holding out hope that more money will be set aside for acquisition. Television advertisements have been airing across the state urging lawmakers to move forward with the U.S. Sugar purchase. Groups like the Conservancy are sending out alerts to members to tell them to encourage lawmakers to support more money for land purchases.

“It’s not like this is a new idea. It’s not like this is the latest new shiny toy,” said Wessel. “It’s a legacy opportunity.”

Jenna Buzzacco-Foerster|Tribune/Naples Daily News Capital Bureau|April 5, 2015

Isadora Rangel of Treasure Coast Newspapers and Matt Dixon of the Naples Daily News contributed to this report.

At session midpoint, disappointment replaces promise

What had become the “year of the environment” for the 2015 legislative session has become a year of disappointment for some environmentalists.

Amendment 1 and statewide water policy were major issues heading into the session, with growth management also emerging once the opening gavel dropped.

Approved by 75 percent of voters in November, Amendment 1 provides an estimated $742 million for water and land conservation programs.

But the House-proposed spending plan includes at least $10 million for land-buying – House leaders say it’s $205 million for the Florida Forever program – while the Senate is proposing $37 million. Environmental groups say both proposals ignore voters on Amendment 1.

Senate and House water bills would replace a Lake Okeechobee pollution permitting program with “basin action management plans.” Supporters say the bills provide statewide consistency for permitting, but environmental groups say the basin plans lack enforcement.

With Florida coming out of the recession and with a record level of revenue, environmentalists had hoped that environmental spending would be restored from earlier cuts, said Charles Pattison, policy director of 1000 Friends of Florida.

“You would hope that would mean better stewardship of our resources, whether it was land management or land acquisition, (and) managing water resources as well,” he said. “I think people are just generally disappointed there hasn’t been more comprehensive and widespread discussion of both of those topics.”

Sens. Thad Altman and Darren Soto, both of whom last week offered but later withdrew budget amendments to boost spending on land-buying, also expressed disappointment. The Senate agreed to add $35 million for land-buying after initially proposing $2 million.

“I’m very disappointed with where we are now in both the House and the Senate – extremely disappointed,” said Altman, a Republican from Melbourne. “I hope the Legislature listens. I know the people are making their voices heard.”

“While we had some progress, it clearly was not enough yet,” said Soto, a Democrat from Kissimmee.

Eric Draper of Audubon Florida said he felt a shift in tone recently as people flooded legislators with calls requesting more money for land-buying.

“I think as people are waking up around the state and getting more engaged,” he said, “I’m hoping we’ll see a different tone from legislators.”

In addition to environmental issues, seven House bills have been combined into one growth management bill, HB 933. It would eliminate the state “developments of regional impact” review program and presume that “constrained” agricultural lands proposed for development are not prohibited “urban sprawl.”

Industry groups and developers are supporting the bill while environmentalists, cities and counties are raising concerns. And there is some skepticism on both sides that the legislation can pass both chambers.

Sen. Wilton Simpson, a Republican from Trilby, is sponsoring five of the Senate bills that were combined into the House bill. He describes the legislation as “clean-up” for growth management rather than a significant policy change.

He said eliminating the development of regional impact process and moving those large developments into the streamlined state “coordinated review” process will encourage large-scale planning rather than smaller developments.

On Amendment 1 spending, he said people all over the state have different ideas where the focus should be. In North Florida, he said, they want money spent on springs, while in South Florida they want more spent Everglades restoration – and there are other spending priorities on both coasts.

With the changes in water policy, growth management and legislation to structure the Amendment 1 spending process, “I think this is going to be a great session for the environment,” Simpson said.

Bruce Ritchie|April 6, 2015

Florida’s Water and Land Legacy Newsletter, Vol 4, Issue 7, Apr 10, 2015

Next Steps

A lot has happened in Tallahassee in the past few weeks regarding Amendment 1 spending. Allow us to give you a quick recap:

The House and Senate budgets have a long way to go to meet voter intent for Amendment 1 spending. That’s largely because neither provides meaningful funding for Florida Forever projects. The Senate proposes spending only $15 million to acquire environmentally sensitive lands under Florida Forever. (For anyone who’s counting, that is only $2.5 million more than Florida spent on Florida Forever last year, before we passed Amendment 1). The House proposes a bonding strategy that would use $8.5 million to allow for

• $50 million for land acquisition and conservation easements related to springs protection,
• $10 million for conservation easements under Florida Forever, and
• $2.5 million for Rural Family Lands conservation easements under Florida Forever.

The biggest threat to Amendment 1 is the fact that both the Senate and House budgets allocate roughly $230 million to existing state agency expenses. Once that money is allocated to salaries for existing staff and other day-to-day agency operations, it will be difficult to get it back in next year’s budget process. If you’d like to dig into the details, read our comparison of the Governor’s, House, and Senate budgets posted online here.

Despite these hurdles, your civic engagement is making a huge difference. Thanks to you, Florida Forever was a hotly debated item on the Senate floor with several Senators standing up in support of land acquisition under Florida Forever. Thanks to your calls and emails, the substandard $2 million allocated to Florida Forever in Sen. Hays’ budget was amended to $15 million, and $20 million of the springs protection funds were earmarked for land acquisition.

Our work is not done yet. The next step, legislatively speaking, is for both houses to go into conferencing, which is a closed-door negotiation of the budget. We’ve been assured by numerous senators that the $15 million is starting point for negotiations in the Senate, and they know they can do better by Florida voters, but we need to keep up the pressure on both houses to do right thing and fund the conservation programs that we know work.

Keep trucking. That’s why we need you to keep up the calls and emails to your lawmakers. Tell them you voted for Amendment 1 to increase funding for Florida Forever, not to supplant existing agency operating expenses. Tell them you want restored springs, more parks and wildlife habitat, and real solutions to the Lake Okeechobee discharges that are destroying our estuaries in the Indian River Lagoon and the Caloosahatchee. With all of us advocating for Amendment 1, we will make a difference.

Go to our action page: yes1fl.org/action0315 and continue to make calls and send emails. There are only 3 weeks left of session and the first year of Amendment 1 implementation will set the tone for the next 20 years of its lifespan. We have to make sure our lawmakers honor its intent and we need your help to do it.

A note about the House budget

We’ve received word from supporters that Rep. Caldwell (District 78, which covers part of Lee County) is claiming that the House is allocating $200 million to Florida Forever. We’d like to clarify the House’s budget recomendations with a statement from our chair Will Abberger:

How the House budget defines “Florida Forever” is very different from the state’s flagship conservation land acquisition program started under the leadership of Gov. Bush in 1999, re-authorized by the Florida Legislature in 2008, and found in Chapter 259.105 of the Florida Statutes. The House budget uses existing Florida Forever bonding authority to provide $205 million as follows (these numbers are taken directly from Rep. Albritton’s, Chairman of the House Agricultural and Natural Resources Appropriations Subcommittee, budget documents):

• $100 million to the Water Management Districts for “water resource development” projects – this is NOT land acquisition;
• $50 million acquire land to protect springs – This is laudable and something we support, but again not under the Florida Forever program; it circumvents the existing project selection process to fund a single, albeit important, natural resource;
• $25 million to the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services for the Rural and Family Lands program – Again, a program we support and have recommended be funded, but not Florida Forever;
• $20 million to the South Florida Water Management District for land acquisition to complete the Kissimmee River restoration – This is an important component of Everglades restoration and something we support, but again not Florida Forever; there is no Kissimmee River project on the existing Florida Forever priority list;
• $10 million for Florida Forever – These funds are restricted in the House budget and can ONLY be used for conservation easements, with 50-50 funding another source to match state funding, and to acquire military base buffers.

The House budget does not provide anywhere near adequate funding to protect parks and wildlife habitat under the conservation land acquisition program known as Florida Forever.

With just 3 weeks left of session, we must keep up the pressure on our lawmakers to follow the intent of Amendment 1 and implement the will of the people.

For Florida!|Aliki and Laura

Air Quality

3 ways climate change harms health ‏

Yes, there’s always been climate change. But human civilization has thrived during tens of thousands of years of a relatively stable climate. We weren’t around to experience the large climate swings of the past; we could never survive the extreme heat and dramatic sea level rise triggered by too much CO2.

Now, our climate is changing again. And scientists know that today’s climate change is caused by us. By how we get our energy. It is affecting everyone’s health–and especially that of our children and our grandparents.

We can still avoid the worst of it. We know what to do. We must cut our carbon and methane pollution–and welcome a clean energy future.

Here are three ways climate change harms our health.

Dominique Browning|Co-Founder and Senior Director|Moms Clean Air Force 

Transportation

Inexpensive Electric Cars May Arrive Sooner Than You Think

A new study suggests that battery-powered vehicles are close to being cost-effective for most people.

Transportation accounts for roughly a quarter of the world’s annual carbon dioxide emissions.

Electric cars may seem like a niche product that only wealthy people can afford, but a new analysis suggests that they may be close to competing with [the big] 3.

The true cost of lithium-ion batteries in electric cars is a secret closely held by manufacturers. And estimates of the cost vary widely, making it tough to determine just how much lower they must go before electric vehicles with long ranges can be affordable for most buyers. But a peer-reviewed study of more than 80 estimates reported between 2007 and 2014 determined that the costs of battery packs are “much lower” than widely assumed by energy-policy analysts.+

The authors of the new study concluded that the battery packs used by market-leading EV manufacturers like Tesla and Nissan cost as little as $300 per kilowatt-hour of energy in 2014. That’s lower than the most optimistic published projections for 2015, and even below the average published projection for 2020. The authors found that batteries appear on track to reach $230 per kilowatt-hour by 2018.+

If that’s true, it would push EVs across a meaningful threshold. Depending on the price of gas, the sticker price of an EV is expected to appeal to many more people if its battery costs between $125 and $300 per kilowatt-hour. Because the battery makes up perhaps a quarter to a half of the cost of the car, a substantially cheaper battery would make the vehicle itself significantly cheaper too. Alternatively, carmakers could maintain current EV prices but offer vehicles with much longer ranges.6

The range would likely be crucial for many buyers because it’s so much cheaper to “fill” an EV with electricity-charging a car with a 300-mile range could cost less than $10. Given the disparity in gasoline and electricity prices, the study’s authors, Bjӧrn Nykvist and Måns Nilsson, research fellows at the Stockholm Environment Institute, say that if batteries fall as low as $150 per kilowatt-hour, this could lead to “a potential paradigm shift in vehicle technology.”5

The analysis suggests that the cost of packs used by the leading EV manufacturers is falling about 8 percent a year. Although Nykvist acknowledges that “the uncertainties are large,” he says it’s realistic to think that this rate of decline could continue in the coming years, thanks to the economies of scale that would be created if large manufacturers like Nissan and Tesla follow through with their separate plans to massively increase production. The speed at which the cost appears to be falling is similar to the rate that was seen with the nickel metal hydride battery technology used in hybrids like the Toyota Prius, he says.1

Nykvist and Nilsson relied on estimates from a variety of sources: public statements by EV manufacturers, peer-reviewed literature, news reports (including from MIT Technology Review), and so-called gray literature, or research papers published by governments, businesses, and academics.+

Luis Munuera, an energy analyst for the International Energy Agency, and Pierpaolo Cazzola, a transport policy analyst for the same agency, caution in an e-mail to MIT Technology Review that the cost reductions implied in the new analysis “should be taken with care,” since battery cost figures from disparate sources are often not directly comparable. Further, they point out, the degree to which cost decline trends for energy technologies can be extrapolated into the future is unclear. Still, they admit, “we have seen events moving quicker than expected in lithium-ion battery technology.”

Mike Orcutt|April 2, 2015

9 Tips for Sharing the Road With Cyclists

More and more people are choosing bikes for getting to work, traveling to campus, and just having fun, which is great news for the planet. Bikes are an energy-efficient and non-polluting way to get around. Unfortunately, riding a bike carries certain risks, especially in countries like the United States where cyclists are forced to share the road with motorists to get from place to place. While both have to follow the same traffic laws, bicyclists are much smaller and easier to injure than motorists—so if you drive a car, do the world a favor and keep an eye out for your two-wheeled friends.

1. Always check your blind spots

Before changing position in the road (turning, changing lanes, moving around a double-parked vehicle), look over your shoulder to check your blind spot. Don’t assume that the road is clear; someone may have come on from a side street, or caught up to you while you were stopped at a light.

2. Always use your signals

They’re not optional. The law requires you to use them so that everyone sharing the road knows where you’re going. If you’re planning to pass someone, make a turn, change lanes, park, or engage in related activities, signal. If you see a cyclist approaching, try to meet her gaze so you can be sure she knows what you’re doing.

3. Pay attention to hand signals

Cyclists signal too. When a cyclist signals a turn or stop, pay attention so you don’t accidentally hit her. Be aware that while cyclists are counted like vehicles, the law also allows them to engage in reasonable defensive maneuvers if they think they might be in danger, like taking a sharp turn to avoid a collision. Make sure you know what the cyclists around you are doing. Watch for body language and eye contact, too—cyclists often look at drivers to make sure other people in the roadway understand what they’re doing.

4. Watch out for dooring

Dooring—being slammed by a car door as it opens into a bike lane—is an extremely common cycling injury. On a low level, it can create some bruising and discomfort. It can also cause serious injuries and property damage, and in some cases, a cyclist could be forced into traffic and struck by a car. To avoid dooring cyclists, open your car with your off hand (right hand in right hand drive countries, left hand in left hand drive countries), so you’re forced to look all the way over your shoulder to see if someone’s coming. Moreover, don’t leave streetside car doors open—a cyclist halfway down the block might assume that you’ll close your door by the time she arrives at your car.

5. Give cyclists leeway

Some states, like California, specifically require drivers to provide a certain amount of clearance to cyclists (in California, it’s three feet). Even when a street is narrow or doesn’t have bike lanes, still provide clearance—it keeps everyone safer. Be aware that on extremely narrow streets, a cyclist may opt to “take the lane,” which could be the safest and most practical thing to do—and in most states, it’s also entirely legal.

6. Check for “stop and yield”

Some states have what’s called a “stop and yield” law, in which cyclists can treat a stop sign like a yield if no one is present. If you’ve ever been annoyed with a cyclist for breezing through a stop sign, it could be because it was legal for her to do so—she didn’t see you coming, and you weren’t at the intersection to contest the stop sign, so she opted to keep going rather than make a full stop. It’s best practices in general while driving to approach intersections cautiously and look across the whole intersection before going through it.

7. Surprise! Bikes are fast!

A bicyclist can move very quickly, especially going downhill. When car traffic is clogged up, a cyclist might whizz by (another reason to consider picking up a bike for yourself). Don’t cut bikes off or try to drive around them, because they can collide with your car in a potentially extremely dangerous accident. Be aware of the fact that cyclists may also be forced to swerve quickly to avoid road hazards you don’t notice or can’t see, and if you’ve come up sharply behind or next to them, they could be injured.

8. When drivers hit cyclists, they’re usually at fault

Depending on state laws, in bike versus car collisions, it’s always the driver’s fault. It’s a legal incentive to encourage drivers to avoid hitting cyclists. If you are involved in a bike accident, be aware that fleeing the scene is illegal and can come with criminal penalties, especially if the cyclist is severely injured or killed. Call emergency services and stay on the scene until police officers and medical personnel, if needed, arrive.

9. Don’t be a jerk to cyclists—even when they’re in the wrong

Cyclists can be victims of road rage, and the results can be far more deadly for them. Even if a cyclist is behaving badly or engaging in dangerous or illegal activities like running red lights, not wearing a helmet or bike lights, it’s not cause to take out your frustrations on her—or other cyclists. Honking your horn is illegal unless it’s necessary to prevent an imminent accident, so don’t honk at cyclists who are annoying you, and don’t shout at them either—among other things, it can distract them, increasing their risks of getting into an accident.

s.e. smith|April 6, 2015

Hydrogen fuel breakthrough could pave the way for clean cars (+video)

A new method of hydrogen fuel production, developed by Virginia Tech researchers, could be used in zero-emission vehicles.

Researchers from Virginia Tech have developed a way to drastically cut the time and money necessary to produce hydrogen fuel. By using discarded corn cobs, stalks, and husks, they have improved on previous methods deemed too inefficient by energy experts. Their research, which was funded in part by Shell, was published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .

“This means we have demonstrated the most important step toward a hydrogen economy – producing distributed and affordable green hydrogen from local biomass resources,” lead author Percival Zhang said in a press release.

Hydrogen is by far the most abundant element, making up about three quarters of the entire universe. In its gaseous form, it is also an incredibly clean fuel. It is combustible – just like gasoline – but instead of carbon dioxide, it produces only energy and water. And we already have the technology to harness hydrogen fuel – many major auto companies have prototype and commercial hydrogen cars, and the first (very primitive) hydrogen internal combustion engine was developed over 200 years ago.

But hydrogen is an energy carrier, not an energy source. Pure hydrogen gas doesn’t occur naturally on Earth, so it needs to be separated out of hydrogen-based compounds, such as water. Running an electrical current through water will release free hydrogen gas – but the process, called electrolysis, is usually too expensive to be considered practical. Certain microbes can separate hydrogen fuel out of decaying biomass, but only in tiny amounts. So while they look great on paper, hydrogen engines trail behind their electric counterparts in practice.

But Virginia Tech’s new method could change that. Corn “stover” – which includes the cobs, husks, and stalks – decays into hydrogen and carbon dioxide. Using genetic algorithms, Dr. Zhang and co-author Joe Rollin developed an “enzymatic pathway” that speeds up this reaction. By including two simple plant sugars, glucose and xylose, they were able to increase the rate of hydrogen production while emitting an “extremely low amount” of carbon dioxide.

Cost effective and productive in volume, this method could breathe new life into the hydrogen car. Biomass relies on readily available (and usually discarded) material, which reduces initial fuel costs. The method also increases the reaction rate three times over – as such, the fuel can be produced in smaller, gas station-sized facilities, further driving down cost. These facilities could be stationed alongside processing plants, potentially spurring local industries.

“We believe this exciting technology has the potential to enable the widespread use of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles around the world and displace fossil fuels,” Rollin said.

Whether it can make hydrogen fuel commercially viable remains to be seen – the team plans to scale up before estimating the wider costs of their method. But Zhang and company have cleared a major obstacle in the path to renewable fuel.

Joseph Dussault|Staff Writer|April 8, 2015

And the World’s Greenest Car Is …

There’s a reason why this plug-in hybrid is described as “the most progressive sports car.” The BMW i8 was presented with the 2015 World Green Car Award at the New York International Auto Show, repeating the automaker’s win last year with their purely electric BMW i3.

The international jury recognized the car for its plug-in hybrid drive technology, its lightweight construction as well as its Avant-garde design.

With its scissor doors, low ground clearance and (optional) laser headlights, the i8 is every bit the futuristic Hot Wheel. The car claims to go from 0 to 60 in about 4.5 seconds, achieves more than 56 mpg for everyday commuting when the battery is fully charged and has an overall fuel consumption that’s about 50 percent better than conventionally powered sports cars.

At a starting price of $135,700, the luxury vehicle is not for everyone. To satisfy the eco-minded driver, the i8’s battery can be charged at a conventional power outlet, at a charging station or while driving.

The car has three different driving modes: its default setting will determine the most efficient balance between fuel and electric power; sport mode combines fuel and power for the best performance; and its eDrive mode goes on electric power alone for up to 22 miles. Chris Knapman of the UK’s Telegraph Cars noted in a review that when driving the car with battery power exclusively, the i8 releases 49g/km (about 0.17lbs/m) in CO2 emissions. “Despite all of its technology, the i8 is as user-friendly as a Toyota Prius,” Knapman noted.

According to a press release, to qualify for the World Green Car Award, the vehicle had to be all-new or substantially revised and at least 10 units had to be sold or leased in a major market between Jan. 1, 2014 and May 31, 2015. Also taken into consideration were tailpipe emissions, fuel consumption and use of a major advanced power plant technology aimed specifically at increasing the vehicle’s environmental responsibility.

Because of the complex nature of “green” technologies, five experts from around the world were tasked with extensively reviewing all documentation and specs with each green car award candidate. Seventy-five World Car Awards jurors then voted for the best green car based on the experts’ recommendations.

“The BMW i8 gasoline hybrid looks so cool, it should be the icon for all ‘green’ cars,” one of the experts said of the machine. “The i8 adds so much enjoyment to a sensible lifestyle that it needs to be recognized as a great green car.”

The BMW i8 was chosen from an initial entry list of 10 new vehicles from all over the world. A short list of this year’s finalists also included the Mercedes-Benz S 500 Plug-In Hybrid and the Volkswagen Golf GTE.

“I am delighted to accept this award on behalf of the team in Munich,” said Dr. Ian Robertson, head of Sales and Marketing and member of the Board of Management at BMW. “The BMW i8 represents the future with its unique lightweight construction and unrivaled connectivity. To win this award for the second year in a row shows that our BMW products are truly leading the world.”

Lorraine Chow|April 7, 2015

Could Apple Have An Electric Car By 2020?

The early years of electric vehicles were not very promising, and according to businessmen and entrepreneurs at the time, it wouldn’t be much of a success for different reasons. The market for electric cars didn’t automatically boom when it was introduced, but several companies have tried making their way through to success, to no avail.

That was until Tesla Motors introduced its first electric vehicle, and the electric car market was given a much-needed boost. Tesla has since paved the way for aspiring electric car companies to aim higher.

Apple is one of – if not the biggest – names in the electronics industry. As a massive tech company, Apple has introduced us to a whole new range of personal computing devices and smartphones. More recently, however, instead of greeting us with innovations in tech design and development, Apple has chosen a different path – one with wheels.

Yes, the brand behind the success of the iPhone has been the subject of rumors in the automotive industry, after sensor-laden minivans registered to the California-based company have been spotted cruising throughout the state.

Who would have ever thought Apple would be serving us alongside Tesla, BMW, and other names in the auto industry? And if they do, will they succeed?

How much money can a solar roof save you in Florida?

Sources say Apple will have its electric car on the streets in the next five years. It is also rumored to take on the pioneers of electric car manufacturing – an example of which is the recently successful Tesla motors. And similar to its main competitor in the smartphones business, Google, Apple too is said to be aiming to develop a self-driving vehicle with its growing team of experts in robotics and engineering.

It can be remembered that in the past year, Tesla’s Elon Musk confirmed his meetings with Apple in the latter’s effort for acquisition, which Musk declined with a statement saying Tesla isn’t for sale. Apple has also been rumored to have acquired a few of Tesla’s employees.

In addition to Musk’s claims, Apple has made no secret about their ambitions to have their iOS software embedded in vehicles. Dubbed ‘CarPlay’, the software “takes the things you want to do with your iPhone while driving and puts them right on your car’s built-in display.”

In early February, we also learned of the A123 Systems, an American company in Massachusetts, filing a lawsuit against Apple for allegedly luring a number of engineers in an effort to start the company’s massive engineering project.

Bloomberg reports that the “car team” is 200 strong and is looking to make their introduction into the automobile world in no more than 5 years. A strenuous task at best, but with such financial leverage and powerful branding, Apple will definitely be shown respect.

With its success in the electronics world, Apple is looking conquering the world of automotives should the rumors prove to be factual with similar dominance. An autonomous car, one we normally see in movies set in the future, will no longer be just seen in movies. Technology has taken man farther than he can imagine thanks to electronics giants who constantly think outside the box in an effort to make the everyday man’s life more convenient.

Callum Newcombe|April 8, 2015

Recycling

New Study Says We Should Nix Biodegradable Additives in Our Plastics

Plastics play a huge role in all of our lives. From our phones to our shampoo bottles, most of us consume and throw away over one billion pounds of plastics every year. However, in recent years additives in plastic have promised consumers that the product will be broken down and biodegrade naturally. Well, according to a new scientific study, this is simply not true.

The study, which was carried out by Michigan State University, explored the most common methods of trash disposal to rate the effectiveness of these additives. The first method left plastics out in the open air (think composting). The next method studied how plastics biodegraded in an anaerobic or non oxygenated atmosphere (think bottom of the landfill) and for the third method, scientists simply buried plastics in the soil.

The study length was three years long and compared five of the most common additives used to make plastics biodegradable. According to Rafael Auras, the co-author of the study, “There was no difference between the plastics mixed with the additives we tested and the ones without.”

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In the abstract of the study, it becomes increasingly clear that the average ways that we, the consumer, dispose of these biodegradable plastics is not doing the environment any favors:

Biodegradation was evaluated in compost, anaerobic digestion, and soil burial environments. None of the five different additives tested significantly increased biodegradation in any of these environments. Thus, no evidence was found that these additives promote and/or enhance biodegradation of PE or PET polymers. So, anaerobic and aerobic biodegradation are not recommended as feasible disposal routes for non-biodegradable plastics containing any of the five tested biodegradation-promoting additives.

The study’s authors say that manufacturing companies need to start telling consumers the truth about the products they are using. Further, for those that worry about additives in their plastic products, especially in containers they drink or eat food from, it only cements the fear that unnecessary compounds are being added to the mix.

So what’s a well meaning person living in today’s modern world to do? Of course cutting down on plastic bags is always an option. Some countries, such as Rwanda, go so far as to ban them entirely, including plastic bags sourced outside of the country. In fact, it’s considered normal procedure for customs agents to go through luggage at the Rwandan border, and if they find any plastic bags, they will dispose of them right there before you can proceed into the country.

It’s true that these bans have worked to decrease our plastic trash. Yet so many items are made of plastic that it would be nearly impossible to remove it from our lives entirely.

In recent years, science has found a few methods that help break down the components of plastics. Fungi, as reported on at Care2, can be used to actually turn plastics into consumable food. However, as great as this method is, it’s not a realistic solution for our everyday trash issues.

So scientists have turned back to nature for the solution. Enter the waxworm. This pre-caterpillar larvae is known for being able to eat through beeswax in the wild. However, when exposed to plastics, it seems two strains of these larvae can also digest plastics. Scientists are now looking into ways to harness the microbes inside the guts of waxworms to help naturally degrade plastics.

However for now, when it comes to so-called “biodegradable” additives for plastics, scientists are warning consumers to not believe the hype, and recycle rather than assuming a product is safe to throw away.

Lizabeth Paulat|April 3, 2015

20 Year Old Claims He Can Rid the World’s Oceans of Plastic

Last June, an intrepid teenaged environmentalist made headlines after developing The Ocean Cleanup, described as the “world’s first feasible concept to clean the oceans of plastic.”

Boyan Slat, a Dutch former aerospace engineering student, said his plastic-capturing concept can clean half the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in a decade. The project was inspired after the young man took a diving trip in Greece in 2011 and saw more plastic in the water than fish.

Slat’s ambitious project—proposed when he was only 17—received a slew of accolades and was recently named a finalist in London’s Design Museum′s Design of the Year awards, which “celebrate design that promotes or delivers change, enables access, extends design practice or captures the spirit of the year.”

The design involves a static platform that passively corrals plastics as wind and ocean currents push debris through V-shaped booms that are 100 kilometers long. The floating filters would catch all the plastic off the top three meters of water where the concentration of plastic is the highest, while allowing fish and other marine life to pass under without getting caught. Besides natural currents, the self-sufficient platform would also be powered by 162 solar panels.

Traditional strategies of capturing ocean plastic usually involve vessels and nets, but Slat’s study pointed out, “Not only would by-catch and emissions likely cancel out the good work, but also, due to the vastness of areas in which the plastics concentrate, such an operation would cost many billions of dollars, and thousands of years to complete.”

The platform would be emptied of its haul every month and a half. As for what can be done with the plastic, the Ocean Cleanup team tested degraded plastic from the Hawaiian shoreline and found that it’s suitable to be turned into oil. They have also tested whether or not the plastic can be recycled.

Critics have written off the idea, but Slat and 70 other scientists and engineers composed a 530-page feasibility report, and concluded that the concept “is indeed likely a feasible and viable ocean cleanup technique.” Their conclusion has also been peer-reviewed by external experts, Slat wrote in a blog post.

After releasing the feasibility report, Slat launched an extremely successful crowdfunding campaign that garnered support from 38,000 funders from 160 countries, and raised $2 million in 100 days. The project is currently in phase two in which a team will build a large-scale, fully operational pilot of the design near the Azores Islands within the next three to four years.

After introducing the idea at a 2012 TEDx Talk conference in the Netherlands, the Ocean Cleanup crew has since gone on several gyre expeditions. Last month, a sampling team took off for a month-long trip to the North Atlantic Gyre. Slat tweeted some good news from the crew:

We previously mentioned that plastic threatens marine life and marine ecosystems, and also causes about $13 billion in damages to marine ecosystems each year. In the video below, Slat talks about how his concept could rid the world of this costly environmental menace with seemingly little effort.

“Why move through the oceans, if the oceans can move through you?” he said. “Instead of going after the plastics, you could simply wait for the plastics to come to you without requiring any added energy.”

Watch Slat’s Ted Talk.

Lorraine Chow|April 8, 2015

This Video Will Make You Want to Give Up Plastic (Plus 5 Ways to Break the Habit)

We all know that humans have created a garbage problem for the planet. But do we really have an understanding of what that problem looks like?

A wildlife photographer learned just how bad our garbage problem is, and he kept snapping his lens to make sure we don’t forget. When I recently saw his video on Viral Dump, it worked — I couldn’t forget. He captured the injustice for our consumption’s silent victims.

The Journey to MIDWAY

Chris Jordan is the photographer and our guide in this journey to MIDWAY. On the Midway Journey site, Jordan’s project is described as “a powerful visual journey into the heart of an astonishingly symbolic environmental tragedy.” Jordan’s team traveled to some of the most remote islands in the world — Midway Atoll — to confront us with the reality of our out-of-control consumption. The consequences of our consumption habits mean: “tens of thousands of baby albatrosses lie dead on the ground, their bodies filled with plastic from the Pacific Garbage Patch.”

And for critics who would rather deny than find solutions, this isn’t an isolated photography session. Jordan’s team has returned to the island over many years. Through the years and tens of thousands of innocent bodies, we’re confronted with horror, grief and our own complicity in making this floating island of garbage.

While difficult to watch, the video effectively conveys this is not how things are supposed to be and we can do better. In a very poetic way, MIDWAY isn’t just a journey to a remote island — it’s a journey to a midway point in what kind of environmental story we want to write. Because there are lots of things we don’t have control over, but we can control what and how much we consume. And since garbage is projected to double by 2025, now is the time to clean up the mess we’ve made.

5 Simple Ways to Cut Plastic Out of Your Life

Plastic is one of the most environmentally-destructive materials that we use every day. Breaking your plastic habit may seem impossible, but it’s not. And if you’re committed to doing your part in not adding to this floating island of garbage and protecting the albatrosses, here are a few tips to get you off the plastic from Forbes:

1. Kick the straw habit. Admittedly, I was a straw fanatic because I thought my teeth wouldn’t stain as much when I drank coffee or tea. But when I weigh my vanity next to tens of thousands of dead albatrosses, that’s a pretty stupid reason. The only way to keep straws in a sustainable way is to bring your own glass or stainless steel ones.

2. Thanks but no thanks to pizza tables. It seems small, but what purpose does that tiny, white plastic table inside the pizza box serve? It doesn’t enhance your pizza or your experience, and we know exactly where it’s going to go: straight to the garbage. Little things matter and they add up. While we’re on the subject of small changes, check out the toilet paper companies that are going tubeless.

3. Scream for ice cream cones. When indulging in some delicious ice cream, or “nice cream,” stick with the cones: no container or utensils needed.

4. Go solid or powdered. Products in solid or powdered forms are just as effective as their liquid counterparts. All they did was add water and add extra packaging. Go with a bar of soap over liquid soap and lather up!

5. Can the canned and bagged goods. Buying in bulk when possible saves the need for extra cans that may end up on that floating island. Staples like beans and rice are easy to buy and store in bulk.

Bonus tip: Say no to-go. Ask yourself, “Do I really need this to-go?” The answer might surprise you. Because if you really don’t have to, then you could swap containers and plastic utensils for in-house dishes and utensils that will be re-washed, not thrown away.

Jessica Ramos|April 10, 2015

Miscellaneous

Why Does This Florida County Have So Many Secret Animal Testing Facilities?

Many countries around the world are clamping down on the breeding and testing of primates due to ongoing pressure from animal rights campaigners and increasing consumer concerns over the ethics of animal tested cosmetics.

However, this worldwide movement away from animal testing is not catching on in Labelle County, Fla., where there are an alarming number of primate testing facilities, with another huge breeding and research lab due to be built imminently.

If the proposed opening of the very secretive Primera facility goes ahead as planned, they will be housing over 3,000 macaques in this lab alone, and with the three facilities already in operation in Labelle County, this would make the total number of primates living in the county higher than the human population of 4,600 residents.

The U.S. Is the End Destination for Many 

There is a large web of macaque trade spanning across the globe, and Florida is becoming a hotspot for breeding and research centers which animal rights campaigners say are the focal point of the industry within the U.S.

The British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection has been investigating the international trade of primates for animal testing and argue that Primate Products, one of the existing Florida facilities, buys their Macaques from the island of Mauritius, where adults are captured from the wild and forced to reproduce in captivity, producing babies which are then sent abroad.

In a statement, BUAV spokeswoman Sarah Kite explained that “the trapping and removal of wild primates from their natural habitat and social groups has a substantial negative impact on these individuals. Over the years, official bodies and organizations have called for a move away from this practice.” Yet U.S. companies continue to engage in this unethical practice.

Gary Serignese from South Florida Smash HLS, recently made a statement claiming “these are the places that supply helpless animals to the rest of the U.S. These animals are suffering in a horrible way, and they know they’re suffering.”

Florida’s Secret New Animal Testing Facility

The fact that many other countries are closing down their primate testing facilities is having little effect on the U.S., and in some instances is even increasing the amount of primates being shipped into the country. A facility recently closed down in Israel, but rather than rehoming the primates to a sanctuary, it seems like they were en-route to Florida’s secretive new primate testing facility Primera.

Little is known of the new facility, except that local officials and planning executives ushered through the proposal without first notifying the public. A company calling itself Primera published a letter in the local newspaper to try and quiet public concern over news that the facility had been secretly given planning permission. Further investigation from animal rights campaigners uncovered papers appearing to show that the company was in fact owned by a company called Pre-Labs in Chicago.

With public perception about the ethics of animal testing changing drastically over the past few years, it seems like the breeding and testing facilities are doing all they can to hide their activities so that they can avoid public scrutiny.

Businessman and conservationist Ady Gil stepped in and purchased 1,250 monkeys from the breeding facility in Israel in an attempt to halt their move to Primera, although it’s not clear if this will have any meaningful impact on preventing Primavera’s activities.

Proper Primate Protection

Locals, animal rights campaigners, and the Animal Defenders International have stepped in to question the legality of the new Primera facility, and have begun legal proceedings to prevent it from going ahead. The future of this particular facility remains unclear, but there are plenty of others out there, just the same.

Unfortunately, while the law allows the use of animals for medical and cosmetic testing, facilities such as this will continue to exist. There is intolerable cruelty, and unthinkable pain and suffering being inflicted on animals in the industry every single day, and the law currently supports this.

For a real victory for the animals, we need to win the war against animal testing, not just the battle against the proposed Primera facility.

Abigail Geer|April 3, 2015

More mystery craters appear in Siberia

Huge holes have been discovered in a Siberian region nicknamed “the end of the world,” reports the ‘Siberian Times.’ (Photo: Yamalo-Nenets Press Service via AP)

(NEWSER) – More mysterious craters have been spotted in Siberia, and researchers are starting to sound more than a little alarmed about the phenomenon. Vasily Bogoyavlensky, deputy director of Russia’s Oil and Gas Research Institute, says at least seven suspicious craters have now been spotted—five of them in a region known as the “end of the world”—and a satellite image shows one of them has at least 20 water-filled “baby craters” around it. “I would compare this with mushrooms: When you find one mushroom, be sure there are [a] few more around. I suppose there could be 20 to 30 craters more,” he tells the Siberian Times. He’s calling for urgent research “to prevent possible disasters” that could affect cities and oil industry infrastructure in the region.

Bogoyavlensky and other experts believe gas emissions, possibly linked to climate change, are causing the holes to appear and suspect there are many more to be found, reports NBC News. “The processes that are causing them to form likely occur over a wide area of the continuous permafrost in this part of Siberia,” the chief of the US Geological Survey’s Gas Hydrates Project tells the Huffington Post. She hasn’t researched the holes firsthand, but she agrees they demand further study “to determine the processes that cause their formation, how they evolve with time, and whether it is possible to predict where new ones will occur.” Bogoyavlensky plans an upcoming expedition to the craters (only one of them has been studied in depth thus far) and intends to install seismic stations in the region.

Rob Quinn|Newser staff|February 26, 2015

Kaiduan dam in Borneo meets fierce opposition

Activists are calling on the government of Sabah, Malaysia, to reconsider the proposed Kaiduan dam, saying the Infrastructure Development Ministry (IDM) has not considered other solutions to Sabah’s looming water crisis and has failed to consult with the indigenous people who will be displaced if the project proceeds.

The government first proposed building the Kaiduan dam in 2008. The IDM insists the project is necessary to ensure an adequate water supply for the west coast of Sabah, one of the two Malaysian states on the island of Borneo. The dam would be built on the Papar River in the Ulu Papar valley, and would be 150 meters (492 feet) high, according to the website of the Taskforce Against Kaiduan Dam, a group that opposes the dam. It would submerge as much as 12 square kilometers (about 3,000 acres) of forest and parts of the Crocker Range, which the Sabah government itself nominated to be a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve and is home to numerous endangered species. An associated water treatment plant would be built some distance away.

The number of homes and communities that will be impacted is one of the hottest points of contention. IDM officials have asserted that only 110 families will be displaced. But in a statement issued on March 26, a group representing affected communities that oppose the dam called Sabah Save Rivers argued that each of the 110 homes that will be rendered uninhabitable houses two or three families. The group’s website asserts that more than one thousand indigenous people belonging mainly to the Dusun ethnic group will be ultimately displaced.

The IDM is ignoring Ulu Papar’s role as a watershed for the west coast of Sabah, as well as the part the indigenous villagers who will be driven from their homes play in conserving the ecosystems that all residents of Sabah rely on, Mary Giun, a spokesperson for Sabah Save Rivers, said in the statement.
“Indigenous people in the area are safeguarding the west coast’s water tank,” Giun said. “We want the public to be aware of this. One day, those who live in the city and its surrounding areas will be thankful to these very same communities who are struggling today to get the Government to listen to their side of the story.”

Giun said in the statement that the dam would rob local indigenous people of their ancestral lands and traditional ways of life. The government’s plan to resettle displaced villagers “is the worst nightmare for the community and it is like death for us,” she told mongabay.com. “The younger generation of Ulu Papar will lose everything from their identity as Indigenous Peoples who are rooted in our soil, the historical sites, the local knowledge, culture and traditional belief which have a deep connection with the nature around us,” Giun said.

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples calls on governments and institutions to consult with communities that will be impacted by development projects and to ensure that projects have their “free, prior and informed consent.” However, the Sabah government has not initiated the consultation process with the indigenous villagers who will be displaced by the dam, according to an earlier statement Sabah Save Rivers issued on March 24.

A stretch of the Papar River, where the Kaiduan dam would be built. Credit: Sabah Save Rivers

In that statement, the group called on Infrastructure Development Minister Tan Sri Joseph Pairin Kitingan (commonly referred to as Pairin) to visit Ulu Papar and discuss the dam with the people who would displaced by it.

Pairin asserted that the government is making plans to initiate a dialogue with the affected communities, The Borneo Post reported on March 23. He said the dam is necessary to keep fresh water flowing to Sabah’s west coast, especially the rapidly growing capital city, Kota Kinabalu, according to the news report, which stated that Sabah’s population grew from 930,000 in 1980 to 3.12 million in 2010, and is projected to continue increasing. Pairin asserted that the dam must be built within the next three years in order to avoid a water crisis expected to arrive as soon as 2030, the report stated.

“What we hope is for the people to appreciate that we are doing our best to think of the future requirement of water for everyone,” the report quotes Pairin saying. “The increase in demand has made the management of water resources more challenging and complex.”

“Kaiduan Dam cannot be the best solution or measure to avoid water crisis,” state assemblyman Terence Siambun told The Borneo Post, speaking at a protest against the dam in the district of Penampang on March 25. “Why not look into the existing services and management, including leakages; how is it that 57 per cent of the clean water supplied to our people is wasted?”

Giun told mongabay.com that she and other opponents of Kaiduan Dam understand the need to address the approaching water crisis, but that they have yet to receive adequate information from the government to justify the project, such as how much water is really needed and whether anything has been done to address Sabah’s poor water management systems.

“Communities are not protesting to deny the people of Kota Kinabalu continuous water supply,” she said in the March 24 statement. “What they want is for the Government to look for sustainable solutions. Make use of the money that will be spent on this dam to better manage water resources.”

Mike Gaworecki |April 06, 2015

Big Beef’s In Big Trouble

Big beef is having a cow over this.

The USDA and the US Department of Health & Human Services are updating their dietary guidelines, as they do every 5 years.

But this time, as far Big Beef is concerned, something has gone terribly wrong.

It all started innocently enough, when the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans Committee decided to recommend that the guidelines include, for the first time, sustainability in their recommendations. If the U.S. government did indeed recommend food that is good for both our health and the environment, the impact would be felt in schools and other government facilities across the country – and across our entire food system. It might also be good for the future of our planet.

Why? Because livestock production, and most especially industrialized beef production, is responsible for 15% of global carbon emissions. Halve your meat intake, and you could cut your diet-driven carbon footprint by more than 35 percent. Go vegan, and the difference could be 60%.

In drought-ravaged California, water is part of any sustainability equation. And here again, the livestock industry is not happy with the data. A quarter of the state’s entire water budget is used to produce meat and dairy. Stunningly, California’s livestock industry uses more water than all the homes, businesses and government in the state combined. And even with all that water, California still imports most of the meat consumed in the state.

One thing California exports is Alfalfa. And alfalfa is a thirsty crop. California, it turns out, exports more than 100 billion gallons of water per year in the form of alfalfa to countries like China, who use it for livestock feed. How much sense does it make, in a state that is facing a devastating water crisis, to in effect ship away more than three times enough water to meet the needs of every household in the city of San Francisco, so China can eat more beef?

Want to conserve water? Since it takes 1,799 gallons of water to produce a single pound of grain-fed beef, it turns out that, if you want to save water, reducing industrialized beef consumption could be the most powerful single step you can take.

Meat consumption in the United States has already fallen by more than 15% in the last 10 years. But in January, the Washington Post said that including sustainability in dietary guidelines could be the meat industry’s worst nightmare. An article on Nasdaq.com titled “How The ‘Death Of Meat’ Could Impact Your Portfolio” urged investors to think twice about holding long positions in meat industry stocks, stating that “investors shouldn’t underestimate the potential effect of this on the meat industry.”

And sure enough, when the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans Committee released its recommendations on February 19, the committee stated that: “Consistent evidence indicates that… a dietary pattern that is higher in plant-based foods… and lower in animal-based foods is more health promoting and is associated with lesser environmental impact (GHG emissions and energy, land, and water use).”

The industry, of course, isn’t taking all this lying down. Not with hundreds of billions of dollars on the line. A recent headline on FOX News reads, “Beef producers say Obama is trying to kill their industry.”

The North American Meat Institute and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association have each issued statements denouncing any suggestion that environmental impact should dictate dietary guidelines. Having apparently decided that any attempt to convince researchers that meat was environmentally benign would be fruitless, they are now trying to assert that the committee has overstepped its bounds.

While the dietary guidelines committee was charged specifically with looking at food and health, there is a decidedly strong rationale for including sustainability in the picture. Our environment does, after all, dramatically impact our health — as well as our ability to grow the food we need to provide for an expanding human population. In an increasingly hungry world, it matters a great deal that we use about 8 times as much land grow food for animals as we do to grow food for humans.

Between now and the fall, the USDA and the Department of Health & Human Services will be evaluating the committee’s recommendations, and deciding how they’ll actually translate into official government policy. The lobbyists will be out in full force, and there’s no telling whether or not government officials will ultimately heed the recommendations of the independent experts on the committee they created. (To add your voice saying whether or not you think sustainability recommendations should be included in the report, submit a comment between now and May 8, here.)

Whatever the ultimate policy outcome, the environmental impact of our food choices is getting more attention than ever.

And while the industrialized beef industry might not like that one bit, it just might be good news for our planet.

Ten Simple Ways to Clean Green

Make your own nontoxic cleaners, or find eco-friendly products from Green America’s Green Business Network™ members.

There are many benefits to making your own green cleaners. You may already have most of the ingredients in your cupboards. You’ll save money by not buying an array of expensive products, each targeted to clean only one type of surface in your home. And, in most cases, green cleaners work just as well as their commercial counterparts.

Perhaps the most compelling reason to use green cleaners is to keep potent toxins out of your home. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) notes that many household cleaners contain volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as formaldehyde and harsh acids.
Since indoor VOC levels are often two to five times greater than outdoor levels, humans can experience “eye, nose, and throat irritation; headaches; loss of coordination; nausea; and damage to liver, kidney, and central nervous systems” from indoor exposure to these chemicals, according to the EPA.

“Some [VOCs] can cause cancer in animals; some are suspected or known to cause cancer in humans,” the agency says. Most modern chemical cleaners are, quite simply, overkill, notes the nonprofit Children’s Health Environmental Coalition (CHEC). “Atomic energy is not necessary to unclog a drain, nor are the Marines necessary to combat ants,” Jan Williams writes in the CHEC’s book Household Detective. “Most of the time, we can use milder, natural chemicals … to do the same jobs.”

Sure, you say, but who has time to make their own cleaners?

You do—with our help. Just ten basic ingredients that are probably already in your home will tackle most cleaning jobs Your home will sparkle, germs will still run in fear from your sponges and rags, and your indoor air will be better than ever.

The Basic Ten

Stock your cupboards with these ten products, and you can clean just about anything:

1) White vinegar: An antifungal that also kills germs and bacteria.

2) Baking soda: Eliminates odors and works as a gentle scouring powder.

3) Borax: Borax, the common name for the natural mineral compound sodium borate, eliminates odors, removes dirt, and acts as an antifungal and possible disinfectant. Use with care around children and pets, as it can be toxic if swallowed.

4) Hydrogen peroxide (3% concentration): A great nontoxic bleach and stain remover, as well as a proven disinfectant.

5) Club soda (fresh): A stain remover and polisher.

6) Lemon juice: A pleasant-smelling nontoxic bleach, grease-cutter, and stain remover.

7) Liquid castile soap: An all-purpose cleaner, grease-cutter, and disinfectant. “Castile” means the soap is vegetable-based, not animal-fat-based.

8) Corn meal: Great at picking up carpet spills.

9) Olive oil: Makes a wonderful furniture polish.

10) Pure essential oils: Adding all-natural, organic essential oils to your cleaning concoctions can add wonderful scents to your housekeeping endeavors. Some—such as lavender, peppermint, eucalyptus, lemongrass, and tea tree oils—also may have antibacterial, antifungal, or insect-repelling properties. To find pure, organic essential oils, visit your local health food store or consult the “Aromatherapy/ Essential Oils” category of our National Green Pages™. Remember to use care with essential oils, as they can cause harmful reactions when ingested or put directly on the skin. Some are considered dangerous for pregnant women (To be safe and simplify things, stick with eucalyptus, lemongrass, and tea tree oils for all recipes below if you’re pregnant).

If you want to try an oil we haven’t mentioned in this article, consult a reliable source on its proper usage, such as the aromatherapy education section of Frontier Natural Products Co-op’s Web site.

The Basic Ten at Work

Now that you know what products you need, grab a few clean, empty spray bottles; some rags and sponges; and a bucket of water, and you’re ready to clean your house the green way.
All-purpose cleaners: An all-purpose cleaner is just that—something you can use for just about every surface in your home, from kitchen counters and appliances to bathroom surfaces and walls. Clean House, Clean Planet author Karen Logan offers this recipe for the all-purpose “Alice’s Wonder Spray”: Put 2 Tbsp. white vinegar and 1 tsp. borax into a 16 oz. spray bottle. Fill the rest with very hot water and shake to blend until the borax is dissolved. Add 1/4 cup of liquid castile soap only after you’ve completed the above steps. If you want to scent your spray, also add 10–15 drops of an essential oil, such as lavender, lemongrass, thyme, eucalyptus, rosemary, rose, or clove. The spray will keep indefinitely. For an even simpler solution, try cleaning with two cups of club soda in a spray bottle.

Hard floor cleaner: Author and Care2.com healthy living editor Annie Bond (a.k.a. Annie Berthold-Bond) recommends this solution for all hard floors (except when directed by the manufacturer to avoid even mild detergents): Combine 1/4 liquid castile soap, up to 1/2 cup white vinegar or lemon juice, and 2 gallons of warm water in a large plastic bucket. Use with a mop or sponge.

Carpet cleaner: To clean and disinfect your carpet, the CHEC recommends blending 1/2 cup baking soda, 1 cup borax, and 1 cup cornmeal. Sprinkle mixture over rug and rub with a cloth. Be sure to sprinkle, rather than dump, the mixture on your carpet. Large clumps of cornmeal could clog your vacuum. Let rest for several hours or overnight, then vacuum. To remove stains from your carpet, Logan advises mixing 1/4 cup liquid castile soap and 1/3 cup water in a blender until foamy. Spread the mixture on the carpet and let sit for a few minutes, then scrub the stain with a brush or clean rag. Also, club soda will remove many acidic stains, like coffee, wine, or juice. To deal with big carpet spills, pour cornmeal on the spill, wait 15 minutes, then vacuum.

Glass cleaner: To make your windows shine, you can simply use club soda in a spray bottle. Add 1 tsp. of lemon juice to increase your window cleaner’s degreasing power. Logan recommends using a terry-cloth cotton rag for best results.

Bathroom surface cleaners: You can use the all-purpose cleaners recommended above or, for even simpler bathroom cleaning, use baking soda or borax as a scouring powder. For a softer scrub, Bond says to combine 1/2 cup baking soda with enough liquid soap to achieve a frosting-like consistency. You may want to add 5-10 drops of an essential oil for fragrance. Club soda works wonders on plumbing fixtures.

Toilet cleaner: Sprinkle baking soda or borax, or pour white vinegar into the toilet, and let sit for a few minutes. Scrub with a good toilet brush. oven cleaner: Cover the oven floor with baking soda, spray with water until very damp, and let set overnight. Spray with water every few hours before you go to bed to keep damp. In the morning, clean out the baking soda, and the stuck-on gunk will be loosened and ready to scrub off.

Mold remover: Bond recommends combining 1/2 cup hydrogen peroxide or white vinegar with 1 cup water. Spray on mold and do not rinse. She also recommends treating mold with a spray mixture of 2 tsp. tea tree oil and 2 cups water.

Wood polish: To polish wood furniture, dab olive oil onto a soft cloth and rub.

Germs and Other Concerns

You may be worried about do-it-yourself green cleaners not being able to kill germs effectively. Researchers at Tufts New England Medical Center, on the other hand, worry that we’re killing too many microorganisms, saying that disinfectants found in household cleaners may contribute to drug resistant bacteria. The CHEC says that ordinary soap and water do the job well enough to keep our families safe, barring someone with a seriously compromised immune system.

For most of us, the best way to prevent the spread of harmful microorganisms is to wash our hands frequently. Also, disinfect any sponges you’re using weekly by boiling them in water for three minutes and then microwaving them for a minute or two. Launder dish rags every week.

If you prefer over-the-counter products, look for green cleaners made with natural ingredients. Check your local health food store, or consult the box below for screened green cleaning product companies listed in our National Green Pages™.

Tracy Fernandez Rysavy|April 2015

Environmental Links

SFAS International Wildlife News Audubon Advocate Audubon Restore Eco-Voice South Florida Wildlife Care Center Sawgrass Nature Center & Wildlife Hospital The Turtle Hospital The Marathon Wild Bird Center Climate change info Audubon’s Coastal Strand Audubon of Florida News Blog Bioenergy News Climate Progress – climate science, politics and solutions Collins Center for Public Policy Comprehensive Everglades Restoration News EcoWatch – feeds from the WaterKeeper Alliance Everglades Foundation – press releases Everglades Hub Fort Myers News – Press Green Front Pages from Florida Newspapers Herald Tribune Newspapers –  Environmental News KeysNews.com Naples Daily News  – Environmental News National Public Radio Eco-News Riverwatch News about the Caloosahatchee Sierra Club Sierra Club Florida South Florida Watershed  Journal South Florida Water Management District Union of Concerned Scientists – news Yahoo News Search: Everglades NASA Climate Information American Littorial Society log NASA Climate Information Sun Newspapers – Lake Okeechobee News Everglades City News  – Mullet Wrapper IFAW’s World of Animals Magazine

ConsRep 1504 A

For 200 years we’ve been conquering Nature. Now we’re beating it to death. ~Tom McMillan

Announcements

The critically acclaimed anti-fracking film Groundswell Rising is coming to Broward County!

This film tells the story of people from all walks of life and across the political spectrum who are working to stop fracking.

Join us on our Florida film tour for a free film screening and conversation with special guest Craig Stevens.

As you may know, Craig Stevens is a Pennsylvania resident and activist whose fight for clean water is featured in the film.

Craig will share his personal experiences in battling fracking on his land.

Stick around and find out how you can plug in to the movement to ban fracking!

RSVP to reserve a seat and join the conversation.

What: Screening of Groundswell Rising with special guest Craig Stevens
When: Tuesday, April 7 at 6:30 p.m.
Where: Fern Forest Nature Center, 201 Lyons Rd. South, Coconut Creek, FL 33063

Sign up today to let us know you can join us.

Vickie Machado|Florida Organizer|Food & Water Watch
vmachado@fwwatch.org

Welcome our new Board Member, Phil Kushlan

BBWK is thrilled to have Phil join our Board of Directors. Phil’s dedication and passion for protecting Biscayne Bay,

as well as his scientific expertise, will be an asset to BBWK as we continue to grow and advocate for our watershed.

Get to know Phil here.

All turtles are not equal; the gopher tortoise lives on land so don’t ‘help’ it into water

          Last month, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) received three known reports of well-intentioned good Samaritans

incorrectly releasing gopher tortoise hatchlings into the ocean. Gopher tortoises cannot swim well and can easily drown.

Because gopher tortoises often nest in dunes adjacent to sea turtle nesting beaches, correct identification of these terrestrial

animals is important before deciding what action, if any, is necessary.

          To distinguish gopher tortoises from sea turtles, simply inspect their limbs from a distance:

Gopher tortoises have toes, with claws on each toe. Sea turtles have flippers with only one or two claws present on each fore-flipper.

Proper identification can be achieved without handling the animals.

Please see our gopher tortoise photos at http://bit.ly/1ysPccM for help discerning gopher tortoises from sea turtles.

          All five species of sea turtles found in Florida are federally endangered or threatened and managed under the Endangered Species Act as well as under Florida Statutes;

the gopher tortoise is listed under state law.

If you spot any of these species in danger on the beach, please do not disturb the animal.

Instead, call the FWC’s Wildlife Alert Hotline at 888-404-FWCC (3922) or call #FWC or *FWC on your cell phone.

Of Interest to All

4 of Harry Reid’s Biggest Accomplishments

Democrat Harry Reid, the current Senate Minority Leader, has announced he will not seek re-election when his term expires in 2016. After nearly 30 years in the Senate, Reid has established quite a legacy for his efforts in advancing liberal ideology. Here are four of his progressive accomplishments:

1. Health Care

The Affordable Care Act may be better known as Obamacare, but the law could just as easily have received a Harry Reid nickname as well. The senator made passing the health care bill a top priority and negotiated with politicians on both sides of the aisle to ensure it would have enough votes to pass. According to political analysts, it’s no exaggeration to say that the legislation was unlikely to pass without Reid’s efforts.

Reid himself called the ACA “the most important thing we’ve done for the country.” Although the Republican Party still threatens to dismantle Obamacare, getting it passed in the first place was the real trick. Now that Americans have had the opportunity to see that expanding access to medical insurance to those who previously could not afford or qualify for it is hardly the evil idea it was rumored to be, Republicans will have a much harder time getting rid of something that’s wound up being fairly popular amongst citizens.

2. Downgrading the Filibuster

With partisanship running strong in the Senate, Reid grew tired of the incessant filibustering that blocked the legislative body from accomplishing even the most routine of tasks. In order to minimize future obstructions, Reid helmed a controversial decision to change the way presidential appointments and judicial nominees are approved. Now, rather than needing a hard-to-obtain 60 votes to get approved, a simple majority is all it takes.

Republicans called Reid’s change a “power grab,” but it’s a rule that they now benefit from since Republicans now have the majority in the Senate. Pointless posturing over appointees just leaves important federal jobs unfilled. It’s a way of reducing the gridlock and saving the filibustering for issues that really matter.

3. Reproductive Issues… in a Roundabout Way

While most Democrats support a woman’s right to choose, Reid actually considers himself “pro-life.” Unlike most politicians who oppose abortion, however, he’s not anti-woman’s reproductive health altogether. It’s crazy when the same people who gripe about abortions also vote to block birth control, sex education and other ideas that would help women avoid having unwanted pregnancies in the first place.

In 2006, Reid teamed with (then) Senator Hillary Clinton to launch the Prevention First Amendment. The law acknowledged that people on both sides of the abortion debate have deeply held convictions, and called on the government to put forward more money to expand access to family planning programs and emergency contraception

He may not be pro-choice, but at least Reid is a man who understands that decreasing abortion means starting to eliminate the reasons women have abortions. His 92 percent approval rating from Planned Parenthood proves that a politician can have personal objections to abortions and still not be a jerk when it comes to reproductive health.

4. Environment

When it comes to the environment, Reid has never waivered, earning a perfect score from the League of Conservation Voters. He may not be the most vocal politician on this issue, but that doesn’t stop him from always doing the right thing.

Reid’s office includes three energy/environmental staffers so that he can help safeguard the EPA’s powers. He’s voted to close coal plants, protect public lands, maintain clean water, slow the effects of climate change, and even give extra consideration to endangered species. The planet will miss having his consistent vote, un-swayed by private interests.

Kevin Mathews|March 28, 2015

[Environmentalists in government positions are hard to find – he will be missed.]

Major 7.7 Quake Strikes Off Papua New Guinea, Tsunami Warning Issued

YDNEY, March 30 (Reuters) – A major earthquake with a magnitude 7.7 struck off Papua New Guinea on Monday, official monitors said, and a tsunami warning was issued soon after.

The epicenter of the 33 km (22 mile) deep quake was near the town of Rabaul in the northeast of Papua New Guinea, The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii said “hazardous tsunami waves are possible for coasts located within 1,000 km (620 miles) of the earthquake epicenter along the coasts of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.”

Tsunami waves reaching 1-3 meters (3-9 feet) above the tide level are possible along some coasts of Papua New Guinea, said the center.

No destructive, Pacific-wide tsunami was expected, it said.

“Persons located in threatened coastal areas should stay alert for information and follow instructions from national and local authorities,” it added.

Rabaul, a town on East New Britain Island, lies in the shadow of Mount Tavurvur, an active volcano. Rabaul was destroyed in 1994 during a severe eruption.

Jane Wardell|Paul Tait and Michael Perry|Reuters|03/29/2015

The Lights Go Off At St. Peter’s Basilica For Earth Hour

St. Peter’s Basilica joined more than 1,400 of the world’s iconic landmarks on Saturday to take a stand for stronger climate action.

The Vatican’s central square plunged into darkness on March 28 for Earth Hour, a global campaign held between 8:30 pm and 9:30 pm local time in 172 countries and territories. Rome’s Great Synagogue and Great Mosque also took part in the initiative this year, along with other iconic religious sites, like St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow.

Like his two predecessors, Pope Benedict XVI and Saint John Paul II, Pope Francis has taken a serious interest in promoting action on environmental issues. He’s currently drafting an encyclical about man’s relationship with nature, reportedly with the hopes of influencing the United Nation’s upcoming climate change conference.

In the past, Francis has called the exploitation of nature a grave sin.

“This is one of the greatest challenges of our time: to convert ourselves to a type of development that knows how to respect creation,” he said while addressing students at a university in southern Italy last year.

“When I look at America, also my own homeland (South America), so many forests, all cut, that have become land … that can longer give life. This is our sin, exploiting the Earth and not allowing her to her give us what she has within her.”

Carol Kuruvilla|The Huffington Post|03/30/2015

Minnesota Professor Accused Of Smuggling Elephant Ivory And Rhino Horn

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A St. Cloud State University philosophy professor was arrested Tuesday on charges of conspiring to smuggle rhinoceros horns and elephant ivory out of the United States and into China.

Yiwei Zheng, who appeared in U.S. District Court Tuesday, faces a federal indictment accusing him of conspiracy, smuggling and making a false statement to agents. Zheng also is charged with violating the federal Lacey Act, which bans trade in wildlife, fish and plants that have been illegally taken, transported or sold.

Zheng, who has taught at St. Cloud State since 1999, was arrested by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agents in St. Cloud, the Star Tribune reported. Zheng appeared in court, surrendered his passport and was released on $25,000 unsecured bond, according to a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office.

An email sent to Zheng’s defense attorney for comment was not immediately returned Tuesday. A university spokesman said he can’t comment due to the investigation.

The indictment alleges Zheng conspired with two unnamed co-conspirators in a scheme that ran from 2006 through 2011. The two co-conspirators are not named as defendants.

According to the indictment, the black rhinoceros is listed as an engendered species and international trade in elephant ivory is largely banned. Trade in rhinoceros horn and elephant ivory has been regulated by an international treaty since 1976. Any animal species listed as protected under the treaty cannot be legally exported from the U.S. without approval from the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Zheng, who grew up in Shanghai, China, is accused of importing into the U.S. objects made from rhinoceros horn from his co-conspirators in China. Demand for libation cups and other ornamental carvings made of rhinoceros horn has resulted in a thriving black market and has pushed most species of rhinoceros to the brink of extinction, the indictment said.

The indictment also alleges Zheng smuggled objects made from rhinoceros horn and elephant ivory from the United States to China by using the U.S. mail. Among the items Zheng is accused of smuggling to China in April 2011 are potted flower carvings, a fan and a carved lion all made with elephant ivory.

Zheng also is accused of facilitating the sale in March 2010 of a rhinoceros horn libation cup that was fraudulently imported into the U.S. and of exporting two rhinoceros horns in July 2010.

In September 2011, the indictment alleges, Zheng told agents he had sold two rhinoceros horns to a Chinese national named Mr. Zhang at a McDonald’s restaurant in St. Cloud. In fact, Zheng knew that he had illegally sent to the rhino horns from the U.S. to China, the indictment said.

|JEFF BAENEN|03/31/2015

Why Vertical Farming Could Be On The Verge Of A Revolution — And What’s Keeping It Down

Could the future of modern agriculture be found completely indoors?

That’s the question on the mind of Caleb Harper, the research scientist behind the CityFARM project of MIT Media Lab’s City Science Initiative.

On any given day on the fifth floor of the glass-walled Media Lab building, a team of 15 researchers led by Harper can be found operating the project’s small indoor vertical farm. The CityFARM team includes mechanical engineers, biologists, architects and more, who manage pests, monitor water chemistry and grow produce such as tomatoes, leafy greens and herbs.

The goal of CityFARM, Harper explained, is to create a sustainable, scalable, open-source vertical farming system and solutions that can be shared by others in the still-nascent industry — like buzz worthy projects just announced in Jackson, Wyoming, and Newark, New Jersey.

“What I’m trying to do is be like the Linux foundation for [agricultural] technology, to develop the cross platform that can go between these farms,” Harper told HuffPost.

Plants at most vertical farms are grown hydroponically, or without soil, nourished instead by the recycling of a nutrient-rich water solution. Some such farms rely on aeroponics, where the water solution is misted onto the plants’ roots. The farms are typically several stories tall, allowing for crops to be stacked in an enclosed space. Photosynthesis is brought about by artificial light, and sometimes augmented by natural light, like in a greenhouse.

The benefits of vertical farming are many, according to advocates such as Dickson Despommier. He authored what could be considered the industry’s Bible, The Vertical Farm, in 2010.

According to Despommier’s theory, by as soon as 2050 the world will run short on land suitable for the amount of traditional farming that will be required to feed a growing population. Vertical farming, he argues, would make for more efficient use of the limited land. It also comes with a number of other benefits, including year-round crop production regardless of climate and a shorter distance between farms and consumers.

Further, all the produce grown in vertical farms is, due to the nature of its cultivation, organic and free of any chemicals, herbicides or pesticides — meaning that the food is both local and healthy.

The industry is growing so quickly, according to Maximilian Loessl, the Munich-based vice chair of the Association for Vertical Farming, that it can be difficult to keep track of where new vertical farm operations are being built. Though all of the world’s vertical farms were based almost entirely in Japan as recently as seven years ago, about 100 companies were already spread throughout the world by 2012. Loessl says there are 24 farms currently operating in the U.S., ranging from large commercial operations to smaller research facilities like CityFARM.

These aren’t just pie-in-the-sky startups chasing after the latest micro-trend either, Loessl argues. He points out that major companies like Philips and General Electric have entered the industry to help develop lighting solutions.

“These companies wouldn’t invest hundreds of millions of dollars if they thought it would be a trend that would fade out,” Loessl said. “I think vertical farming is here to stay and that we’re just at the very, very beginning of really seeing the potential it has in making the world more food secure and more food safe, providing clean and local food to basically any location in the world.”

Still, success is no guarantee. VertiCrop, a large vertical farm founded in 2011 in Vancouver, British Columbia, declared bankruptcy earlier this year. Harper points out that no farms have yet released data proving that their operations are profitable. None most likely are, he says — at least currently.

What’s holding many farms back is the struggle to simultaneously increase their yield-per-square-foot and decrease the cost of production — particularly the cost of powering round-the-clock lights, which is high.

Another factor, Harper argues, is that many operations are working in a “black box mode,” trying to address too many production concerns completely in-house rather than attempting to collaborate and share information with other farms. He likens the current state of vertical farming to the automobile industry prior to the Industrial Revolution — and hopes his initiative will help spread information to ensure a better, sustainable bottom line.

“Before Ford, everyone was designing a car, every single component of it. Some of them were too slow, some were unsafe, some use too much gas, and some people at the time said cars will never work,” Harper said. “It’s going to take this industry to come together to really make a big impact.”

Harper also questions whether consumers will embrace produce grown in such an unusual and unfamiliar way.

“People are incredibly skeptical of science and technology in food and are scared of it,” Harper said. “How do we talk about that? Will people accept or understand it, and ultimately will they buy it?”

Carl Zulauf, a professor at Ohio State University’s Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics, agrees that the consumer response to vertical farm produce will also be key to whether the industry growth will continue.

“Marketing becomes preeminent,” Zulauf told HuffPost. “Will people buy into it and what aura will they assign to that product? If that aura isn’t a good aura, it will be hard to get a premium price out of the product.”

Marketing is already front of mind for Mark Thomann, CEO of FarmedHere. The company operates a massive, 90,000-square-foot farm in a formerly abandoned warehouse in Bedford Park, Illinois.

FarmedHere says it’s been “growing in leaps and bounds” toward profitability since it launched the suburban Chicago facility, its third and largest farm, in 2013. Today, its basil, arugula and other greens are distributed to more than 400 grocery stores in the Chicago area, including Whole Foods, and will later this year launch a retail partnership with local Jewel and Target stores. Thomann declined to disclose more specific financial information about the company.

FarmedHere is also converting their fluorescent lighting to LED lighting, a change that five years ago would have been too costly. It’s not only more affordable today but also more energy-efficient and, according to their research, better for crop yields. The company is also building additional growing operations within the facility to help them meet demand, which currently exceeds output. Thanks to utilizing ever-evolving technology, Thomann believes the next facility the company builds could look very different from those they’re operating today.

“What we’re doing could potentially be a major significant way to grow produce and other types of crops in the future,” Thomann told HuffPost.

Recognizing that educating consumers about how the produce is grown is also important for the company, FarmedHere welcomes field trips of Chicago Public School students and their parents to come and see the facility for themselves.

Thomann is confident the firm will be a success, pointing to recent research indicating that consumers are willing to pay a premium for foods they perceive as better for them.

As for the naysayers: “I like the skeptics best because they’re the ones I like to prove we can do this, that this is something we can do,” Thomann said. “We are trying to feed the world sustainable, healthy, organic, local food. It’s why we exist as a company and why the category is continuing to improve.”

Joseph Erbentraut|huffingtonpost.com|03/12/2015

EPA Classified Roundup as Carcinogen 30 Years Ago…But Mysteriously Reversed Decision

Scientists and environmentalists have been saying for decades that the world’s most common weed killer, glyphosate, also known as Monsanto’s Roundup, is a carcinogen. Last week, a World Health Organization report indicated that, indeed, glyphosate is a “probable carcinogen.” Now there’s evidence that the Environmental Protection Agency knew glyphosate was a probable carcinogen thirty years ago, but approved it for use anyway. Here’s a summarized chronology of events:

1985: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was aware of the herbicide’s ability to cause cancer 30 years ago, even categorizing it as a ‘Class C Carcinogen.” Class C carcinogens have “suggestive evidence of carcinogenic potential.”

1991: The EPA already had evidence of multiple studies showing glyphosate is a possible carcinogen, but still reversed its decision suggesting that suddenly, six years later, there wasn’t enough evidence. It approved the herbicide for widespread use, classifying it as “Group E: evidence of NON-carcinogenicity for humans.” According to the Organic Consumers Association: “Six years (after the EPA classified glyphosate as a carcinogen), just about the time former Monsanto lawyer Michael Taylor got himself installed in a key position at the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA), the EPA reversed that decision.”

2013: Although the evidence of glyphosate’s carcinogenicity had been mounting for years, the EPA increased the upper limits of allowable amounts of glyphosate that can be sprayed on crops.

2015: World Health Organization declares glyphosate a “probable carcinogen.”

The Research:

Study after study continues to link Roundup to cancer. A few months ago, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found a link between some pesticides and a significantly increased risk of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma — a type of cancer of the lymphatic system. In this type of cancer, tumors of the lymph nodes or within the lymph system can form. According to the review of 44 studies, 80 active ingredients in 21 classes of chemicals, researchers found that exposure to glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup, doubles the risk of this deadly cancer.”

Other research links Roundup to the growing incidence of infertility and sterility.

When I consider the timeline and the recent news, it screams negligence on the part of the EPA

Michelle Schoffro Cook|March 31, 2015

Shell’s Arctic Drilling Plans Approved by Department of Interior

It seems like the battle to save the wild and remote Arctic seas from predatory oil and gas companies never ends. Despite court cases finding it had illegally sold oil and gas exploration leases in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska and despite its own environmental impact study depicting the dangers of drilling there, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) has opened the door to selling offshore drilling leases in the Arctic seas again. Currently there are no gas or oil operations in the Arctic seas, and environmental groups would like to keep it that way.

But this week the DOI announced that it is re-affirming the 2008 Bush-era leases opening 30 million acres of the Chukchi Sea—an area about the size of Pennsylvania—to oil drilling, even though a court-ordered re-analysis showed that the environmental impacts could be far worse than previously thought.

In 2010, a federal district court in Alaska found the 20o8 lease sales violated the National Environmental Protection Act. The following year the Obama administration re-affirmed the sale. Shell attempted to start drilling operations in 2012 but was plagued with misadventures such as a drilling rig running aground. It abandoned its plans to drill in 2013 and 2014.

The leases were again shot down in court in January 2014 after 14 conservation and Native groups represented by Earthjustice brought a lawsuit against Chukchi Lease Sale 193. The court again found the impact study inadequate and determined that the DOI had only analyzed the best-case scenario that “skews the data toward fewer environmental impacts and thus impedes a full and fair discussion of the potential effects of the project.”

“Interior rushed the process of reconsidering the leases, issuing a flawed final environmental impact statement less than two months after it received hundreds of thousands of comments on the draft,”according to Earthjustice. “Rather than take the time fully to assess the impacts and alternatives of leasing in the Chukchi Sea, Interior catered to Shell Oil’s desire to drill as early as this summer.”

Because the area is subject to severe and often dangerous weather conditions and is hundreds of miles from the nearest Coast Guard facility, it would be impossible to respond to or clean up an oil spill there, something the DOI’s environmental impact study concluded had a 75 percent chance of happening. Given the quantity of residual oil and the ongoing ecological impacts of the Deepwater Horizon spill five years ago in the warmer and more accessible Gulf of Mexico, that’s a frightening thought.

“Our Arctic ocean is flat out the worst place on Earth to drill for oil,” pointed out Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)’s Alaska director Niel Lawrence. “The world’s last pristine sea, it is both too fragile to survive a spill and too harsh and remote for effective cleanup. Shell’s disastrous misadventures there in 2012 prove it can never be a secure source of energy for America.”

“It is unconscionable that the federal government is willing to risk the health and safety of the people and wildlife that live near and within the Chukchi Sea for Shell’s reckless pursuit of oil,” said Friends of the Earth‘s Marissa Knodel. “Shell’s dismal record of safety violations and accidents, coupled with the inability to clean up or contain an oil spill in the remote, dangerous Arctic waters, equals a disaster waiting to happen. Alaska, beware: with a 75 percent chance of a large oil spill and a 100 percent chance of environmental degradation from drilling-related activities, today’s decision foreshadows dark days to come for the state warming twice as fast as the rest of the nation.”

Greenpeace’s executive director Annie Leonard agrees. “Shell may now have approval from the Obama administration to drill in the Arctic, but it does not have approval from the people. Millions around the world are saying ‘no’ to Arctic drilling and other extraction projects that we have to freeze to avoid catastrophic climate change. On the same day President Obama pledges to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by nearly a third, he opens the back door for one of the most irresponsible oil companies to drill in the Arctic.”

Oil spills and their impact on wildlife and the isolated Native communities that rely on the sea for their livelihood are only part of the concern of the environmental groups opposing the re-opening of the leases. They’re concerned that upsetting its balance would hasten the melting of its ice cover, something drove tens of thousands of walruses ashore last fall in both Alaska and Russia, and help fuel climate change.

“Interior still has time to make a better decision when evaluating Shell’s drilling plan, and we sincerely hope it says no to Shell’s louder, bigger and dirtier tactics, loaded with potential environmental harm,”said Earthjustice staff attorney Erik Grafe. “The region is suffering dramatically under climate stress, and drilling will only further stress the region’s wildlife and people and ultimately worsen climate change.”

“The industrial oil development that Interior hopes will flow from its decision to approve the Chukchi lease sale gives us a 75 percent chance of a large oil spill and a 100 percent chance of worsening the climate crisis,” said Rebecca Noblin, Alaska director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “I don’t like those odds.”

Anastasia Pantsios|April 1, 2015

Port Everglades Harbor Deepening & Widening Project Reaches Milestone in Federal Approval Process

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Civil Works Review Board Moves Plan Forward

DATE: February 27, 2015
MEDIA CONTACT: Ellen Kennedy
Assistant Director
Port Everglades Business Development Division/Communications
PHONE: 954-468-3508; 954-868-0220 (cell)
EMAIL: ekennedy@broward.org
BROWARD COUNTY, FL – Broward County’s Port Everglades reached a major milestone today in its effort to deepen and widen its navigational channels and turning basin as the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Civil Works Review Board approved the final environmental and economic feasibility studies for the project.

The Civil Works Review Board met today in Washington, DC, to discuss various aspects of the project before unanimously approving that the plan move forward for state and agency review. There will now be a 30-day comment period for oversight agencies, followed by time for the Corps to address any questions. The final step in the Corps’ project approval process is a Chief of Engineers Report recommending the project to Congress for construction authorization.  The Chief’s Report is anticipated by the end of May 2015.

“The future of this economic powerhouse depends on being able to keep up with Florida’s growing population, larger ships, and competition from international and domestic ports that are expanding and modernizing their infrastructure. Any delay to the expansion risks the new larger freight ships contracting with other ports, passing us by and taking thousands of jobs with them,” said Congresswoman Lois Frankel, whose district includes Port Everglades. Congresswoman Frankel attended the meeting in Washington along with staff from the South Florida Congressional Delegation and Richard Biter, Assistant Secretary for Intermodal Systems Development for the Florida Department of Transportation.

Port Everglades has been working with the Corps for more than 18 years on this project, designed to enable safe passage of deep draft post-Panamax cargo ships, those too large to fit through today’s Panama Canal. Port Everglades already handles Post-Panamax ships from Europe, but the ships must be lightly loaded, which is inefficient, and older fleets are being replaced with much larger ships.  Main features of the project are to deepen the main navigational channels from 42 feet to 48 feet (plus 1-foot required and another 1-foot allowable overdepth for a total of 50 feet) and to widen the Entrance Channel and the maneuverability constrained Southport Access Channel, including the “knuckle” area between berths 23-26.

The project is anticipated to create an estimated 4,700 total construction jobs and nearly 1,500 permanent direct jobs locally. The estimated cost is $374 million which will be paid with Port Everglades revenue generated through port user fees, federal appropriations and state grants. No local tax dollars will be used for this project because Port Everglades is a self-funded enterprise fund.

At the crossroads of north-south and east-west trade, Broward County’s Port Everglades is Florida’s leading container port, handling more than one million TEUs (20-foot equivalent units, the industry standard measurement for container volumes) and serving as a gateway to Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia. Located within the cities of Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, and Dania Beach, Florida, Port Everglades is in the heart of one of the world’s largest consumer regions, including a constant flow of visitors and up to a combined 110 million residents and seasonal visitors within a 500-mile radius. Port Everglades has direct access to the interstate highway system and the newly opened 43-acre Florida East Coast Railway (FECR) intermodal hub, and is closer to the Atlantic Shipping Lanes than any other Southeastern U.S. port. Ongoing capital improvements and expansion will ensure that Port Everglades can continue to handle future growth in container traffic. A world-class cargo handling facility, Port Everglades serves as an ideal point of entry and departure for products shipped around the world.

More information about Broward County’s Port Everglades is available at porteverglades.net or by calling toll-free in the United States 1-800-421-0188 or emailing PortEvergladesCargo@broward.org .

Water Cutbacks Now Mandatory In California For First Time In History

  Conserving water in California isn’t just a suggestion anymore.

On Wednesday, Gov. Jerry Brown announced there will be mandatory water cutbacks in the drought-stricken state for the first time in history.

“Today we are standing on dry grass where there should be five feet of snow,” he said in a statement. “This historic drought demands unprecedented action. Therefore, I’m issuing an executive order mandating substantial water reductions across our state. As Californians, we must pull together and save water in every way possible.”

The orders come the same day Brown joined officials at a snowpack measure in the Sierra Nevada mountains that revealed levels are are at an all-time recorded low, at just 6 percent of the long-term average for this time of year. The previous low was 25 percent, set in 1977 and again in 2014.

Images Brown’s office released with his announcement show the shocking difference in snowpack measured in April of previous years.

Under the new restrictions, the State Water Resources Control Board will enforce a 25 percent water use reduction in every city, conserving about 1.5 million acre-feet of water throughout the next nine months. According to the governor’s office, that’s nearly the amount of water currently left in Northern California’s Lake Oroville. Shrinking water levels made the lake one of the drought’s most jaw-dropping visuals.

The mandatory cutbacks come a little over a year after Brown asked Californians to voluntarily reduce their water use by 20 percent. Maps from the National Drought Mitigation Center show the increasingly dry conditions the state is facing as it suffers through its fourth year of drought.

The state will also partner with local governments to rid California of 50 million square feet of lawns and replace the water-intensive greenery with drought-tolerant landscaping. Campuses, golf courses, cemeteries and other large landscapes often covered in sprawling lawns will be required to make significant cuts, the announcement notes. Watering ornamental lawns on public street medians will be banned.

Residents will also be able to take advantage of a new temporary, statewide consumer rebate program that rewards them for replacing appliances with more water-efficient ones. All new residences and developments will be prohibited from irrigating with potable water unless they use water-efficient drip irrigation systems.

Brown also called for increased enforcement of these water restrictions. He’s requiring local water agencies to implement conservation pricing and agricultural water users to report additional water use activity to state regulators.

Lydia O’Connor|The Huffington Post|04/01/2015

Good News: Our Planet Might Actually Be Getting Greener

The threat of deforestation is understood as one of the major problems in the world today, but a new study suggests that the total amount of vegetation in the world appears to have increased in the past decade, suggesting a rare ray of light in conservation and climate change news.

The study, which was published late last month in the journal Nature Climate Change, saw researchers from Australia assess the amount of carbon stored in living plant mass, also known as biomass, stored above ground. This is one established way that we can measure not just how much carbon is stored but also the density of biomass in any given area and so provides us with an interesting way of assessing regional and global forest densities.

To assess this, the researchers developed a new technique. The researchers explain:

We developed a new technique to map changes in vegetation biomass using satellite measurements of changes in the radio-frequency radiation emitted from the Earth’s surface, a technique called passive microwave remote sensing. The radiation varies with temperature, soil moisture and the shielding of water in vegetation biomass above the ground.

We extracted this vegetation information from several satellites and merged them into one time series covering the last two decades. This allowed us to track global changes in biomass from month to month, something that was not possible before.

When the researchers looked at the years between 2003 and 2012, they saw that the amount of carbon stored above ground in biomass increased by 4 billion tons. This indicates that, despite ongoing and severe deforestation in tropical rainforests, other areas have actually managed to “re-green” quite successfully. The researchers indicate one key effort that seems to have had an impact is China’s tree planting known as the Three-North Shelter Forest Program. The effort has seen China create a strip of wind-breaking trees that are specifically designed to halt the expansion of the Gobi Desert. This ongoing effort is set to be completed by 2050, with estimates suggesting that by that time the corridor of forest will stretch 4,500km. While the project has hit some problems, and has had its share of criticism, it seems that in this regard at least, it may have been helpful. It also makes China the only region that has purposefully contributed to the identified restoration of forests.

Other factors that appear to have contributed to this increase in vegetation include the practice of abandoning farmland in Eastern Europe and forests being allowed to, effectively, reclaim that land. Another thing that seems to have helped, and one that is mostly outside of human control, is increased rainfall across Australia, Africa, and South America.  The researchers note that the increase found in Australia happened despite land clearing operations — which perhaps suggests that this effect is already under threat, but that forests are proving robust and are capable of bouncing back given the right conditions.

This study also identified the areas of greatest decline, and unsurprisingly they occurred on the southeastern edge of the Amazon forest, in particular areas like Sumatra and Kalimantan, where vast land clearing and logging operations continue despite conservationists warning that the reduction of these vital habitats are driving hundreds of species toward decline and possible extinction.

The news that there appears to have been an increase in forests when looking at the world as a whole is good in some respects, but it’s not out of the blue. It has been suspected that a certain reversal happened in overall vegetation loss because the carbon storage effect known as “carbon sink” appeared to go up in recent studies examining data from the past couple decades. Carbon sink refers to how trees and other vegetation take in and in effect hold on to carbon from our atmosphere. While not a permanent solution to greenhouse gas emissions, carbon sinks are an important part of our climate change management strategy. As such, news that forests are making a comeback is very encouraging.

Let’s not celebrate too fast though. Other research has shown that when it comes to carbon sinks, not all forests are created equal and unfortunately for us, it is the tropical forests that we need in order to have the maximum off-setting for our climate damaging fossil fuels and manufacturing practices. All that said though, this research does indicate that, alongside saving tropical forests and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, concerted efforts to re-green really can be successful and can create a meaningful contribution to ongoing climate change reduction efforts.

Steve Williams|April 2, 2015

Florida’s national parks losing their looks

WASHINGTON – The backlog of maintenance work at Florida’s national parks is approaching $195 million, according to a new report by the National Park Service.

Everglades National Park has the most deferred maintenance, with a $58.9 million price tag. It is followed by Dry Tortugas National Park ($56.9 million), Canaveral National Seashore ($22.2 million), Gulf Islands National Seashore ($20.9 million) and Big Cypress National Preserve ($20 million).

Nationwide, national parks face a $11.5 billion backlog – an increase of $190 million over last year’s estimate. The park service counts as deferred maintenance repairs to roads and bridges, visitor centers, trails, and campgrounds that have been put off for more than a year.

In releasing the maintenance report, National Park Service Director Jonathan Jarvis pointed out President Barack Obama’s fiscal 2016 budget proposes additional funding to reduce the backlog and spruce up the parks as part of efforts to mark the agency’s 100th birthday.

“As we invite more Americans to discover the special places in the national park system during our centennial celebration, we need to have facilities that can accommodate them and provide the best possible visitor experience,” Jarvis said.

Crumbling park roads and bridges account for about half the maintenance backlog. Florida is no exception:

*At Everglades National Park, which had more than 1.1 million visitors last year, most postponed work involves repairing paved and unpaved roads, NPS records show. Another $7.8 million is for building renovations.

*At Canaveral National Seashore on the Space Coast, which hosted more than 1.4 million visitors, deferred maintenance on roads accounted for almost all the park’s backlog.

*At Gulf Islands National Seashore in Florida’s Panhandle, visited by nearly 4.5 million in 2014, $16.4 million of the backlog is earmarked for roads.

Obama’s budget calls for increasing parks spending by $433 million, to $3 billion. The park service estimates its staffing would increase by almost 500 full-time employees.

The budget includes $242.8 million to deal with the most urgent deferred maintenance.

Chilly reaction

But the proposal has received a chilly reaction from some Republicans in the GOP-controlled Congress.

Republican Rep. Tom McClintock of California, chairman of the House Natural Resources subcommittee that oversees the park system, said during a budget hearing last week record attendance at the parks is “an illusion” created by the huge numbers visiting the new World War II Memorial and the Franklin Roosevelt Memorial.

He said lodging is down by 330,000 annually, or about 10 percent, and RV and tent camping also have declined. He questioned why the park service would be looking to add new properties when it’s having difficulty maintaining existing parks.

Craig Obey, senior vice president with the National Parks Conservation Association, told a different House subcommittee last week 73 percent of people polled in a recent survey said it’s important the nation’s parks are fully restored and ready for the centennial in 2016.

“This is a critical time for our national park system and the National Park Service, which celebrate their 100th birthday next year,” Obey said. “Our parks, though beloved by Americans from all walks of life and celebrated worldwide, are under significant financial strain.”

Ledyard King and Bill Theobald|USA TODAY

National Park maintenance backlog

National Parks in Florida face a maintenance backlog amounting to about $195 million. Here’s a list of the parks and cost of addressing that backlog:

*Everglades National Park $58.9 million

*Dry Tortugas National Park $56.9 million

*Canaveral National Seashore $22.2 million

*Gulf Islands National Seashore $20.9 million

*Big Cypress National Preserve $20 million

*Biscayne National Park $6.7 million

*Castillo de San Marcos National Monument $5.7 million

*Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve $3.6 million

*De Soto National Memorial $151,369

Source: National Park Service

Senate Republicans pass hydraulic fracturing limits

 Democrats argue for ban

TALLAHASSEE- A proposal to regulate hydraulic fracturing cleared a Senate panel Tuesday, despite calls from opponents and some state lawmakers to ban the method in Florida.

The measure (SB 1468) cleared the Senate’s environmental preservation and conservation committee, 6-2 along party lines with Democrats opposing.

That proposal, sponsored by Sen. Garrett Richter, R-Naples, would increase penalties to $25,000 a day, create a chemical disclosure registry and require companies to disclose the chemicals being used in the process.

A companion measure (SB 1582) also cleared the committee with only Republicans supporting. That measure creates a public records exemption for proprietary business information.

“I believe this bill is intended to pave the way for fracking in the state of Florida,” said Sen. Darren Soto, D-Orlando, who sponsored legislation to ban it. “I believe that is short sighted. I don’t believe the answer here is to regulate. It is to eliminate.”

Paula Cobb, the deputy secretary for regulatory programs at the state Department of Environmental Protection, said hydraulic fracturing and high-pressure well stimulation already are allowed under existing law and the Senate proposal puts “protections in that don’t already exist.”

“I really believe this is a work in progress,” Sen. David Simmons, R-Altamonte Springs, said. “I believe it is better to have regulation.”

Drilling has come under increased scrutiny in the past few years, in part because the Collier-Hogan well, south of Lake Tafford, was fracked at the end of 2013. Cobb said it “is very clear” the proposed legislation is, in part, a response to what happened in 2013.

“Because we did not have … what we have in this bill today, that activity went forward without the proper or robust framework,” she said.

But some question whether the proposal would have even covered what happened in Collier County. The measure defines high-pressure well stimulation as an intervention performed by injecting “more than 100,000 gallons of fluids into a rock formation at a high pressure.” In a March 30 staff analysis, Senate staff said the limit “might not capture all well stimulation activities.”

Stephanie Kunkel, who represents the Conservancy of Southwest Florida and Clean Water Action, said the Conservancy supports efforts to put regulations in place but called on lawmakers to strengthen the proposal before it becomes law.

The organization has offered several suggestions for ways to

strengthen the measure, including broadening the definition of high-pressure well stimulation, prohibiting companies from using drinking water in the process and holding companies accountable for remediation associated with contamination.

While Kunkel said the organizations she represents are generally supportive of the measure, many others were not. Kim Ross, president of ReThink Energy Florida, said lawmakers need to take up proposed legislation to outlaw hydraulic fracturing. Ross called the Senate proposal a “look-good bill.”

“It makes everyone look like they’re doing something, when they’re not,” she said. “We’re in favor of a ban. We think the only way to go is a ban.”

That is unlikely to happen, though. Two bills (SB 166 and HB 169) have been filed this session that aim to ban hydraulic fracturing. Neither of those proposals have received a committee hearing, and House and Senate Democrats held a news conference Tuesday urging lawmakers to hear the bills.

This was the first committee stop for the Senate proposal. It needs to clear two more committees before it makes it to the Senate floor. A similar House proposal (HB 1205), sponsored by Estero Republican Rep. Ray Rodrigues, cleared the first of three committees on March 17.

Jenna Buzzacco-Foerster|Scripps-Tribune Capital Bureau

Calls to Action

1. Tell the EPA and FDA- Immediately Suspend Monsanto’s Roundup Herbicide – here
2. Fight Sea-Level Rise- Cut Carbon Pollution – here
3. National forests and wilderness areas are not for sale – here

Birds and Butterflies

Plans Move Forward to Kill Thousands of Cormorants

Last summer, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers caused some major upset when it announced a controversial plan to kill 16,000 double-crested cormorants who it believes need to die simply because they eat fish.

The Army Corps planned on targeting cormorants on East Sand Island, which is located near the mouth of the Columbia River. The spot is considered an important point for migrating salmon, but it’s also an important nesting site for cormorants and a variety of other birds.

According to the Audubon Society of Portland, the island is home to the largest double-crested cormorant colony in the west, the largest Brown Pelican roost in the Pacific Northwest and the largest Caspian Tern colony in the world. It has also been designated as an internationally recognized Important Bird Area by both the Audubon Society and the American Bird Conservancy.

Bird and wildlife advocates raised serious concerns that the proposal was cruel, wasteful and pointless, and used these birds as scapegoats for problems affecting salmon that are caused by humans – namely dams and habitat loss.

They also worried the plan could potentially have dire unintended consequences for cormorants who may be doing well on the island, but aren’t thriving elsewhere, which could potentially push them towards needing endangered species protection.

Criticism was also brought by researchers from Oregon State University who were hired by the Army Corps to study the bird population on the island. They say the Army Corps ignored their findings and isn’t using the best available science in its plan to protect young salmon.

Unfortunately, despite widespread opposition from the public and scientific community, the Army Corps announced it has finalized its decision that will slightly reduce the number of cormorants targeted, but will still kill nearly 11,000 of them and destroy more than 26,000 of their nests in an effort to reduce their numbers by more than half.

As of now, it still has to get permits from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to begin, which will likely bring in contractors from the notorious Wildlife Services to start the killing this spring. Still, if permits are granted there’s now hope a lawsuit could shut down the plan and save cormorants from this massive slaughter.

In response to the Army Corp’s latest plan, the Audubon Society of Portland announced its Board of Directors has voted to sue both the Army Corps and the FWS if permits are granted. Bob Sallinger, the organization’s conservation director, said in a statement:

We are deeply disappointed that despite more than 145,000 comments opposing this decision, the federal government has chosen to move forward with the wanton slaughter of thousands of protected birds. Rather than addressing the primary cause of salmon decline, the manner in which the Corps operates the Columbia River Hydropower System, the Corps has instead decided to scapegoat wild birds and pursue a slaughter of historic proportions. Sadly this will do little or nothing to protect wild salmon but it will put Double-crested Cormorant populations in real jeopardy.

The organization is hoping to get the Army Corps to focus instead on non-lethal measures that will protect both birds and salmon. For more info on how to help protect these cormorants from being needlessly killed, visit the Audubon Society of Portland.

Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/plans-move-forward-to-kill-thousands-of-cormorants.html#ixzz3Vl6xxHcp

Alicia Graef|March 27, 2015

Plant Native Milkweed to Aid the Monarch Migration

To ensure that the next generation of monarch butterflies thrives this spring, you can do one simple thing: plant native milkweed.

Milkweed is essential for the butterflies because it is the only food of monarch caterpillars. It makes me both sad and furious that milkweed is disappearing because of human greed and carelessness, falling victim to heavy use of herbicides and monocrop agriculture. Please join me this spring in welcoming the return of the monarchs by planting native milkweed, untreated by pesticides.

Not all milkweed is alike: it is very important that you plant the species of milkweed native to your area and that you do not buy it from vendors who pre-treat it with pesticides.

Our friends at the Xerces Society have all the resources you need to find milkweed native to your region. If you can’t plant this spring, you can also plant milkweed seed this fall to aid next spring’s migration. You can even plant milkweed in a pot or planter box.

In the coming weeks monarchs will embark on their return journey to the United States, and they’ll need food and places to lay their eggs when they arrive. I hope you will help monarchs along their remarkable migration by planting milkweed.

Planting milkweed is an incredibly simple action you can take to preserve an astounding natural phenomenon and create habitat for these important pollinators.

Ask your friends, family, school and community gardens “Got Milkweed?”

Together, we can help save the monarch migration.

Bethany Cotton|Wildlife Program Director|WildEarth Guardians

The Rise of Jerdon’s Babbler

This babbler’s back. Or maybe it never left?

Jerdon’s babbler, a small brown bird the size of a house sparrow, was first described by the British naturalist T.C. Jerdon in 1862. In the ensuing decades, its native grasslands near Yangon, Myanmar, were swallowed up by human development. By the 20th century, the bird was feared extinct.

Recently, though, Jerdon’s babbler was rediscovered by a WCS-led scientific team. The group was surveying the site of an abandoned agricultural station and heard the bird’s distinct call. Over the next 48 hours, the team repeatedly found Jerdon’s babblers at several locations in the immediate vicinity and managed to obtain blood samples and high-quality photographs. They published their findings in Birding Asia, the magazine of the Oriental Bird Club.

According to Colin Poole, Director of WCS’s Regional Conservation Hub in Singapore, the discovery proves that not only is the bird still around but it’s native grassland is, as well. “Future work is needed,” he said, “to identify remaining pockets of natural grassland and develop systems for local communities to conserve and benefit from them.”

Wildlife Conservation Society|March 2015

Migratory Dragonfly Partnership Annual Report

4 Epic Bird Migrations

Do you have a long commute to work? You may think so, but take a look at how far migrating birds travel. Every year, as the cycle of nature keeps turning, thousands upon thousands of birds fly from their feeding grounds to their breeding grounds. And that journey can cover almost the entire globe.

These are very risky flights that involve huge amounts of energy.

Townsends Warbler

Take the Townsends Warbler, (seen above), which follows the pattern of wintering south and breeding north. It spends winters in central Mexico and Costa Rica, and also along the coast of California. During migration, the species disperses across the western United States, but to breed, it moves into northern Idaho and the Pacific Northwest, much of British Columbia, and southern Alaska.

Blackpoll Warbler

This tiny bird flies 1,700 miles over open ocean in a non-stop flight lasting fewer than three days.

A study involving miniature electronic backpacks to monitor the birds’ movements has revealed that the Blackpoll Warbler takes off from the north-east corner of North America and flies due south over open water without stopping until it reaches landfall in the Caribbean about two or three days later, before flying on to Venezuela and Colombia.

“We’re really excited to report that this is one of the longest non-stop overwater flights ever recorded for a songbird, and finally confirms what has long been believed to be one of the most extraordinary migratory feats on the planet,” said Bill DeLuca of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the first author of the study published in the journal Biology Letters.

Sanderling

Shorebirds make some of the farthest trips. The Sanderling is a good example: every year this 3-ounce bird goes around the American continent. Starting in California, Sanderlings fly east across the top of North America and down the Atlantic Coast in the autumn to wintering grounds in Chile and Peru, then back north in the spring through the western United States to their Arctic breeding grounds. Finally they return to California. That’s an exhausting schedule!

British Swallows

Another epic journey is the one taken by British Swallows. These birds arrive in the UK in April and May and take off for their wintering grounds in South Africa in September and October. To get to South Africa, they cover 200 miles a day, mainly during daylight, at speeds of 17 – 22 miles per hour. Maximum flight speed is 35 mph.

Their route takes them through western France, across the Pyrenees, down eastern Spain into Morocco, and across the Sahara. Some birds follow the west coast of Africa avoiding the Sahara, and other European swallows travel further east and down the Nile Valley.

How do these tiny birds find their way? They use clues such as land forms, rivers, shorelines. At night they orient themselves by the stars and by the earth’s magnetic field. By day they use the sun. They also use smells to help them know where they are (like trout and salmon returning to breed). With these tools, birds find their way to and from their breeding grounds – the same trip every year.

So next time you’re tempted to complain about your commute, think first about these tiny creatures and their amazingly long journeys!

Judy Molland|April 2, 2015

Tiny Songbird Discovered to Migrate Non-Stop, 1,500 Miles over the Atlantic

For more than 50 years, scientists had tantalizing clues suggesting that a tiny, boreal forest songbird known as the blackpoll warbler departs each fall from New England and eastern Canada to migrate nonstop in a direct line over the Atlantic Ocean toward South America, but proof was hard to come by.

While other birds, such as albatrosses, sandpipers and gulls are known for trans-oceanic flights, the blackpoll warbler is a forest dweller that migrates boldly where few of its relatives dare to travel. Most migratory songbirds that winter in South America take a less risky, continental route south through Mexico and Central America. A water landing would be fatal to a warbler.

A Long Overwater Flight
Now, for the first time an international team of biologists report “irrefutable evidence” that the birds complete a nonstop flight ranging from about 1,410 to 1,721 miles (2,270 to 2,770 km) in just two to three days, making landfall somewhere in Puerto Rico, Cuba and the islands known as the Greater Antilles, from there going on to northern Venezuela and Columbia. Details of their study, which used light-level, or solar, geolocators, appear in the current issue of Biology Letters.

As for why the blackpoll undertakes such a perilous journey while other species follow a longer but safer coastal route, the authors say that because migration is the most perilous part of a songbird’s year, it may make sense to get it over with as quickly as possible. However, this and other questions remain to be studied.

First author Bill DeLuca, an environmental conservation research fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, with colleagues at the University of Guelph, Ontario, the Vermont Center for Ecostudies and other institutions, says, “For small songbirds, we are only just now beginning to understand the migratory routes that connect temperate breeding grounds to tropical wintering areas. We’re really excited to report that this is one of the longest nonstop overwater flights ever recorded for a songbird, and finally confirms what has long been believed to be one of the most extraordinary migratory feats on the planet.”

How Do You Track A Tiny Bird Over The Ocean?
In the recent past, geolocators have been too large and heavy for use in studying songbird migration and the tiny blackpoll warbler, at around half an ounce (12 grams) or about as much as 12 business cards, was too small to carry even the smallest of traditional tracking instruments. Scientists had only ground observations and radar as tools.

But with recent advances in geolocator technology, they have become lighter and smaller. For this work, the researchers harnessed miniaturized geolocators about the size of a dime and weighing only 0.5g to the birds’ lower backs like a tiny backpack. By retrieving these when the warblers returned to Canada and Vermont the following spring, then analyzing the data, first author Bill DeLuca, an environmental conservation research fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and his colleagues could trace their migration routes.

For this work the scientists fitted geolocator packs on 20 birds in Vermont and 20 more in Nova Scotia. They were able to recapture three birds from the Vermont group and two from the Nova Scotia group for analyses.

A Daring Flight
To prepare for the flight, the birds build up their fat stores, explains Canadian team leader Ryan Norris of the University of Guelph. “They eat as much as possible, in some cases doubling their body mass in fat so they can fly without needing food or water. For blackpolls, they don’t have the option of failing or coming up a bit short. It’s a fly-or-die journey that requires so much energy.”

He adds, “These birds come back every spring very close to the same place they used in the previous breeding season, so with any luck you can catch them again. Of course there is high mortality among migrating songbirds on such a long journey, we believe only about half return.”

eNature|March 31, 2015

 Florida Panthers

DEP Celebrates First Year of Care of Florida Panther Kitten

HOMOSASSA – The Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s Florida Park Service is celebrating the first anniversary of Yuma’s arrival at Ellie Schiller Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park.

Yuma (meaning “Son of the Chief”) arrived at the park on April 3, 2014, as a three-month-old kitten. He was found barely alive on Jan. 23, 2014, by Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission biologists in the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge in Naples, Florida. Apparently abandoned, the kitten was dehydrated and non-responsive. The kitten received emergency care at Animal Specialty Hospital in Naples and rehabilitative care at Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa. He could not be returned to the wild, so Yuma has been given a home at Ellie Schiller Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park where he serves as an ambassador for his species.

Yuma is almost 15 months old and is healthy and active. The 80-pound panther has become a favorite of park visitors who can easily observe him in his habitat from the Wildlife Walk.

The anniversary of Yuma’s arrival at the Wildlife Park will be celebrated at the park’s Earth Day Egg-stravaganza on Saturday, April 4, 2015. Visitors will be able to adopt Yuma for a $20 donation to the Friends of Homosassa Springs Wildlife Park.

The Earth Day Egg-stravaganza event kicks off with a complimentary Easter Egg Hunt starting at 9 a.m. on the green behind the Park’s Visitor Center parking area. Families should arrive early to register their children and to meet the Easter Bunny and other costumed characters. Children will redeem the Easter Eggs they collect for candy.

WHAT:      Celebration of Yuma and Earth Day Egg-stravaganza

WHEN:      Saturday, April 4, 2015

WHERE:    Ellie Schiller Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park

4150 S. Suncoast Blvd.

Homosassa, FL 34446

There is no charge to participate in the Easter Egg Hunt, but regular admission fees to the park apply. Please contact the park at (352) 628-5343 for additional information.

The Friends of Homosassa Springs Wildlife Park encourage participants to bring canned goods for donation to the We Care Food Pantry to help needy families in the community.

nataliarodriguez2015|March.31.2015

Florida Panther FIELD UPDATE

FP 238’s Port Royal adventure

Few people get to see a Florida panther, so when a gardener working on a Naples Port Royal waterfront estate saw a large cat resting in the shrubbery the morning of February 3, 2015, it’s not surprising he told the owner it was a tiger.  The homeowner went outside to see what was in his shrubs.  After seeing that there was a panther in his bushes, the homeowner called 911.  The dispatcher was more than a little surprised to get a call about a panther in the upscale neighborhood and notified the Naples police.  The police, first on the scene, asked the neighbors to stay inside their homes.

Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s (FWC) Wildlife officers were dispatched to the scene prior to the panther capture team. The capture team responded as quickly as seasonal traffic would allow.  The on scene personnel notified the in route capture team, that the panther was resting in shrubs in an alcove between residences.  The biologists asked the officers to keep onlookers from disturbing the panther. Upon arrival, the biologists saw that the panther was still resting in the shrubs, and estimated the cat’s weight so they could prepare an anesthetic dart.  The capture team then positioned the biologists and officers to be able to watch and follow the panther if he ran after he was darted.  There was a Naples Police boat in the adjacent waterway.

Fortunately, the panther stayed put and was out after about 10 minutes.  The biologists moved the panther to a shady area on the walkway between the two houses, and with the assistance of local veterinarian Dr. Noble, began the capture examination and data collection (Figure 1).  The panther, now known as FP238, was given a routine capture workup.  They collected blood, hair, and ear tissue samples, vaccinated, tattooed, inserted a transponder chip, weighed, and fitted him with a GPS radio-collar. FP 238 appeared to be in good condition, so he was loaded into a transport crate, and taken to the FWC office to recover from the anesthesia.  (The effects of the drugs used in emergency situations lasts longer than the typical capture drugs, FP 238 did not leave his transportation crate until after sunset.) During his holding in the transportation crate one of the biologists noted he had fishy breath, perhaps a result of his coastal habitat diet.  Although the panther had most likely come from Rookery Bay, the FWC biologists decided to release him in Picayune Strand State Forest because it was further from roads and housing developments.  He stayed in Picayune for a couple of days then crossed US 41 at Collier Seminole State Park and headed west between Fiddlers Creek and Marco Airport.  Since then he has been using the northern area of Rookery Bay, west of Treviso Bay.

Mac Hatcher|Volunteer|Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge (FPNWR)|MARCH 2015

16 Year Old Panther Littermates Found in February

In late February of 1999, female Tx107, one of 8 panthers brought from Texas to improve the diversity of Florida panther genes, gave birth to 3 kittens, 2 females and 1 male, in Big Cypress National Preserve. Their dad was the infamous FP79, aka Don Juan. They were the 56th, 57th, and 58th kittens handled by panther biologists and each were marked with a unique ID, a tiny microchip beneath their skin. The 2 females were caught later as adults and radio-collared.  K58 was collared in 2000 when she was just a year old. She became FP93. Her sister, K56, eluded capture until 2011 when she was 12 years old. She became FP191. Both females have successfully raised 3 young some years and FP191 even denned when she was 14 years old.

The Big Cypress panther team handled both of these female littermates this past February when they were 16 years old.  Unfortunately, FP191 was found dead and too decomposed to determine her cause of death.  Old age, however, is unlikely, given that the team also caught her sister, FP93, this year. She weighed 77 pounds and was in excellent condition for her age. She had been MIA since 2011 when her collar failed.

Panther biologists efforts to find and mark kittens at dens with microchips have been one of the best ways to monitor panther productivity and survival on a long-term basis.

They were two of 20 kittens from Texas panther and Florida panther parents. The genetic restoration program, in which FP 93 and 191 played a key role, is believed to have resolved significant abnormalities prevalent in the Florida panther population.  The genetic introgression has improved the likelihood of kittens to reach adulthood.

Deborah Jansen|Big Cypress National Preserve|MARCH 2015

Naples Zoo

In fall 2014, a motorist on Immokalee Road slowed down because a panther was walking right next to the road and was then struck by a following vehicle.  The FWC panther biologists thought they were capturing a panther injured by a vehicle.  After the panther was captured, the biologists discovered he had been shot in the face and rear with birdshot and was emaciated.

FWC sent him to Animal Specialty Hospital in Naples for initial treatment, and then to Lowry Park Zoo for additional treatment, in their recently completed veterinary hospital.  (He was named Uno because he was the first patient at the Lowry Park Zoo veterinary hospital.)   He is blind so cannot be returned to the wild but has made a sufficient recovery and is a good candidate for managed care.  He will be placed at the Naples Zoo later this spring in a newly refurbished exhibit where he will serve as an ambassador for his species.

His story will hopefully inspire peaceful coexistence with wildlife. Additionally, in conjunction with creating a new exhibit for Uno, the Naples Zoo is building facilities to temporarily house panthers in need of short-term care.

This will be a beneficial local asset used to provide care for panthers in need.

  Invasive species

Researchers link Everglades’ mammal drop to invasive pythons

EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK, Fla. — Researchers have linked invasive Burmese pythons to the severe drop in the population of small mammals in the Florida Everglades.

A University of Florida research team outfitted 30 marsh rabbits with radio collars and set them free. When they later tracked the signals they found mostly pythons.

U.S. Geological Survey herpetologist Bob Reed says the study is the first hard evidence of invader pythons causing mammal declines in Everglades National Park.

Scientists believe the pythons in the Everglades are related to discarded or escaped pets introduced about 30 years ago.

The Gainesville Sun reports (http://bit.ly/1Bu01LZ) that trappers and scientists have also found bobcats and deer inside snakes.

The UF biologist who led the experiment says he hopes the findings reinvigorate efforts to solve the python problem.

|March 30, 2015

[The hard evidence has been here all along – now it’s official.]

Endangered Species

Sea turtle nesting season

Sea Turtle Nesting Season (March – October) is underway on Greater Fort Lauderdale’s beaches — and these ancient mariners need all the help they can get. Nearly 90% of sea turtle nesting in the U.S. occurs in Florida. From March through October these creatures will return to their home beaches to lay eggs. Greater Fort Lauderdale’s coastal residents and beach visitors can help sea turtles during the nesting season by keeping beaches clean, being aware of nesting sites and reducing artificial lighting near beaches that can distract and confuse mothers and hatchlings. Sea turtle hatchlings use light and reflections from the moon to find their way to the water at night. Artificial lighting discourages adult females from nesting on the beach.

Turtles deposit approximately 100 golf-ball size eggs, gently cover the eggs with sand and then they spread sand over a wide area to obscure the exact location of the chamber. They then leave the nest site and reenter the water.

Since adult sea turtles do not nurture their hatchlings, the female never sees the nest site again. A single female may nest several times during a season and then not nest again for one or two years. Approximately half of all emergences result in a female crawling on the beach for long distances and reentering the water without digging a nest. These are called “false crawls” and usually occur because the turtle was disturbed or it could not find a suitable nest site. The crawl tracks left on the beach are always made by female sea turtles and they resemble marks left by a tractor tire. Male sea turtles never leave the ocean.

Incubation of the nests takes about 45-55 days. Here in Broward County the eggs that are deposited in the chambers are either left to incubate naturally or are moved, (relocated) to a safer area of the beach. Some of the nests are relocated because of the extent of the development on our beaches and the bright lights from condos, streets, and highway traffic. The relocation process serves to protect the emerging hatchlings so they can exit the nest and traverse the beach to the water on their own. Nests that are not moved are those that are already on safe beaches.

After incubation, the hatchlings emerge from the nest en masse and, using various environmental and inherited cues, quickly migrate to the water’s edge. If artificial lights are lighting the beach, the hatchlings will be disoriented, travel in the wrong direction, and possibly never make it to the water.

Once in the water the hatchlings swim directly out to sea, facing a perilous struggle to survive to adulthood. The best scientific estimates available indicate that only one in 1,000 hatchlings will survive (anywhere from 12-50 years) to become a reproductive adult sea turtle.

Pick the Winner: 32 Endangered Animals Face Off in March Sadness Bracket

Are you worried about what climate change is doing to the Earth’s innocent animals?

Then you’ll want to participate in ClimateProgress’ March Sadness: A Bracket Battle of Cute Animals, now underway. Thirty-two animals threatened by climate change and environmental degradation were selected to compete. The bracket divided the animals into four categories: Paws and Claws, Fins and Flippers, Horns and Hooves, and Shells and Wings. One animal out of the 32 that began round one almost two weeks ago will emerge as champion after the final round of voting April 6. Voting takes place via Twitter using the hashtag #CPMarchSadness and via comments on the ClimateProgress Facebook page.

“The creatures within this bracket were lovingly chosen by ClimateProgress’ staff, based both on their cuteness and the severity of the environmental threat they face,” says ClimateProgress. “They were ranked semi-arbitrarily, but with our perceived likelihood of how popular each animal would be in mind.”

One of the primary goals of March Sadness is education. As part of each round, readers learn more about each animal and how it’s being endangered by climate change impacts such as drought, sea level rise and rising temperatures. The “winner” will get a deep-dive story put together by a ClimateProgress research team, detailing the extent of the climate threats to that particular animal.

“The basis for how you vote is up to you—you can choose the animal you like the most, the one you think is the cutest, or if you’re really into the end-game of the competition, the one you’d most like to read a deep-dive feature story about,” says Climate Progress.

Anastasia Pantsios|March 30, 2015

15 animal species have the lowest chance for survival

Climbing rats, seabirds and tropical gophers are among the 15 animal species that are at the absolute greatest risk of becoming extinct very soon. Expertise and money is needed to save them and other highly threatened species.

A new study shows that a subset of highly threatened species – in this case 841 – can be saved from extinction for about $1.3 billion a year. However, for 15 of them the chances of conservation success are really low.

The study published in Current Biology concludes that a subset of 841 endangered animal species can be saved, but only if conservation efforts are implemented immediately and with an investment of an estimated US $1.3 billion annually to ensure the species’ habitat protection and management.

Researchers, led by Assistant Prof. Dalia A. Conde from University of Southern Denmark and Prof. John E Fa from Imperial College, developed a “conservation opportunity index” using measurable indicators to quantify the possibility of achieving successful conservation.

To estimate the opportunities to conserve these species the researchers considered:

1. Opportunities of protecting its remaining habitats, which are restricted to single sites. Important factors are costs, political stability, and probability of urbanization.

2. The possibility to establish protected insurance populations in zoos: Important factors are costs and breeding expertise.

The researchers computed the cost of, and opportunities for, conserving 841 species of mammals, reptiles, birds and amphibians listed by the Alliance for Zero Extinction (AZE) as restricted to single sites and categorized as Endangered or Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List.

“AZE sites are arguably the most irreplaceable category of important biodiversity conservation sites,” said Dr. Dalia A. Conde, lead author on the paper and Assistant Professor at the Max-Planck Odense Center at the University of Southern Denmark, adding:

“Conservation opportunity evaluations like ours show the urgency of implementing management actions before it is too late. However, it is imperative to rationally determine actions for species that we found to have the lowest chances of successful habitat and zoo conservation actions.”

While the study indicated that 39% of the species scored high for conservation opportunities, it also showed that at least 15 AZE species are in imminent danger of extinction given their low conservation opportunity index (see list below).

The estimated total cost to conserve the 841 animal species in their natural habitats was calculated to be over US$1 billion total per year. The estimated annual cost for complementary management in zoos was US$160 million.

“Although the cost seems high, safeguarding these species is essential if we want to reduce the extinction rate by 2020,” said Prof. Hugh Possingham from The University of Queensland, adding:

“When compared to global government spending on other sectors – e.g., US defense spending, which is more than 500 times greater -, an investment in protecting high biodiversity value sites is minor.”

Prof. John E. Fa said, “Our exercise gives us hope for saving many highly endangered species from extinction, but actions need to be taken immediately and, for species restricted to one location, an integrative conservation approach is needed.”

The paper stated the importance of integrating protection of the places these particular species inhabit with complementary zoo insurance population programs.

According to Dr. Onnie Byers, Chair of the IUCN SSC Conservation Breeding Specialist Group, “The question is not one of protecting a species in the wild or in zoos. The One Plan approach – effective integration of planning, and the optimal use of limited resources, across the spectrum of management from wild to zoo – is essential if we are to have a hope of achieving the Aichi Biodiversity Targets.”

Dr. Nate Flesness, Scientific Director of the International Species Information System, stressed “We want to thank the more than 800 zoos in 87 countries which contribute animal and collection data to the International Species Information System, where the assembled global data enables strategic conservation studies like this.”

Dr. Markus Gusset of the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums added “Actions that range from habitat protection to the establishment of insurance populations in zoos will be needed if we want to increase the chances of species’ survival.”

The 15 species with the lowest chances for survival in the wild and in zoos are:

Amphibians:

1. Bay Lycian salamander, Lyciasalamandra billae, Turkey.
2. Perereca Bokermannohyla izecksohni, Brazil.
3. Campo Grande tree frog, Hypsiboas dulcimer, Brazil.
4. Santa Cruz dwarf frog, Physalaemus soaresi, Brazil.
5. Zorro bubble-nest frog, Pseudophilautus zorro, Sri Lanka.
6. Allobates juanii, Colombia.

Birds:

1. Ash’s lark, Mirafra ashi, Somalia.
2. Tahiti monarch, Pomarea nigra, French Polynesia.
3. Zino’s petrel, Pterodroma madeira, Madeira.
4. Mascarene petrel, Pseudobulweria aterrima, Reunion Island.
5. Wilkins’s finch, Nesospiza wilkinsi, Tristan da Cunha.
6. Amsterdam albatross, Diomedea amsterdamensis, New Amsterdam (Amsterdam Island).

Mammals:

1. Mount Lefo brush-furred mouse, Lophuromys eisentrauti, Cameroon.
2. Chiapan climbing rat, Tylomys bullaris, Mexico.
3. Tropical pocket gopher, Geomys tropicalis.

Their low chance for survival is due to at least two of the following factors:

• High probability of its habitat becoming urbanized
• Political instability in the site
• High costs of habitat protection and management.
• The opportunity of establishing an insurance population in zoos for these 15 species is low, due to high costs or lack of breeding expertise for the species.
  

  Springtime brings close encounters of manatees, boaters ‏

  

  As springtime arrives, chances increase that manatees and boaters will have close encounters.

  Boaters can enjoy opportunities to observe one of Florida’s unique species but to avoid colliding with manatees, people on the water should take basic steps such as slowing down, watching out for the animals and complying with regulations in manatee zones.

  Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) law enforcement officers will be on patrol in state waters to remind boaters of the seasonal manatee speed zones that go into effect in April. They will be taking enforcement actions when necessary.

  “Our officers do their very best to support conservation of this species,” said FWC Capt. Gary Klein. “We ask that boaters take notice of the zones and do their part as well.”

  In effect from April 1 through Nov. 15, seasonal manatee zones require boaters slow down in certain areas to prevent manatees from being struck by motorboats or personal watercraft. For more information on manatee zones and maps, go to MyFWC.com/Manatee and select “Protection Zones,” where there are links to county maps.

  In spring, manatees leave their winter warmer-water habitats, such as freshwater springs and power plant discharge areas, and disperse along Florida’s Atlantic and Gulf coasts and inland waters.

  Because manatees are large, slow-moving and difficult to detect when underwater, operators of boats and personal watercraft need to take basic steps to avoid causing injury to the marine mammals:

  • Wear polarized sunglasses to help spot manatees.
  • Look for the large circles on the water, also known as manatee footprints, indicating the presence of a manatee below.
  • Look for a snout sticking up out of the water.
  • Slow down and comply with manatee speed zones.

  The FWC also asks anyone seeing an injured, distressed, sick or dead manatee to call the agency’s Wildlife Alert Hotline, 888-404-3922 (FWCC) or dial #FWC or *FWC on a cell phone.

  People can support the FWC’s manatee research, rescue, rehabilitation and management efforts by purchasing a “Save the Manatee” Florida license plate at BuyaPlate.com, or by donating $5 to receive an FWC manatee decal by going to MyFWC.com/Manatees and clicking on “Decals.”

  For more about manatees, go to MyFWC.com/Manatee, where you can find the brochure, A Boater’s Guide to Living with Manatees.

  Photos available on FWC’s Flickr site: https://flic.kr/s/aHsjxNrc5v

  Suggested Tweet: Boaters, watch out! #Manatees are on the move this spring! http://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/FLFFWCC/bulletins/fc344c @MyFWC #Florida #boating

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  Protect People From Bears Without Killing The Bears

About 3,000 bears live in the state of Florida. When they get hungry, they do what all animals do: they look for the easiest-to-find, most accessible food. In some cases, that seems to be people’s trash, backyard birdfeeders, and outdoor bowls of pet food, all of which are bringing bears in closer contact with humans — which isn’t good for either species. It doesn’t help matters when people actually feed bears, since that only conditions the animals to want more human contact. And that contact can sometimes lead to attacks.

Care2 member Sue Lee is concerned that the bears’ feeding habits is going to lead to them being hunted. She has launched a petition to encourage the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), which is charged with managing bears and other wildlife in the state, to find more humane ways to keep bears at bay.

According to the FWC, it is illegal to hunt bears in Florida and the Commission is not proposing a bear hunting season. But according to their website, “FWC has a bear management plan that lists hunting as one of several options that could be considered as a management tool in the future.” Additionally their website states that the question of whether to hunt black bears is being “carefully considered.”

FWC says that hunting is usually used to “attain wildlife population objectives, such as slowing population growth rates, rather than to resolve conflict issues.”  The most successful way to reduce human-bear conflicts, they say, is to secure items that attract bears into neighbors.

Care2′s Sue Lee agrees, which is why her petition advocates humane measures such as relocating bears far from population centers. The Humane Society in Florida also says it is important to get people to stop feeding bears and to use bear-proof trash cans that will deter the animals from human areas. Sue Lee cites the example of 20-year old Caster, a bear that started going to people’s homes and even going in their garages. The Fish and Wildlife Service relocated the animal about 150 miles away. Happy bear, happy people.

Sue Lee’s petition, aimed at Florida state lawmakers and the FWC, asks these officials to devise more humane methods to control bear attacks. She also urges them to educate the public against intentional feeding while considering trapping, moving and releasing bears into more remote areas.

If you agree, you can sign Sue Lee’s petition here.

Diane MacEachern|March 31, 2015

New Snow Leopard Equipped With GPS Collar

Good news from the base camp of our long-term snow leopard study in Mongolia’s Tost Mountains: Our team has managed to equip a new male snow leopard with a GPS collar, allowing them to track the cat’s movements in the months to come.

“The cat weighed 44.3 kg [just under 100 lbs.] and we think he is 4-5 years old”, field scientist Örjan Johansson reported. This is the 20th snow leopard the Trust has been able to equip with a GPS collar since the long-term study began in 2008, and the 11th male.

With the long-term snow leopard study in the South Gobi region of Mongolia, the Snow Leopard Trust and its partners have been breaking new ground in the research of this elusive, endangered cat. Results from this study have vastly expanded our knowledge of the snow leopard’s behavior, its spatial and nutritional needs, its reproductive cycle and population dynamics.

Data gained from the previous 19 cats that had been equipped with GPS collars have yielded insights into snow leopard cub dispersal, migration between mountain ranges, and predation patterns, i.e.

These insights have informed conservation approaches and have been crucial in efforts to protect parts of the cats’ habitat in the area.

It will be interesting to compare the movement patterns of this new cat, which will be named in the coming days, to its predecessors. Analysis of existing research camera photos from the area will perhaps also shed some light on the cat’s history and family connection to other known snow leopards in the area.

Snow Leopard Presence Confirmed in Western Sichuan

A team of researchers from our Chinese partner organization, Shan Shui, found signs of snow leopard presence in Sichuan’s Ganzi Prefecture, an area that had last been surveyed 8 years ago. However, densities appear to be lower than elsewhere in China.

The China team just finished a one-month-long survey in the Ganzi Prefecture of Sichuan Province to evaluate the status of and threats to snow leopards.

Dr. George Schaller, the Vice President of Panthera, initiated this trip to revisit this area after his initial trip in March of 1998. Mr. Zhou Huaming, Director of Gongga Mountain Natural Reserve, joined the survey and contributed greatly with his over 20 years of wildlife experience.

Personnel from Shan Shui and Peking University joined this survey, including Liu Yanlin, Cheng Chen, He Bing, Mei Suonancuo, Xiao Lingyun, Zhao Xiang, Hu Yanan and two volunteers.

The mountainous area of Ganzi Prefecture was suggested to hold potential habitats for snow leopards according to Dr. Li Juan’s prediction, but little information was known besides some presence records from camera traps in Luoxu NR in the west and Gongga Mountain NR in the east, respectively since 2007.

This survey covers twelve sites in five counties, including Kangding, Luhuo, Shiqu, Ganzi and Batang. The team was divided to check snow leopard signs, count blue sheep, and interview communities. The field observations, combined with thirty household interviews, also indicate that historical hunting from 1950s to 1990s might be responsible for blue sheep depletion in many areas.

The presence of snow leopards and leopards is now confirmed in Gongga Mountain and Luoxu Township. However, the researchers only found a few snow leopard spoors during the trip, which may indicate that a lower density of snow leopards inhabit the Ganzi Prefecture than Sanjiangyuan and the Qilian Mountain region in the Qinghai province.

Forty nature reserves have been established to cover 24% of the land in Ganzi and in each reserve, village rangers are hired to manage wildlife.

A meeting with Sichuan Forestry took place on March 27th. The survey team presented the finding to Mr. Wang Hongjia, Director of the Conservation Office in Sichuan Forestry.  Mr. Wang Hongjia encouraged the team to develop monitoring and conservation protocols on snow leopards.

These protocols could then be used by nature reserves and forestry departments to help train staff and students for snow leopard conservation.

During and after this trip, Dr. Schaller gave three inspiring presentations respectively in Yushu Vocational School, Youth Zone in Chengdu, and Natural History Museum in Beijing.  All three speeches attracted lots of young people, even kids, who were interested in wildlife. Dr. Schaller shared his wildlife research experiences in Tibetan Plateau, China and all around the world, and encouraged people to take part in wildlife conservation.

Dr. Schaller also gave his comments in an interview on a controversial TV ape show in China. He said the television station should be blamed for its irresponsibility, but above all we should call for more robust laws and moral principles on how we treat great apes.

Portland Bans Neonicotinoid Insecticides On City Lands To Protect Declining Honey Bees

April 1 (Reuters) – Oregon’s biggest city on Wednesday banned the use of an insecticide on city lands blamed by conservationists as a factor in the decline of honey bees in recent years.

Despite protests from farmers who argued the insecticide was crucial for crop production, the Portland City Commission voted unanimously to immediately suspend use of products that contain neonicotinoids.

Such pesticides are widely used on crops and on plants as well as trees in gardens, parks and commercial nurseries.

Portland brings to at least eight the number of U.S. municipalities, including Seattle and Spokane in neighboring Washington state, that have banned the chemicals amid what conservationists say is mounting evidence the insecticide is a culprit in the decline of bees and other pollinating insects.

Portland Commissioner Amanda Fritz successfully sought approval of the measure on Wednesday as a public health issue requiring emergency action that would immediately outlaw use of neonicotinoids in such areas as municipal parks, streets and gardens.

“I think we’re doing another good thing for the city of Portland, Oregon … and maybe the entire world,” Fritz said.

Opponents like Oregonians for Food and Shelter, a coalition of farmers, foresters and other pesticide users, said findings by some scientists suggesting honey bees have been severely harmed by the insecticide have been refuted by other researchers.

Scott Dahlman, the group’s policy director, said the decision by Portland leaders was based on “fear and ideology” rather than sound science about bees and other pollinators, which are vital for food production.

“Farmers have a huge investment in honey bees but they also need insecticides to protect their crops from destructive pests,” he said.

Aimee Code, pesticide program coordinator for the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, said momentum was building among local governments to prohibit use of such chemicals even as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency mulls restricting or curtailing their use.

Eugene, Oregon, and Shorewood, Minnesota, are among eight municipalities that have passed bans similar to the one in Portland, said Code.

The federal Fish and Wildlife Service is to prohibit neonicotinoid use at national wildlife refuges by next January.

The agency found that the insecticide, which is taken up by plants through roots and leaves, was not preferred because it could be broadly distributed and potentially affect “a broad spectrum of non-target species.”

Laura Zuckerman|Reuters|04/01/2015|Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Sandra Maler

EPA Unlikely To Approve New Or Expanded Use Of Some Pesticides Amid Honey Bee Decline

(Reuters) – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said on Thursday it was unlikely to approve new or expanded uses of certain pesticides while it evaluates the risks they may pose to honey bees.

The so-called neonicotinoid pesticides are routinely used in agriculture and applied to plants and trees in gardens and parks. But their widespread use has come under scrutiny in recent years after a drop in the number of honey bees and other pollinating insects, which play key roles in food production.

The decline is attributed to factors including pesticide and herbicide use, habitat loss and disease, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The EPA notice came the day after Oregon’s largest city suspended the use of the pesticides on its property to protect honey bees.

The unanimous vote on Wednesday by the Portland City Commission came despite protests from farmers, nursery owners and others who claimed the insecticide was crucial in combating pests that destroy crops and other plants. Portland is among at least eight municipalities that have banned the chemicals.

The EPA is conducting an assessment of the six types of neonicotinoids and their impact on honey bees, with its evaluation of four expected by 2018 and the remaining two a year later.

In the interim, the agency said in a statement that its move stemmed from the agency’s “ongoing effort to protect pollinators.”

But the federal environmental regulators said they would review the suspension “if a significant new pest issue should arise that may be uniquely addressed by one of these chemicals.”

The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation said the EPA’s latest measure on neonicotinoids, which are taken up by plants through roots and leaves, was insufficient.

“The reality is, there are risks to our pollinators with current uses (of the insecticide),” said Amy Code, the Xerces Society’s pesticide program coordinator.

The EPA and a group representing farmers and other pesticide users could not immediately be reached for comment.

Laura Zuckerman|Editing by Curtis Skinner and Alan Raybould|Reuters|04/02/2015

Wild & Weird

Now We Know It’s True: Animals Can Predict Earthquakes

Reason #435 why animals are amazing: they can predict earthquakes.

The Amazon rainforest teems with animal activity throughout the day and night. When animals suddenly withdraw and go silent, however, something unusual is going on. Many believe that this reaction can mean an earthquake is imminent.

Scientists now say they’ve got proof this belief is true. They’ve published their study’s findings in the journal Physics and Chemistry of the Earth.

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Researchers set up a series of motion-activated camera traps in Peru’s Yanachanga National Park to observe animal activity at ground level. They filmed rodents and other ground dwellers as they went about their busy forest lives.

In 2011, just weeks before the 7.0 magnitude Contamana earthquake hit this area, those cameras revealed something amazing. Those animals suddenly dropped out of sight. They packed their bags and headed for the hills, so to speak.

Animal activity began dropping noticeably about 23 days before the quake struck. On a normal day, the cameras captured between five and 15 animals moving about. During those 23 days, they captured only five such daily sightings.

Even more astounding — for five of the seven days immediately preceding the earthquake, the cameras picked up absolutely no animal movements of any kind. In an area so rich with animal life, this development clearly meant something important.

“As far as we know, this is the first time that motion-triggered cameras have documented this phenomenon prior to an earthquake,” Dr. Rachel Grant, lecturer in Animal and Environmental Biology at Anglia Ruskin University and the report’s lead author, said in a news release.

“The park was 320km from the epicenter, and I thought, there was not much going to be happening,” Grant told Sky News. “But when I saw the results I was totally shocked. It was amazing. The analysis showed that just before the earthquake animal activity dropped right down.”

So what was going on? It seems that when the Earth’s surface experiences stressors, electrically charged molecules cause elevated serotonin levels in the bloodstream. This in turn causes animals and humans to experience confusion, agitation, headaches, restlessness and hyperactivity. Animals will naturally depart an area in which they experience this kind of discomfort.

In the week before the 2011 quake hit in Peru, an especially big fluctuation of this type occurred. This was the same time frame in which rodents and other smaller ground dwelling animals went to ground or left the area. Clearly, they knew something bad was coming.

“Animals have the potential to be reliable forecasters of earthquakes and could be used alongside other monitoring systems,” Grant told Reuters. “The system could be used in developing and earthquake-prone countries, it is affordable and feasible to implement as it just requires someone to monitor animal behavior… there is no need for satellites.”

Just when we thought we knew all the reasons it’s important to stop the decimation of our world’s rainforests, here’s one more. All those animals living in those pristine forested areas can actually assist humans in identifying when an earthquake might hit. We don’t have to harm or interact with them in any way to make this happen.

If we continue to allow deforestation in these areas, we’ll have little opportunity to observe how animals are reacting to naturally occurring changes around them. How many more reasons do we need to stop destroying these beautiful and life-sustaining forests?

Susan Bird|March 30, 2015

Everglades

Finally, Here’s One Thing We Can All Agree On: Helping the Everglades

What is it about the Everglades that brings people together who can’t otherwise seem to agree on anything?

For example, you might not expect Democratic National Committee Chair and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to have much in common with Tea Party-backed Republican Congressman Curt Clawson. They have different views on immigration, health care, and what a responsible federal budget looks like. Yet they both spoke at the most recent Everglades Coalition Conference and both support Everglades restoration. Clawson even shared movingly in his State of the Union response that he originally got into politics in part to help preserve the Everglades, calling it “a real national treasure we must protect.”

Maybe it’s not such a surprise, then, that in a political climate where members of Congress engage in tense debates and crippling stand-offs over seemingly every dollar, funding for Everglades restoration projects have won wholehearted bipartisan support.

In February, President Obama released a Fiscal Year 2016 budget that would provide $240 million for Everglades restoration, an amount that’s significantly higher than it was a year ago. This money would fund on-the-ground restoration projects led by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, an important federal partner that accomplishes much of the planning, design, construction, and management of the restoration work. The money would also fund Department of the Interior initiatives, such as combatting invasive species like the infamous Burmese python.

We are optimistic that these projects will receive the requested funding in the coming year, despite other measures proposed in the president’s budget that will likely fail due to partisan wrangling. Here’s a look at some of the projects that this money would advance on the ground.

• C-111 South Dade:The C-111 South Dade project will provide a series of detention basins that hold water in places that need it, like Everglades National Park, instead of releasing it to places that don’t need it, like the agricultural and urban areas of Miami-Dade County. Ultimately it will allow more freshwater to flow south through Everglades National Park and Florida Bay.
• Biscayne Bay Coastal Wetlands: This project will rehydrate freshwater wetlands in Biscayne National Park by returning more freshwater to Biscayne Bay in a more natural pattern via a spreader canal system.
• Kissimmee River Restoration: A major restoration project that is very near completion, this project will restore more than 40 square miles of river-floodplain ecosystem, including almost 20,000 acres of wetlands and 44 miles of historic river channel.
• Picayune Strand Restoration: This project will restore wetlands in an 85-square-mile area that was originally slated for residential development located on the edge of Everglades National Park and Big Cypress National Preserve by removing canals and roads. Doing so will also restore important habitat for the endangered Florida panther.
• C-43 and C-44 Reservoirs: Building these two reservoirs and water treatment marshes will directly improve the health of the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries, respectively, by capturing and storing water from Lake Okeechobee and allowing harmful nutrients to filter out before being sent to the estuaries.

NPCA is now working with Congress to pass these budgetary measures so we can continue to build on the recent political momentum supporting the Everglades. Fortunately, this bipartisanship is nothing new. Democratic President Bill Clinton and Republican Governor Jeb Bush came together back in 2000 to sign the landmark legislation that made many of these projects possible in the first place, the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan.

That’s right: Even a Clinton and a Bush joined forces to celebrate—and fund—this unique and spectacular subtropical wetland.

It’s an investment that pays off. An economic study by Mather Economics found that for every dollar invested in Everglades restoration, more than four dollars are returned to the economy. Everglades restoration work also employs thousands of workers, while supporting a robust tourism economy. According to the National Park Service, in 2013 alone, Everglades and Biscayne National Parks and Big Cypress National Preserve created more than 2,670 jobs and generated approximately $202 million in visitor spending. Sustained funding for these restoration projects is critical for the ecosystem, economy, and water supply for nearly 8 million Americans.

So, what is it that brings people together to protect the Everglades? Perhaps, like many of America’s Great Waters, it captures our imagination or connects us to fond memories. Maybe it provides a loved one’s drinking water or employs a friend. In these ways, and many more, protecting the Everglades continues to be a bipartisan success story in these often politically divided times. And that should give us all hope for the future.

Sarah Gaines Barmeyer|March 25, 2015

Water Quality Issues

Epic Drought Spurs California to Build Largest Desalination Plant in Western Hemisphere

“The U.S. Drought Monitor shows nearly 40 percent of the state of California remains in exceptional drought, the highest level of drought and many communities are working to come up with long-term solutions as reservoirs and rivers continue to diminish,” says Jeremy Hobson of NPR’s Here and Now.

On the show yesterday, Hobson discussed desalination as a solution to the drought with David Jassby, assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering at the University of California, Riverside and Sandy Kerl of the San Diego County Water Authority. There are currently 13 desalination projects under consideration along the California coast.

Jassby explains how desalination works, why in the U.S. we rely on reverse osmosis rather than thermal-based plants and the environmental impacts of the process. Desalination has been proposed for years in the U.S., but has always been shot down for being too expensive and requiring too much energy. Now, “the first desalination plant in Carlsbad is coming online in 2016 or maybe even sooner,” says Jassby.

The cost of desalinized water has come down significantly in recent years, making it “pretty comparable” to conventional water sources, according to Jassby. He expects that places that have “ready access to the ocean” and are water-stressed will employ desalination in the coming years. It’s already widely used in other parts of the world such as the Middle East, Australia and parts of Southern Europe.

When the Carlsbad Desalination Project is completed this fall, it will be the largest desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere. Kerl of the San Diego County Water Authority, which is partnering with Poseidon Water on the project, explains why she believes the desalination plant is environmentally sound and also necessary for the state of California. The state’s recent snowpack survey reveals that the snowpack, a major source of drinking water for residents, is currently five percent of average, according to Kerl.

Cole Mellino|March 10, 2015

California moves to kill lawns, save water

LONG BEACH, Calif. — What’s it going to take to get people to use a lot less water in drought-stricken California, the Technicolor landscape of lush yards, emerald golf courses and aquamarine swimming pools?

The state might be about to find out as it imposes the first mandatory water- use restrictions in California history later this year.

Gov. Jerry Brown on Wednesday ordered a 25 percent overall cutback in water use by cities and towns, but not farms, in the most sweeping drought measures ever undertaken by the nation’s most populous state.

The crackdown comes as California moves toward its fourth summer of drought with no relief in sight. Record low snowfall over the winter has left the state of nearly 40 million people with a year’s worth of water in its reservoirs and dwindling groundwater for wells.

On Thursday, retired secretary Brenda Johnson stood in the doorway of her Sacramento home contemplating her lovingly tended lawn and azalea bushes. Johnson did not love the idea of brown as the new green.

“With the money I put into it, I don’t want it to go dry,” said Johnson, who got a warning letter from the city last year for watering her front yard on the wrong day.

“I don’t want a dead lawn,” she said. “But change is hard, and you do adjust.”

In Southern California’s sunbathed city of Long Beach, homeowner Katherine Rusconi stood among the bright red, pink and yellow succulents and desert plants that make up her front yard, basking in the knowledge of being ahead of the game.

The city of Long Beach gave her $3,000 in rebates for ripping out her own lawn less than two years ago. Some of her neighbors have since followed her lead, making the block a showpiece of water-saving, wildlife-friendly yards.

“You know, this is a desert climate. This should have been in place for some time,” Rusconi said.

Brown’s move to get tough on water use came after his push for voluntary conservation yielded mixed results. Asked by Brown in January 2014 to cut their water consumption by 20 percent, Californians achieved only about half that.

Affluent Southern California communities with lots of landscaping on automatic timers were some of the worst offenders, topping 300 gallons of water per person a day compared with 70 gallons for some San Francisco Bay Area communities.

Homeowners will get rebates for replacing lawns with greenery more suited to the semi-arid state and for installing more water-thrifty appliances and plumbing fixtures. The state will also press water agencies to impose higher, graduated rates to discourage water guzzling.

Homeowners and water districts that violate the rules will be subject to fines, but many of the enforcement details have yet to be worked out.

Californians should water enough to save their trees, water board head Felicia Marcus said, but should let their lawns go the way of all mortal things.

Some water experts and economists are dubious the crackdown will succeed.

Californians will embrace saving water if they feel everyone is doing the same, water experts said. Brown’s cutback order, however, exempts agriculture, which consumes 80 percent of all the water Californians use.

But farmers have already done their part, fallowing land and paying more for water, said Shawn Stevenson, a farmer in California’s agricultural heartland, the Central Valley.

ELLEN KNICKMEYER AND GILLIAN FLACCUS|ASSOCIATED PRESS

Fracking In California Used 70 Million Gallons Of Water In 2014

SAN FRANCISCO, April 2 (Reuters) – California oil producers used 214 acre-feet of water, equivalent to nearly 70 million gallons, in the process of fracking for oil and gas in the state last year, less than previously projected, state officials told Reuters on Thursday.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, occurs when water and some chemicals are injected deep underground at high pressure to break up rock and release oil and gas into wells.

The practice has been criticized in the state, which is suffering from a drought so severe that Governor Jerry Brown announced the first-ever mandatory 25 percent statewide reduction in water use on Wednesday.

“Hydraulic fracturing uses a relatively small amount of water – the equivalent of 514 households annually,” said Steven Bohlen, the state oil and gas supervisor.

About 100,000 gallons of water is used on average, he said. [That’s a per well figure.]

Previous industry estimates said that fracking used about 100 million gallons of water in California a year.

Bohlen said that not all of the water used for fracking is fresh water. Some portion of it is “produced” water, or water that comes to the surface during oil drilling that is not suitable for drinking or agricultural use.

The industry brought 387,000 acre-feet of produced water to the surface last year, Bohlen said. Of that, two-thirds was put back into the aquifers from which it came or was used to produce more oil through drilling techniques including steam flooding and cyclic steam injection.

The remaining third was put into underground injection, evaporated in surface ponds, or cleaned up for beneficial use, he said.

About 25,000 acre-feet of produced water is used for beneficial use in the San Ardo, Cawelo, and Arvin water districts, he said.

A law passed last year requires oil producers to report the sources of water used in all oil and gas extraction as well as where the water goes.

The first data report is due April 30 and will be made public soon after, Bohlen said.

Rory Carroll|Reuters|04/02/2015|Editing by Ken Wills

Water is life; we can’t afford to waste it

How long can you go without water? You could probably survive a few weeks without water for cooking. If you stopped washing, the threat to your life might only come from people who can’t stand the smell. But most people won’t live for more than three days without water to drink. It makes sense: our bodies are about 65 per cent water.

According to the United Nations, about 750 million people lack access to safe water — that’s one in nine! One child dies every minute from a water-related disease and 1.2 billion people, a fifth of the global population, live in areas where water is scarce. And it’s not just in other countries. As of January, at least 1,838 drinking water advisories were in effect in Canada, including 169 in 126 First Nations communities — some ongoing for years.`

With Canada’s abundant glaciers, lakes, rivers and streams, we often take water for granted. (In my home province, we give it away to large corporations that bottle and sell it back to us at exorbitant prices!) We shouldn’t be so complacent. People in California thought they had enough water to fill swimming pools, water gardens and yards, support a fertile agricultural industry and shoot massive volumes into the ground to fracture shale deposits to release the oil they contain. Now, with the state in its fourth year of severe drought, regulators are considering emergency legislation and have imposed restrictions to deal with shortages.

Droughts in California and elsewhere are serious warnings about what we could face in Canada and around the world as growing human populations and industry require ever more water, and as climate change wreaks havoc on the Earth’s hydrologic cycle, causing drought in some areas and flooding in others.

According to a UN report, as water supplies dwindle, demand from manufacturing, thermal electricity generation and domestic uses will increase 55 per cent by 2050. The report, “Water for a Sustainable World”, says that unless we find better ways to manage water, the world could face a 40 per cent shortfall by 2030. About 20 per cent of the world’s aquifers are already overexploited.

Water shortages and unsafe water lead to many problems, including food scarcity and crop failure, increased poverty and disease, ecosystem collapse, problems for industry and increasing conflicts over dwindling supplies.

As individuals, we should do everything possible to conserve water, but avoiding massive shortages of clean water will take concerted action at all levels of society. The UN report concludes: “The global water crisis is one of governance, much more than of resource availability, and this is where the bulk of the action is required in order to achieve a water secure world.”

Water conservation is the best way to ensure we have enough to go around. Recycling wastewater and reserving clean water for drinking, moving away from water-intensive agricultural practices, reducing water pollution and avoiding industrial activities that use excessive amounts of water are also important. The report states that the growing demand for meat, large homes, motor vehicles, appliances and other energy-consuming devices “involves increased water consumption for both production and use.” And while population is a factor, the report shows the increase in water demand is double the rate of population growth.

At the policy level, better supply and sanitation infrastructure and improved management are essential. Protecting natural assets such as forests and wetlands that purify and store water and reduce flooding will help, especially in light of expected increases in natural disasters as the world continues to warm. Of course, doing all we can to reduce climate change and its consequences is also crucial.

The report also notes the world’s current obsession with economic growth has “come at a significant social and environmental cost,” including greater demands on water resources.

Getting a handle on water management and conservation concerns us all. It’s also about social justice, as the poor feel the brunt of negative impacts from water pollution and shortages.

As the UN report points out, “It is now universally accepted that water is an essential primary natural resource upon which nearly all social and economic activities and ecosystem functions depend.” Water makes life possible. We must never take it for granted.

Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor Ian Hanington.

Great Lakes & Inland Waters

2014 record year for Columbia River salmon, concerns raised

Salmon returns in the Columbia River, counted at Bonneville Dam, were the largest in 2014 than in any year since 1938, when fish counting began at the site, according to the Northwest Power and Conservation Council.

The 2014 run was about 2.5 million fish.

This is indeed good news.

But, NWPCC says these big numbers “may portend less benefit for future generations of fish” because the productivity of naturally spawning salmon is decreasing. Citing a mechanism called “density dependence,” which regulates the grown of populations, NWPCC indicates robust runs are exceeding habitat limits in some areas. These limits include the types and amounts of available food, shelter from predators and competitors, and the ability to move to other suitable habitats when needed. These limits, along with others, define the “carrying capacity” of habitat, NWPCC says. “When carrying capacity is exceeded, salmon runs can collapse quickly to levels the habitat will support.”

The Independent Scientific Advisory Board — a panel of 11 experts that advises NWPCC, NOAA Fisheries and Columbia River Basin Indian tribes — released a report containing detailed scientific evidence on the above. The report contains a number of recommendations for fish managers and planners, including:

— Understanding why density dependence occurs in particular habitats and life stages of fish and accounting for density dependence when evaluating the responses of fish populations to restoration actions

— Setting biologically based spawning escapement goals that sustain fisheries and also a resilient ecosystem

— Balancing hatchery production and releases with the basin’s capacity to support existing natural populations

— Improving stream habitat to help resident fish, as well as those that go to the ocean

The report, entitled Density Dependence and its Implications for Fish Management and Restoration Programs in the Columbia River Basin, is available here.

NWPCC is charged by the Northwest Power Act to develop a fish and wildlife program for the Columbia River Basin that achieves its biological objectives with minimum economic cost.

Elizabeth Ingram|Managing Editor|PORTLAND, Ore., U.S.|03/25/2015

Smeltdown: Great Lakes fish vanishing act

Tom Durecki remembers the glory days for smelt fishing — or smelting — in Michigan in the 1970s.

“The smelt are running!” was a call that sent fisherman scrambling to Michigan rivers and streams to dip nets and catch buckets full of the silvery fish as they moved into tributaries to spawn at the onset of spring — right around this time, every year.

“It was absolutely fantastic,” said Durecki, owner of Tom’s Bait and Tackle Shop in East Jordan. “Even into the ‘80s, we’d go up to Carp River in the U.P. and you’d get what you wanted in an hour — five, 10, 15 gallons.”

Those days are gone. The smelt population has declined so much, so quickly over the past two decades that most fishermen don’t even bother trying anymore.

Why it’s occurring isn’t simple to explain. Researchers believe the arrival in the Great Lakes of invasive species like zebra mussels disrupted the food chain and plays a role. But it’s not the entire answer. Adult smelt today are almost a third smaller than they were less than 40 years ago. Even more puzzling, a new study shows smelt hatchling survival is improving, but it doesn’t seem to impact the dwindling adult population.

The smelt’s plight matters, researchers say, because smelt are an important food source for some of the sport fish that drive Michigan’s multi-billion-dollar fishing tourism industry. They also can tell scientists key things about the Great Lakes through their behavior, such as about water temperatures that contribute to harmful algae blooms in Lake Erie.

“People ask about it every spring: ‘What happened to the smelt?’” said Michigan Department of Natural Resources fisheries biologist David Clapp, who’s based in Charlevoix.

There’s no simple answer, and the mystery in some ways is deepening.

“Trying to explain it is not that easy,” said Chuck Madenjian, a research fishery biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Great Lakes Science Center in Ann Arbor.

“There’s nothing really that obvious about what’s driving that pattern.”

Invasive species

Like so many fish people associate with the Great Lakes, the rainbow smelt is an invasive species. The approximately 6-inch fish is native to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, but moves into freshwater to spawn. It was first stocked in Crystal Lake in Benzie County in 1912, after several unsuccessful attempts to stock smelt in the St. Mary’s River to support another transplanted fish, Atlantic salmon. Smelt were found in Lake Michigan in 1923 and then spread throughout the Great Lakes.

Smelt quickly thrived in their new freshwater home. The commercial harvest of smelt on the Great Lakes reached 4.8 million pounds by 1941. The population showed large fluctuations over the years, impacted by lamprey eels and the emergence of whitefish and lake trout.

Some 94 percent of smelt harvested from the Great Lakes come from Lake Michigan — on both the Michigan and Wisconsin sides. It was around 1993 when smelt stocks began to plummet.

The Great Lakes Science Center does annual prey fish surveys in the lakes, trawling the lake bottom and counting what they find. Their 2013 survey found 11juvenile smelt — smelt less than a year in age — per hectare, an area of 10,000 square meters. That was only 6% of the long-term average count.
“Rainbow smelt biomass in Lake Michigan during 1992-1996 was roughly four times higher than rainbow smelt biomass during 2001-2013,” scientists from the Science Center wrote in a report on Lake Michigan prey fish populations last year.

Clapp noted that the start of the decline coincides with the arrival and spread of zebra mussels in Lake Michigan.

“That changed the reproductive and nutrient dynamics of the lake,” he said. Smelt eat zooplankton, small aquatic shrimp-type creatures, and they have declined significantly over the same time period, Clapp added.

But that’s not a perfect answer, Madenjian said. “We don’t know why smelt would be affected, but not a lot of other species,” he said.

The take by fisherman also doesn’t fully explain the drop, Madenjian said. Nor does larger fish, such as salmon and lake trout, preying upon smelt, he said.

“The amount of predation on them by salmon and trout was bigger in the 1980s than the 1990s, and yet the big drop was in the1990s,” he said. “You begin to doubt that predation was a driver.”

Plot thickens

The plot further thickened with new research out of Purdue University that shows smelt offspring survival is rising in Lake Michigan, but with no impact on the adult population of smelt, which are now on average 2 inches shorter than they were in the 1970s — down to about 4.5 inches in length.

“Traditionally, the ratio of the number of offspring that survive and the number of adults that are around is pretty constant,” said Zachary Feiner, a doctoral candidate in Purdue’s Department of Forestry and Natural Resources, who was part of the research team.

“We saw that the number of offspring was increasing. It was really unexpected, especially since adults are smaller, so they should be laying fewer eggs, and laying worse eggs.

“We really don’t have an answer for it.”

One theory: Smelt are known to engage in cannibalism on their hatchlings. With fewer adult smelt, the juveniles have a chance to thrive.

As scientists continue to seek answers, Feiner outlined why it matters.

“Smelt, alewives, they were invasives. Now they’re supporting a multibillion- dollar fishery,” he said. “These are the forage fish at the base of the food chain.”

Smelt also illustrate how the smallest plant and aquatic life in the Great Lakes are changing, Feiner said. And as a fish that likes colder water, they can show how stratification — changes in a lake’s water density and temperature — is changing on Lake Erie, where algae b looms have sparked drinking water crises in recent years.

“Smelt can be a canary in the coal mine in a few ways,” he said. “They can tell you what’s going on in the environment.”

KEITH MATHENY|Detroit Free Press

Offshore & Ocean

Florida coral restoration may take $250 million, and 400 years

Staghorn coral is one of two coral species off southeastern Florida named in a new report listing steps for recovery.

Climate change threatens Florida coral, but the government has a plan

$250 million — an underestimate — is the price tag for saving two coral species

Here’s the estimated price for restoring two declining coral species found in South Florida and the Caribbean: about $250 million.

How long will it take? 400 years or so (assuming all goes smoothly).

No one expected it would be easy to restore elkhorn and staghorn corals, the once-abundant, reef-building species that since the 1970s have vanished from almost all of their old range. A recovery plan released this month by the National Marine Fisheries Service says the biggest current threat is climate change, a problem beyond its power to solve.

Assuming the oceans continue to warm, the plan recommends about two dozen steps to help these species survive. Among them: growing the corals in nurseries for transplantation to the ocean floor, tightening fishing regulations, identifying resilient genetic strains, and reducing the amount of fertilizer and other pollutants washing into the ocean.

“While the climate threats are the most significant, reducing the local threats will provide a buffer for the species to be able to deal with the climate threats,” said Jennifer Moore, a fisheries service biologist.

Often compared to tropical rainforests, coral reefs support a vast range of marine life, from sea anemones and sponges to angelfish and lemon sharks. They are among South Florida’s major tourist attractions, drawing visitors for fishing, diving and snorkeling, accounting for about $483 million in national recreation spending.

Elkhorn and staghorn corals, which can be found in the reefs that stretch from the Florida Keys through Palm Beach County on the state’s southeast coast, have been declining for at least 40 years from a variety of causes.

An outbreak of white-band disease wiped out about 80% of them in the early 1980s, Moore said. Rising ocean temperatures have made them more vulnerable to bleaching, in which they expel the colorful algae on which they depend for energy.

“Climate change is beginning to creep up in terms of causes,” Moore said. “The indications are that bleaching events will become more frequent and more severe due to climate change.”

The plan puts a price tag of $254,540,000 for recovery but admits it is “an extreme underestimate,” considering what other countries in the Caribbean also would have to spend.

Among the costs: basic research on their genetics, physiology and resistance to disease ($9.6 million), increasing land-based nurseries ($10 million per year), restocking sea urchins that clear algae from corals ($5 million) and improving sewage treatment in the U.S. and Caribbean ($10 million-$20 million).

No one expects this amount of money to be spent. The federal government this year has budgeted $500,000 to $800,000 for protecting coral, but Moore said not all the money would come from the federal government.

Coral grows extremely slowly, and some of the living coral reef structures off southeast Florida are hundreds of years old.

“The recovery team estimated that it will take approximately 400 years to achieve recovery based on the significant mitigative actions identified in this plan,” the plan states.

The next step for the fisheries service will be to set up implementation teams of governmental and environmental representatives, outside scientists and others with knowledge of the reefs. These teams, expected to be in place by September, should also be a means of leveraging money from other agencies, state and local governments and nonprofits, Moore said.

Meanwhile, the federal government is working on regulations to protect 20 other coral species found in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

David Fleshler|Sun Sentinel

[In the meantime, both Port Miami and Port Everglades are blasting and dredging through our reefs exacerbating an already bad situation.]

State and Local Funds Awarded to the Lake Worth Lagoon Initiative

PALM BEACH COUNTY —State and local governments have committed a combined $4,150,000 to the Lake Worth Lagoon Initiative, an interagency organization that protects Lake Worth Lagoon coastal habitats. With these extra funds, the Lake Worth Lagoon Initiative will expand its restoration of seagrasses, mangroves and oyster reef habitats along with the construction of stormwater control projects. Coastline monitoring will assess the lagoon‘s environmental health, including its water quality, and track the restoration and natural construction projects along the shoreline.

“This initiative will provide long-term environmental, recreational and economic benefits to the region,” said DEP Secretary Jon Steverson. “Improving water quality in Lake Worth Lagoon will support the wildlife population and provide an ecotourism destination that supports fishing and kayaking activities.”

The Lake Worth Lagoon estuary, stretching for 20 miles along the shores of 13 municipalities from North Palm Beach to Boynton Beach, provides habitat for many endangered and threatened species. The lagoon’s living shorelines provide important habitat for marine organisms, feeding areas for birds and shelter for a variety of wildlife. Mangrove habitat serves as a nursery for juvenile fish and traps sediments in its roots, providing a natural defense for coastal erosion.

“We have seen success in monitoring water quality, restoring seagrasses and planning new protection projects under the Lake Worth Lagoon Initiative,” said South Florida Water Management District Governing Board member Melanie Peterson. “This work highlights the effectiveness of the lagoon partnership, and the additional investment will help ensure we continue to deliver results for a significant South Florida waterway.”

Human activities have degraded lagoon habitat and water quality, and runoff from residential and commercial growth around the lagoon continues to stress this valuable urban estuary. Along with educating residents about the lagoon’s importance, the Lake Worth Lagoon Initiative has focused on restoring the shoreline to a healthier, more natural state. Grant funds will allow the following initiative projects to continue and expand:

• Artificial Reef Projects along the Peanut Island Reef Complex, located in the city of Riviera Beach, will create reef habitat to benefit marine life and enhance recreational snorkeling and diving. These reef structures will provide important marine refuge during prolonged high-volume inflows of freshwater into the Lake Worth Lagoon system.
• The Grassy Flats Restoration Project will create more than 12 acres of seagrass, mangrove, salt marsh and oyster habitat in a degraded area of the lagoon. The creation of extra wetland will restore critical estuarine habitat for fisheries and wildlife and improve water quality.
• Living Shoreline Projects along West Palm Beach Currie Park, Bryant Park and Old Bridge Park will create new mangrove, Spartina cordgrass and oyster reef   habitats that were removed as a result of development. Restored shoreline will provide an important marine refuge during prolonged high-volume freshwater inflows into the Lake Worth Lagoon system. A natural living shoreline will absorb waves and boat wakes, prevent erosion, increase the life span of the seawalls and enhance recreational fishing opportunities.
• Various monitoring projects will track the health of lagoon habitats, including the populations of oyster, seagrass and fish in the area.

“The habitat and water quality benefits that have accrued to the Lagoon are simply amazing,” said Palm Beach County Commissioner Paulette Burdick. “Fisheries have rebounded, and birds are nesting where they haven’t been seen in decades.Snorkelers, kayakers and bird watchers are enjoying the sights. It is wonderful to see what this partnership is accomplishing.”

The Lake Worth Lagoon Initiative is an interagency collaboration that includes the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, Palm Beach County, the South Florida Water Management District and the Florida League of Cities. Through this program, over $17 million in state funds and $59 million in local funds have been dedicated to restoring Lake Worth Lagoon to date.

nataliarodriguez2015|March 27, 2015

What the Slowing of Oceanic Circulation Means for You

A new study has revealed with 99 percent certainty that Atlantic circulation is slowing, not due to any natural presence, but rather due to man-made climate change. This is causing a shift in the Gulf Stream, and creating a ‘cold bubble’ over the North Atlantic which could lead to widespread environmental damage.

A slowing of oceanic circulation has been predicted for years, starting back when greenhouse gasses first emerged as a new buzz word. And although this was not the first scientific study to prove that circulation was winding down, it does prove that man, not nature, is responsible.

So what are the impacts that could come with the slowing of oceanic circulation? The author of the study stresses that the Statue of Liberty will not dip under the icy waters of the ocean in some “Day After Tomorrow” scenario. However, sea levels, particularly in New York and Boston will rise.

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There will also likely be damage to fisheries up and down the coast, which could damage economies and fishing communities throughout the East Coast. It is also likely the North Atlantic will have record freezing temperatures over the winter and there will be an increase in storms across Western Europe.

In fact, the process is already underway on a number of seaboards. As noted by Chris Mooney at the Washington Post, scientists recorded a four inch rise in the sea level on the East Coast in a one year period from 2009-2010.

The Gulf Stream, which is also slowing, is one of the most powerful forces on earth. A large oceanic ‘river,’ it pushes more water across the ocean than all the rivers on earth combined. It keeps a regular flow of cooler and warmer currents and ensures that there is a sort of ‘balance’ between the continents. This is true from the Florida Keys to West Africa the western coast of the British Isles.

The Gulf Stream controls a number of factors in the world, from western winds to ice distribution and snowfall. With the Gulf Stream slowing down it is likely that climates across the globe will become far more extreme. Colder than normal temperatures are predicted on the USA’s eastern coast and hotter than normal temperatures will likely be seen across Europe.

In the rest of the world, certain areas of sub-Saharan Africa are likely to see hotter than average temperatures, which could exacerbate food and water scarcity issues.

However, it’s the weather patterns in the Atlantic that could also lead to catastrophic incidents. For instance, just off of the Gulf Stream is something known as the North Atlantic Gyre, which is partly responsible for weather anomalies such as cyclones.

For those living on the eastern seaboard of the United States, a risk of more turbulent weather patterns mixed with a sharp increase of sea levels could have disastrous consequences, including loss of life. Surges during hurricanes and cyclones could make their way further inland, devastating important crops and communities along the way.

It is well known that our disregard for climate change has led to a number of irreversible issues within our environment. However, slowing down ocean currents to their weakest point in over 1,000 years could take us into uncharted territories that have immediate and lasting consequences on the rest of our lives.

Lizabeth Paulat|March 29, 2015

Scary New Proof That We Have Seriously Screwed Up the Planet’s Oceans

Scientists confirm that climate change is stalling a major Atlantic Ocean current, and that could lead to flooding and food shortages

The powerful ocean current that carries tropical warmth from the South Atlantic to northern countries has slowed down to a degree “unprecedented in the past millennium,” according to newly published research. The phenomenon has created an unusual pocket of cooling temperatures in the far North Atlantic, even as global warming heats the world overall.

Yes, it’s the exact climate catastrophe envisioned in The Day After Tomorrow, the 2004 movie about how a slowing current triggers a new ice age and deep-freezes New York City. In real life, the current could cause severe coastal flooding between New York and Boston and affect the distribution of marine wildlife, putting coastal fishing industries at risk.

If the slowdown persists or intensifies, weather could significantly change in parts of the Northern Hemisphere that have traditionally been warmed by this current, affecting everything from agriculture to urban transportation.

“These are the kinds of things that scare me,” said oceanographer Scott Rutherford of Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, who coauthored the new study. “How much is this going to change temperature, sea level, marine ecosystems? We’re starting to mess with big things now.”

“Can we stop this? Yes,” he said. “We’re already locked into a little bit of warming. I would say that we ought to be concerned with minimizing it as much as we can.”

It’s the first time scientists have analyzed trends in the “Atlantic meridional overturning circulation” over such a lengthy period, which allowed them to contrast its contemporary state to preindustrial conditions and beyond.

The slowdown is one more recent sign that burning fossil fuels, the leading cause of global warming, has fundamentally disrupted Earth’s climate.

Last week the National Snow and Ice Data Center announced that less sea ice formed in the Arctic this winter than at any other time in the 35-year satellite record. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, meanwhile, announced that globally, the winter of 2014–15 was the warmest ever—except on the East Coast of the United States and in parts of West Africa and Western Europe, all areas that that saw unusually cool or cold weather, and that depend on this current to supply them with heat.

The study, published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, looked at trends in the current, which flows between North and South America, transporting heat northward and cold southward. (The Gulf Stream current that many of us learned about as schoolchildren is a part of this larger circulation.)

In addition to the written record, the researchers used data that came from interpreting nature’s own records—ice and sea sediment core samples, as well as tree rings—to go far back in time.

By deducting sea surface temperatures from averaged land and sea temperatures, they figured out what temperature the current must have been, and based on that, determined its salinity and speed.

“For about 900, nearly 1,000 years, the AMOC stays relatively stable,” said Rutherford. “It bounces around, but it’s not until about 1900 that we start to see a relatively steady decline.”

“From 1970 to 1990, we see a very rapid drop in temperature” in the current, he added, followed by a warmer period from 1990 to 2010. But “from 2010, we’re starting to see a decline again,” he said.

Both current cool-downs happened shortly after large amounts of freshwater appeared in the North Atlantic. The earlier pulse of freshwater came from a load of Arctic Ocean ice flowing into the North Atlantic; the latest came from Greenland’s glaciers, which have been melting faster since the 1990s.

(Infographic: Courtesy NOAA)

“It really showed up this past winter in the surface temperature maps,” Rutherford said. “That very, very cold spot reappears just south of Greenland.”

Scientifically, “it’s a bit of stretch right now” to link this winter’s record low temperatures and snowfall on much of the East Coast to the slowed ocean current, he said. “But it’s the kind of thing that we might expect to see” based on climate change modeling.

“As a scientist, this is just one more data point to add to our records,” said climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University. “As a human, though, it’s a stark reminder that our choices have consequences, and the door is rapidly closing on our opportunities to choose a different future.”

Emily J. Gertz|March 24, 2015

Miami Beach ‘rising’ to challenge of encroaching seas

In Miami Beach, Fla., flooding is not unusual. Vehicle owners are accustomed to salt water getting into their cars, corroding the metal, and getting stuck in traffic when floods turn streets into shallow canals.

Several years ago, flooding got so bad, people were kayaking through the city.

“Everything becomes a challenge,” said Eric Carpenter, public works director for the city of Miami Beach.

To cope with the sea-level-rise-related flooding, the city is changing its coastline. In the next five years, 70 to 80 pumps will be installed to keep the streets free of water — a project that will cost $300 million to $500 million, according to Carpenter. Funding comes primarily through city bonds and should buy the city about 30 years in its efforts to adapt to sea-level rise, he said.

At the same time, the city may raise roads and sidewalks by 1.5 to 2 feet along the west side that faces the Biscayne Bay.

“We’re anticipating that the elevation of roadways will not cost more than 10 to 15 percent more for stormwater improvements,” Carpenter said. “It’s a long-term prospect.”

While raising Miami Beach above sea level could slow flooding, the city may need to raise itself an additional 2 to 4 feet in the next four years.

Florida is one of the states most vulnerable to climate change. Sea levels rose 8 to 9 inches in the last hundred years and are expected to rise 3 to 7 inches more in the next 15 years, according to federal projections.

Cities across the state are preparing their coastlines for the imminent sea rise, raising bridges, installing backflow preventers to protect drinking water supplies, building sea walls and managing dunes. In 2012, Miami Beach implemented a Storm Water Management Master Plan to assess the city’s needs and implement effective adaptation strategies.

Preparing while Tallahassee drifts away

“We can only postpone the problem,” said Luiz Rodrigues, executive director of the Environmental Coalition of Miami and the Beaches. “We need to do what we can to preserve what we have. The city [of Miami Beach] is doing what it can right now.”

In the last 10 years, Miami Beach’s economy has suffered from the effects of sea-level rise, Rodrigues added. Businesses along West Avenue on the western coast suffered damage from being flooded two to five times a year until recently, when pumps installed ahead of a major tide in 2014 were built to keep the streets dry and diminish the impact of flooding.

Though the city has actively implemented sea-level adaptation strategies, Miami Beach Commissioner Michael Grieco said a lack of support from the state is forcing cities like Miami Beach to fend for themselves. At a sea-level-rise summit last Friday, he said he sent lobbyists to “beg” for money from the federal government but that the government in Tallahassee didn’t “want to deal with realities.”

Miami Beach City Manager Jimmy Morales, who also attended the summit, said the state has been supportive of the city’s plans to adapt to sea-level rise and expedited necessary permits.

Florida’s position on climate change has been under fire since reports that the governor banned the phrase “climate change” came out earlier this month. Environmentalists are concerned about what this could mean for how the state addresses climate change, but government officials are not too concerned.

“Our officials have embraced the idea that the sea is rising no matter what the source may be,” Carpenter said. “We don’t have time to debate the causes.”

For Susanne Torriente, assistant city manager of Fort Lauderdale, climate change is part of the daily vocabulary in South Florida. Like Miami Beach, Fort Lauderdale has faced flooding and sea-level rise. The city has developed coastal resilience by improving roads damaged in flooding to mitigate future risks, Torriente said. Though funding is always a challenge, it has nothing to do with opinions on climate change.

“Cities all over the country are dealing with aging infrastructure,” she said. “There’s no new pot of money that appears from the federal government.”

Manon Verchot|E&E reporter|ClimateWire|April 1, 2015

Oceans Could Take 1,000 Years to Recover From Climate Change

More bad news in climate science: it could take our oceans up to 1000 years to recover from decades of degradation from global warming.

Researchers at UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory have found that climate change and the resulting de-oxygenation of seawater has altered the oceans’ ecology rapidly.

Now these scientists say that getting back to normal could be on the scale of 1000 years, rather than 100 years as previously thought.

They found their results by going back in time to the last glacial period.

Study leader Sarah Moffitt and her team analyzed about 5,400 invertebrate fossils in a sediment core off the shore of Santa Barbara, Calif.

The fossils cover a period between about 3,000 and 16,000 years and help provide a snapshot of what the world was like before, during and after de-glaciation, which saw a dramatic climate warming as we are currently experiencing.

This was a period, not unlike ours, of melting polar ice caps and the lowering of oxygen in the ocean.

Using this information the scientists can show how long it took for the recovery of the ocean ecosystem – and it took awhile.

“The recovery does not happen on a century scale; it’s a commitment to a millennial-scale recovery,” said Moffitt, according to the Los Angeles Times. “If we see dramatic oxygen loss in the deep sea in my lifetime, we will not see a recovery of that for many hundreds of years, if not thousands or more.”

Primarily, this means the disappearance of species and a rapidly changing ocean ecology, the consequences of which can be ugly.

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Alexander Besant|RYOT|April 2, 2015

This post originally appeared on RYOT

A Silent Victory

A federal judge stands up to the noisy navy for the sake of marine mammals.

Last summer, the United States Navy invited 22 countries to participate in exercises across a wide swath of the Pacific Ocean. For whales and dolphins, though, the gathering probably felt more like war than war game. Training exercises such as the biannual RIMPAC event—which includes naval ships, submarines, aircraft, and all the noise pollution that comes with them—are dangerous to cetaceans. In short, noise can be a deadly weapon.

The tide may finally be turning in the whales’ favor, though. A federal court ruled yesterday that the government has fallen short of its legal obligation to protect marine mammals from naval exercises in the Pacific.

Active sonar—bouncing sound waves off physical objects to produce an underwater map—is a major threat to marine mammals. Whales, for example, are exquisitely attuned to sound. Their ear bones are about the size of a human head, and those ears provide the animal with most of its sensory information in the dark underwater environment. Whales rely on their sensitive hearing to find food, communicate with peers, and mate. Marine biologists have a saying that sums this up succinctly: A deaf whale is a dead whale.

Deploying active sonar near a whale that’s trying to hunt is a bit like shining a spotlight in the eyes of a human in the grocery store. So when sonar-equipped ships enter an area, whales stop feeding. They also stray from migration paths and abandon their traditional habitats. If a whale is close to the ship when sailors switch on their sonar system, the consequences can be even more dramatic. The blast of sound can damage the whales’ lungs and digestive system and cause temporary or permanent hearing loss.

Under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the National Marine Fisheries Service must review any activities that could pose a threat to, well, marine mammals. Its review isn’t always satisfactory, though. In December 2013, the NMFS approved the navy’s five-year plan for sonar and ordinance use in the Pacific Ocean—even though the military’s own data showed that the activities would inflict harm on marine mammals 9.6 million times. The plan represented a 1,100 percent increase in incidents of harm to whales and dolphins.

The following month, NRDC and a coalition of environmental groups sued the NMFS for failing to fulfill its obligations. (Disclosure.) The organizations demanded that the government develop better safeguards to protect marine mammals from the navy’s sonar and explosives, such as declaring certain areas off-limits when whales are feeding or mating. In response, the navy pointed out that it had set aside a plot of sea—3.1 miles in length—near the Hawaiian coast to protect humpback whales and contended that any additional restrictions would hamper its operational ability. That argument, though, seems a teeny bit unreasonable, considering it claims its exercises need 2.7 million square nautical miles, an area larger than the continental United States.

Federal Judge Susan Oki Mollway rejected the arguments made by the navy and the NMFS—and the language she used in her opinion verged on mockery in some places. When the NMFS said it would have come to the same conclusion even if it had used superior data, she dismissed this as an “it makes no difference” argument and accused the agency of offering “after-the-fact explanations.”

Judge Mollway even waxed nautical in describing her search for a rational justification for the NMFS’ decision: “This court feels like the sailor in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, who, trapped for days on a ship becalmed in the middle of the ocean, laments, ‘Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.’ ”

Although the whales won this round, Judge Mollway’s ruling is only on the merits, not on the remedies. That’s a fancy legal way of saying that the judge hasn’t yet decided on what the NMFS must do to bring itself into compliance with the law. That decision is likely months away. Until then, whales can breathe a sigh of relief, presumably out of their blowholes.

Brian Palmer|@PalmerBrian

Wildlife and Habitat

Global War Against Nature: 100 Elephants Killed Each Day in Illegal Ivory Trade

Maybe baby steps will help, but the world needs a lot more than either the U.S. or China is offering to combat the illegal traffic in wildlife, a nearly $20-billion-a-year business that adds up to a global war against nature. As the headlines tell us, the trade has pushed various rhinoceros species to the point of extinction and motivated poachers to kill more than 100,000 elephants since 2010.

Last month China announced that it would ban ivory imports for a year, while it “evaluates” the effectiveness of the ban in reducing internal demand for ivory carvings on the current slaughter of approximately 100 African elephants per day. The promise, however, rings hollow following a report in November (hotly denied by China) that Chinese diplomats used President Xi Jinping’s presidential plane to smuggle thousands of pounds of poached elephant tusks out of Tanzania.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has launched its own well-meaning but distinctly inadequate initiative to curb the trade. Even if you missed the roll-out of that policy, you probably know that current trends are leading us toward a planetary animal dystopia, a most un-Disneyesque world in which the great forests and savannas of the planet will bid farewell to the species earlier generations referred to as their “royalty.” No more King of the Jungle, while Dorothy’s “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” will truly be over the rainbow. And that’s just for starters.

The even grimmer news that rarely makes the headlines is that the lesser subjects of that old royalty are vanishing, too. Though largely unacknowledged, the current war is far redder in tooth and claw than anything nature has to offer. It threatens not just charismatic species like elephants, gibbons, and rhinos, but countless others with permanent oblivion.

If current trends hold, one day not so very long from now our children may think of the T. rex and the tiger as co-occupants of a single Lost World, accessible only in dreams, storybooks, and the movies. Sure, some of the planet’s present megafauna will be bred in zoos for as long as society produces enough luxury to maintain such institutions. Even the best zoo, however, is but a faint simulacrum of wild habitat and its captives are ghosts of their free-roaming forebears.

That’s why the Obama administration deserves some credit for highlighting the urgent need to curb the wildlife trade. Its plan calls for using assets of the National Intelligence Council to advance enforcement efforts. Unfortunately, the administration proposes boosting the enforcement budget of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency with primary responsibility in this area, by only $8 million. Such an increase would lift its force of inspectors just slightly above the levels of 30 years ago when the illicit trade in wildlife was far smaller.

To grasp the breadth of the carnage now going on, it’s essential to realize that the war against nature is being waged on an almost infinite number of planetary fronts, affecting hundreds of species, and that the toll is already devastating. Among the battlefields, none may be bloodier than the forests of Southeast Asia, for they lie closest to China, the world’s most ravenous (and lucrative) market for wildlife and wildlife parts.

China’s taste for wildlife penetrates even the least visited corners of the region, where professional poachers industriously gather live porcupines and turtles, all manner of venison, monkey hands, python fat, pangolin scales, otter skins, gall bladders, antlers, horns, bones and hundreds of other items. These goods, dead or alive, are smuggled to markets in China and elsewhere. Meanwhile, an expanding economy enables ever more millions of people to purchase expensive animal commodities they believe might stave off disease or provide the fancy restaurant meals that will impress in-laws and business associates.

To put the present war in perspective, think of it this way: every year, more and more money chases fewer and fewer creatures.

Slaughter at the Ground Level

In a typical forest in Southeast Asia you might encounter a snare line stretching a kilometer or more along a mountain ridge or running down one side of a canyon and all the way up the other. These barriers are waist-high walls of chopped brush, with gaps every few meters. They are hedges of death.

Almost any mammal traveling in this landscape, if larger than a tree shrew (which would fit in a modest handbag), sooner or later will have to pass through one of these gaps, and in each a snare awaits. Powered by a bent-over sapling, it lies beneath a camouflage of leaves and hides a loop of bicycle brake cable—or truck winch cable for larger animals like tigers. The trigger controlling each snare is made of small sticks and can be astonishingly sensitive. I’ve seen snares set for deer and wild pig that were no less capable of capturing creatures as light of foot as a jungle fowl, the wild cousin of the domestic chicken, or a silver pheasant, the males of which shimmer in the dusky forest like bundles of fallen moonbeams.

On an expedition to central Laos, my companions and I made our way into a forest distinguished mainly by its remoteness. The Vietnamese border lay perhaps a dozen kilometers to the east, closer by far than the nearest village, four days’ hard march away, where we’d recruited the guides and porters traveling with us. That village, in turn, lay two days by foot and motorized pirogue from the end of the nearest road. The head of our expedition, conservation biologist William Robichaud, the only other westerner in our group of 14, told me that, unless a distressed American pilot had parachuted into the sprawling watershed that lay before us during the Vietnam War, ours were the first blue eyes that had glimpsed it.

Isolation, however, failed to protect the canyons and ridges we surveyed. Evidence lay everywhere of commercial poachers who had crossed the mountains from Vietnam to feed the Chinese market. In a matter of days, we collected wires from almost a thousand snares. In them, we found the decaying carcasses of ferret badgers, hog badgers, mongooses, various species of birds, and several critically endangered large-antlered muntjacs, a species of barking deer, one of which, in its struggle to free itself, had pulled off its own foot before dying nearby.

We camped by fish-rich rivers that had been stripped of their otters and saw the remains of dozens of poachers’ camps, some elaborately equipped with butchering tables and smoking racks. Saddest of all was the sight of a red-shanked douc (also called a douc langur), perhaps the most beautiful monkey in the world, dangling upside down at the end of a snare pole, having succumbed to as slow and cruel a death as might be imagined.

The indiscriminant wastefulness of this massive trapping enterprise is hard to absorb even when you see it yourself. Poachers check their snare lines haphazardly and leave them armed when they depart the area. This means the killing goes on indefinitely, no matter if the bodies languish and rot.

A Unicorn Still in the Wild?

Though we were in that forest in part to remove snares and assess the nature of the ongoing damage, our main goal was to find a unicorn—or actually an animal almost as rare, a creature that might indeed have already moved, or might soon move, from Earth’s natural realms to the realm of mythology. We were searching for any sign of saola (Pseudoryx nghetinhensis), one of the rarest large mammals on the planet. Its very existence, though known to locals, was revealed to science only in 1992, when researchers spotted a strange set of horns on the wall of a hunter’s shack high in the mountains of Vietnam.

Saola proved to be much more than a new species. It represented a new genus, possibly even a new taxonomic tribe, although the jury is still out on that. A kind of bovid, a ruminant with cloven hooves, its nearest evolutionary relatives appear to be wild cattle, yet it looks nothing like a cow or bison. A saola stands a little higher than a carousel pony. Deer-like, but thicker in form, its powerful build helps it push through the densest vegetation. Its muzzle is splashed with camo patterns of white, and its tri-colored tail—white, chocolate brown, and black—blends with similar bands of color on its rump. Its long, nearly straight horns are elegantly tapered, and in profile they seem to blend into a single horn, giving the creature the otherworldly look of a unicorn.

At best, the existing population of saola numbers between a few dozen and a few hundred, making it nearly as rare and hard to find as a unicorn. Even stranger, its disposition, except when the animal is directly threatened, appears to be as gentle as that of the unicorns of medieval European lore.

In 1996, Robichaud spent two weeks in a rough crossroads town in central Laos observing a captive saola. The unfortunate creature did not survive long in the menagerie in which it was held—no saola has lasted more than a few months in confinement and none is held anywhere today—but he had ample opportunity to note that it reacted alertly, even violently, to the presence of a dog outside its enclosure. (Wild dogs, or dholes, are among its natural enemies.)

Eerily, however, the saola was calm in the presence of humans—far more so than the barking deer or the serow (a species of mountain goat) in nearby cages, even though they had been in the menagerie far longer. Captured in the wild just before Robichaud arrived, the saola proved calmer than any domestic goat, sheep, or cow he had known from farms in his native Wisconsin. The captive saola even let him pick ticks from its ears. Local information buttressed Robichaud’s sense of the creature’s almost unearthly serenity. A Buddhist monk from a nearby temple told him that people in the area had dubbed the creature “sat souphap,” which translates roughly as “the polite animal.”

Today, no one knows if the clock of extinction for the species stands at two minutes before midnight or two minutes after. The greatest threat to its survival is the kind of snaring we witnessed on our expedition, which is doubly tragic, for saola do not appear to be a target of the poachers. In spite of its exotic horns, the animal is unknown in traditional Chinese medicine. (Its omission from that medical tradition’s encyclopedic command of Asian fauna and flora testifies to its profound isolation from the rest of the world.) Rather, the last living remnants of the species risk being taken as by-catch, like sea turtles in a shrimper’s net.

The Politics of Extinction

The situation may be terrible, but at least there are parks and protected areas in Southeast Asia where wild creatures are safe, right?

Alas, wrong. Our travels took place in an official National Protected Area in Laos where snaring of the kind we witnessed is blatantly illegal. Yet the deadly harvest continues, there and elsewhere, thanks to insufficient investment in protection and law enforcement, not to mention insufficient political will in countries whose overriding priority is economic development. Last year in the protected area of more than 4,000 square kilometers (1,544 square miles) that we visited, a small number of government patrols removed nearly 14,000 snares, undoubtedly a small fraction of what’s there.

The same is true elsewhere. According to the Saola Working Group, a committee sponsored by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, patrols that its members help to fund and supervise in just five protected areas in Laos and Vietnam (including the one in which we traveled) have destroyed more than 90,000 snares since 2011. And yet that, too, is just a drop in the bucket of the wildlife trade.

While the trade’s reach is global, the stakes may be highest in Southeast Asia (including Indonesia and the Philippines). About half the world’s people live there or in the adjacent countries of China, Bangladesh, and India. The region leads the world in the proportion of its birds and mammals that are endemic; that is, found nowhere else. Unfortunately, it also leads in the proportion in imminent danger of extinction, due in large measure to the wildlife trade. Worse yet, no country in Southeast Asia possesses a tradition of effective biological conservation.

Already many forests that once were rich in tigers, leopards, gaur, banteng, and gibbons are devoid of any mammals larger than a cocker spaniel. If the rest of the world truly wants to protect the planet’s endangered biodiversity, assisting the governments and NGOs of Southeast Asia in safeguarding their region’s natural heritage needs to be a global priority.

Critics often point out that the West is hypocritical in urging the East to do what it failed to accomplish in its own grim history of development. Indeed, the present sacking of Asian forests is analogous to the stripping of beaver from western American streams and the subsequent extirpation of bison herds in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, if the West has learned one thing, it’s that conservation in advance of calamity costs much less than repairs after the fact and that it is the only way to prevent irreparable mistakes. No matter what moral ground you stand on, the facts in the field are simple: our best chance to avert catastrophe lies before us, right now.

Other critics complacently observe that extinction has always been part of evolution and that other epochs have seen similar waves of species loss. New species, they say, will emerge to take the places of those we destroy. Such a view may be technically correct, but it commits an error of scale.

Evolution will continue; it cannot not continue. But the inexorable emergence of what Darwin called “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” proceeds at a nearly geological pace. By comparison, our human tenancy of Earth is a fleeting breath. Within the time frame of what we call civilization, the extinctions we cause are as eternal as any human accomplishment.

A Loneliness That Could Stretch to Infinity

The essential conservation task before the world is to protect key habitats and wildlife populations long enough for generational attitudes to change in China and its neighbors. At least in part, this means meeting the war on nature with a martial response. Whether protecting elephants in Kenya, mountain gorillas in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (a cause movingly depicted in the documentary film Virunga), tigers in Thailand, or saola in Laos, one has to prepare, quite literally, to meet fire with fire.

In the case of our expedition in Laos, three of our guides doubled as militia and carried AK-47s. The weapons were not for show. Poachers are generally similarly armed. On one occasion, such a band, traveling in the dead of night, nearly walked into our camp, only to melt back into the forest when they realized they’d been discovered.

Good news, however, glimmers amid the bad. Although the shift will take time, cultural values in Asia are beginning to change. Witness the recent abandonment of shark fin soup by Chinese consumers. The San Francisco-based NGO WildAid reports that sales of shark fins have plummeted 82 percent in Guangzhou (formerly Canton), the hub of the shark trade, and that two-thirds of the respondents to a recent poll cited public “awareness campaigns” against the global destruction of shark populations as a reason for ending their consumption.

Only by rising to the challenge of species protection—not “eventually,” but now—can we ensure that nature’s most magnificent creations will persist in the wild to delight future generations. Only through generous cooperation with Asian partners, boosting both law enforcement and political resolve, can we preserve the stunning, often cacophonous, and always mysterious diversity of a large share of the planet’s most biologically productive ecosystems.

The dystopian alternative is terrible to consider. Uncounted species—not just tigers, gibbons, rhinos and saola, but vast numbers of smaller mammals, amphibians, birds and reptiles—are being pressed to the brink. We’ve hardly met them and yet, within the vastness of the universe, they and the rest of Earth’s biota are our only known companions. Without them, our loneliness would stretch to infinity.

William deBuys|TomDispatch|March 24, 2015

Construction starts on river walk wetlands

Construction crews have started building a wetlands this week, something that takes thousands of years for nature to make.

Workers should be finished by mid-June, said Mark Brochu, director of St. Clair County Parks and Recreation.

The wetlands will encompass about 2.5 acres of property in Port Huron, Michigan at the south end of the Blue Water River Walk.

The river walk, which stretches nearly a mile along the St. Clair River south of the Black River, opened to the public in June 2014.

“It will be contingent on the weather and also the planting of the native species,” Brochu said. “That may push some of the plantings into August if they are not able to get in by June.

“All of the excavation, contouring, bringing in topsoil and all of the underground construction should be done by then,” he said.

Boddy Construction, with offices in Port Huron Township, is doing the work. Workers were using a bulldozer and other equipment on Thursday to start construction of a small berm along the river.

The county used a Michigan Natural Resources Trust Fund grant of about $150,000, along with $150,000 from the county recreation tax, to purchase about 2.75 acres of property from Acheson Ventures along the St. Clair River. A bike and pedestrian path runs through the property.

The county also plans to buy an additional 2.1 acres from Acheson Ventures. It has a trust fund grant of $118,400 that will be matched with $41,600 in county parks funds.

The wetlands will not have a direct connection to the river, Brochu said.

“We were not able to engineer that,” he said. “The engineering did not work out on that.

“The storm water off the adjacent hillside will be collected and directed into the wetland.”

The wetlands also will collect some storm water from the city’s storm sewer system, he said, and a pump will be available to draw water from the river in the event of a prolonged dry period.

The wetlands will include three small pools. Other areas will be wet during wet seasons and dry during dry seasons, Brochu said.

The work and the project engineering is being funded by a National Fish and Wildlife Foundation grant of $1.04 million. Brochu said the acquisition of the property was considered the match for the NFWF grant.

SmithGroupJJR of Detroit, which did the engineering for the river walk, also is the engineer for the wetlands project.

Brochu said the project will provide habitat for birds, including waterfowl, and small animals.

“There will be amphibians and reptiles around the area, but there won’t be a fishing hole per se,” he said.

The county is trying to secure funding from the Coastal Zone Management Program, Brochu said, to build boardwalks and elevated viewing platforms for a second phase of the project.

He said the county also will be working with adjacent property owners to remove invasive plants, such as Japanese knotweed, and replace them with native wildflowers.

BOB GROSS|TIMES HERALD

Forestry

6,000 Acres of Old Growth Forests Slated for Logging, the Largest Sale in Decades

Two coalitions of conservation groups filed Notices of Appeal before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals last week from recent district court opinions approving old growth logging in the Tongass National Forest. In one case, four groups challenged the U.S. Forest Service’s Big Thorne old growth timber sale and associated road construction. In a separate lawsuit, a partially overlapping set of groups challenged provisions in the Tongass Land Management Plan that the Forest Service relies on when preparing old growth sales across much of Southeast Alaska.

The Big Thorne sale is by far the largest Tongass old growth sale in decades. The conservation groups argue that it undercuts the region’s $2 billion fishing and tourism industries while continuing an unsustainable log export industry. The groups are also concerned about damage to vital habitat for salmon, bears, Sitka black-tailed deer, goshawks and the Alexander Archipelago wolf, and impacts to sport and subsistence hunters as well as recreational use of the forest.

The Big Thorne sale would clearcut more than 6,000 acres of old-growth rainforest on Prince of Wales Island. Though the Forest Service estimates the sale would cost taxpayers $13 million, the economics of recent sales indicate taxpayer costs could eventually climb over $100 million. The Forest Service has been widely criticized for offering old-growth sales at an economic loss to American taxpayers and its Tongass timber program is currently under review by the federal General Accounting Office. Timber makes up less than 1 percent of economic activity in Southeast Alaska.

By contrast, economic reports value Southeast Alaska’s fishing and tourism industries at a combined $2 billion annually. Some reports suggest road building and industrial activity associated with Big Thorne would harm fish habitat and is inadequately analyzed by the Forest Service. Wild coho runs, an economic staple for the region’s troll fleet, are particularly sensitive to habitat impacts to headwater streams.

While concerns have been raised that the Big Thorne sale is vital to a local mill, the groups presented evidence to the court of ample timber supply from State of Alaska timber sales as well as existing sales under contract to maintain operations. Additionally, in seeking to halt the old growth sale, the groups exempted the project’s second-growth and stewardship components.

The separate suit over the management plan challenges its failure to ensure that adequate old growth is left after timber sales for stable populations of wildlife—including Sitka black-tailed deer. It also alleges that the Forest Service failed, when adopting the plan, to give the public an accurate picture of how plan implementation would affect wildlife and those – like subsistence hunters—who rely on healthy wildlife populations.

“We’re looking for a solution that keeps jobs in the woods without sacrificing key habitat for deer, bear, wolf and salmon. We support projects that will be compatible with the region’s fishing and tourism industries—as well as deer hunting opportunities—over the long run,” said SEACC executive director Malena Marvin. “For years, SEACC has worked with regional partners to advocate micro sales, develop community-scale forest projects that support local businesses, and promote the region’s small sawmills,” she continued. “Our organization remains opposed to industrial-scale clearcuts that rely on exports—curtailing the export of round logs to Asia would increase jobs per log cut on the Tongass while eliminating massive, controversial old-growth sales.

“Economic prosperity in Southeast Alaska depends on vibrant, healthy old growth forests to support the economic drivers of our region—world-class fishing, hunting, recreation, and tourism,” said Holly Harris, staff attorney with Earthjustice.  “While Southeast Alaska loses thousands of acres of irreplaceable old growth habitat in sales like Big Thorne, taxpayers are paying tens of millions of dollars a year to prop up the old growth timber industry. The Forest Service’s tired reliance on these kinds of massive, subsidized old growth sales devastates the environment and jeopardizes the future of our region.”

“Allowing massive sales like Big Thorne is yet another blow to the Tongass National Forest and southeast Alaska,” said Kristen Miller, Conservation Director at Alaska Wilderness League. “Continuing to subsidize sales like Big Thorne threatens the viability of the wildlife and scenery that bring one million people to hike, hunt, fish, kayak and tour the Tongass each year. Southeast Alaska’s economy has moved on from timber. Instead of continuing to pour money into massive old growth giveaways like Big Thorne, why not put taxpayer dollars where they will give us the largest return on our investment year after year, and allow us to preserve a national treasure in the process.”

“It’s clear that the Big Thorne sale is not the best path forward for taxpayers, for local communities, or for wildlife,” said Alli Harvey, Alaska Representative for Sierra Club’s Our Wild America campaign. “We should be safeguarding this amazing rainforest and its old growth trees, not clear-cutting the future.”

“The Big Thorne timber sale is bad for wildlife, birds, fish and the people who care about them,” said Jim Adams, Audubon Alaska’s Policy Director. “The science tells us it is long-past time for the Forest Service to transition away from large-scale old-growth timber sales on the Tongass.”

Appealing the Big Thorne decision are the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, Alaska Wilderness League, Sierra Club, and Audubon Alaska. Appealing a separate decision related to the Tongass Land Management Plan are Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, Natural Resources Defense Council, Alaska Wilderness League, and Sierra Club. Earthjustice represents the groups in both appeals.

Earthjustice|March 30, 2015

Conservationists Halt Public Lands Clearcutting Outside of Eugene, Oregon

BLM Pulls Decision After Lawsuit for Largest Lane Co Clearcut in 20 Years

Public opposition and a legal challenge from Cascadia Wildlands and Oregon Wild has prompted the Eugene Bureau of Land Management to place on hold its plans to clearcut 259 acres of public lands just outside of Springfield, Oregon near Shotgun Creek.  The “Second Show” timber sale would have been the largest clearcut on federal lands in Lane County in 20 years.

This logging proposal elicited over 700 public comments, largely in opposition to the proposed clearcutting .  Local residents raised concerns about clean water, Chinook salmon, and logging some of the last old forests in an already degraded watershed.

“I am extremely relieved that these mature trees may now have a chance to become a real old growth forest. They are located very near the BLM Shotgun Park and Recreation Area and I believe the BLM should focus on preserving our public lands for wildlife, recreation, and future generations,” said Ellen Furstner, a Marcola resident who commented on the sale.  “Protecting the old forest that is left should be our priority to fight global warming. It’s just a shame our federal agencies do not see it that way.”

After the BLM’s decision to move forward with logging, Cascadia Wildlands and Oregon Wild filed a “protest” with BLM but BLM failed to pick up their mail at the post office and refused to consider the protest. Seneca Sawmill then purchased the sale, and Cascadia Wildlands and Oregon Wild were forced to file suit in federal court arguing that the BLM neglected to analyze the effects of clearcutting in conjunction with ongoing commercial logging and road construction in the same area.  BLM withdrew their decision to log the Second Show timber sale on March 19 before answering the complaint and before the court could rule on the merits of the case.

“Our federal timber lands have been hammered by reckless clearcut logging for the past 90 years.  Salmon and spotted owl populations are plummeting, water quality is terribly diminished, and our federal timber lands have more roads than Los Angeles,” said Nick Cady, Legal Director of Cascadia Wildlands. “Yet despite the science and public opposition, the BLM continues to target mature forests.  The agency refuses to open its eyes.”
Decades of past clearcutting has resulted in federal lands that are now overstocked with dense young Douglas fir plantations.  Conservation groups have been working with the BLM for the past decade to meet timber targets by commercially thinning these younger forests.

“The Second Show proposal is a big step backward,” said Doug Heiken of Oregon Wild. “Restoration thinning has allowed the agency to meet its timber goals without clearcutting and without doing undue harm to wildlife habitat and watersheds. Clearcutting public lands should be put in the dust-bin of history where it belongs.”

The Second Show decision has been pulled, but the agency may again elect to proceed with the controversial logging after revising its analysis documents.  The revision process will be open to the public, and the BLM will respond to public concerns and questions about the proposed logging.

Nick Cady|Legal Director|Cascadia Wildlands|Doug Heiken|Conservation and Restoration Coordinator|Oregon Wild|March 23, 2015

Sequoias, the True Giants of the World Photos

Agribusiness giant tells suppliers to stop cutting down forests

Today, the state of New York announced that, after negotiations with the global agribusiness conglomerate Archer Daniels Midland, ADM will adopt a no-deforestation policy for soy and palm oil.

This is really freaking good news, and it comes at a critical time. There is some evidence that, after years of progress, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is increasing again. Meanwhile, people have been cutting down the forests just outside the Brazilian Amazon — in Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, and in Brazil’s Cerrado region — where there has been less pressure to stop. The move from ADM will provide a clear warning to farmers who are considering the costs and benefits of clearing more land.

ADM laid out a specific set of commitments and a plan for implementation. This announcement is the latest in a cascade of no-deforestation commitments set off when Wilmar, the largest palm-oil company, pledged to stop buying from suppliers who cut down rainforest. ADM owns 16 percent of Wilmar.

“ADM has a steadfast commitment to the development of traceable and transparent agricultural supply chains that protect forests worldwide,” wrote Victoria Podesta, ADM’s chief communications officer, in an email. “We are confident that our No Deforestation policy is both strong and appropriate for our company.”

Last year, another agribusiness, Cargill, announced a plan to stop buying all commodities that caused deforestation. While this ADM commitment is more narrowly focused on soy and palm oil, it applies more stringent rules than the Cargill pledge, said Ben Cushing, spokesperson for the advocacy group Forest Heroes. “For soy, this puts ADM out front,” he said.

“I don’t think there’s any agribusiness company in the world that hasn’t been thinking about how to improve their supply chains as they’ve watched the dominos fall,” Cushing said.

The New York State Common Retirement Fund had asked ADM to take this step. The retirement fund holds $83.1 million in ADM stock. A group of NGOs — Forest Heroes, Sierra Club, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the National Wildlife Federation, SumOfUs, and NRDC — had written to ADM urging the company to make its business more sustainable. Nordic investors and Green Century Capital Management also asked ADM to take action.

Nathanael Johnson|31 Mar 2015

Global Warming and Climate Change

How Climate Change May Be Ruining Your Pizza

Love scrumptious vegan pizza? You’d better enjoy it while you can, because climate change is moving in to hog a slice. According to an Australian report, Appetite for Change, climate change isn’t just going to decimate existing crops — it’s also going to change the way the survivors taste. And not in a good way. The researchers say that we’re going to be eating increasingly bland, tasteless, mushy food because of the way shifting temperatures are affecting farming, and in fact, it’s already started happening.

We’re already aware that climate change is forcing agriculture to adjust. The amount of arable land on Earth is decreasing, and the types of food we can grow are also shifting — some regions are getting too hot and dry for traditional crops, for example. Changes in the climate may eventually wipe out some crops altogether, while others may become extremely rare and expensive. Coffee and cocoa, two extremely popular luxury crops, are particularly unhappy examples of this situation, as the plants are fussy and require very particular conditions to grow. Once those conditions are disrupted, they find it extremely difficult to recover.

The most stark illustration of the problem with climate change and produce may actually come from a Japanese study conducted in 2013. The researchers evaluated nearly 40 years of data on apples, looking at a number of quality metrics like texture, flavor and firmness. Over time, they discovered that apples were mushy, grainy, bland and less tart than before — in other words, our apples were really starting to get pretty terrible. Importantly, they found that trees were blooming earlier than before, and that even when harvest times were adjusted to account for the earlier blooming period, the apples collected were still of poor quality. This reflected a problem not just with the growing season, but also with how the fruit matured — bad news for apple fans.

Poor root vegetables took a particular beating in this study. They rely on rich, loose soil with excellent drainage and good moisture, otherwise they can’t grow to full size and they can become wooden and flavorless. They also need lush, healthy greens to photosynthesize and draw energy into the root — that’s what gives roots their size and flavor. Moreover, it’s important that the plants not “bolt” — go to seed too early — because the roots won’t fully develop if that’s the case. That means thin, woody, straggly carrots and beets without much flavor. Blech. Meanwhile, potatoes will be more prone to blight.

Fruit and nut trees may also get into trouble if the weather doesn’t get cool enough in the winter months to trigger important seasonal changes, while wheat and other grains will suffer too. These could amount to massive expenses for farmers on wasted and failed crops as well as conversions — if, for example, a farmer decides to stop growing almonds, she needs to invest in tearing out the orchard and planting new crops. If she’s planning on replacing her almonds with other fruit or nut trees, she’ll have to wait for years for them to mature.

One small consolation: if you’re vegan or vegetarian, you won’t be facing the crisis for animal products predicted in this study. Changes to the environment are likely to cause a radical decline in the quality of meat, eggs and dairy — all issues you won’t have to deal with. Moreover, that quality decline could lead to a drop in consumption, which would be good for both animals and the planet.

s.e. smith|March 27, 2015

A second giant blob of Antarctic ice is getting ready to drown us

Remember when we found out last year that the West Antarctic ice sheet had started to collapse, that the collapse more or less can’t be stopped, and that it will eventually result in 10 to 15 feet of sea-level rise? Now we have some more bad news of that caliber.

An enormous glacier, one on the other side of the continent from the ailing ice sheet, is doing pretty much the same thing, researchers have discovered. Chris Mooney reports for The Washington Post:

The findings about East Antarctica emerge from a new paper just out in Nature Geoscience by an international team of scientists representing the United States, Britain, France, and Australia. They flew a number of research flights over the Totten Glacier of East Antarctica — the fastest-thinning sector of the world’s largest ice sheet — and took a variety of measurements to try to figure out the reasons behind its retreat. And the news wasn’t good: It appears that Totten, too, is losing ice because warm ocean water is getting underneath it. …

The floating ice shelf of the Totten Glacier covers an area of 90 miles by 22 miles. It it is losing an amount of ice “equivalent to 100 times the volume of Sydney Harbour every year,” notes the Australian Antarctic Division.

That’s alarming, because the glacier holds back a much more vast catchment of ice that, were its vulnerable parts to flow into the ocean, could produce a sea level rise of more than 11 feet — which is comparable to the impact from a loss of the West Antarctica ice sheet. And that’s “a conservative lower limit,” says lead study author Jamin Greenbaum, a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin.

If you haven’t already done the math, this means we could see well upwards of 20 feet of sea-level rise over the next few centuries, double the rise expected from the West Antarctic ice sheet alone — and those are conservative estimates.

Though it’ll be awful for the entire world, the newly liberated Antarctic ice melt will affect some of us more than others. The Northern Hemisphere (including, of course, North America) will be hit particularly hard: As Antarctica melts, it exercises less gravitational pull on the seas, and will head northward.

Researchers have made it pretty clear that the West Antarctic ice sheet’s collapse is unstoppable. The Totten Glacier has almost reached that same point. “The ice loss to the ocean may soon be irreversible unless atmospheric and oceanic conditions change so that snowfall outpaces coastal melting,” the researchers said in a press release. So with climate change moving forward — something that’s not likely to change anytime soon — it’s probably too late for both of these ice blobs. “[I]t’s difficult to see how a process that starts now would be reversed, or reversible, in a warming world,” one of the study’s coauthors, Martin Siegert, told Mooney.

So maybe just cross your fingers and hope that your grandchildren are born with gills.

John Light|17 Mar 2015

On Thin (and Rapidly Disappearing) Ice

This small Alaskan town is the front line of America’s battle with climate change.

Colleen Swan holds an unusual municipal title—town “relocation project manager.” Because her entire town might soon relocate.

Swan lives in Kivalina, Alaska, a tiny island town with a population just above 350 people. The problem is that, thanks to climate change, warmer temperatures and higher seas are eroding the island’s shores at an alarming rate. “Strange things are happening up here that people need to be aware of,” she says. “And they’re only going to get worse.”

Kivalina is essentially a sandbar off the coast of Alaska that used to be 2.9 square miles, but today clocks in at 1.9 square miles (Central Park in New York City, for comparison, is about 1.3 square miles). The community of Inupiat Alaskan natives who call it home were historically semi-nomadic hunters, but in 1905 the U.S. government built a school on the island, and the community coalesced around it. Its permanence, however, was fleeting—the island will be inhospitable within 10-15 years, according to a 2006 analysis by the Army Corps of Engineers. That makes Kivalina a northerly test case for a scenario that’s already happening farther south—in Miami as well as in North Carolina’s Outer Banks (read the cover story from Audubon’s March-April issue).

Encroaching Waters

Located above the Arctic Circle, Kivalina experiences brutal winters for about nine months a year, and until recently, the water surrounding the island froze several feet thick; on hunting expeditions for whales or seals or fish, hunters would camp right on the ice. Today that’s far too risky: The Inupiat used to ride snowmobiles over nearby rivers, treating them as roads—since there are no real roads or even a bridge to connect Kivalina with the mainland—but after a few snowmobiles fell through the ice in the middle of winter, boats became the only option.

The thick ice also used to serve as a barrier, keeping the relentless ocean away from sandy land vulnerable to erosion. Now, even into the heart of winter, the ocean cuts through ice to eat away at the shoreline. A rock revetment, or retaining wall, was constructed in 2008 to slow erosion. It’s helped, says Shearer, but doesn’t stop the flooding—another consequence of the ice-less sea.

The erosion brought about by global warming is compounded by increasingly variable weather that makes it harder for the Inupiat to survive on the island. Sometimes, says Swan, it’ll be the regular -30 degrees Fahrenheit one day and then break the freezing point the next. “We’ve had rain, we’ve had subzero temperatures, we’ve had wet snow, we’ve had a lot of wind from the south, wind from the north,” she says. The animals don’t know what to do; some starve to death after melting ice prevents them from getting to their prey, and some abandon the migration and behavioral patterns that have made it possible for the Inupiat to survive for centuries. “It’s been very hard to find caribou,” says Swan. “That’s the main meat for us.”

Stalled Politics

That Kivalina was facing an imminent crisis was clear back in the early 1990s; the Arctic is experiencing climate change twice as fast as the rest of the world. Despite many studies, many books, many floods, and many fears, in 2009 the federal Government Accountability Office essentially declared that even though the threat had been obvious for years, nothing had been done to save the people of the sinking hamlet.

“What they’re dealing with is not something they’re going to be dealing with alone,” says Christine Shearer, a researcher at UC Irvine and author of Kivalina: A Climate Change Story. Unfortunately, she adds, “we don’t really have relocation policies, we don’t have a government agency in charge of it.”

Last month, Sally Jewell, Secretary of the Interior, became the first U.S. cabinet member to ever visit Kivalina, making a brief stop to hear from residents. But Swan is doubtful that any policy could save the island at this point—what’s left is to relocate the village, a daunting challenge for a population that is impoverished, isolated, and non-white. Relocating would cost somewhere north of $100 million, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, yet Obama’s proposed plan to assist the coastal regions of Alaska only includes $50 million for all of the state’s coastal communities. During Jewell’s visit, she announced that the Department of the Interior would provide another $8 million, says the Native Times, to “fund projects that promote tribal climate change adaptation.”

“I don’t know what those [next] steps are going to be yet,” Jewell said at the time, according to KMOM. “But what I do know is the situation out here is very serious, and it’s indicative of the kind of impacts we’re seeing in climate change everywhere, that this is probably the beginning of what may be to come in other areas.”

Swan was surprised and pleased by Jewell’s visit, but says she’s not sure what will come of it. In the current Congress, climate change’s status as a political punching bag seems to preclude anything being done, no matter how dire the circumstances. To the people of Kilvana, however, the debate over whether global warming is fact or fiction has been settled. The issue has been researched enough, they say, and now is the time to act.

Dan Nosowitz|Mar 26, 2015

Scientists: Orbital Variations Main Cause of Climate Change

Global warming theorists have taken yet another hit with a new study out of Denmark which demonstrates that variations in Earth’s orbit are the primary causes of climate change, and have been for at least the last 1.4 billion years.
Scientists from the University of Southern Denmark and the China National Petroleum Corporation investigated marine sediment from the Xiamaling Formation in China and determined that the sediment shows evidence that “the same orbital forcing that caused the climate to change 1.4 billion years ago is the underlying force behind global warming today,” the Daily Caller reports.

The research, published in PNAS, states: “There is a wealth of evidence pointing to dramatic short-term climate change on Earth over the last few million years. Much of this climate change is driven by variations of Earth’s orbit around the Sun with characteristic frequencies known as Milankovitch cycles.”
Milankovitch cycles are fluctuations which occur in Earth’s orbit every 20,000, 40,000 and 100,000 years, which bring about an ice age every 100,000 years or so. Currently, Earth is in the middle of a warming period, and has been for the last 11,000 years, Dr.  Donald Canfield, professor at the Nordic Center for Earth Evolution at the university and one of the principle researchers, said, the Daily Caller reported.
“This research will also help us understand how Milankovitch cyclicity ultimately controls climate change on Earth,” Canfield said in a statement.
“The way our planet revolves around the sun is the ultimate control knob over the climate,” the Daily Caller commented.

The study approximates findings from a study of sea surface temperatures and diatoms, marine algae, from Aarhus University in Denmark. Researcher Marit-Solveig Seidenkrantz commented: “We know that the sun is very important for our climate, but the impact is not clear. Climate change appears to be either strengthened or weakened by solar activity. The extent of the sun’s influence over time is thus not constant, but we can now conclude that the climate system is more receptive to the impact of the sun during cold periods, at least in the North Atlantic region,” Eureka Alert reported.
Other climate researchers dispute the effect of the sun and Earth orbits on climate change.
Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told the Daily Caller: “While the ranking of individual years can be affected by chaotic weather patterns, the long-term trends are attributable to drivers of climate change that right now are dominated by human emissions of greenhouse gases” from fossil fuels.
Science 2.0 states: “Natural forces have always caused climate on Earth to fluctuate — sometimes quite a bit. We can’t control everything. The Earth is still going to orbit the sun and such orbital forcing of climate change happens over thousands of years and brings ice ages and warming periods.”

John Blosser|11 Mar 2015

[It’s no secret that cyclical changes are partially responsible for global warming. As the poles tip closer to the sun, the world has no choice but to get warmer. However, that doesn’t alter the fact that mankind has exacerbated the situation by allowing the greenhouse gasses to build up to the point we are at currently. The fact remains that if we cut pollution we will slow  global warming.]

Antarctica Records Hottest Day Ever, New Study Finds Rapid Acceleration of Ice Melt

The warmest temperature ever recorded in Antarctica may have occurred last Tuesday with a thermometer reading 63.5 degrees Fahrenheit at Argentina’s Esperanza Base on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, according to Weather Underground. The previous record was set the day before at 63.3 degrees at Argentina’s Marambio Base on a small islet just off the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula.

Prior to this week’s record heat wave for the icy continent, the hottest known temperature in Antarctica was 62.8 degrees Fahrenheit, recorded at Esperanza Base on April 24, 1961. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has not officially declared last week’s temperatures as all-time weather records for Antarctica, but “the Argentinian weather service has verified that the temperatures measured at Esperanza Base and Marambio Base were the highest ever measured at each site,” said Weather Underground.

The WMO has traditionally had a more narrow definition of Antarctica, which only include sites south of the Antarctic Circle and not the Esperanza and Marambio bases. But even if the WMO doesn’t officially recognize the recordings, the message is clear. The Antarctic peninsula is one of the fastest warming spots on the planet.

The record heat coincides with the release of a new study from Science that finds “ice shelves in West Antarctica have lost as much as 18 percent of their volume over the last two decades, with rapid acceleration occurring over the last decade. The study found that from 1994 to 2003, the overall loss of ice shelf volume across the continent was negligible, but over the last decade West Antarctic losses increased by 70 percent,” says Think Progress.

The heat wave also coincides with Robert Swan and his 2041 team’s Antarctic Expedition, which wrapped up last week. The point of the trip was to document the firsthand effects of climate change, which was obviously very apparent.

Cole Mellino|March 30, 2015

Arctic ice melt sets yet another record

Every year around the end of February, after a long winter, Arctic ice reaches its maximum extent. This year that happened around Feb. 25, when it encompassed 14.54 million square kilometers (5.61 million square miles) of ice around the North Pole.

Sound like a lot? It’s not. Really, really not. This year’s maximum extent was the lowest on record.

Ice extent (area covered by at least 15 percent by ice) for 2015 (solid blue line) compared with 2012 (dashed) and the average from 1981-2010 (black line).NSIDC

The plot above shows the situation. The solid line shows the average ice extent over the year (measured from 1981 to 2010) and the gray area represents a statistical measure of random fluctuations; anything inside the gray is more or less indistinguishable from the average (in other words, an excursion up or down inside the gray area could just be due to random chance).

The dashed line was the extent in 2012, when unusual conditions created the lowest minimum extent in recorded history. The solid blue line is 2015 so far. As you can see, it’s already reached maximum, and it’s well below average. It’s also outside the gray zone, meaning it’s statistically significant. It’s the earliest the peak has been reached as well. Both these facts point accusingly at global warming — more warmth, and shorter winters.

We have to be careful here, because individual records can be misleading. The trend is what’s important. However, the trend is very, very clear: Ice extent at the North Pole is decreasing rapidly over time. Note that this record low extent is about 1 percent lower than the previous record … which was last year.

Here’s a NASA video describing this year’s low maximum:

The implications of losing Arctic ice are profound. First, high latitudes are more affected by warming; the temperature trends in the extreme north are twice what they are at lower latitudes.

Melting ice does contribute to sea-level rise, though not as much as melting glaciers on land. The bad news: Those glaciers are melting faster than ever. This has a second effect that may prove just as disastrous, too. All that fresh water dumped into the salty ocean changes the way the water circulates around the world. This circulation is one of the key ways warmth gets redistributed around the planet. Disrupting this cannot possibly be good news for us. You can read more about this at RealClimate, and climatologist Michael Mann discussed it in a recent interview.

At the other pole, Antarctic land ice is melting at a fantastic rate, and the slight increase in sea ice is not even coming close to making up for it. Deniers love to point at the sea ice, but that comes and goes every year and is roughly stable; the land ice is melting away at huge rates. Claiming global warming is wrong because Antarctic sea ice is increasing is like pointing toward a healing paper cut on your finger when your femoral artery has been punctured.

Arctic ice is like the fabled canary in a coal mine; it’s showing us very clearly what we’re in for. And what’s headed our way is a warmer planet, an even more disrupted climate, and a world of hurt if we do nothing about it.

Phil Plait|30 Mar 2015

This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Mexico just shamed the rest of the world with its climate plan

Mexico is the first developing country to formally make its climate action pledge ahead of U.N. negotiations to be held in Paris later this year. And its plan is actually pretty ambitious, analysts say.

Mexico on Friday said it intends to have its greenhouse gas emissions peak by 2026 and then begin to decline. It will cut its “black carbon” emissions — particulate pollution generated by burning fuels like wood and diesel — in half by 2030. The net effect is that, by 2030, Mexico’s emissions will be 25 percent lower than if the country had continued without making any changes, and by 2050, emissions will be 50 percent below 2000 levels. The country is also working on reducing its “carbon intensity” — the amount of CO2 emitted per unit of GDP.

“That would make Mexico’s announcement a bit more ambitious than what is expected from China, but not as ambitious as what the U.S. will offer,” InsideClimate News’s John Cushman notes, referring to the November 2014 agreement between the Obama administration and China. Developing countries like China and Mexico are expected to allow their emissions to keep rising for a few years while their economies grow and their people rise out of poverty, whereas rich nations like the U.S., which have done most of the polluting in the past, are expected to start cutting emissions right away.

“While the devil is in the details, Mexico’s plan to peak its emissions by 2026 is particularly encouraging and should inspire others to follow a similar course,” said Jennifer Morgan of the World Resources Institute, a think tank that’s tracking progress toward a 2015 climate deal.

As part of the process of working toward a climate pact, 190 countries are each submitting their own plan for how they intend to voluntarily reduce emissions (in wonk speak, the plans are known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, or INDCs). In the years ahead, the U.N. will monitor each country’s progress toward realizing its plan, though the international body won’t have much power to penalize countries that don’t meet their goals. Developing countries and the European Union had pushed for a binding treaty that would punish nations that don’t curb emissions as agreed, but Obama would never be able to get that sort of treaty by the current U.S. Senate, so, in order to keep the U.S. in the game, the U.N. is now working toward a nonbinding agreement.

The U.S. is expected to submit its plan by the U.N.’s deadline, the end of the first quarter of 2015, but other nations are not on track to do so. Still, not everyone is dragging their feet: The E.U., Switzerland, and Norway have outlined their INDCs, representing more than 10 percent of global emissions. And once the U.S. submits its plan, a third of world emissions will be accounted for.

Analysts tracking the process say many countries’ delays are probably at least partially strategic: If a country gets its commitment in at the last minute, the world has less of a chance to ask it to commit more. China and India, the world’s first and third biggest polluters, plan to submit their INDCs this summer.

Mexico’s contribution — and China’s anticipated contribution, based on last November’s joint announcement with America — set the reductions for the developing world on a fairly ambitious path. That’s encouraging, given that differences between rich and poor nations have scuttled past attempts at a climate deal. But some developing countries (India, notably) have been difficult to pin down on their likely commitments.

It will take commitments from all of the world’s major polluters, rich and poor alike, to put us on something even resembling a sustainable path — and with so many INDCs as yet undeclared, it’s impossible to determine if 2015 will be the year that the U.N. finally pulls off the climate deal its been attempting for decades. And even under a best-case scenario, diplomats have repeatedly warned that any deal likely won’t be enough to keep global warming under 2 degrees Celsius, the threshold scientists say we must meet to fend off the worst climate impacts.

Still, gotta start somewhere, and Mexico’s announcement is an encouraging step. Olé!

John Light|30 Mar 2015

 

U.S. Commits To Slashing Emissions Up To 28 Percent By 2025

WASHINGTON – The United States officially submitted its emissions-cutting target to the United Nations on Tuesday morning, formalizing its commitment to reducing emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.

The Obama administration had previously announced the goal in its work with China on a bilateral climate agreement. The Tuesday submission makes the pledge official.

“With today’s submission of the U.S. target, countries accounting for more than half of total carbon pollution from the energy sector have submitted or announced what they will do in the post-2020 period to combat climate change,” wrote Brian Deese, senior adviser to the president, in a blog post Tuesday morning.

Under a system established through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, individual countries are putting forward their own emissions commitments, referred to as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, or INDCs. Countries are supposed to submit their INDCs to the U.N. by March 31. The submissions will be the basis for an international climate agreement, which leaders expect to reach at the upcoming negotiation session in Paris at the end of 2015.

The U.S. described its target as “fair and ambitious” in the U.N. document, and said that the country has already undertaken “substantial policy action to reduce its emissions.” The submission says that the U.S. is already on a path to reach its previously submitted goal of cutting emissions 17 percent by 2020, and the new commitment will require the country to speed up its rate of emissions reduction.

The European Union, Norway and Mexico submitted their commitments last week.

The Bicameral Task Force on Climate Change, which includes 34 Democratic senators and 83 Democratic House members, sent a letter to President Barack Obama on Tuesday praising the commitment. “One of the three pillars of the Climate Action Plan is to lead international efforts to address global climate change. As a nation that has contributed more than a quarter of all global carbon pollution, it is our responsibility to lead,” they wrote. “As a nation already feeling the effects and costs of climate change, it is also in our national interest to do so.”

Jennifer Morgan, global director of the climate program at the World Resources Institute, called the U.S. target “a serious and achievable commitment” in a statement. Based on WRI’s research, the U.S. can meet the goal by using existing federal authority, and make even further reductions as technology advances, Morgan said.

Other environmental groups were more critical of the submission, arguing that the U.S. could make a more ambitious commitment. Greenpeace legislative representative Kyle Ash said in a statement that the pledge “begins to treat the wound, but does not stop the bleeding.” “As the world’s second largest emitter, the US must strengthen its commitment to climate solutions before Paris to ensure an agreement that immediately spurs the necessary transition away from fossil fuels and towards 100 percent renewable energy,” said Ash.

The Obama administration is expected to face staunch opposition from the Republican-led Congress to any sort of international climate agreement. It remains unclear at this point whether the international agreement will be finalized as a treaty, which would require Senate approval, or take some other legal form that does not require approval. The Obama administration has long sought an alternative format to try to avoid a battle with the Senate.

Kate Sheppard|huffingtonpost.com|03/31/2015

Polar Bears Can’t Rely On Land-Based Foods When The Ice Melts, Study Finds

 Polar bears need sea ice in order to hunt for seals and other food in the ocean. But climate change is taking that away from them.

The bears are spending more and more time on land, but there is not enough food there to truly sustain them, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

Researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey, Washington State University and conservation group Polar Bears International conducted a first-of-its-kind review of terrestrial Arctic ecosystems’ ability to support polar bear populations with enough of the energy-dense food they need.

The results are grim.

“There simply isn’t enough food to feed polar bears on land,” study co-author and Polar Bears International chief scientist Steven Amstrup told The Huffington Post.

Several earlier studies of Arctic animals have observed polar bears consuming land-based foods, like geese and their eggs. But this evidence is “absolutely” anecdotal, Amstrup said.

He explained that there have only been about 30 observations of polar bear populations eating on land, among 20,000 to 25,000 bears. Arctic bird eggs are more nourishing than most land-based foods available to the bears, but they are too limited in quantity to sustain entire populations.

Previous terrestrial feeding stories are “really simply a distraction from the threat of climate change and melting sea ice,” Amstrup told HuffPost.

The researchers wrote that more quantitative studies are needed on polar bear feeding habits and nutrition. But, they wrote, “available data do not support the conclusion that polar bears can replace lost access to marine-mammal resources with terrestrially derived foods.”

Amstrup says he definitely sees hope for the future, “if we mitigate the rise of greenhouse gas emissions.” A continued decline in polar bear populations is likely inevitable, as the heat-trapping emissions humans are releasing now will remain for some time and continue to melt the Arctic. But “we could save substantial [polar bear] habitat,” Amstrup said, if “we get our act together.” Arctic sea ice could begin to stabilize in several decades if emissions are reduced, he explained.

Amstrup and others showed in a 2010 study that mitigating greenhouse gas emissions could mean a greater number of polar bears in more places later this century. Current trends and modeling of Arctic sea ice loss this century suggest big trouble for polar bears if greenhouse emissions continue unabated.

But mitigating the impacts of climate change is about far more than polar bears. “They’re not the only creature that will be influenced [by climate change],” Amstrup said. “Ultimately, this is about all of us.”

The polar bears’ Arctic home may be warming about twice as fast as the global average, but the entire planet saw the warmest year on record in 2014, and this year’s winter was likewise the warmest on record.

James Gerken|The Huffington Post|04/01/2015

Extreme Weather

California snowpack at lowest level on record
California’s snowpack is at historically low levels, a casualty of the state’s wimpy winter and ongoing drought.

In Northern California, the Sierra Nevada snowpack’s water content was at its lowest late-March level since records began in 1950, at just 6 percent of the late-March average, the California Department of Water Resources said Monday.

The snow’s water content is a key measurement for water resource managers, since it measures the amount that will trickle into the state’s reservoirs when it melts later in the spring.

More than 98 percent of the state of California remains in some level of drought, according to the most recent U.S. Drought Monitor, a website that tracks drought across the country.

Severe droughts are not new to California. However, the drought has been exacerbated by the state’s warmest winter on record.

A manual snow survey will be conducted Wednesday in the Sierra, about 90 miles east of Sacramento. Normally, snowpack is at its peak April 1.

USA TODAY|4/1/15

Typhoon Maysak Hurtles Towards Central Philippines

MANILA (Reuters) – The Philippines put troops on alert on Wednesday and prepared food and medical supplies as it warned residents and tourists along its eastern coast to be ready for a super typhoon expected to land some time in the next 72 hours.

Typhoon Maysak, initially a top-rated category 5 typhoon, weakened slightly as it moved towards the Philippines, hurtling over the Pacific Ocean with winds gusting up to 225 kph (140 mph), the weather bureau said.

It is expected to further weaken once it hits the central or northern parts of the main Philippine island of Luzon on Saturday or Sunday, the agency said, as the Philippines celebrates the Easter long weekend.

“This is very strong and it will maintain its strength as it nears, although we expect that the typhoon will weaken,” Esperanza Cayanan, an officer at the weather bureau, said in a televised briefing.

“But this will still be typhoon intensity so it will bring strong winds when it makes landfall on the eastern coast,” Cayanan said.

British-based Tropical Storm Risk said Maysak would likely weaken to a category 2 typhoon, with maximum winds of up to 175 kph (110 mph), when it hits land.

The typhoon could damage rice and corn crops in central and northern areas of the Philippines, although damage is likely to be minimal because the major harvest of the national staple rice was finished around February.

Alexander Pama, executive director of the national disaster agency, said the biggest challenge for authorities would be keeping foreign and Filipino tourists traveling to northern provinces for the weekend safe when Maysak makes landfall.

Thousands of Filipinos have already begun traveling to the provinces and popular tourist spots before the Easter weekend.

Maysak is not expected to make landfall where another category 5 typhoon, Haiyan, struck more than a year ago, leaving nearly 8000 dead or missing.

Reporting by Rosemarie Francisco|Editing by Paul Tait and Jeremy Laurence|Reuters|04/01/2015

Genetically Modified Organisms

 Roundup Herbicide Is Endocrine Disruptor in Human Cells at Drinking Water Levels

Roundup is an endocrine disruptor and is toxic to human cells in vitro (tested in culture dishes in the laboratory) at levels permitted in drinking water in Australia, a new study has found.

This is the first study to examine the effects of glyphosate and Roundup on progesterone production by human female cells in an in vitro system that models key aspects of reproduction in women.

Glyphosate alone was less toxic to human cells than glyphosate in a Roundup formulation; both glyphosate and Roundup caused cell death which resulted in decreased progesterone levels – a form of hormone/endocrine disruption. Endocrine disruption did not precede the toxicity to cells but occurred after it. The decreases in progesterone concentrations were caused by reduced numbers of viable cells.

A 24h exposure to a concentration of glyphosate (in Roundup) similar to that recommended as an acceptable level for Australian drinking water caused significant cytotoxicity in vitro, which supports a call for long-term in vivo (in live animals) studies to characterise the toxicity of Roundup.

The possibility that Roundup has endocrine disrupting activity independent of its ability to kill or disable cells needs further study.

Find the Full Study Here:

Authors: Fiona Young, Dao Ho, Danielle Glynn and Vicki Edwards

German agency says IARC glyphosate decision based on poor evidence

The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) commented as rapporteur for the active ingredient glyphosate as part of the EU reevaluation this classification by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) based on the published summary report.

At a meeting of the IARC of the World Health Organization in March 2015 Lyon the gathered experts have classified glyphosate differently based on their available studies, namely as a carcinogen group 2A, so probably carcinogenic to humans. This classification was published in a brief report in the journal “Lancet” on March 20, 2015.

The pesticide active ingredient glyphosate has been evaluated by the authorities responsible for the health assessment in national, European and other international institutions, including the WHO / FAO Joint Meeting on Pesticide Residues (JMPR) after considering all available studies, not causing cancer.

The publication of 20 March 2015 in the magazine “Lancet”, classifying glyphosate as a Group 2A carcinogen (“probably carcinogenic to humans”) was based, according to BfR, on available information scientifically poorly understood and apparently only based on a few studies.

This risk is derived from three epidemiological studies from the USA, Canada and Sweden. However, this assessment has not been confirmed in a large cohort of well-cited “Agricultural Health Study” and other studies.

In the current report of the BfR in the EU, however, over 30 epidemiological studies were evaluated. In the overall assessment, there was no validated relationship between Glyphosate exposition and an increased risk of Non-Hodgkin lymphoma or other cancers.

David Tribe|GMO Pundit|March 24, 2015

[One report is enough for me.]

GMOs Will Not Feed the World, New Report Concludes

By the year 2050, the Earth’s population will reach more than 9 billion people. With so many mouths to feed, agribusiness giants have argued that genetically modified crops are the answer to global food security as these plants have been spliced and diced to resist herbicides and pesticides and (theoretically) yield more crops.

However, a new analysis from the Environmental Working Group (EWG) slams this conventional agribusiness argument—and recommends much more sustainable solutions to feed the world.

The report, Feeding the World Without GMOs, argues that genetically engineered crops (also known as GE or GMOs) have not significantly improved the yields of crops such as corn and soy. Emily Cassidy, an EWG research analyst who authored the report, found that in the last 20 years, yields of both GE corn and soy have been no different from traditionally bred corn and soy grown in western Europe, where GE crops are banned. Additionally, a recent case study in Africa found that crops that were crossbred for drought tolerance using traditional techniques improved yields 30 percent more than GE varieties, she wrote.

The report also said that in the two decades that GE crops have been a mainstay in conventional agriculture, they “have not substantially improved global food security” and have instead increased the use of toxic herbicides and led to herbicide-resistant “superweeds.” (FYI: superweeds have spread to more than 60 million acres of U.S. farmland, wreaking environmental and economic havoc along the way).

She pointed out that while corn and soybeans take up the vast majority (about 80 percent) of global land devoted to growing GE crops, they are not even used to feed people but instead as animal feed or fuel.

Unfortunately, this practice is unlikely to change in light of increased consumption of meat around the world, as well as U.S. biofuel policy requiring production of millions of gallons of corn ethanol to blend into gasoline, Cassidy observed. “Seed companies’ investment in improving the yields of GMOs in already high-yielding areas does little to improve food security; it mainly helps line the pockets of seed and chemical companies and producers of corn ethanol,” she said. “The world’s resources would be better spent focusing on strategies to actually increase food supplies and access to basic resources for the poor, small farmers who need it most.”

Gary Hirshberg, chairman of Just Label It, an organization advocating for federal labeling of GMO foods that also provided funding for the EWG report added, “Biotech companies and their customers in chemical agriculture have been attempting to sell the benefits of GMOs for two decades. Between exaggerated claims about feeding the world and a dramatic escalation in the use of toxic pesticides, it is no wonder consumers are increasingly skeptical.”

Fortunately, as Cassidy noted, there are ways out of this mess that will not only produce enough food for the world’s burgeoning population but will also make minimal impacts on our environment. It comes down to four main approaches:

• Smarter use of fertilizers: Fertilizer should be used in places with nutrient-poor soils where it would have the greatest impact, instead of over-fertilizing industrial-scale farms. This switch could increase global production of major cereals by 30 percent, the report said.
• A dramatic shift in biofuels policy: A World Resources Institute analysis found that by 2050, biofuels mandates could consume the equivalent of 29 percent of all calories currently produced on the world’s croplands. According to the report, reversing course on food-based biofuels policies could alleviate the need to double the global calorie supply.
• A significant reduction in food waste: By weight, a third of all food grown around the world—accounting for a quarter of calories—goes uneaten, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. Food gets tossed before it reaches the market, much less anyone’s plate. So in theory, by eliminating all food waste in fields, grocery stores and at home would increase the global calorie supply by 33 percent, the report noted.
• A better diet: Meat production currently uses up three-quarters of all agricultural land, and on average, it takes about 10 calories of animal feed to produce just one calorie of meat. This suggests that a shift from grain-fed beef to a diet emphasizing chicken or grass-fed beef could reduce the amount of land devoted to growing animal feed such as corn and soy (Beef also stands far above the production of other livestock for its negative environmental impact).

Lorraine Chow|March 31, 2015

Monsanto’s “Discredit Bureau” Really Does Exist

Reuters is reporting that Monsanto is demanding a sit-down with members of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). This international scientific body is being called on the carpet for reporting that Monsanto’s most widely sold herbicide, which is inextricably linked to the majority of their genetically engineered products, is probably carcinogenic to humans.

In a DO-YOU-KNOW-WHO-WE-ARE moment, Monsanto’s vice president of global regulatory affairs Philip Miller said the following in interview:

“We question the quality of the assessment. The WHO has something to explain.”

Evidence for the carcinogenicity of Glyphosate comes from a peer-reviewed study published in March of 2015 in the respected journal The Lancet Oncology.

Carcinogenicity of tetrachlorvinphos, parathion, malathion, diazinon, and glyphosateGlyphosate is a broad-spectrum herbicide, currently with the highest production volumes of all herbicides. It is used in more than 750 different products for agriculture, forestry, urban, and home applications. Its use has increased sharply with the development of genetically modified glyphosate-resistant crop varieties. Glyphosate has been detected in air during spraying, in water, and in food. There WAS limited evidence in humans for the carcinogenicity of glyphosate.

Glyphosate has been detected in the blood and urine of agricultural workers, indicating absorption. Soil microbes degrade glyphosate to aminomethylphosphoric acid (AMPA). Blood AMPA detection after poisonings suggests intestinal microbial metabolism in humans. Glyphosate and glyphosate formulations induced DNA and chromosomal damage in mammals, and in human and animal cells in vitro. One study reported increases in blood markers of chromosomal damage (micronuclei) in residents of several communities after spraying of glyphosate formulations.
[emphasis mine]

Recently, I attended a talk by Monsanto’s Dr. William “Bill” Moar who presented the latest project in their product pipeline dealing with RNA. Most notably, he also spoke about Monsanto’s efforts to educate citizens about the scientific certainty of the safety of their genetically engineered products. The audience was mostly agricultural students many of whom were perhaps hoping for the only well-paid internships and jobs in their field.

One student asked what Monsanto was doing to counter the “bad science” around their work. Dr. Moar, perhaps forgetting that this was a public event, then revealed that Monsanto indeed had “an entire department” (waving his arm for emphasis) dedicated to “debunking” science which disagreed with theirs. As far as I know this is the first time that a Monsanto functionary has publically admitted that they have such an entity which brings their immense political and financial weight to bear on scientists who dare to publish against them. The Discredit Bureau will not be found on their official website.

The challenge for Monsanto’s Discredit Bureau is steep in attacking the unimpeachably respected Lancet and the international scientific bodies of WHO and IARC. However, they have no choice but to attack since the stakes are so very high for them. Glyphosate is their hallmark product upon which the majority of their profits are based. Make no mistake, this is extremely bad news for Monsanto.

Monsanto holds up the sheer abundance of their own well-funded studies citing the safety of Glyphosate, done over only the past twenty years which is a short period of time in scientific inquiry particularly when dissenting research is actively suppressed.  They also hold up the findings of regulatory bodies, particularly in the United States where the revolving door between agrochemical corporations and government spins at high speed.

Critics of the agrochemical industry have often cited the history of these corporations who rush their products to market with protestations of safety only to discover down the road that they have become persistent ecological and health nightmares. We are seeing the end of that road for Glyphosate.

Energy

4 years after Fukushima, Japan considers restarting nuclear facilities

Progress at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant may be softening some opposition

A pressing issue is what to do with nearly 158 million gallons of contaminated water stored at Fukushima site

‘If they are going to be restarting plants in Japan, they need to think harder about it,’ nuclear expert says

On many Friday evenings, 38-year-old Tomo Iwabuchi and six friends can be found on a street corner in Fukushima City, banging drums, chanting and singing. “Zero nukes!” Iwabuchi yells into a microphone as a few pedestrians stride by.

“The Fukushima disaster — it’s not over yet,” chimes in Kazushi Machida, another demonstrator, referring to the nuclear power plant about 50 miles southeast that experienced a triple meltdown after Japan’s massive March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. “The cleanup is still going on, and yet the government wants to restart other nuclear plants!”

Nearly four years after Japan shut down all of its atomic energy plants in the wake of the disaster, the country is inching toward a momentous decision on whether to bring some of them back on line, perhaps within the next year.

Such a move would have been unthinkable immediately after the disaster, which struck terror in the hearts of many Japanese and caused concern around the world. Though nuclear power provided 30% of Japan’s energy before the accident, the government of then-Prime Minister Naoto Kan called on the country to give up its reliance on the technology, and opinion surveys showed that up to three-quarters of the public supported such a move.

An October poll by Kyodo News found 60% of respondents still opposed to restarts, but the conversation has started to shift because of a variety of factors, including the introduction of more robust regulation and the creation of new oversight bodies, and the installation in late 2012 of a government led by Shinzo Abe, who introduced a new energy policy last year backing nuclear power.

Japan is the only nation to have nuclear bombs dropped on it, and emotions about radiation here are deep and complex. But mounting concern about higher electricity costs, greater dependence on imported fossil fuels and rising carbon emissions are also figuring into Japan’s calculus. After an initial summer of brownouts, the country replaced lost nuclear power by revving up plants fueled by natural gas and coal.

Progress at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant may be softening some opposition as well. The four damaged reactors have been in “cold shutdown” mode for more than three years, and about 7,000 people are on site doing decommissioning work. They reached a milestone in December by completing the removal of all spent and fresh fuel from the spent-fuel pool in Unit 4.

But decommissioning activities are expected to take at least two decades, and inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency said last month that the situation at Fukushima remains “very complex.” Worker safety is still a critical concern, and high radiation means technicians are still unable to enter some structures and must rely on robots to inspect some damaged reactors.

One of the most pressing issues highlighted by the IAEA is what to do with nearly 158 million gallons — or 600,000 cubic meters — of contaminated water being stored in an ever-growing tank farm on the site. With engineers still unable to stop groundwater from flowing into the damaged reactors, 300 cubic meters of water is added to the inventory each day. In January, a worker inspecting a tank fell and died.

This month, Tokyo Electric Power Co., known as Tepco, said 750 tons of water contaminated with strontium-90 may have seeped from the tank area into the ground. Small amounts of contaminated water have also been leaking into the Pacific Ocean, Tepco acknowledged last month, though it called the amounts inconsequential.

Tests in January found that only 0.3% of all seafood samples caught by the Fisheries Agency of Japan exceeded legal limits for radiation. But with fresh leaks occurring, concern about the effect on marine life has not abated, and coastal fishing off Fukushima prefecture remains suspended, as it has been since the accident.

Whether the government can find a technically feasible — and politically palatable — solution to the water issue is crucial both for reducing hazards for workers at the Fukushima site and building confidence at home and abroad that Japan is turning the corner on the disaster and is ready to restart other nuclear plants.

“This issue of water, it involves everyone — from fishermen, to the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, to civil engineers at the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism,” said Tatsuya Shinkawa, director of the Cabinet Office’s Contaminated Water and Decommissioning Issues Team. “Other countries are asking questions too, so the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is involved as well.”

I think the Tepco people are criminals but they have never been dealt with. People in the nuclear industry have learned from this that they will never be punished.- Hiromitsu Ito, fisherman from Ogatsu, Japan

Edwin Lyman, coauthor of “Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster” and a nuclear expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the post-accident management of water “has been a lot more complex than anyone imagined.”

“If they are going to be restarting plants in Japan, they need to think harder about it,” he said.

Over the last four years, Tepco and the government have tried, with limited success, to halt the inflow of groundwater, and now are even trying to freeze the ground around the reactors. They’ve installed systems to treat the contaminated water, removing a variety of radioactive contaminants, including cesium and strontium. The company said March 16 that 90% of stored water would be processed through those systems by May.

But those systems can’t remove radioactive tritium, which is closely related to hydrogen. Water is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen, and tritium bonds like hydrogen with oxygen to produce “tritiated water.” Tritiated water is odorless and colorless, and the tritium is hard to isolate.

Tritium is not considered as dangerous as cesium or strontium, because it emits very low-energy radiation, has a short half-life and if ingested leaves the body relatively quickly. Tritium is one of the least dangerous radionuclides, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The IAEA has even called on Japan to consider releasing its stores of tritiated water, presumably into the ocean.

“But any release of radioactivity is very emotional,” said Lake Barrett, director of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Three Mile Island cleanup site office from 1980 to 1984, who is now a special advisor to Tepco’s president.

“Fishermen will tell you if this is released, no one will buy our fish. South Korea and China may protest and act holier-than-thou, even though they have reactors that release tritium on a regular basis,” Barrett said. “My opinion is it should be released, but Japan is looking at all the available technology to deal with this.”

A tritium task force has been studying the issue.

“We’ve got about one year to figure this out,” said Teruaki Kobayashi, general manager in Tepco’s nuclear power and plant siting division. “As of now, inside the company, we have no certain direction about what to do, but after we hear the suggestions from them, we will decide our course of action.”

Central to the deliberations is an Orange County company, Kurion, which received a multimillion-dollar contract from Tepco last year to try to devise a solution for the tritiated water.

Gaetan Bonhomme, chief technical officer for Kurion, said the company has a system that can separate tritium from water but needs to show that it can scale it up to deal with the massive amounts of liquid at Fukushima. Kurion’s system, he believes, could remove the tritium from 800,000 cubic meters of water so that only about a cubic meter of the radioactive material remained.

By his estimates, the process would take five to eight years, and cost about $1 billion to set up, plus several hundred million dollars a year to operate.

“Some people will say that’s expensive, but compared to what? I’d be very interested to talk to someone who says you should release this water, and discuss the costs of that,” he said. “How would you do it? What would be the impact? And how would you compensate people who might be affected?”

(Decommissioning is already expected to cost $8.5 billion, Kobayashi said, but Tepco believes it will need an additional $8.7 billion over the next 10 years for “unanticipated” expenses.)

In Japan, cost considerations may take a back seat to other concerns, such as convincing the public that Tepco is adhering to national guidelines on releases of radioactive material.

Japan, Bonhomme said, has regulations both on the concentration of tritiated water that can be released and annual total volume limits. Tepco could find ways to dilute the tritiated water, he said, but the amount of tritium it has on hand now is 40 times the annual release limit.

Barrett said that the rules should be changed and that technology to remove tritium is “not practical.” But he noted that “the Japanese are much less sensitive to cost than we Americans.” The Three Mile Island cleanup cost about $2.3 billion in today’s dollars, he said, but the Fukushima cleanup “is much more expensive than I would have thought.”

No matter what Tepco or the government spends on remediation and decommissioning at Fukushima, it’s unlikely to convince people like Hiromitsu Ito that restarting nuclear plants is a good idea.

The fisherman from the northern town of Ogatsu near Sendai says he’s long been against nuclear power and he’s outraged by the fact that no one has been criminally prosecuted for the Fukushima meltdowns.

“I think the Tepco people are criminals but they have never been dealt with,” he said. “People in the nuclear industry have learned from this that they will never be punished.”

Eiju Hangai is another skeptic. A former Tepco board member, he retired from his position a year before the Fukushima disaster and now has thrown himself into promoting solar power.

In the city of Minamisoma, just north of the mandatory evacuation zone around the nuclear plant, he has built a small solar park and conducts workshops for schoolchildren, teaching them about green energy.

“I am one of the people responsible for this accident. I need to help the reconstruction of this area,” he said. “I don’t think we should even be talking about nuclear now — not until we do a much better job of raising awareness about renewable energy.”

Julie Makinen|LA Times|3/30/15

Six Flags to Build New Jersey’s Largest Solar Farm and Become First Theme Park to Be Entirely Self-Powered

New Jersey theme park Six Flags Great Adventure announced that it is partnering with New Jersey-based KDC Solar to construct a solar farm that will provide virtually all its energy needs. It will be the largest solar farm in New Jersey and will make the sprawling, 2,200-acre Six Flags Great Adventure the first theme park in the country to be entirely self-powered. The park is located in Jackson Township in central New Jersey, 26 miles from Asbury Park on the Jersey Shore.

“We are continually searching for new ways to operate more efficiently and enhance our role as good stewards of the environment,” said the park’s president  John Fitzgerald. “Solar power will significantly reduce our reliance on harmful fossil fuels.”

Six Flags said that the 90-acre, 21.9 megawatt (MW) facility will take about 16-18 months to construct and should be up and running in late 2016. It’s expected to produce about 98 percent of the park’s electricity, accounting for some cloudy days.

Jackson township councilman Kenneth Bressi told the Asbury Park Press that the township, whose planning board gave the project the green light earlier this month, is enthusiastic about it because the undeveloped property east of the park that the solar farm will be located on will be taxed at a higher rate and the new facility helps assure the park will stay open for the long term.

“God knows what their electric bill is and what they’re going to be saving annually,” said Bressi. “They wouldn’t be doing projects like this if they weren’t going to around for a long while, so this is great for Great Adventure and for Jackson.”

David Beavers, solar campaign organizer at Environment New Jersey, also expressed enthusiasm for the project, telling the Asbury Park Press, “This is going to be the biggest installation in New Jersey, which is going to be a huge step in the right direction.”

It was also revealed the 18,000 trees would be removed to make way for the facility. Six Flags spokesperson Kristin Siebeneicher told the Asbury Park Press the trees were mostly in poor condition and that the Six Flags and KDC Solar would be replanting 25,000 trees over a seven-year period.

“Hearing that they are going to be replanting those trees, it definitely sounds like it’s going to be a worthwhile initiative,” said Beavers.

While Six Flags Great Adventure is boasting it will be the largest U.S. theme park to rely entirely on clean energy, it doesn’t have much competition yet. Last April, Tampa’s much smaller, 150-acre Legoland Florida announced that it was the first U.S. theme park to run entirely on renewables for one day when it did so to celebrate Earth Day. The park’s Imagination Zone area features permanent solar panels that continue to feed energy to that section of the park.

Currently, the Tinton Fall Solar Farm and Pilesgrove Solar Farms are the largest solar facilities in New Jersey, each generating about 20 MW of power. New Jersey ranks sixth among states in the amount of solar installed in 2014 with 239.8 MW and currently has the third highest amount of installed capacity after California and Arizona, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.

Anastasia Pantsios|March 28, 2015

In Texas Oil Town, Early Signs Of Economic Strain As Drilling Slows

NEW YORK, March 29 (Reuters) – Sales tax receipts in the thriving oil town of Midland, Texas, fell this month, only the third decline in five years and one of the first signs of how low oil prices are beginning to ripple beyond oil company bottom lines and into the wider economy.

Midland’s sales tax revenues, which reflect commercial and residential spending, dipped to $5.119 million in March from $5.126 million in March 2014, according to data from the Texas Comptroller released last week.

The fall was slight, but it was just the third year-over-year decline since April 2010, when an oil production boom was just beginning to transform Midland.

It also marks a stark and potentially protracted turnaround from recent years: last year in March, when oil prices soared above $100 a barrel, sales tax receipts increased 11 percent.

“These numbers are more significant to me than anything else,” said Karr Ingham, an economist who compiles the Texas PetroIndex, an annual analysis of the state’s energy economy.

“There is no doubt that local spending is going to suffer, and we are just seeing the beginning of this,” said Ingham, who expects an economic downturn to last for months and potentially years, even after oil prices rebound.

Midland has a population of around 140,000, and an economic decline there alone should not seriously dent the state economy. However, the town has become a potent symbol of the oil boom, and its economy could shed light on the potential future impact for Texas and other oil producing regions across the country.

Moreover, the fact that the first cracks in the Midland economy are appearing nine months after oil prices began falling, highlight how long it can take for an oil price slump to seep into a more general economic indicators.

At the heart of the Permian Basin, one of the biggest oil deposits in the country, Midland experienced lightning fast growth over the past five years as energy companies flocked in, bringing jobs, investment and large construction projects.

Now, a 50 percent drop in oil prices since June to below $50 a barrel, the biggest decline since the recession, has forced drillers to cut their workforces, slow drilling and halt investments.

The city’s overheated housing market has also shown signs of easing. The 514 unsold houses on the market in Midland County in January was most in years, according to county statistics. The average sale price fell 20 percent from June to January. Foreclosures starts jumped 193 percent from 40 in 2013 to 117 in 2014, with most of that growth occurring in the second half of the year, according to data from Realty Trac.

“The most visible sign of cracks in the armor of the Midland housing market is the rise in foreclosure starts in 2014,” said Realty Trac vice president Daren Blomquist.

City officials are aware of the early warning signs. An annual city council retreat that will focus on maintaining economic growth amid the oil industry downturn has been delayed until May to allow the city to gather more sales tax data before making budgeting decisions, said Midland mayor Jerry Morales.

“We feel this is a cooling period,” he said. “We know sales taxes will decline, we just do not know to what level.”’

So far, the effects have been limited. Oil companies including Chevron, Occidental Petroleum and Schlumberger are all building facilities in Midland, according to city building official Steve Thorpe. Apache Corp an EOG Resources have sought approval for building permits.

The City Council is considering a permit for a $100 million boutique hotel, health club and food emporium on city land. A plan by Xcor Aerospace to build a launch pad for 90-minute, $90,000 tourist space shuttle rides from Midland airport remains on track.

It is anyone’s guess how long oil prices will remain depressed. Some say it could be months, even years, before oil producing regions recover from low oil prices.

“There is an incorrect assumption that we are further into this than we already are,” said Ingham. “We have a long way to go.”

Edward McAllister|Reuters |03/30/2015 |Editing by David Gregorio

Northeast Resists More Pipelines, Despite Higher Energy Costs

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — There is near universal agreement that the Northeast has to expand its energy supply to rein in the nation’s highest costs and that cheap, abundant, relatively clean natural gas could be at least a short-term answer. But heels dig deep when it comes to those thorniest of questions: how and where?

Proposals to build or expand natural gas pipelines are met with an up-swell of citizen discontent. At the end of last year, a Massachusetts route selected by Texas-based Kinder Morgan generated so much venom that the company nudged it north into New Hampshire — where the venom is also flowing freely. During this winter’s town meetings, a centuries-old staple of local governance in New England, people in the nine towns touched by the route voted to oppose the project.

That Northeast Direct line is one of about 20 pipeline projects being proposed throughout the Northeast, where savvy environmental and political forces combine with population density to provide a formidable bulwark. There’s another reason the loudest protests are all coming from the region: They’re where the gas is, waiting just east of the gas-rich Marcellus Shale region.

“Everyone seems to know the Northeast has a pipeline capacity problem, but not many seem to be willing to make many concessions to fix that problem,” said Andrew Pusateri, senior utilities analyst for Edward Jones.

And these are folks who pay a lot to stay warm in the winter and keep the lights on in summer. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, New Englanders paid $14.52 per thousand cubic feet of gas in 2014, compared to $10.94 for the rest of the nation. ISO-New England, which operates the region’s power grid, said in its 2015 Regional Electricity Outlook that natural gas availability is “one of the most serious challenges” the region faces as more coal and oil units go offline.

The Kinder Morgan plan would take gas from the plentiful Marcellus Shale region of Pennsylvania and pump it through a 36-inch line from Wright, New York, to Dracut, Massachusetts. Along the way, it would cut across a 70-mile stretch of southern New Hampshire, tickling the Massachusetts line. About 90 percent of the project would be along an existing power line corridor.

Homer Shannon and his wife raised three children on their suburban plot in Windham, New Hampshire, where the pipeline would pass a few hundred feet from their house. The retired high-tech salesman is part of a 10-family group of neighbors opposed to the pipeline’s route.

“This whole Northeast Direct thing is just fraught with question marks,” Shannon said. “Why in the hell is it in New Hampshire anyway? They want to get it from New York to Massachusetts and if you draw that line on a map, it sure doesn’t go through New Hampshire.”

Opponents — on the route and far from it — worry about environmental and scenic harm, lower property values, the potential for accidents and the idea that relying on natural gas only forestalls a switch to more renewable sources like wind or solar.

“It would be really nice if, as a region, we had a coherent energy policy that stated, ‘These are the things we need to do to improve our energy situation,'” Shannon said. “And if one of those things is I have to sacrifice part of my backyard for the greater good, I’d be willing to have that discussion. But I don’t see it that way. I see it as them enriching themselves on my back and I don’t like that.”

In New York and Pennsylvania, the 124-mile Constitution Pipeline has also fanned flames of opposition, some of it pegged to the price the gas company is paying to take land. Of 651 landowners in New York and Pennsylvania affected by the $700 million pipeline project, 125 refused to sign right of way agreements. Condemnation proceedings undertaken by Constitution have largely resolved the remaining disputes, either through settlements or access granted by a judge.

Donald Santa, president and CEO of the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, said it follows that the most complaints would come from the Northeast because that’s where most of the pipeline activity is happening, largely because of the boom enabled by the Marcellus Shale.

“Having so much of this gas literally on the doorstep of the market has really increased the need to get the gas to consumers,” Santa said.

Richard Wheatley, a spokesman for Kinder Morgan, said the company’s pipeline is not the only one getting pushback. He declined to address the opposition specifically but said the company continues to reach out to landowners and others as the siting process moves along. The company expects to file a certificate with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission this year.

Pusateri, the Edward Jones analyst, said part of the resistance may also be inflamed because of how the gas gets out of the ground. The Marcellus Shale gas is extracted using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The process, which blasts chemical-laden water into wells to crack open rock, has drawn heavy criticism. In New York, much of the antipathy toward pipelines was driven by the anti-fracking sentiment that resulted in Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s ban on shale gas development in New York.

“All major projects have some opposition, but I would say this pipe has garnered more attention and protests and gained more steam than average,” he said. “I think Kinder has done what they can to move the right of way of the pipe as much off of people’s property as possible. They can do this by utilizing utility easements at times. I don’t know that opposition really softens.”

RIK STEVENS||03/29/2015

Deepwater Horizon oil spill caused lasting damage, report says

Since the oil spill, about 1,000 dolphins have been found dead from Florida to Texas

WASHINGTON — Dolphins are dying in unusually high numbers. Sea turtle nests are declining.

Tuna are developing abnormally. And pelicans and gulls are still suffering from the lasting effects of a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico five years ago, the National Wildlife Federation warned in a report released Monday.

The impact is concentrated in the northern Gulf, but scientists say the long-term damage affects spawning waters for many fish that migrate to South Florida, the Caribbean and along the East Coast.

“Wildlife from sperm whales to marsh ants are still feeling the effects of the disaster,” said Ryan Fikes, the environmental group’s Gulf restoration scientist.

The report rounds up research findings on the Deepwater Horizon disaster in April 2010 that spewed 134 million gallons of oil into the Gulf.

An oil slick from the spill slathered much of the Gulf Coast, coating beaches, forcing a temporary fishing ban and ruining the region’s summer tourist season. Scientists remain concerned that the submerged oil is causing untold damage to fish and their habitat, depleting their numbers, disrupting the food chain and ultimately pinching Florida’s commercial and recreational fishing operations.

A research consortium drawing from nine institutions and spearheaded by scientists at Nova Southeastern University plans to launch another mission in late April or May to study fish, shrimp, squids and microbes in the deep waters of the Gulf. The team received an $8.5-million grant, which is drawn from $500 million provided by BP, the giant oil company that had leased the rig when it exploded, killing 11 workers.

“It’s important we keep looking. Sometimes it takes a long time for these long-term effects on fish populations to show themselves,” said Tracey Sutton, director of the research team.

The consortium’s three-year study will help determine the impact of submerged oil and of chemical dispersants used to break up the giant slick. The results have implications for the Atlantic side of Florida because powerful currents bring fish and pollutants through the Florida Straits before turning north on the Gulf Stream near the coast.

“We know that oil is still below the surface, on the beaches and in the sand,” said Jose Victor Lopez, one of the NSU scientists. “We know that if the sea currents are not in our favor, some of the particles of dispersants could make it over [to the East Coast].”

The National Wildlife Federation, an advocacy group, is pushing for more research on the spill’s lasting effects in the Gulf and beyond. Its report says that:

• Since the spill, about 1,000 bottlenose dolphins have been found dead in an area stretching from the Florida Panhandle to Texas. Dolphins on the Louisiana coast were found dead at four times the historic rates.

• The number of endangered sea turtle nests, which had been increasing rapidly, has declined on average since the spill.

• Exposure to oil has caused abnormal development in many species of fish, including mahi mahi, Gulf killifish and bluefin and yellowfin tuna.

• 12 percent of the brown pelicans and 32 percent of the laughing gulls in the northern Gulf may have died as a result of the oil spill.

• 2010 and 2011 had the lowest numbers of juvenile red snapper seen in an eastern Gulf fishery since 1994.

William E. Gibson|Washington Bureau|Sun Sentinel|3/31/15

North Dakota’s New Oil Train Safety Checks Miss Risks, Experts Warn

WASHINGTON, March 31 (Reuters) – New regulations to cap vapor pressure of North Dakota crude fail to account for how it behaves in transit, according to industry experts, raising doubts about whether the state’s much-anticipated rules will make oil train shipments safer.

High vapor pressure has been identified as a possible factor in the fireball explosions witnessed after oil train derailments in Illinois and West Virginia in recent weeks.

For over a year, federal officials have warned that crude from North Dakota’s Bakken shale oilfields contains a cocktail of explosive gas – known in the industry as ‘light ends.’

The new rules, which take effect on April 1, aim to contain dangers by spot-checking the vapor pressure of crude before loading and capping it at 13.7 pounds per square inch (psi) – about normal atmospheric conditions.

The plan relies on a widely-used test for measuring pressure at the wellhead, but safety experts say gas levels can climb inside the nearly-full tankers, so the checks are a poor indicator of explosion risks for rail shipments.

It is “well-understood, basic physics” that crude oil will exert more pressure in a full container than in the test conditions North Dakota will use, said Dennis Sutton, executive director of the Crude Oil Quality Association, which studies how to safely handle fossil fuels.

Ametek Inc, a leading manufacturer of testing equipment, has detected vapor pressure climbing from about 9 psi to over 30 psi – more than twice the new limit – while an oil tank is filled to near-capacity. (Graphic: http://reut.rs/1EHChG4)

About 70 percent of the roughly 1.2 million barrels of oil produced in North Dakota every day moves by rail to distant refineries and passes through hundreds of cities and towns along the way.

The state controls matter to those communities because there is no federal standard to curb explosive gases in oil trains.

North Dakota officials point out that the pressure limit is more stringent than the industry-accepted definition of “stable” crude oil. They also say that they lack jurisdiction over tank cars leaving the state and that the pressure tests are just one of the measures to make oil trains safer.

“We’re trying to achieve a set of operating practices that generates a safe, reliable crude oil,” Lynn Helms, director of the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources, has said. Helms has also said that test readings for near-full containers were less reliable.

However, given different testing and transport conditions, industry officials say the pressure threshold may need to be lowered to reduce the risks.

Limiting vapor pressure to 13.7 psi in transit would require an operator to bring it to “something well below that” at the loading point, Sutton said.

The uncertainty about regulatory reach and safety has spurred calls for the White House to develop national standards to control explosive gas pressure.

“Let me be really clear,” Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington state told reporters last week. “They should set a standard on volatility.”
The National Transportation Safety Board, an independent safety agency, has already encouraged a federal standard for “setting vapor pressure thresholds” for oil trains citing Canadian findings linking such pressure and the size of explosions in train accidents.

Meanwhile, the American Petroleum Institute, a leading voice for the oil industry, is lobbying lawmakers to resist federal vapor pressure benchmarks and last week urged lawmakers to oppose “a national volatility standard.”

The industry’s argument is that wringing ‘light ends’ out of Bakken crude adds expense and may keep a share of valuable oil from reaching refineries.

Reuters reported early this month that Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx took his concerns about Bakken oil volatility to the White House last summer and sought advice on what to do about the danger of explosive gases.

The administration decided that rather than assert federal authority it would allow the North Dakota rules to take root, according to sources familiar with the meeting.

Patrick Rucker|Reuters|03/31/2015|Additional reporting by Ernest Scheyder in North Dakota|Editing by Tomasz Janowski

Deep in the Amazon, one tribe is beating big oil

The people of Sarayaku in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest are a leading force in 21st century indigenous resistance, writes David Goodman, resisting the incursion of oil exploration into their lands, winning legal victories, and inspiring other communities to follow their example.

We are millionaires. Everything we need we have here. We are a small pueblo, but we are a symbol of life. Everyone must come together to support the life of human beings and Earth.

Patricia Gualinga stands serenely as chaos swirls about her. I find this petite woman with striking black and red face paint at the head of the People’s Climate March in New York City on September 21, 2014.

She is adorned with earrings made of brilliant bird feathers and a thick necklace of yellow and blue beads. She has come here from Sarayaku, a community deep in the heart of the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador.

Behind Gualinga, 400,000 people are in the streets calling for global action to stop climate change. Beside her, celebrities Leonardo DiCaprio, Sting, and Mark Ruffalo prepare to lead the historic march alongside a group of indigenous leaders.

Gualinga stands beneath a sign, “Keep the Oil in the Ground.” She has traveled across continents and cultures to deliver this message.

“Our ancestors and our spiritual leaders have been talking about climate change for a long time”, she tells me in Spanish above the din, flashing a soft smile as photographers crush around the celebrities. She motions to the throngs around her. “We are actually speaking the same language right now.”

A year earlier, I traveled to her village in the Ecuadorian Amazon to research the improbable story of a rainforest community of 1,200 Kichwa people that has successfully fended off oil companies and a government intent on exploiting their land for profit. How, I wondered, has Sarayaku been winning?

This is not the story most people know from Ecuador. Headlines have focused on northern Ecuador, where Chevron is fighting a landmark $9.5 billion judgment for dumping millions of gallons of toxic wastewater into rivers and leaving unlined pits of contaminated sludge that poisoned thousands of people.

A beacon of hope for indigenous communities across Ecuador

Sarayaku lies in southern Ecuador, where the government is selling drilling rights to a vast swath of indigenous lands – except for Sarayaku. The community has become a beacon of hope to other indigenous groups and to global climate change activists as it mobilizes to stop a new round of oil exploration.

What I found in Sarayaku was not just a community defending its territory. I encountered a people who believe that their lifestyle, deeply connected to nature, holds promise for humans to save themselves from global warming and extinction.

They are fighting back by advancing a counter-capitalist vision called sumak kawsay – Kichwa for ‘living well’ – living in harmony with the natural world and insisting that nature has rights deserving of protection.

Naively romantic? Think again: In 2008, Ecuador’s constitution became the first in the world to codify the rights of nature and specifically sumak kawsay. Bolivia’s constitution has a similar provision, and rights-of-nature ordinances are now being passed in communities in the United States.

Sarayaku residents describe sumac kawsay as “choosing our responsibility to the seventh generation over quarterly earnings, regeneration over economic growth, and the pursuit of well-being and harmony over wealth and financial success.”

The people of Sarayaku are the face of 21st-century indigenous resistance. Sarayaku may be a remote, pastoral community, but it is engaging the Western world politically, legally, and philosophically.

Patricia Gualinga and other Sarayaku community members have traveled to Europe to meet with foreign leaders and warn energy company executives about their opposition to oil extraction from their lands, produced their own documentary film about their struggle, filed lawsuits, leveraged their message with international groups such as Amazon Watch and Amnesty International, marched thousands of kilometers in public protest, and testified at the United Nations.

Sarayaku’s resistance has angered the pro-development Ecuadorian government-which bizarrely hails sumak kawsay while selling hotly contested oil drilling leases-but has inspired other indigenous communities across the globe.

Defending life and land

I climb aboard a four-seater Cessna parked at a small airstrip in the town of Shell, a rambling settlement on the edge of the Amazon rainforest in southeastern Ecuador. The town is named for Shell Oil Company, which established operations here a half century ago.

Our plane flies low over the thick green jungle. The dense growth below is broken only by rivers the color of chocolate milk, the sinewy arteries of the rainforest.

The forest canopy parts to reveal a grass airstrip and clusters of thatched huts. This is Sarayaku. Moist jungle air envelops me as I step out of the plane. The villagers escort me and my daughter, Ariel, who has been living in Ecuador and is translating for me, past a large communal hut where a woman tends a small fire.

Gerardo Gualinga, Patricia’s brother and one of the community leaders, arrives dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and knee-high rubber boots, the signature footwear of the rainforest. He carries a tall, carved wooden staff, a symbol of his authority.

“The community is in the middle of a three-day meeting to plan our political and development work for the next year. Come along-I think you will find it interesting”, he says, motioning for us to follow him down to the edge of the broad Bobonaza River.

We board a motorized canoe and head upstream, passing slender dugouts propelled by men pushing long poles. In 10 minutes, we clamber out on the river bank and hike up to a sandy village square.

Inside an oval building with a thatched roof, we find José Gualinga, another of Patricia’s brothers, who was then president of Sarayaku. He is holding his ceremonial staff and wearing a black headband and a Che Guevara T-shirt.

Gualinga is leading a discussion of how the community should pressure the Ecuadorian government to comply with the judgment of the Inter-American Court on Human Rights, which ruled in 2012 that the Ecuadorian government should have obtained the consent of the native people when it permitted oil drilling on Sarayaku’s territory.

Compensation awarded for a long history of abuse

Following hearings in Costa Rica, the court ordered the government to apologize and pay Sarayaku $1.25 million, plus attorney’s fees.

The court decision, declared Mario Melo, attorney for Sarayaku from the Quito-based Fundación Pachamama, is “a significant contribution to a more profound safeguard of indigenous peoples’ rights, and it is an example of dignity that will surely inspire many other nations and peoples around the world.”

At a lunch break, Mario Santi, Sarayaku’s president until 2008, explains the history of the struggle here. In the early 2000s, “The government let oil businesses exploit and explore for oil in this territory. There was no consultation. Many communities sold out to the oil companies. Sarayaku was the only pueblo that didn’t sell the right for oil companies to explore.”

Ecuador’s government ignored the community’s refusal to sell oil-drilling rights and signed a contract in 1996 with the Argentinian oil company CGC to explore for oil in Sarayaku. In 2003, CGC petroleros – oil workers and private security guards – and Ecuadorian soldiers came by helicopter to lay explosives and dig test wells.

Sarayaku mobilized. “We stopped the schools and our own work and dedicated ourselves to the struggle for six months”, says Santi. As the oil workers cleared a large area of forest-which was community farmland-the citizens of Sarayaku retreated deep into the jungle, where they established emergency camps and plotted their resistance.

“In the six months of struggle, there was torture, rape, and strong suffering of our people, especially our mothers and children”, Santi recounts. “We returned with psychological illness. All the military who came … “. He pauses to compose himself. “This was a very, very bad time.”

Political power …  down the barrel of a gun

In their jungle camps, the Sarayaku leaders hatched a plan. The women of the community prepared a strong batch of chicha, the traditional Ecuadorian homebrew made from fermented cassava. One night, a group of them traveled stealthily through the jungle, shadowed by men of the village. The women emerged at the main encampment of the petroleros. They offered their chicha and watched as the oil workers happily partied.

As their drinking binge ended, the petroleros fell asleep. When they awoke, what they saw sobered them: They were staring into the muzzles of their own automatic weapons. Wielding the guns were the women and men of Sarayaku.

The Sarayaku residents ordered the petroleros off their ancestral land. The terrified workers called in helicopters and fled, abandoning their weapons. The oil workers never returned. An Ecuadorian general came later and negotiated with community leaders – five of whom had been arrested and beaten – for the return of the weapons.

I ask Santi why Sarayaku has resisted. His tan, weathered face breaks into a gentle smile even as he recounts a difficult story.

“Our fathers told us that for future generations not to suffer, we needed to struggle for our territory and our liberty. So we wouldn’t be slaves of the new kind of colonization.

“The waterfall, the insects, the animals, the jungle gives us life”, he tells me. “Because man and the jungle have a relationship. For the Western capitalist world, the jungle is simply for exploiting resources and ending all this. The indigenous pueblos without jungle – we can’t live.”

Sarayaku now wants to help indigenous people around the world resist and defend their way of life. “Our message that we are also taking to Asia, Africa, Brazil, and other countries that are discussing climate change, we propose an alternative development-the development of life. This is our economy for living – sumak kawsay – not just for us but for the Western world. They don’t have to be afraid of global warming if they support the life of the jungle.

“It’s not a big thing”, he says understatedly. “It’s just to continue living.”

Indigenous climate change warriors

The Sarayaku story is just the latest in a long-running battle over Ecuador’s natural resources. Oil extraction began in northern Ecuador in 1964, when the American oil giant Texaco set up drilling operations in indigenous lands (Chevron later purchased Texaco).

When the oil company exited in 1992, it “left behind the worst oil-related environmental disaster on the planet”, according to Amazon Watch, a nonprofit organization that defends indigenous rights. The devastated and poisoned region is known as the ‘rainforest Chernobyl’.

Despite pursuing Chevron for damages, the Ecuadorian government of President Rafael Correa has embarked on an aggressive new round of oil development in southern Ecuador, opening thousands of acres to exploration.

The government has cracked down on resisters, recently ordering the closure of the Quito headquarters of CONAIE, Ecuador’s national indigenous organization, attempting to stop Ecuadorian activists opposed to oil drilling from attending a U.N. climate summit in Peru, and closing Fundación Pachamama, an NGO supporting indigenous groups.

Most of Sarayaku’s land has been excluded in the new round of oil drilling, though nearby communities, including those of the neighboring Sápara people, are threatened. Sarayaku is joining the protests of its neighbors.

José Gualinga says these struggles have bigger implications. “We are doing this to stop carbon emissions and global warming. This struggle of indigenous pueblos is a doorway to saving Pachamama [Mother Earth].”

Women have been at the center of the indigenous resistance. Patricia Gualinga tells me, “The women have been very steadfast and strong in saying we are not negotiating about this. We are the ones who have mobilized for life.”

She recounts how, in 2013, 100 women from seven different indigenous groups marched 250 kilometers from their jungle communities to Quito, where they addressed the National Assembly. In the 1990s, Patricia’s mother embarked on a similar march with thousands of other indigenous women.

“We want to continue living a good life within the forest”, Patricia tells me. “We want to be respected, and we want to be a model that could be replicated.”

The living jungle

I follow Sabino Gualinga, a 70-year-old shaman, as he walks lightly through the dense tangle of growth. He deftly flicks his machete to make a path through the jungle for me and Ariel. He stops and points up toward a tree.

“The bark of that tree helps cure grippe [flu]. This one”, he says, pointing to a weathered, gray tree trunk, “helps to break a fever. That one”, he motions to a fern-like plant, “helps with psychological problems.”

That night, Sabino’s sons, Gerardo and José, join us in front of a flickering fire to talk about Sarayaku’s journey. They are unwinding after a long day of meetings. José wears a white soccer jersey and his long black hair hangs loosely at his shoulders.

José, president of Sarayaku from 2011 to 2014, led his community to take its fight to the Inter-American Court on Human Rights. Part of the court judgment required Ecuadorian government leaders to apologize to Sarayaku. I doubted this would occur, but José was insistent that it would.

In October 2014, Ecuador’s Minister of Justice, Ledy Zuniga, stood in Sarayaku’s sandy community square and delivered an extraordinary message:

“We offer a public apology for the violation of indigenous property, cultural identity, the right to consultation, having put at serious risk their lives and personal integrity, and for the violation of the right to judicial guarantee and judicial protections.”

The court decision and official apology appear to have given Sarayaku an extra measure of protection from new oil exploration. The government must now secure at least the appearance of consent, contested though it may be, lest they get dragged back into court. “We’ve shown that laws can change”, reflects Gerardo. “We’ve won not only for Sarayaku, we’ve won for South America.”

A key element in Sarayaku’s success is telling its story everywhere it can. Sarayaku resident Eriberto Gualinga trained in videography and made a film about his community, Children of the Jaguar, which won best documentary at the 2012 National Geographic All Roads Film Festival.

Sarayaku has also embraced social media. Community members showed me to a thatched hut. Inside, young people were clustered around several computers updating Facebook pages and websites via a satellite Internet connection.

Now, says José, “When the state says, ‘Sarayaku, we are going to destroy you,’ we have international witnesses. We can tell people the truth.”

José draws a distinction between Sarayaku’s struggles and those led by leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Che Guevara. “They wanted their freedom. We don’t need to win our freedom. Here in Sarayaku, we are free. But we take from the experience of these leaders. It strengthens us.”

A steady rain falls on the thatched roof overhead. The fat raindrops make a hard thwack on the broad leaves of the trees. A guitarist strums softly in another hut. Chickens and children run free.

“We are millionaires”, says Gerardo, motioning to the jungle that embraces us. “Everything we need we have here.” José peers into the fire. “We are a small pueblo, but we are a symbol of life. Everyone must come together to support the life of human beings and Earth.”

David Goodman|30th March 2014

US coal sector in ‘structural decline’, financial analysts say

Over 200 mines shut down and industry loses 76% of its value in five years, report finds

 

The US coal sector is in a “structural decline” which has sent 26 companies bust in the last three years, according to financial analysts.

A report by the Carbon Tracker Initiative found that in the past five years the US coal industry lost 76% of its value. At least 264 mines were closed between 2011 and 2013. The world’s largest private coal company, Peabody Energy, lost 80% of its share price.

These declines were in spite of the Dow Jones industrial average increasing by 69% during the same period. Authors said this indicated a decoupling of US economic growth from coal.

Co-author Luke Sussams said the coal industry had been pummeled by cheap shale gas and a series of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations.

“It was something of a one-two punch. Gas took the legs out from the sector and the EPA really held it down,” he said.

The US shale gas price fell 80% since 2008. Meanwhile, renewable energy has become increasingly competitive. From 2005 to 2013 the amount of US electricity generated by burning coal dropped by 10.5%. This was picked up by gas (8.7%) and renewables (4.1%).

But Chiza Vitta, a credit analyst from Standard and Poor’s, said he did not believe coal was in a terminal decline, although its share of the US electricity market would diminish somewhat in the coming years.

Vitta said the drop in share prices noted by Carbon Tracker was due to a complex series of factors, including a cyclical dip in metallurgical coal demand. He said despite the slowdown “coal will continue to be an integral part of the energy portfolio. It’s going to get a little smaller so the share price is going to fall. But there is always going to be a place for coal”.

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Carbon Tracker first introduced the idea of a ‘carbon bubble’, the overvaluation of the fossil fuel industry, in 2011. A key part of their argument was the idea that carbon intensive fuel sources would become less valuable because of increasingly stringent regulation from international and national bodies. This would leave many companies holding vast reserves of essentially worthless fossil fuels. A concept known as ‘stranded assets’.

The coal industry has been subject to seven major EPA regulations since 2008. This includes 30% cuts by 2030 to carbon emissions from coal power plants announced by president Barack Obama last year. But mostly the measures target forms of pollution other than carbon. Sussams said the decline of US coal “proves the [stranded assets] concept doesn’t rely on international regulations”.

In order to avoid the increasingly hostile domestic market, Sussams said the industry had banked heavily on a future where US coal exports to China and India grew significantly. But this has been undercut by cheap supply from Indonesia, Australia and South Africa. Additionally, Chinese coal consumption fell 3% last year and India has said it may stop imports of coal within three years.

Andrew Grant, report co-author said the report issued a warning that even without an international agreement on carbon emission, the most carbon intensive sectors of the economy were risky investments.

“The roof has fallen in on US coal, and alarm bells should be ringing for investors in related sectors around the world. These first tremors are amongst the clearest signs yet of a seismic shift in energy markets, as high carbon fuels are set to be increasingly outperformed by lower carbon alternatives,” he said.

Karl Mathiesen|24 March 2015

Fracking penalty proposal clears Senate panel

A proposal to regulate the oil and gas industry, particularly when it comes to hydraulic fracturing and high pressure well stimulation, cleared a Senate panel Tuesday, despite dozens of speakers calling on lawmakers to vote against it.

The proposal (SB 1468), sponsored by Sen. Garrett Richter, R-Naples, passed the Senate environmental preservation and conservation committee 6-2, along party lines. The proposal would increase penalties to $25,000 a day, create a chemical disclosure registry and requires companies disclose the chemicals being used.

Opponents to the measure said it doesn’t go far enough, and said the state should ban hydraulic fracturing. Three amendments, including one to put a moratorium on the process, were not introduced because they failed to get the necessary support to be considered.

The vote came just hours after House and Senate Democrats held a press conference to call on leadership to pass legislation that would ban the method, not regulate it.

“We ought to be ashamed of ourselves,” said Sen Dwight Bullard, a Miami Democrat whose district includes parts of eastern Collier County, during the press conference. “The idea that we’re even having a conversation about regulating the process for poisoning Floridians speaks volumes about where our priorities are on the other side of the aisle.”

This was the first committee stop for Richter’s bill. A similar House proposal (HB 1205), sponsored by Rep. Ray Rodrigues, R-Estero, has cleared its first committee on March 17.

Matt Dixon|Jenna Buzzacco-Foerster|March 31, 2015

Oil and Gas Billionaire Pressured Oklahoma Scientist to Ignore Fracking-Earthquake Link

Hillary Clinton’s emails aren’t the only ones making news, at least not in Oklahoma. A trove of emails were released by the Oklahoma Geological Survey (OGS), which regulates the state’s oil and gas industries, in response to public records requests from news outlets such as Bloomberg and EnergyWire. They appear to reveal that oil and gas billionaire Harold Hamm, known as the founding father of the U.S. fracking boom, inserted himself into the conversation about whether fracking was causing a dramatic upsurge in earthquakes in the state.

Bloomberg reports that in November 2013, state seismologist Austin Holland, who works for the OGS, got a request from University of Oklahoma president David Boren to meet with him and Hamm in Boren’s office. Boren is on the board of Hamm’s company, Continental Resources.

Hamm isn’t known as a guy shy about slinging around his money and his influence. He’s given millions to the University of Oklahoma including $20 million for a diabetes center. He contributed almost a million dollars to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign and was named his energy advisor. And according to Holland, at that meeting with Boren, he wanted to express his “concern” about the growing evidence that the wave of earthquakes was an outcome of the fracking process.

As fracking has exploded in Oklahoma in the last five years, so have earthquakes, going from an average of two a year over 3.0 magnitude from 1975-2008 to 538 in 2014. Last year, Oklahoma surged past California as the most seismically active state in the lower 48. And scientific studies have been piling up showing a connection between earthquakes and fracking, not just in Oklahoma but also in Texas, Colorado and Ohio.

“Large areas of the U.S. that used to experience few or no earthquakes have, in recent years, experienced a remarkable increase in earthquake activity that has caused considerable public concern as well as damage to structures,” says the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). “This rise in seismic activity, especially in the central U.S., is not the result of natural processes. Deep injection of wastewater is the primary cause of the dramatic rise in detected earthquakes and the corresponding increase in seismic hazard in the central U.S.”

“Holland had been studying possible links between a rise in seismic activity in Oklahoma and the rapid increase in oil and gas production, the state’s largest industry,” wrote Bloomberg reporters Benjamin Elgin and Matthew Phillips. “Hamm requested that Holland be careful when publicly discussing the possible connection between oil and gas operations and a big jump in the number of earthquakes, which geological researchers were increasingly tying to the underground disposal of oil and gas wastewater, a byproduct of the fracking boom that Continental has helped pioneer.”

“It was just a little bit intimidating,” said Holland. When he emailed a colleague that he had been summoned to have “coffee” with Boren and Hamm, she replied, “Gosh, I guess that’s better than having Kool-Aid with them. I guess.”

The previous month, Holland had a meeting in the office of Patrice Douglas, then one of the three elected members of the OGS, that was attended by Jack Stark, then senior vice president for exploration at Continental and now its president. Holland updated his superiors following the meeting, saying, “The basic jist [sic] of the meeting is that Continental does not feel induced seismicity is an issue and they are nervous about any dialogue about the subject.”

It appears their nervousness was making Holland and the OGS nervous as well, and that they bowed to Hamm’s suggestion that they “be careful” about linking earthquakes and fracking operations. When the journal Geology published a paper attributing a 2011 5.6 magnitude Oklahoma quake in 2011 to the injection of fracking wastewater, OGS put out its own statement attributing it to “natural causes.”

And when a new disposal well was turned on in southern Oklahoma’s Love County and the area began to experience multiple quakes a day, which disappeared when the well was de-activated, Holland wrote, “We cannot rule out that this observation could be simply a coincidence.” After Holland stonewalled residents at a public meeting, ExxonMobil geologist Michael Sweatt emailed him, saying, “I would like to congratulate you on a job well done at the Town Hall meeting in Love County. I believe you delivered an unbiased report on the recent earthquake activity and answered the residents’ questions the best you could.”

Both Boren and Continental dismissed concerns that there was anything improper in the November 2013 meeting in Boren’s office or other contacts that Continental had with the OSG.

“The insinuation that there was something untoward that occurred in those meetings is both offensive and inaccurate,” Continental Resources spokeswoman Kristin Thomas told Bloomberg. “The Oklahoma Geological Survey had a solid reputation of an agency that was accessible and of service to the community and industry in Oklahoma. We hope that the agency can continue the legacy to provide this service.”

Boren called the meeting in his office “purely informational,” and said, “Mr. Hamm is a very reputable producer and wanted to know if Mr. Holland had found any information which might be helpful to producers in adopting best practices that would help prevent any possible connection between drilling and seismic events. In addition, he wanted to make sure that the OGS had the benefit of research by Continental geologists.”

Holland has denied that pressure from the oil and gas executives influenced his thinking, telling EnergyWire “None of these conversations affect the science that we are working on producing.”

And today for Holland, the evidence seems to have overwhelmed Hamm’s push for discretion. While saying that Oklahoma has seen spikes in earthquakes in the past when no drilling was going on, he told Bloomberg that he believes most of the new seismic activity is due to the injection of oil and gas wastewater.

“We don’t work in a vacuum, although a lot of people think science does occur in an ivory tower or vacuum,” Holland told the Tulsa World earlier this year. “So clearly we feel pressures on both sides, and really we are trying to serve Oklahomans and understand things as best we can.”

Anastasia Pantsios|April 1, 2015

EPA Report Finds Nearly 700 Chemicals Used in Fracking

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released a report on Friday that found there are nearly 700 chemicals used in the fracking process. The EPA completed the analysis by looking at more than 39,000 FracFocus disclosures in the last two years. The FracFocus Chemical Disclosure Registry was developed by the Groundwater Protection Council and the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission in response to public concern about the contents of fracking fluid, says the EPA report.

“FracFocus is a publicly accessible website where oil and gas production well operators can disclose information about the ingredients used in hydraulic fracturing fluids at individual wells,” says the EPA report. However, only 20 states require fracking companies to use FracFocus “to publicly disclose the chemicals they inject into wells,” says The Hill. Additionally, the report found that 10 percent of all chemicals used during the fracking process were not disclosed.

Despite all these limitations, the findings were still alarming. The report found that the median number of chemical additives per fracking job was 14. Hydrochloric acid, methanol, and hydro-treated light petroleum distillates were the most common additives, being reported in 65 percent of all disclosures, says The Hill. Even in low doses, these are known to cause skin irritation, chemical burns, headaches and blurred vision, according to the Center for Disease Control and California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. At higher concentrations, exposure to these chemicals can cause shortness of breath, blindness and possibly death.

The report has been heavily criticized for its reliance on a voluntary reporting system and for not probing deep enough into the toxicity of these chemicals. “Launched in 2011 and delayed repeatedly, the study was supposed to provide definitive answers to the public’s concerns about fracking’s possible effect on drinking water,” says InsideClimate News. “But pushback from the oil and gas companies and the EPA’s weakness relative to the multi-billion dollar fossil fuel sector narrowed the project’s scope.”

Specifically, the $29 million initiative “will not include baseline studies that provide chemical snapshots of water before and after fracking,” says InsideClimate News. “Such data is essential to determine whether drilling contaminated water or whether toxic substances were present before oil and gas development began.” However, EPA researcher, Tom Burke, assured The Hill that “This report really focuses on the first step, and that is collecting information about what is used and the volumes of what is used. As part of our broader assessment, we will definitely be focusing on toxicity, though.”

Cole Mellino|April 1, 2015

Pemex Oil Platform Fire Kills At Least 4, Injures Dozens In Gulf Of Mexico

MEXICO CITY, April 1 (Reuters) – Mexican state-run oil company Pemex said at least four people died after a fire broke out on a production platform in the Gulf of Mexico early on Wednesday, sparking the evacuation of around 300 workers.

Local emergency services said as many as 45 people were injured in the blaze, which erupted overnight on the Abkatun Permanente platform in the oil-rich Bay of Campeche.

Pemex said it was battling the flames with eight firefighting boats and that a contractor for Mexican oil services company Cotemar was one of the dead.

Videos posted on Twitter showed the platform engulfed in flames, lighting up the night sky, as rescue workers looked on from nearby ships.

The fire broke out in the dehydration and pumping area of the platform, Pemex said, though it was not clear what caused it. A Pemex spokesman could not immediately say whether local oil production had been affected.

A spokesman for emergency services in the nearby city of Ciudad del Carmen said earlier that authorities had registered 45 people with injuries from the fire. Other officials put the total at around 16 injured.

The platform forms part of the Abkatun-Pol-Chuc offshore complex. According to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, production at the complex has fallen steadily since the 1990s to below 300,000 barrels per day (bpd) in 2013.

Mexico currently produces just under 2.3 million bpd, and is the world’s No. 10 crude producer.

Pemex has suffered a number of accidents in recent years, with at least 37 people killed by a blast at the company’s Mexico City headquarters in 2013. Another 26 people were killed at a fire in a Pemex natural gas facility in September 2012.

Cotemar is based in Ciudad del Carmen and provides offshore services to Pemex including platform refurbishment, maintenance, and maritime transport, according to its website.

Reporting by Ana Isabel Martinez and Gabriel Stargardter|Editing by Kieran Murray and Peter Galloway|Reuters|04/01/2015

States Fail to Properly Manage Fracking Waste, Says Groundbreaking Report

It might seem illogical, but in 1988 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) put a loophole in the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) which regulates hazardous and solid waste, exempting the waste from oil and gas exploration, development and production (E &P) from oversight. While it conceded that such wastes might indeed be hazardous, it said that state regulations were adequate.

That was then, and this is now. The fracking boom has brought oil and gas operations into states and communities that never dealt with them before. Elected officials in those states are often beholden to those oil and gas interests, especially as the amount of money flowing into elections has multiplied exponentially. Basically, the fox is guarding the henhouse.

A new study, Wasting Away: Four states’ failure to manage oil and gas waste in the Marcellus and Utica Shale, conductedby Earthworks, explore just how inadequate state oversight of drilling operations is today. It specifically looks at four states that sit on top of the lucrative Marcellus and Utica shale deposits—New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia—to discover exactly how well they are doing in overseeing the identification and handling of the potentially hazardous waste materials left behind after the shale has been fracked.

Not very well, it found.

“Many of the questions asked about oil and gas field waste decades ago persist, including what it contains and how it is, and should be, treated and disposed of,” the report says. “Also debated is whether states have the ability and resources to adequately protect water, soil, and air quality in the process. Many policymakers and advocates have started to ask: as drilling continues, where is all the waste going and what happens as a result? States are revising regulations and policies in an attempt to catch up with growing volumes and associated problems. However, these efforts by states, both current and proposed, are lacking.”

The report points out that a series of  high-profile events over the last seven years has raised public awareness and concern—events such as illegal dumping, wastewater spills and earthquakes. That awareness has also increased thanks to a burgeoning number of studies documenting the toxic ingredients in fracking waste and how they can enter the environment. Those studies were cited by Dr. Howard Zucker, New York state’s commissioner of health, in his testimony that led that state to ban fracking in December 2014.

“Thirty years ago the Environmental Protection Agency exempted oil and gas waste from federal classification as hazardous, not because the waste isn’t hazardous, but because EPA determined state oversight was adequate,” said report lead author and Earthworks’ eastern program coordinator Nadia Steinzor. “But our analysis shows that states aren’t keeping track of this waste or disposing of it properly. States must take realistic, concrete steps to better protect the public.”

Earthworks’ report made a series of specific recommendations of the types of regulations states should adopt. They include state-level legislation identifying oil and gas waste as hazardous, filling in gaps in current state laws, requiring testing of wastes before they leave the site, implementing “cradle to grave” tracking of wastes and requiring detailed documentation throughout its lifespan, upgrading testing and monitoring of wastes, and requiring treatment and disposal of wastes at specialized facilities designed to detoxify them.

It found all four states lacking. While it pointed out that West Virginia has adopted some new regulations and Pennsylvania is currently revising its regulations, it cited numerous shortcomings in how those states handle fracking waste. Of Ohio it said, “Even as shale gas development surges in Ohio, the state has done little to strengthen regulations and procedures related to waste management. HB59, passed in 2013, directed Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) to adopt rules for waste storage and disposal—but critical regulations have still not been put forward for public review and adoption. As a result, operators and disposal facilities have wide discretion to decide whether waste is contaminated and how to dispose of it.”

“Ohio’s land and water are at great risk from improper and under-regulated disposal of fracking wastes,” said Melanie Houston, director of water policy and environmental health at the Ohio Environmental Council. “As this report details, regulations in Ohio remain woefully inadequate when it comes to protecting human health and the environment from the radiological and chemical risks associated with fracking waste.”

And although New York has banned fracking inside its borders, it still produces waste from conventional drilling and increasingly accepts fracking waste from other states. And like the EPA rule, it said that New York law specifically excludes all oil and gas field waste from the definition of industrial and hazardous waste.

“As a result, operators can dispose of waste at municipal waste landfills and sewage treatment plants,” the report says. “The actual tracking of waste is currently left up to drillers and the operators of disposal facilities. Oil and gas operators are not required to report the volume, type, chemical content, disposal process, or origin and destination for waste with any specificity.”

“This report illuminates the dirty secret of oil and gas development—what to do with the enormous amount of waste generated each year. In New York, problems with the improper reuse and disposal of oil and gas waste persist despite the ban on high-volume fracking,” said Riverkeeper staff attorney Misti Duvall. “We have a state that not only allows importation of waste from Pennsylvania into New York’s landfills, but also permits the not-so-beneficial reuse of oil and gas waste on our roads.  It’s past time for New York to rethink its haphazard approach to oil and gas waste.”

The report condemned the piecemeal “Create it now, figure it out later” approach taken by the states in the Marcellus and Utica shale region, saying “All four states have taken essentially the same approach—one that unfortunately has inadvertently created an opaque picture of what’s really happening with waste and inadequate efforts to fix problems associated with it.”

“Drilling waste harms the environment and health, even though states have a mandate to protect both,” said report co-author and Earthworks energy program director Bruce Baizel. “Their current ‘see no evil’ approach is part of the reason communities across the country are banning fracking altogether. States have a clear path forward: if the waste is dangerous and hazardous, stop pretending it isn’t and treat it and track it like the problem it is.”

Anastasia Pantsios|April 2, 2015

Shell inches closer to spilling oil all over the Arctic

Shell has passed another hurdle in its push to resume Arctic drilling operations this summer. On Tuesday, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell reaffirmed her department’s 2008 decision to lease part of the Chukchi Sea, off the coast of Alaska, to the company, and accepted a revised environmental impact statement for the lease.

“The Arctic is an important component of the Administration’s national energy strategy, and we remain committed to taking a thoughtful and balanced approach to oil and gas leasing and exploration offshore Alaska,” Jewell said in a statement.

“Thoughtful” might not be the most applicable word to describe Shell’s activities in the Chukchi Sea. The company suspended its Arctic drilling operations in 2012 after a series of screw-ups and delays that culminated with a drilling rig running aground on New Years Eve. But, undaunted, the company is hoping to resume operations this summer. Shell’s 2015 plans involve working with the same contractor, Noble Drilling, that was hit with eight felony counts for the results of those disastrous few months in 2012.

After the 2012 setbacks, the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals put the Chukchi Sea lease on hold in response to a suit filed by Alaskan Natives and environmental groups. The coalition argued that the Department of Interior had underestimated the amount of oil that Shell could get out of the lease, and, thus, the amount of damage that drilling in the sea could cause.

In response, the DOI released a revised environmental impact statement this February. It found that, over the course of Shell’s 77-year lease, there’s a 75 percent chance the company will be responsible for an oil spill of more than 1,000 barrels. The report also forecast 750 smaller spills.

The latest news on DOI’s decision has environmental groups enraged, obviously. “No one in her right mind would trust Shell to deliver a pizza safely across town, so trusting the company to drill in the Arctic is nothing short of negligence,” Greenpeace USA Executive Director Annie Leonard said in a statement. Earthjustice attorney Eric Grafe, who has coordinated green groups’ legal appeals in their suits against Shell’s Arctic operations, suggested to the Associated Press that the DOI was rushing through the process to help Shell get back to work.

Green groups also noted the irony of the DOI’s announcement coming on the same day the Obama administration affirmed its commitment to a global climate deal under which the U.S. would reduce its emissions by as much as 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025. Shell’s leadership also recently affirmed its commitment to engaging seriously in discussions about climate change. Yet the company’s plan to operate in the Chukchi Sea for the next three quarters of a century, and the DOI’s plan to allow it, fly in the face of much-discussed research published in the journal Nature earlier this year which found that all the oil in the Arctic would have to stay put if the world is to avert disastrous climate change. Though the DOI’s environmental impact statement does look at the significant chances of a major oil spill resulting from Shell’s operations, it does not analyse the effect on the environment that burning all of that oil would cause.

In a statement, Earthjustice’s Grafe expressed hope that the DOI would reverse course. “Interior still has time to make a better decision when evaluating Shell’s drilling plan, and we sincerely hope it says no to Shell’s louder, bigger, and dirtier tactics, loaded with potential environmental harm,” he said.

Before drilling can go ahead, Shell will still have to get drilling permits and win approval for its exploration plan from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, an agency within the DOI.

John |1 Apr 2015

Land Conservation

University of Miami Researchers Contaminated Rare Pine Rockland, DOJ Lawsuit Alleges

Critics of a plan to develop rare forest land in southwest Miami-Dade County say that radioactive materials dumped there by University of Miami researchers during the Cold War show that the university was a poor steward of such sensitive land and should never have been allowed to sell that land last year.

In 2006, the U.S. Department of Justice sued UM under the federal Superfund law, accusing the school of releasing hazardous waste into the ground during a 20-year period when school scientists conducted medical and biological experiments at its old south campus. The university quickly settled the lawsuit. The 140-acre property, located near Zoo Miami, is predominantly pine rockland, a disappearing native habitat home to more than a dozen endangered species, including the bald eagle and indigo snake, the Florida bonneted bat, which was given federal protection last year, and two rare butterflies expected to be protected this summer.

Last July, UM announced the sale of 88 acres of the land for $22 million to Palm Beach Gardens-based Ram Realty, which plans to build a retail and residential project called Coral Reef Commons. To secure a zoning change, Miami-Dade County, UM and Ram agreed to set aside 40 acres for a preserve.

Since then, activists and environmentalists have waged a public campaign to stop the new development. While the lawsuit and settlement didn’t generate media coverage, opponents are now bringing up the settlement as proof UM is a negligent custodian of environmentally sensitive land.

“The University of Miami took this property and pretty much trashed it,” said Grant Stern, a Miami mortgage broker and anti-Walmart activist. “The public should be made aware that the university was producing hazardous waste out there.”

A UM spokeswoman said the school declines to comment for this story, as did representatives from Ram Realty.

Pine rockland, which is found only in the Sunshine State and the Bahamas, once blanketed 185,000 acres between Florida City and Miami. Today, only 2,900 acres remain outside of Everglades National Park, and in 1984, Miami-Dade County passed a law requiring preservation of at least 80 percent of rockland if an owner is to build on such land.

In 1946, the federal government leased 140 acres that were once part of the Richmond Naval Air Station to UM for use as a south campus that provided housing, dining, recreational facilities and classrooms to 1,100 students, mostly freshmen.

Two years later, after many students complained that the south campus was too remote, UM converted the sprawling site into a research facility. Experiments ran the gamut, from development for the packaging of frozen TV dinners to the first scientific tests that produced cancer cells in embryonic chicks.

A half-dozen buildings totaling about 70,000 square feet housed malaria research, studies on food and sound, and provided storage. The school also built primate cages on nine acres. Between the early 1980s and 1990s, the federal government donated the property to UM.

According to the 2006 DOJ lawsuit, one of the buildings housed a laboratory where experiments using radioactive materials were conducted from 1946 to 1966. Supporting court documents filed with the lawsuit state that researchers “disposed of radionuclides by burying them in trenches” and similarly “disposed of radiated animal carcasses, derived from radiological experiments.” The “hazardous substances,” including carbon, cesium, cobalt, zinc, tritium, iron, iodine, chromium and sulfur, were “pumped, poured, emitted, discharged, dumped, or injected, or otherwise spilled, leaked, escaped or leached, into surface water, groundwater, drinking water supply, land surface or subsurface strata, or ambient air,” according to the court documents.

In addition, a radiological survey in 1985 found several hazardous substances — cesium-137, cobalt-60, Hydrogen-3 and carbon-14 — at the site. A 2001 geophysical survey found metallic material in 12 trenches, according to the lawsuit.

“The government seeks compensation from the university, which now owns the property in question, under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, commonly known as the Superfund law,” the complaint states.

DOJ claimed the Army Corps of Engineers spent $763,336 cleaning up the hazardous waste. On Oct. 6, 2006, UM settled with the government by agreeing to pay $393,473 without admitting any liability. The only media coverage came from a single article by the journal Inside Higher Ed.

Dennis Ollie, president of the Miami chapter of the North American Butterfly Association, said the lawsuit shows UM had a reckless disregard for protecting the pine rockland.

“One would think UM would have been more responsible with land that was essentially given to them by the federal government,” Ollie said. “The lawsuit shows what a bad steward the school has been.”

In early March, Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez said he would ask the state to help the county buy the 88 acres from Ram to conserve the site, but the company’s principal, Peter Cummings, told the Miami Herald he has no intention of selling.

Francisco Alvarado|Florida Center for Investigative Reporting|March 31, 2015

Update on Sector Planning Legislation ‏

For more than a month 1000 Friends has worked with stakeholders and Senate staff to improve Senate Bill 832 which, as originally filed, would have severely weakened the planning process for Florida’s largest developments. We are pleased to report that yesterday a much improved strike-all of Senate Bill 832 unanimously passed the Community Affairs Committee.

1000 Friends Policy Director Charles Pattison testified during the committee hearing and thanked Senator Simpson for addressing many of our concerns with the bill. Most importantly the amended bill allows local governments to require information and conditions beyond the minimum criteria set in state law. Additionally, provisions which would have delayed the recording of conservation easements to protect vital natural lands were removed in favor of compromise language which provides more flexibility to developers without lessening environmental protection.

We remain concerned about provisions in the bill which could allow for extended water use permits near springs, especially those that do not have minimum flow and level regulations in place. We will continue to work with stakeholders and Senator Simpson to try to address this issue, as well as the timing for recording conservation easements and opportunities to further improve the sector planning process through this legislation.

One of the state’s leading experts on Florida’s community planning process, 1000 Friends of Florida Policy Director Charles Pattison, FAICP, will provide detailed information on the process to amend local comprehensive plans, elements and future land use maps, the state review process, citizen participation requirements including information on citizen challenges, plan implementation through land development regulations and development orders, sector planning and other Florida-specific planning issues. Long-time environmental advocate Pegeen Hanrahan will focus on promoting meaningful citizen involvement in the local planning process both from her perspective as a former City of Gainesville Mayor and Commissioner and citizen advocate. The session will conclude with a question and answer period. This event has been approved for 1.5 AICP CM LEGAL CREDITS for planners.  1000 Friends has applied for professional certification credits for Florida attorneys (CLE) and environmental health professionals (CEHP) but cannot guarantee these will be approved.

1000 Friends of Florida|4/1/15

Tribe members oppose plans for bike path across Everglades

MIAMI — Some Native Americans are protesting plans for a bike path across Florida’s Everglades.

Betty Osceola of the Miccosukee Tribe and Bobby Billie of the Panther Clan of the Miccosukee Simanolee Nation have led a nearly weeklong march along the route proposed for a biking and hiking trail alongside a highway that cuts across the wetlands.

Osceola tells The Miami Herald (http://hrld.us/1G6DZ9G ) that the path from Miami-Dade County into Collier County “opens the door to more development in the Everglades.”

Others who joined the march expected to end Thursday call the path “a desecration.”

County officials planning the bike path say it will offer a green, more intimate entry into the vast wilderness. It will be years before any construction starts, though. A feasibility study is expected to conclude this month.

April 2, 2015

Recycling

A Not-So-Beautiful Ode to Plastic Bags

Marine debris is man-made waste that either directly or indirectly is disposed of in oceans, rivers or other waterways.  Most trash reaches the sea via rivers, and 80 percent of that originates from landfills or other urban sources. In the Florida Keys where we are surrounded by water, a blowing plastic bag has a high likelihood of reaching the ocean within just days, or sometimes immediately. We’ve all seen plastic bags blowing across the bridges as we cross, haven’t we? This waste often ends up in huge ocean gyres, and along coastlines like those in the Florida Keys, that are home to numerous threatened, protected and endangered species.  Plastic bags are consumed by fish, sharks, sea turtles, birds, and can cause life-threatening entanglements to wildlife. In the Florida Keys, we also have the only coral reef in the continental United States; studies indicate that even our reefs are becoming contaminated by plastic bags and the chemicals released by them.

The Worldwatch Institute claims that Americans alone use 100 billion plastic bags per year… Less than 1% of these are recycled.

There are 5 major ocean gyres worldwide or in the world’s oceans. The Pacific Ocean is home to the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” an area now twice the size of Texas, extending at least 20 feet down into the water column.  Scientists estimate that for every 2.2 pounds of plankton in this area there are 13.2 pounds of plastic.

Plastic bags choke and entangle wildlife, wrap around boat propellers, and get sucked into boat engines.  Californians Against Waste estimates that plastic marine debris kills over 100,000 sea turtles and marine mammals every year.

All plastic products, including plastic bags, are made from polymers or polymer resin that require oil or natural gas to manufacture. According to the New York Times, the 100 billion bags used per year in America require an estimated 12 million barrels of oil for their production.  Since approximately 25% of plastic bags used in the West are made in Asia, even more fossil fuels have to be used to transport the bags to their destination.

Plastic bag pollution is a global problem in all oceans, and the waters of the Florida Keys are not exempt. Fortunately, we are home to The Turtle Hospital, a rescue/rehab/release sea turtle facility. The Turtle Hospital treats a large number of sea turtles with entanglement injuries and impactions from ingesting plastic bags, although many are too sick to save. Another significant cause of sea turtle mortality are fibropapillomas, large tumors that inhibit a turtle’s ability to see, eat and swim.  These tumors are caused by a virus that often affects internal organ functions.  In Florida, fibropapillomas have become an epidemic.  Scientific studies are trying to determine if human activities on land are related to the development of fibropapilloma tumors.

Plastic bags take 500-1000 years to degrade but they don’t really “go away.” Instead, the plastic eventually breaks down into minute bits of plastic which are ingested by sea turtles and other marine life. As the plastic bags break down, they are releasing toxic chemicals into the water and being ingested by many animals that may eventually find their way into our own food chain and onto our dinner plates.

Video: Why Plastic Bags are Evil

Miscellaneous

Will Rachel Carson Be the First Woman on the $20 Bill?

There’s a movement afoot to put a woman on the $20 bill and retire the slavery-supporting, Trail-of-Tears-blazing President Andrew Jackson from his long-held post.

Among the top 15 nominees is marine biologist Rachel Carson. In 1962, Carson authored Silent Spring, a seminal book for the environmental movement that warned of the degradation of natural systems if pesticide use continued unchecked. Drawing from many scientific studies, she described how DDT enters the food chain by accumulating in the fatty tissues of animals (humans, too). Today DDT is classified internationally as a probable carcinogen that persists in the environment for long periods.

Silent Spring was a bestseller, in part because, as the President’s Science Advisory Committee under John F. Kennedy acknowledged when it examined and later defended Carson’s findings, the American public had previously been unawares that pesticides were toxic.

The scientific community also largely backed Carson up, but chemical companies and some government scientists went on the attack. Carson’s gender was regularly used as a means to undermine her work; she was called “hysterical,” a “nun of nature,” and a “sentimental woman who loved cats.”

During the several years it took to finish Silent Spring, Carson learned she had breast cancer—a diagnosis she kept secret for fear that the chemical industry would use it to discredit her. She died in 1964. Carson didn’t live to see the formation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency six years later or the 1972 ban of the sale of DDT within the U.S.—two events she helped bring about.

Although best known for Silent Spring, Carson wrote three other bestsellers about the sea. Environmental writer and activist Bill McKibben once told the New York Times Magazine, “She was Jacques Cousteau before there was Jacques Cousteau.”

That may be true, but let’s remember her name was Rachel. And she’d look great on a $20.

Perrin Ireland|onEarth|March 30, 2015

EPA Takes Action to Protect the Public from an Unregistered Pesticide

 EPA issues order to stop the sale of BioStorm and NanoStrike

ATLANTA – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued an order to Nano Defense Solutions, Inc. in Saint Augustine, Fla. to stop the sale of “BioStorm” and “NanoStrike.” BioStorm and NanoStrike are products that are being marketed by the company for use in sites that include hospitals and athletic facilities.

The company claims in advertisements and brochures that BioStorm and NanoStrike use silver nanoparticle as an active ingredient and that these products are highly effective against bacteria, viruses, fungi, algae and yeasts. The company also makes unsubstantiated efficacy claims that “BioStorm and NanoStrike are designed to swiftly eradicate all microorganisms and keep surfaces free of colonization for up to a full year”. Such public health claims can only be made on products that have been properly tested and are registered with the EPA.

Under federal pesticide law, products that contain a pesticide as an active ingredient or claim to kill or repel bacteria or germs are considered pesticides and must be registered with the EPA prior to distribution or sale. The Agency will not register a pesticide until it has been determined that it will not pose an unreasonable risk when used according to the label directions.

The EPA is committed to ensuring that products making public health claims in the marketplace meet stringent effectiveness and safety standards, since the public cannot readily determine with the naked eye the effectiveness and safety of antimicrobial pesticides. Due to potential human health implications if the pesticides are not effective or meet our safety standards, the EPA continues to place a priority on actions regarding non-complying pesticides.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 30, 2015

Contact Information: Dawn Harris Young, (404) 562-8421 (Direct), (404) 562-8400 (Main), harris-young.dawn@epa.gov

For additional information about pesticides, visit: http://www.epa.gov/pesticides/.

Connect with EPA Region 4 on Facebook: www.facebook.com/eparegion4

And on Twitter: @EPASoutheast ###

Extinct Tree Resurrected from Ancient Seeds is now a Dad

Ten years since the Judean Date Palm was miraculously brought back to life following the chance discovery of seeds in the 2,000-year-old ruins of Masada, the male date palm tree named Methuselah, the only one of his kind, has become a father.

For thousands of years, the date palm was a staple crop in the Kingdom of Judea, as it was a source of food, shelter and shade.  Thick forests of the palms towering up to 80 feet and spreading for 7 miles covered the Jordan River valley from the Sea of Galilee in the north to the shores of the Dead Sea in the south.

So valued was the tree that it became a recognized as a symbol of good fortune in Judea.  It is chronicled in the Bible, Quran and ancient literature for its diverse powers, from an aphrodisiac to a contraceptive, and as a cure for a wide range of diseases including cancer, malaria and toothache.

However, its value was also the source of its demise and eventual extinction.  The tree so defined the local economy that it became a prime resource for the invading Roman army to destroy.  Once the Roman Empire took control of the kingdom in 70 AD, the date palms were wiped out in an attempt to cripple the Jewish economy. They eventually succeeded and by 500 AD the once plentiful palm had completely disappeared, driven to extinction for the sake of conquest.

But all was not lost, because in 1963, the late archeologist Yigael Yadin began excavating Masada, a mountaintop fortress built over 2,000 years ago on the shore of the Dead Sea where King Herod built a spectacular palace. Masada was the last stand of a small band of Jewish rebels who held out against three Roman legions for several years before committing mass suicide in A.D. 73.

aprilholloway|29 March, 2015

House Sugar Reform Act Would Make Much-Needed Reforms to America’s Costly Sugar Program

Washington, DC – Today, the Coalition for Sugar Reform issued the following statement welcoming the introduction of the bipartisan Sugar Reform Act of 2015 in the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill, which would reform the Depression-era U.S. sugar program, is the companion bill to legislation (S. 475) introduced in the Senate on February 12.

“We applaud Representatives Pitts, Davis, Goodlatte and Speier and others for their leadership in introducing this legislation, which calls for modest reforms to fix the outdated U.S. sugar program and would ultimately benefit all Americans – from consumers and taxpayers to the sugar-using industry and the hundreds of thousands they employ across the country.

“The proposed reform measures would provide the Secretary of Agriculture with the flexibility to adjust marketing allotments and import quotas to stabilize the U.S. sugar market when needed, ensuring we have a sugar program that reflects the realities of today’s market, not a program that is stuck in the 1930s.

“We ask lawmakers to think of their constituents, the American consumers and taxpayers who continue to foot the bill for the U.S sugar program, which the Congressional Budget Office forecasts will cost taxpayers $115 million over the next 10 years. Why is one small, special interest group being propped up at the expense of American consumers, taxpayers and sugar-using businesses?

“It is time to address the shortfalls of America’s protectionist sugar policy. We call on lawmakers to support this legislation.”

Green Concrete for a Sustainable Future

Dubai – Hours after switching off lights for Earth Hour, Dubai on Sunday announced its decision to switch to green concrete to make its ever-expanding built-up areas healthier and more sustainable.

From April, all new buildings coming up in Dubai will have to use green alternatives for original Portland cement (OPC), the major component of concrete mix that is found to emit toxic gases.

With each ton of OPC produced puffing out more than one ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other toxic gases, the Dubai Municipality (DM) has made it mandatory for consultants and contractors to use more of greener and safer alternatives like Fly Ash, and Ground Granulated Blast Furnace Slag (GGBFS), officials said at a Press conference.

Hussain Nasser Lootah and other officials watching the green concrete mixing process in Dubai on Sunday. – Supplied photo

The aim is to keep Dubai a healthy city that follows the highest standards of sustainable development and provide residents clean and pollution-free environment. The move followed a study by the municipality’s Building Department that ascertained the negative impacts that Portland cement can have.

When one ton of cement is produced, studies have found, 164kg of dust is also dumped to the air, which contributes to intensifying the phenomenon of global warming and also causes several diseases including cancer.

“We are keen to provide what is best for the city. We are looking at every element of buildings,” said Dubai Municipality Director-General Hussain Nasser Lootah.

He said the new options comply with green building requirements, are more durable and offer better quality at the same or even cheaper rates.

Officials said the construction industry in the UAE depends solely on a dozen cement-manufacturing companies. “The capacity of the 12 cement companies in the UAE is 39 million tons. But we are producing only 19 million tons as per the demand, which is going up slowly,” said DM Assistant Director-General for Engineering and Planning Sector Abdullah Raffia.

These factories will now be producing more of GGBS and Fly Ash.

With a minimum of 66 per cent of these materials in the concrete, which are recyclable byproducts from other industries, the concrete mix becomes stronger.

Apart from causing less emission of dust and fume, they are better resistant to water, salt and sulfate.

Raffia said the ash and slag are considered lifetime materials that give 40 more years for buildings. “We have calculated an estimated saving of Dh192 billion for Dubai because of the extended durability of buildings.”

Depending on the design and specifications of buildings, he said, only up to a maximum of 34 per cent of OPC will be allowed in the concrete mix.

Industry prepared

The industry here is very well prepared to switch to the green concrete, according to Robin Styles, technical support manager of CEMEX.

“From the ready-mix industry perspective, I think we are very well prepared for the change…The municipality has been engaging with the stakeholders for a few years. By using these alternative options, you can reduce the carbon footprint of concrete by up to 45 per cent,” he said.

Talking about the benefits for individual building owners, Styles said: “If you have a villa, you have less maintenance, less problems and the structure will last longer…You get more rentable time before you need to do repairs.”

As part of the “#Sustainable Dubai” initiative, the ready-mix concrete trucks in Dubai will also go for a makeover in their looks. A truck wrapped in the new design showing a green skyline of Dubai and carrying the tagline “Green Concrete for a Sustainable Future” was displayed at the venue where officials also witnessed a demonstration of the green concrete mixing process.

Sajila Saseendran|Senior Reporter|30 March 2015

Why You Should Think Twice About Feeding Wild Animals

When people provide food to wild animals, it usually comes from a place of love and compassion, not malice. Alas, sometimes these feedings can put the animals in harm’s way by increasing the spread of disease. The good news is that scientific researchers are just starting to understand the dos and don’ts of feeding wild creatures, so that animal lovers can do it more responsibly.

Having seen from various studies that feeding wild animals can either raise or decrease the rate of disease, a research team at the University of Georgia set out to figure out the overall trend for this kind of activity. Examining over 20 independent studies, they determined that feeding animals does indeed often have a harmful impact on wildlife, although that’s not always the case.

The problem with feeding animals — be it birdhouses, food left out in a yard or even feeding stations at a park — is not the food itself, it’s that it tends to bring a lot of animals to one centralized location. The inevitable proximity of the animals makes it that much more likely that they will pass diseases between each other and expedite the spread.

Another problem is that humans don’t often have an understanding of what’s nutritious for animals. If food is easily accessible, they’ll probably tend toward whatever is put out, even if the food they normally eat in the wild would be healthier for them. By switching their diets, the animals are also at a heightened risk for disease.

And if the human-provided food is more nutritious? Well, it does benefit the animals, but not enough to negate the spread of disease by eating in proximity to other animals.

Oddly, the main exceptions to increasing disease risk seem to come from unintentional feedings by humans, like when animals make their way into garbage cans or landfills. This kind of dining for some animals is more common as human expansion is encroaching into previously untouched habitat. Since human garbage is less likely to have certain parasites that affect animals, an animal is actually at a decreased risk of becoming infected by landfill meals than when they eat, say, a rodent in the wild.

Before you take the researchers’ findings as an admonishment not to feed animals, they want to clarify that that’s not their intention. “For a lot of people, feeding animals provides a crucial connection to nature, increases their appreciation of wildlife and presents opportunities for outreach and education,” said ecology professor Sonia Altizer. “We don’t want to suggest that all feeding of wildlife should be avoided, but we do need to find ways to minimize the risks for human and wildlife health.”

For their part, the researchers say they want to continue studying this subject, so they can give the public more specific information on what is safe and what isn’t when it comes to feeding wild animals.

In the meantime, the researchers have some actionable steps for animal lovers to minimize the risk of spreading disease while still feeding their wild friends:

• Clean birdhouses semi-regularly to get rid of harmful bacteria present
• Spread out feeding stations/birdhouses as far as possible to allow animals to have less close contact with each other.
• Choose food that is more nutritious for the species you are attracting since that at least helps the animals to have stronger immune systems to combat potential disease exposure.

Kevin Mathews|March 31, 2015

Why Earthquakes Could Be Even Worse for the Environment Than We Thought

The devastation caused by Japan’s 2011 earthquake and resulting tsunami is hardly a secret, but now researchers believe the earthquake and other earthquakes like it may have been damaging in an unexpected way due to the amount of climate-warming and ozone-depleting chemicals released into the atmosphere as a result of an earthquake’s destructive powers.

The 9.0 earthquake, which took place on March of 2011 with an epicenter in the waters off the Pacific coast of Tōhoku, is noted as one of the most devastating earthquakes in recent history. The quake was directly responsible for over 15,000 deaths and billions of dollars worth of damage to infrastructure, but according to a study published this month in Geophysical Research Letters, it also released around 6,600 metric tons (7,275 U.S. tons) of damaging chemicals into the atmosphere.

The researchers decided to look into the presence of these chemicals, known as halocarbons, after local monitoring stations recorded surprisingly high levels of the chemicals after the quake. The researchers combined measurements from air monitoring stations across the region and then used standard atmospheric models and mathematical models to work out the probable increase — and it was marked. In fact, the researchers believe that the earthquake resulted in an increase from 21 percent to 91 percent over typical levels of these chemicals.

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So what chemicals are we talking about? The researchers say that about half of them were HCFC-22, which went up by 38 percent and probably got into the atmosphere as a result of refrigerators, air conditioners and other electrical goods with cooling units or heat pumps, being destroyed. HCFC-22 is a well known ozone-depleting substance and is subject to the Montreal Protocol as a Class II restricted chemical, meaning that it is slowly being phased out and replaced with less antagonistic substances.

Other chemicals included CFC-11, which went up 72 percent and was probably released due to damaged insulation foams that are used in buildings and elsewhere in construction and manufacturing. Others, including HFC-134a and HFC-32, also increased sharply, going up 49 percent and 63 percent respectively, when comparing the year immediately before the disaster and the year after.

This is the first study of its kind to zero in on this kind of ozone depleting and climate-affecting chemicals being released as the result of an earthquake, and for this reason the data is being widely scrutinized and discussed.

“What we found is a new mechanism of halocarbon emissions coming from the earthquake,” said Takuya Saito, a senior researcher at the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Tsukuba, Japan.

So has this contributed to climate change? On its own, that’s unlikely. While the figures are significant enough to be of interest, their actual total worth would add up to only a very small impact. However, there are reasons to take this data seriously.

For one thing, the figures offered by the Japanese government on national halocarbon emissions didn’t take into account the release of chemicals with any degree of accuracy as shown here. That means that Japan underestimated the amount of halocarbons released into the atmosphere — and this isn’t just a problem for Japan.

While the 2011 Japanese earthquake was particularly devastating, the earth is constantly moving and quakes are happening all the time. While some do not cause major damage, this research points to the fact that when major damage does occur, the release of halocarbons and other gasses that have a climate-altering and ozone-depleting effect, can be significant. As isolated incidents, they may not add up to very much, but when looked at more expansively, they could add up to quite large gas release events, and at the very least this may be something we need to account for and factor in as we attempt to gather accurate atmospheric data.

This, the scientists say, should be reason enough to change how we measure the chemicals in the atmosphere. Instead of working from data that simply predicts what gases are present based on industrial data on chemical releases and broader atmospheric estimates from previous counts, which is what many governments do today, we should rely more closely on actual atmospheric readings to gain accurate insight. Though undoubtedly more costly, this research suggests that if we really want to assess greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting chemicals, ensuring our data is as robust and up-to-date as possible will be an important step in the right direction.

Steve Williams|March 31, 2015

Who says a better world is impossible?

Cars, air travel, space exploration, television, nuclear power, high-speed computers, telephones, organ transplants, prosthetic body parts… At various times these were all deemed impossible. I’ve been around long enough to have witnessed many technological feats that were once unimaginable. Even 10 or 20 years ago, I would never have guessed people would carry supercomputers in their pockets — your smart phone is more powerful than all the computers NASA used to put astronauts on the moon in 1969 combined!

Despite a long history of the impossible becoming possible, often very quickly, we hear the “can’t be done” refrain repeated over and over — especially in the only debate over global warming that matters: What can we do about it? Climate change deniers and fossil fuel industry apologists often argue that replacing oil, coal and gas with clean energy is beyond our reach. The claim is both facile and false.

Facile because the issue is complicated. It’s not simply a matter of substituting one for the other. To begin, conservation and efficiency are key. We must find ways to reduce the amount of energy we use — not a huge challenge considering how much people waste, especially in the developed world. False because rapid advances in clean energy and grid technologies continue to get us closer to necessary reductions in our use of polluting fossil fuels.

It’s ironic that anti-environmentalists and renewable energy opponents often accuse those of us seeking solutions of wanting to go back to the past, to living in caves, scrounging for roots and berries. They’re the ones intent on continuing to burn stuff to keep warm — to the detriment of the natural world and all it provides.

People have used wind and solar power for thousands of years. But recent rapid advances in generation, storage and transmission technologies have led to a fast-developing industry that’s outpacing fossil fuels in growth and job creation. Costs are coming down to the point where renewable energy is competitive with the heavily subsidized fossil fuel industry. According to the International Energy Agency, renewable energy for worldwide electricity generation grew to 22 per cent in 2013, a five per cent increase from 2012.

The problem is that much of the world still burns non-renewable resources for electricity and fuels, causing pollution and climate change and, subsequently, more human health problems, extreme weather events, water shortages and environmental devastation. In many cities in China, the air has become almost unbreathable, as seen in the shocking Chinese documentary film Under the Dome. In California, a prolonged drought is affecting food production. Extreme weather events are costing billions of dollars worldwide.

We simply must do more to shift away from fossil fuels and, despite what the naysayers claim, we can. We can even get partway there under our current systems. Market forces often lead to innovation in clean energy development. But in addressing the very serious long-term problems we’ve created, we may have to challenge another “impossibility”: changing our outmoded global economic system. As economist and Earth Institute director Jeffrey Sachs wrote in a recent Guardian article, “At this advanced stage of environmental threats to the planet, and in an era of unprecedented inequality of income and power, it’s no longer good enough to chase GDP. We need to keep our eye on three goals — prosperity, inclusion, and sustainability — not just on the money.”

Relying on market capitalism encourages hyper-consumption, planned obsolescence, wasteful production and endless growth. Cutting pollution and greenhouse gas emissions requires conserving energy as well as developing new energy technologies. Along with reducing our reliance on private automobiles and making buildings and homes more energy-efficient, that also means making goods that last longer and producing fewer disposable or useless items so less energy is consumed in production.

People have changed economic systems many times before, when they no longer suited shifting conditions or when they were found to be inhumane, as with slavery. And people continue to develop tools and technologies that were once thought impossible. Things are only impossible until they’re not. We can’t let those who are stuck in the past, unable to imagine a better future, hold us back from creating a safer, cleaner and more just world.

Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor Ian Hanington.

Terps Leave Tinier Water Footprints

The University of Maryland (UMD) is one of the largest consumers of freshwater in the state of Maryland, but it’s making big steps in water conservation across campus. Despite the addition of a new dorm in 2011, which added 640 beds and over 180 bathrooms to campus, water consumption levels have remained relatively steady at about a half a billion gallons annually since 2009. This is thanks to mass implementation of new water saving devices such as low-flow toilets, showers, faucets and moisture sensors on irrigation fields.

Although I’ve been a student at UMD for the past three years, it wasn’t until I came to intern for EPA’s Office of Water this semester that I truly began to appreciate the innovative ways UMD conserves water. During my internship, I learned about WaterSense, a partnership program started by EPA’s Office of Water, which offers people a simple way to use less water with water-efficient products, new homes, and services. Three water efficient products in the program are low-flow toilets, faucets and showerheads. According to EPA, one WaterSense low flow showerhead will save 2,900 gallons of water and $70 a year. To earn the WaterSense label, a showerhead needs to be under a 2.00/gallon per minute flow.

Residential facilities at UMD says that every single shower on campus (1,236 to be exact) has a 1.5/gallon per minute flow. They even have an entire residence hall that utilizes showers with 1.25/gallon per minute flow. The campus also boasts 1,370 toilets equipped with low-flow flush valves, and 1,370 sinks equipped with low flow aerators. To illustrate how effective this is, let’s consider the case of Washington Hall. In 2011-2012 Washington Hall used an average of 65,750 gallons of water annually. However, after the installation of low-flow products, the building used an average of 34,250 gallons of water annually in 2013-2014, saving over 30,000 gallons a year.

When organizations buy WaterSense products, they empower the individual to make a difference without even realizing it, simply by using the WaterSense products offered. Recruiting larger organizations and companies – or even universities — could be an effective solution to curb the immense amount of water wasted by toilets, faucets and showerheads, like at the University of Maryland.

Madeleine Raley|2015 March 31

Death by strangulation? Hydropower threatens to kill the mighty Mekong

Over 18 million people live off the natural bounty of the The Mekong Delta, writes Tom Fawthrop – the source of huge annual harvests of fish, rice, fruit, and one of the world’s most productive ecosystems. But now huge dams threaten to strangle the Mekong river and the abundant life it supports, while the world sits idly by.

Killing off the Irrawaddy Dolphins is just the beginning of a chain of calamities that would be set in motion by the Don Sahong dam construction, and the Xayaburi dam already under construction.

In its 4,880km journey from the snow-capped mountains to Tibet to the delta in Vietnam, Sipandon in southern Laos stands out as a critical part of the Mekong’s uniquely wonderful ecosystem, blessed by raging waterfalls, picturesque islands, and graced by a colony of highly endangered freshwater dolphins.

Irrawaddy dolphins symbolize the magnificence of the Mekong River and its continued high biodiversity. WWF regards the dolphins as a flagship species, reflecting the health of the river ecosystem for other species, including humans.

But the dwindling numbers of surviving dolphins – estimated between 78 and 91 individuals confined to Sipandon in Laos, and neighbouring Cambodia, should ring alarm bells that all is not well in the river. Dolphin conservation is also vitally important to local villagers who have come to revere them.

The area’s dolphins alone would justify designating Sipandon – which translates as ‘Four Thousand Islands’ as a wetland sanctuary protected by the Ramsar Convention.

And that’s before taking into account its spectacular beauty, its extraordinary biodiversity, and its enormous importance for fish which feed 60 million people downstream.

But instead of protecting Sipandon, Laos is bent on its destruction

“If this special wetlands zone is protected, it could be one of the great wonders of the world”, says Carl Grundy-Warr, a geography professor at the National university of Singapore (NUS). “But now it is far from being a secure sanctuary.”

Instead of signing up to the Ramsar Convention for Wetlands Protected Areas, the government of Laos has perversely opted to launch a hydro-electric dam in this Mekong wetlands zone in 2015, spurning opportunities for the Lao people to further benefit from expanding ecotourism, and nature conservation.

“The dam builders intend to excavate millions of tons of rock using explosives, creating strong sound waves that could create grave, potentially lethal threats to the only dolphin population in Laos”, WWF reports. “These dolphins have highly sensitive hearing structures.”

Mekong specialist Dr Grundy-Warr concluded that “if these dams along the mainstream of the Lower Mekong go ahead we are talking about massive calamity”.

Killing off the Irrawaddy Dolphins is just the beginning of a chain of calamities that would be set in motion by the Don Sahong dam construction, and the Xayaburi dam already under construction. There are nine more dams in the pipeline.

With so much water diverted from magnificent Khone Phapheng waterfalls to fuel the Don Sahong dam, Mekong experts fear this national treasure, the widest waterfall in Southeast Asia, would be undermined and lose its iconic status.

A great and productive ecosystem may soon be unraveled

Downstream nations Cambodia and Vietnam fear that the huge freshwater fisheries that support a population of 60 million will be massively reduced. Food security will be undermined. Poverty will be increased and nutrition will decline.

80% of Cambodian protein comes from fish, most of it coming from the Mekong and Tonle Sap, the great lake is also an integral part of the same ecosystem connected directly to the Mekong via the Tonle Bassac River.

WWF program officer in Cambodia Chit San Ath commented: “The Don Sahong Dam will only push Cambodia and Vietnam closer to a food crisis. Have they forgotten that fish are our lifeline and the backbone of our economy?”

The Lao refusal to heed the chorus of opposition prompted a strong reaction from Cambodia-based ecologist Taber Hand, who told the Phnom Penh Post:

“I view it like a declaration of war by Laos on Cambodia and Vietnam. The impact of reducing fisheries and sediment flow is more subtle than most acts of war, but it has the same or greater effect on national security.”

Laos unfazed by the anti-dam opposition

“For Laos, any dam is very important, because Laos has no other options to improve its economy”, Daovong Phonekeo, director-general of Laos’ Department of Energy Policy and Planning, told the Voice of America news site. “Our only option is to develop hydropower.”

In fact Laos has several other development options and other alternative paths to generate energy. But solar energy, wind power and other clean and renewable technologies fail to generate the same financial concentrations that feed lucrative commissions to well-connected intermediaries, and subsidize the powerful contracting companies that benefit from big dam projects.

The neo-liberal ideology adopted by the ruling communist party state of Lao [the Lao PDR] pushes a policy of ‘dam every river’ to turn the landlocked country into “the battery of Asia” – an idea conceived by the World Bank and endorsed by the ADB – the Asia Development Bank.

This blind obsession with damming rivers regardless of the environmental consequences puts them on a collision course with downstream countries – Cambodia and Vietnam.

So far the the Mekong River Commission (MRC) – the inter-governmental agency that works with the governments of Cambodia, Lao PDR, Thailand and Viet Nam on the “joint management of shared water resources and sustainable development of the Mekong River” – has managed to avoid open conflict. But maybe not for much longer.

The toothless Mekong River Commission

The first big test of whether the MRC legal framework of consultation and cooperation could manage the conflict of interests between member states was the first Lao dam project – the Xayaburi dam project in 2011

The controversial dam was launched 2012 in defiance of protests from Cambodia and Vietnam that maintained the consultation process had not been completed. (See ‘The Mekong must run free!’, The Ecologist 14th December 2013.)

The Don Sahong dam is now the second attempt to resolve water disputes over dam projects under the auspices of the MRC. The lack of credible environmental impact studies and the flawed plans of the dam developer were exposed during a MRC-regional consultation in December 2014 hosted in Pakse Laos.

Malaysian dam developer Mega-First has opted to engineer a fish diversion (see map). With the dam blocking the Sahong channel, the scheme aims to divert fish away from the Sahong channel and the dam construction, to two other lesser channels, that are now being deepened and widened.

The grassroots communities in Cambodian and Vietnam participated in public forums to discuss the dam impacts, and in January 2015 the official National Mekong Committees reported back to the MRC that there was overwhelming opposition to the dam and even Thailand backed the chorus of complaint.

Vietnam’s National Mekong Committee (NMC) insisted that the regional consultation process should be extended till the end of 2015, when the findings of a special study of hydropower impacts on the river would be completed. Cambodia and Thailand added their voice of concern and requested more time to study the dam project.

Laos: ‘We don’t need consensus!’

However the Lao government absolutely refused to consider any extension of the six-month period. As Daovong Phonekeo, director-general of Laos’ Department of Energy Policy and Planning, told Voice of America: “For the development of the Mekong River, we don’t need consensus!”

On a very narrow reading of the international agreement that created the MRC, the Lao government is correct. No country has any veto power. The CEO of the MRC Hans Guttman has clarified that “the MRC is not a regulatory body. We can only facilitate dialogue between member states, we cannot enforce anything.”

However the 1995 Mekong Agreement also stipulates an important caveat that “no country has the unilateral right to use water without taking into account other riparian’s rights.”

The US-based International Rivers argues that “taking into account” by any reasonable interpretation must surely include taking into account the weight of riparian opposition overwhelmingly against the project.

All the regional NGOs likewise insist the Lao government PDR is obliged to halt the dam project order to avoid conflict between member states, and promote MRC’s proclaimed spirit of international cooperation and equitable sharing of water resources.

MRC throws precaution to the winds

However the MRC’s CEO Hans Guttman insisted: “Prior consultation is not a process to seek approval for a proposed project.” This helped the Lao government to deflect the consultation away from the core issue of whether the dam should be built or not, into a secondary issue of how best to mitigate the negative consequences of the dam.

Dr. Philip Hirsch, director of Sydney University’s Mekong Research Centre, told The Ecologist “In such an environmentally sensitive area you don’t just go ahead with a project..It is a highly risky project so you need to take a precautionary approach, and make sure you have got it right, before you take a decision to build a dam.”

But MRC Chief Mr. Guttman claimed the consultation had a far more limited role to restricted to ” review the project, raise concerns, and see how problems can best be mitigated.” Hirsch is astonished by this approach: “It is very odd that Mr. Guttman’s statements only focus on mitigation, and ignore the precautionary principle.”

Mega First, the Malaysian company planning to dam Hou Sahong, claims making adjacent channels wider and deeper will provide fish with a detour route.

But Dr So Nam, a Cambodian fisheries expert with the MRC, considered this Malaysian company had failed to provide any scientific proof that MRC’s recommended guidelines of a 95% success rate for effective fish mitigation could be met.

So on what basis can the MRC secretariat possibly justify the sustainability of this dam project if there is no realistic prospect of fish mitigation?

Earthrights regional coordinator Daniel King is highly critical: “The attempt by the CEO of the Mekong Commission to limit consultation to dam mitigation measures is misleading, irresponsible and dangerous for the Mekong River’s future.”

Is the Mekong doomed?

If the Don Sahong dam goes ahead against all the weight of scientific evidence on hydropower impacts, in defiance of regional and riparian opposition, it is widely expected nine more dams will follow suit.

Vietnamese Mekong experts have concluded it will strip one of the world’s great rivers of its natural flow, block sediment and destroy the river’s immense biodiversity. In a nutshell the delta will be doomed.

River flows will change. Much of the rich sediment and nutrients that has long made the Vietnamese delta a rice bowl of the region will be blocked. The relentless damming of the river will exacerbate salinization from the ocean. In a world already facing climate change and worsening natural disasters, here is a classic example of a man-made disaster rapidly unfolding.

Yet most aid from western governments and other donations to the MRC are targeted at adapting to climate change, rather than dealing with the far greater threat from the dams.

Vietnamese experts at the Delta’s Cantho University are not happy with this exclusive focus, including Dr Duong Van Ni, Director of the Centre for Biodiversity, who insists that dams will erode all attempts to cope with climate change.

At a recent forum Dr Ni declared: “While we are busy adapting to climate change and rising sea levels, the dam will hit us like a rock to the back of the head.”

Killing the Golden Goose

Wetlands specialist Nguyen Huu then reported that the loss of fish alone in the Mekong estimated at over $3 billion, outweighs the sum total of all the benefits that dams can offer from hydropower: in total the Mekong Delta alone earns $10 billion a year in export revenues alone, mostly from rice, fruit, and fish.

Yet the Delta is facing a devastating collapse. The domino effect of the dams will undermine the rice crop, fisheries and food security. With such a severely damaged agriculture. Mr Then predicts that if all the dams go ahead, in about 20 years time, Vietnam the second largest rice exporter in the world will have lost its capacity to export any rice at all.

If the delta is lost, the problems won’t stop at Vietnam’s borders. Not only the 18 million people living in the Delta will be the losers, but all who depend on her bounty. The removal of Vietnam from the list of top rice exporters would have a disastrous impact on global food security, and rice prices.

And the increasing poverty of small farmers and fishermen in all the Mekong countries that would follow is certain to trigger turbulence and instability along the banks of the Mekong and beyond, and a flux of millions of environmental refugees that is certain to prove unmanageable in this land-hungry region.

Yet the battle to Save the Mekong led by International Rivers and civil society organizations in the region has so far sadly failed to kindle an uprising of global outrage sufficient to tip the balance against the Don Sahong dam.

And the wider world remains largely ignorant of, and silent about about the mighty Mekong’s imminent slow death by strangulation, and the crippling social, ecological, economic and human impacts impacts on the region and far beyond.

Tom Fawthrop|27th March 2015

New Zealand Bans Animal Testing for Cosmetics

In another historic victory for animals in labs, New Zealand has just become the latest country to ban their use in cosmetics testing.

Following heavy campaigning by animal advocates and the Green Party to end the practice, this week the government voted to amend the Animal Welfare Act to make it illegal for companies to test finished products or their ingredients on animals in the country.

Even though it was a slightly different bill than the one pushed by the Green Party’s animal welfare spokesperson Mojo Mathers, she said she’s still “over the moon” that the government has acknowledged her work and agreed to a ban.

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While no known testing is currently taking place in New Zealand, the new measure will ensure it never does. Now animal advocates are celebrating a win they believe will protect animals and bring the country in line with what consumers want. The New Zealand-based animal advocacy organization SAFE, which has also been working on the issue, highlighted a poll that found 89 percent of adult New Zealanders do not support using animals to test cosmetics, especially in light of the fact that there are already so many safe products and ingredients available to choose from and work with.

“We are thrilled that New Zealand’s politicians have taken this important step to vote out cosmetics cruelty. This is a moment to be celebrated for animal welfare and compassionate consumers, and yet another achievement for the #BeCrueltyFree campaign,” said Claire Mansfield, Humane Society International’s Global #BeCrueltyFree Campaigns Director.

Unfortunately the ban doesn’t affect imported cosmetics that have been tested on animals, which make up a majority of products currently on store shelves, but animal advocates say they will focus their attention on those next in an effort to grow the global community of nations that have taken a stand against this.

Already a number of countries have taken progressive steps to stop the unnecessary suffering of animals used in tests for personal care and household products, including India, Israel, Brazil’s São Paulo, the European Union and China, which recently removed a huge barrier when it officially announced it would end its mandatory requirement for animal testing.

Now efforts are also now underway in Australia, Canada, Brazil, Korea and Taiwan.

While the U.S. is still lagging behind on the issue, last year legislation was introduced that would make it illegal to conduct or commission animal testing for cosmetics after a one year phase in, which would be followed by a ban on the interstate sale of products and ingredients that were made using animal testing after three years.

Alicia Graef|April 2, 2015

India Deploys Army to Clean Up Trash on Mount Everest

India’s Prime Ministers Narenda Modi has deployed 34 skilled members of his nation’s Army to beat back a force that’s taken hold of the world’s tallest mountain for countless years.

Their mission? To haul some 4000 kilos, or roughly 8818 lbs of non-biodegradable waste left behind by generation after generation of climbers who’ve made the pilgrimage to the highest of terrestrial heights.

Over the years, the slopes have accumulated everything from small food and beverage packaging to oxygen cylinders, camping equipment, clothing, and all sorts of other discarded goods that might weigh down climbers as they make the perilous ascent.

Nepal recently implemented rules that climbers must descend the mountain with 18 lbs of trash, which is roughly the average amount of waste a climber produces over the course of a trip to the iconic crown of the Himalayas. Still, those measures have only slowed the further buildup of trash, not the trash that already exists as mountains in and of themselves.

The team will set out for Kathmandu on April 4 ahead of a May ascent, which will actually comprise two separate advances on the mountain. One team will scale Everest while the other will scale its neighbor and fourth tallest peak in the world, Mt. Lahoste. While there will be other activities taking place, at least 30 days of the mission will be devoted to the arduous task of hauling as much waste down as they can.

Most of their work will take place either at base camp (17,700 feet), though they will document and attempt to haul down as much waste as they can from the four Everest mission camps that dot heavily trafficked South Col route.

With a year of training under their belt for this mission, we can only hope for their safe passage.

Ben Roffee|RYOT|April 2, 2015

This post originally appeared on RYOT

Environmental Links

SFAS International Wildlife News Audubon Advocate Audubon Restore Eco-Voice South Florida Wildlife Care Center Sawgrass Nature Center & Wildlife Hospital The Turtle Hospital The Marathon Wild Bird Center Climate change info Audubon’s Coastal Strand Audubon of Florida News Blog Bioenergy News Climate Progress – climate science, politics and solutions Collins Center for Public Policy Comprehensive Everglades Restoration News EcoWatch – feeds from the WaterKeeper Alliance Everglades Foundation – press releases Everglades Hub Fort Myers News – Press Green Front Pages from Florida Newspapers Herald Tribune Newspapers –  Environmental News KeysNews.com Naples Daily News  – Environmental News National Public Radio Eco-News Riverwatch News about the Caloosahatchee Sierra Club Sierra Club Florida South Florida Watershed  Journal South Florida Water Management District Union of Concerned Scientists – news Yahoo News Search: Everglades NASA Climate Information American Littorial Society log NASA Climate Information Sun Newspapers – Lake Okeechobee News Everglades City News  – Mullet Wrapper IFAW’s World of Animals Magazine

ConsRep 1503 E

Earth Day 1970 was irrefutable evidence that the American people understood the environmental threat and wanted action to resolve it. Barry Commoner

Announcements

Biscayne Bay Aquatic Preserves Celebrates March as Seagrass Awareness Month

MIAMI – Biscayne Bay Aquatic Preserves staff joined the Mayor of North Bay Village Connie Leon-Kreps,

North Bay Village Commissioners and area residents, to discuss the importance of seagrasses to Miami-Dade County’s ecology and economy.

Mayor Leon-Kreps read the official proclamation along the aquatic preserves shoreline with several seagrass species exhibited.

“Awareness of the dangers facing seagrass, a vital natural resource, will help to create an understanding

of the ways seagrass damage can impact both the economic and ecological value of our marine resources,” said Mayor Leon-Kreps.

Participants visited a seagrass restoration site by catamaran cruise, learned proper boating techniques in a shallow bay,

viewed endangered Bottlenose Dolphins foraging and listened to the calls of birds roosting at a bird rookery.

The highlight was the release of a rehabilitated pelican, injured from marine debris, by the Pelican Harbor Seabird Station staff.

“From residents to the city manager, the chief of police to the mayor herself, the North Bay Village community came out to celebrate Seagrass Awareness Month,”

said Biscayne Bay Aquatic Preserves Manager Pamela Sweeney. “For many participants, this was the first time actually seeing their city – a chain of islands – by water.”

Seagrass beds, an important economic driver, provided over $4.1 million in commercial harvest to Miami-Dade County last year.

Thousands of acres of seagrass beds run throughout Biscayne Bay, comprising all seven species of seagrasses known to grow within the Caribbean.

Master gardeners, Master naturalists, Habitat Stewards… EARTH DAY AT TRADEWINDS PARK.. Sat Apr 11th ‏

Please join us for EARTH DAY AT TRADEWINDS PARK . 

We would like to see our Master Gardeners and Master naturalists participate…..

Master Gardeners, please sign up on the VMS… Volunteer Event Calendar

Master Naturalists… please sign up by emailing Adam Pitcher… apitcher@broward.org, with a copy to me.

Your Opinion Counts: Please CLICK HERE to complete a short survey

or copy this link into your browser:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RJNJFXQ

John J. Pipoly III, Ph.D., FLS

Extension Agent

FFL-FYN, Master Gardener & Master Naturalist Coordinator

UF-IFAS/Broward Co Extension Ed Section

Parks and Recreation Division

c/o Tree Tops Park  3900 SW 100^th Avenue

Davie, FL 33328-1705

Tel: 954-357-5270

Extension Education Hosts Presentation by Renowned Landscape Architect Akiko Iwata ‏

Ladies and Gents….

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC…. NEW AND IMPROVED, CUTTING-EDGE CURRICULA

Also, a  unique opportunity to meet our new class of Master Gardener trainees, our Master Gardeners, Master Naturalists, and others. 

We hope our academic friends feel free to bring their classes along as well.

This is a fabulous opportunity for we of like mind to collaborate and learn from Ms. Iwata, all done in the spirit of FLORIDA FRIENDLINESS…..

Hope to see you there !

Your Opinion Counts: Please CLICK HERE to complete a short survey

or copy this link into your browser:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RJNJFXQ

Semper parat

John J. Pipoly III, Ph.D., FLS

Extension Agent

FFL-FYN, Master Gardener & Master Naturalist Coordinator

UF-IFAS/Broward Co Extension Ed Section

Parks and Recreation Division

c/o Tree Tops Park  3900 SW 100^th Avenue

Davie, FL 33328-1705

Tel: 954-357-5270

DEP’s Coral Program Offers Free Classes to Encourage Coral Reef Protection

by nataliarodriguez2015

March.24.2015

MIAMI – In honor of “Earth Month” in April, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s Coral Reef Conservation Program

will be teaching a variety of free, educational classes at the Biscayne Bay Environmental Center.

April 2: 6-9 p.m. Professional Association of Diving Instructors Project Aware Class

April 7: Noon-3 p.m. Stony Coral Identification Class

April 9: 6-9 p.m. Stony Coral Identification Class

April 14: Noon-2 p.m. Southeast Florida Action Network (SEAFAN) Bleach Watch Class

April 16: 6-8 p.m. SEAFAN Bleach Watch Class

April 21: Noon-3 p.m. Marine Invertebrate Identification Class

April 23: 6-9 p.m. Marine Invertebrate Identification Class

April 28: Noon-3 p.m. Reef Fish Identification Class

April 30: 6-9 p.m. Reef Fish Identification Class

Reservations are required as space is limited, and guests may register for one class per person.

Reservations can be made by emailing coral@dep.state.fl.us.

For more information on the classes, please click here or contact Ana Zangroniz at 305-795-1222.

All classes will be taught at Biscayne Bay Environmental Center located at 277 NE 79 St., Miami, FL 33138.

National Find Your Voice Campaign to Support America’s National Parks Kicks off in Biscayne ‏

On Saturday, April 18–the start of National Park Week–the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) will host the official East Coast

launch of its Find Your Voice campaign in Biscayne and Everglades National Parks.

This national campaign aims to help inspire people to take action on behalf of America’s most treasured places, and to become life-long park advocates.
To start the day, catch the free national park trolley or drive to Biscayne where lunch will be provided for participants, along with fishing lessons and boat rides on the bay.

You’ll also meet with a Lancelot Jones re-enactor who will talk about his role in the creation of Biscayne National Park

and a ranger who will discuss the maritime history of the largest marine park in the National Park System.
While at Everglades, you can take a tour of the Anhinga Trail to see alligators, wading birds, and other native wildlife,

and see an exhibition and film about young urban writers who recently ventured into the park’s wilderness for the first time.
Event Details
WHAT: Find Your Voice East Coast Kick-Off Event at Biscayne and Everglades National Parks
WHEN: Saturday, April 18 from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m., with keynote address at noon. Find a more detailed schedule of events here.
WHERE: You can catch the trolley at 9:35 a.m. from Losner Park in Homestead (104 N. Krome Ave.), or drive to either park (see below).
10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Biscayne National Park, Dante Fascell Visitor Center, 9700 SW 328 Street, Homestead, Florida 33033
2 – 4 p.m.
Everglades National Park, 40001 State Hwy 9336, Homestead, Florida 33033
WHO: NPCA and invited partners: Mahogany Youth, City of Homestead, YMCA, Blue Star Families,

Baptist Health System, Junior Scientists in the Sea, and the Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science, among others.
RSVP: Please RSVP to Jackie Crucet at SunCoast@npca.org by April 15.
OTHER INFO: Free parking is available in downtown Homestead and at both national parks.
NPCA’s Find Your Voice activities help to provide a lasting legacy for our national parks.
We hope you will join us!

Jackie Crucet|NPCA Program Analyst

Of Interest to All

Fossil Fuel Industry Is Quietly Building Pipeline Network That ‘Dwarfs Keystone’ XL

Despite public opposition that has so far blocked the building of the Keystone XL pipeline, the fossil fuels industry has successfully—and quietly—expanded the nation’s domestic oil network by installing thousands of miles of pipeline across the country, according to new reporting by the Associated Press.

“Overall, the network has increased by almost a quarter in the last decade,” the AP reports. “And the work dwarfs Keystone. About 3.3 million barrels per day of capacity have been added since 2012 alone—five times more oil than the Canada-to-Texas Keystone line could carry if it’s ever built.”

While the Keystone project is still in limbo, the petroleum industry has “pushed relentlessly everywhere else to get oil to market more efficiently, and its adversaries have been unable to stop other major pipelines,” writes AP journalist Henry Jackson.

That’s not to say they haven’t tried.

In Minnesota, for example, local opponents succeeded last year in getting state regulators to consider rerouting a 616-mile pipeline proposed by Toronto-based Enbridge around lakes and forests, delaying it for at least a year.

“More typical, though, was an Enbridge project to double the capacity of a 285-mile stretch of pipeline in Michigan,” Jackson writes. “Groups like the Michigan Coalition Against Tar Sands fought the proposal, citing a spill in 2010 that caused serious environmental damage. But the Michigan Public Service Commission ruled the project acceptable, and the expansion went ahead.”

Opposition to local pipeline projects is ongoing. In Iowa, the Meskwaki Indian tribe is objecting to a Texas company’s plans to construct a 343-mile crude oil pipeline across 18 Iowa counties, the Des Moines Register reported Monday.

“As a people that have lived in North America for thousands of years, we have environmental concerns about the land and drinking water,” tribal chairwoman Judith Bender wrote in a letter filed last month with state officials. “As long as our environment was good we could live, regardless of who our neighbors were.”

She continued: “Our main concern is Iowa’s aquifers might be significantly damaged. And it will only take one mistake and life in Iowa will change for the next thousands of years. We think that should be protected, because it is the water that gives Iowa the best way of life.”

An analysis released in November by the Center for Biological Diversity found that there have been more than 8,700 significant incidents with U.S. pipelines involving death, injury, and economic and environmental damage since 1986—more than 300 per year.

In fact, a new proposal from the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration “is an implicit acknowledgment that some of the oil industry’s testing technology isn’t sophisticated enough to detect cracks or corrosion in time to prevent a pipeline’s failure,” according to Energy & Environment Publishing’s EnergyWire, which reported exclusively on the plan on Monday.

According to EnergyWire:

Almost two years after an Exxon Mobil Corp. pipeline split open and sent Canadian crude flowing through a neighborhood in Mayflower, Ark., federal regulators have quietly proposed a sweeping rewrite of oil pipeline safety rules.

If the proposal is finalized in its current form, as much as 95 percent of the U.S. pipelines that carry crude, gasoline and other liquids—182,000 miles—would be subject to the new rules and about half the system may have to undergo extensive tests to prove it can operate safely, according to information from the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration.

The plan, known as the Hazardous Liquids Integrity Verification Process, is an implicit acknowledgment that some of the oil industry’s testing technology isn’t sophisticated enough to detect cracks or corrosion in time to prevent a pipeline’s failure. And for the first time since PHMSA was created, it may wind up telling companies they have to replace certain aging pipelines.

The oil and pipeline industries are already lobbying against the idea, EnergyWire reports, though few details about the plan are publicly available.

According to EnergyWire journalist Mike Lee: “PHMSA declined to make any of its officials available for interviews over a five-day period and wouldn’t answer written questions on the record—even though the agency has already briefed two oil industry trade associations about the proposal.”

Deirdre Fulton|Common Dreams|March 23, 2015

A $600-Million Fracking Company Just Sued This Tiny Ohio Town For Its Water

A tiny town in eastern Ohio is being sued by an Oklahoma-based oil and gas company that bought more than 180 million gallons of water from the town last year. That water use, combined with a dry fall, prompted the village to temporarily shut off water to Gulfport Energy. Now, a second company has a water agreement, and there might not be enough water to go around.

Gulfport Energy alleges in the lawsuit that the village of Barnesville, population 4,100, violated its agreement to provide water from its reservoir by entering into a contract with oil and gas company Antero Resources. Gulfport says the village’s contract with Antero allows for withdrawals beyond what Gulfport is allowed to take.

Gulfport’s water supply can be shut off whenever water levels in the reservoir create a risk to the health and safety of the village residents and businesses. Last fall, the reservoir was down three feet below average when village officials stopped all outside withdrawals.

“We felt like we had to shut everyone off to protect the regular users,” said village solicitor Marlin Harper. “We don’t have unlimited water.”

But here’s the catch: Only Gulfport pumped water out of the reservoir last year. So even though, as Harper admits, the Antero contract has “a little bit of a priority” over the Gulfport contract, that’s not the reason Gulfport’s water supply was shut off. During the unusually dry fall, water withdrawals by Gulfport alone were too much for the reservoir to sustain.

Environmentalists stress how valuable water is in the area, and particularly how valuable the reservoir at the heart of the lawsuit is. The water being sold to Gulfport comes from the Slope Creek Reservoir, which supplies water to all the town’s residents as well as another 8,000 people in neighboring areas, said John Morgan, a spokesman for Concerned Barnesville Area Residents.

“It’s one of the best reservoirs in the area,” Morgan told ThinkProgress. “North of us, everything was strip mined years ago, so having a good water supply is valuable here.” When the reservoir got low last year, residents got alarmed, he said.

Concerns over water supplies make sense in Ohio, a state that has steadily increased the number of drilling permits it has issued over the years. In 2010, Ohio issued 651 drilling permits. In 2013, the last year the state provides data on, it issued 1,000 drilling permits.

In Belmont County, where Barnesville is located, 63 horizontal drilling permits were issued in 2013. Belmont and its neighboring eastern Ohio counties have the most active oil and gas development in the state, according to documents from the state’s Division of Oil and Gas Resource Management. By 2019, there will be an estimated 3,240 horizontal oil and gas wells in Ohio, according to Iryna Lendel, assistant director of the Center for Economic Development at Cleveland State University.

But critics of Ohio’s oil and gas boom have worried that there isn’t enough regulation on either the drilling or the subsequent disposal of waste water. During the hydraulic fracturing process, known as fracking, water mixed with sand and chemicals is ejected into underground layers of rock, freeing tiny pockets of oil or natural gas. The wastewater often can’t be reused, is filled with chemicals, and can sometimes be contaminated with naturally occurring radiation from the shale.

“Once it’s been used, it is polluted,” Morgan said. “Other states have been realizing their need to catch up and regulate better. Ohio has been going the other direction and deregulating.”

The risks from fracking are myriad. Twenty-five families about 50 miles south of Barnesville were evacuated last year after a fracking well sprung a leak. Fracking in Ohio has triggered earthquakes, and there is concern about how waste water is treated and stored. A study in the Akron Beacon Journal found that one drilling well can have nearly 1 million pounds of liquid chemical additives.

Gulfport claims that if Barnesville fails to provide water, Gulfport could lose millions of dollars. The company pays more than $75,000 a year for water, it said in court documents.

Protecting water rights against the interests of the gas and oil industry in Ohio is a struggle, Morgan said. His group, Concerned Barnesville Area Residents, formed around the issues of potential water pollution from oil and gas extraction in the area.

The state Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been developing a Source Water Assessment and Protection Program, but the agency has limited oversight. All regulation of oil and gas extraction falls under the Division of Oil and Gas Resource Management.

“The EPA is trying to help up with the source water protection plan, but they can’t directly have any say about oil and gas wells,” Morgan said.

Other avenues for protecting water have also been blocked. Last month, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that towns can’t ban fracking through local zoning laws.

For now, water withdrawals continue at the reservoir, and there is enough for everyone. But locals expect that Antero will start up operations this year, which will mean two companies taking water from the reservoir. Another dry summer could mean another mandatory shut off and another round of litigation for Barnesville.

Samantha Page|March 24, 2015

  FEMA to states like Florida: no climate planning, no money

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is making it tougher for governors to deny man-made climate change. Starting next year, the agency will approve disaster preparedness funds only for states whose governors approve hazard mitigation plans that address climate change.

This may put several Republican governors who maintain the earth isn’t warming due to human activities, or prefer to do nothing about it, into a political bind. Their position may block their states’ access to hundreds of millions of dollars in FEMA funds. Over the past five years, the agency has awarded an average $1 billion a year in grants to states and territories for taking steps to mitigate the effects of disasters.

From 2010 to 2014, Florida received about $260 million.

“If a state has a climate denier governor that doesn’t want to accept a plan, that would risk mitigation work not getting done because of politics,” said Becky Hammer, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council’s water program. “The governor would be increasing the risk to citizens in that state” because of his climate beliefs.

The policy doesn’t affect federal money for relief after a hurricane, flood or other disaster. Specifically, beginning in March 2016, states seeking preparedness money will have to assess how climate change threatens their communities. Governors will have to sign off on hazard mitigation plans. While some states, including New York, have already started incorporating climate risks in their plans, most haven’t because FEMA’s old 2008 guidelines didn’t require it.

“This could potentially become a major conflict for several Republican governors,” said Barry Rabe, an expert on the politics of climate change at the University of Michigan. “We aren’t just talking about coastal states.” Climate change affects droughts, rainfall and tornado activity. Fracking is being linked to more earthquakes, he said. “This could affect state leaders across the country.”

Among those who could face a difficult decision are Republican Govs. Rick Scott of Florida, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Chris Christie of New Jersey, Greg Abbott of Texas and Pat McCrory of North Carolina – all of whom have denied man-made climate change or refused to take action. The states they lead face immediate threats from climate change.

The five governors’ offices did not return requests for comment.

Environmentalists have been pressing FEMA to include global warming in its hazard mitigation guidelines for almost three years. FEMA told the Natural Resources Defense Council in early 2014 that it would revise the guidelines. It issued draft rules last October and officially released the new procedures last week as partisan politics around climate change have been intensifying.

On March 8, the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting said the Scott administration instituted an unwritten ban on the use of “climate change” or “global warming” by Florida officials. Gov. Scott denied the claim, telling reporters in Tallahassee, “Well, first off, that’s not true. At our Department of Environmental Protection, there’s lots of conversation about this issue. From my standpoint, like every issue, my goal is: Instead of talking about it, let’s do something about it.”

Still the group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility has filed a complaint arguing that a state employee, Bart Bibler of the Department of Environmental Protection, was reprimanded for speaking about climate change at an official meeting and keeping notes on the subject in official minutes.

The complaint says that on March 9, Bibler got a letter of reprimand, was ordered to take two days leave and then was told not to return until he had medical clearance of his fitness for duty.

“There’s no such policy banning the use of ‘climate change,’ ” DEP spokeswoman Lauren Engel told the Palm Beach Post. She had no specific comment on the Bibler case, the Post reported.

In the reprimand letter, provided by PEER to the Palm Beach Post, Marianne Gengenbach, chief of environmental services, said Bibler “engaged in personal political advocacy related to the Keystone XL Pipeline” and that he provided his supervisors a summary suggesting climate change was on the agenda when it wasn’t.

“Your actions were disrespectful, unprofessional and represent insubordination,” Gengenbach wrote.

According to PEER’s complaint, Bibler – currently land management plan coordinator for DEP’s Division of State Lands – attended a Florida Coastal Managers Forum on Feb. 27 at which climate change and sea-level rise were discussed.

PEER said Bibler later “was directed to remove any hot button issues, especially explicit references to climate change, and then was given a letter of reprimand for supposedly misrepresenting that the ‘official meeting agenda included climate change.'”

FEMA wrote in its new procedures, “The challenges posed by climate change, such as more intense storms, frequent heavy precipitation, heat waves, drought, extreme flooding, and higher sea levels, could significantly alter the types and magnitudes of hazards impacting states in the future.”

FEMA’s disaster preparedness program has been granting money to states since the 1980s for projects as diverse as raising buildings out of floodplains and building safe rooms. States are required to update their plans every five years to be eligible for the agency’s mitigation funding. Since 2010, FEMA has doled out more than $4.6 billion to states and territories as part of this program.

Republican-led regions constitute 8 of the top 10 recipients of this category of FEMA money between 2010 and 2014. Louisiana was No. 1, having received almost $1.1 billion from FEMA for hazard mitigation. New Jersey was third with nearly $379 million, and Texas fourth with almost $343 million. Florida was sixth.

The gubernatorial approval clause was included in the new guidelines to “raise awareness and support for implementing the actions in the mitigation strategy and increasing statewide resilience to natural hazards,” said FEMA spokeswoman Susan Hendrick.

The new federal rules don’t require public involvement in the creation of states’ disaster preparedness plans, eliminating the opportunity for environmental groups and concerned citizens to submit comments or concerns about the assessments.

InsideClimate News is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers clean energy, carbon energy, nuclear energy and environmental science. More information is available at http://insideclimatenews.org/

Katherine Bagley|InsideClimate News (TNS)|March 19, 2015

World Water Day

March 22 was World Water Day; here are 10 facts to consider and some ways you can make a difference.

Since 1993, the United Nations has designated March 22 as World Water Day. It’s a day devoted to promoting activities within member nations regarding the world’s water resources.

Facts:

Ten percent of the world’s population live without access to safe water.

More than 1,400 children die a day from water-related diseases.

Around the world, women spend 200 million hours a day carrying water.

Every American uses 7,500 liters (1,981 gallons) of water a day, with most of that going to produce the food they consume.

One liter (.26 gallons) of water is needed to irrigate one calorie’s worth of food.

It takes 15,000 liters (3,962 gallons) of water to produce two steaks.

Agriculture accounts for 70 percent of water withdrawal worldwide.

By 2050, the agriculture sector will need to produce 60 percent more food globally than current rates.

Droughts in the United States in 2012 affected 80 percent of farms and ranches, with crop losses of more than $20 billion.

It takes 91 liters (24 gallons) of water to create 500 grams (17.6 ounces) of plastic.

What you can do:

Conserve water at home by taking shorter showers, investing in a low-flow toilet and turning off the tap while brushing your teeth or shaving.

Plant low-water species in your yard.

Buy a rain barrel to collect rainwater to use for watering the lawn or garden.

Run your washer or dishwasher only when they are full, which can save up to 1,000 gallons of water a month per household.

Buy recycled paper products, because they take less water to produce.

Have a vegetarian meal from time to time, since the ingredients take less water to produce than a burger, pork chop or chicken sandwich.

Consider donating to an organization such as Water.org, WaterAid or Food & Water Watch.

Contact your federal legislators and urge them to support a dedicated Sustainable Development Goal on water and sanitation.

Sources: UNESCO, UN Water, Water for Food, wateruseitwisely.com, WaterAid America, Water.org.

Modern Farmer|March 22, 2015

Radiation, climate change force Bikini Islanders to seek refuge in the US

 

A tiny central Pacific community, forced to evacuate their homes because of US nuclear testing, are now demanding refuge in the United States as they face a new threat from climate change.

“We want to relocate to the United States,” Nishma Jamore, mayor of the atoll of Bikini, said on the weekend as Pacific waters continued to eat away at the small Kili and Ejit islands in the far-flung Marshall Islands archipelago.

Jamore heads a community of about 1,000 islanders who have lived in exile on the islands for decades because their original homeland of Bikini remains too radioactive for resettlement.

There were 24 nuclear tests conducted on the atoll in the 1950s, including “Bravo”, the largest hydrogen bomb detonation conducted by the United States.

Unable to return to Bikini, the islanders are now faced with increasingly heavy flooding from high tides and storms hitting Kili and Ejit with waves washing over the islands and wiping out food crops.

Jamore voiced their concerns to US Assistant Secretary of Interior Esther Kia’aina during her visit to the Marshall’s capital of Majuro this month.

“We want to relocate to the United States,” Jamore said. “Kili has been repeatedly flooded since 2012 and we’ve asked the Marshall Islands government for help with no response.”

There is also serious concern over a recent legislative move by the Marshall’s parliament, known as the Nitijela, to take authority for Ejit Island away from the Bikinians.

The latest flooding at Kili hit last month during annual high tides, and Jamore described the island’s airport runway as like “the Nile River” as water flooded over it.

As the floods damaged houses and damaged crops, the 1.6 kilometer (one mile) long runway, which is 2.5 metres (8.2 feet) above sea level, disappeared beneath about 25 centimeters of saltwater.

This is the second time Bikini Islanders have called to be resettled in the United States.

In the 1980s, following an aborted resettlement on Bikini atoll that ended with the islanders exposed to high levels of radiation, they attempted to buy a tract of land on Maui in the state of Hawaii for resettlement.

The plan was vetoed when it ran into considerable opposition from Maui residents, but it is gathering steam again because of the damage to homes and agriculture caused by repeated flooding of Kili and Ejit in recent years.

“We’re going to Washington next month,” Jamore said, insisting he would take the plan to the US government.

Arkansas, Oklahoma and Hawaii have been identified as ideal locations as they are already home to significant populations of Bikini islanders.

Jamore and other Bikini Council executives want to use the US-funded Bikini Trust Fund to purchase property for the resettlement.

Currently the Fund allows for property purchase only in the Marshall Islands, but Jamore said they have asked the Interior Department to change the agreement so they can buy land in the United States.

“This will give the people options for education and jobs,” he said.

Agence France-Presse|3 Mar 2015

McConnell ratchets up fight against EPA ‏

McConnell ratchets up fight against EPA

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell demands nation’s governors reject the EPA’s carbon pollution limits.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell just decided to take his war against the EPA to a whole new level.

Late last week, Senator McConnell sent a letter to every governor in the nation telling them to ignore the EPA’s carbon pollution limits on coal-fired power plants, our country’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions.

This is sickening and despicable. Senator McConnell is out of control. He hasn’t succeeded in taking down the EPA through official means, so instead he’s asking state governments to reject creating their own plan, a vital tool to build their clean energy future.

McConnell is out to ensure that the EPA’s Clean Power Plan fails and is dictating to states his own plan to make this happen.

Here are the facts: Peabody Energy, the very definition of Big Coal, has been the fourth largest contributor to Senate Majority Leader McConnell over the course of his career. And in 2014, the Koch brothers and other polluting interests pumped more than $700 million into supporting McConnell and his allies.

Not content with the damage he’s doing in the US Senate, McConnell is now meddling in statehouses and courtrooms across the country — parts of the government he has no business messing with. McConnell’s efforts are leading up to the Paris climate change talks coming in December. It’s McConnell’s hope that if enough states reject the Clean Power Plan, the President will be weakened in his attempts to negotiate a global climate change treaty. McConnell’s plans are both audacious and unprecedented. It’s going to take an army of activists to stop him.

Gene Karpinski|President|League of Conservation Voters|3/25/15

Statement from Ronnie Cummins, Organic Consumers Assoc., on Reintroduction of Federal Bill to Kill States’ Rights to GMO Labeling Laws

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, March 25, 2015

FINLAND, Minn.—The Organic Consumers Association (OCA) issued the following statement today in response to plans by Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) to reintroduce a federal bill to preempt states’ rights to enact GMO labeling laws, and create a voluntary non-GMO labeling scheme.

International Director Ronnie Cummins said:

“The Pompeo bill, aptly dubbed the DARK (Deny Americans the Right to Know) Act, is not only anti-consumer, but anti-democracy and anti-state’s rights as well.

“The bill will take away the right of states to require GMO labeling and will legalize the routine industry practice of labeling genetically engineered (GE) foods as ‘natural’ or ‘all natural.’ It also includes a complicated scheme for voluntary labeling of non-GMO foods.

“The DARK Act overturns the century-old balance of power between the federal government and the states, whereby states have exercised their right to pass numerous laws regarding food safety or food labels when the federal government failed to act.

“Since 1994, when controversial GE foods were forced onto the market, with no labeling nor independent safety testing required, consumers have demanded mandatory labeling of GE foods and food ingredients. After 20 years of waiting for the federal government to heed the people’s will, citizens have begun lobbying in every state and organizing ballot initiatives to pass mandatory GE food labeling at the state level. Vermont passed the nation’s first mandatory labeling law in 2014, prompting Big Food and the chemical industry to try to reverse the law in federal court.

“Understanding that they are losing the battle at the state level to keep consumers in the dark about whether or not their food is genetically engineered, Monsanto and its minions are now prepared to abolish consumer choice and overturn state’s constitutional rights so that they can continued to force feed us their GMO foods—foods grown with the toxic chemical, glyphosate, which just last week the World Health Organization declared a ‘probable human carcinogen.’

“More than 90 percent of consumers want the same basic right that consumers in more than 60 other countries already have—a simple label stating whether or not a product contains GMOs. Research has shown that GMO labels will not increase food prices, contrary to industry claims. The sole reason to pass this bill is to keep consumers in the dark about what’s in their food.

“We must the stop the Pompeo Bill dead in its tracks. This is a fight, not just for consumer rights, but for democracy as well. “

Contact: Katherine Paul, Organic Consumers Association, katherine@organicconsumers.org, 207.653.3090

Organic Consumers Association|March 24, 2015

Strengthen dispersant protections ‏

After hearing from thousands of people, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is moving forward on new reforms for the use of toxic dispersants when responding to oil spills.

Almost 2 million gallons of dispersants were released into the Gulf of Mexico during the BP drilling disaster despite widespread recognition that little was known about the health and environmental effects of applying such massive quantities of these chemicals. The debacle of that emergency response highlighted the pressing need for a new rule on dispersants.

EPA’s proposed reforms require more rigorous science and safety information when evaluating the use of dispersants.

This new rule, although not strong enough, is a step in the right direction. It improves testing of dispersants for toxicity and effectiveness, requires companies to release the ingredients in dispersants and increases monitoring of the effects of dispersants when used in some oil spills. We need your help to ensure that the final version provides the strongest possible protection for public health and the environment.

Cyn Sarthou|Gulf Restoration Network|3/26/15

Click here to tell the EPA to make these reforms as strong as possible.

Calls to Action

1. Tell Anheuser-Busch: Support clean water – here
2. Support the EAA Reservoir, buy the land, build the reservoir, and save Florida’s drinking water – here

‏

Birds and Butterflies

Check out Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Bird Cams – here

There Are So Many Beautiful Birds in the World

Logging Industry Fails Again to Strip Threatened Seabird of Protections

Victory: Court upholds marbled murrelet protection in Washington, Oregon, and California

Five strikes and you’re out—there is no support in science, law, or public opinion for the industry’s continued demand to log the public old-growth murrelet forests.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals last Friday rejected yet another attempt by the timber industry to remove federal endangered species protections from the marbled murrelet, a unique coastal bird found in the Pacific Northwest. The appeal was the timber industry’s fifth attempt in the past decade to eliminate protections for the old-growth forests that marbled murrelets call home, despite undisputed scientific evidence which has shown that murrelets are continuing to disappear from the coasts of Washington, Oregon, and California.

“The D.C. Circuit soundly disposed of industry’s arguments, most of which it called ‘frivolous,’” said Kristen Boyles, staff attorney with Earthjustice. “Five strikes and you’re out—there is no support in science, law, or public opinion for the industry’s continued demand to log the public old-growth murrelet forests.”

The marbled murrelet is a shy, robin-sized seabird that feeds at sea but nests only in old-growth forests along the Pacific Coast. Murrelets don’t build nests, instead laying their single egg on large, moss-covered branches in old growth Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, western hemlock, and redwood trees. In 1992, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service protected marbled murrelets in Washington, Oregon, and California as a threatened species due to logging of coastal old-growth forests. The timber industry has waged a 15 year legal campaign to eliminate protections for the small seabird in order to increase logging of some of the region’s last-remaining mature and old-growth forests.

“It’s time to move forward with recovering these unique seabirds,” said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “We know what we need to do to save the marbled murrelet and that is protecting the last coastal old-growth forests in Washington, Oregon and California.”

Tom Wheeler, program and legal coordinator with the Environmental Protection Information Center in Arcata, California, agreed. “Murrelets down here in the southern end of their range need more, not less, protection and recovery.”

“The marbled murrelet’s coastal old-growth habitat is known the world around for its biological treasures,” said Dave Werntz, science and conservation Director at Conservation Northwest. “This court ruling ensures the murrelet and its old forest habitat have a shot at recovery.”

“Marbled murrelet populations have continued to decline in the Pacific Northwest, even as the timber industry has continuously tried to strip their protections ,” said Bob Sallinger, Conservation Director of Audubon Society of Portland. “We stand ready to defend murrelets if the time industry continues to push for their extinction.”

Represented by Earthjustice, Audubon Society of Portland, Seattle Audubon Society, Center for Biological Diversity, Conservation Northwest, Environmental Protection Information Center, Oregon Wild, and Sierra Club intervened in the lawsuit to defend the murrelet listing and critical habitat.

Kristen Boyles|Attorney|Earthjustice|March 2, 2015

Panhandle Rooftops Now Safe for Nesting Seabirds

Threatened seabirds, such as Least Terns and Black Skimmers, prefer to lay their eggs in shallow, sand scrapes on open beaches, but human disturbance around their beach nest sites sometimes causes these seabirds to nest on gravel rooftops along Florida’s developed coasts. Where rooftop edges, rain gutters, and drains aren’t protected, the chicks of rooftop nesting birds fall to the ground as a result of disturbance from crows or hawks or after heavy rainfall. Those that survive the fall can easily dehydrate on the ground, get stepped on or run over, or eaten by predators.

In Northwest Florida, Audubon Rooftop Nesting Program staff are working with 30 local businesses to protect Least Terns and other imperiled seabirds at rooftop nesting sites. Last summer, Audubon staff, volunteers, and business employees searched the parking lots for fallen chicks around active rooftop colonies. In 2014, over 100 Least Tern chicks fell from rooftops, 70 of which were safely returned to their colony by dedicated chick-checkers. During the non-nesting season winter months of 2014-2015, Audubon staff enlisted the help of volunteers and business partners to chick-proof rooftops throughout the Panhandle.

On Monday, February 9, the Chateau Motel in Panama City Beach, Florida became a much safer nest site for Least Terns. Staff from Audubon Florida, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, Gulf Coast Tree Specialists, and seven brave volunteers installed “chick-fencing” along the perimeter of Chateau Motel’s rooftop. Volunteers attached hardware cloth to brick pavers with corner brackets to create a permanent barrier around the Chateau’s rooftop. The Gulf Coast Tree Specialists lifted the materials and volunteers up to the rooftop using their bucket truck. The result was a one-foot high chick-fence that will save the lives of many Least Tern chicks this breeding season. Six more rooftops will be chick-fenced before the Least Terns, Black Skimmers, and other seabirds return this spring to raise their young in the Florida Panhandle.

Coastal Strand|Audubon Florida|3/24/15  

Give Florida’s beach-nesting shorebirds space to help them survive

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) asks beachgoers to watch out for and avoid disturbing beach-nesting shorebirds on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the state. Shorebirds build nests out of sand and shells on Florida beaches in spring and summer, hatching chicks that are difficult to see.

Shorebird nests, eggs and chicks are well camouflaged and can be easily missed and even stepped on unless people know to look out for them. The snowy plover, least tern, black skimmer, American oystercatcher and Wilson’s plover are several of Florida’s beach-nesting shorebird species that face conservation challenges and need people’s help to survive.

“People can still enjoy the beach while keeping shorebirds and their chicks safe,” said Nancy Douglass, who works on shorebird conservation at the FWC. “Following a few simple steps while at the beach can have a tremendous positive impact on shorebirds. People’s actions can directly affect the success of shorebird nesting and whether future generations will get to see these iconic birds along our coasts.”

Ways to protect beach-nesting shorebirds:

• Keep your distance, whether on the beach or paddling watercraft along the shore. If birds become agitated or leave their nests, you are too close. A general rule is to stay at least 300 feet from a nest. Birds calling out loudly and dive-bombing are giving signals for you to back off.
• Never intentionally force birds to fly or run. They use up energy they need for nesting, and eggs and chicks may be left vulnerable to the sun’s heat or predators. Teach children not to chase shorebirds and kindly ask fellow beach-goers to do the same.
• Respect posted areas. Avoid posted nesting sites and use designated walkways when possible.
• It is best not to take pets to the beach, but if you do, keep them on a leash and avoid shorebird nesting areas.
• Keep the beach clean and do not feed wildlife. Food scraps attract predators such as raccoons and crows, which can prey on shorebird chicks. Litter on beaches can entangle birds and other wildlife.
• Spread the word. If you see people disturbing nesting birds, gently let them know how their actions may hurt the birds’ survival. If they continue to disturb nesting birds, report their activities to the FWC’s Wildlife Alert Hotline at 888-404-FWCC (3922), #FWC or *FWC on a cell phone or by texting Tip@MyFWC.com. You can also report nests that are not posted to Wildlife Alert.

Wildlife photographers also should follow the rules that protect shorebirds:

• Remain beyond the posted area, with no part of you or your camera equipment extending beyond the string or signs.
• Restrict photography to no more than 10 minutes. Too much time photographing near the nest may stress birds.
• Don’t “push” birds around the beach. Stay far enough away so the birds do not change their behavior in response to your presence. They need to feed and rest without disturbance.

For more information, go to MyFWC.com/Shorebirds and download the “Share the Beach with Beach-Nesting Birds” brochure. Read the FWC’s plan for four imperiled beach-nesting bird species, part of the broader Imperiled Species Management Plan: http://myfwc.com/media/2720106/Imperiled-Beach-Nesting-Birds-Species-Action-Plan-Final-Draft.pdf. Or go to the Florida Shorebird Alliance at www.flshorebirdalliance.org.

Government Under Fire After Killing Tens Of Thousands Of Starlings In Nevada

RENO, Nev. (AP) — Land owners surprised to discover tens of thousands of dead birds across the high desert are criticizing the federal government over a mass killing of starlings in northern Nevada.

A U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesman said a pesticide was used to destroy the birds to prevent the spread of disease to dairy cows.

Some area residents, however, say the government should have done more to alert the public and to dispose of the dead birds.

European starlings, introduced to the U.S. in 1890, are considered an invasive species and have been the target of similar eradication efforts in Nevada and elsewhere for decades. About 2 million starlings were destroyed in 2013, nearly 50,000 in Nevada, to assist farmers, according to Agriculture Department records.

Authorities have used DRC-1339 in recent weeks to kill flocks of birds at the request of farmers in Fallon and Fernley east of Reno, and Yerington, about 90 miles southeast of Reno, Agriculture spokesman Travis Kocurek said.

Starlings transmit livestock diseases and cause crop losses, Kocurek said in an email.

“Bird feces can contaminate food and water sources, putting cattle at risk for salmonella and E. coli infections if ingested,” he wrote.

Hundreds of thousands of starlings usually pass through northern Nevada each winter. But their numbers spiked this year as over a million flocked to the state, possibly due to extreme cold temperatures in Canada and the northern U.S., Kocurek said.

Gary Smith, of Fallon, said an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 starlings had roosted near his home.

“It was like a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds,'” he said.

The eradication program wiped them out and left dead birds scattered across the area, he said.

Like others, Smith said the government should have given the public notice. He didn’t learn about the effort until he began smelling the dead birds, many of which were eventually removed by a federal employee.

“I have no problem with the dairyman and ranchers having to do this. These are an introduced species, and they don’t want starlings messing their operations more than you and I want mice in our house,” Smith said.

“My concern was that they get the word out” to the public about potential health risks and its offer to pick up dead birds, he said.

Kocurek said the government followed notification procedures by informing local officials, but it will review the process to determine whether changes are needed.

The public can dispose of dead birds in the trash, using disposable gloves or a plastic bag to avoid exposure to disease or parasites, he said.

The Humane Society of the United States, meanwhile, said the Agriculture Department should have chased the birds off, rather than kill them.

DRC-1339 leads to prolonged deaths and can kill non-target birds including golden eagles, said Wendy Keefover, a spokeswoman for the national animal protection group.

“It can take up to three days for a bird to die after ingesting it, and it’s a cruel and horribly inhumane death,” she said.

Kocurek said studies show death will occur within one to three days, but the majority of starlings that eat the bait die within 12 hours. A scavenging animal or raptor should not be harmed by eating a dead starling, he said.

MARTIN GRIFFITH| |03/24/2015

The story was first reported by the Lahontan Valley News newspaper of Fallon.

23 Butterfly Species that may go Extinct Soon Photos

Celebrating 50 Years of Nest Monitoring!

Volunteers have been helping the Cornell Lab of Ornithology monitor nesting birds for 50 years, keeping tabs on open-cup nests and nest boxes alike. What started as the North American Nest Record Card Program in 1965, and later became The Birdhouse Network, is now known as NestWatch. But the goal of these projects hasn’t changed: collect quality data on nesting success across the country for use in “big picture” studies of bird reproduction.

Our nest-monitoring data have been used in more than 130 scientific studies, yielding valuable information for scientists and land managers, such as:

• When, where, and how many eggs are laid by certain species across a wide range
• How to minimize the effects of forestry and agricultural practices on nesting birds
• Revealing that some species, such as Tree Swallows and Eastern Bluebirds, are nesting earlier as spring temperatures have risen.

Even after five decades, there’s still a lot to learn. For example, data on the Eurasian Collared-Dove, a relative newcomer to North America, remain sketchy. We still don’t know how its presence affects our native Mourning Doves, or even how many times they can nest in one year. NestWatch needs more data to understand how and why species respond differently to large, continent-level changes in the environment.

To encourage everyone to commit to monitoring at least one nest this year, and to celebrate 50 years of volunteer nest monitoring, we’ll be giving away prizes to three lucky participants for (1) most nest attempts submitted, (2) most species monitored, and (3) a random winner with at least one nest attempt. We will draw winners in late November, and prizes (TBD) will ship in time for the holidays. It’s our way of saying “Thank you” and kicking off a great 50th year.

Florida Panthers

A Growing State Means Growing Threats for Florida’s Official State Animal

Florida is a pretty incredible place. It has some of the greatest biological diversity – the widest variety of plants and animals – in the entire country, and is home to many species found nowhere else in the world. It’s also home to people – lots of them. In fact, with nearly 20 million residents, Florida recently surpassed New York as the third most populous state in the entire country. The economy has picked up once again and development and road building are accelerating. Florida is also a top travel destination in the world, hosting 93.7 million visitors in 2013, and many visitors return to live in Florida, encouraging the building of more homes and highways. All this places the Sunshine State in the unique position of having both tremendous wildlife diversity and mounting pressure from development.

What’s At Risk

Among the many species threatened by this nonstop development is our state’s official animal, the Florida panther. With just an estimated 100-180 adults left in the wild, the Florida panther is one of the most endangered mammals in the country. Once ranging across the southeastern U.S., today it is restricted to south Florida, in just five percent of its historic home range. The greatest threat to panther survival is the loss of its habitat, which is continually being destroyed, fragmented and degraded. And it isn’t just the buildings, but also the roads that connect them that cause problems. Wide-ranging panthers have to cross dangerous roads and highways in their search for territory, food and mates, and collisions with vehicles take a toll on the small population. Vehicle strikes are the greatest source of human-caused mortality for Florida panthers. In fact, 2014 set a new and tragic record for panthers lost to vehicle collisions, with a total of 25 panthers killed.

The Work Ahead

Fortunately, Florida’s Water and Land Legacy Conservation Amendment was passed by an overwhelming 75% of Florida voters in November. This constitutional amendment (Amendment 1) will set aside an estimated $18 billion over the next 20 years to fund water and land conservation, management and restoration, including protecting important habitat for Florida panthers and other wildlife. It takes a percentage of the existing documentary stamp tax revenues generated by real estate transactions and dedicates them to protecting and restoring important habitat on land and water. This source of funding was used for nearly two decades to fund the land acquisition program and because it is tied to development, the very thing that contributes to habitat destruction is also helping to prevent it.

Defenders is hard at work to make sure that elected officials will put that money to use in the way that the conservation amendment (and the Floridians who voted for it) intended, not on shopping lists of inappropriate projects brought to them by lobbyists. We are working with our members and supporters to remind their elected officials that they knew exactly what they were doing when they voted for the amendment, and that they expect their legislators to carry out the voters’ wishes. Amendment 1 funds could be spent to help secure, manage and restore important habitat and corridors for the panther and its prey, expanding and buffering protected areas, and protecting lands to enable construction of more wildlife crossings.

Elizabeth Fleming|www.defendersblog.org | March 22, 2015

  Invasive species

Burmese Pythons Are Wiping Out the Everglades, Scientists Conclude

The Burmese python problem down here is a problem. So much so that there was, once upon a time, a state-sanctioned open hunt for the invasive snakes. That went bust. And now, according to a study published in The Royal Society this week, it looks like the Burmese python’s quest to completely take over the Everglades is nearly accomplished.  

Specifically, the snakes are becoming the apex predator with no equal, and they are eating everything that moves. And this is not good.

The snakes prey on wading birds, rabbits, foxes, and deer while having no real threat themselves. The study says a group of experts ranging from the University of Florida, the Fort Collins Science Center, and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission released marsh rabbits into and on the fringes of the Everglades, along with radio trackers.

Within nine months, the scientists found that the majority of the rabbits released inside the Everglades had been eaten. None of the rabbits that were released outside of the Everglades was harmed.

The experiment had the rabbits released between September 2012 and August 2013. The study says the rabbits placed inside the park did well for themselves for a little while, getting acclimated to their environment and even breeding. But they slowly started getting picked off and disappearing, leading the scientists to confirm that the Burmese python problem is a serious one indeed.

Marsh rabbits are known to be extremely resilient creatures and, in normal situations, thrive and are able to escape predators. So the swift way in which the rabbits in this experiment were taken out is alarming. The scientists eventually concluded that every rabbit was released into the Everglades was found inside a python’s belly — radio trackers included. 

From the study:

Our findings provide strong empirical evidence that pythons caused reductions in marsh rabbit populations […]. Not only were pythons the dominant predators of marsh rabbits in Everglades National Park (ENP), but only one mammalian predation event occurred in the park. Outside of ENP, mammals (bobcats Lynx rufus and coyotes Canis latrans) were the dominant cause of marsh rabbit mortalities. The lack of mammalian predations of marsh rabbits in ENP was consistent with the reported declines of most mammalian species in the park  and may be attributed to direct (predation) or indirect (e.g. depletion of prey base) impacts of pythons on populations of mammalian predators.

More alarming, the pythons seem to be breeding at a quicker clip than scientists first feared. Last year, the Conservancy of Southwest Florida found that more and more Burmese python eggs were hatching in Southwest Florida . In 2012, researchers found a 17-foot Burmese that had been pregnant with 87 eggs.

And the snakes are roaming the Everglades eating not just rabbits. All manner of animals and critters have been found inside pythons, including raccoons and deer. Bottom line: The Everglades are a smorgasbord for the Burmese, and there isn’t another animal that can stop it. This means that, unless the invasive creatures are taken under control somehow, the Everglades could be irrevocably damaged.

Between 2003 and 2011, a team of scientists reported a 99.3 percent drop in the frequency of raccoon observations, a 94 percent drop in white-tailed deer observations, a 98.9 percent drop in opossum observations, and an 87.5 percent drop in bobcat observations.

The Everglades is an already fragile ecosystem to begin with, and scientists fear that it’s being decimated and changing faster than it should. 

For now, there is no real answer on how to fix the problem. The FWC says that if you spot one, call them immediately. And it’s perfectly legal to kill Burmese pythons when you see them, though it’s probably best to let the experts handle that.

Chris Joseph|March 20, 2015

Invasive termites in Florida are cross-breeding into terrifying new species of “Super Termites”

A new study is the latest sign that climate change is going to affect us in strange and horrible ways

Oh man guys, buckle up: two of Florida’s most destructive invasive termite species are interbreeding, and their offspring is a new, hybrid species of “super termite” that’s even worse than its parents.

In the latest indication that climate change is going to affect us in strange and horrible ways, University of Florida entomologists have documented how unusual weather patterns appear to be causing the swarming seasons of the two species — the Asian and Formosan termites — to overlap for the first time, giving them an opportunity to meet and mate. (In fact, they say, male Asian termites seem to prefer Formosan females over their own species, further increasing the rate at which this is happening.)

Their study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, documents how this phenomenon is facilitating the development of brand-new hybrid colonies, capable of developing twice as fast as their parent species. The scientists aren’t sure yet whether the super termite itself can reproduce, which would bring even more problems — like the potential for the new species to itself invade other areas beyond Florida. But they’re worried either way.

“Because a termite colony can live up to 20 years with millions of individuals, the damaging potential of a hybrid colony remains a serious threat to homeowners even if the hybrid colony does not produce fertile winged termites,” author Nan-Yao Su explained in a statement. Or, as the study puts it, “a kick from a mule is as good as a kick from a donkey.”

And it may be a harsh kick indeed. Asian and Formosan termites already cost as much as $40 billion in damage each year, globally. And that’s nothing, the authors say, compared to what’s coming for Florida: they predict Florida will experience “dramatically increased damage to structures in the near future.”

The two termite species have always been capable of mating — again, it appears to be a shift in climate that’s gotten them actually doing it. Specifically, the authors points to the unusually warm winters of 2013 and 2014,to explain the wide overlap in their swarming seasons. If this sort of thing continues, as predicted, with climate change, they warn that the interbreeding could become a common occurrence.

“Right now, we barely see the tip of the iceberg,” Su said in a statement. “But we know it’s a big one.”

Lindsay Abrams|Staff Writer|Salon|Mar 26, 2015

[State inspectors reviewed my home a week ago and no problems were discovered.]

Endangered Species

One in Ten Wild Bee Species Now Face Extinction in Europe

Following the first-ever assessment of Europe’s wild bee population, scientists are warning that one in 10 species of bees are now facing extinction.

The study, which was published as part of the IUCN European Red List of Bees and the Status and Trends of European Pollinators (STEP) project, examined the population distribution, trends and threats for 1,965 species of wild bees.

According to the IUCN, 9.2 percent of bee species are at risk of extinction while another 5.2 percent are likely to be threatened in the near future. More concerning is that scientists believe the number of species they found were facing extinction might be a very low estimate because there was not enough information on many of the less common species to determine how they’re doing.

Researchers cite a number of reasons behind the decline, ranging from climate change, which brings extreme weather from heavy rains to drought that alters habitats, to an increase the frequency of fires. Still ,the biggest threat to these valuable pollinators comes with habitat loss and degradation as a result of urban development and agriculture, which also brings the use of pesticides, insecticides and fertilizers that can kill pollinators like bees and the flowering plants they rely on for food.

“This report should be a wake up call to the ecological disaster that is unfolding in Europe’s countryside,” Ariel Brunner, the head of EU policy at Birdlife, told the Guardian. “It’s very clear that something is going horribly wrong with our agricultural practices which are the main driver of these declines, whether it is increased pesticide use, the destruction and conversion of grasslands, or the loss of natural vegetation and intensified farming methods.”

The loss of bees and other pollinators don’t just pose a threat to biodiversity and healthy ecosystems, but also threatens our food security. The IUCN points out that in Europe, 84 percent of crops need insect pollinators and the services bees provide are estimated to be worth 22 billion euros annually. Globally, more than 80 percent of the crops we need for food rely on pollinators.

“Our quality of life – and our future – depends on the many services that nature provides for free,” said Karmenu Vella, EU Environment, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Commissioner. “Pollination is one of these services, so it is very worrying to learn that some of our top pollinators are at risk! If we don’t address the reasons behind this decline in wild bees, and act urgently to stop it, we could pay a very heavy price indeed.”

Now scientists are calling for a number of measures that will help with monitoring and conservation efforts across Europe that include, among other things, acting to reduce the potential for the spread of diseases between domestic and wild bees, providing support for farmers to diversify their crops, making a commitment to reduce the use of pesticides, expanding the network of experts and creating a Europe-wide database to improve knowledge gaps.

Hopefully their research will lead to a greater awareness of how bad the loss of pollinators will be and serve as a serious call to action for policy makers to reduce the threats that we can control.

Alicia Graef|March 20, 2015

There’s Good News for Imperiled Green Sea Turtles

After conducting a global status review for green sea turtles, federal officials say some of their populations have rebounded enough to be downlisted from endangered to threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

NOAA Fisheries and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which conducted the review, have proposed reclassifying green sea turtles, who can be found in oceans around the world, into 11 distinct populations, which the agencies stated will allow for a more tailored approach when it comes to protecting each population from different threats they face.

Globally, green sea turtles are listed as endangered by the IUCN and continue to face a number of threats ranging from a loss of coastal habitat to capture and entanglement in fishing gear. They also suffer as a result of pollution, plastic and other marine debris they may eat, disease, climate change and poaching of adults and eggs that is believed to have led to severe declines in their numbers over the years.

There is, however, good news for green sea turtles who live and nest in Florida and along the Pacific Coast of Mexico, who the agencies believe have recovered enough to have their status downgraded. Conservationists are celebrating the announcement and highlighting it as proof the Endangered Species Act is working as it should to provide a critical lifeline to species on the brink.

“The proposal to revise the status of green sea turtles breeding in Florida and Mexico from endangered to threatened shows that conservation is making a difference, and once again demonstrates the effectiveness of the Endangered Species Act in protecting and recovering our most at-risk species,” said Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dan Ashe.

There’s also good news for green sea turtles who live in Hawaii. The Association of Hawaiian Civic Clubs also petitioned NOAA to have federal protection removed in 2012, but in this announcement the agencies denied the request.

Patrick Opay, the endangered species branch chief of NOAA’s Fisheries Pacific Islands Regional Office, told the Associated Press that even though their numbers are increasing slowly Hawaii still has fewer than 4,000 green sea turtles. He added that an estimated 96 percent of them also nest in the same place in the Northern Hawaiian Islands, which makes them vulnerable to disease outbreaks, climate change and rising sea levels.

There is also continued widespread public support for keeping Hawaii’s green sea turtles, or honu as they’re known, protected. More than 36,000 people signed the Center for Biological Diversity’s Care2 petition urging the National Marine Fisheries Service to keep them listed under the Endangered Species Act.

Under the proposal, Hawaii’s green sea turtles will be included in the Central North Pacific population, and will continue to remain protected as a threatened species. For populations that aren’t doing as well, protection will also be increased in American Samoa, Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.

The proposal is now open for a 90-day public comment period, which will be available until June 22, while a public hearing will be held later on April 8 at the Japanese Cultural Center in Honolulu.

Alicia Graef|March 23, 2015

Census shows China’s wild giant panda population growing

Good news for China’s national treasure: Wild giant pandas, which have spent more than two decades on the endangered species list, are increasing in number.

The species’ population throughout China grew by nearly 17 percent over the past decade, officials said Saturday, according to a census by China’s State Forestry Administration.

The country’s fourth national giant panda survey documented a growth of 268 pandas to a total population of 1,864 in the country since the last census was conducted in 2003 — more than a decade after the species was downgraded from rare to endangered status.

The report found that nearly 67 percent of wild giant pandas live in nature reserves, which also grew in number from 40 to 67, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which partially funded the census.

The giant panda has been the logo for the WWF since its inception in 1961 and has grown to become a worldwide symbol of the conservation movement.

Farms That Save Space for Flowers Give Bees a Boost

For over a decade, bee populations have been declining dramatically all over the world. There are likely a number of compounding causes, including pesticide use, viruses and global warming. But another major factor is a loss of habitat and a decline in wildflowers, particularly species preferred by bees.

Wilderness often loses ground to agricultural uses, but a new study from the University of Essex shows that farms can boost wild bee populations by saving room for flowers. The paper was published this week in the scientific journal “Molecular Ecology.”

In 2005, England introduced incentives to farmers to plant more bee-friendly flowers on their land. Similar incentives also exist in the E.U. These agri-environmental schemes have been shown to attract bees a provide them with a good source of food, but the new paper shows for the first time that they are also associated with increased populations.

“A consistent problem in assessing the response of bumblebees to agri-environment schemes has been that it is unclear whether a high observed abundance of bumblebees was merely an attraction of workers to sown forage patches or a genuine population level increase,” write the authors. So, they set out to determine the number of wild bee colonies on the different types of farms, which they say is a good measure of the overall population of bees.

Using this measure, the researchers compared nine farms that have areas planted with flowers for bees with nine farms that don’t have special pollinator-targeted planting over the course of two years. In addition to observing and counting the bees, the researchers collected non-lethal DNA samples to determine how many bee colonies visited the different types of farms.

The researchers found that the colony density of the four most common types of bees was significantly higher at farms with flower-rich patches. They also observed a greater number of individual bees. That’s good news for the crops and wild plants that rely on bees for pollination. It’s also good for the people that eat those crops and enjoy those wildflowers.

However, the researchers did not find that the farm intervention is significantly helping the rarer species of bees that may need support the most, like the large garden bumblebee (Bombus ruderatus). One possible explanation is that these species may have smaller foraging ranges, and the farms with flower patches may be too few and far between to benefit them. It’s possible the rarer bees may need more targeted planting if our goal is to prevent them from disappearing. Since the 1940s, two species of bumblebees have gone extinct in the UK.

Nonetheless, it’s encouraging to see that with the right policy incentives, farms can be a part of the solution to the global bee decline.

Margaret Badore|TreeHugger|March 24, 2015

This post originally appeared on TreeHugger

Bat maternity season starts April 15

Bat maternity season starts April 15 in Florida, so if you have groups of bats roosting in attic, eve or chimney spaces and you want them to roost elsewhere, now is the time to act. It is illegal to harm or kill bats in Florida, but they can be legally excluded from a building or structure by following recommended and effective practices that protect bats and people. Exclusions of bat colonies must be complete by April 15, when bats begin giving birth to their young.

Florida is home to 13 resident bat species, including threatened and rare species such as the Florida bonneted bat. Many of those species do not roost in man-made structures. For bats that do roost in structures such as houses and other buildings, guidelines have been developed to more effectively and safely exclude bats when it is not their maternity season in Florida.

“Maternity season begins when groups of bats gather to give birth and raise their young and lasts until the young bats are able to fly and feed themselves,” said Melissa Tucker, who works in species conservation planning for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC). “In Florida, this season occurs from mid-April through mid-August for most bat species.”

Exclusion guidelines on how to remove bats from buildings can be found at MyFWC.com/Bats. Exclusions are illegal during the maternity season, from April 16 through August 14, to prevent young bats that cannot yet fly from being trapped inside structures and dying. Materials and methods used to exclude bats can affect the success of that process. For more information on how to conduct a bat exclusion, watch this YouTube video: How to Get Bats out of a Building. Further details on bat exclusions can be found at Bat Conservation International.

Bats are beneficial to people and are an important part of the ecosystem. The state’s native bats help keep insect populations under control, with the average bat eating hundreds of insects a night. In addition to the benefit of keeping mosquitoes and other night-flying insects at bay for residents enjoying the outdoors, the dollar value of insect suppression by bats to U.S. agriculture has been estimated to be in the billions.

There are ways that residents can help bats thrive in Florida:

• Preserve natural roost sites, including trees with cavities and peeling bark. Dead fronds left on palms can also provide roosting spots for bats.
• Put up a bat house.
• Report unusual bat behavior to: MyFWC.com/BatMortality

For more information on Florida’s bats, go to MyFWC.com/Wildlife, click on “Species Profiles” and look under “Mammals.”

Contact your closest FWC Regional Office to speak with a regional Wildlife Assistance Biologist for more information.

Court Throws a Lifeline to Idaho’s Rare Caribou

There’s new hope for endangered mountain caribou in Idaho and Washington: In response to a coalition lawsuit by the Center for Biological Diversity and allies, a federal court on Monday ordered the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to revisit a 2013 decision that reduced, by 90 percent, its designation of protected “critical habitat” for the caribou. A judge ruled the agency had not given the public sufficient opportunity to comment.

Mountain caribou have dinner-plate-sized hooves that work like snowshoes; these remarkable animals can subsist for months on nothing but arboreal lichens found on old-growth trees. Fewer than 20 of them have been found on the U.S. side of the border in recent years. So in response to a 2002 petition, the Fish and Wildlife Service in 2011 proposed to protect more than 375,000 acres — but in 2012 it sharply reversed course, dramatically slashing the area to only about 30,000 acres.

“We can recover mountain caribou in Idaho and Washington, but it can’t be done without protecting their habitat,” said Noah Greenwald, the Center’s Endangered Species director. “I’m encouraged the lower 48’s last caribou will get another chance at being awarded the amount of critical habitat that will truly foster their recovery.”

Get more from ABC News.

Suit Launched to Save Southern Salamanders

Two species of unique amphibians — reticulated and frosted flatwoods salamanders — were once found throughout extensive longleaf pine forests of the coastal plain in Alabama, Florida, South Carolina and Georgia, but are now reduced to a handful of small populations. So, along with Gulf Restoration Network, we filed a notice of intent this morning to sue the feds for failing to develop recovery plans for the rare and vanishing creatures.

Both species are moderately sized salamanders that are black to chocolate-black with light gray lines and specks that form a cross-banded pattern across their backs. They spend most of their lives underground, emerging in the early winter rains to breed.

Although these salamanders have been protected under the Endangered Species Act for more than 15 years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has never developed the legally required recovery plans needed to save them from extinction, which they’re being driven toward at breakneck speed largely due to habitat destruction and poor forest management.

Read our press release and check out our new page about these flatwoods salamanders

[Could there still be hope for a critical habitat designation for the Florida Panther?]

 Hundreds of European Bee Species Threatened With Extinction

Researchers say more than 60 percent of the continent’s bee species may be in decline owing to pesticides, industrial farming, and climate change.

Are we about to see a pollinator apocalypse in Europe?

That’s the buzz from the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which has just released a report warning that at least 9.2 percent of Europe’s 1,965 wild bee species are threatened with extinction. Another 5.2 percent, the report found, are likely to be threatened in the future. But researchers warn that more than 60 percent of European bees could be in trouble.

The major factors putting these bees at risk include habitat loss, insecticides, fertilizer (which suppresses flowering plants in favor of grasses), and climate change.

Most of these problems stem from the rise of industrial agriculture in Europe. Ironically, bees are essential in agriculture and provide approximately $24 billion in pollination services in Europe every year and $167 billion worldwide.

“It is true that agriculture presents a key threat to many species, not just bees,” said Angelika Pullen, a spokesperson for the IUCN’s European Union office in Belgium. “This is often counterproductive as it harms essential ecosystem services, such as pollination, soil, and water quality.”

Simon Potts, coordinator for the IUCN’s Status and Trends of European Pollinators project, said in a statement that helping wild bee populations benefits wildlife, improves food production, and preserves the natural beauty that people have come to expect. “We must not forget that most of our wildflowers and crops are pollinated by a whole range of different bee species,” he said.

Even though the study found that around 200 European bee species face possible extinction, the IUCN said that may be the tip of the iceberg. The study was not able to assess the health of more than half of Europe’s bee species and classified them as “data deficient.”

That doesn’t mean they’re in the clear.

“It is likely that many of the data-deficient species are in fact threatened with extinction,” Pullen said. The IUCN calculated that if all of the data-deficient species are at risk, then the number of threatened bee species in Europe could be higher than 60 percent.

The high level of data-deficient bee species in Europe is not an aberration, as most bee species around the world are poorly studied.

“In the United States, we know even less about our native bee fauna than Europe does,” said Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the Xerces Society for Insect Conservation in Portland, Oregon. “We’ve got 4,000 species of native bees in North America, and we don’t really know much about most of them.”

The only species regularly studied in North America, he said, is the western honeybee, which is not native to the continent.

Many of the species the IUCN identified as at risk were probably rare to begin with and live in extremely small ranges. Southern Europe and the countries along the Mediterranean Sea have high levels of bee biodiversity, with some areas playing host to more than 100 species. Other areas, such as islands in the Mediterranean, have high levels of “range-restricted” bees, although each island only holds a few species.

The problem, however, is not restricted to these “rare endemics.” Many species with wider ranges are also disappearing.

“We’re also seeing declines in pollinator species that were once common,” Black said.

The report offers a range of recommendations for helping Europe’s bees and, in the process, the agricultural industry that depends on them. Proposals include targeting specific bee species for conservation, preserving key habitats, and establishing agricultural policies that would benefit bees, such as encouraging farmers to provide diverse crops of flowering plants that would serve as food for local bees. The report also calls for expanding the pool of academic and government experts who can study bees, especially the data-deficient species.

Even with the high level of data-deficient bee species, the IUCN and its partners in the EU say it’s time to move forward. “We certainly know enough to justify taking urgent action now,” said Pullen

John R. Platt|March 26, 2015

Everglades

From coastlines to the Everglades, researchers tackle sea level rise

Under the streets of Miami Beach, seeping up through the limestone, water creeps into storm drains and pours into the streets. It happens once a year when the sun and moon align in such a way that gravity pulls at Earth’s water. The phenomenon is known as King Tide. It is the highest of high tides, and every year, it puts Miami Beach at risk of major flooding.

FIU researchers were on-site during the latest King Tide event to collect and assess data. The efforts are part of a university-wide initiative to study, better understand and develop solutions for sea level rise. Plans are under way to create an institute dedicated to the interdisciplinary work being done at FIU, which includes collaboration among researchers from Arts & Sciences, Architecture and the Arts, Business, Law, Public Health and Social Work, Engineering, Hospitality and Tourism Management, as well as Journalism and Mass Communication.

South Florida ranks as the world’s most vulnerable urban region in terms of assets exposed to the effects of sea level rise. FIU’s research is dedicated to developing and implementing solutions for the major environmental and economic challenges created by the rising seas.

Beyond the Shoreline

When King Tide arrived in October of 2014, all eyes were on Miami Beach and a new pump system that helped to keep the water off the streets-this time. But the manner in which the water traditionally invades is a stark reminder that when it comes to sea level rise, there is more to be concerned about than just the shoreline. The hidden danger is largely the water within. In South Florida’s case, that means the Everglades.

“The greater South Florida ecosystem is predicated on the balance of freshwater and saltwater,” said Todd Crowl, researcher within the institute and director of FIU’s Southeast Environmental Research Center. “When that ecosystem hits its tipping point and an imbalance occurs, that’s when this whole
thing collapses.”

A natural region of subtropical wetlands, the Everglades is a complex system that features sawgrass marshes, cypress swamps, mangroves and marine environments. The Everglades is also the main source of freshwater for the Biscayne Aquifer, South Florida’s primary water supply. Beneath the river of grass, rising sea levels are pushing saltwater inward into the Everglades.

This intrusion is already affecting South Florida residents through a shrinking and tainted aquifer. Some communities, such as Hallandale Beach, can attest to the problem as underground wells have been closed due to saltwater, forcing communities to buy water from other sources.

“Few people might make the connection between sea level rise and the water pouring out of their faucets,” said Evelyn Gaiser, a wetland ecologist and interim executive director of the School of Environment, Arts and Society. “We simply don’t have freshwater moving in at the rate we need it, but Everglades restoration provides a solution for that.”

The River of Grass

In 2000, the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan was approved as part of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Water Resources Development Act. The 30-year plan provides a framework to restore and protect the water resources of Central and South Florida.

Every two years, the National Research Council issues a report evaluating the progress of the plan. In the 2014 report, the authors raised concerns about slow progress, noting sea level rise is causing new concerns for the already troubled Everglades.

“Climate change and sea level rise are reasons to accelerate restoration to enhance the ecosystem’s ability to adapt to future changes,” authors of the report wrote.

Much of FIU’s work in the Everglades is based on research conducted within its Florida Coastal Everglades Long Term Ecological Research program, which studies how hydrology, climate and human activities interact with ecosystem and population dynamics in the Everglades. With 9 million residents in the greater South Florida region, long-term data will be the key to long-term solutions.

Certainty in Uncertain Times

One of the greatest uncertainties with sea level is just how high and how fast the seas will rise. Without that knowledge, it’s difficult to plan for how South Florida should adapt. Conservative projections suggest sea levels could rise by almost a foot by 2100, but some scientists believe that number will be closer to three feet.

Earth and Environment Professor René Price, along with a team of international researchers, recently completed a study, based on historical data that identifies the timings at which accelerations might first be recognized.

While she can’t say for sure today, Price knows a data-driven prediction about rate and height is near.

“Our results show that by 2020 to 2030, we could have some statistical certainty of what the sea level rise situation will look like in 2100,” Price said. “That means we’ll know what to expect and have 70 years to plan. In a subject that has so much uncertainty, this gives us the gift of long-term planning.”

Even with long-term predictions on the horizon, immediate action is still required as sea level rise is the reality today. Communication and collaboration among scientists, policy makers and community members are crucial in FIU’s efforts to not only study climate change but also to help define how South Florida responds to the rising seas.

Hydrologist Henry Briceño spends much of his time in the community sharing what he and his students are working on and engaging policy makers in the issues they uncover.

“It’s really not enough what we do in the lab and field. What we discover has to transcend the decision-makers,” Briceño said. “We have to take this crisis and turn it into an opportunity. South Florida has the opportunity to become a leader worldwide to tackle sea level rise. We have a way out. We can adapt. Humanity can deal with this and can prevail.”

Phys-Org|March 18, 2015

New organization opposes $500 million Everglades land purchase

A group of Florida residents formed a new organization to oppose a $500 million taxpayer-funded purchase of thousands of acres of farmland recommended by environmental activists and the Everglades Foundation.

“Everglades restoration and protection are high priorities for all Floridians,” says Miami resident Nicholas John Kakanis, one of the founders of Florida Citizens Against Waste. “Taxpayers, farmers, businesses and water managers have devoted more than two decades and $10 billion in a cooperative and massive effort to restore a precious resource, and that effort is working.”

The newly formed group is asking residents sign an online petition through its website, http://www.Stopthelandgrab.org, urging state legislators to reject the proposed land purchase.

Environmental groups, including the Everglades Foundation, are asking the state of Florida to exercise its option to purchase approximately 46,000 acres in the Everglades Agricultural Area south of Lake Okeechobee. The purchase option is set to expire in October, providing a limited window of opportunity to purchase land at market prices.

This particular 46,000 acres, the Foundation says, could be useful for additional storage, treatment or as lands that the state could trade with other agricultural interests.

Florida Citizens Against Waste argues that taxpayers, farmers, and businesses already spent more than $10 billion to restore and protect the Everglades, with another $5.5 billion planned. The land purchase would divert resources away from the “real work” of restoration.

“Court mandated Everglades water quality tests today surpasses federal standards,” Kakanis adds, “Experts have a science-based plan to complete the restoration project. Governor Rick Scott recently provided $900 million to more finish the effort.”

Kakanis points to “environmental and political special interests” working to convince the legislature to divert $500 million to purchase land south of Lake Okeechobee. He calls it a “land grab” not part of the restoration plan, with no science behind it.

The move only adds to the government’s “already ample real estate portfolio,” he says. “This land would have little or no impact on Everglades Restoration.”

The group says the purchase would leave Florida taxpayers holding the bag for an unnecessary reservoir with potentially billions in future costs.

“Floridians deserve to know the truth about this land grab, and once they do know the truth,” Kakanis concludes. “We are confident they will let their legislators know that the state needs to spend our tax dollars finishing the real work of Everglades restoration — not buying more real estate.”

Phil Ammann|March 25, 2015

[What this group fails to recognize is the fact that the water coming from Lake Okeechobee is contaminated with agricultural runoff and must be stored and vegetatively cleansed prior to its being sent south. The land in question is needed for this purpose.]

Army Corps pour $500M into Hoover Dike Rehabilitation

LAKE OKEECHOBEE, Fla.- The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is getting close to the half-way mark in its efforts to rehabilitate the Herbert Hoover Dike, 143 miles of earthen levee around Lake Okeechobee.

The project will go on for several more years and probably will top the $1 billion mark when done.

Engineers and contractors are replacing 26 of 32 culverts in the dike, devices that allow water to flow out to nearby towns and farms.

Workers are replacing the old culverts will much larger and stronger ones.

The corps inventoried all dams in the country after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It found the Hoover Dike urgently needed some repairs to prevent a catastrophic breach of the dike.

WINK News was given exclusive access to some sites  near Moore Haven and Clewiston, where engineers are improving the dike’s ability to hold back water.

The dike was built in the 1930s, and updated in the 40s and 50s. The current project is supposed to ensure the dike’s ability to hold up for at least the next 80 years.

Mike Walcher|March 26, 2015

Water Quality Issues

1 in 3 Floridians get their drinking water from the Everglades 

We have an opportunity to protect our drinking water for future generations, but our elected leaders must act now. On May 1st, the legislative session will end.  If the legislature does not allow the use of voter approved funds to buy land to be used to store and clean drinking water south of Lake Okeechobee, we could lose our last chance to save Florida’s drinking water and the Everglades.

Watch this informative video to better understand why we can’t let the legislature fail to act by May 1st.

Last November, 75% of us voted to change the constitution and approve funds to buy land to protect the Everglades and our drinking water. Now the legislature needs to act before it’s too late. We can’t let this opportunity to save our drinking water pass us by.

Watch the video and contact your legislator today

Mary Barley|The Everglades Trust

Water and Math in the Caloosahatchee Watershed

One acre foot equals

• 326,000 U.S. gallons

• 43,560 cubic feet

• 1233 cubic meters

• 893 gallons per day for 365 days

• Your bathtub holds about 5 cubic feet. How big is the Caloosahatchee River?

• In the dry season, the Caloosahatchee River flow can go as low as 300 ft3 (0.007 acre-foot) per second, or 18,000 ft3 (0.4 acre-foot) per minute, or 1.1 million ft3 (25 acre-feet) per hour, or 26 million ft3 (600 acre-feet) per day.

• In the rainy season, the Caloosahatchee River flows at about 2,000 ft3 (0.05 acre-foot) per second, or 120,000 ft3 (16 acre-feet) per minute, or 7.2 million ft3 (170 acre-feet) per hour or 170 million ft3 (4,000 acre feet per day) per day.

• The Caloosahatchee watershed contains 1408 square miles, or 900,000 acres. It receives an average of 53″ (4.5′) of rain every year. That comes to 4.1 million acre-feet of rain that drains into the soil, runs off hardened parking lots and roads, or evaporates

courtesy of Friends of the Charlotte Harbor Preserve 

Why We Should Celebrate Wetlands on World Water Day

World Water Day, celebrated every March 22^nd, encourages citizens around the world to celebrate water and calls for collective learning and action on water-related issues. With Canada being home to one fifth of the world’s freshwater, it is easy to forget that clean water is a precious resource.

Some say water is the lifeblood of this planet, and it’s true! The areas where land and water meet (wetlands, coasts, shorelines and stream banks, to name a few) are places that brim with biodiversity and rare species. The healthy state of these ecosystems is crucial for nature’s provision of services such as purification of air and proper nutrient cycling.

Healthy wetlands and watersheds play key roles in the quality of our water resources. They act like giant sponges that help absorb and replenish water to buffer flood and drought risks. They are also vital nesting, breeding and staging grounds for waterfowl and many other species and continue to be among the most diverse ecosystems of all!

But in spite of their important roles, our world’s wetlands are facing serious woes.

Troubling statistics estimates that 64 percent of world’s wetlands have disappeared since the 1900s (Ramsar Fact Sheet, 2015). Canada, home to a quarter of the world’s wetlands, is not immune to these trends. Southern Ontario for example has lost an estimated three-quarters of its wetlands through agricultural conversion.

Dan Kraus, Weston conservation scientist with the Nature Conservancy of Canada, says wetlands are under various kinds of human-induced environmental stresses. For example, “wetland losses have significant impacts on species, habitats and ecosystem functions, which is why there is a lot of interest in finding ways to mitigate and offset the negative impacts of infrastructure development on wetlands.”

The good news is that there is an increasing recognition that humans and nature’s needs are inextricably linked together.

“We are coming to better understand and appreciate that nature is a key part of the infrastructure for our cities and communities. Just as we need pipes and pumps as a part of our water system, we also need healthy wetlands, rivers and watersheds to ensure a future of clean and abundant fresh water,” says Kraus.

Hope for Canada’s wetlands

Conservation organizations like the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) have long been working to protect and restore these precious ecosystems for the benefit of wildlife and humans alike.

In honor of World Water Day, here is a sampling of internationally acclaimed wetlands that NCC has protected across Canada:

British Columbia – The Campbell River Estuary, once an industrial site, is now a thriving hub of wildlife. After years of restoration efforts from NCC staff and partners, the estuary epitomizes nature’s swift ability to recover when given the chance. The area is a paradise for paddlers and a boon for wildlife-watching enthusiasts year-round.

Alberta – Just 100 kilometres southwest of Edmonton, the Coyote Lake property is one of the richest biological areas of Alberta, supporting more than 22 mammal species, 154 bird species and 266 plants species.

Manitoba – The Oak Lake Sandhills and Wetlands Natural Area, in the southwest corner of the province, supports migrating and nesting waterfowl.

Saskatchewan – Quill Lakes, located north of Regina, is ideal for shorebird and waterfowl watching. An Important Bird Area and Heritage Marsh, the property is home to endangered species like piping plover.

Ontario – The Minesing Wetlands is one of the largest wetland complexes in southern Ontario. It is home to at-risk turtles, eastern prairie white-fringed orchid and many species of fish.

Quebec – The Malbaie Salt Marsh, where NCC owns 20 properties, features picturesque lagoons as far as the eye can see. Situated just 50 kilometres southeast of Gaspé, the area’s salt and freshwater composition is the perfect mix for a wide range of species.

Atlantic Canada – NCC has protected a number notable wetland properties in Atlantic Canada, including the Tabusintac Estuary in New Brunswick, St. Peter’s Lake Run in P.E.I., Pugwash River Estuary in Nova Scotia and Grand Codroy River Estuary in Newfoundland and Labrador. Each of these properties is an excellent destination for birders and a chance of spotting moose or otters.

There are many ways to “tap into” the water conservation conversation. If you’d like to get active and lend a helping hand to nature, conservation volunteering is a great way to make a difference for our water systems across the country.

The Nature Conservancy of Canada|March 21, 2015

[Florida alone has lost over 80,000 acres of wetlands since President Clinton signed an Executive Order in 1995 calling for “No Net Loss”of wetlands.]

Energy’s Thirst for Water ‏

Water. It covers 71% of our planet’s surface, which is really something special: the Earth is the only known planet with large, stable bodies of liquid water on its surface.
Water and energy are inseparably intertwined and today, on World Water Day, we acknowledge our obligation—and our need—to ensure they innovate and improve together.
As a society, we use a tremendous amount of water to generate electricity…

…and a tremendous amount of electricity to pump and purify our water. Demand for water is expected to grow 40% by 2030—and as climate change makes water more scarce in many regions, it’s absolutely critical that we use water with maximum efficiency.
Today, the next time you take a drink of water or turn on the lights, take a moment to appreciate it and make a commitment to yourself to protect it.

Emily Stevenson|Manager|Online Membership|Environmental Defense Fund|3/22/15

The Most Brazen Rip-Off Ever? How the Beverage Industry Brainwashed You to Fear Tap Water

 Tap water is superior to bottled water. Why don’t consumers know that?

The biggest con job perpetrated on the consumer is not some shady operation selling bogus cures through TV infomercials. America’s biggest snake-oil salesman is actually the beverage industry, or Big Bev, which resells the simplest and most vital product for thousands of times its value. That product is drinking water.

Multinationals like PepsiCo, the Coca-Cola Company and Nestle rake in a combined $110 billion a year selling bottled water worldwide. In the U.S. alone, more than half the population drinks bottled water, which accounts for about 30% of liquid refreshment sales, far exceeding the sales of milk and beer (only soft drinks sell more).

But the expensive water the beverage industry sells is no better — and possibly worse — than the water you get from your tap (and often, the water they sell is tap water). So how did these companies fool the public into paying a few bucks for something that costs a few pennies per gallon from a faucet?

Fear. These multinationals have spent millions on marketing to convince consumers that tap water tastes bad, contains high levels of contaminants and poses a danger to human health. Municipal water, they claim, is a scourge, and the only way you get drink healthy water is to buy it through private beverage companies, at up to 2,000 times the cost of getting it from a tap.

And it appears that their tactics are working. With some 92% of tap water meeting state and federal standards, the U.S. has the cleanest and safest public water supply in the world. Yet polls have shown that that a great majority of Americans worry a great deal about the public water supply.

To make matters worse, the supposedly healthy alternative is virtually unregulated. The water from a public utility is constantly monitored under Environmental Protection Agency standards, but bottled water does not have to meet those standards. In fact, independent testing of bottled water has indicated that microbiological impurities and high levels of fluoride and arsenic posed health concerns.

Misplaced Doubts

“Water fountains used to be everywhere, but they have slowly disappeared as public water is increasingly pushed out in favor of private control and profit,” writes Peter Gleick in his book Bottled & Sold. “[They] have become an anachronism, or even a liability, a symbol of the days when homes didn’t have taps and bottled water wasn’t available from every convenience store and corner concession stand. In our health-conscious society, we are afraid that public fountains, and our tap water in general, are sources of contamination and contagion.”

When towns and cities still didn’t have the means to provide all homes access to clean water, sanitary water fountains were a benefit to public health. The irony today is that public water is no longer viewed as a safe option, yet poorly regulated bottled water is.

Nine years ago, the high-end bottled-water brand Fiji began a marketing campaign in which it sniffed, “The label says Fiji because it’s not bottled in Cleveland.”

Clevelanders, angered they were being unfairly insulted because of some issues with their water decades back, took action. The city’s water utility even bought some bottles of Fiji and other top brands like Dasani, Evian and Aquafina and tested them against Cleveland tap water. And guess what? Cleveland’s tap water was the purest of them all. Moreover, Fiji had a 6.31 micrograms of arsenic per bottle. While under the amount of 10 micrograms allowed by the EPA and Food and Drug Administration, it was notably high in comparison.

But Cleveland only tested a few samples of bottled water. Consumers can’t be sure what they’re getting, as the contents can vary from bottle to bottle. That’s because bottled water, which is regulated by the FDA, doesn’t have to meet the stricter standards the EPA requires. Tap water needs to undergo regular testing for bacteria and microbes such as E. coli, while bottled water doesn’t. Further, the EPA requires water suppliers to use certified labs to test their water, but there’s no such FDA requirement for water bottlers. The bottlers also don’t need to send off reports to regulators about problems they might find with their product. There are no requirements for disinfection or filtration for bottlers that water utilities must meet. Consumers are left at the mercy of a corporation to protect them from their product.

What’s in a Name?

While Fiji water actually comes from the South Pacific Island that bears its name, close to half of the bottled water bought by consumers is nothing more than filtered tap water with fancy names, according to Food & Water Watch. Much of the bottled water Americans drink, including top brands like Aquafina and Dasani, is pretty much the same stuff you get from your own faucet, perhaps run through an additional filter by the bottler.

“These are the numbers the bottled water industry doesn’t want you to see,” says Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter. “These figures reveal that more and more bottled water is basically the same product that flows from consumer taps, subsidized by taxpayer dollars—then poured into an environmentally destructive package, and sold for thousands of times its actual value.”

The environmental concerns of bottled water are well documented. Made from fossil fuels, the plastic bottles are often not subject to state bottle-return programs and end up littering the landscape, even invading our waterways and oceans where they break down, leaching petrochemicals back into the water and severely impacting marine life. There are even some questions about the industrial chemicals the bottles are made out of mixing with the water contained inside. Bisphenol A is notably worrisome. It’s an endocrine disruptor that could lead to reproductive issues, is known to disrupt normal heart muscle function and has been linked to some cancers.

Why are the health issues of bottled water so widely ignored, while at the same time consumers are fed Big Bev’s horror stories about tap water? It’s clear the industry works hard creating a climate of fear regarding tap water in order to maximize its profits. And seeing how we consume bottled water in such great quantities, it’s obvious that the public has bought into this nonsense.

Tap water has a bad reputation, which is not well deserved, making it an easy target for the beverage industry. And while Big Bev has lobbyists, industry organizations and public relations companies to boost its profile, this is not really an option for our nation’s water utilities. There’s nobody to put a correct perspective on unfortunate events such as water main breaks and cryptosporidium and E. coli contamination on the rare occasion that they impact water quality in an area. In the U.S., our water utilities are very safe overall, but we only hear about them when something goes wrong. This has led to mistrust of the utilities and even conspiracy theories about public water.

Fluoridated water, in particular, is widely believed to be proof of some government malevolence. As far back as the Cold War era, anti-fluoride activists claimed that fluoridation was part of a mind-control scheme. Critics of fluoride point to a pile of other health consequences that have never been proven. To date, the only known negative consequence of proper water fluoridation is dental fluorosis, which can create pitting and mottling on children’s teeth, a condition which is mostly cosmetic.

There is a legitimate debate as to whether governments have the legal basis to add chemicals, such as fluoride, to drinking water that do not improve its safety. There’s also a point to be made that people can’t opt out of public fluoridated water. But unfortunately, any valid discussion of the topic is overshadowed by conspiracy theories that further fuel fears of tap water.

But while public water resources must reveal the contents of their water, including fluoridation, you have to do some digging to find out if your bottled water contains it; this information is not on any label. Unsuspecting consumers who thinking they’re avoiding fluoride by drinking bottled water could be getting a good dose of it anyway.

This lack of transparency helps Big Bev in its mission to convince the consumer that its product is superior, and that tap water is dirty and contaminated. Such omissions help the beverage industry create a perceived need for bottled water.

Now that it’s got people genuinely afraid of tap water, Big Bev is trying to take public water sources away from the public. After all, “the biggest enemy is tap water,” according to Robert S. Morrison, the vice chairperson of PepsiCo in 2000.

The industry is working on restaurants, convincing them to sell customers bottled water instead of giving them tap water as they’re seated. Even worse, whole sports stadiums, where beverage companies heavily market their products, are being built without any drinking fountains in order to force thirsty fans to buy bottled water and other beverages at inflated prices.

“When we’re done, tap water will be relegated to showers and washing dishes,” says one beverage executive.

Casey Coates Danson|Mar 20, 2015

36 Eye-Opening Facts About Water

In 1993, the United Nations General Assembly designated March 22 as the first World Water Day. And with good reason – without water, we’d be nothing. Just dust. Water is one of the most common substances on earth, and one of the most vital; it’s a tremendously valuable resource, yet one we squander and pollute prodigiously.

Water is deceptive. For while it pours freely from the heavens and seems to flow endlessly in rivers, it’s a finite resource; we only have what we have. And although there is about 332,500,000 cubic miles of it on earth – only one-hundredth of one percent of the world’s water is readily available for human use. We really need to learn how to show it some respect. Which is where World Water Day comes in.

Even though water deserves celebration every day, we’ll take this occasion to give a shout-out to this incredible compound that gives us life and sustains the planet around us. So with that in mind, consider the following facts – some wondrous, some disconcerting, all eye-opening:

1. The average human body is made of 50 to 65 percent water.

2. Newborn babies have even more, ringing in at 78 percent water.

3. A gallon of water weighs 8.34 pounds.

4. A cubic foot of water weighs 62.4 pounds.

5. An inch of water covering one acre (27,154 gallons) weighs 113 tons.

6. Water covers 70.9 percent of the planet’s surface.

7. Ninety-seven percent of the water on Earth is salt water; the water found in the Earth’s lakes, rivers, streams, ponds, swamps, etcetera accounts for only 0.3 percent of the world’s fresh water. The rest is trapped in glaciers or is in the ground.

8. There is more water in the atmosphere than in all of our rivers combined.

9. If all of the water vapor in our planet’s atmosphere fell as water at once and spread out evenly, it would only cover the globe with about an inch of water.

10. More than one-quarter of all bottled water comes from a municipal water supply – the same place that tap water comes from.

11. Approximately 400 billion gallons of water are used in the United States per day; nearly half of that is used for thermoelectric power generation.

12. In a year, the average American residence uses over 100,000 gallons.

13. Since the average faucet releases 2 gallons of water per minute, you can save up to four gallons of water every morning by turning off the tap while you brush your teeth.

14. A running toilet can waste up to 200 gallons of water each day.

15. At one drip per second, a faucet can leak 3,000 gallons in a year.

16. A bath uses up to 70 gallons of water; a five-minute shower uses 10 to 25 gallons.

17. The first water pipes in the U.S. were made from hollowed logs.

18. Leaks in the New York City water supply system account for 36 million gallons of wasted water per day.

19. There are around one million miles of water pipeline and aqueducts in the U.S. and Canada, enough to circle the globe 40 times.

20. 748 million people in the world do not have access to an improved source of drinking water

21. And 2.5 billion people do not have use of an improved sanitation facility.

22. Some 1.8 billion people worldwide drink water that is contaminated with feces.

23. The World Health Organization recommends 2 gallons per person daily to meet the requirements of most people under most conditions; and around 5 gallons per person daily to cover basic hygiene and food hygiene needs.

24. On average, an American resident uses about 100 gallons of water per day.

25. On average, a European resident uses about 50 gallons of water per day.

26. On average, a resident of sub-Saharan Africa uses 2 to 5 gallons of water per day.

27. It takes .26 gallons of water to irrigate one calorie of food.

28. (Yet it takes 26 gallons for one calorie of food when water is used inefficiently.)

29. It takes 2.6 gallons of water to make a sheet of paper.

30. It takes 6.3 gallons of water to make 17 ounces of plastic.

31. It takes 924 gallons of water to produce 2.2 pounds of rice.

32. It takes 2,641 gallons of water to make a pair of jeans.

33. It takes 3,962 gallons of water to produce 2.2 pounds of beef.

34. It takes 39,090 gallons more water to manufacture a new car.

35. In developing nations women and girls are primarily responsible for collecting water; on average, 25 percent of their day is spent on this task.

36. Collectively, South African women and children walk a daily distance equivalent to 16 trips to the moon and back to fetch water.

Melissa Breyer|TreeHugger|March 22, 2015

Sources: UN World Water Day; EPA Water Sense; EPA Water.

This post originally found on TreeHugger

Millions of gallons of wastewater to be injected underground

A new deep injection well has been operating for about a week now in a process that injects the brine 1,700 feet below ground. It’s part of an agreement between the city and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. “It takes away any impact that we have on the bay, any anthropogenic effect that we might have on the bay is now ceased and the bay can return to a pristine setting” said Gerald Boyce, City of Sarasota Utilities GM.

Before the well was installed last Friday, 9 million gallons of water treatment residue and treated waste water was legally discharged into Hog Creek and Whitaker Bayou each day, which leads to the Sarasota Bay.

In the next few weeks the city will also pump the 6 million gallons of treated waste water, that was being disposed in the Whitaker Bayou, into the new well.

This new process is not without risk, “there are chances for the material you’re injecting below the aquifer to seep into the aquifer, which would be our drinking water, and for things to go wrong” said Justin Bloom, Executive Director of the environmental group Suncoast Water Keeper.
Both city officials and environmentalists say the well is designed to prevent that from happening, and will be continually tested for safety.

The well, which is located on the north side of the utilities campus on 12th street, is able to receive up to 18 million gallons of brine a day.

Rebecca Vargas|MySunCoast.com|March 19, 2015

City In Vermont Losing 600,000 Gallons Of Water A Day Due To Leak

RUTLAND, Vt. (AP) — The city of Rutland, Vermont, is losing more than 600,000 gallons of water a day because of a leak.

The Rutland Herald reports (http://bit.ly/1DYsVKU) that officials are trying to figure out the source of the leak. They say residents have experienced a drop in water pressure since Saturday.

Public Works Commissioner Jeffrey Wennberg says the water isn’t running through the streets and doesn’t appear to be finding its way into the sewer. He says that means it may be going into a stream.

Wennberg says workers are inspecting valves, hydrants and vacant buildings. He planned to isolate and check the three transmission lines running from the water plant into the city of about 16,500 residents.

He says the leak isn’t an immediate threat to the city’s water supply.

|03/25/2015

Global water crisis causing failed harvests, hunger, war and terrorism

The world is already experiencing water scarcity driven by over-use, poor land management and climate change, writes Nafeez Ahmed. It’s one of the causes of wars and terrorism in the Middle East and beyond, and if we fail to respond to the warnings before us, major food and power shortages will soon afflict large parts of the globe fuelling hunger, insecurity and conflict.

Countries like Iraq, Syria and Yemen, where US counter-terrorism operations are in full swing, are right now facing accelerating instability from terrorism due to the destabilizing impacts of unprecedented water shortages.

The world is already in the throes of an epidemic of local and regional water shortages, and unless this trend is reversed, it will lead to more forced migrations, civil unrest and outbreaks of conflict

Behind the escalating violence in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, as well as the epidemic of civil unrest across the wider region, is a growing shortage of water.

New peer-reviewed research published by the American Water Works Association (AWWA) shows that water scarcity linked to climate change is now a global problem playing a direct role in aggravating major conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa.

Numerous cities in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia are facing “short and declining water supplies per capita”, which is impacting “worldwide” on food production, urban shortages, and even power generation.

In this month’s issue of the Journal of the AWWA, US water management expert Roger Patrick assesses the state of the scientific literature on water scarcity in all the world’s main regions, finding that local water shortages are now having “more globalized impacts”.

US still playing catch up with the dry facts

He highlights the examples of “political instability in the Middle East and the potential for the same in other countries” as illustrating the increasing “global interconnectedness” of water scarcity at local and regional levels.

In 2012, a US intelligence report based on a classified National Intelligence Estimate on water security, commissioned by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, concluded that after 2022, droughts, floods and freshwater depletion would increase the likelihood of water being used as a weapon or war, or a tool of terrorism.

The new study published in the Journal of the AWWA, however, shows that the US intelligence community is still playing catch-up with facts on the ground.

Countries like Iraq, Syria and Yemen, where US counter-terrorism operations are in full swing, are right now facing accelerating instability from terrorism due to the destabilizing impacts of unprecedented water shortages.

The AWWA is an international scientific association founded to improve water quality and supply, whose 50,000 strong membership includes water utilities, scientists, regulators, public health experts, among others. AWWA operates a partnership with the US government’s Environment Protection Agency (EPA) for safe water, and has played a key role in developing industry standards.

Study author Robert Patrick, formerly of Price Waterhouse Cooper, is a government consultant and water management specialist who has worked on water scarcity issues in Jordan, Lebanon, New Mexico, California and Australia.

Thirsty people, failing states

The UN defines a region as water stressed if the amount of renewable fresh water available per person per year is below 1,700 cubic metres. Below 1,000, the region is defined as experiencing water scarcity, and below 500 amounts to “absolute water scarcity”.

According to the AWWA study, countries already experiencing water stress or far worse include Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, Israel, Syria, Yemen, India, China, and parts of the United States. Many, though not all, of these countries are experiencing protracted conflicts or civil unrest.

Patrick’s Journal of AWWA paper explains that the grain price spikes that contributed to Egypt’s 2011 uprising, were primarily caused by “droughts in major grain-exporting countries” like Australia, triggered by climate change.

He points out that such civil unrest could signal an Egyptian future of continuing unrest and conflict. He highlights the risk of war between Egypt and Ethiopia due to the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, threatening to restrict Egypt’s access to the Nile River, which supplies 98% of Egypt’s water supply.

As Egypt’s population is forecast to double to 150 million by 2050, this could lead to “tremendous tension” between Ethiopia and Egypt over access to the Nile, especially since Ethiopia’s dam would reduce the capacity of Egypt’s hydroelectric plant at Aswan by 40%.

Water wars and the ‘war on terror’

The nexus of countries in the Middle East and North Africa where the United States is currently leading a multi-year military engagement against the ‘Islamic State’ (IS) all happen to be drought-stricken.

Before Syria erupted into ongoing civil war, Patrick reports, 60% of the country went through a devastating drought that led over a million mostly Sunni farmers to migrate to coastal cities dominated by the ruling Alawite sect, fuelling sectarian tensions that culminated in unrest and a cycle of violence.

A new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has provided the most compelling research to date on how climate change amplified Syria’s drought conditions, which in turn had a “catalytic effect” on civil unrest.

But Patrick’s concern is that the Syria crisis could be a taste of things to come. Citing the findings of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) sponsored by NASA and the German Aerospace Centre, he notes that between 2003 and 2009, the Tigris-Euphrates basin comprising Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and western Iran “lost groundwater faster than any other place in the world except northern India.”

A total of 117 million acre-feet of stored freshwater was lost due to reduced rainfall and bad water management. If this trend continues, “trouble may be brewing” for the region.

Read more

Nafeez Ahmed|27th March 2015

Great Lakes & Inland Waters

EPA Awards Great Lakes Restoration Initiative Grants to Reduce Runoff that Contributes to Algal Blooms

CHICAGO (March 26, 2015)  — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today announced the award of 14 Great Lakes Restoration Initiative grants totaling over $17 million to fund projects that will improve Great Lakes water quality by preventing phosphorus runoff and soil erosion that contribute to algal blooms and by reducing suspended sediments in Great Lakes tributaries. 

“These Great Lakes Restoration Initiative grants will be used for critical projects to prevent soil erosion and reduce phosphorus runoff that contributes to algae growth in the Great Lakes,” said Great Lakes National Program Manager Susan Hedman. “Many of these grants target Great Lakes watersheds where there have been harmful algal blooms in recent years – such as Maumee Bay on Lake Erie, Saginaw Bay on Lake Huron and Green Bay on Lake Michigan.”

The projects funded by the GLRI grants announced today will be implemented by conservation organizations and by state and local governments:

• Fox-Wolf Watershed Alliance Inc. ($4,196,221) will use conservation practices – such as stream buffering and cover crops – in key sections of the Lower Fox River watershed to reduce nutrient runoff and soil erosion that impacts Green Bay and Lake Michigan.

• Ohio Environmental Protection Agency ($3,696,182) will retire 270 acres of cropland, restore six miles of streams, stabilize 1,000 feet of eroding stream banks and restore 70 acres of wetlands at eight locations in the Maumee River watershed to prevent phosphorus from entering Lake Erie.

• The Nature Conservancy ($2,558,853) will administer a program to reimburse farmers for implementing conservation practices (tillage, cover crops and drainage water management) on 10,000 acres of cropland in the Saginaw Bay watershed. The project will reduce nutrient runoff and soil erosion that impacts Saginaw Bay and Lake Huron.

• Green Bay Metropolitan Sewerage District Council ($1,686,669) will work with partners to implement conservation practices on over 70 percent of cropland in the Duck Creek watershed to reduce nutrient runoff and soil erosion that impacts Green Bay and Lake Michigan.

• Western Reserve Land Conservancy ($750,000) will purchase 1,000 acres of easements in northern Ohio’s Grand River watershed — protecting five miles of streams and 400 acres of wetland — to reduce nutrient runoff and soil erosion that impacts Lake Erie.

• Delta Institute ($750,000) will lead a coalition of community organizations to prevent nutrient runoff and soil erosion in the Bear Creek/Bear Lake watershed to reduce impacts on the Muskegon Lake Area of Concern and Lake Michigan. The coalition will promote the use of best practices to reduce nutrient runoff and soil erosion from farms and urban areas. 

• The Stewardship Network ($745,000) will work with partners to provide farmers in the River Raisin watershed with technical assistance on best practices to prevent nutrient runoff and soil erosion into the river and Lake Erie.

• Grand Traverse Bay Watershed Initiative ($729,840) will work with two major landowners to restore eroding stream banks and install green infrastructure at Kids Creek– reducing stormwater runoff and soil erosion that impacts Grand Traverse Bay and Lake Michigan.

• Ohio Environmental Protection Agency ($689,060) will expand agricultural conservation practices to 8,000 acres of cropland in five northern Ohio watersheds that flow into the Sandusky River. The project will reduce nutrient runoff and soil erosion into Lake Erie.

• Redevelopment Authority of the City of Milwaukee ($580,000) will excavate, re-grade and stabilize 900 feet of stream banks along the Menomonee River, which flows through Milwaukee and discharges directly into Lake Michigan. The stream banks are composed largely of building debris which contains contaminants such as asbestos and lead. The project will reduce the discharge of contaminants and sediment into the river and Lake Michigan.

• Muskegon River Watershed Assembly ($356,970) will work with partners to establish cover crops on 2,000 acres of agricultural land. In addition, buffers will be established on 24 acres of stream banks, and 500 feet of stream banks will be stabilized at community parks.  The project will reduce nutrient runoff and soil erosion into Tamarack Creek, the Muskegon River and Lake Michigan.

• Superior Watershed Partnership ($330,403) will restore about 1,500 feet of eroding stream banks at a rural river (Salmon-Trout River) and an urban river (Dead River) in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The project will reduce stormwater runoff, improving water quality in both rivers and in the near-shore waters of Lake Superior.

• Outdoor Discovery Center ($250,000) will restore over 40 acres of wetlands and floodplain to increase floodwater storage capacity along the Macatawa River which will reduce soil erosion and the quantities of nutrients and streambed sediment entering Lake Michigan.

• Chagrin River Watershed Partners Inc. ($178,479) will partner with the City of Wickliffe, Ohio, and Cleveland Metroparks on a project to restore 640 feet of streams and wetlands in the Deer Creek/Gully Brook watershed. The project will reduce soil erosion and the quantity of nutrients and streambed sediment entering the Chagrin River and Lake Erie.

This year, EPA has awarded GLRI grants totaling over $25 million to fund 29 projects to protect and restore the Great Lakes. Earlier this month, EPA announced 15 GLRI grants totaling over $8.1 million to fund projects to combat invasive species.   

Since 2010, EPA has funded more than 700 Great Lakes restoration and protection projects totaling over $570 million.  For more information about the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, visit www.glri.us.

Contact Information: Peter Cassell, 312-886-6234, cassell.peter@epa.gov

15-OPA128

Offshore & Ocean

Dredged sand not landing on beaches

In letter to Corps, mayor expresses frustration, says ‘mutual commitment was ignored.’

Town officials are disappointed that sand from inlet maintenance dredging is being placed several feet into the ocean rather than on the beach.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began dredging the Lake Worth Inlet on March 1 as part of an annual project to maintain the navigability of the Port of Palm Beach. By the end of the month, the Corps expects to dredge about 80,000 cubic yards of sand.

Mayor Gail Coniglio wrote a letter to Corps District Commander Col. Alan Dodd last week expressing her frustration with the sand placement and with lack of communication between the Corps and the town .

“I am disheartened that our mutual commitment was ignored,” she wrote. “Sand is being placed in 17 to 25 feet of water, which is counterproductive to the success of our long-term goals. As we move forward together, I want to ensure that our partnership will get back on track and that the Corps keeps its commitment to the town.”

The town dismissed a civil lawsuit against the Corps in May 2013 after Dodd announced at a Town Council meeting that dredged sand would be placed on the dry beach at no cost to the town.

Coniglio recently rode on the dredge with Corps officials to observe the operation and sand placement.

“This certainly isn’t what the outcome of our lawsuit was meant to be,” Coniglio told the Town Council last week. “It is very unfortunate. It is of concern.”

Corps spokeswoman Susan Jackson has said it’s cheaper and easier to place sand in the nearshore rather than the beach, especially because the Corps hired a small hopper dredge for the project.

What’s next?

Coniglio said she’s been in contact with Corps officials, Congresswoman Lois Frankel, port officials and the town’s federal lobbyists with Greenberg Traurig to discuss the matter. Her goal is to have everyone in agreement for next year’s maintenance dredge.

The Corps’ permit with the state Department of Environmental Protection does not require placing sand on the dry beach, Public Works Director Paul Brazil said. But town officials hope to change that.

“The state and the DEP need to get involved in our long-term plan,” Coniglio said. “I have had conversations with the DEP staff but we need to have a visit to Tallahassee. I’m prepared to meet with the director of DEP and his staff to begin the process to ensure that permit requirement.”

The 2016 maintenance dredge should produce much more sand, possibly 200,000 cubic yards, Brazil said Corps officials have told him.

“Although I am disappointed to see the ongoing project again placing the sand out in the nearshore,” Coniglio wrote in her letter, “I am encouraged to hear that next year’s project is being planned for dry beach placement.”

Aleese Kopf|Daily News Staff Writer|3/20/15

Town watching, waiting as scaled-back port project moves forward

The Port of Palm Beach Commission is staying the course with an inlet expansion project it downsized because of opposition from town officials and others.

“The board didn’t specify any specific direction so we are going to continue to work with the (community) stakeholders and the Army Corps of Engineers,” Manuel “Manny” Almira, the port’s executive director, said Friday. “It’s the status quo, basically.”

Last June, the Corps withdrew its permit application with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection for an $88.6 million deepening and widening project because DEP officials believed that the application didn’t fully address questions about potential impact on the environment. The Corps has federal approval for the project, however, and will be submitting a new application.

In January, after hearing opposition from Palm Beach and other communities that border the inlet, the port asked the Corps to scale back the project, in part by keeping the inlet’s depth at 33 feet instead of the proposed 39 feet and scrapping a plan to expand the width of the inner channel from 300 feet to 450 feet.

Town officials, civic groups and others had raised concerns about the project’s potential impact on the marine environment, recreational boaters and storm surge.

After hearing community concerns, Col. Alan Dodd, commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Jacksonville District, said in 2014 that the deepening and widening of the port as originally proposed would cause water in the vicinity of the inlet to rise at most 4 inches during a once-in-a-century hurricane. Mayor Gail Coniglio has said that increase in storm surge is a concern as some streets in town are prone to flooding.

On Friday, Almira said the port wants to preserve a Corps proposal to widen the entrance of the inlet by 50 feet, on the north side.

The port also wants the inlet deepened in the area behind the Grand Celebration cruise ship so that it has more room to clear sandbars near Peanut Island when the ship exits port, he said. Boat captains also want the southeast corner of the inlet widened, he said. “The pilots are extremely concerned about coming close to that area with the stern of any ship on entrance and equally important on departure,” Almira said.

Almira said the port, by modifying its plan, is showing cooperation with Palm Beach and other communities near the inlet. Parts of the inlet, however, need to be widened and/or deepened for safety’s sake, he said.

“We’ve illustrated to you that we can be flexible and we are willing to work not only with the town of Palm Beach but also neighboring communities,”Almira said. “But at the end of the day, the port has to look out for what’s best for the port and in this case, safety is a major concern.”

Palm Beacher Bradford Gary attended Thursday’s port commission meeting. In an email sent to Coniglio Friday, Gary urged the town to not oppose safety dredging designed to help boats avoid sandbars that hamper boat traffic south of Peanut Island and southwest of Singer Island.

“Not only are these areas characterized as ‘hazardous’ by the port pilots but smaller recreational vessels are at risk of grounding,” Gary wrote.

Coniglio attended the meeting and has been monitoring the Corps’ dredging proposal since the Corps gave the plan final approval in April 2014.

“This is a long process and we continue to monitor all of the aspects of the project to determine whether or not they have unintended consequences and detrimental impacts not only to the lagoon neighborhood (Riviera Beach, Palm Beach Shores and West Palm Beach) but also to Palm Beach,” Coniglio said Friday.

Coniglio said Palm Beach and the broader community want more information on the methodology the Corps is using to determine what work should be done, as well as more data on what would be done to minimize any impact the inlet’s expansion would have on the environment and the communities near it.

In response to Gary’s email, the mayor said she could not comment on individual aspects of the project. The port has not clearly defined each zone, Coniglio said.

Another question yet unanswered is whether Congress will provide money for the project.

“It’s a very nebulous situation right now,” Coniglio said.

David Rogers|Daily News Staff Writer|3/20/15

Florida coral restoration may take $250 million, and 400 years

Climate change threatens Florida coral, but the government has a plan

$250 million — an underestimate — is the price tag for saving two coral species

Here’s the estimated price for restoring two declining coral species found in South Florida and the Caribbean: about $250 million.

How long will it take? 400 years or so (assuming all goes smoothly).

No one expected it would be easy to restore elkhorn and staghorn corals, the once-abundant, reef-building species that since the 1970s have vanished from almost all of their old range. A recovery plan released this month by the National Marine Fisheries Service says the biggest current threat is climate change, a problem beyond its power to solve.

Assuming the oceans continue to warm, the plan recommends about two dozen steps to help these species survive. Among them: growing the corals in nurseries for transplantation to the ocean floor, tightening fishing regulations, identifying resilient genetic strains, and reducing the amount of fertilizer and other pollutants washing into the ocean.

“While the climate threats are the most significant, reducing the local threats will provide a buffer for the species to be able to deal with the climate threats,” said Jennifer Moore, a fisheries service biologist.

Often compared to tropical rainforests, coral reefs support a vast range of marine life, from sea anemones and sponges to angelfish and lemon sharks. They are among South Florida’s major tourist attractions, drawing visitors for fishing, diving and snorkeling, accounting for about $483 million in national recreation spending.

Elkhorn and staghorn corals, which can be found in the reefs that stretch from the Florida Keys through Palm Beach County on the state’s southeast coast, have been declining for at least 40 years from a variety of causes.

An outbreak of white-band disease wiped out about 80% of them in the early 1980s, Moore said. Rising ocean temperatures have made them more vulnerable to bleaching, in which they expel the colorful algae on which they depend for energy.

“Climate change is beginning to creep up in terms of causes,” Moore said. “The indications are that bleaching events will become more frequent and more severe due to climate change.”

The plan puts a price tag of $254,540,000 for recovery but admits it is “an extreme underestimate,” considering what other countries in the Caribbean also would have to spend.

Among the costs: basic research on their genetics, physiology and resistance to disease ($9.6 million), increasing land-based nurseries ($10 million per year), restocking sea urchins that clear algae from corals ($5 million) and improving sewage treatment in the U.S. and Caribbean ($10 million-$20 million).

No one expects this amount of money to be spent. The federal government this year has budgeted $500,000 to $800,000 for protecting coral, but Moore said not all the money would come from the federal government.

Coral grows extremely slowly, and some of the living coral reef structures off southeast Florida are hundreds of years old.

“The recovery team estimated that it will take approximately 400 years to achieve recovery based on the significant mitigative actions identified in this plan,” the plan states.

The next step for the fisheries service will be to set up implementation teams of governmental and environmental representatives, outside scientists and others with knowledge of the reefs. These teams, expected to be in place by September, should also be a means of leveraging money from other agencies, state and local governments and nonprofits, Moore said.

Meanwhile, the federal government is working on regulations to protect 20 other coral species found in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

David Fleshler|Sun Sentinel

Watch Ocean Acidification Explained

Gulf Stream is slowing down faster than ever, scientists say

The Gulf Stream that helps to keep Britain from freezing over in winter is slowing down faster now than at any time in the past millennium according to a study suggesting that major changes are taking place to the ocean currents of the North Atlantic.

Scientists believe that the huge volumes of freshwater flowing into the North Atlantic from the rapidly melting ice cap of Greenland have slowed down the ocean “engine” that drives the Gulf Stream from the Caribbean towards north-west Europe, bringing heat equivalent to the output of a million power stations.

However, the researchers believe that Britain is still likely to become warmer due to climate change providing the Gulf Stream does not come to a complete halt – although they remain unsure how likely this is.

Calculations suggest that over the 20th century the North Atlantic meridional overturning circulation – the northward flow of warm surface water and the southward flow of deep, cold water – has slowed by between 15 and 20 per cent, said Professor Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

“There is more than a 99 per cent probability that this slowdown is unique over the period we looked at since 900 AD. We conclude that the slowdown many have described is in fact already underway and it is outside of any natural variation,” Professor Rahmstorf said.

The scientists calculated that some 8,000 cubic kilometres of freshwater has flowed from Greenland into the Atlantic between 1900 and 1970, and this rose significantly to 13,000 cubic kilometres between 1970 and 2000.

Freshwater is lighter than salty water which means that it tends to float on the surface of the ocean and in doing so disturbs the normal sinking of dense, cold saltwater to the ocean floor, which is the main driver of the Atlantic circulation.

In a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, Professor Rahmstorf and colleagues point out that maps of global surface temperatures have consistently indicated an overall warming trend around the world, except for the region of the North Atlantic south of Greenland. 

“It is conspicuous that one specific area of the North Atlantic has been cooling in the past hundred years while the rest of the world heats up,” said Professor Rahmstorf, who added that previous research had indicated that a slowdown in ocean currents may be the explanation.

“Now we have detected strong evidence that the global conveyor has indeed been weakening in the past hundred years, particularly since 1970,” he said.

The study used proxy measurements of the Atlantic currents, using ice cores, tree rings, coral growth and ocean and lake sediments, to estimate regional temperature variations and so assess how the Gulf Stream has changed over the past 1,000 years.

Jason Box of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, who helped to calculate the amount of freshwater flowing into the Atlantic from melting ice caps, said that the slowdown can be linked to man-made climate change.

“Now freshwater coming off the Greenland ice sheet is likely disturbing the circulation. So the human-caused mass loss of the Greenland ice sheet appears to be slowing down the Atlantic overturning, and this effect might increase if temperatures are allowed to rise further,” Dr Box said.

Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University said: “Common climate models are underestimating the change we’re facing, wither because the Atlantic overturning is too stable in the models or because they don’t properly account for Greenland ice melt, or both.”

Steve Connor|Science Editor|The Independent|23 March 2015

Port Everglades reports out for public, agency review

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Jacksonville District announces the release of the Port Everglades Feasibility Study and Final Environmental Impact Statement for public, state and agency review and comments.  The study and report will be available for review and comment during a 30-day period that starts Friday, Mar. 20.

“The release of this report is a significant milestone for Port Everglades and reflects the efforts of many people to successfully address complex issues and produce this quality report,” said the Jacksonville District Commander, Col. Alan Dodd.

The recommended plan, which was unanimously approved by the Corps’ Civil Works Review Board Feb. 27, includes deepening and widening the harbor. The configuration of the current Federal project dates back to the 1980s, making it difficult to accommodate today’s larger container and tanker vessels. The recommended plan accommodates existing and future vessel movements, resolves navigation restriction problems, and presents opportunities for national economic development.  Since release of the draft feasibility study in June 2013, the Corps has continued consultation with state and federal agencies regarding the new endangered species coral listings, and refining the environmental mitigation and monitoring plans.

The Port Everglades Feasibility Study and Environmental Impact Statement is available starting Mar. 20 at http://1.usa.gov/1AFFapp.  The Corps will accept comments through Apr. 20, 2015.  There are two ways to submit comments, via email to Terri.Jordan-Sellers@usace.army.mil or mailed to:

Ms. Terri Jordan-Sellers

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

P.O. Box 4970

Jacksonville, FL 32232-0019

The Corps will incorporate comments and responses as appropriate into the final report, which will be followed by completion of the Chief of Engineers Report in May 2015. The signed Chief’s Report will then be submitted to the administration for review.

Wildlife and Habitat

Bear hunt expected to take place in October

Florida hunters could start taking aim at bears in Rock Springs Run and Seminole State Forest in October under a state wildlife plan.

The Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission’s bear-management program has proposed a seven-day bear hunting season, the state’s first in more than two decades, despite protests from members of Audubon Florida, the Humane Society of the United States, and other conservation groups.

Florida hunters would pay $100 for a bear permit and out-of-state hunters would have to pay $300 for the privilege of killing a bear.

The plan must be approved by a majority vote of FWC’s seven, governor-appointed commissioners, only one of whom raised an objection to a possible hunt during the panel’s most recent meeting in February when they listened to five hours of testimony for and against resuming a bear hunt.

A seven-day hunt, as outlined on the agency’s website, would begin Saturday, Oct. 24, and run through Friday, Oct. 30.

The proposed rules forbid the use of bait or dogs to hunt Florida’s largest native land mammal. But hunters could use the same weapons now allowed in deer hunts, including crossbows, handguns, rifles and shotguns. They could not take a bear with cubs or a bear that is less than 100 pounds.

Hunters could stalk bears on approved public lands, including Rock Springs Run, the Seminole State Forest and the Ocala National Forest.

Conservation groups say the wildlife agency should focus more of its energy on persuading people to use lock-top garbage cans in neighborhoods close to bear habitat and less effort organizing what they call a “trophy hunt.”

They also contend FWC should wait until it has updated a 2002 bear-population study, which estimated 3,000 bears were roaming the state. The wildlife agency launched a new study last spring, but does not expect to finish it until 2016.

“It’s disappointing to us that they seem to be moving so quickly on a trophy hunt,” said Kate MacFall, state director of the Humane Society of the United States. “What’s the rush?”

Bears are blamed in four separate attacks on people since December 2013, including three women in Seminole County where two were mauled while walking their dogs. Residents of Heathrow and other gated neighborhoods have reported attacks on pets and property damage blamed on bears.

The state has insisted the hunt is not a solution for human-bear conflicts in residential neighborhoods, where hunting will not be permitted.

It’s not clear yet how many bears FWC will allow hunters to take.

While the state will not place a limit on the number of bear permits it will sell, it will limit the number of bear kills by ending the season early if necessary, said Diane Eggeman, FWC’s director of hunting. She said the state wants to approach the first bear hunt conservatively, allowing hunts only in regions of the state where the bear population was estimated to have at least 200 bears in 2002.

“Every indication is that those subpopulations have increased dramatically over that time,” Eggeman said.

Statewide, according to the FWC’s latest estimate, Florida will allow “in the ballpark” of 275 bear kills, she said.

The state also plans to limit the number of kills per region using a formula that takes into account bears killed in collisions with cars and trucks.

Under that formula, hunters would be able to kill about 60 bears in Central Florida.

From 1981 until 1994, when Florida outlawed bear hunting, hunters killed an average of 46 bears a year.

In New Jersey, which re-established a bear hunt five years ago and has a bear population similar to Florida’s, hunters have killed 1,886 bears since 2010, including 592 the first year.

Stephen Hudak|Orlando Sentinel

Which Wildlife Issues Top Your List?

Earlier this month, to celebrate National Wildlife Federation Membership Month, we asked supporters to vote for their top three wildlife issues.

Thousands responded, and we’re so grateful to be working side-by-side with such caring conservationists. Behind every great wildlife victory – from defending species from extinction to restoring waterways to protecting pristine habitat – is a caring supporter.

Here are the results of the 2015 Membership Month Survey.

63%: Permanently protecting amazing wildlife habitat areas and wild lands especially in the 600 million acres of public lands in this country

52%: Stopping the destruction of crucial wildlife habitat from mining, agriculture and development

36%: Keeping our waters safe and healthy for wildlife like great blue heron, dolphin and orcas

33%: Helping endangered species like the red wolf, Hawaiian monk seal and manatee recover from the brink of extinction

32%: Combating runaway carbon pollution and other emissions that fuel climate change and harm wildlife

20%: Saving native grassland habitat and the milkweed that grows there for pollinators like monarch butterflies

19%: Restoring coastal water habitat for fragile wildlife like sea turtles, songbirds and horseshoe crabs

19%: Creating safe habitat havens so neighborhood wildlife from backyard birds to native bees can thrive in and around our cities and suburbs

15%: Restoring magnificent species like the American bison and bighorn sheep back to their native habitat

12%: Ensuring every child in our country has the opportunity to get outside and experience all of America’s wild places

Collin O’Mara|Wildlife Promise|3/27/2015

Twelve Native Milkweeds for Monarchs

The monarch butterfly population in North America has plummeted by over 90% in just the last 20 years. Destruction of America’s grasslands ecosystems, commercial agricultural practices and even conventional gardening have all contributed to the precipitous decline of this iconic species. National Wildlife Federation has launched a comprehensive campaign to help save the monarch, and there are many ways you can get involved.

One of the biggest factors in monarch decline is the increasing scarcity of its only caterpillar host plant: milkweed. Without milkweed, monarchs can’t successfully reproduce and the species declines. By planting milkweed in your own garden, landscape and throughout your community, you can help reverse the fortune of these beautiful insects.

Meet twelve of the most ornamental milkweeds native to different parts of the country. Make it a goal to include a few plants of at least one native milkweed type to help the monarchs.

Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca)

Native Range: AL , AR , CT , DC , DE , GA , IA , IL , IN , KS , KY , LA , MA , MD , ME , MI , MN , MO , MS , MT , NC , ND , NE , NH , NJ , NY , OH , OK , OR , PA , RI , SC , SD , TN , TX , VA , VT , WI , WV

Description: This tall perennial has large balls of pink or purplish flowers that have an attractive odor. The flowers bloom from June to August.

Growing Conditions: Shade intolerant, needs lots of sunlight, moist soil

Plant Size:  Usually 3-5 feet (90-150 cm), sometimes reaching 8 feet (240 cm) in ditches and gardens

Butterflyweed (Asclepias tuberosa​)

Native Range: AL , AR , AZ , CA , CO , CT , DC , DE , FL , GA , IA , IL , IN , KS , KY , LA , MA , MD , ME , MI , MN , MO , MS , NC , NE , NH , NJ , NM , NY , OH , OK , PA , RI , SC , SD , TN , TX , UT , VA , VT , WI , WV

Description:  Sometimes called Orange Milkweed, this perennial has large, flat-topped clusters of yellow-orange or bright-orange flowers and blooms May to September.

Growing Conditions: Needs sunlight, drought tolerant, dry or moist soil

Plant Size:  1-2 ft (30-60 cm)

Swamp Milkweed (Asclepias incarnata​) 

Native Range: AL , AR , CO , CT , DC , DE , FL , GA , IA , ID , IL , IN , KS , KY , LA , MA , MD , ME , MI , MN , MO , MT , NC , ND , NE , NH , NJ , NM , NV , NY , OH , OK , PA , RI , SC , SD , TN , TX , UT , VA , VT , WI , WV , WY

Description: Also known as Pink Milkweed, this perennial has large blossoms composed of small, rose-purple flowers. The deep pink flowers are clustered at the top of a tall, branching stem and bloom June to October.

Growing Conditions: Needs lots of water, shade tolerant, moist to wet soil

Plant Size: 2-5 ft (60-152 cm)

Antelope-horns Milkweed (Asclepias asperula)

Native Range: AZ , CA , CO , ID , KS , NE , NM , NV , OK , TX , UT

Description: Also known as Spider Milkweed, this perennial is clump-forming with stems that are densely covered with minute hairs. As the green seed pods grow, they curve to resemble antelope horns. It has pale, greenish-yellow flowers, tinged maroon that bloom March to October.

Growing Conditions: Needs sunlight, dry or moist soil, medium water use

Plant Size: 1-2 ft (30-60 cm) tall

Purple Milkweed (Asclepias​ purpurascens) 

Native Range: AR , CT , DC , DE , GA , IA , IL , IN , KS , KY , LA , MA , MD , MI , MN , MO , MS , NC , NE , NH , NJ , NY , OH , OK , PA , RI , SD , TN , TX , VA , WI , WV

Description: The milky juice from this perennial is known to remove warts. The flowers are deep magenta red and bloom May to July.

Growing Conditions: Needs sunlight and dry soil

Plant Size: 2-4 ft (61 to 122 cm)

Showy Milkweed (Asclepias speciosa​) 

Native Range: AZ , CA , CO , IA , ID , IL , KS , MI , MN , MT , ND , NE , NM , NV , OK , OR , SD , TX , UT , WA , WI , WY

Description: This perennial has large, oval, blue-green leaves and spherical clusters of rose-colored flowers. The flowers occur at the top of the stem and on stalks from leaf axils and bloom May to September.

Growing Conditions: Shade intolerant, needs sunlight, medium water use, moist soil

Plant Size: Generally 1 ½ – 3 ft (46 – 91 cm) but can reach 6 ft (183 cm) under favorable conditions

California Milkweed (Asclepias californica)

Native Range: Central and southern California

Description: This perennial is a white-woolly plant with milky sap and deep purple flowers. It blooms May to July.

Growing Conditions: Drought tolerant, dry slopes

Plant Size: Maximum height 3 ft (91 cm)

White milkweed (Asclepias variegata)

Native Range: AL , AR , CT , DC , DE , FL , GA , IL , IN , KY , LA , MD , MO , MS , NC , NJ , NY , OH , OK , PA , SC , TN , TX , VA , WV

Description: This perennial has small white flowers with purplish centers crowded into round, terminal clusters that resemble snowballs and blooms May to September.

Growing Conditions: Low water use, dry soil, moderately shade tolerant

Plant Size:  1-3 ft (30- 91 cm)

Whorled milkweed (Asclepias verticillata)

Native Range: AL , AR , AZ , CT , DC , DE , FL , GA , IA , IL , IN , KS , KY , LA , MA , MD , MI , MN , MO , MS , MT , NC , ND , NE , NJ , NM , NY , OH , OK , PA , RI , SC , SD , TN , TX , VA , VT , WI , WV , WY

Description: This single-stemmed perennial has narrow, linear leaves whorled along the stem. Small, greenish-white flowers occur in flat-topped clusters on the upper part of the stem and bloom May to September.

Growing Conditions: Low water use, moderately shade tolerant, dry soil

Plant Size: 1-3 ft (30- 91 cm)

Mexican Whorled Milkweed (Asclepias fascicularis)

Native Range: CA , ID , NV , OR , UT , WA

Description: Also known as Narrowleaf milkweed, this perennial has narrow, whorled leaves with clusters of greenish-white flowers, often tinged with purple and blooms June to September.

Growing Conditions: Needs sunlight, drought tolerant, dry to moist soils

Plant Size: 1-2½ ft (30-76 cm)

Desert Milkweed (Asclepias erosa)

Native Range: AZ , CA , NV , UT

Description: Desert milkweed has white to yellow flowers and a green to yellow stem and blooms April to October. Identification is somewhat difficult because its leaves vary from mostly smooth to covered with fine cream-colored hair.

Growing Conditions: Best grown in deserts or desert conditions with sandy soils, needs sunlight, dry soils, not shade tolerant

Plant Size: 1-3 ft (30- 91 cm)

Green Milkweed (Asclepias viridis)

Native Range: AL , AR , FL , GA , IL , IN , KS , KY , LA , MO , MS , NE , OH , OK , SC , TN , TX , WV

Description: Also known as Green Antelopehorn Milkweed, this perennial has white flowers – mostly one per plant and lacks the “horns” seen on Antelopehorn Milkweed. These milkweeds bloom from May to August.

Growing Conditions: Needs sunlight, cold and heat tolerant, moist soil, low water use

Plant Size: Matures to 4 ft (122 cm) in height

Milkweed Resources

Now that you’ve met some milkweeds, head over to the National Wildlife Federation’s Milkweed Resources page to learn about more milkweed species and where you can find milkweed for your garden! Also stay tuned on how to become a Butterfly Hero this March to receive a free pack of milkweed or nectar plant seeds to get your monarch garden started.

Forestry 

Up Next on the GOP’s To-Do List: Selling US National Forests

Friday, 20 March 2015 00:00 By Dan Faris, Truthout | Op-Ed

To prove a point, a conservation group held a mock auction for ownership of the Grand Canyon back in February. At the time, they were trying to provide an example of what would happen to public land if Congress stripped the president’s authority to identify and protect national monuments. While this scenario may seem a bit extreme at the outset, it could actually happen soon with public land – including national forests like Yellowstone, along with many others.

Several parties have drawn up a proposal for the House GOP budget resolution that calls for the seizure and sale of US national forests and public land. Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, believes that control over US public lands should be transferred to the state level. The real kicker is that he demands $50 million in taxpayer funds – yes, you’ll be the one paying for it – to jumpstart these property transfers. This way, they can be done “immediately.” All of this was proposed in a recent memo addressed to the House Budget Committee, explained by none other than Senator Bishop.

The memo claims that public lands “create a burden for the surrounding states and communities,” and his “solution is to convey land without strings to state, local and tribal governments.”

Back in reality, this proposal is very bad news, not only for the US people, but also for the properties involved in the deal. It’s probable that affected regions would see higher taxes for locals, in addition to the sale of these properties to private parties just to cover associated costs. This would, in turn, make the land vulnerable to drilling and mining projects, which would certainly result in it being destroyed and defaced. We’re not talking about prime urban real estate or barren land here – we’re talking about prized national forests and parks.

Without a doubt, proposals like this check all the wrong boxes: They’re generally expensive, don’t go over well with citizens and last – but certainly not least – are unconsti[tu]tional. Of course, those kinds of considerations haven’t stopped politicians in the past, and they don’t appear to be putting a damper on Bishop’s plan, either. There’s a good chance that this proposal will be included in the House GOP budget.

Various right-wing politicians and public interest groups invested time and money lobbying for plans like this. For instance, the American Lands Council (ALC) – an organization founded by Representative Ken Ivory (R) of Utah state – hired a lobbyist, Michael Swenson, last year to “educate congressional lawmakers on the benefits of relinquishing federal lands to the states.” Evidence of this can be found on disclosure forms, which clearly state that ALC paid Swenson $150,000 for three months of lobbying. Why does Swenson even matter, you ask? Swenson has been tied to various clients with interest in this segment, particularly a Utah mining company. Of course, Swenson later claimed in an interview with the E&E Daily that the disclosure was a simple “mistake,” and that he’d only been paid $20,000.

What this all means is that we – as US citizens and residents – should be highly concerned about the 2016 budget resolution that has just been released, and by a House Republican majority, no less. The Washington Post called their budget “a gimmick,” while Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, during a call to “The Diane Rehm Show,” said it resembles “Robin Hood in reverse.”

Should this proposal actually succeed, it will cost taxpayers a great deal of money. To make matters worse, it could potentially open up our country even more to private and commercial parties.

Selling off public lands to satiate corporate interests? Another innovation brought to you by our American Oligarchy.

Dan Faris|Truthout|20 March 2015

Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

Citrus world feeling squeezed

The big squeeze is on in citrus industry, and it isn’t expected to lessen anytime soon.

Florida growers have yielded far fewer oranges over the past decade due to citrus greening, resulting in less juice in the market and fewer dollars in their pockets.

“Everything starts and ends with citrus greening,” said Fritz Roka, a University of Florida agricultural economist at the Southwest Florida Research & Education Center in Immokalee. “For the next several years, citrus greening will still be the focus of attention.”

Greening is caused by a bacterium that interrupts the flow of nutrients, weakening the plant and affecting its production.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently said this season’s Florida orange production will be down 1 percent from an earlier forecast. The 2014-15 crop was already expected to be below the 2013-14 yield.

Greening has the attention of state lawmakers, and state Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam has asked for $18 million to fight diseases impacting the citrus industry.

The House and Senate, however, are far apart in their citrus budget proposals released this week. The House proposal is for $17.9 million – including $8 million for citrus greening research and $5.75 million for marketing, while the Senate plan calls for $8 million, all for greening research. Money in the House plan would also be used to grow clean citrus stock and plant new trees in areas where diseased trees have been removed.

In another development, the possible establishment of a federal research and promotion program for orange juice was discussed Wednesday by the Florida Citrus Commission, the first such hearing on the issue.

Most of the research money has been poured into biotechnology, Roka said, along with antimicrobials and thermotherapy, also known as heat therapy. Antimicrobial products kill or slow the spread of microorganisms such as bacteria, while thermotherapy cooks a tree enough to kill the bacteria but allows the plant to survive. Those procedures have found limited success.

“We’re experimenting and learning more and more,” Roka said. “As with anything with citrus, it takes years to prove it out.”

Genetic modification – a scary term in some circles – may play more of a role in the long run, experts say.

Besides funding from growers and the Legislature, the federal government is kicking in $25 million per year to fight greening over the next five years. Even with all of this funding, growers wonder if it will be enough.

“We’re running out of money to research this and still no answer,” said Wayne Simmons, a LaBelle-based grower and president of the Gulf Citrus Growers Association, noting growers alone have spent tens of millions of dollars over the years for research. “There’s just no silver bullet yet on the horizon.”

Simmons, whose orange crop grows on roughly 200 acres, said time is running out. Some Florida processors, he said, have already gone out of business because there isn’t enough production.

“We’re starting to lose our infrastructure,” Roka echoed. “That processing infrastructure is really of concern.”

Simmons, who has worked in the industry since 1980, pointed to the resiliency and and adaptability of growers. At the same time, he wonders how long they can hang on.

“It’s tough, it’s tough,” he said wistfully. “We’ve got our sleeves rolled up. We’re trying to come up with an answer. There’s just no quick answer.”

The only reason growers have been able to hang on this long is that prices have increased substantially since citrus greening was first identified in 2005. About 95 percent of all Florida oranges ends up as juice. The price for those oranges has more or less doubled compared to 12 years ago. On the flip side, the production cost per acre to the point of harvest has nearly tripled for many growers.

Chet Townsend not only produces oranges on a few acres in Fort Denaud, between Alva and LaBelle, he puts out an e-newsletter that tracks the industry.

“It’s more of a hobby today,” said Townsend, who got his citrus start in the 1970s. “It doesn’t really make a lot of money but it does get me an agricultural exemption.”

In the end, despite the challenges, growers take pride in what they do and want to continue to contribute to one of the industries that makes the state unique.

“We still want to maintain the great Florida sunshine product that we produce,” Simmons said.

CASEY LOGAN|NEWS-PRESS.COM|March 21, 2015

Global Warming and Climate Change

Antarctic Expedition Team Finds Clear Signs of Climate Change at the Bottom of the World

“If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on Earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it.” Robert Swan offers this quote from Andrew Denton, an Australian television producer, as his inspiration for fighting to protect the great icy continent.

Swan, the famed Arctic and Antarctic explorer, and his team at 2041 are leading a group of intrepid travelers to Antarctica right now as part of the International Antarctic Expedition. The team, which has been documenting the trip on its Expedition 2015 blog, welcomed travelers from all over the world as they arrived in Ushuaia, Argentina on Friday. They spent Friday and Saturday gearing up for their departure on Sunday. As prep for the expedition, the team hiked up to the Martial Glacier in the mountains overlooking Ushuaia on Saturday. The glacier, which has been steadily retreating for the last 15 years, serves as the first of many physical impacts of climate change that the crew will take in over the next few weeks. In a video from the hike, one trekker says, “Here we are, where the glacier used to be, and that’s really frightening.”

On Friday and Saturday, participants were briefed on the current, political and environmental status of Antarctica. The 2041 team explained how climate change is drastically impacting the icy continent, which has huge implications for the entire globe. All hope is not lost though: Participants brainstormed ways to advocate for change at every level starting with their own communities. Then, on Sunday, the team set sail for Antarctica. Galyna Tymoshenko, who represents Bain & Company, a global management consulting firm, is on the trip and wrote a blog post on the day of the crew’s departure. He ended his post with “Today, full of thrill, we are heading south. The journey will take us beyond the edge of the world, beyond the edge of ourselves.”

You can track the expedition through the “Ship Tracker” page on 2041’s website. They just hit the tip of Antarctica yesterday. The plan is to make numerous shore landings in inflatable rubber boats, or “zodiacs.” They will take in stunning ice shelves, calving glaciers, whales and one of the largest gatherings of penguins on the continent.

Robert Swan made a video this weekend explaining the International Antarctic Treaty and the goal of the expedition. In it, he asks: “Do we have the sense to leave one place alone on Earth as a natural reserve for science and peace?”

Cole Mellino|March 18, 2015

Thawed Frost Releases Extra Carbon, Too

By now, most people are aware of the devastating effects climate change is having on the Arctic’s glaciers. Unfortunately, that’s hardly the only thing that’s melting due to the rising global temperatures. Permafrost, areas of land that are coated in a layer of frost year-round due to the (normally) cold temperatures, is now defrosting, too… and an alarming new study shows that that process in itself is causing additional amounts of carbon into the air.

Permafrost – which has wound up being a bit of a misnomer in the wake of climate change – has helped to trap frozen carbon beneath the ground for centuries. As it defrosts, however, this long dormant carbon is finally able to escape. While we didn’t know exactly how much carbon was breaking free, researchers at the United States Department of Energy created a computer simulation to see how problematic it could be, and the results were not encouraging.

Previously, scientists had hoped that permafrost thaw could possibly have an overall positive impact on carbon emissions since the land would then be able to produce vegetation. During the thawing process, nitrogen beneath the surface breaks down and increases the soil’s fertility.

Theoretically, a rise in regional plant life would help to absorb some of that carbon back, but the computer simulation demonstrates that, while the vegetation can alleviate the situation, it’s still a net negative. In fact, it’s not even close – a lot more carbon will be released thanks to the disappearance of permafrost.

Part of the problem that the scientists have discovered is that the thawing doesn’t reach its peak until late autumn. By that point in the year, there aren’t many plants growing that would benefit from the decomposed nitrogen.

The researchers are the first to admit that they need to explore this subject further. The experiment could only conclude that an additional 21 to 164 petagrams of carbon would enter the atmosphere because of thawing within the next 300 years, which is quite a large range. While the high end of the estimate would be equivalent to 16-years worth of carbon emissions currently created by human, the low end of that spectrum is only 2-years worth. Even the conservative estimate is enough to frighten scientists though, since the threats of climate change necessitate us finding ways to slow the process, not accelerate it.

The study just goes to show that in not being more proactive against climate change, the situation is only compounding. Existing carbon emissions aren’t just thawing permafrost, they’re also releasing more carbon in the process, making the situation even more dire. There’s no excuse to keep turning a blind eye to this mounting problem.

Kevin Mathews|March 22, 2015

Climate change is spreading diseases you haven’t even heard of yet

Hollywood tradition dictates that in Act One of the outbreak narrative, we begin deep in the bowels of the CDC, cell cultures sloshing around a petri dish, a gaggle of white coats huddled around a microscope. Cut to the limb-flailing, flesh-eating symptoms, entire families frothing at the mouth — once unleashed, the pathogen will sweep the globe and consume us all before you can finish your Hail Marys: I’ve always loved you, Nancy!

But according to Daniel Brooks, who’s been studying the rise of emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) for 40 years, the Hollywood model needs to be recalibrated in light of climate change.

“It’s not that there’s going to be one ‘Andromeda Strain’ that will wipe out everybody on the planet,” says Brooks, professor emeritus at Toronto University and a senior research fellow at the University of Nebraska’s H.W. Manter Parasitology Lab. “There are going to be a lot of localized outbreaks that put a lot of pressure on our medical and veterinary health systems. There won’t be enough money to keep up with all of it. It will be the death of a thousand cuts.”

Brooks, whose article on the relationship between these new diseases and climate change was published last month in the journal Philosophical Transactions, claims that evolutionary history suggests EIDs spike along with major climate change events. When organisms flee their native habitats in search of more amenable climates, they expose themselves to pathogens they’ve never encountered — and to which they haven’t developed a resistance. Human activities only serve to accelerate this process, Brooks says, scattering organisms across the planet at an unprecedented rate.

The idea — called the “Stockholm Paradigm,” by Brooks and coauthor Eric Hoberg — runs counter to earlier host-pathogen theories, which generally assumed that because pathogens evolve in tandem with their hosts, they couldn’t easily switch to new ones. Under the new paradigm, diseases can and do jump hosts when given an opportunity, leading to crossover diseases we may have never dealt with before.

The most notorious example of this is the recent outbreak of the Ebola virus, which swept across West Africa last fall and has so far killed more than 10,000 people. The epidemic was ultimately triggered by humans moving into landscapes they’ve never occupied before, where they came into closer contact with fruit bats and their weird pathogens.

But even Ebola is straightforward, compared to what Brooks sees as the real danger of climate-driven disease outbreaks.

“Pathogens that jump into human beings, like Ebola or West Nile Virus — they’re only part of a larger story,” Brooks says. “If you think of every species of plant and animal on this planet that human beings depend on — every single crop, livestock, wild species, everything — all of them are going to experience some kind of emerging disease over the next 35 to 50 years.”

Regardless of the severity of each individual outbreak, humans will be left to foot the economic bill, to clean up what Brooks and his colleagues call “pathogen pollution.” And the costs could add up quickly.

“Either these diseases are going to reduce the population of the animals or the plants, and that’s going to hurt people economically, or it’s going to cost people a lot of money to try to treat them,” he says. “Either way, because most of the world’s biodiversity is where most of the world’s poor people live, disproportionately poor societies are going to be hit the hardest.”

And while you may not hear about them in the headlines like West Nile and Chikungunya, outbreaks in other species are already happening all the time. For example, in recent years a black yeast-like fungus (Exophiala cancerae) has several times virtually wiped out the mangrove land crab population along the Brazilian coast. Not only do poor coastal Brazilians consume mangrove land crabs as a primary food source, says Walter Boeger, coauthor of a 2012 study on the fungus, but they also sell them as a cash crop. A Google search for “Lethargic Crab Disease” yields little beyond a scientific abstract, and yet as a consequence of this EID, some of the poorest, hungriest Brazilians have become even poorer and hungrier.

Brooks also points to a group of nematodes, Setaria tundra, that has destroyed reindeer populations across northern Scandinavia and Finland. Driven by climate change and severe short-term weather events, the resulting disease outbreak is “a direct threat to sustainability and food security,” according to the 2013 Artic Biodiversity Assessment.

“What’s happening now is irreversible,” Brooks says. “Just as it’s becoming more and more difficult to predict the weather, it’s going to be more and more difficult to predict what species will move to what places, and who’s going to survive, and which populations are going to go up and down.”

There may not be zombies roaming the streets — and Brad Pitt may not be ramrodding a Jamboree through Philadelphia — but it’s a grim scenario all the same. And it’s important that everyone stay calm, Brooks says, lest we regress to a more primitive stage of our own evolution [insert Congress joke here].

“A lot of us are concerned that the natural history of human beings is that when they see a potential crisis approaching, they freeze. And then when the crisis is upon them, they scatter,” he says. “If you’ve ever seen any wild primates, that’s exactly how they are.”

Instead, Brooks and his colleagues have proposed a number of proactive steps to help mitigate the cost of future EIDs. Foremost among them: the immediate compilation of a complete global inventory of species, which biologists have been advocating for decades without managing to convince anyone to bankroll it. In order to more successfully predict where EIDs will strike next, scientists from a slew of different fields would need access to information on pathogens and their hosts alike.

“Here’s the irony,” Brooks says. “The countries that have the money and the technology to actually make a difference don’t feel the crisis, and the countries that feel the crisis don’t have the money to do anything.”

Funny, I don’t remember a scene in Contagion in which Congress approves massive funding to inventory life on the planet, pathogens included. Maybe that’s because it’s pretty far-fetched, even for Hollywood. Brooks concedes that it would be a monumental undertaking. And terribly expensive, he says — but it will never be cheaper than it is now.

Carson Vaughan|6 Mar 2015

Antarctic ice shelves melting 70% faster, study shows

Melt accelerates on ice shelves holding back glaciers in Antarctica

The frozen fringes of western Antarctica have been melting 70% faster in the last decade, raising concern that an important buttress keeping land-based ice sheets from flowing to the sea could collapse or vanish in coming decades, a new study shows.

An acceleration in the flow of massive ice sheets would add substantially to the ongoing rise of sea levels, according to Fernando Paolo, a geophysics PhD candidate at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and lead author of the study published online Thursday in the journal Science.

“They hold back the ice discharge from the ice sheet into the ocean,” Paolo said. “In the long term, that is the main concern from losing volume from an ice shelf.”

The study adds to growing concern that climate change has altered the equilibrium of growth and melt on a part of the continent holding an estimated 530,000 cubic miles of ice. That’s enough ice to raise the sea level by 11 feet, by some estimates.

“If the rate of change that we have observed remains the same, then we should expect a larger contribution of the ice sheet to sea level rise,” Paolo said.

Shelves in the Bellingshausen and Amundsen seas had the most rapid thinning, losing an average of 24 to 63 feet per decade, according to the study, which analyzed satellite-based radar data from 1994-2012. 

The most dramatic loss occurred on the Venable ice shelf on the Bellingshausen Sea, which thinned by an average of 118 feet per decade, according to the study. At that rate, it could disappear in 100 years. The same fate could befall the Crosson shelf on the Amundsen Sea, the study found.

Those rates are conservative “lower bound” estimates, said Paolo.

On the eastern side of Antarctica, previous ice sheet growth has ground to a halt over the last decade, the study showed.

The mechanics behind the changes in the east and west of Antarctica, however, are different, largely because the geology of each is distinct.

Glaciers form from the long-term accumulation of snowfall that compresses and flows slowly downhill toward the sea. In the east, these ice masses are predominantly anchored to land, so growth and decline are driven largely by changes in snowfall. Those glaciers nonetheless have tongue-like extensions floating on the sea, and studies have shown these shelves are thinning as rapidly as those in the west. 

In the west, most of the ice sheet already is marine, and “grounded” to the continent below sea level. Warmer waters coming into contact with that boundary, or grounding line, are thinning it from the bottom, causing more of the sheet to become buoyant. That effectively causes this grounding line to migrate inward, potentially for many miles.

Such a retreat is particularly dangerous in the many areas of western Antarctica where ice sheets lie on a retrograde bed – where the inland slope is downward. The retreat of the grounding line in those areas could trigger runaway acceleration of land glaciers, according to the study.

“After we pass that tipping point, the ice sheet just keeps flowing” regardless of the ocean water’s influence, Paolo said.

The forces driving both trends point toward altered wind patterns over Antarctica that bring less precipitation to east Antarctica and warmer water to the continent’s ice shelves. That, in turn, is likely caused by long-term changes in climate linked to the warming effect of increased carbon building up in Earth’s atmosphere, Paolo said.

By clustering the data in three-month snapshots over 18-mile swaths, the researchers were able to offer a high-resolution view of many individual shelves and differentiate short-term, local fluctuations from longer climate-related trends. Several earlier studies of ice sheets looked at shorter intervals over much broader regions, the authors noted.

The more detailed mosaic presented by the new study nonetheless offered little to surprise Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at UC Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada-Flintridge.

His research, which analyzed 40 years of data, suggests that many glaciers already have reached a point of no return.

“It does emphasize that a number if ice shelves are not healthy, which is bad news for the glaciers that flow into them because the glaciers will start flowing faster and raise sea level faster,” Rignot said.

See videos here and here

Geoffrey Mohan|March26,2015

Genetically Modified Organisms

These Three Companies are Using GMOs in their Baby Formula

It seems with the many reports of birth defects, organ failure, cancer, and other unsavory health conditions associated with GMO consumption, we should limit the use of GMO in baby products. After all, babies are very sensitive to the foods they consume, and we already know that pesticides found in mother’s milk can be damaging. Below you will learn of three companies which represent more than 90% of baby formula sales in the US that won’t consider removing GMOs from your baby’s food.

Health-Damaging GMOs in Baby Formula

Why would we knowingly feed our children GMOs before it has really been proven to be ‘safe’ as Monsanto, BASF, and other companies like Abbott Laboratories, Mead Johnson Nutrition, and Nestlé USA, the company who wants to own water rights, tout?

If you feed your baby one of the following three infant formulas, you are perhaps, unknowingly, feeding them GMO corn, sugar beets, and soy, since they are often used these companies’ products:

1. Similac

One of the widest used brands and often given out for ‘free’ at hospitals, this baby formula is made by Abbott Laboratories. The company is selling you a can of baby formula for over $100 that is full of GMO poisons. You could contact the company to ask why it would include GMOs, or, you can just boycott it altogether. Shareholders are supposed to vote on whether the company is able to continue to use GMO in baby formulas. Abott Laboratories is one of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies – go figure.

2. Enfamil

Another baby formula often given out as ‘free’ samples to new mothers is made by Mead Johnson Nutrition. Their website boasts, ‘Enfamil, scientifically designed to meet the nutritional needs of newborns and infants.’ The following Mead Johnson formulas are known to have GMO toxins:

• Enfamil with Iron
• Enfamil with low Iron
• Enfamil Lacto Free
• Enfamil 22
• Enfamil Next Step (both soy and milk varieties)
• Enfamil Nutramigen
• Enfamil Pro-Soybee

3. Gerber Good Start

The GMO-riddled formula made by Nestlé USA is perhaps the most questionable since the company has knowingly tried to ‘patent’ water and make it a commodity though it is all part of life itself on this planet. Do we really want to trust a company who wants privatize water with feeding our children health foods? The company went GMO free in South Africa, according to Corporate Action Network, but continues to sell American families the contaminated GMO formula we feed our babies every day.

Nestlé USA and Mead Johnson Nutrition have dismissed calls to remove genetically-modified organisms (GMO) from their infant formula products in the US – citing the approved use of GMOs by several national and global regulatory bodies.

You can boycott all these companies and start making your own home-made, natural baby formula without toxic chemicals and pesticides and nasty GMOs. The assistant director of the FDA, Nick Duy, says we shouldn’t make our own baby formula, but why isn’t he ousting these companies for using questionable (at best) and health-damaging GMOs?

How genetic engineering can fight disease, reduce insecticide use and enhance food security: Pamela Ronald speaks at TED2015

Pamela Ronald is here to talk about her work as a plant geneticist, about her work “studying genes that make plants resistant to disease and tolerant of stress.”

But first, she’d like to introduce us to her husband. “This is Raoul. He’s an organic farmer,” she says. “People say, ‘Really? An organic farmer and a plant geneticist? Can you agree on anything?’ Well, we can. Because we both have the same goal: we want to help nourish the growing population without further destroying the environment.”

Genetic improvement of plants isn’t new, she says. Ancient corn had a case so hard that it couldn’t be chewed; the ancient banana was full of large seeds; ancient Brussels sprouts weren’t actually individual objects. “To create these crops, breeders used many kinds of genetic techniques,” says Ronald. “Today breeders have even more the options choose from. Some of them are extraordinarily precise.”

She moves on to her own work on rice, “the staple food for more than half the world’s population.” Every year, 40% of the rice harvest is lost to pests and disease. “Farmers rely on varieties that carry genes for resistance.”

When Ronald started her work, no one knew exactly what those genes were. Her lab helped isolated a gene called “XA21″ that makes rice resistant to bacterial infection, and engineered it into plants. After the publication of this work, Ronald was approached by a colleague, Dave Mackill, who was working on how to make rice more resilient in the face of flooding.

“Although rice grows well in standing water, most varieties will die if they’re submerged for more than three days. Flooding increasingly problematic as climate changes,” says Ronald. “[Mackill] said, ’70 million rice farmers are having trouble growing rice because their fields are flooded. They’re living on less than $2 a day.”

The two launched a decade-long quest, with graduate student Kenong Xu, to identify and isolate a gene that might help. Eventually, they succeeded with the discovery of the gene Sub1. In a greenhouse test, rice engineered with Sub1 survived 18 days of flooding, while the standard rice died. Ronald shows a time lapse of what happened when breeders at the International Rice Research Institute developed new varieties carrying this gene using precision breeding. Both the IRRI variety and the conventional variety grow well at first. But after 17 days of submergence, the conventional rice has withered while the Sub1 rice thrives. “And they produce three-fold more grain than the conventional variety,” says Ronald.

Last year,  3.5 million farmers grew Sub1 rice thanks to financial support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“A lot of people don’t mind genetic modification when it involves moving rice genes around,” says Ronald, “but when it comes to taking genes from viruses and bacteria and putting them into plants, people say ‘Yuck! Why would scientists do that?’”

Ronald’s answer: “Because sometimes it is the safest, cheapest and most effective technology to advance sustainable agriculture and enhance food security.”

She walks us through a few examples. In the 1950s, the papaya crop on the island of Oahu in Hawaii was threatened by a ringspot virus. “Many people thought the Hawaiian papaya was doomed,” says Ronald.

A local Hawaiian plant pathologist named Dennis Gonsalves had an idea. He spliced a snippet of the DNA of the virus into the papaya genome — and it worked. It made the papaya resistant to the virus. “His pioneering work is credited with rescuing the papaya industry,” says Ronald. “Twenty years later, no other method is as effective.” 80% of all Hawaiian papaya is now engineered in this way.

Next, she brings us to Bangladesh, where a caterpillar pest is ravaging the eggplant crop. “To control this pest, farmers spray insecticides 2 to 3 times a week, sometimes even twice a day,” says Ronald. Of course, this threatens their own health. “It’s estimated that 300,000 people die every year because of exposure and misuse of insecticides.”

Organic farmers like Ronald’s husband use a spray called Bt, which is highly specific to caterpillars while being safe for humans, birds and other animals — it’s less toxic than table salt, says Ronald. But this approach does not work for farmers in Bangladesh because it is expensive and hard to find. “In the genetic approach, scientists cut the gene for Bt out of the bacteria and insert it directly into the eggplant genome,” says Ronald. This was used last season and it helped farmers take insecticide use down to zero.

And one final example has to do with malnutrition. “In less developed countries, Vitamin A deficiency causes nearly 500,000 children to go blind every year. More than half die,” says Ronald.

To try to help, scientists created genetically engineered “golden rice,” that has B-carotene, a precursor of Vitamin A. “Scientists predict that just one cup of golden rice per day will reduce blindness and the deaths of thousands of young children each year,” says Ronald. “But Golden Rice has been virulently opposed by activists who are against genetic modification.”

She points to a moment last year when activists stormed and destroyed a golden rice field trial. “When I heard about it, I wondered if the activists realized that they had destroyed much more than an important scientific research project — that they had destroyed medicines that children desperately need.”

Genetic engineering has been used commercially for 40 years in wines, cheeses and much more. And in that time, there hasn’t been a case of harm to human health or the environment, she points out. “Look, I’m not asking you to believe me. Science is not a belief system. My opinion does not matter.  Let’s look at the evidence. After 20 years of careful study and rigorous peer review by thousands of independent scientists, every major scientific organization in the world has concluded that the process of genetic engineering is as safe or safer as older methods of genetic modification.”

She ends: “What scares me most about the loud arguments and misinformation about plant genetics is that the poorest people, the people who most need the technology, may be denied access because of the fears and prejudices of those who have enough to eat.”

Kate Torgovnick May|March 18, 2015

[I have long said that genetic engineering has been in use for centuries. When hunter/gatherers started to cross-pollinate crops for quality or quantity improvement, genetic modification was born. It is no secret that many of our genetically modified foods are an improvement over ancestral crops, but the engineering that takes place today, that involves splicing genes from unrelated food groups, needs further study before marketing. So far, a food that is modified in this fashion will more often than not be allowed to hit our shelves without sufficient proof that the combinations are safe for our consumption. This is my main objection to the use of genetic modification without labeling. At the very least, people should be allowed to choose for themselves as to whether or not they will be test specimens.]

Opossums Could Hold the Key to Saving Snakebite Victims

Scientists pinpoint a compound in the marsupial’s blood that neutralizes venom—could it help in the quest to create a universal antivenin?

The opossum may be known for being stupid, ugly, and the animal voted Most Likely to Become Roadkill in high school, but scientists say its blood may be key to fighting the effects of snakebites worldwide.

In lab experiments with mice, a team discovered the exact molecule, called a peptide, in the North American marsupial’s blood that can neutralize snake venom. The peptide worked against several venomous snake species, including America’s western diamond back rattlesnake (Crotalus atrox) and India’s Russell viper (Daboia russelii).

“The mice that were given the venom incubated with the peptide never showed any signs [of being sick],” says Claire Komives, a professor of chemical engineering at San Jose State University in California.

“It was like a miracle, that this peptide really has this activity,” says Komives, who presented her preliminary findings on March 23 at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Denver.

Scientists have known since the 1940s that Virginia opossums (Didelphis virginiana) possessed some level of immunity to snake venom, Komives notes. Other mammals, such as ground squirrels and honey badgers, also have natural immunity to venom.

But now that her team has isolated the component responsible for the opossum’s superpower, Komives says, scientists could mass produce the substance as an inexpensive and universal antivenin for use in the developing world.

The World Health Organization estimates that as many as 94,000 people die each year as a result of snakebites. While antivenoms already exist for many snake species, the compounds can be costly and need to be tailored to each animal—making a universal antivenin vital to saving lives.

Not So Fast?

The opossum research is fascinating, but venom expert Zoltan Takacs cautions against popping open the champagne just yet.

The problem is that a snake’s venom contains hundreds of different compounds, each with its own method of subduing the victim.

is a multipoint assault. One set of toxins might attack your nerve cells while another set of toxins attacks your muscles,” says Takacs, who is also a National Geographic emerging explorer.

“Once you have a hundred toxins or more in your body, you would have to deactivate all of them, or at least the really bad ones, in order to prevent symptoms of the bite.”

Takacs worries that isolating a single peptide from opossums will most likely neutralize only one class of toxins, while the others would continue to wreak havoc on the body. (See “What’s the Most Toxic Snake?”)

Furthermore, he says the specific compounds found in a snake’s venom can vary depending on the species, the sex, the snake’s age, and even geographic location. So even if the opossum peptides work on one sample of Russell viper in the lab, the antidote might not hold up against all Russell vipers, which kill thousands of people a year in India.

Asked about some of these hurdles, Komives says Takacs definitely has a point.

However, she said her research speaks for itself.

“It is almost not reasonable that the peptide alone neutralized the rattlesnake venom,” she says in a follow-up email, “but that is what happened.”

The idea that a single peptide could combat venom in several snakes is “truly revolutionary,” agrees Robert Harrison, a venom expert at the U.K.’s Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.

Though “invigoratingly innovative,” the approach requires much more experimentation, notes Harrison, who’s working on a universal antivenom project.

Antivenin Crucial

Any new research on venom and antivenom is crucial, says Takacs, who has witnessed the devastating effect of snakebite firsthand.

He has seen a man lying on a gurney in rural Nepal six hours after being bitten by a cobra. Antivenom is rare there, as are expensive medical devices such as artificial regulators, so the man remained alive yet in complete respiratory paralysis. His brother sat next to him using a rubber ball to manually squeeze air into his lungs for each breath. Takacs never found out what happened to the man.

The first antivenin was invented over a hundred years ago, says Takacs. But because of various roadblocks, such as the complexities of the venom compounds involved and the cost of research, much of the world is still powerless to fight the effects of snakebites.

“There are very few situations in life,” he says, “where you get up in the morning perfectly healthy and by the end of the day you’re dead.”

Jason Bittel|National Geographic|March 23, 2015

[A person bitten might be grateful for a life-saving genetic modification.]

Engineers Develop New Yeast Strain to Enhance Biofuel and Biochemical Production

Researchers in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin have used a combination of metabolic engineering and directed evolution to develop a new, mutant yeast strain that could lead to a more efficient biofuel production process that would make biofuels more economically competitive with conventional fuels.

Their findings were published online in the journal Metabolic Engineering in March.

Beyond biofuels, the new yeast strain could be used in biochemical production to produce oleochemicals, chemicals traditionally derived from plant and animal fats and petroleum, which are used to make a variety of household products.

Hal Alper, associate professor in the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering, and his team have engineered a special type of yeast cell,Yarrowia lipolytica, and significantly enhanced its ability to convert simple sugars into oils and fats, known as lipids, that can then be used in place of petroleum-derived products. Alper’s discovery aligns with the U.S. Department of Energy’s efforts to develop renewable and cost-competitive biofuels from nonfood biomass materials.

“Our re-engineered strain serves as a stepping stone toward sustainable and renewable production of fuels such as biodiesel,” Alper said. “Moreover, this work contributes to the overall goal of reaching energy independence.”

Previously, the Alper team successfully combined genetically engineered yeast cells with ordinary table sugar to produce what Alper described as “a renewable version of sweet crude,” the premium form of petroleum. Building upon this approach, the team used a combination of evolutionary engineering strategies to create the new, mutant strain of Yarrowia that produces 1.6 times as many lipids as their previous strain in a shorter time, reaching levels of 40 grams per liter, a concentration that could make yeast cells a viable platform in the creation of biofuels. The strain’s high lipid yield makes it one of the most efficient organisms for turning sugar into lipids. In addition, the resulting cells produced these lipids at a rate that was more than 2.5 times as fast as the previous strain.

“This significant improvement in our cell-based platform enables these cells to compete in the biofuels industry,” Alper said. “We have moved to concentration values that begin to align with those in other industrial fuel processes.”

Alper and his team improved the performance of Yarrowia through a combination of metabolic engineering and directed evolution, which, like the process of natural selection, seeks to identify and cultivate the high-performing cells. In this work, the researchers recognized that cells with high lipid content would float to the top of a tube, whereas cells with lower lipid content would settle down to the bottom. The researchers used this “floating cell scheme” to identify the best-performing cells.

The researchers used these high-performing cells, cells that produced more lipids and at a faster rate, to obtain the final yeast with improved function.

“We were able to iterate the strain through a process of directed evolution, which involves mutation and selection, and with each cycle we were able to get things better and better,” Alper said.

In addition to using lipids for biofuels, the cell-based platform is able to produce oleochemicals, including nutritional polyunsaturated fatty acids, waxes, lubricants, oils, industrial solvents, cosmetics and a type of vitamin supplements called nutraceuticals.

The researchers’ method and platform are patent pending. Alper’s lab is continuing to work on ways to improve how the yeast strain converts sugar into lipids, and on the types of lipid products they can produce.

This research received funding from the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program, the DuPont Young Investigator Award and the Welch Foundation.

The University of Texas at Austin|March 24, 2015

What happened when Patrick Moore was challenged to drink a glass of glyphosate?

Lobbyist tells the world that Monsanto herbicide is safe enough to drink, then refuses to drink it!

In the wake of the World Health Organization’s designation of the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide as a “probable carcinogen”, the French investigative journalist and film maker Paul Moreira has released a sensational video of an interview with the high-profile GMO advocate Patrick Moore.

In the film, Moore first assures Moreira that you can drink a whole quart of glyphosate without suffering any harm and then refuses to drink it, telling the film maker, “I’m not an idiot.”

The interview was recorded as part of Moreira’s six-month-long investigation for the documentary “Bientôt dans vos assiettes” (Soon on your plate), originally broadcast by the French TV channel Canal +.

The film shows the terrible damage done in Argentina over the last 15 years by the use of increasingly large and uncontrolled amounts of agrochemicals in the GMO soy-growing areas. The documentary notes the explosion of illnesses, including cancer, among those living in the areas where the Roundup Ready crop is being cultivated.

Here’s the transcript of Moreira’s interview with Moore, which is conducted in English:

Moore: Do not believe that glyphosate in Argentina is causing increases in cancer. You can drink a whole quart of it and it won’t hurt you.

Interviewer: You want to drink some? We have some here.

Moore: I’d be happy to actually… Not, not really, but…

Interviewer: Not really?

Moore: I know it wouldn’t hurt me.

Interviewer: If you say so, I have some glyphosate.

Moore: No, I’m not stupid.

Interviewer: OK. So you… So it’s dangerous, right?

Moore: No. People try to commit suicide with it and fail, fairly regularly.

Interviewer: Tell the truth. It’s dangerous.

Moore: It’s not dangerous to humans. No, it’s not.

Interviewer: So you are ready to drink one glass of glyphosate?

Moore: No, I’m not an idiot.

Interviewer looks puzzled.

Moore: Interview me about golden rice. That’s what I’m talking about.

Interviewer: Really?

Moore: OK. Then it’s finished.

Interviewer: Except it’s…

Moore: The interview is finished.

Interviewer: That’s a good way to solve things.

Moore (getting up to leave): Yeah. You’re a complete jerk.

Not shown in the video is Moore’s dismissal as “lies” suggestions Roundup could be contributing to the cancer explosion in Argentina. This can be seen however in an advert for Moreira’s documentary, which also shows how totally taken aback Moore was when offered glyphosate to drink.

Of course, the interview with Moore was recorded before the World Health Organization’s panel of scientists from 11 countries announced their decision to list glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen. But Moore has subsequently used social media to dismiss the WHO’s statement about glyphosate as “anti-science“, comparing it to the IPCC’s statements on human-induced climate change – something else Moore hotly denies.

You might conclude from all this that Moore so clearly lacks credibility that he can only be some kind of fringe figure. But in fact he’s a darling of the GMO lobby, who love his aggressive attacks on GM critics. They even ran a high-profile campaign to have Moore adopted as an Ambassador for science at the current EXPO 2015 in Milan.

And Moore has only just returned from a tour of Asia where he met with Bangladesh’s Minister of Agriculture, among others. He was there to promote the adoption of golden rice, even though this GMO remains both unproven and unavailable. Other effective approaches to Vitamin A Deficiency (VAD) are not only readily available but have already substantially reduced VAD in for example the Philippines.

Let’s hope that others among Moore’s interlocutors prove as astute as Paul Moreira in exposing the hollowness of Moore’s claims. Sadly though, Moore’s many critics, like the journalist George Monbiot, have been waiting for years for Moore to be recognised as a toxic brand.

It’s well worth watching the actual video, which you can see here.

Jonathan Matthews|GMWatch

Opal Apple: non-browning, non-GMO alternative to GMO apple

Growing fruit comes naturally to Ralph Broetje—Broetje Orchards in eastern Washington State, developed with his wife Cheryl, is the largest contiguous orchard in the US. When he tried out a new apple variety bred in the Czech Republic, a cross between the Golden Delicious and the Topaz, the bright yellow fruit turned out to be firm, crispy and crunchy, with a sweet/tangy flavor and floral aroma. And, by “happy coincidence,” the Opal Apple was non-browning: its low occurrence of the browning enzyme delays the process.

Today, Ralph grows one million Opal trees, spanning nearly 1,000 acres of the total 8,000 acres (10 million trees) the company oversees. The Opal debuted in the US in 2010. To distinguish Opals from the recently approved genetically modified, non-browning Artic Apple, Broetje put the seal on it—last year, the Opal became the first apple to achieve Non-GMO Project verification.

Centralization for Quality Control

Broetje Orchards is unique in that produce is grown, stored, and packed in the same location, with a 1.1 million square-foot modern warehouse and packing facility on-site, with 105 atmosphere-controlled rooms. The company packs 25,000 boxes a day—8 million boxes a year—of 15 different varieties, including Opal, Fuji, Gala, Pink Lady, Braeburn, and Golden Delicious. Broetje employs 1,100 year-round, with 1,000 seasonal workers.

Opals are only available December through April; almost 12 million pounds are distributed each season. Around 15% of the Opals are organic.

Keith Mathews, CEO of sales and marketing at FirstFruits, said extensive funds have gone into social media outreach and public events to market the Opal, including tastings at 5K races, winter carnivals and conferences, and in-store demos. Currently the Opal is priced midway between mainline apples and the Honeycrisp.

Threats from GM apples

Mathews said contamination from the new GM Arctic Apple is a definite possibility. “Washington farmers have put their entire lives into apples since the early 1900s. Our Northwest Horticultural Council lobbied hard in DC to oppose GM apples, but we lost. The risk lies in bees pollinating our non-GMO acres.”

Ralph notes that none of the farmers he knows are eager to grow a GM apple, and that its presence might create doubts among consumers about eating apples at all. “There’s no need for a GM apple,” he said.

Mathews noted that the sliced apple business is the only point of value for a non-browning apple, and it’s an important but very small niche of the apple market at about 7-8 million bushels each year.

The company enrolled in Non-GMO Project verification to reinforce consumer awareness that a non-browning apple doesn’t have to be a GM apple. “The folks at the Project were very helpful,” Mathews said. “One complication occurred because I put through my organic and conventional Opals at the same time, and we normally wax our conventionals. There is a miniscule ingredient in the wax we had to deal with, so that took a bit of fine-tuning and frequent checking.”

Mathews expects demand for Opals to build. “We will easily get to one million boxes each season with what’s in the ground already.”

Arianne Pfoutz|March 27, 2015

[When the opening paragraph says that the apple is the result of a cross between a golden delicious and a topaz, how can one say that it is not genetically modified and receive Non GMO verification?]

Is Monsanto on the side of science?

Monsanto positions itself as a champion of science and GM supporters tar critics as ‘anti-science’.* But is this accurate? Claire Robinson looks at how scientists who investigate the safety of GM foods are treated.

When Australian scientist Judy Carman decided to carry out an animal feeding study with GM crops, she asked three GMO companies to supply seeds. One company didn’t reply; another wanted the details of her study first.

Monsanto sent her a legal document to sign stating that she would give the company the results of the study before publication. Carman said: ‘We would have been legally bound to do that whether they gave us seeds or not. No sensible scientist would agree to such conditions, and we didn’t.’

Scientists who want to find out if a GM crop is safe to eat or harms the environment need access to seeds of the GM variety as well as the non-GM parent (isogenic) variety it was developed from, grown in the same conditions.

This way, any differences found in an experiment studying the effects of the GM crop and the non-GM control are known to be due to the genetic modification and not to some other factor, such as different growing conditions.

But Monsanto and other GMO companies restrict access to their seeds for independent researchers. Anyone who buys Monsanto’s patented GM seed has to sign a technology agreement saying they will not use the seeds or crop for research or pass them to anyone else for that purpose. Even if permission to carry out research is given, companies typically retain the right to block publication if the results are ‘not flattering’, according to Scientific American.

In the end, Carman used non-isogenic crops for the control pigs’ diet, noting that GMO companies had claimed, and many government authorities had agreed, that the GM crops used were ‘substantially equivalent’ to non-GM crops. She found toxic effects in the GM-fed pigs – so the GM crops could not be substantially equivalent.

The French scientist Gilles-Eric Séralini also had difficulty accessing seed for his rat-feeding study with Monsanto’s GM maize NK603. No farmer wanted to risk breaching their technology agreement with Monsanto. Eventually a farm school agreed to grow the crops on condition it was not named, out of ‘fear of reprisal’ from Monsanto.

Food writer Nathanael Johnson has claimed that since 2009 the problem of access to seeds has been ‘largely fixed’, due to research agreements being reached between GMO companies and certain universities. But to Carman’s knowledge, these are ‘commercial-in-confidence’ research agreements to make new GMOs, not to test for safety. In any case, we are not permitted to see them to check what conditions are imposed on the researchers.

Scientists under attack

What’s wrong with telling Monsanto about your research in advance? Scientists whose research has questioned the safety of GM crops claim to have suffered attacks on themselves and their studies. They say they fear that giving Monsanto notice of planned research will help attacks to be prepared in advance.

In some cases, pro-GMO scientists have tried to bully journal editors into not publishing the study, or retracting it after it has been published. In the 1990s the editor of The Lancet said he was threatened by a senior member of Britain’s Royal Society that his job would be at risk if he published the research of Arpad Pusztai, a scientist at the Rowett Institute in Scotland.

Pusztai’s research had found toxic effects in rats fed GM potatoes. The editor published the paper anyway, but Pusztai was subjected to a campaign of vilification by pro-GMO scientific organizations and individuals in an attempt to discredit him and his research.¹⁰ He lost his job, funding and research team, and had a gagging order slapped on him which forbade him to speak about his research.

According to a former Rowett administrator, the campaign to silence Pusztai was set in motion by a phone call from Monsanto to US President Bill Clinton, who called British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who in turn called the Rowett Institute.

A Rowett director said: ‘Tony Blair’s office had been pressured by the Americans, who thought our study would harm the biotechnology industry, and particularly Monsanto. A similar smear campaign against a 2001 study that found GMO contamination in native Mexican maize was traced to Bivings Woodell, a PR company working for Monsanto.

The climate for independent researchers looking at GMO risks has not improved, though Monsanto and other GMO companies are less visible in attack campaigns – and may not need to be involved at all. They have plenty of foot-soldiers at universities and institutes to fight their battles without any apparent involvement on the part of the company, as the following examples of treatment of researchers show.

Gilles-Eric Séralini: In 2012 the French researcher published in Food and Chemical Toxicology a long-term two-year study which found liver and kidney damage in rats fed Monsanto GM maize and tiny amounts of the Roundup herbicide it is engineered to be grown with.

As soon as the study was published, university-based scientists joined a vicious smear campaign against it. After a year of pressure and the appointment of a former Monsanto scientist to the journal’s editorial board, the editor retracted the study. The reason he gave was the supposed ‘inconclusive’ nature of some of the results.

But David Schubert, a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California, commented: ‘As a scientist, I can assure you that if this were a valid reason for retracting a publication, a large fraction of the scientific literature would not exist. Séralini’s study was later republished by another journal.

Many of Séralini’s attackers had conflicts of interest with the GMO industry – but these were not made clear to the public.¹⁹ The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) also criticized the study, but it is not independent: over half of EFSA experts have been found to have conflicts of interest with the industries they regulate.

Judy Carman: After Carman received government funding for a GMO feeding study, she suffered six personal attacks by pro-GMO scientists over a 10-year period. They attacked her through her university, alleging she was lying, bringing the university into disrepute, or defaming them. Carman said: ‘It was clear to me that they wanted me sacked.’

Following the attacks, Carman says she was forced out of two successive university posts. She is fortunate not to need income from a university position, but points out that isn’t true of most scientists: ‘Any scientist in my shoes relying on a university income to eat or pay a mortgage would feel forced to stop investigating GMOs.’

Manuela Malatesta: The Italian researcher found that Monsanto’s GM soy disturbed the functioning of the liver, pancreas and testes of mice. After she published her papers, she says she was forced out of her job at the university where she had worked for 10 years, and could not obtain funding to follow up her research.

She commented: ‘Research on GMOs is now taboo. You can’t find money for it… People don’t want to find answers to troubling questions. It’s the result of widespread fear of Monsanto and GMOs in general.

Commenting on these cases, Michael Antoniou, a London-based molecular geneticist, says the normal scientific response to worrying findings is to design more experiments to get to the bottom of whether there really is a health concern or environmental impact.

Yet in the area of GM crops and foods, this does not happen. Instead, Antoniou says, ‘the GMO lobby attempts to discredit the study and the scientists who conducted it. It’s despicable and unprecedented in the history of science.’

The corporate university

It’s no surprise that many public scientists and organizations ally themselves with the GMO industry, as they rely heavily on industry funding. GMO companies have representatives on university boards and fund research, buildings and departments.

Monsanto has donated at least a million dollars to the University of Florida Foundation. Many US universities that do crop research are beholden to Monsanto. Some academic scientists own GMO patents and are involved in spin-off companies that develop GM crops.

‘Research on GMOs is now taboo… You can’t find money for it… It’s the result of widespread fear of Monsanto’

In Britain, the public institute Rothamsted Research counts Monsanto as a collaborator. Monsanto reportedly sponsored the Rowett Institute prior to Pusztai’s going public with his GM potato findings. Universities have become businesses and scientists have become entrepreneurs and salespeople.

Sponsorship of public institutions enables companies to steer research resources into areas that profit them. The companies develop patented GM crops in partnership with the institution and the institution generates research that, with its stamp of academic objectivity, can convince regulators of the safety or efficacy of GM crops.

An added bonus for companies is a supply of scientists who are prepared to act as GMO advocates. They are often described only by their public affiliations, even though they and their institutions depend on GMO industry money.

Is Monsanto on the side of science? The answer appears to be: ‘Only if it can control and profit from it.’ That runs counter to the spirit of scientific inquiry, which must be free to go wherever the data leads – however inconvenient it may prove to a company’s bottom line.

Monsanto Demands World Health Organization Retract Report That Says Roundup Is Linked to Cancer

Last week, the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) released a report, compiled by a team of scientists, that said glyphosate—sold by Monsanto in the herbicide Roundup—was probably linked to cancer.

This week, Monsanto is demanding the WHO retract the report, essentially repudiating years of research by multiple scientists. Monsanto is claiming the report was biased and that glyphosate products like Roundup are safe when the directions are followed. The company says that the WHO report contradicts regulatory findings, which can, of course, be influenced by politics and lobbying. So far, WHO has not responded.

“We question the quality of the assessment,” Philip Miller, Monsanto vice president of global regulatory affairs, told Reuters. “The WHO has something to explain.”

Miller claimed that the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) was provided by Monsanto with information on glyphosate’s safety, and that it ignored Monsanto’s input.

That response indicates a level of panic on Monsanto’s part because the report could hit it where it hurts—its profits. Its Roundup, formulated to be used on GMO or “Roundup Ready” crops engineered to be resistant to it, is the most widely used herbicide in the world. Originally introduced in the early ’70s to control weeds, it took off when the planting of GMO crops skyrocketed in the last 15 years. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimated that glyphosate use in the U.S. increased from about 20 million pounds in 1992 to 110 million pounds in 2002 to more than 280 million pounds in 2012.

The use of glyphosate weed killers has exploded since the introduction of GMOs engineered to be resistant to it. Image credit: USGS

What Monsanto is demanding is the equivalent of declaring a person innocent because there is insufficient evidence to prove his guilt. The WHO report did not claim definitely the glyphosate causes cancer, but rather that multiple scientific studies have suggested a link.

“For the herbicide glyphosate, there was limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans for non-Hodgkin lymphoma,” the study said. “The evidence in humans is from studies of exposures, mostly agricultural, in the U.S., Canada and Sweden published since 2001. In addition, there is convincing evidence that glyphosate also can cause cancer in laboratory animals. Glyphosate also caused DNA and chromosomal damage in human cells. One study in community residents reported increases in blood markers of chromosomal damage after glyphosate formulations were sprayed nearby.”

It points out that “limited” does not mean “nonexistent” as Monsanto wants it to declare. When a substance is categorized as “probably” carcinogenic to humans, it says “there is limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans and sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental animals. Limited evidence means that a positive association has been observed between exposure to the agent and cancer but that other explanations for the observations could not be ruled out. This category is also used when there is limited evidence of carcinogenicity in humans and strong data on how the agent causes cancer.”

And, as the Reuters article points out, Monsanto says such studies are invalid, but critics say they merit attention. According to Dave Schubert, head of the cellular neurobiology laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, “There are a number of independent, published manuscripts that clearly indicate that glyphosate … can promote cancer and tumor growth. It should be banned.”

Several leading public interest organizations agree with Schubert and today urged the Obama administration to “weigh heavily” the WHO’s recent conclusion that glyphosate is a “probable human carcinogen.” The groups believes that “As a result of WHO’s rigorous and independent review, the link between glyphosate and cancer has now been greatly strengthened.”

In a letter to Gina McCarthy, administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, JLI, Consumers Union, Center for Food Safety, Environmental Working Group and Natural Resources Defense Council, among others, called the WHO announcement “extremely timely, as EPA is preparing to issue its preliminary risk assessment of the widely used herbicide under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act.”

“Consumers deserve to know which foods are made with GMOs considering it’s their dollars that are largely driving the use of this dangerous herbicide,” said Gary Hirshberg, the chairman of the board for the Just Label It campaign. “This new evidence that the main pesticide used on GMO crops is a ‘probable human carcinogen’ is even more reason consumers should have the right to know what’s in their food.”

One proponent of the “glyphosate is absolutely safe” narrative is former environmentalist/current environmental contrarian/sometime Monsanto consultant Dr. Patrick Moore, who was interviewed by filmmaker Paul Moreira for a French TV documentary. He not only insisted “[Roundup] is not dangerous to humans, he also said “You can drink a whole quart of it and it won’t hurt you.” But when Moreira said, “You want to drink some? We have some here,” Moore responded “I’d be happy to … not really, but I know it wouldn’t hurt me,” and walked off the set when Moreira repeated his offer, calling the him an “idiot.”

Anastasia Pantsios|March 26, 2015

GMO Labeling: Nation’s ‘Biggest Food Fight’ Hits DC

Food products containing genetically modified ingredients (GMOs) are labeled in 64 countries all around the world, including Japan, China, Russia, Australia and the European Union. In many countries, consumers’ right to know what they’re eating is uncontroversial.

Not so in the U.S. While a vast majority of American consumers would like this information, industrial-scale food companies and chemical companies like Monsanto and DuPont that developed GMO crops and the pesticides and herbicides they’re engineered to resist don’t think they need it. While three states—Vermont, Maine and Rhode Island—have passed GMO labeling laws, ballot issues in California, Colorado and Oregon have gone down to defeat, thanks to massive spending by Monsanto, DuPont and the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents the corporate food business.

Now the battle has shifted to the national level, where the corporations that benefit from GMOs are pushing for the so-called DARK (Denying Americans the Right to Know) Act, introduced by Kansas Congressman Mike Pompeo, which would preempt states from setting up their own GMO labeling systems and bar them from defining “natural” foods as free from GMOs. Food safety advocates and consumer groups are fighting back, supporting a national mandatory labeling bill called the Genetically Engineered Food Right to Know Act, re-introduced in February by a group of congressional Democrats.

This morning, the House Agriculture Committee held a hearing on a national GMO labeling law. Following the hearing, Tom Colicchio, cofounder of Food Policy Action, Just Label It chairman Gary Hirshberg, Environmental Working Group (EWG) president Ken Cook and EWG vice president of governmental affairs Scott Faber held a teleconference to offer their thoughts on the bills, on GMO labeling in general and on the hearing, which Faber called “probably the most biased and unbalanced hearing in history of Congress.”

Colicchio rebutted one of the main arguments made by the companies battling against labeling: that it would dramatically increase food costs.

“The opposition would suggest that costs to consumers will skyrocket,” he said. “Manufacturers change labels all the time. Also the idea that we have to create a whole new system to track food—that’s already in place. A lot of this is scare tactics to get people to think prices will go through the roof and we don’t see that.”

Cook pointed out that it’s something people overwhelmingly want—as many as 90 percent, according to one poll.

“More than 1.4 million responded to a petition to label genetically engineered ingredients,” he said. “We’re seeing more and more state action. Seventy bills were proposed in 30 states in last two years. The food companies are coming to Washington for a big government solution because of a consumer uprising that caught them off guard. This is designed for one reason and one reason alone—to extinguish this consumer uprising that these companies thought would never happen in the U.S. They thought [GMO labeling] was a European phenomenon.”

There’s been a push by GMO supporters to declare their safety for consumption a “settled” issue and compare those questioning it to climate deniers, despite the lack of solid evidence either way. Science Guy Bill Nye earned a flurry of attention recently when he appeared to walk back on his skepticism about safety claims following a meeting with Monsanto.

But Hirshberg pointed out that even if that debate WERE settled in favor of GMOs, there’s still a big problem.

“There have been all kinds of exaggerations on both sides of the labeling debate—what I think we can call the biggest food fight in America,” he said. “But one fact that is not in dispute is that genetically engineered foods have led to enormous increases in herbicide use because crops are engineered to be tolerant of herbicides. In many cases farmers become dependent on an herbicide spiral and more resistant weeds, leading to stronger chemicals.”

He cited a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) study that found the herbicide glyphosate, sold by Monsanto as Roundup which its “Roundup Ready” crops are engineered to resist, is found in most of the water sources in the Midwest.

“Higher yields [a commonly cited benefit of GMO crops] may come to pass, but 90 percent are engineered to tolerate more chemicals,” he said. “So it’s no surprise that companies selling these are chemical companies. We’ve been told since 1996, since the first herbicide-tolerant corn was introduced, that glyphosate is safe but as of Friday, we now know that what scientists have been saying for some time: the World Health Organization  (WHO) has said glyphosate is probably a carcinogen. And it’s in our rainwater, streams and air.”

Hirshberg said he believed that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has the power now to require GMO labeling, which the DARK Act would block, and brushed aside another common industry claim, that labeling would be equivalent to telling consumers to avoid a product, pointing out that orange juices made from concentrate must be labeled and it’s only considered a point of information, not a warning.

“This is economic tyranny being exercised by companies that want to protect status quo,” he said. ‘The fastest growing segment of the marketplace is organic and non-GMO. Mandatory labeling gives consumers choices. The bill [the DARK Act] is really diabolical and it’s really deceptive. It’s made to look like the sponsors support transparency but it really prevents it. This is really about selling pesticides and herbicides.”

Anastasia Pantsios|March 25, 2015

Energy

New Fracking Rules on Public Lands ‘A Giveaway to Oil and Gas Industry,’ Advocates Say

Earlier this week, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell said that the new regulations for fracking on federal lands from the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) would be released “within the next few days,” following a four-year process that included receiving more than 1.5 million public comments. Today she unveiled those new rules, which take effect in 90 days. The BLM claimed they would “support safe and responsible hydraulic fracturing on public and American Indian lands.”

“Current federal well-drilling regulations are more than 30 years old and they simply have not kept pace with the technical complexities of today’s hydraulic fracturing operations,” said Jewell. “This updated and strengthened rule provides a framework of safeguards and disclosure protocols that will allow for the continued responsible development of our federal oil and gas resources. As we continue to offer millions of acres of public lands for conventional and renewable energy production, it is absolutely critical the public have confidence that transparent and effective safety and environmental protections are in place.”

Drilling has been occurring on federal lands for years with more than 100,000 wells in existence. However, following the fracking boom of the last two decades, more than 90 percent of new drilling operations involve that process, evading the regulations of 30 years ago.

Rather than the ban on new drilling that many environmental and citizen groups sought, the rules focus on safety issues like well construction, and chemical management and disclosure.

Specifically, they include:

• Ensuring the protection of groundwater supplies by requiring a validation of well integrity and strong cement barriers between the wellbore and water zones through which the wellbore passes;
• Requiring companies to publicly disclose chemicals used in fracking to the Bureau of Land Management through the website FracFocus within 30 days of completing operations;
• Higher standards for interim storage of recovered waste fluids from fracking to mitigate risks to air, water and wildlife; and
• Measures to lower the risk of cross-well contamination with chemicals and fluids used in the fracturing operation, by requiring companies to submit more detailed information on the geology, depth and location of preexisting wells to give the BLM the chance to better evaluate and manage site characteristics.

“This rule will protect public health and the environment during and after hydraulic fracturing operations at a modest cost while both respecting the work previously done by the industry, the states and the tribes and promoting the adoption of more protective standards across the country,” said Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management Janice Schneider. “We know how important it is to get this right.”

“This rule was informed and shaped by the technical expertise, interests and concerns of all of our partners, and builds on the work of states and tribes to ensure best practices on a nationwide basis,” added BLM director Neil Kornze. “The new regulations are essential to our mutual efforts to protect the environment and the communities that depend on vital water, land and wildlife resources. This rule is good government.”

That opinion was far from universal. Some environmental groups hailed it as a good start.

“Our public lands and the people who live near them deserve the highest level of protection from the oil and gas industry,” said Earthjustice senior legislative representative Jessica Ennis. “Today’s Interior rules take an important step forward by moving toward the use of tanks to store toxic produced water and removing the flawed ‘type well’ concept and replacing it with a requirement for integrity tests on all wells, but there is more to be done. The U.S. must ramp up its expansion of clean energy and keep oil and gas in the ground.”

“The BLM fracking rule is a significant improvement over business as usual,” said Earthworks policy director Lauren Pagel. “For the first time, the BLM will prohibit fracking waste pits on public lands, and require oil and gas companies to test the integrity of every well to help prevent pollution. But in other important ways this rule falls short of what is needed to protect communities and the environment and continues the Obama administration’s pattern of prioritizing fossil fuel extraction over clean energy development and people’s health.”

Others were more emphatic about how much the new rules fall short.

“Our precious public lands have and are continuing to be sacrificed by the Obama administration, only for the short-term profit of the oil and gas industry,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. “Our work will continue to truly protect the millions of acres of federal lands that will remain in harm’s way until fracking is halted entirely. Americans believe that preserving the environmental integrity of these areas for generations to come is a critically important policy goal, especially in light of new evidence about fracking-related harm to natural resources.”

“Our public lands are too precious to spoil with fracking,” said Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky of Illinois who, along with Congressman Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, introduced a bill in December to ban fracking on public lands. “The BLM regulations are a step in the right direction, but more must be done to ensure that public lands are protected and preserved for future generations. We will continue to work to completely ban fracking on public lands.”

But even these modest, common-sense rules were too much for some industry players. The American Petroleum Institute (API) called them “duplicative” and a hindrance to job growth. “Despite the renaissance on state and private lands, energy production on federal lands has fallen, and this rule is just one more barrier to growth,” said API director of upstream and industry operations Erik Milito. “Under the strong environmental stewardship of state regulators, hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling have opened up a new era of energy security, job growth and economic strength.”

Mark Ruffalo, an advisory board member for Americans Against Fracking, couldn’t disagree more. “Our U.S. national parks and public lands are some of our most treasured places and should be protected from fracking. Yet instead of following the lead of New York in banning fracking, the Obama Administration has devised fracking regulations that are nothing more then a giveaway to the oil and gas industry. These regulations take from us our heritage and hands it to an industry that doesn’t need a hand out. Industrialization and parks don’t belong together.”

Charlie Cray, research specialist at Greenpeace, agrees, “The President should direct BLM to stop issuing any new leases immediately until there is evidence that we won’t cross the climate tipping point, or the very least until their new methane pollution regulations are finalized and binding. All of the above should mean no more from below.”

Anastasia Pantsios|March 20, 2015

Appeal Decision Blocks Shell Oil Train Project

 County must first analyze environmental and public health risks of dangerous oil rail project

With last weekend’s oil train explosions in Ontario and West Virginia fresh in our minds, this is a commonsense victory for communities along the rail line.

The Skagit County Hearing Examiner today halted Shell Oil Refinery’s planned crude-by-rail expansion until it undertakes a full, transparent environmental review. The decision blocks the project until such a comprehensive review can be completed.

The Hearing Examiner found that Shell’s proposed project, which would receive hundreds of tank cars of crude oil every week, posed a significant risk of harm to people, water, and wildlife. 

The decision finds that:

“The crude oil being brought in large quantities to a small area in the northwest Washington State is highly flammable and explosive. Catastrophes have occurred elsewhere. No one doubts that such a thing could occur here … Unquestionably, the potential magnitude and duration of environmental and human harm from oil train operations in Northwest Washington could be very great.”

“With last weekend’s oil train explosions in Ontario and West Virginia fresh in our minds, this is a commonsense victory for communities along the rail line,” said Jan Hasselman, an attorney with Earthjustice representing the conservation groups. “Before allowing more oil trains, Skagit County must make sure they pose no threat to our communities, our waters, and our way of life.”

In Skagit County, the oil trains pass right through the downtowns of Burlington and Mount Vernon. The oil trains also cross the old Burlington/Mount Vernon bridge spanning the Skagit River immediately above the Anacortes Water Treatment Plant and the old swing bridge spanning the Swinomish Channel directly adjacent to the Padilla Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve. While there is pending state legislation that would enhance public information on oil transport, those laws are not yet on the books.

“The Hearing Examiner correctly found that the enormity of the environmental impacts associated with Shell’s Bakken oil trains warrants a full environmental and safety review,” said Tom Glade, president of local watchdog group Evergreen Islands, one of the appellants. “We applaud the Hearing Examiner for listening to the evidence and to the community.”

Shell is the latest of several projects that would involve increases in transportation of Bakken crude oil through Washington state, none of which received any meaningful environmental review. The decision highlights the failure of the state to grapple with the cumulative impacts of multiple projects, finding: “The total impact of the entirety of the massive upsurge in shipments of crude along this route has not been analyzed. The risks that adding one more actor to this scene poses to the environment and to health and safety can only be appreciated after a cumulative analysis of the entire picture.”

The Hearing Examiner also highlighted the importance of the unique ecosystem near the refinery on Padilla Bay—which support an “astonishing diversity” of aquatic life—and the County’s failure to analyze the risks of an oil spill there.  He also observed the importance of the Skagit River for salmon production and the need to review potential spill impacts on salmon habitat.

Jan Hasselman|Attorney|Earthjustice|February 23, 2015

RE Sources for Sustainable Communities, Friends of the San Juans, ForestEthics, Washington Environmental Council, Friends of the Earth, and Evergreen Islands filed the Shell appeal, represented by Kristen Boyles and Jan Hasselman of Earthjustice.

Groups File Suit to Protect Greater Chaco Region From Dangerous Fracking

Feds Approving Oil Drilling at Expense of Public Health, Cultural Treasures, Safe Climate

Santa, Fe, NM—A coalition of local, regional, and national watchdog groups filed suit today to put the brakes on the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s ongoing approval of fracking in the Greater Chaco region of northwestern New Mexico. The suit comes as community members and organizations today are rallying at the New Mexico State Legislature in support of a moratorium on fracking in Greater Chaco.

“It’s time to put the brakes on an out of control agency that wants to promote fracking at the expense of our clean air, scarce water, and a safe climate,” said John Horning, Executive Director of WildEarth Guardians. “The Bureau of Land Management has to stop putting the oil and gas industry ahead of our public lands and our future.”

Filed in federal court, the suit challenges the Bureau of Land Management for illegally authorizing a surge of new fracking in the Greater Chaco region. Home to Chaco Canyon, extensive Ancestral Puebloan ruins, and Navajo communities, the region is considered the cultural heart of the American Southwest.

Over the last two years, the Bureau of Land Management has approved more than 130 new fracking proposals, primarily near Lybrook and within 20 miles of Chaco Canyon. This, despite the agency’s acknowledgment that it has never analyzed how this development will impact public health and the environment, and has no plan in place to protect the regions’ air, water, and communities.

“The Bureau of Land Management is not taking serious consideration of the sacredness of the Greater Chaco region and the impacts on surrounding Diné communities as they continue to approve more drilling and fracking,” said Colleen Cooley with Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment. “It’s time to account for what really matters, our health, our environment, and future generations.”

Today’s suit also comes as 30 groups, including Navajo, community, environmental, and for-profit energy companies called on New Mexico Senators Udall and Heinrich and Congressman Luján to support a moratorium on oil and gas fracking until the Bureau of Land Management can assure protection of the region.

“The Bureau of Land Management is recklessly leaping before looking, turning its back on our public lands in favor of the oil and gas industry,” said Mike Eisenfeld, New Mexico Energy Coordinator for the San Juan Citizens Alliance. “With all signs that fracking is costing us dearly, it’s time to put the brakes on this disaster.”

The fracking approvals have come amidst industry pressure to exploit oil from the Mancos shale using horizontal drilling. An intensively industrial form of fossil fuel development, horizontal drilling has besieged the region with truck traffic, oil tanks, pipelines, flares, and fracking equipment. Dozens, if not hundreds, more fracking permits are slated to be approved by the Bureau of Land Management.

While today’s suit targets the failure of the Bureau of Land Management to protect the cultural integrity of the region, including Chaco Culture National Historical Park, the suit also targets the agency’s failure to address the global warming impacts of ramped up fracking. A recent study from NASA found the region has the highest amount of methane emissions in the nation due to extensive fossil fuel development. Methane is not only a valuable product that is being wasted, it’s a potent greenhouse gas that creates 86 times more warming than carbon dioxide.

“These are our public lands, not the oil and gas industry’s,” said Kyle Tisdel, Climate and Energy Program Director at the Western Environmental Law Center. “With today’s lawsuit, all we’re asking for is a time-out to ensure that we have the safeguards in place to protect our climate, keep our air clean, and ensure the health of the region. That’s not too much to ask.”

The groups filing today’s lawsuit include Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment, the San Juan Citizens Alliance, WildEarth Guardians, and Natural Resources Defense Counsel. Attorneys from the Western Environmental Law Center and WildEarth Guardians represent the groups.

Contact: Jeremy Nichols (303) 437-7663

Additional Contacts:

Colleen Cooley, Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment, (928) 637-3221, ccooley22@gmail.com

Mike Eisenfeld, New Mexico Energy Coordinator, San Juan Citizens Alliance, (505) 325-6724, mike@sanjuancitizens.org

Kyle Tisdel, Climate and Energy Program Director, Western Environmental Law Center, (575) 613-8050, tisdel@westernlaw.org

Texas Town Says No to Fossil Fuels, Yes to Renewable Energy

Texas’ image as the king of oil states clings to it through repeated boom and bust cycles. Its politicians tend to be close friends of the fossil fuel industry. So people don’t think of it as the leading U.S. state for renewable energy—even though it is. It’s the top producer of wind energy in the U.S.

One city in Texas aims to be the first to power itself entirely on renewables. Georgetown, Texas, 30 miles north of Austin in central Texas, has announced its intention to be all-renewable by 2017. The city of 50,000 has signed a deal with SunEdison to supply it with solar power for the next 25 years. It comes on the heels of a a deal the city made last year to source electricity from a wind farm currently under construction 50 miles west of Amarillo that will start to provide power next year. The two deals—for 150 megawatts of solar and 144 megawatts of wind—will make Georgetown Utility Services one of the largest municipally owned utilities in the U.S. to get all its electricity from renewables.

“Georgetown Utility Services isn’t required to buy solar or other renewables—we did so because it will save on electricity costs and decrease our water usage,” said Georgetown’s interim city manager and general manager of utilities Jim Briggs. “When Georgetown Utility Systems opted to seek new sources of power in 2012, we were charged with a mission to secure the most cost-effective energy that balanced risk and reward. Our team took advantage of a unique time in the market place and did just that. By securing these renewable contracts the utility can consider itself 100 percent ‘green,’ but it does so at extremely competitive costs for energy, and it hedges against future fuel and regulatory risks, fulfilling our initial goal.”

The city says that the combination of solar and wind will provide energy from complementary renewable sources to meet demand patterns. Solar’s afternoon supply peak matches the daily energy demand peak in Georgetown, particularly during hot summer months. Wind power production in the Amarillo area is generally highest in the evening or early-morning hours, providing power when the sun isn’t shining. And wind and solar generation requires no water, an important consideration in the drought-stricken state.

“SunEdison is very excited to be working with Georgetown Utility Systems to provide their customers with 100 percent renewable, clean energy,” said Paul Gaynor, executive vice president of SunEdison’s North America Utility and Global Wind division. “Georgetown is an exceptional city, and by going 100 percent renewable they cut down on pollution, save water and enjoy stable energy prices. They’re able to accomplish all of this without spending a penny upfront with the SunEdison power purchase agreement. Georgetown is a model for other cities that hope to become powered by clean renewable energy.”

Despite Texas’ position on the leading edge of renewable energy generation, the oil mentality dies hard in Texas, especially now that the fracking boom has given the state a new source of fossil fuels. State Sen. Troy Fraser from Horseshoe Bay, Texas, about a hour west of Georgetown, has proposed ending the state’s renewable energy standard, saying that renewables are doing so well it’s no longer necessary.

“We have done what we intended to accomplish,” he said at a hearing this week. “Not only did we roar past the goal we had in place, we have more than doubled that goal.”

But Cyrus Reed of the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter warned, “Even though the Texas Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) goal has been met, these renewable energy credits are still part of project economics, both complete and under construction, and eliminating the RPS would hurt current investors and risk weakening additional investment in Texas. In other words, if these RPS-based renewable energy credits were eliminated, their value would plummet and revenue would be lost, which would be unfair to developers and their investors who have invested their money with the expectation the RPS would be carried out through 2025.”

He also warned that if the RPS was repealed, it would cost Texas more to comply with the carbon reduction goals of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan.

The rollback attempt, part of a nationwide effort to kill renewable energy standards, is bankrolled by fossil fuel-friendly organizations. West Virginia became the second state to do so in February, following Ohio’s rollback last June. A Pew Charitable Trusts report found that Ohio’s rollback has already cost the state jobs and investment money.

Anastasia Pantsios|EcoWatch|March 22, 2015

New Roofs in France Must Be Green

Environmentalism is fast becoming a top concern in France – a rooftop concern, to be precise. Excitingly, the nation has just passed new legislation that will require all upcoming commercial construction projects to feature either green roofs or solar panels above their top floors.

By now, most people are at least passingly familiar with the benefits of solar panels, but green roofs remain unknown to the general public. A green roof is one that is covered in lush plant life, and the perks extend well beyond the aesthetic. Because green roofs help to insulate, buildings are able to slash seasonal energy costs for both heating and air conditioning by approximately 25 percent.

That alone should be incentive for buildings to add a “plantscape” to their roofs, but the advantages don’t end there. Green roofs also help to reduce water runoff during rainstorms, combat air pollution, provide food for the buildings’ residents, and even make a good home for birds that are normally displaced by urban development. For more details on the green roof phenomenon, check out Care2’s previous coverage.

To get the law to pass through parliament, environmentalists had to make some significant concessions. First, the plan was to have all new buildings incorporate green roofs, but they agreed to settle for just new commercial buildings since businesses would better be able to afford the related costs upfront. Second, the goal was initially to make roofs entirely covered in plants, but they reduced the requirement to being partially covered for purposes of practicality. Finally, politicians encouraged environmentalists to allow new buildings to have either plants or solar panels to provide businesses with a more of a choice.

Sure, the ultimate legislation is not as ambitious as it was initially written, but the end result is still great for the environment. These reasonable compromises make sense when they help to ensure backing from politicians.

Toronto, Canada, actually implemented a similar plan about five years ago and is estimating hundreds of millions of dollars saved in energy costs. The same looks to be true for France. Though building managers may not want the stress of having yet another building regulation to worry about, they’ll love the impact down the road. Whether they choose solar panels or green roofs, within a few years time, they should start to make back their money from the initial investment thanks to the energy savings.

Currently, France receives 80 percent of its power from nuclear sources. The new rooftop mandates will nudge the country closer to safer, sustainable choices like solar energy, as well as reduce the need for energy altogether.

Kevin Mathews|March 24, 2015

Top 10 Cities Embracing Solar Energy—Did Your City Make the List?

While giant new solar farms located in rural areas and deserts have been grabbing the headlines lately, America’s cities have been embracing solar power as well. A new report from Environment America Research & Policy Center, Shining Cities: Harnessing the Benefits of Solar Energy in America, shows how wide that embrace is.

The report found that 65 American cities account for 7 percent of U.S.’s 20,500 megawatts (MW) of solar capacity, more than all the solar installed in the country in 2009. And the top 20 cities were the leaders, accounting for 6.5 percent of the country’s solar capacity but using just .1 percent of its land.

“Cities across the U.S. are recognizing and harnessing the transformative power of solar energy,” says the report. “Many local governments have recognized the benefits of solar energy and are using it to make their electric grids more efficient, create local jobs, protect residents from the dangers of extreme weather events, and mitigate pollution that is fueling global warming and endangering public health.”

“These cities are shining examples of solar power’s promise,” said report co-author Rob Sargent, energy program director at Environment America.

Unsurprisingly, Sun Belt cities were the leaders, with Los Angeles the top city, followed by San Diego and Phoenix. The top 10 also included San Jose, Honolulu, San Antonio and New Orleans. But, demonstrating that solar’s potential is not limited to the sunny south, Indianapolis—which averages 187 sunny days annually compared to Los Angeles’ 292—came in at number four, Denver at number eight and New York City at number nine. Newark and Boston also cracked the top 20. And the report spotlighted initiatives in cities like Chicago and Fort Collins, Colorado that are growing their solar sectors.

“Los Angeles is blessed with abundant sunshine and with the most solar power in the country we are proud to be putting it to good use,” said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. “We look forward to increasing that amount significantly in the coming years through the nation’s largest Feed in Tariff program and broadening adoption by residential customers, simultaneously creating green jobs and combating climate change.”

“San Diego is leading the way in solar energy and that’s going to help us meet many of our city’s environmental goals and put San Diegans back to work,” added San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer. “Solar energy is a key element to the city’s proposed Climate Action Plan, which calls for 100 percent renewable energy use in the city by 2035.”

Honolulu, the number six city, is the leader in most solar panels per capita, followed by Indianapolis.

“Honolulu is honored to once again earn the top spot in Environment America’s nationwide study on PV capacity per capita,” said Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell. “Our thriving city in the center of the Pacific has not rested on its laurels.  In our proposed budget, my administration calls for spending $4 million annually over the next four years to install photovoltaic systems at city facilities to continue pushing the needle when it comes to clean, sustainable energy.”

The report points out multiple ways in which boosting solar can benefit cities: cutting air pollution, reducing the threat of climate change, helping protect against severe weather events and boosting their economies. And it suggests that to continue the growth shown by the report that cities (and states) need to adopt solar-friendly policies.

“Cities can reap the benefits of clean, solar energy by adopting pro-solar policies and taking actions that will encourage innovation and investment in the solar industry,” it says. “Many leading cities have successfully built their solar energy markets with local government policies. Some leading cities are in states that have taken state-level action to promote solar energy adoption.”

Among those policies are streamlining the permitting process, providing predictable tax incentives and solar-friendly building codes, expanding access to allow more people—especially lower-income people—to buy in through continued cost cutting and innovative financing programs, and partnering with local utility companies to ward off the lobbying some utilities have done to block or penalize solar installations.

Image credit: Environment America

The report spotlighted what can happen when cities aggressively pursue policies friendly to clean, renewable energy. Denver more than doubled its solar capacity from 24 to 58 MW in 2014, thanks to Colorado’s strong pro-solar policies and the city’s own policies that reduce the cost of installing solar.

Last year, the mayors of the country’s leading solar city Los Angeles joined with the mayors of two cities aspiring to join the list, Houston and Philadelphia, to launch the Mayors’ National Climate Action Agenda. The agenda acknowledges that cities create a significant percentage of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions and says, “Mayors are uniquely compelled and equipped to lead on the fight to stem climate change, as well as to adapt to it and prepare for the impacts of global warming.”

One of the leading components of this initiative is growing the cities’ renewable energy sectors. Houston already generates half its electricity from renewables and is working on increasing that amount.

“Houstonians are increasingly embracing renewable energy, as evidenced by a significant growth in solar installations in the last year,” said Houston Mayor Annise Parker. “The city is also looking at solar options to provide additional renewable power to our municipal buildings. We want to continue to be the largest municipal purchaser of renewable energy in the nation.”

“The city leaders included in this report have shown that setting goals and implementing transparent and well-designed programs are key to bringing solar energy to their communities,” says the report. “Every city has the potential to adopt smart policies and make this same progress toward a clean energy future. Cities can lead America’s transformation from a country largely dependent on polluting fossil fuels to one that sources much of its energy from the sun.”

“With prices going down and concern about global warming going up, solar power is growing rapidly across the country,” said Sargent.  “We need federal, state, and even more city leaders to embrace the policies that allow solar to shine.”

Anastasia Pantsios|March 26, 2015

[Jacksonville, the only Florida city listed, came in at the 19th position. Not bad for the Sunshine State.]

The coal industry is so totally screwed

The American coal industry is terminally ill — and that should serve as a warning to investors who might be tempted to put their money into other fossil fuels.

That’s the gist of a new report from the Carbon Tracker Initiative, which warns that oil and natural gas could also wind up becoming stranded assets — property that under other scenarios could be worth a lot of money, but not in the real situation we face as the climate warms and the market shifts in response.

Coal use has been decoupled from America’s economic growth for a number of reasons, the report finds. The biggest is the availability of other cheap sources of energy — since 2008, the abundance of shale gas from America’s fracking boom has played a big role in driving that trend, but so have renewable energies like solar and wind. Increasingly strict regulations on air pollution and the energy sector from the Obama administration’s EPA have also played a role.

“Cheap gas has knocked coal off its feet, and the need to improve air quality and ever-lower renewables costs has kept coal down for the count,” said Luke Sussams, co-author of the report and a Carbon Tracker senior researcher. He and his colleagues posit that investors in oil, and eventually even natural gas, could see a similar trend. The Carbon Tracker Initiative was one of the first groups to promote the idea of a “carbon bubble,” in which, as the world confronts global warming, fossil fuel investors would see the value of their assets collapse. Companies stand to lose billions, the think tank said.

This week’s Carbon Tracker report comes on the heels of a separate report from CoalSwarm and the Sierra Club that looks at international coal use. That picture, too, does not look good for fossil fuel investors. From “Boom and Bust: Tracking the Global Coal Plant Pipeline”:

In India, projects shelved or cancelled since 2012 outnumber project completions by six to one, and new construction initiations are at a near-standstill. In both Europe and the U.S., the coal fleet is shrinking, with retirements outnumbering new plants. China faces a looming glut in coal-fired generating capacity, with plant utilization rates at a 35-year low.

The report also finds that more than two dozen U.S. coal companies have gone bankrupt in the past three years, and those that haven’t lost more than 80 percent of their share value.

The coal industry, of course, disputes these gloomy assessments. Peabody Energy, the largest coal company in the U.S., recently predicted that U.S. coal usage would increase 10 million to 30 million tons by 2017, and global demand could grow by 500 million metric tons during the same period.

The company and its coal-loving friends are also making every effort to challenge forthcoming EPA regulations that could hasten coal’s collapse. The company is paying well-respected constitutional scholar and former Obama mentor Laurence Tribe to argue that the administration’s Clean Power Plan is unconstitutional. And coal’s allies in Congress are trying to undermine the EPA plan with, among other things, an amendment to a big budget bill that would allow states to opt out. If the amendment passes, it will likely face a presidential veto, spurring yet another budget standoff.

But, as the Carbon Tracker report shows, the EPA’s efforts are just one factor among many that have weakened coal’s prospects. Ultimately, the industry is up against a global energy economy in which coal, with its huge environmental and health costs, increasingly just doesn’t make sense. And no amount of lobbying Congress or arguing in court will slow that trend.

John Light|25 Mar 2015

Miami on EPA’s Energy Star Top Cities List of Most Energy Star buildings of any city in the U.S.

ATLANTA – Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released its seventh-annual list of the top 25 U.S. metropolitan areas with the most Energy Star certified buildings in 2014 and the city of Miami ranks eighteenth. EPA’s Energy Star Top Cities list shows how cities across America, with help from Energy Star, are embracing energy efficiency as an effective way to save money and reduce greenhouse gas emissions that fuel climate change.

Energy Star labeled buildings in Miami achieved significant reductions in their energy bills and greenhouse gas emissions. These buildings represent more than 19 million square feet and will save more than $19 million annually in energy costs while preventing greenhouse gas emissions equal to the emissions of 15,600 homes a year. Energy Star buildings and plants are America’s energy all-stars – they save more, use less and help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“Cities across the country are saving billions every year through partnering with our Energy Star program and increasing energy efficiency, while doing their part to reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions that fuel climate change,” said EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy. “This is the type of leadership we need from city leaders and building owners who are demonstrating that increasing energy efficiency strengthens local economies, reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and helps preserve a healthy planet for future generations.”

More than 25,000 buildings across America have earned EPA’s Energy Star certification since 1999. The buildings have saved nearly $3.4 billion on utility bills and prevented greenhouse gas emissions equal to the emissions from the annual electricity use of nearly 2.4 million homes.

Energy use in commercial buildings accounts for 17 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions at a cost of more than $100 billion per year. Energy Star certified buildings are verified to perform better than 75 percent of similar buildings nationwide, and they use an average of 35 percent less energy and are responsible for 35 percent fewer emissions than typical buildings. Many common building types can earn the Energy Star, including office buildings, K-12 schools, hotels, and retail stores.

The program starts with tools to help building owners or managers understand how their buildings are currently performing and what to aim for in terms of improvements. A typical upgrade includes the following: tuning up the building systems; reducing lighting loads; reducing supplemental loads (e.g., equipment, wasteful behaviors, leaky windows, poor insulation, etc.); improving air distribution systems; and making upgrades to heating and cooling equipment. The stages, when followed in order, account for the interactions between different building systems. For example, replacing heat-producing incandescent bulbs with cool CFLs or LEDs will mean that a building’s air conditioner won’t have to work as hard in the summer months, so a building may be able to downsize its cooling system based on the new lighting’s heat output. Another benefit of the five-stage approach is that it ensures the lowest-cost measures are tackled first. As organizations progress through the five stages, they can roll their cost savings into larger and larger investments, culminating in the last, most expensive stage. By the time organizations start making upgrades to heating and cooling equipment, they typically have already amassed substantial cost savings from previous lower-cost improvements.

To create the annual top cities list, EPA tallies the number of Energy Star certified buildings for the end of the previous year within each metropolitan area, as defined by the U.S. Census. These areas include the city itself as well as surrounding towns and suburbs.

Energy Star is the simple choice for energy efficiency. For more than 20 years, people across America have looked to EPA’s Energy Star program for guidance on how to save energy, save money, and protect the environment. Behind each blue label is a product, building, or home that is independently certified to use less energy and cause fewer of the emissions that contribute to climate change. Today, Energy Star is the most widely recognized symbol for energy efficiency in the world, helping families and businesses save $300 billion on utility bills, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions by two billion metric tons since 1992. Join the millions who are already making a difference at www.energystar.gov.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 25, 2015  Contact Information: Dawn Harris Young, EPA, (404) 562-8421 (Direct), (404) 562-8400 (Main), harris-young.dawn@epa.gov

Utilities wage campaign against rooftop solar

Three years ago, the nation’s top utility executives gathered at a Colorado resort to hear warnings about a grave new threat to operators of America’s electric grid: not superstorms or cyber attacks, but rooftop solar panels.

If demand for residential solar continued to soar, traditional utilities could soon face serious problems, from “declining retail sales” and a “loss of customers” to “potential obsolescence,” according to a presentation prepared for the group. “Industry must prepare an action plan to address the challenges,” it said.

The warning, delivered to a private meeting of the utility industry’s main trade association, became a call to arms for electricity providers in nearly every corner of the nation. Three years later, the industry and its fossil-fuel supporters are waging a determined campaign to stop a home-solar insurgency that is rattling the boardrooms of the country’s government-regulated electric monopolies.

The campaign’s first phase—an industry push for state laws raising prices for solar customers—failed spectacularly in legislatures around the country, due in part to surprisingly strong support for solar energy from conservatives and evangelicals in traditionally “red states.” But more recently, the battle has shifted to public utility commissions, where industry backers have mounted a more successful push for fee hikes that could put solar panels out of reach for many potential customers.

In a closely watched case last month, an Arizona utility voted to impose a monthly surcharge of about $50 for “net metering,” a common practice that allows solar customers to earn credit for the surplus electricity they provide to the electric grid. Net metering makes home solar affordable by sharply lowering electric bills to offset the $10,000 to $30,000 cost of rooftop panels.

A Wisconsin utilities commission approved a similar surcharge for solar users last year, and a New Mexico regulator also is considering raising fees. In some states, industry officials have enlisted the help of minority groups in arguing that solar panels hurt the poor by driving up electricity rates for everyone else.

Utility companies take on solar power

“The utilities are fighting tooth and nail,” said Scott Peterson, director of the Checks and Balances Project, a Virginia nonprofit that investigates lobbyists’ ties to regulatory agencies. Peterson, who has tracked the industry’s two-year legislative fight, said the pivot to public utility commissions moves the battle to friendlier terrain for utilities. The commissions, usually made up of political appointees, “have enormous power, and no one really watches them,” Peterson said.

Industry officials say they support their customers’ right to generate electricity on their own property, but they say rooftop solar’s new popularity is creating a serious cost imbalance. While homeowners with solar panels usually see dramatic reductions in their electric bills, they still rely on the grid for electricity at night and on cloudy days. The utility collects less revenue, even though the infrastructure costs — from expensive power plants to transmission lines and maintenance crews — remain the same.

Ultimately, someone pays those costs, said David K. Owens, an executive vice president for Edison Electric Institute, the trade association that represents the nation’s investor-owned utilities.

“It’s not about profits; it’s about protecting customers,” said Owens, said. “There are unreasonable cost shifts that do occur [with solar]. There is a grid that everyone relies on, and you have to pay for that grid and pay for that infrastructure.”

Whether home-solar systems add significant costs to electric grids is the subject of intense debate. A Louisiana study last month concluded that solar roofs had resulted in cost shifts of more than $2 million that must be borne by Louisiana customers who lack solar panels. That study was immediately disputed by clean energy groups that pointed to extensive ties between the report’s authors and the fossil-fuel lobby.

Other studies commissioned by state regulators in Nevada and Mississippi found that any costs are generally outweighed by benefits. For one thing, researchers found, the excess energy generated by solar panels helps reduce the strain on electric grids on summer days when demand soars and utilities are forced to buy additional power at high rates. Other experts note that the shift to solar energy is helping states meet new federal requirements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while also producing thousands of new jobs. The residential solar industry currently employs about 174,000 people nationwide, or twice as many as the number of coal miners.

“Independent studies show that distributed solar benefits all ratepayers by preventing the need to build new, expensive power plants or transmission lines,” said Matthew Kasper, a fellow at the Energy & Policy Institute, a pro-solar think tank. “Utilities make their money by building big, new infrastructure projects and then sending ratepayers the bill, which is exactly why utilities want to eliminate solar.”

Solar-panel costs plunge

Residential solar panels have been widely available since the 1970s, but advances in the past decade have transformed home solar energy in many areas from an expensive novelty to a cost-competitive alternative to traditional power.

The average price of photovoltaic cells has plummeted 60 percent since 2010, thanks to lower production costs and more-efficient designs. Solar’s share of global energy production is climbing steadily, and a study last week by researchers from Cambridge University concluded that photovoltaics will soon be able to out-compete fossil fuels, even if oil prices drop to as low as $10 a barrel.

In the United States, utilities have embraced solar projects of their own making, building large solar farms that produce nearly 60 percent of the electricity that comes from the sun’s rays.

“We are pro-solar,” said Edison’s Owens. “We are putting in more solar than any other industry.”

But the arrival of cheaper solar technology has also brought an unexpected challenge to the industry’s bottom line: As millions of residential and business customers opt for solar, revenue for utilities is beginning to decline. Industry-sponsored studies have warned the trend could eventually lead to a radical restructure of energy markets, similar to earlier upheavals with phone-company monopolies.

“One can imagine a day when battery-storage technology or micro turbines could allow customers to be electric grid independent,” said a 2013 Edison study. “To put this into perspective, who would have believed 10 years ago that traditional wire line telephone customers could economically ‘cut the cord’?”

Support from conservatives

The utility industry’s playbook for slowing the growth of residential solar is laid out in a few frames of the computer slide show presented at an Edison-sponsored retreat in September 2012, in a lakeside resort hotel in Colorado Springs, Colo. Despite a bland title—“Facing the Challenges of a Distribution System in Transition”—the Edison document portrays solar systems as a serious, long-term threat to the survival of traditional electricity providers.

Throughout the country, it noted, lawmakers and regulatory agencies were “promoting policies that are accelerating this transition — subsidies are growing.” The document, provided to The Washington Post by the Energy & Policy Institute, called for a campaign of “focused outreach” targeting key groups that could influence the debate: state legislatures, regulatory agencies and sympathetic consumer-advocacy groups.

Two-and-a-half years later, evidence of the “action plan” envisioned by Edison officials can be seen in states across the country. Legislation to make net metering illegal or more costly has been introduced in nearly two dozen state houses since 2013. Some of the proposals were virtual copies of model legislation drafted two years ago by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a nonprofit organization with financial ties to billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch.

Most of the bills that have been considered so far have been either rejected or vetoed, with the most-striking defeats coming in Republican strongholds, such as Indiana and Utah. There, anti-solar legislation came under a surprisingly fierce attack from free-market conservatives and even evangelical groups, many of which have installed solar panels on their churches.

“Conservatives support solar — they support it even more than progressives do,” said Bryan Miller, co-chairman of the Alliance for Solar Choice and a vice president of public policy for Sunrun, a California solar provider. “It’s about competition in its most basic form. The idea that you should be forced to buy power from a state-sponsored monopoly and not have an option is about the least conservative thing you can imagine.”

Where legislatures failed to deliver, power companies have sought help from regulatory agencies, chiefly the public utility commissions that set rates and fees that can be charged by electricity providers. Here, the results have been more encouraging for power companies.

Last month’s decision to slap monthly surcharges on solar customers in south-central Arizona was hailed as a breakthrough for the utilities in a state that has turned back several similar attempts in the past two years. The Tempe, Ariz., Salt River Project, one of Arizona’s largest utilities, approved the new fee despite furious opposition from solar users, including about 500 people who packed the commission’s hearing room for the Feb. 26 vote.

Solar companies already have filed suit to stop a similar fee increase approved last year by Wisconsin commissioners, and others are watching closely to see if New Mexico’s Public Service Co. will adopt a proposal to impose a monthly surcharge of up to $35 on solar customers there.

Regulators in each of the three states have cited fairness as the reason for the proposed increases. But solar advocates say the real injustice is the ability of electric monopolies to destroy a competitor that offers potential benefits both to consumers and to society.

“It’s really about utilities’ fear that solar customers are taking away demand,” said Angela Navarro, an energy expert with the Southern Environmental Law Center. “These customers are installing solar at their own cost and providing a valuable resource: additional electricity for the grid at the times when the utilities need it most. And it’s all carbon-free.”

Joby Warrick|March 7, 2015

James Inhofe Makes Questionable Claims On Fracking, Water

Sen. James Inhofe says there has never been “an instance of ground water contamination” caused by hydraulic fracturing — fracking — for oil and natural gas. Inhofe’s office told us he is referring only to “the physical act of cracking rocks through hydraulic fracturing.” But drilling operations that involve fracking include other actions that have caused contamination.

A peer-reviewed study published in 2014 found that drinking water wells near fracking sites in Pennsylvania and Texas were contaminated with methane that had the chemical signature of gas normally found only deep underground.

Rob Jackson, a Stanford University professor of earth system science who coauthored the 2014 study, told us that drilling that uses hydraulic fracturing has “contaminated ground waters through chemical and wastewater spills, poor well integrity, and other pathways.”

The Fracking Boom

Fracking involves injection of a large volume of water, sand and a cocktail of chemicals (known as fracking fluid) deep underground to fracture the rock and allow gas to seep out. It is also used for oil extraction. (See EPA diagram at bottom.)

In common usage, the term “fracking” is sometimes used to describe the entire process of drilling for natural gas, but that isn’t accurate. After a well is drilled, cemented and prepared in other ways, only then is the well “fracked” — the actual stimulation of rock far beneath the earth’s surface to allow extraction of the gas.

Although hydraulic fracturing has been in use since the late 1940s, better technology and changing economics have led to a recent boom in natural gas extraction, in particular from shale formations. U.S. production of shale gas rose by almost 500 percent between 2007 and 2013, according to the Energy Information Administration.

With this boom, however, have come questions regarding water contamination related to drilling activity. This could occur through a number of mechanisms, including spills of gas or fracking fluid at the surface that could leach into groundwater, faulty cement casings inside wells allowing seepage of gas into the water table, and failed pieces of the well, such as steel and cement.

Partially in response to those concerns, the Department of the Interior finalized a regulation on March 20 regarding hydraulic fracturing and related activities on public and tribal land. The regulation includes a number of provisions related to fracking and other aspects of natural gas drilling activity.

For example, the rule includes “[p]rovisions for ensuring the protection of groundwater supplies by requiring a validation of well integrity and strong cement barriers between the wellbore and water zones through which the wellbore passes.” It has specific requirements for constructing cement casings for wells, and monitoring pressure on certain well parts during fracking operations. And it also requires disclosure of the chemical contents of fracking fluids.

Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, opposes the regulation. He, along with 26 cosponsors, introduced a bill that would specifically put the responsibility for regulating relevant oil and gas operations in the hands of the states rather than the federal government.

In a statement, Inhofe claimed fracking operations have never resulted in any contamination issues:

Inhofe, March 20: Since 1949, my state of Oklahoma has led the way on hydraulic fracturing regulations, and just like the rest of the nation, we have yet to see an instance of ground water contamination.

A spokeswoman for Inhofe, Donelle Harder, told us in an email that “the physical act of cracking rocks through hydraulic fracturing, thousands of feet below ground, has never caused groundwater contamination. What we are not saying is that a surface spill, faulty casing, bad drilling practices cannot be a problem. There is a difference between the hydraulic fracturing process and rest of the well drilling process.”

But scientists we interviewed say that it doesn’t make sense to separate fracking from the entire gas and oil production process, and there is ample evidence that the overall process can cause contamination of water supplies. As we noted above, the new DOI rules cover the entire process including fracking, well casings and other activities.

Well Failures and Water Contamination

Anthony Ingraffea, a Cornell civil and environmental engineering professor, told us in a phone interview that discussing contamination related to the frack per se isn’t useful. “The simpler question to ask is, ‘Is there any instance in which oil and gas development, writ large, has contaminated peoples’ drinking water?’ And the answer is, thousands. Thousands of cases.”

For example, Pennsylvania — which has been at the center of the recent rapid growth in natural gas extraction – maintains a list of hundreds of cases where a “private water supply was impacted by oil and gas activities.” The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection list covers both conventional and unconventional drilling — unconventional gas development refers to drilling for gas in shale and other difficult-to-access geologic formations. But it does not address specifically how the contamination occurred.

Among the first studies specifically linking natural gas development and fracking to water quality was a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014 that analyzed drinking well water near fracking operations in Texas and Pennsylvania.

In that study, which was coauthored by Jackson at Stanford, researchers identified the presence of methane — the primary component of natural gas — in drinking well water near unconventional drilling sites in the Marcellus Shale region in Pennsylvania and the Barnett Shale region in Texas. Using chemical signatures of certain gases, the researchers were able to determine in several cases that the methane was from deep underground — evidence that the drilling operations had caused the contamination.

The study found that faulty and leaky wells were likely to blame, and recommended studying “whether the large volumes of water and high pressures required for horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing influence well integrity.”

Ingraffea, of Cornell, said sending the water, sand and chemicals down the well puts an enormous amount of pressure on the casing, which could cause it to crack or separate from the steel surrounding it. Many wells are often fracked up to dozens of times, he added, and the repeated increase in pressure could cause failures as well. According to one 2014 paper published in Marine and Petroleum Geology, an estimated 6.3 percent of all Pennsylvania wells drilled between 2005 and 2013 suffered either a “well integrity failure” — meaning failures of barriers including casing, tubing and cement, and actual leakage of gas or fluids into surrounding soil and water — or a “well barrier failure” — meaning failure of one or more barriers with no information indicating actual leakage. The DOI points out that about 90 percent of all new wells are fracked.

Methane has been the primary culprit in proven cases of contamination, but other substances including heavy metals and chemicals related to fracking fluid have been found as well.

A paper published in Environmental Science and Technology in 2013 found higher levels of heavy metals such as selenium and arsenic in wells close to drilling activity in the Barnett Shale region compared with water that was farther from drilling. The researchers concluded that these contaminants could have arrived via a variety of mechanisms, including natural processes or failure of gas well components. Another study found fish kills and damage to other aquatic life following a surface spill of fracking fluid. The fracking process itself was not responsible, but in order to spill fracking fluid at the surface one must intend to frack a well.

Clearly, the DOI’s new regulation is designed to ensure water quality and safety as it relates to the entire process of extracting oil and natural gas, not just to the singular action of fracking. Inhofe is entitled to the opinion that such regulations should be left in the hands of the states, but he is wrong to say or imply that existing regulatory efforts have a perfect track record when it comes to preventing contamination of water supplies.

Dave Levitan|FactCheck.org|03/27/2015

The following post first appeared on FactCheck.org.

Senators Introduce Legislation After Series Of Oil Train Accidents

 A group of Democratic senators wants to improve the safety of transporting oil by rail in the United States, following a series of high-profile derailments that led to fires and explosions.

Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.), and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) on Wednesday introduced the Crude-By-Rail Safety Act, which would direct the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration to bar the use of older, riskier types of tankers and ask it to set standards for the volatility of gases in tank cars — meaning they won’t explode as easily. The legislation would also set standards for new tankers, requiring thicker shells, thermal protection and pressure relief valves.

In one recent major incident, a train carrying 3 million gallons of crude oil derailed last month in West Virginia, causing a massive fire and requiring an evacuation. Another train derailed and caught fire in Illinois in early March.

Concern about the safety of tankers is on the rise. A recent federal government report predicted an average of 10 oil train derailments a year and $4.5 billion in damage over the next two decades. The DOT has also proposed stricter rules for transporting oil by rail, but has delayed issuing final rules.

“Every new derailment increases the urgency with which we need to act,” Cantwell said in a statement. “We can’t afford to wait for ten accidents per year, as estimated by the Department of Transportation.”

The legislation would also authorize more funding to train first responders, buy equipment to deal with derailments and conduct rail inspections. It also calls for companies to have spill-response plans that are specific to trains carrying oil products.

The environmental group the Center for Biological Diversity praised the measure, but said it could go further. “It’s painfully clear something needs to be done to protect people and the environment from the mounting dangers of these oil trains, and this bill is an important step in the right direction,” said Jared Margolis, an attorney with the group. “Our view is that oil trains should be stopped because of the inherent dangers to the public and wildlife, and their role in climate disruption. Although this bill doesn’t go that far, it provides important protections that would help limit the risks to people and the environment from oil train derailments.”

The oil and railroad industry groups also announced on Wednesday new training for first responders dealing with oil-by-rail accidents. The American Petroleum Institute and the American Association of Railroads said there are plans for training in 15 states.

Kate Sheppard|huffingtonpost.com|03/26/2015

36 Years of Three Mile Island’s Lethal Lies … and Still Counting

The lies that killed people at Three Mile Island 36 years ago on March 28, 1979 are still being told at Chernobyl, Fukushima, Diablo Canyon, Davis-Besse … and at TMI itself.

As the first major reactor accident that was made known to the public is sadly commemorated, and as the global nuclear industry collapses, let’s count just 36 tip-of-the iceberg ways the nuclear industry’s radioactive legacy continues to fester:

1. When about half of TMI’s fuel melted on March 28, 1979, the owners, industry and regulators all denied it, and continued to deny it until robotic cameras showed otherwise.

2. Early signs that such an accident could happen had already surfaced at the Davis-Besse reactor in Ohio, which was also manufactured by Babcock & Wilcox. TMI’s owners later sued Davis-Besse’s owners for not warning them about what had happened.

3. When TMI’s radiation poured into the atmosphere the industry had (and still has) no idea how much escaped, but denied it was of any significance even though stack monitors failed and dosimeters in the field indicated high releases (plant owners claimed they were “defective”). Only due to the work of the great Dr. Ernest Sternglass, recently departed, was public attention turned to the potential harm this radiation could do.

4. When animals nearby suffered mass mutations and death, the industry denied it. When the plague was confirmed by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture and the Baltimore News-American, the industry denied the damage could be related to radiation.

5. Industry “experts” assured the public radiation doses to downwinders were similar to a single x-ray, but ignored well-established findings from Dr. Alice Stewart and others that a single x-ray to a pregnant woman could double the chances of childhood leukemia among her offspring.

6. Industry “experts” ignored the reality that radioactive fallout can come down in clumps rather than spread evenly, and scoffed at findings from neighborhood surveys done by Jane Lee, Mary Osbourne and others showing major outbreaks of cancer in certain downwind neighborhoods.

7. When humans nearby were born with Down’s Syndrome and other mutations, and then adults began dying, the industry denied it, then denied any connection to TMI, but then did pay at least $15 million in out-of-court settlements to affected families on condition they not speak about it in public.

8. When Chernobyl exploded in 1986, Soviet officials said nothing as massive clouds of radiation poured across Europe and into the jet stream that would carry it to the U.S. within 10 days.

9. The U.S. government did nothing of sufficient scale to monitor Chernobyl’s radiation as it came here, and did nothing to warn the public to avoid milk and other foods that might concentrate that radiation, and has repeated that behavior in the wake of Fukushima.

10. A massive bird die-off at the Pt. Reyes National Seashore came with the arrival of the Chernobyl cloud and was documented by resident ornithologist Dr. Dave DeSante, whose findings were ignored by the government; soon thereafter, DeSante lost his job.

11. Chernobyl’s radiation was tracked all across Europe where it continues to irradiate plants, animals and humans. The most credible study of Chernobyl’s human death toll put it at 985,000 in 2010.

12. Chernobyl still seethes with radiation, but the massive, hugely expensive movable sarcophagus meant to cover it is not yet in place.

13. When fire runs through the wooded areas around Chernobyl, massive quantities of radiation are re-released into the atmosphere.

14. Fifteen Soviet-era reactors remain operable in Ukraine, much of which is now a de facto war zone, raising serious doubts about what will happen to them and the rest of the downwind human race.

15. The Japanese government was repeatedly and passionately warned by thousands of citizens for more than 40 years that putting reactors in a tsunami zone surrounded by earthquake faults was not a good idea. They were dismissed as “alarmists” and repeatedly assured that the reactors at Fukushima and elsewhere around Japan could come to no harm.

16. Despite repeated public protests, when Fukushima Dai’ichi was built an 85-foot-high bluff was taken down so units 1 through 4 could operate more cheaply at sea level; as widely predicted, they were massively flooded on March 11, 2011.

17. Critical backup batteries meant to keep the reactor cores cool in case of melt-downs were placed in basements which were thoroughly flooded when the tsunami hit Fukushima. Workers later frantically took batteries from nearby parked cars to try to power up the stricken cooling systems and other critical components.

18. The exact whereabouts of the melted cores from Fukushima Units 1, 2 and 3 remain unknown.

19. After a half-century of industry assurances that American reactors could not explode, four General Electric reactors blew up at Fukushima.

20. By estimate of Hiroaki Koide, assistant professor at Kyoto University Research Reactor Institute, some 30 times as much Cesium 137 has been released at Fukushima as was released during the bombing of Hiroshima.

21. Some 300 tons of radioactive water continues to pour into the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima every day.

22. Thousands of highly radioactive spent fuel rods remain scattered around the Fukushima site; thousands are also still suspended in damaged spent fuel pools 100 feet in the air atop weakened buildings above shattered, melted reactors.

23. A petition signed by more than 150,000 people demanding that Fukushima be taken over by the world community was submitted to the United Nations on November 7, 2013, but has yet to receive a response of any kind.

24. Fukushima is still owned and operated by Tokyo Electric Power, which built it despite massive public opposition and continues to mismanage it while turning the “clean up” into a profit center, with a labor force thoroughly infiltrated by organized crime.

25. Like Fukushima, California’s Diablo Canyon reactors were built despite huge public protests, and sit in a tsunami zone surrounded by earthquake faults whose potential seismic power exceeds Diablo’s structural capacities, according numerous experts, including NRC official Dr. Michael Peck, who worked at Diablo for the commission.

26. A continual stream of revelations indicate illegal collusion on safety and other issues at Diablo between its owners, Pacific Gas & Electric, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as well as the California Public Utilities Commission.

27. Diablo’s owners almost certainly violated regulatory requirements and the law in using components within the reactors that were not tested to meet seismic standards.

28. Earthquakes have already damaged at least two U.S. reactors, at Ohio’s Perry site and at North Anna, Virginia (that quake also damaged the Washington Monument in our nation’s capital).

29. Public money designated for use by PG&E to upgrade piping systems was diverted to executive bonuses, according to the Los Angeles Times. In 2010 unrepaired gas lines, which were known to have been deteriorating for a decade, blew up in San Bruno, killing eight people and doing millions of dollars in damage. Such a disaster at Diablo Canyon could kill countless thousands and do untold damage to the national economy and global ecology.

30. Diablo Canyon’s once-through cooling system violates state and federal water quality regulations by dumping huge quantities of hot, radioactive liquid into the Pacific, killing billions of marine creatures while unbalancing the ocean ecology and contributing to climate chaos.

31. Like most other old U.S. reactors, Ohio’s Davis-Besse is literally crumbling, with the concrete in its safety shield being pulverized by continual freezing, yielding ever-growing holes in the structure.

32. Like most other old U.S. reactors, Diablo Canyon, Davis-Besse, five reactors in Illinois and many more cannot compete in electricity markets against wind power, solar panels, other renewable sources or increased efficiency, and would shut down were it not for massive public subsidies.

33. Ohio’s Public Utilities Commission is being asked by FirstEnergy, Davis-Besse’s owner, for subsidies amounting to more than $3 billion to keep open that decrepit reactor, which opened in 1978, and the Sammis coal burner, which is even older.

34. Wisconsin’s Kewaunee reactor has shut for purely economic reasons despite being fully amortized and having no apparent outstanding maintenance or engineering crises.

35. California’s San Onofre reactors were shut in part due to violations of licensing requirements that are mirrored at both Diablo Canyon and Davis-Besse, where shut-downs could be required by law. Let’s hope …

36. As we commemorate this tragic anniversary, we must note that this list of reactor nightmares could go very very far past 36. But let’s hope it doesn’t take that many more years to realize the folly of this failed technology.

In honor of the many many victims of Three Mile Island, and of the great Dr. Sternglass and so many dedicated experts and activists, we must turn this sad litany into the action needed to shut down ALL the world’s reactors so we don’t have to experience this nightmare yet again.

The lives we save will be our own … and those of our children … and theirs

Harvey Wasserman|March 27, 2015

Land Conservation

Arthenia Joyner filing budget amendment to boost land-buying

Sen. Arthenia Joyner of Tampa, the Senate Democratic leader, is filing a budget amendment to redirect $80 million toward the Florida Forever land-buying program and away from other purposes she said are not consistent with Amendment 1.

Approved by 75 percent of voters in November, Amendment 1 is supposed to direct $742 million toward water and land conservation programs in the 2015-16 state budget.

The Senate budget bill filed Friday provides $2 million for Florida Forever along with $20 million for land-buying for Kissimmee River restoration.

“When 75 percent of Floridians resoundingly vote for environmental protection, the Legislature is obliged to listen,” Joyner said. “But it’s apparent from the bill before us today that the Legislature is doing everything but listen.”

The current state budget provided $12.5 million for the Florida Forever program plus $40 million from the possible sale of non-conservation land. Another $5 million was provided through the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services for conservation easements through the Rural and Family Lands Protection.

A Senate Democratic office press release said the Amendment 1 money would be “clawed back” from such areas as bridge and road repair ($4 million), restroom and parking lot upgrades ($15 million) and highway construction ($25 million). Those were never intended to be paid for under Amendment 1, Senate Democrats said.

“My amendment is the reminder, on behalf of the 4.2 million voters who voted ‘Yes,’ that this proposed spending plan is not what they intended,” Joyner said.

In response, a spokeswoman for Senate President Andy Gardiner, a Republican from Orlando, pointed out that the $25 million is for the SUN Trail bicycling network through the Florida Department of Transportation provided for in SB 918.

This past week, Sen. Alan Hays, chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on General Government, suggested that the state already owns enough land with 9.4 million acres under federal, state and local conservation ownership. Hays is a Republican from Umatilla.

In response, Florida’s Water & Land Legacy, the Amendment 1-sponsoring committee, on Monday tweeted in response that the 4.2 million voters who supported Amendment 1 disagreed with Hays. It provided phone numbers for people to call Hays and other key legislators.

In response to the Senate Democrats on Monday, Katie Betta, spokeswoman for Gardiner, said, “Chair Hays’ recommendation was a bipartisan work product of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on General Government.”

The Senate Committee on Appropriations will consider the proposed Senate budget, SB 2500, on Wednesday at 1 p.m.

Bruce Ritchie|March 23, 2015

La Rosa: Give Builders A Faster Track

The same Republican leaders who are pushing to rewrite state water policy apparently aren’t satisfied. Now House leaders are taking their scissors to the massive rule book that governs all the new growth in Florida.

“Alachua County has a unique comprehensive plan. Everything you’re doing here completely destroys that plan, basically.”

That’s James Dick, an activist who drove from the Gainesville area to give an earful to the bill sponsor, Representative Mike La Rosa, a St. Cloud Republican.

The bill allows developers with massive projects to sidestep regional planning councils and get on a fast-track state approval process. It forces local governments to include a property rights protection element in their comp plans.

Eric Poole, executive director of the Florida Association of Counties, says the Legislature is breaking a promise not to interfere with local governments, one it made four years ago, the last time it rewrote growth management laws.

“I would encourage you to honor the words of that sponsor from 2011 and let locals be local.”

The bill has some heavy hitters behind it, including the Florida Chamber of Commerce. And some unlikely supporters, including the association that represents the regional planning councils. If the bill passed the council boundaries would be rewritten and their number would shrink from 11 statewide to 10.

Critics were most incensed with a provision called “constrained agricultural parcels.”  It defines those as parcels up to 6,400 acres that were once used for agriculture. Developers of those properties would have the right to match densities from projects as much as three miles away. Palm Beach County lobbyist Todd Bonlarron says it would essentially be a fast-track approval for an entire city.

“There are some very grave consequences for our taxpayers.”

To Charles Pattison, policy director for 1,000 Friends of Florida, that part of the bill looked like a special favor for Sunrise based GL Homes. The company has thousands of rural acres in Palm Beach County it wants to develop.

“We question the need for the constrained ag parcels bill. We think that’s something for a particular interest in one county that has statewide implications. The staff report did not indicate how many other counties would be effected by this.”

La Rosa denied the bill was intended to give any one company an advantage.

The 68-page bill, cobbled together from nine previously filed bills, has several more stops before reaching the floor.

Jim Ash 3/25/15

Governor and Cabinet Approve Cross Florida Greenway Acquisition

TALLAHASSEE – Today, Governor Rick Scott and the Florida Cabinet agreed to purchase the Cross Florida Greenway to expand recreational opportunities for Florida families across the state. With hiking, biking, equestrian and paddling trails, boat ramps, fishing spots, campgrounds, playground and picnic shelters, the Greenway offers Floridians of all interests and ages a great place to enjoy Florida’s natural treasures. In fiscal year 2013-14, 927,008 people visited the Greenway, generating an estimated $74,341,241 in direct economic impact.

“This acquisition provides a critical connector for the Cross Florida Greenway, furthering recreational opportunities through additional trailhead access and camping areas,” said DEP Secretary Jon Steverson.

The Cross Florida Greenway is a key component of the Florida Greenways and Trails System Plan Priority Trails Network, and is home to approximately 36 miles of the Florida National Scenic Trail. The greenway stretches 110 miles across central Florida from the Gulf of Mexico on the west coast to the St. Johns River near the east coast. The corridor encompasses diverse natural habitats and traverses four counties (Citrus, Levy, Marion and Putnam).

Governor Scott and the Cabinet members agreed to purchase approximately 193.90 acres in Marion County for $594,000 using Florida Forever Greenway and Trails program funds. The property will be managed as an addition to the Marjorie Harris Carr Cross Florida Greenway.

Of the 171 units of the Florida State Parks System, the greenway is ranked the third-highest unit in attendance and direct economic impact; only Honeymoon Island and the Florida Keys Overseas Heritage Trail rank higher.

This land is formerly known as the Cross Florida Barge Canal. A series of historic events transformed this corridor from one of the nation’s largest uncompleted public works projects to a world-class greenway.

nataliarodriguez2015|March.24.2015

Air Quality

Settlement with Continental Carbon Company to Reduce Air Pollution at Manufacturing Facility in Alabama ‏

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 23, 2015

Contact: Jennifer Colaizzi (News Media only) Colaizzi.jennifer@epa.gov (202) 564-7776

WASHINGTON – In a settlement with the United States and the states of Alabama and Oklahoma, Continental Carbon Company has agreed to install pollution control technology that will significantly cut emissions of harmful air pollutants at manufacturing facilities in Alabama, Oklahoma and Texas, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Justice announced today. The settlement will resolve claims that Houston-based Continental violated the Clean Air Act by modifying their facilities in a way that caused the release of excess sulfur dioxide (SO₂) and nitrogen oxide (NOx).

The settlement requires Continental to pay a civil penalty of $650,000, which will be shared with Alabama and Oklahoma, co-plaintiffs in the case. Continental must also spend $550,000 on environmental projects to help mitigate the harmful effects of air pollution on the environment and to benefit local communities, including at least $25,000 on energy efficiency projects in the communities near each of the three facilities.

“This settlement brings another major carbon black company into compliance with a law that protects clean air for American communities,” said Cynthia Giles, assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. “By investigating all 15 carbon black manufacturing plants in the U.S., EPA is committed to improving public health and leveling the playing field for companies that follow the law. By installing the latest pollution control technology and funding environmental projects, Continental is taking steps to reduce emissions of air pollutants that can lead to serious health problems.”

“Today’s agreement is good news for residents living near Continental facilities in Alabama, Oklahoma, and Texas, who will benefit from cleaner air for years to come because of this action,” said Assistant Attorney General John C. Cruden for the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division.  “The agreement also reflects our continuing efforts to vigorously enforce the Clean Air Act to protect public health and the environment.  The settlement requires Continental to control large sources of air pollution with advanced technology and requires projects that will have a direct and positive impact on Continental’s neighbors.” 

Continental manufactures carbon black, a fine carbonaceous powder used in tires, plastics, rubber, inkjet toner and cosmetics, at facilities in Phenix City, Ala., Ponca City, Okla., and Sunray, Texas. Because the oil used to make carbon black is high in sulfur, its production creates large amounts of nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and particulate matter. This settlement supports EPA’s and DOJ’s national efforts to advance environmental justice by working to protect communities such as Phenix City and Ponca City that have been disproportionately impacted by pollution.

EPA expects that the actions required by the settlement will reduce harmful emissions by approximately 6,278 tons per year of sulfur dioxide and 1,590 tons per year of nitrogen oxide. Continental estimates that it will spend about $98 million to implement the required measures. The pollution reductions will be achieved through the installation, upgrade and operation of state-of-the-art pollution control devices designed to reduce emissions and protect public health.

SO₂ and NOx have numerous adverse effects on human health and are significant contributors to acid rain, smog, and haze. These pollutants are converted in the air to particulate matter that can cause severe respiratory and cardiovascular impacts, and premature death.

EPA concluded that the modifications made at Continental’s plants violated the Clean Air Act based on information the company submitted in response to an information request from EPA in 2007. EPA issued notices of violation to Continental for these claims in 2012.

The settlement was filed with the United States District Court for the Western District Court of Oklahoma and is subject to a 30 day public comment period. The company is required to pay the penalty within 30 days after the court approves the settlement. 

This settlement is part of EPA’s National Enforcement Initiative to control harmful emissions from large sources of pollution. Through the initiative, EPA investigated all 15 of the carbon black plants in the U.S. for violations of the Clean Air Act’s Prevention of Significant Deterioration requirements. With this settlement, six of the 15 facilities will be covered by consent decrees with EPA. In 2013, EPA announced the first national carbon black settlement with Boston-based Cabot Corporation, the second largest carbon black manufacturer in the United States.

Jennifer Colaizzi|U.S. EPA|3/23/15

More on the settlement: http://www2.epa.gov/enforcement/continental-carbon-company-clean-air-act-settlement

How Dirty Air Might Help Save the Climate

All this dirty air makes me hopeful.

It’s often argued that climate change is too slow, too insidious, for humans to take much notice and actually act. Not so when it comes to smog. And as it becomes increasingly clear that smog is having huge economic consequences in cities across the Globe, we can expect the efforts to tackle air quality issues to give very real, substantial impetus to cutting carbon emissions too.

Just take these few examples:

Last year, Paris temporarily banned 50 percent of cars from its roads and made public transport free. Almost exactly a year later, it is doing the exact same thing again as air pollution spikes to dangerous levels once more. Not only are there significant direct health impacts of such appalling air quality, but between the damage to tourism and the economic costs of banning cars and making buses and trains free, it’s not hard to see that the status quo is untenable. (That’s why the mayor wants more long-term action.)

The Guardian also reports that the smog from Europe has carried over to the UK too (that happened last year as well). Meanwhile a recent London bus strike showed how quickly air pollution comes down when you don’t burn as much dirty fuel, as long as you can persuade your neighbors to stop burning it too.

And over in China, as a documentary about air pollution goes insanely viral, the country is slashing coal use, shuttering power stations, and the country’s Ministry of Transportation has just announced ambitious targets of getting 300,000 alternative fuel buses and taxis (many of them electric) on the road by 2020.

The exciting news is that the tools we need to cut smog and carbon emissions are already here, and they are getting increasing attention from the world’s cities. Whether it’s bike highways, electric buses, urban forestry, distributed clean energy or radical energy efficiency, as each new project rolls out, there are fewer and fewer excuses for cities not to act.

It sucks that we all have to breathe this dirty air, especially when people are dying, but the alternative could be even worse. When you can’t breathe, you have little choice but to act.

Meanwhile, in The Guardian’s reporting of Paris’ latest smog crisis, I was drawn to this brief quote from Rosa, a concierge sweeping the front of a building near Boulevard Saint Martin as the emergency measures kicked in and the streets were emptied of cars:

“I can breathe.”

Would that we were all so lucky. And just in case you don’t think there’s anything we can do about it, take a look at Pittsburgh in the 1940s before air quality laws took effect. (Now imagine if they’d had electric buses, teslas and solar panels back then too…)

Sami Grover|TreeHugger|March 23, 2015

This post originally appeared on TreeHugger

Spike In California Air Pollution Brings Reminder Of Bad Old Days

KINGS COUNTY, Calif., March 27 (Reuters) – The brown haze over California’s San Joaquin Valley breadbasket on some winter days has been an unwelcome reminder of the bad old days, when pollution hung so thickly that people were warned to stay inside.

Years of tight environmental rules improved California air quality so much that the state has not issued a smog alert in a dozen years. But prolonged drought and warmer temperatures have triggered a spike in the number of winter days thick with soot and dirt, while summer days have been marred by smog.

“It’s shocking sometimes to see the valley on a bad day,” said Mike Kleeman, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who studies air quality.

The uptick in pollution over California’s cities and farms is not enough to undo decades of environmental progress against smog, which is characterized by high levels of ozone in the atmosphere caused by an interaction of heat with pollutants.

But Karen Magliano, chief of the state’s Air Quality Planning and Sciences Division, said it has caused California to miss a key federal deadline for improving the air in the San Joaquin Valley, and could lead the state to tighten rules on emissions from cars, trucks, factories and even backyard barbecues.
“We’re tracking it very closely,” Magliano said.

Last summer, California was out of compliance with federal ozone rules for 99 days in the San Joaquin Valley, up from 89 the year before. Sooty particulates, which cause brown haze in the late fall and winter, were up throughout the state last winter.

Rain helped ameliorate the problem of particulates this past winter, but the storms, though intense, have been relatively few.

For December 2014-February 2015, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which covers Los Angeles, reported 24 days that failed to meet federal pollution rules. That was up from 19 days during the same three months in 2013-2014, and 16 in 2012-2013, state figures show.

To be sure, California air remains much cleaner today than in 1975, when authorities issued 120 Stage 1 smog alerts that warned the elderly and young children they might have trouble breathing, and urged people with heart and respiratory problems to stay inside.

The state’s last Stage 1 alert was issued in 2003, and California has not had a stage 3 alert – the worst – since 1974.

“We are continuing to make progress but we are going to continue to have bad years when the weather is unfavorable for us,” said Kleeman. “What last winter showed is that we’re still vulnerable to those events.”

SMOG DAYS

Smog has been a problem in California since at least 1943, when residents of Los Angeles sometimes could not see for more than three blocks and suffered burning eyes.

The haze was first blamed on a chemical factory. But the problem did not diminish when the plant was shuttered, and scientists later realized the bad air was caused by a combination of geography, weather and emissions from factories and a burgeoning number of cars.

California enacted its first air quality standards in 1959 and decades of restrictions on emissions meant the state led the nation in cleaning its air.

So successful was the effort that adults who remember being required to stay inside on “smog days” as children were able to raise their own offspring in Los Angeles and other cities who rarely had such experiences.

But it has always been a struggle to keep the air clear in the state’s vast valleys, where geography and warm, dry weather combine to keep dirt, haze and pollutants close to the ground.

“It’s not like all of a sudden we’re emitting a lot more junk into the atmosphere this year,” said Anthony Wexler, director of the Air Quality Research Center at UC Davis. “It’s completely weather-driven.”

He said wind can blow pollutants away and rain washes them out of the air, but stagnant conditions mean ozone, particulates and dust stay put.

David Pettit, director of the Southern California Air Program for the National Resources Defense Counsel, said if climate change brings a steady increase in warm, dry conditions, air quality will continue to decline.

“If temperatures continue to increase the ozone problem is going to get worse everywhere,” he said.

Reporting by Sharon Bernstein|editing by Jill Serjeant and Richard Chang|March27, 2015

Transportation

Goodyear’s Concept Tire Can Charge an EV on the Go

Long charging times are among the biggest challenges faced by electric vehicles and one of the biggest obstacles preventing them from becoming a true alternative to internal combustion engine vehicles.

Increasing the number of fast-charging stations is one of the solutions to this problem, but they are pretty expensive and will continue to be scarce in the foreseeable future, so the auto industry is still looking for alternative solutions.

Goodyear, one of the world’s largest tire manufacturing companies, showcased recently one rather unconventional solution that could be used to extend a car’s range even if there is no charging station in sight.

At the 2015 Geneva International Motor Show, Goodyear unveiled a concept tire that promises to solve the range anxiety issue without requiring installation of additional charging stations or development of more powerful EV batteries.

The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company introduced a heat-gathering concept tire that can generate electricity as it rolls along the road. The concept is named BHO3 and employs piezoelectric and thermoelectric materials that generate heat energy, that is created by the friction that occurs when the tire gets in contact with the road surface, and convert it into electricity.

The electricity converted by the tires is transmitted to the car’s battery and is used to keep the car running.

“This tire generates electricity through the action of materials in the tire that capture and transform the energy created by heat when it flexes as it rolls during normal driving conditions,” Goodyear said in a press release. “The materials used would optimize the tire’s electricity generation capabilities as well as its rolling resistance.”

The company did not release any details in terms of how much electricity the tires will be able to produce, but it did say that aside from heath, they will capture sunlight, which will also be transformed into electricity.

In addition to the BHO3, Goodyear unveiled another concept tire, named Triple Tube, which features an even more radical design. Unlike the BHO3, it is not aimed at directly extending EV range, but rather at improving a vehicle’s performances, which ultimately affects energy efficiency.

It has the capability to adjust automatically to three different positions, depending on the conditions of the road, thanks to an internal pump that transports air from one main air chamber to three separate tubes.

The three positions include: Eco/Safety position, which reduces rolling reduces by inflating all three tubes as much as possible; Sporty position – providing improved handling; and the Wet Traction position – which maximizes inflation in the center tube to increase aquaplaning resistance.

With these concept tires, Goodyear shows that it is determined to get actively involved in the efforts for promoting electric vehicles and speed up their adoption, by offering potential solutions to the most serious challenge they face – range anxiety.

If they ever go into production, the BHO3 and the Triple Tube might be important factors for solving the puzzle in EV adoption, which the auto industry has been having a hard time finding a solution for in the past couple of years.

DMV.com|March 17, 2015

All board Florida-Update on FEC Train Horns ‏

In response to messages received from many concerned citizens, as well as our municipal partners along the Florida East Coast Railway (FECR) rail corridor, the Broward MPO has thoroughly researched the issue of increased noise due to train horns. Pursuant to Federal law, a train must sound its horn at all at-grade crossings.  In November 2014, FECR began using new locomotive engines with new horns. There was speculation that the new horns exceeded the legal limit for sound, 96-110 decibels.  The Federal Railroad Administration has certified that the horns do meet Federal regulations. Due to the amount of complaints filed, the FRA is taking the extra step to send a team to manually test the horns. Below is a letter from FRA’s Public Affairs Specialist, Michael Cole.

For attribution to Michael Cole, an FRA spokesman.

The FRA, as part of the investigation into the complaints regarding train horn noise along Florida’s southeast coast has taken several actions. First, the FRA requested test reports on FECR’s locomotive fleet.  Those reports are being evaluated, but demonstrate the horns are compliant with federal regulations.

FRA has also scheduled further testing of FECR’s locomotive horns and trains for the first week of April.  Those tests will be conducted by FRA experts, and are being done to validate that FECR’s locomotive horns and trains are compliant.

R/

Michael Cole

Public Affairs Specialist

Office of Communications and Legislative Affairs

Federal Railroad Administration

Last year, the Broward MPO partnered with All Aboard Florida (AAF) to construct the necessary safety enhancements to merit a quiet zone spanning all of Broward County along the FEC corridor. A quiet zone is a section of rail where the train conductor will only sound the horn in an emergency situation. This April, the Broward MPO will retain a consultant to manage the process of applying for a quiet zone. We are timing our efforts so that when AAF’s construction is complete, a quiet zone can be active as soon as possible. For updates and more information please visit our webpage http://www.browardmpo.org/projects-studies/quiet-zones.  

For more information please contact Paul Calvaresi at (954) 876-0037 or CalvaresiP@browardmpo.org

Christopher Ryan, Public Information Officer/Title VI Coordinator

Trade Centre South

100 W. Cypress Creek Road, Suite 850

Fort Lauderdale, FL 33309

RyanC@browardMPO.org

(954) 876-0033 Office

(954) 876-0036 Direct

(954) 876-0062 Fax

For more information on activities and projects of the Broward MPO, please visit:

www.browardMPO.org

“move people, create jobs, strengthen communities”

See Video

Provided by Barbara Ruge|Broward Sierra Group

Recycling

House Committee Votes to Continue Practice of Dumping Septic Tank Pump Out on Open Land

The most unbelievable vote of the week came as legislators approved extending the deadline for dumping the pump out from septic tanks – 40 million gallons a year, much of it in springsheds. The septic tank companies say the waste is treated, but it is dense with nutrient pollution that gets into waterways. 

Audubon recommends that the material be hauled to wastewater treatment plants were it can be treated effectively. 

National Audubon Society/Audubon Florida 

Surprise Finding Heightens Concern Over Tiny Bits Of Plastic Polluting Our Oceans

Scientists are looking for — and finding — little bits of plastic in a lot of places lately: ice cores, deep sea sediments, coral reefs, crab gills, the digestive system of mussels, even German beer. Now, new research suggests they need not actually be searching for the man-made material to discover it.

“We never thought of looking for plastic,” said Javier Gomez Fernandez, a biologist at Singapore University of Technology and Design.

His team’s accidental finding of plastic in the skin of both farmed and wild fish, published online this month in the supplementary section of their unrelated peer-reviewed paper, adds to already growing environmental and public health concerns about the plastic particles pervading our oceans and waterways.

Over time, waves and sunlight break down large chunks of plastic, leaving the remnants of discarded packaging, bottles and bags nearly invisible to the naked eye. These so-called microplastics, particles under a millimeter across, may pose big troubles, experts warn.

“It fragments quickly. We fear that as plastic continues to break down, it becomes even more susceptible to being eaten by marine organisms or taken into the gills of fish or, apparently, even embedded into their scales,” said Kara Lavender Law, of the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Plastic has been found in creatures ranging from worms and barnacles to seabirds and marine mammals, Law noted. Synthetic chemicals can then travel up the food chain, and potentially on to our dinner plates.

Law co-authored a study published in February that estimated 5 to 13 million metric tons of plastic litter enters the world’s oceans every year. That’s equivalent to five plastic grocery bags filled with plastics for every foot of coastline.

Since plastic does not biodegrade, it simply accumulates — year after year.

Only about 1 percent of the plastic estimated to reside in the oceans has been accounted for by the five major floating garbage patches, according to another study published last year.

How all this translates into potential harm to wildlife or human health remains unclear. Law and other experts, however, suggest the outlook isn’t good. Some plastics are manufactured with chemicals known to mess with hormones. Perhaps even more concerning is that plastic can act as a sponge for other toxic pollutants such as flame retardants and pesticides. Even DDT, long banned in the U.S., still lingers in coastal waters and can hitch a ride on plastic particles.

Decades of convenient plastics and environmental pollution “may be coming back to haunt us in our seafood,” said Chelsea Rochman, a postdoctoral fellow in conservation research at the University of California, Davis.

At the forefront of the current debate over microplastics are microbeads, the minuscule balls of petrochemical-derived plastic added to hundreds of cosmetics, sunscreens, toothpastes and exfoliating body washes. When they’re rinsed down the drain, microbeads can flow through sewer systems — where they are often too tiny to be efficiently filtered by wastewater treatment plants — and into lakes, rivers and, ultimately, oceans. They arrive in the environment already fish-food size, even before the waves and sun begin breaking them down.

More than a dozen states have begun addressing the emerging concern. Microplastic pollution in the Great Lakes drove Illinois to pass the first ban on microbeads last summer. A policy brief from the Society for Conservation Biology, authored by Rochman and several other microplastic experts, is set to be sent this week to senators drafting similar federal and state legislation. Rochman said she anticipates signatures from about 50 scientists on the brief, which supports the bans and warns of potential loopholes in the Illinois bill that could allow for continued production and use of microbeads.

Meanwhile, Rochman called the fish skin finding “unexpected” and “interesting,” and noted that it “opens up new questions.”

The discovery began with a one-liter bucket of slimy fish scales and skin. “It is smelly,” said Fernandez, of working with the “fish soup” that filled the bucket. “Fortunately, I come from a region of fishermen [Cantabria, Spain], so I kind of like the smell of the sea.”

Fernandez and his colleagues from Harvard University and the University of Washington had been investigating the presence of a natural substance called chitin when they also began detecting a foreign material in the farmed Atlantic salmon, and wild haddock and carp. To their surprise, the little particles entrapped in the filmy fish skin — averaging about one-tenth the width of a pinhead (0.1 millimeters) — turned out to be various types of plastic, including polystyrene, or Styrofoam.

“There is an absolute lack of knowledge on the impact of plastic at that scale or even where it goes,” said Fernandez. “We have found that when it is small enough it acquires the ability to be entrapped in the mucosa of marine animals.”

“We don’t know the extent of this process, or if it happens in other animals. But it definitely points to the need of evaluating this issue in more detail,” he added, noting that humans have mucosa in the digestive tract.

The connection may not be farfetched, according to other experts. For one thing, fish skin is coated in mucosa. For another, human mucosa has shown an affinity for plastic: Researchers have long used small plastic balls to mimic viruses when studying the virus-trapping ability of mucosa in the human cervix and digestive tract.

Andrew Watts, an expert on ocean plastic at the University of Exeter, in England, led research published last June that found plastic in the gills of crab.

“We know crab gills are coated with a thin layer of mucous,” Watts told The Huffington Post in an email.

More research is needed to be certain of the source of the plastic found in the fish skin. While Fernandez noted that his team was extremely careful to avoid any potential contamination during their work in the lab, they can’t rule it out. Fish are also often caught with plastic nets, and transported in polystyrene boxes, noted Watts.

Watts pointed out that he always washes fish before he cooks it, although he added that this may or may not remove the plastic, depending on its location within the skin.

“There are a whole host of questions that could come out of this,” said Law. “We’re starting to ask more questions about our drinking water.”

“And we’re really just looking at the tip of the iceberg in terms of effects,” she added.

The most pressing need right now, according to Law, is to improve waste management systems so that they can properly capture the plastic. She and other experts added that consumers can also do their part by choosing reusable shopping bags and avoiding the purchase of heavily packaged products or personal care products with “polyethylene” listed on the ingredient list.

“In the long-term, we all need to think about how we’re using plastic,” Law said. “Individual actions can add up to have a positive impact.”

Lynne Peeples|huffingtonpost.com|03/23/2015

Watch 8 Great THings to do with Plastic Bottles

Miscellaneous

Cheetah Raised by Humans Who Loved Her Enough to Set Her Free

Every parent knows the bittersweet ache of watching their children grow and leave the nest, but what happens when your baby is not yet two years old and can already run as fast as a car?

No one knows exactly how a one-month-old cheetah cub made her way under the fence of the Ol Pejeta chimpanzee sanctuary in Kenya in October of 2010. It’s no small miracle that sanctuary workers spotted her before the apes could make a meal out of her, yet great concern set in after an extensive search turned up absolutely no trace of the cub’s natural mother. With nowhere else to turn, sanctuary staff loaded the little cheetah onto a jeep and they set off together on a journey into the world of mankind.

“We have added a new member to the family and we are trying to make friends,” explained Sue Roberts of the Sirikoi game lodge in the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in her very first blog post about her latest wild orphan. As foster mom to all forms of wildlife including a baby giraffe and an infant porcupine, Sue was well prepared to be patient in bonding with the cub.

The Cub’s New Home – Cheetah Paradise

On the northern slopes of Mount Kenya, set in a shady acacia grove overlooking a natural waterhole, Sirikoi is the perfect place for the human race to unwind and an even more perfect place for a young cheetah to grow up. The lodge runs on solar energy, has its own extensive organic vegetable and fruit garden and a crystal clear mountain spring.

Before she could begin to enjoy all that this new land had to offer, the little cub had to gather the courage to connect with her caretakers.

“When she arrived she was terrified of humans, lots of hissing and spitting, so it was important to get her trust fast,” Sue explains, adding that they have chosen the name Sheeba for the cub. “To do this we had to be on the same level as her, so we took turns for the first three days to lie next to her and do our office work from the floor. We would sleep with her in a tent on a mattress on the floor and she would gently pat our faces in the morning when she wanted us to wake up.We played classical music which calmed her down enormously, Beethoven was best.”

“This paid off after eight days and we took her outside to play,” Sue continued. “She was no longer frightened or trying to run away. She was now full of fun and joy and confidence and came when called.”

Weeks flew by and Sheeba continued to charm her human companions on their long walks and lazy snoozes together. But her sense of adventure frequently led to mischief. One day, Sheeba decided to go for a climb but was ill prepared to make her way back down the tree.

“We were alerted by her loud chirping cries for help and found her stuck up this  very large tree,” Sue said. “She does not like to be lifted so resisted being rescued by digging her claws into the bark. A tug of war ensued but she was  finally brought down safely.”

Growing by Leaps and Bounds

“One morning we found her sitting in the bush breakfast car, hoping for a ride,” Sue said. “Sheba has decided that she loves cars, something we have tried hard to discourage as this could mean disaster for visitors to the conservancy should they come across her in the bush, and she decides to join them!”

But when the humans refused to take her for a drive, Sheeba decided she’d take matters into her own paws and she went for a very long walk.

Sheeba Suddenly Goes Missing

“On Wednesday, her keeper called us to say that she’d disappeared around lunchtime, and two hours later still hadn’t appeared,” Sue recalls of a time when Sue was out of town. “We weren’t unduly worried, as she was becoming more and more independent. But when we went out at 5 pm in vehicles to help look for her, there still was no sign, and by the time darkness fell we had to call off the search.”

“We were hoping she’d caught something and was still feeding, and would reappear at first light,” Sue continued. “She would no doubt be rather wide-eyed after her first night alone in the bush. But she didn’t appear. So then we started wondering if the two males who’ve been around had come by and spirited her away to mate. At over 17 months now, she was bound to be ready for mating. We prepared ourselves for a dishevelled Puddy Puddy to suddenly reappear, with burrs in her fur and a guilty expression. But she didn’t. Nor did she come back on Friday. Nor did she come back on Saturday. We began to imagine the worst.”

And then, suddenly an early morning phone call blew the lid of Sheeba’s caper. “A ranger had found her (or had she found him) wandering along the Marani valley, a long, long way from home. Her keeper Lekoitip was called, and we rushed to the place to reunite him with Sheba. When she heard his voice, and saw him walking down the hill she raced towards him, ecstatic to see him.”

The Time Had Come to Set Her Free

Sheeba was now straddling two worlds and the time was nearing for her to go free. And no matter how much their hearts protested, the team at Sirikoi knew they had to let her go. Lekoitip, a member of the Masai people, was comfortable walking in the bush with wild animals and his excursions with Sheeba helped build her muscles and make her familiar with all the sounds and smells. It gave her a routine that was as close as possible to what she would hold with her natural mother.

“During the day they would nap under a shady tree before returning home,” Sue recalls. “Sheeba would often catch hare on the way back.”

Lekoitip stayed with Sheba at her new home for a couple of months as she settled in completely and with the help of a tracking collar deploying Google Earth technology, the team was able to pinpoint her location at any given time for weeks after her official release.

Once they were completely certain of Sheeba’s established territory and full capacity to fend for herself as a wild cheetah, the ‘parents’ knew their primary role was done. Sheeba’s new home is about two hours away from Sirikoi in an area without tourist vehicles as she still has a proclivity for jumping into the backseat of cars, despite their best efforts to discourage her from doing so.

“We really wanted her to live a natural life so yes, it was heartbreaking to leave her but she was with Lekoitip and she felt totally at home in her new place,” explained Sue, adding that Sheeba was at the age when cubs in the wild would normally leave their mothers and go out on their own.

Laura Simpson|March 21, 2015

Beautiful Time Lapse VIdeo of Mt. Kilauea Volcano

10 Ways to Spend Earth Hour That Can Actually Make a Difference

In 2007, Earth Hour launched in Australia as a “lights-off” event to raise awareness about climate change. Today, the event is observed in 162 countries on the last Thursday in March from 8:30 – 9:30  p.m. local time. And it’s gone from simply “lights off” to taking measurable, meaningful actions.

Every year has a special theme related to climate change. For 2015, the focus is on the power each and every one of us has to make a difference. So, as tempting as it might be to just turn off your lights, light a few candles, and sing “We Shall Overcome,” we offer instead ideas for ten actions you or anyone can take that can have a real impact.

1) Change out 5 light bulbs for LEDs. If you’ve been thinking about changing your light bulbs but haven’t gotten around to it, doing it during Earth Hour could be the perfect time. EPA recommends switching out the light bulbs you use the most: the ones in the kitchen, bathroom, porch, and probably two in the living room. Every hardware store sells LEDs, which stands for light emitting diodes. LEDs will cost a little more, but some of them last a decade or more, and they use just a fraction of the energy a regular incandescent bulb uses, so you will make up the purchase price with savings on your electricity bill.

2) Plug your electronics into a power strip. Our computers, fax machines, printers, chargers and televisions use 40% of their power when they’re turned off but still plugged in to an electrical outlet. You can save all this energy by plugging them into an energy-saving powerstrip instead. Be sure to turn off the entire powerstrip when not in use for longer periods of time.

3) Adjust your thermostat. Not just for one hour, but as a matter of course, adjust your thermostat down a couple of degrees if you’re heating, and up a few degrees if you’re cooling, to save electricity or gas, depending on what you use to heat. If you do this every night before you go to bed, you’ll save money on your heating and cooling bills over the long-term.

4) Install a programmable thermostat. You can make it easy to adjust your thermostat by installing a programmable thermostat that will make the adjustments for you automatically. Again, order online or purchase at a place like Home Depot or Lowe’s.

5) Tune up your bicycle. Biking is a great way to save energy and still get where you want to go, especially when distances are short. Use Earth Hour to tune up your bike: pump up the tires, oil the chain, check the gears, and rub away any rust that may have accumulated over winter. Then, install a basket on the front handle bars or some panniers on the back so you can carry groceries or your briefcase.

6) Organize a potluck supper to discuss energy-saving ideas with your friends and neighbors. Climate change is too big a problem for any one of us to solve on our own. But working together, we can make a big difference. Invite a group of friends to a potluck to brainstorm activities that would matter in your community.

7) Research the benefits of going solar. Many solar energy companies – like NRG Home Solar, Solar City, and Solar Power Now – help homeowners figure out whether solar makes sense for their homes and if so, how to finance it. Visit solar company websites and learn more about this money- and power-saving technology.

8) Research the benefits of getting a hybrid or electric car, or joining a leasing program like Car2Go or Zip Car. Are you in the market for a new vehicle? Figure out whether a hybrid or fully electric vehicle would work for you. Or take a closer look – maybe you could get along without your own car, but using Car2Go, Zip Car, Uber, and other car sharing options.

9) Clean out your closets and attic. All of our “stuff” contains embedded energy that can live as long as our stuff does. Use Earth Hour to pull out items you don’t use any more but that someone else could, saving that person from having to buy new and helping to put the brakes on consumption.

10) Write to your elected officials. As important as our independent and collective actions our, the kind of global change we need will have be driven by new laws that require companies as well as citizens to use non-polluting sources of energy like solar and wind, and to save energy wherever and whenever we can. Use Earth Hour to research where your mayor, city and county council representatives, and Members of Congress stand on climate change and energy policy. Use your power as a voter to encourage them to pass laws and regulations that will advance clean energy and help stop climate change.

Diane MacEachern|March 24, 2015

5 of the Most Obscure Predators on the Planet

There are lots of predators in the animal kingdom and wildlife world that are extremely well-known for their agility, speed, intelligence and power. In fact, among the top ten predators on the planet are wolves, bears, coyotes and sharks, which are exactly what most of us immediately think of when fearsome animal predators are mentioned. But what about the more obscure creatures that have fascinating abilities, but are less common and rarely even talked about? Here are five unknowns with remarkable skills that we just had to share:

1. The Fossa

Photo Credit: Thinkstock

The fossa is from the Madagascar region and is essentially a large mongoose that lives in the trees. From the same family as the mongoose, this cat-like animal is an Eupleridae. Interestingly, the muscular, long-tailed fossa usually can be found hunting lemurs, and this bigwig is actually the largest mammalian predator living on the island. The fossa is an excellent climber and can effortlessly leap between tree branches, adding to its predatory talents.

2. The Spectral Bat

Photo Credit: Carnivora Forum

The spectral bat, which is sometimes also referred to by the name of the false vampire bat, is a carnivorous bat that has an impressive three foot long wingspan. In fact, the spectral bat is the biggest bat of the modern world. Although significantly large in size, this bat can glide around ever so gracefully, making it a highly skilled hunter. This natural predator catches prey, such as reptiles, amphibians, small mammals and birds, with ease.

3. The Cookiecutter Shark

Photo Credit: Treehugger

The cookiecutter shark can actually be considered as more of a parasite than a shark. The cookiecutter gets its name from its ability to remove circular chunks of flesh from its victims by using its unique and exceptionally sharp-toothed jaw. The cookiecutter shark, also called the cigar or luminous shark, has a stealth advantage: its pale, blue-green bioluminescent coloring on its belly, when viewed from below, allows the deep sea shark to blend in with the ocean’s surface.

4. The Giant Otter

Photo Credit: Thinkstock

A member of the weasel family, a Mustelidae to be exact, and the largest of this category at that, the giant otter can reach a body length of up to six feet. This huge and nimble otter, also appropriately nicknamed the river wolf, swims the Amazon swiftly and in search of any animal that is smaller than it is to feast on. The giant otter’s prey includes animals like fish, frogs and other mammals that are tinier in size, which are included in its diet and regarded as fair game to this expert predator.

5. The Portia Spider

Photo Credit: imgur

The portia spider, belonging to a group of sly and clever jumping spiders, is probably one of the most manipulative arachnids around. This spider preys on other web-building spiders, in the most sneaky way: by plucking their victim’s web in a manner that mimics a trapped insect, then striking when their prey comes to investigate and is within a close enough distance. They also possess a camouflage that resembles leaf litters, which helps these crafty portia spiders blend in while being the successful hunters that they are.

Catherine Gill|March 24, 2015

A Menacing Mix In Antibiotic Resistance: Herbicides, Heavy Metals And Factory Farms

Two common Big Agriculture production practices — feeding antibiotics to livestock and spraying herbicides on conventional crops — each face condemnation from the environmental community. And there’s been plenty of new fodder in the last week: One study predicted that antibiotic use in livestock will soar by two-thirds globally from 2010 to 2030, and another declared that Monsanto’s popular Roundup herbicide is “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

The latest research may merge the herbicide and antibiotic battle lines. The use of common herbicides, such as Roundup, Kamba and 2,4-D, according to a study published on Tuesday, may help drive antibiotic resistance.

Antibiotic-resistant infections take the lives of more than 23,000 Americans every year. The World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are among major groups warning of the dire threat posed to public health. Antibiotic resistance stemming from overuse in livestock also is the target of a bill re-introduced in Congress on Tuesday.

Environmental health advocates predict the use of herbicides will continue to rise as farmers plant more genetically modified seeds engineered to survive weedkillers. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently approved Enlist seeds, which are designed for use with a mix of 2,4-D and glyphosate, the chief ingredient in Roundup.

In some cases, combinations of herbicides and antibiotics in the new study made bacteria more susceptible to antibiotics, or had no effect. But more often, it had the opposite effect. If the disease-causing bacteria — E. coli and salmonella — were exposed to high enough levels of herbicide, the researchers found that the microbes could survive up to six times more antibiotic than if they hadn’t been exposed to herbicide. They studied five common classes of the drugs: ampicillin, chloramphenicol, ciprofloxacin, kanamycin and tetracycline.

“In a sense, the herbicide is ‘immunizing’ the bacteria to the antibiotic,” said Jack Heinemann, lead author of the study and researcher at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. He noted that the levels of herbicide tested in the study were above legal limits for residues on food, but lower than what’s commonly applied to commercial crops.

The new finding builds on emerging evidence that multiple environmental contaminants may play a role in the rise of antibiotic resistance. Swedish researchers reported in September that antibiotic residues and heavy metals in the environment — even at “infinitesimally low” concentrations — may team up to drive the growth of antibiotic resistance. In addition to metals potentially leaching into the environment from other industries, construction or health care facilities, some farmers use arsenic in animal feed and as a pesticide. Mercury can also contaminate fish meal, while copper is common in swine fodder.

“This could be an important contributor” to antibiotic resistance, Dan Andersson, lead author of that study and a microbiologist at Upsalla University in Sweden, told The Huffington Post in October.

Mark Silby, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, noted an “important parallel,” between the heavy metal and herbicide studies. “Low-level antibiotics can be of considerable importance in the evolution of antibiotic resistance, by means which we may not be very good at anticipating,” he said.

Most research in the past has looked at chemicals or other contaminants in isolation, rather than as the cocktail that typically lingers in the environment — especially near farms — and is enlisted in modern agricultural practices. Livestock feed, and the fields on which animals graze, may contain traces of antibiotics, herbicides and heavy metals.

Heinemann, too, emphasized that “combinations of exposures to what we think of as different kinds of chemicals can matter.”

He also pointed to the core issue of the overuse of antibiotics in both medicine and agriculture. His team’s study was published the same day that Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) re-introduced the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act. The bill has the support of 50 city councils and more than 450 medical, consumer advocacy and public health groups.

“Right now, we are allowing the greatest medical advancement of the 20th century to be frittered away, in part because it’s cheaper for factory farms to feed these critical drugs to animals rather than clean up the deplorable conditions on the farm,” Slaughter, the only microbiologist in Congress, said in a statement Tuesday. “My legislation would save eight critical classes of antibiotics from being routinely fed to healthy animals, and would reserve them only for sick humans and sick animals.”

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration offers voluntary guidance to the pharmaceutical industry on the use of antibiotics in livestock, including a request that drugmakers change their labels by December 2016 to exclude uses for growth promotion. The FDA hasn’t imposed a ban or mandatory restrictions. Advocates are not impressed, pointing to potential loopholes in the voluntary guidance.

Slaughter’s bill has faced steep opposition since its first iteration in 1999. In the last Congress, according to a press release from her office on Tuesday, 82 percent of lobbying reports filed on her bill came from “entities hostile to regulation.”

Slaughter is among experts and advocates who largely blame the pressing public health problem on the routine administration of low doses of antibiotics to cattle, swine, chickens and other livestock. Just as an incomplete course of antibiotics can result in the rise of a more virulent infection in a person, this use in animals — often to prevent the spread of disease or to simply promote growth — means bacteria that can withstand the drugs will survive, reproduce and pass on their resistance to the next generation of bugs on the farm.

Food animals receive about 80 percent of the antibiotics sold in the U.S. Livestock antibiotics are thought to affect human health via multiple pathways: direct or indirect contact with food, water, air or anywhere urine or manure goes.

While some fast food brands and retailers have begun eliminating medically-important antibiotics from their supply chains, the agriculture industry maintains that its practices are critical for livestock health and not a significant contributor to the rise of antibiotic resistance. The Animal Health Institute, which represents pharmaceutical companies, suggested that the herbicide and heavy metal studies further support their case.

“These studies are further indications that antibiotic resistance is a very complex issue and there are non-antibiotic compounds that can select for resistance,” Ron Phillips, vice president of legislative and legal affairs with the group, told HuffPost in an email. “That’s why simple solutions will only waste resources while not addressing the real issue. We must address the issue of antibiotic resistance with careful, science-based” approaches.

Charla Lord, a spokeswoman for Monsanto, added that her company was taking a closer look at the “very complicated” study. She said more research is needed to identify what components in the herbicide may be linked to any effects.

Amy Pruden, an expert on antibiotic resistance at Virginia Tech, agreed that the studies “definitely complicate things” and add evidence that “it’s not just antibiotics that contribute to the problem.”

Pruden emphasized the need for “a really broad management plan that thinks comprehensively about all the things that contribute to the failure of antibiotic treatment.” She noted that antibiotic overuse, including in livestock, is far from off the hook. “It’s common sense that antibiotics themselves are the core issue,” she said. “It’s just that even if we cut way back on them, we still might have work to do and other things to think about.”

Silby agreed. “Obviously, sick animals should be looked after appropriately, but the large-scale use of antibiotics as growth enhancers has almost certainly been a significant driver of antibiotic resistance.”

Lynne Peeples|huffingtonpost.com|03/24/2015

Meet 5 of the World’s Tiniest and Most Amazing Creatures

The attractions of the biggest creatures in the world are well-known, whether it’s Tyrannosaurus Rex or a Whale Shark. But what about the tiniest creatures? Here are five of my favorites:

Kitti’s hog-nosed bat (or bumblebee bat)  |  Image credit: Wikipedia

Bumblebee Bat

Let’s start with what is probably the world’s smallest mammal: the bumblebee bat. This tiny creature weighs less than two grams, or 0.07 ounces, meaning less than the weight of a dime.

Bumblebee bats are between 1.1 and 1.3 inches long, they have no tail, and they have a wingspan of approximately 6.7 inches.

However, you’re not likely to meet one of these tiny creatures unless you live in Thailand or Myanmar, where they roost in limestone caves. Here they are most active at dusk when they fly around teak trees and clumps of bamboo seeking insects for dinner. Incidentally, they are also known as Kitti’s hognose bats, and they are endangered.

Ili pika

For more than 20 years, the Ili pika, a type of tiny, mountain-dwelling creature with a teddy bear face, eluded scientists in the Tianshan Mountains of northwestern China. But last summer, scientists were thrilled to catch a glimpse of the elusive mammal. You can see what this adorable animal looks like by clicking here.

In fact, people have seen only 29 live Ili pikas, so little is known about them, only that they are about eight inches long, with large ears and several small brown spots on their gray fur. It is feared that grazing pressure from livestock and air pollution have contributed to the decline in the Ili pika, which the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists as vulnerable to extinction.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Mouse Lemur
You could hold a mouse lemur in the palm of your hand, but you probably shouldn’t.

“They’re fast, fierce, and feisty,” says Chris Smith, education specialist at the Duke Lemur Center in Durham, North Carolina, which is home to 55 mouse lemurs.

According to Smith, Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur is the tiniest of the 17 mouse lemur species. It weights just about one ounce and is considered to be the world’s smallest primate.

Along with all other lemurs, mouse lemurs inhabit the island of Madagascar off the east coast of Africa. These tiny animals live in female-dominated groups of up to 15 animals, and are highly skilled at leaping from branch to branch and from tree to tree. They sleep in those trees by day, but at night they are out searching for insects, fruit, flowers, and other plants.

Western Pygmy Blue Butterfly  |  Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Western Pygmy Blue Butterfly

The Western pygmy blue is definitely the smallest known butterfly in North America, and maybe in the world, with a wingspan of just half an inch.

It is unmistakable with brown dorsal wings that become blue closer to their bodies. It can be seen all year long but is most often spotted in early July through September during the warm weather season. Of course, even though it is fairly common, you may walk right by it without seeing it, since it is so small and tends to fly close to the ground.

Its common habitat is the western U.S. but it has also been spotted in the southern U.S. in coastal areas, and as far south as Venezuela. And it was introduced to Hawaii around 1979. What a dainty delight!

American Miniature Horse |  Photo Credit: Thinkstock

American Miniature Horse

These horses are of course bred to be small, originally for European nobility in the 17th century. They are, quite simply, tiny versions of full-size horses, so there is no specific breed of miniature horse.

According to the International Museum of the Horse, an American miniature horse can’t be more than 34 inches tall at the withers. (The withers are at the top of the shoulder, where the horse’s neck joins its body.)

Nowadays these mini-horses are often used as guides and therapy animals for people. That’s because they are friendly, docile creatures and interact well with humans. Some people even keep them as family pets.

While miniature horses are the size of a very small pony, many retain horse characteristics and are still considered horses.

Judy Molland|March 26, 2015

David Suzuki: A Better World Is Possible

Cars, air travel, space exploration, television, nuclear power, high-speed computers, telephones, organ transplants, prosthetic body parts … At various times these were all deemed impossible. I’ve been around long enough to have witnessed many technological feats that were once unimaginable. Even 10 or 20 years ago, I would never have guessed people would carry supercomputers in their pockets—your smart phone is more powerful than all the computers NASA used to put astronauts on the moon in 1969 combined!

Despite a long history of the impossible becoming possible, often very quickly, we hear the “can’t be done” refrain repeated over and over—especially in the only debate over global warming that matters: What can we do about it? Climate change deniers and fossil fuel industry apologists often argue that replacing oil, coal and gas with clean energy is beyond our reach. The claim is both facile and false.

Facile because the issue is complicated. It’s not simply a matter of substituting one for the other. To begin, conservation and efficiency are key. We must find ways to reduce the amount of energy we use—not a huge challenge considering how much people waste, especially in the developed world. False because rapid advances in clean energy and grid technologies continue to get us closer to necessary reductions in our use of polluting fossil fuels.

It’s ironic that anti-environmentalists and renewable energy opponents often accuse those of us seeking solutions of wanting to go back to the past, to living in caves, scrounging for roots and berries. They’re the ones intent on continuing to burn stuff to keep warm—to the detriment of the natural world and all it provides.

People have used wind and solar power for thousands of years. But recent rapid advances in generation, storage and transmission technologies have led to a fast-developing industry that’s outpacing fossil fuels in growth and job creation. Costs are coming down to the point where renewable energy is competitive with the heavily subsidized fossil fuel industry. According to the International Energy Agency, renewable energy for worldwide electricity generation grew to 22 percent in 2013, a five percent increase from 2012.

The problem is that much of the world still burns non-renewable resources for electricity and fuels, causing pollution and climate change and, subsequently, more human health problems, extreme weather events, water shortages and environmental devastation. In many cities in China, the air has become almost unbreathable, as seen in the shocking Chinese documentary film Under the Dome. In California, a prolonged drought is affecting food production. Extreme weather events are costing billions of dollars worldwide.

We simply must do more to shift away from fossil fuels and, despite what the naysayers claim, we can. We can even get partway there under our current systems. Market forces often lead to innovation in clean energy development. But in addressing the very serious long-term problems we’ve created, we may have to challenge another “impossibility:” changing our outmoded global economic system. As economist and Earth Institute director Jeffrey Sachs wrote in a recent Guardian article, “At this advanced stage of environmental threats to the planet, and in an era of unprecedented inequality of income and power, it’s no longer good enough to chase GDP. We need to keep our eye on three goals—prosperity, inclusion and sustainability—not just on the money.”

Relying on market capitalism encourages hyper-consumption, planned obsolescence, wasteful production and endless growth. Cutting pollution and greenhouse gas emissions requires conserving energy as well as developing new energy technologies. Along with reducing our reliance on private automobiles and making buildings and homes more energy-efficient, that also means making goods that last longer and producing fewer disposable or useless items so less energy is consumed in production.

People have changed economic systems many times before, when they no longer suited shifting conditions or when they were found to be inhumane, as with slavery. And people continue to develop tools and technologies that were once thought impossible. Things are only impossible until they’re not. We can’t let those who are stuck in the past, unable to imagine a better future, hold us back from creating a safer, cleaner and more just world.

Dr. David Suzuki|March 25, 2015

In Memoriam

 

Environmental Links

SFAS International Wildlife News Audubon Advocate Audubon Restore Eco-Voice South Florida Wildlife Care Center Sawgrass Nature Center & Wildlife Hospital The Turtle Hospital The Marathon Wild Bird Center Climate change info Audubon’s Coastal Strand Audubon of Florida News Blog Bioenergy News Climate Progress – climate science, politics and solutions Collins Center for Public Policy Comprehensive Everglades Restoration News EcoWatch – feeds from the WaterKeeper Alliance Everglades Foundation – press releases Everglades Hub Fort Myers News – Press Green Front Pages from Florida Newspapers Herald Tribune Newspapers –  Environmental News KeysNews.com Naples Daily News  – Environmental News National Public Radio Eco-News Riverwatch News about the Caloosahatchee Sierra Club Sierra Club Florida South Florida Watershed  Journal South Florida Water Management District Union of Concerned Scientists – news Yahoo News Search: Everglades NASA Climate Information American Littorial Society log NASA Climate Information Sun Newspapers – Lake Okeechobee News Everglades City News  – Mullet Wrapper IFAW’s World of Animals Magazine

ConsRep 1503 D

“We are seeing a vast increase in the amount of carbon dioxide reaching the atmosphere… The result is that change in future is likely to be more fundamental and more widespread than anything we have known hitherto.” UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warns in a 1989 speech to the UN

Announcements 

FWC asks beachgoers to help survey spawning horseshoe crabs

Photos available on FWC’s Flickr site: https://flic.kr/s/aHsk9g2oJk

Suggested Tweet: Biologists at @MyFWC invite people to assist in horseshoe crab surveys at beaches! http://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/FLFFWCC/bulletins/f837c5 #Florida

As spring approaches, horseshoe crabs congregate to spawn along sandy beaches and shallow coastal waters throughout the state.

Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) biologists are asking the public to assist in the

FWC’s survey effort by reporting horseshoe crab sightings and other useful information.

Although horseshoe crabs mate year-round, spring is the peak season to see them aggregate on beaches and in bays.

Citizen scientists interested in contributing to the survey should have the best luck sighting horseshoe crabs around high tide

within three days of a new or full moon, March 20 and April 4 respectively.

The FWC asks people to report sightings by using the online form listed under “Horseshoe Crab Nesting Activity”

by going to MyFWC.com/Contact. You can also email findings to horseshoe@MyFWC.com or call the FWC at 866-252-9326.

Observers should note the number of horseshoe crabs they see and whether those horseshoe crabs are mating.

Mating crabs “pair up,” with the smaller male on top of the larger female.

Other male crabs may be present around the mating pair.

If possible, the observer should specify roughly how many horseshoe crabs are mating adults and how many are juveniles (4 inches wide or smaller).

Biologists are also interested in the date, time and location of your sighting as well as the habitat type.

Through Dec. 31, 2014, the FWC has received 3,097 reports since the survey program began in April 2002.

Although horseshoe crabs have been around for approximately 450 million years, their populations

have declined in recent decades due to overfishing and loss of habitat.

It takes female horseshoe crabs about 10 years to reach sexual maturity before they are able to lay about 80,000 eggs per year.

The eggs are an important food source for migrating shorebirds, and larger crabs are often consumed by loggerhead sea turtles.

The FWC is grateful when people report sightings.

If you see a horseshoe crab on its back, gently pick it up (holding both sides of the shell) and release it back into the water.

Simple actions like this help conserve the species and the countless other species that depend on it.

Support Wildlife Conservation When You Travel ‏

Planning a trip? Looking for somewhere to stay?

If you reserve your room through our Intercontinental Hotel Group affiliate link,

IHG will match 5% of your room rate and give it back to the Wildlife Foundation of Florida.

This program applies to IHG Hotels throughout the world!

So no matter where you are in the world YOU can support Florida’s wildlife!

Thanks for your support!

Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission|3/16/15

The Mounts Botanical Garden of Palm Beach County Invites the Public to Eight Fun & Informative Horticultural Events in April:

* Season of Bamboo Trilogy, Part III – April 6

* Butterflies of South Florida & Native Plants – April 12

* Book Discussion Series – April 14

* Butterfly Fest – April 18

* Creating a Butterfly Garden – April 18

* Orchid Care 101: Repotting Your Orchid – April 19

* Spring Plant Sale – April 25-26

* Space Invaders: How to Deal with Invasive Plants – April 30

(West Palm Beach, FL – March 16, 2015)  The Friends of Mounts Botanical Garden will be hosting eight fun,

horticulturally informative and family friendly public events during April 2015.

New:  

Season of Bamboo Trilogy, Part III

The Art of Bamboo: 

An Evening with a Contemporary Master

Monday, April 6 – 6:30 to 9 pm

Exhibit Hall A

$30 for members; $40 for nonmembers

Speaker: Shouchiko Tanabe, Master Bamboo Artist

Shouchiko Tanabe is a fifth-generation contemporary bamboo artist.

After graduating from the Department of Sculpture at Tokyo University of the Arts,

Tanabe took part in a two-year training program at the Oita Prefectural Bamboo Craft and Training Support Center.

His renowned Tsunagari series of bamboo crafts utilize the inherent pliancy of bamboo,

while adopting the traditional methods of bamboo crafts passed down from mentor Tanabe Chikuunsai I.

This approach captures the essence of the medium in both concept and visual presentation,

evident by the many exhibitions showcasing his work overseas,

including Golden Week on Japanese Art (Seattle Asian Art Museum) in 2006,

New Bamboo Contemporary Masters (Japan Society in New York) in 2008, and Modern Master (Bayem Gallery, Munich) in 2012.

Butterflies of South Florida

& Their Connections to Native Plants

Sunday, April 12 – 10 am to noon

Exhibit Hall A

$30 for members; $40 for nonmembers

Speaker: Jeff Nurge, Florida Native Gardening & Native Choice Nursery

In this popular and visually captivating presentation,

learn how easy it is to attract local butterflies to your yard and have them stay year-round.

Our native plant expert and contributing writer for the Palm Beach Post’s column Native Roots

will describe in detail which native plants are suitable for this area and how to grow them successfully.

Mounts Botanical Garden Book Discussion Series

Tuesday, April 14 – 7 to 8:30 pm

Clayton Hutcheson Complex – Conference Room

FREE

In partnership with the Palm Beach County Library System,

this new series provides an opportunity for book and garden enthusiasts to meet together to

experience exciting fiction and non-fiction titles related to all aspects of gardening and horticulture. 

The featured book in April will be Florida Butterfly Encounters published by the University of Florida Press.

Butterfly Fest

Saturday, April 18 – 9 to 11 am

Mounts – Butterfly Garden

FREE for members; $5 for nonmembers

In collaboration with the Audubon Society of Florida and Atala-NABA

Celebrate butterflies with fun and educational activities throughout the Garden.

Butterfly walks led by interpreters will explore Mounts and feature the butterfly garden in partnership

with members of the South Florida Audubon Society and the North American Butterfly Association, Atala Chapter.

Master gardeners and NABA members will be on-hand to answer questions about how to attract butterflies

and other pollinators to your yard. Children in butterfly or insect costumes will receive a free gift while supplies last.

Creating a Butterfly Garden

Saturday, April 18 – 10 to 11:30 am

Clayton Hutcheson Complex – Conference Room

$20 for members; $30 for nonmembers

Speaker: Alan Chin Lee, Nature Photographer

Creating a butterfly garden is easy and fun if you know a few basics about butterflies.

Learn interesting facts about these beautiful “flowers of the air.”

Find out what plants our local butterflies need at all stages of their life cycle, including host plants and nectar plants.

This workshop includes a docent-led tour of our Butterfly Garden, and butterfly plants will be for sale.

Butterfly gardening is good for the environment and good for the soul.

Orchid Care 101:

Repotting Your Orchid

Sunday, April 19 – 10 am to 1 pm

Mounts Auditorium, Garden & Pavilion

$30 for members; $40 for nonmembers

Speaker: Sandi Jones, Broward Orchid Supply and Bonnet House Museum & Gardens

Spring Plant Sale

Saturday, April 25 – 9 am to 5 pm

Sunday, April 26- 9 am to 3 pm

Throughout the Garden

$10 per person

This annual Spring Plant Sale features over 80 vendors with an amazing assortment of quality plants and goods. 

This is a great opportunity to learn about the plants that grow well in South Florida and find something new for the garden. 

Rare and hard-to-find palms, orchids, begonias, bromeliads, fruit trees will be available for purchase at their booths. 

The PBC Wood Turners will be selling a large selection of beautiful wood turnings.

Space Invaders:

How to Deal with Invasive Plants

Thursday, April 30 – 5:30 to 7 pm

Mounts Auditorium

$20 for members; $30 for nonmembers

Speaker: Laurie Albrecht, UF/IFAS Cooperative Extension Agent

Discover how to protect your landscape from invasive plants while preserving native Florida flora.

In this free workshop, attendees will learn how to identify the area’s worst plant marauders

and find out the best methods for their removal and disposal.

They’ll also explore the devastating impacts prohibited plants can have on property, pocketbook, and Palm Beach County’s natural areas.

The workshop includes a hands-on identification segment.

Note:

To register for any of the events and workshops at The Mounts Botanical Garden of Palm Beach County, please call 561.233.1757. 

Events at Mounts are accessible to people with disabilities.

About The Mounts Botanical Garden of Palm Beach County:

With a mission to inspire the public, Mounts Botanical Garden is Palm Beach County’s oldest and largest botanical garden,

offering gorgeous displays of tropical and sub-tropical plants, plus informative classes, workshops, and other fun-filled events.

The Garden contains more than 2,000 species of plants, including Florida native plants, exotic and tropical fruit trees, herbs, palms, bromeliads and more. 

Mounts Botanical Garden is a facility of the Palm Beach County Extension Service, which is in partnership with the University of Florida and the Friends of Mounts Botanical Garden.

Located at 531 North Military Trail in West Palm Beach, The Mounts Botanical Garden of Palm Beach County is open Monday-Saturday from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 4 p.m.

The suggested donation for entry to the Garden is $5 per person. For more information, please call 561.233.1757 or visit www.mounts.org .

Audubon of Southwest Florida

Join us for a morning of Bird Photography with Bob Blanchard, Wildlife Photographer, on Saturday, April 4, 2015, at 8:30 am.

Bob will conduct a beginning bird photography class at Bowditch Point Regional Park (http://www.leeparks.org/Facility_info?Project_num=0111)

This is a Lee County Park – please go to their website for more information on location and parking.

Vehicles with Lee County Parks passes park for free, otherwise there is a parking fee.

Bring your camera and be ready to learn!

Saturday, April 4th, 8:30 a.m.

Due to limited capacity, reservations for 20 people will be taken on a first come first served basis.

To reserve, please send an email including your name and phone number to audubon.southwest.florida@gmail.com 

FWC Bear Management Plan

Managed Species Black Bear for Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission information has recently been updated, and is now available.

http://www.myfwc.com/wildlifehabitats/managed/bear/

Of Interest to All

Fukushima Radiation Found in Sample of Green Tea from Japan

 Four years after the multiple explosions and melt-downs at Fukushima, it seems the scary stories have only just begun to surface.

Given that Japan’s authoritarian regime of Shinzo Abe has cracked down on the information flow from Fukushima with a repressive state secrets act, we cannot know for certain what’s happening at the site.

We do know that 300 tons of radioactive water have been pouring into the Pacific every day. And that spent fuel rods are littered around the site. Tokyo Electric power may or may not have brought down all the fuel rods from Unit Four, but many hundreds almost certainly remain suspended in the air over Units One, Two and Three.

We also know that Abe is pushing refugees to move back into the Fukushima region. Thyroid damage rates—including cancer—have skyrocketed among children in the region. Radiation “hot spots” have been found as far away as Tokyo. According to scientific sources, more than 30 times as much radioactive Cesium was released at Fukushima as was created at the bombing of Hiroshima.

Some of those isotopes turned up in at least 15 tuna caught off the coast of California. But soon after Fukushima, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration stopped testing Pacific fish for radiation. The FDA has never fully explained why.

But now a small amount of Fukushima’s radiation has turned up in green tea shipped from Japan to Hong Kong. This is a terrifying development, casting doubt on all food being exported from the region.

According to the New York Times:

“A sample of powdered tea imported from the Japanese prefecture of Chiba, just southeast of Tokyo, contained traces of radioactive cesium 137, the Hong Kong government announced late Thursday evening, but they were far below the legal maximum level.

The discovery was not the first of its kind. The government’s Center for Food Safety found three samples of vegetables from Japan with “unsatisfactory” levels of radioactive contaminants in March 2011, the month that nuclear reactors in Fukushima, northeast of Tokyo, suffered partial meltdowns following a powerful earthquake and tsunami.”

Should every meal you are served now be accompanied with a radiation monitor?

Harvey Wasserman|March 16, 2015

Rising seas bring heavy burden to Florida coastal economy.

Florida is a coastal state. Nearly 80% of its 20 million residents live near the coast on land just a few feet above sea level, and over a hundred million tourists visit the beaches and stay in beach-front hotels every year. The coastal economy in Florida is estimated to account for 79% of the state’s gross domestic product, a measure of direct revenue into the economy.

People living and working on the Florida coast face threats from hurricanes and storm surge, sometimes more than once a year. Scouring of beaches by wind and waves takes away sand, and beaches must be nourished with new sand, as often as yearly, in areas with high erosion. Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties now have problems obtaining near-shore, low-cost sand. This means that they will have to use considerably more expensive alternatives to native sand that may negatively impact sea turtles or beach plants, diminish the quality of the beach environment and have adverse impacts to local communities that pay for beach re-nourishment.

The threats aren’t reserved just for coastal residents. People in south Florida who live farther inland have homes and businesses on former wetlands that were drained in the middle of the 20th century. After a heavy rainfall, canals carry water to the sea. Should those canals fail, there would be massive flooding. Those canals also maintain a freshwater “head,” or buffer, that prevents salt water from intruding into the well fields that supply drinking water to the millions of residents.

In this precarious situation, how is sea-level rise affecting coastal Florida, and what can we expect in the future?

Inches matter

An important reality is that sea-level rise is not a future phenomenon. It has been happening slowly over the past decades, at about one inch every ten years. That’s a half foot since the 1960’s and already it is taking a toll. Areas of Miami now have flooding at high tide – a situation not observed in the past. The drainage system in south Florida is starting to fail. Flood control structures that take away rainwater by gravity sometimes cannot flow when the ocean side of the flood gates have a higher level of salt water than the upstream fresh water sides.

Why does one inch matter? When I lived in coastal Florida, one time a major rain event coincided with high tide, which made it difficult for water to quickly exit to the ocean. When water levels rose one half of an inch from the storm, my entire neighborhood flooded and water nearly entered my house. As we hastily tried to block all of the doors with tape and towels, it hit home what a difference one more inch of sea level would have meant – the difference between no damage and perhaps thousands of dollars of damage to our home. However, over many decades, we are looking at feet, not inches of rising sea levels.

What we know now

Three years ago, leading researchers convened at a climate change summit hosted by Florida Atlantic University, the research program Florida Sea Grant and the University of Florida to discuss the future of Florida under projected climate change and sea-level rise conditions. The picture these researchers paint is bleak. Between now and 2100, floods that happen every 100 years are projected to start happening every 50, then every 20, then every 5, until large areas of coastal Florida are under water.

These experts’ discussions considered such dire things as: how to strategically abandon large areas of the Florida Keys; how animals that now live in low-lying areas will move to higher ground when human populations are vying for the same territory; and even how to reconfigure Miami into a series of islands on a historical ridge along the southeast Florida coast, knowing that at some point, even those ridges will be part of the ocean.

A report by the Florida Oceans and Coastal Council, a body established by the state’s legislature and on which I serve, developed a comprehensive report on the probable and possible effects of sea-level rise on coastal Florida. Major findings of that report included:

• Sea level is likely to rise by 20 to 40 inches by 2100. If there is major melting of polar and glacier ice, sea level could rise as much as 80 inches this century

• During hurricanes, higher sea levels may boost storm surge, causing greater scouring of beaches and in the worst case scenario, inundation of barrier islands and loss of coastal properties

• There will be increased pressure to armor shorelines with seawalls to protect buildings from waves, but at some point this may not be effective because of escalating costs and the porous rock that underlies most of Florida, which will allow sea water to seep under seawalls.

• Rising seas will shift the beach inland, imperiling coastal roads, homes and businesses.

• Rising seas will stress coastal infrastructure (buildings, roads and bridges) because salt water will affect structural integrity.

• Saltwater intrusion will become more common in freshwater well fields near the coast. A sea rise of just six inches will require water conservation, waste water reuse, stormwater storage facilities and alternative water supplies including desalinization.

It now is widely accepted that climate change is causing an unprecedented rise in sea levels around the world, and that locations such as Florida, where huge infrastructure and large populations live right on the coast, are especially vulnerable.

As noted in the Oceans and Coastal Council report, the risks compel us to seek a more thorough understanding of the impacts, and provide current and future generations with the information needed to adapt. Ignoring climate change or dismissing it as ‘not settled science’ will only lead to more costly and complex decisions in the future and cause greater harm to our people and our economy.

Future communities

While the challenges presented by climate change and sea-level rise are great, challenges also bring opportunity.

As Florida seeks to adapt to the changing future, it is an opportunity for us to engage in vibrant discussions at the local, regional, state and federal levels about the nature of our communities, how we want them to look in the future, and how to achieve our goals. Engaging in such conversations will help us learn and work together for the best possible future for our communities.

Many communities around the state are already doing this. Southeast Florida has its Climate Change Compact, northeast Florida is working together under the Public Private Regional Resilience Initiative, southwest Florida and Punta Gorda as far back as 2009 developed the City of Punta Gorda Adaptation Plan. With such work, we can move towards a future which, while filled with challenges and different than the past, need not be only about loss, but also about what we can accomplish.

Professor Karl Havens|Director of Florida Sea Grant|University of Florida|March 16 2015

An Amazing New Pacific Island Emerges in Tonga

Planet Earth is constantly shifting and changing: oceans are created and destroyed; mountains are formed under the sea, but then lifted up to great heights. In general, we humans aren’t aware of these shifts, as they take place over millions of years. However, last month the people of Tonga experienced just how geologically dynamic the earth is, as an ongoing volcanic eruption under the ocean created a new cone-shaped island about 40 miles northwest of Tonga’s capital, Nukualofa.

Specifically, experts believe that a volcano exploded underwater and then expanded until an island formed.

Tonga is a Polynesian sovereign state and archipelago comprising 177 islands with a total surface area of about 290 square miles, scattered over 270,000 square miles of the southern Pacific Ocean. Fifty two islands are inhabited by its 103,000 people, and seventy percent of Tongans reside on the main island of Tongatapu.

The new island is about one mile long, eight tenths of a mile wide, and rises over 300 feet above the sea–and it is still growing.

You can see the first amazing photographs of this newly formed island by clicking here. They were taken by G.P. Orbassano, a local man who, along with two others, climbed to the peak of the new land mass earlier this month. Apparently the surface was still hot and the green lake in the crater smelt strongly of sulphur. “It was a perfect day, with fantastic views – bright blue sky and the sea was the same color as the sky,” Orbassano told Tonga’s Matangi Online.

Orbassano said he believed the island was high enough for it to remain for some time, and potentially attract tourists. “There are thousands of seabirds – all kinds, laying eggs on the island,” he said. This is by no means the first area to witness such an amazing event.

On November 20, 2013, an island of approximately 600 feet in diameter emerged 600 miles south of Tokyo, Japan, in the Ogasawara Islands. This new island, originally called Niijima, was created by volcanic activity along the western edge of the Pacific ‘Ring of Fire.’ A month later, NASA images revealed that the newly formed island had tripled in size. In fact, it kept growing so much that it “ate up” its neighboring island, Nishino-shima, which had formed in 1973. The two islands merged in December 2013. Since then, the island has started producing its own weather, and lava flows have transformed bays into lakes.

Another example of this amazing phenomenon happened recently in Pakistan. You may remember that the country experienced a devastating 7.7 earthquake in September, 2013. After the shaking stopped, the people of Gwadar, on the Balochistan coast, were amazed to see that three new islands had emerged from the Arabian Sea.

Earthquakes and volcanic activity clearly played their part in producing these dramatic changes. The newly emerging islands are also a stunning reminder that our planet is definitely alive, and always shifting!

Judy Molland|March 17, 2015

Amendment 1 Spending Plan Lands Mixed Reviews

Florida’s natural springs would get $50 million, the Kissimmee River is in line for $30 million, and a wastewater plan for the Florida Keys is up for $25 million, under a newly released House proposal that would help carry out a voter-approved increase in conservation dollars.

But there are few other clearly outlined projects in a $772.1 million proposal for next fiscal year released Tuesday by the House Agriculture and Natural Resources Appropriations Subcommittee. The proposal is focused more on land management and water projects than on new land acquisitions.

The plan quickly drew mixed reviews from conservationists, whose reactions included that it was “a good starting point” for negotiations and that lawmakers disregarded the intent of voters who supported a constitutional amendment, known as Amendment 1, in November.

“The recommendation ignores what the voters thought that they were voting for, which was to put money into land acquisition for parks and wildlife habitat and trails,” said Audubon Florida Executive Director Eric Draper, a lobbyist on environmental issues.

Among the House funding proposals were $191 million for debt service for the Florida Forever program, Everglades restoration and water-management districts; $100 million for Everglades restoration bonding; $91.6 million for management of state parks, greenways and wildlife management areas; $35 million for water farming; $25 million for beach restoration; $15 million for an agricultural project on the west side of Lake Okeechobee; and $800,000 for an increase in pay for Forest Service firefighters.

“There is some serious funding in there to solve some serious problems,” said subcommittee Chairman Ben Albritton, R-Wauchula. “We focused on the things that we think have to do with helping the environment, helping out ecosystems and providing for quality land management.”

The proposed spending plan is about $30 million more than state economists have projected will be available.

The Senate’s proposal for the Amendment 1 money will be released Thursday by the General Government Appropriations Subcommittee.

Sen. Alan Hays, a Umatilla Republican who is chairman of the subcommittee, said Tuesday he had only briefly seen the House proposal, but that he supports the idea of favoring land management over acquisitions.

“I think that’s a move in the right direction,” said Hays, who added that the Senate proposal may offer similar approaches.

The amendment, approved in November by 75 percent of voters, lays out for 20 years an increase in funding for land and water conservation.

The amendment requires 33 percent of the proceeds from a real-estate tax to go for land and water projects. The funding level is currently projected to generate $741 million in next year’s budget, more than $200 million above what lawmakers allocated for such uses in the current year.

Nearly $200 million of the House proposal falls under two categories — water resource development and fund shifts from the General Revenue Fund — that don’t fully indicate how that money will be used.

“That’s mystery money,” Draper said. “You might call that a reserve for lobbyist-driven water projects.”

More importantly, the budget is limited to the state’s springs and the area around Lake Okeechobee, he said.

“If you’re a voter from Tallahassee, outside the capital, or you’re in Miami, or in Orlando, this really doesn’t do anything for you,” Draper said.

House Speaker Steve Crisafulli, R-Merritt Island, disagreed, saying the money will get spread statewide to maintain lands the state already owns.

The House proposal addresses the Kissimmee River, some cleanup in the Indian River Lagoon, and includes the Keys wastewater plan, but doesn’t break down further local projects for purchase or management.

Noticeably absent is any indication that there will be funding to buy U.S. Sugar land south of Lake Okeechobee.

Some South Floridians have recently called for the state to complete a 2010 deal to acquire 46,800 acres from U.S. Sugar, of which 26,100 acres would be used for construction of the Everglades Agricultural Area reservoir, which would aid in the shifting of water now going east and west to the south.

The deal, estimated at $350 million, must be completed by Oct. 12 or Florida would have to buy an additional 157,000 acres to get the land for the reservoir.

Albritton noted that U.S. Sugar has recently soured on the deal.

“For there to be an agreement consummated, everyone has to want to do it and agree on a price, and I don’t think U.S. Sugar is interested in selling,” Albritton said.

As with most of the Amendment 1 spending plan, spending on local projects must still get hammered out through negotiations with the Senate later in the legislative session.

Janet Bowman of The Nature Conservancy said she was encouraged with the plan enhancing land management, increasing from $5 million to $25 million the annual funding for the Rural and Family Lands program, while putting $105 million into programs that could result in land acquisitions.

“It’s a good starting figure going into conference,” said Bowman

Gov. Rick Scott has offered his own spending plans, some of which have drawn criticism.

While touting a desire to provide funding on a recurring basis for Everglades restoration and springs maintenance, Scott during the upcoming fiscal year wants $150 million for the Everglades, of which $122 million would cover work already under way. He also wants lawmakers to allocate $50 million for springs and $178 million for debt service on bonds tied to the Florida Forever and Save Our Everglades programs. Another $20 million would go for land purchases and restoration of the Kissimmee River.

Scott has drawn criticism for his proposal to use $7.6 million for state park ranger wages and $63 million to cover operating expenses at water-management districts and the Department of Environmental Protection.

JIM TURNER|NEWS SERVICE OF FLORIDA|March 17, 2015|Copyright Colin Hackley

Obama Calls On Federal Agencies To Reduce Emissions 40 Percent By 2025

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama signed an executive order on Thursday committing the federal government to cutting its own emissions 40 percent by 2025 and pledging to increase the amount of renewable energy used by federal agencies to 30 percent.

The executive order builds on a previous administration directive to cut emissions from federal agencies 28 percent by 2020, compared with 2008 levels. “We are well on our way to meet that goal,” Brian Deese, senior adviser to the president, said in a call with reporters Thursday. “That’s what’s motivating us today to chart out a new and even more aggressive goal going forward.”

The administration is also setting a goal of cutting the per-mile emissions from the agencies’ vehicle fleet 30 percent, it said. It estimates the total commitment across the federal agencies will save taxpayers $18 billion — funds that won’t be spent on energy.

Christy Goldfuss, managing director of the Council on Environmental Quality, said that by the end of 2014, the federal government had cut emissions 17 percent since 2008, putting it well on the way to meeting Obama’s earlier goal. Much of that has come through energy efficiency improvements in federal buildings and with the installation of renewables.

As of the end of 2014, renewable energy accounted for 9 percent of the federal government’s energy use, and Thursday’s directive wants to increase that to 30 percent by 2025. The Department of Defense has set its own goal of deploying 3 gigawatts of solar energy on its installations around the world by 2025.

The federal government is the single largest energy user in the United States, Goldfuss said, with 360,000 buildings and 650,000 vehicles. “Not only is our footprint expansive, our impact is as well,” she said.

The administration also argued that the push to reduce emissions in the federal government has effects across the private sector as well. To that end, the administration also released a scorecard to track emissions from major federal contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing and General Dynamics, which the administration is also calling on to make reductions.

The White House estimates that with reductions from the agency and those of private suppliers, the administration can cut greenhouse gas emissions by 26 million metric tons in the next 10 years.

“These goals will make sure the federal government is leading by example and pushing the envelope on cutting emissions,” said Deese, adding that it will “demonstrate that we are going to stay on offense in pushing our clean energy and climate change objectives.”

Kate Sheppard|huffingtonpost.com|03/19/2015

PBS Newshour Zooms in on Piping Plover Efforts

Audubon scientists are banding Piping Plovers as they winter in the Bahamas to learn more about this tiny endangered bird.

It was only three years ago that researchers solved the mystery of where endangered Piping Plovers spend their winters, but already Audubon researchers are working, alongside Bahamas National Trust, to preserve the islands in the Bahamas these birds call home this time of year.

The small gray and white shorebird made it onto the endangered species list in 1986, when the population, once in the tens of thousands, dropped below 2,000 individuals. Today, the population has recovered to 8,000 birds, but the plover still faces threats, thanks to climate change, as rising seas might take over some of critical breeding grounds. Audubon’s Birds and Climate Change Report lists the Piping Plover as climate-endangered, meaning it might lose more than 50 percent of its current range by 2050, if global warming continues at its current pace. 

So what could help these vulnerable shorebirds? Protecting their winter habitat in Bahamas’ Joulter Cays is high on the list. A team of researchers led by Audubon and members of the International Alliances Program spent several weeks in the Bahamas this winter trying to learn more about the birds and develop ways to protect the critical habitat. They even managed to band 27 birds, with Bahamas-pink tags. 

Watch the video from PBS News.hour detailing the work: 

Department Of Interior Issues New Rules For Fracking On Public Lands

WASHINGTON — The Department of Interior released new rules for hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas on public lands in the United States on Friday, the first significant update to the regulations in three decades.

“Decades-old regulations don’t take into account current technology for hydraulic fracturing,” said Interior Sec. Sally Jewell in a call with reporters Friday. The new rules will require companies drilling on public lands to disclose the chemicals they are using to the Bureau of Land Management, will set higher standards for the storage of wastewater from the fracking process, and will require validation of well integrity.

There are 100,000 oil and gas wells on public lands across the U.S., according to the department, and 90 percent of those in operation use hydraulic fracturing, a process that uses a high-pressure stream of water, sand and chemicals to tap into oil and gas reserves. Friday’s final rule applies only to development on public lands, however, not to the much more prolific development of state and private land. The Bureau of Land Management oversees 756 million acres of public land across the country.

“It’s important that the public has confidence that it’s being done safely,” said Jewell. “I don’t think anybody would say it’s common sense to keep regulations in place that were created 30 years ago.”

Under the rules, companies drilling on public lands will need to disclose the chemicals they are using through FracFocus, an industry-sponsored website, and submit that information within 30 days of beginning the fracking operation. BLM Director Neil Kornze said that the rule does allow for “limited exceptions for disclosure” under trade secret laws, but that BLM will be able to access a listing of all chemicals in the event of a spill or other accident.

The Department of Interior said it received 1.5 million comments on the draft version of the rules, which were released in May 2013.

Complaints about the new rules came from all directions Friday. A group of five environmental organizations, including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Center for Biological Diversity, issued a statement calling the rules “toothless,” and argued that they give too much leeway for the further development of public lands in an era when climate change considerations should be pushing the U.S. away from fossil fuels.

Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.), ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement that the regulation “lets industry off the hook.” “Rather than raising the bar, the Bureau settled for the lowest common denominator … Half measures aren’t a realistic response to the situation we face today,” he said.

But industry backlash has been just as swift. The American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s leading trade organization, criticized the rules as “duplicative.” “Despite the renaissance on state and private lands, energy production on federal lands has fallen, and this rule is just one more barrier to growth,” said Erik Milito, API’s director of upstream and industry operations, in a statement.

The Independent Petroleum Association of America and Western Energy Alliance announced they were filing a lawsuit in the federal district court in Wyoming to block the rules within minutes of their release. Their complaint calls the rules “a reaction to unsubstantiated concerns.”

In the call with reporters, Jewell argued that the rules are good for industry as well as the public. “We really are upholding the public trust here,” said Jewell. “There’s a lot of fear, a lot of public concern, particularly about groundwater and the safety of water supplies … I think the industry recognizes that thoughtful regulation can help them, because it reassures the public that we’re protecting them.”

The rules go into effect 90 days after publication in the Federal Register.

Kate Sheppard|huffingtonpost.com|03/20/2015

Obama Signs Executive Order to Cut Government Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 40 Percent

“As part of his commitment to lead by example to curb the emissions that are driving climate change, today President Obama will issue an executive order that will cut the federal government’s greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent over the next decade from 2008 levels—saving taxpayers up to $18 billion in avoided energy costs—and increase the share of electricity the Federal Government consumes from renewable sources to 30 percent,” said a White House statement. “Complementing this effort, several major federal suppliers are announcing commitments to cut their own GHG emissions.”

The new actions and commitments are expected to reduce GHG emissions by 26 million metric tons from 2008 levels by 2025. The administration is also releasing its Federal Supplier Greenhouse Gas Management Scorecard where the public can track GHG emissions for all major federal suppliers and their progress in reducing them. Together, these suppliers receive more than 40 percent of all federal contract dollars, more than $187 billion dollars, with Lockheed Martin, which already has and discloses emissions targets, leading the list at more than $32 billion.

The government itself spends more than $445 billion on goods and services, making the impact of this executive order even greater.

“The President’s action today will build on the federal government’s significant progress in reducing emissions to drive further sustainability actions through the next decade,” according to the White House statement. “In addition to cutting emissions and increasing the use of renewable energy, the Executive Order outlines a number of additional measures to make the Federal Government’s operations more sustainable, efficient and energy-secure while saving taxpayer dollars.”

Those measures include making sure that 25 percent of their energy comes from renewable sources by 2025, reducing energy use in federal buildings by 2.5 percent a year and reducing water intensity in federal buildings by 2 percent a year in the next decade, and reducing per-mil GHG emissions from federal vehicle fleets by 30 percent by 2015, including increasing the percentage of zero-emission and plug-in hybrid vehicles.

“Earthjustice applauds President Obama for issuing an Executive Order today that aims to make a significant cut in carbon pollution—the pollution responsible for climate change—from the government sector,” said Abigail Dillen, Earthjustice’s vice president of litigation for Climate & Energy. “The President recognizes that the federal government can lead the way in expanding our use of clean, renewable energy, a key step on the path to end our nation’s unnecessary dependence on fossil fuels that harm our health and the environment.”

The administration also hosted a roundtable today to bring together some large government suppliers to talk about their GHG reduction targets or make public their first-ever commitments to such targets. The White House release a detailed fact sheet explaining the actions they intend to take.

The companies participating in today’s roundtable include IBM, GE, Honeywell, SRA International, Humana, CSC, AECOM, Northrup Gruman and Batelle, among others. All revealed their GHG emissions reduction targets and other sustainability goals. IBM, for instance, announced two new goals. The company said it would reduce carbon emissions from its energy use by 30 percent over 2005 levels by the end of 2020, a reduction of 20 percent over its previous goal. And it said that it would get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020 and that these will be purchases directly matched to its operations, not offsets. Other companies announced similar goals.

Though the President’s executive order is a step in the right direction, Greenpeace points out that a policy banning coal, oil and gas extraction on public lands would have an even bigger impact on the climate crisis.

“It’s good to see President Obama call for more renewable energy to reduce carbon pollution from the federal government’s operations, but his administration needs to get serious about the federal government’s much bigger carbon problem—fueling the climate crisis by giving away our coal, oil and gas from federal lands and waters,” said Greenpeace climate and energy campaign director Kelly Mitchell.

“President Obama and Interior Secretary Jewell can take immediate steps that would have a real impact: rejecting Shell’s plans to drill for oil in the Arctic and putting a moratorium on the sale of federal coal. We also need a comprehensive plan to address the broader problems of federal fossil fuels and climate change, but our land, water, and climate are threatened by fossil fuel companies and outdated federal rules right now, and these are two immediate steps the Obama administration could take.”

Earlier this week, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell delivered a speech calling for “an honest and open conversation” about the federal coal program and climate change. According to a Greenpeace report, last year the federal coal program leased 2.2 billion tons of taxpayer-owned coal during the Obama administration, unlocking 3.9 billion metric tons of carbon pollution. The report also found that the average price per ton for those coal leases was only $1.03, while each ton will cause damages estimated at between $22 and $237, using the federal government’s social cost of carbon estimates.

A new report today from the Center for American Progress and the Wilderness Society provides new data, including that, “Federal lands and waters could have accounted for 24 percent of all energy-related GHG emissions in the United States in 2012.”

Last June, President Obama and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency unveiled their historic Clean Power Plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. power plants—the country’s largest source of GHG emissions—cutting carbon emissions by 30 percent over 2005 levels by 2025.

Obama said then, “Right now, there are no national limits to the amount of carbon pollution that existing plants can pump into the air we breathe—none. We limit the amount of toxic chemicals like mercury, sulfur and arsenic that power plants put in our air and water. But they can dump unlimited amounts of carbon pollution into the air.”

His announcement today of the government’s own actions demonstrates the importance of such goals, a rebuke to the dozen states suing the federal government claiming that the Clean Power Plan is illegal and a burden to the states.

Senate panel deals second blow to U.S. Sugar buy

A Senate proposal on how to spend Amendment 1 dollars released Thursday funds springs, Everglades and beach restoration.

But the item Treasure Coast officials and several environmental groups hoped would be there is missing: money to buy 46,800 acres from U.S. Sugar Corp. to move Lake Okeechobee water south and help reduce discharges into the St. Lucie River.

There was little expectation lawmakers would include the purchase in their plan after leaders, such as House Speaker Steve Crisafulli, said they oppose the purchase and U.S. Sugar said it would be a “waste” of taxpayers’ money. A House proposal released Tuesday doesn’t buy the land either.

Also missing in the $714.1 million proposal unveiled by the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on General Government is increased money for preservation land acquisition under the Florida Forever program, which received only $2 million, an 84 percent cut from last year, said Will Abberger, campaign manager for Florida’s Water and Land Legacy, a coalition of environmental and civic groups that sponsored Amendment 1. Another $20 million buys land for Kissimmee River restoration.

Sen. Thad Altman, R-Rockledge, a committee member who represents northern Indian River County said the Senate plan contradicts what 75 percent of voters had in mind when they approved the constitutional amendment last year.

Matt Dixon|Isadora Rangel|March 19, 2015

Calls to Action

1. Protect the Southern Everglades and Florida Bay – here
2. Stop Monsanto’s attack on GMO labeling – here
3. Tell the Dept of Energy NO GE Trees or Crops for Energy – here
4. Protect our lungs against dangerous smog – here
5. Tell the Florida Legislature to buy critical land south of Lake Okeechobee – here
6. Tell Jeb Bush It’s Time to Stop Attacks on Science – here
7. Protect our national monuments, parks, and wilderness areas – here
8. Tell the Brazilian government to cancel misguided dam project – here
9. Tell Congress – Don’t Give Away Our National Forests – here
10. Say NO to corporate welfare for Big Oil and YES to fighting climate change – here
11. Ban Fracking on Public Lands – here

Birds and Butterflies

10 Plants for a Bird-Friendly Yard

Choose native plants like these to beautify your real estate and provide food for birds.

Looking to spruce up your yard this spring? Try growing more native plants – plants that naturally occur in the area where you live. Gardening with native plants has many benefits: They’re beautiful, they’re already adapted to your precipitation and soil conditions, and they don’t need artificial fertilizers or pesticides. Of course the biggest benefit might be that native plants are great for birds and other wildlife.

Native plants provide nectar for hummingbirds, butterflies, and bees. They provide nourishing seeds and irresistible fruits for your feathered neighbors, and they offer places to nest and shelter from harm. They’re also a critical part of the food chain—insects evolved to feed on native plants, and by and large, backyard birds raise their young on insects, explains Douglas Tallamy, the author of Bringing Nature Home. Take the Carolina Chickadee: A single clutch of four to six chicks will gobble up more than 9,000 caterpillars in the 16 days between when they hatch and when they leave the nest. So thriving insects mean thriving birds.

The key is to pick the right plants for your area. Here are 10 great plants to get you thinking about the possibilities—but remember, there are thousands of native plants out there (more resources below).

Native Flowering Plants:

Purple Coneflowers (Echinacea spp.) Coneflowers are a tried-and-true garden staple, and wildlife are drawn to them, too.
Birds that love them: These beautiful blooms attract butterflies and other pollinators during the summer and provide seeds for goldfinches and other birds in the fall.
Where they’re native: Some of these species, like Echinacea purpurea and Echinacea pallida, are great native plants to grow in the plains states. Coneflowers grow well most places, so check for the species native to your region.

Sunflowers (Helianthus spp.) Sunflowers may signify loyalty and longevity for people, but they mean food for many birds.
Birds that love them: Birds often use the sunflower seeds to fuel their long migrations.
Where they’re native: Helianthus ciliaris in the Southwest and central United States and Helianthus angustifolius in the eastern United States produce seeds in bulk.  

Milkweed (Asclepias spp.) Milkweed is best known for hosting monarch butterfly caterpillars, but they attract loads of insects that are great for birds, too. Bonus: the flowers are gorgeous.
Birds that love them: Some birds, like the American Goldfinch, use the fiber from the milkweed to spin nests for its chicks. Goldfinches, and other birds, also use the downy part of the seed to line their nests.
Where they’re native: It’s likely one or more species of milkweed is native to your area—try butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa) in hot dry areas, while swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) is great in wet areas or gardens.

Cardinal Flower (Lobelia cardinalis) The cardinal flower’s bright red petals resemble the flowing robes worn by Roman Catholic cardinals, after which it was named.
Birds that love them: While few insects can navigate the long tubular flowers, hummingbirds feast on the cardinal flower’s nectar with their elongated beaks.
Where they’re native: This moisture-loving plant is native across large portions of the country, including the East, Midwest, and Southwest.

Native Vines:

Trumpet Honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens)  One of the top most well-behaved vines to plant in your garden, the multitudes of red tubular flowers are magnets for hummingbirds.
Birds that love them: This vine’s nectar attracts hummingbirds while many birds like Purple Finches and Hermit Thrushes eat their fruit. During migration, Baltimore Orioles get to the nectar by eating the flowers.
Where they’re native: Trumpet honeysuckle grows natively in the northeast, southeast, and midwest portions of the United States. The sweetly scented Japanese honeysuckle is actually an exotic invasive—but if you swap it with native trumpet honeysuckle, you’ll attract plenty of birds.

Virginia Creeper (Parthenocissus quinqefolia) The Virginia creeper, also known as woodvine, may be best known for its similarity to poison ivy, but its leaves are harmless to your skin. While people may intentionally avoid it, many birds rely on its fruit during the winter.
Birds that love them: It’s a key food source for fruit-eating birds, such as mockingbirds, nuthatches, woodpeckers and blue jays.
Where they’re native: Parthenocissus vitacea, a related species known as thicket creeper, is native to the American West while Parthenocissus quinqefolia can be found in the Great Plains and eastern United States.

Native Shrubs:

Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis) Showy flowers and fruit make buttonbush a popular choice in native gardens and along pond shores.
Birds that love them: In addition to beautifying a pond, they also provide seeds for ducks and other waterfowl. Their magnificent flowers also attract butterflies—and other pollinators.
Where they’re native: The buttonbush, Cephalanthus occidentalis, is native to the wetlands of California and the eastern half of the United States.  

Elberberry (Sambucus canadensis) Elderberry is a versatile plant that has been used to make dye and medicine by people across the United States, as well as being a showy shrub for the landscape.
Birds that love them: Its bright dark blue fruits (which we use for jam) provide food for many birds within its range, including the Brown Thrasher and Red-eyed Vireo, and dozens of other birds.
Where they’re native: Sambucus canadensis is native to most of the eastern United States, while red elderberry (Sambucus racemosa) is found in most states except for those south of Nebraska and those along the Gulf of Mexico.

Native Trees:

Oak (Quercus spp.) From southern live oaks to California black oaks, these large beautiful trees are a favorite for many people across the country—not to mention the great summer shade they provide. These trees are also an integral part of the food chain, so planting just one really helps your yard’s diversity.
Birds that love them: Similarly, many species of birds use the cavities and crooks of these trees for nesting and shelter. Birds are also drawn to the abundance of insects and acorns that are found on oaks—to learn more, check out Doug Tallamy’s work.
Where they’re native: If you want to plant an oak, be sure to plant one native to your area, such as the shumard oak in the Southeast or the Oregon white oak in the Pacific Northwest.

Dogwoods (Cornus spp.) Nothing says spring quite like a dogwood full of newly-bloomed flowers.
Birds that love them: Cardinals, titmice, and bluebirds all dine on the fleshy fruit of dogwood trees.
Where they’re native: If you live in the Pacific Northwest, you can grow native Cornus nuttallii and for those in the eastern United States, choose either the Cornus alternifolia or the Cornus florida.

By incorporating native plants into your landscape, you’re creating a sanctuary that benefits wildlife.

The 10 plants listed are a great starting point—they’re easy to grow, they’re great for birds, and most can be found at nurseries. Check your local Audubon Center or Native Plant Society for specific native plant sales, for these and a larger selection of the native plant palette!  

Once you’ve mastered the basics, here are a few resources to take you to the next step:

Online resources:

How to Buy Native Plants
Why Native Plants Matter
Plant Native
Wildflower Suppliers
Bringing Nature Home

Books:

Bringing Nature Home…Doug Tallamy
The Living Landscape….Doug Tallamy and Rick Darke
The American Woodland Garden….Rick Darke
Gardening and Propagating Wildflowers, Growing and Propagating Native Trees and Shrubs….William Cullina

Greg Mably|Mar 13, 2015|Additional reporting by Shannon Palus and Tessa Stuart.

Bird Flu Confirmed Further East

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has confirmed a deadly strain of avian flu further east than before, leaving poultry producers to worry that the disease could spread to high production states east of the Mississippi.

Wild birds can carry influenza with them as they migrate and while the disease doesn’t harm them, it can devastate commercial flocks. It destroyed a turkey flock last month at a farm in Minnesota, before turning up in Missouri and Arkansas.

The vast majority of turkeys and chickens in the U.S. are raised indoors. In states like Georgia, the country’s leading producer of broilers, their water source usually is a well, rather than pond or other open water.

Still, the disease obviously can spread despite those biosecurity measures. 

Minnesota confirmed its outbreak March 4, the first H5N2 found in the Mississippi flyway, a major bird migration route. The Missouri and Arkansas cases were confirmed last week week. Experts can’t know for sure whether the disease was spread by migrating birds – the sites in Minnesota, Missouri and Arkansas all share the Mississippi Flyway – or by workers who inadvertently carried the disease away from the farm. But producers are tightening biosecurity measures meant to keep the disease from spreading.

Other recent outbreaks of highly pathogenic strains in commercial turkey and chicken farms, backyard flocks and wild birds were along the Northwest’s Pacific Flyway. The first of those cases was confirmed at a mixed poultry farm in Oregon in December; since then nine other cases have been confirmed along the Pacific Flyway.

While the poultry industry has a strong program for testing and containing any influenza, states where a case is confirmed could take a financial hit. Dozens of countries have banned poultry imports from affected states.

People can contract some strains of avian influenza, but only by handling animals or eating undercooked meat.

Minnesota, Missouri and Arkansas followed rapid response protocols from the federal government and poultry industry. Once H5N2 was confirmed at the farms, all birds were killed and the farms within six miles were quarantined. Tests at nearby farms found no signs of other infected flocks.

“At least right now we’re breathing a little easier,” Missouri Department of Agriculture Director Richard Fordyce said.

Allison Floyd|March 16th, 2015

MILKWEED BUTTERFLIES OF NORTH AMERICA

While late-season ice storms seem to have cancelled spring in some parts of the U.S., the monarch butterflies know that the seasons are changing. Soon they will leave their winter roosts in the oyamel firs of Mexico and return to their breeding grounds, starting in Texas. As milkweed specialists — while adults nectar on a variety of flowers, their larvae only eat plants in the genus Asclepias — their future relies on finding milkweeds along the way.

But monarchs aren’t the only milkweed butterfly. There are four butterflies that occur in North America and share the same reliance on milkweed for their caterpillars. One, the Caribbean queen (Danaus cleophile), can be found only on the islands of Hispaniola and Jamaica. The other three, the monarch (Danaus plexippus), queen (Danaus gilippus), and soldier (Danaus eresimus), are more widespread and will be encountered on the continental mainland. Monarchs can be found across much of North America, while queens have a more southern distribution. The queen’s range starts in Central America and ends in the American southwest. The soldier butterfly’s heartland is smaller, occupying northern Mexico and the subtropical U.S. It’s possible to see all three species side by side in the southernmost parts of Texas and Florida, but even then, soldiers are the least common.

Because queens, soldiers, and monarchs are all very similar in appearance, it is important to be wise to their field markings before attempting to track them down. We have some tips to help you in your search.

Monarch Butterfly

Flashy and readily spotted, monarch butterflies can be found from South America to Canada, although in much smaller numbers recently due to habitat loss in much of North America. They are the only milkweed butterfly with a confirmed long-distance migration, and are much larger than both queens and soldiers. Easily distinguished by the combination of their size and bright orange coloration; black veins contrast boldly against orange on both upper and lower sides of their wings.

Queen Butterfly

Queen butterflies are smaller, more brown than orange, and lack the contrasting black venation visible on monarchs’ dorsal (top) side. They have two lines of white dots on the dorsal side of their forewing (leading wing), versus the single line observed in soldiers. Overall, their color is darker and duller than the monarch’s. Queens are quite common in the parts of southern Texas visited by Xerces staff, and are much more frequently found than monarchs along the coast there. They are more of a southwestern species.

Soldier Butterfly

Distinguishing between queen and soldier butterflies is more difficult than separating the two from the monarch, their larger cousin. Soldier butterflies are encountered less frequently than the other two — they are a veritable four-leaf clover in the field! Sometimes straying into southern Arizona, they primarily inhabit the subtropical areas of the U.S. and northern Mexico. They are differentiated from queens by the single (rather than double) line of white dots on their forewings, and have a dusky, dark patch in the middle of their hindwing. Overall, soldiers are a rich shade of chestnut.

Good luck in your search for butterflies this spring, and keep your eyes peeled for monarchs as they spread northwards over the next few months!

   Invasive species

Feds Ban Imports on Four Large Constrictor Snakes

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has just made it illegal to import four kinds of nonnative constrictor snakes — or sell them across state lines — by adding them to the list of “injurious” wildlife under a law called the Lacey Act. This should prevent widespread introduction of these exotic animals, which can be extremely destructive to U.S. ecosystems and our own native species.

In 2010 scientists identified nine snakes as posing an unacceptable risk of establishing invasive populations; two years later the agency said four of those species would be listed as “injurious”: Burmese pythons, yellow anacondas, and northern and southern African pythons. And now the Service has announced that it will list four of the remaining five snakes under the Lacey Act — the reticulated python, DeSchauensee’s anaconda, green anaconda and Beni anaconda.

Last summer the Center for Biological Diversity posed rule that identified numerous scientific studies documenting the risk posed by exotic constrictor snakes. About 30,000 Center supporters backed our efforts, writing to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell to ask that the remaining snakes be listed as injurious. The Center — and the snakes that won’t be trafficked — thank you.

Read more in The New York Times.

Endangered Species

Conservationists Fight to Give Manatees Some Space From Us

Manatee viewing is a popular activity in Florida’s coastal waters, but our desire to get all up close and personal with them is causing the gentle giants unnecessary harm.

That’s the premise behind the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility’s (PEER) recent announcement that it intends to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) for not providing enough protection to manatees, something they say is in violation of the Endangered Species Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Refuge Administration Act.

Manatees were granted federal protection as endangered species decades ago, but even though their numbers have slightly rebounded they still face a number of threats: from boat strikes to susceptibility to sudden cold spells, and in addition to red tides which were responsible for killing a record number of manatees in 2013.

Under any other circumstance engaging with an endangered species would be off limits, but instead of acting to prevent harm or harassment under the laws intended to protect manatees, the FWS continues to issue permits to tourist operations that allow people to swim and interact with them at Florida’s Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge and other areas.

Now a growing number of tourists who want to enjoy close encounters through these “swim with” programs are encroaching on what limited habitat manatees have left. According to PEER’s notice, last year alone 265,000 visitors went to the Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge–a refuge that was set up specifically to provide protection for manatees.

Even though people might not be intending to cause any harm, our continued and overwhelming presence (see video) is causing a number of problems from altering their behaviors and hindering their ability to communicate with each other, to causing them to flee when they are disturbed, which could send them into areas that are dangerously cold (see video).

“Five years ago, we served a similar notice but agreed to hold off suing because the Service promised to make improvements,” PEER Counsel Laura Dumais said in a statement. “In the succeeding years, the problems have only gotten worse and it has become clear that the Service has no intention of taking meaningful corrective action.”

The FWS did recently announce some changes, but PEER argues they’re not strong enough to provide meaningful protection. The organization isn’t trying to shut down opportunities to see manatees, or tourism in manatee hotspots, but it does want to see more respectful activities that offer a hands-off approach.

“People do not need to pet manatees to learn about or appreciate them,” said Dumais. “We aim to ensure that the Service can no longer avoid addressing this widespread, obvious, and illegal harassment of endangered marine mammals.”

According to a statement, the goals of the potential lawsuit, which is being supported by residents and eco-tourism professionals, are to ban “swim-with” programs and get a 10-foot buffer between manatees and us put in place across the state, to expand no-human-access sanctuary areas so that manatees would have unimpeded access to Crystal Springs and Three Sisters Springs throughout the winter, and to get all of Kings Bay, Three Sisters Springs and Homosassa Springs designated as critical manatee habitat.

The FWS now has 60-days to respond before PEER can move forward. Until then, we can be mindful that these lovable “sea cows” rely on warm water springs for their survival and don’t have any other options if they need to get away, but we have the option to respect them and their habitat and we should if we don’t want to see them disappear forever.

Alicia Graef|March 14, 2015

FWC News Release: Biologists tally a record high manatee count ‏

Photos available on FWC’s Flickr site: https://flic.kr/s/aHsk8cSyyN

Suggested Tweet: Break in cold spells results in record high #manatee count by @MyFWC and partners! http://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/FLFFWCC/bulletins/f834e7 #Florida

Biologists tally a record high manatee count

Warm temperatures and clear, sunny days between some of the coldest weather of the year assisted FWC biologists and partners in counting an all-time high number of manatees during this year’s statewide aerial survey.

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) reported a preliminary count of 6,063 manatees statewide. During the February count, a team of 20 observers from 11 organizations counted 3,333 manatees on Florida’s east coast and 2,730 on the west coast of the state. This year’s synoptic survey count exceeded the previous high count for 2010 by almost 1,000 animals.

“Manatees used warm-water sites and other winter habitat areas to cope with a strong cold front that recently moved through the region,” said FWC biologist Holly Edwards. “In many of the regions surveyed, warm, sunny weather caused manatees to rest at the water’s surface, which facilitated our efforts to count them in these areas. Calm waters and high visibility also contributed to the high count.”

“We were very fortunate to have near-optimal conditions for our survey this year,” said FWRI Director Gil McRae. “The high count this year is especially encouraging, given the large-scale mortality events that resulted in over 800 deaths in 2013.”

Aerial surveys are conducted annually, weather permitting, to provide researchers with a count of manatees visible in Florida waters at the time of the survey. Because researchers have no way to estimate the number of manatees that were not visible during these surveys, scientists consider these results a minimum count of the statewide population. While this year’s results do not mean that the manatee population grew by nearly 1,000 animals in a single year, they do tell researchers there are at least 6,000 manatees in Florida waters.

“Counting this many manatees is wonderful news,” said FWC Chairman Richard Corbett. “The high count this year shows that our long-term conservation efforts are working.”

You can show your support for manatees by purchasing a manatee license plate at BuyaPlate.com and a manatee decal at MyFWC.com/ManateeSeaTurtleDecals. Funds from the license plate and decal support manatee research and conservation.

For more information about manatees and synoptic surveys, visit MyFWC.com/Research, click “Research,” then “Florida Manatee.”

To report a dead or distressed manatee, call the FWC Wildlife Alert Hotline at 888-404-FWCC (3922).

Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission|3/16/15

Bats are harmed rather than helped by street lights

The bright lights of London could be affecting bats’ navigation and their success at feeding

New research at the University of Exeter and Bat Conservation Ireland has given the lie to the popular belief that streetlights are attractive to our common bat species because of the insect life they attract.

The study found that in fact bat activity was lower in street-lit areas than in dark locations with similar habitat.  And, in fact, the scientists have concluded bright lights are having a detrimental effect on bats.

Despite frequently being depicted as blind, bats have good eyesight that is adapted for low light conditions. 

Dr Fiona Mathews from the University of Exeter says: “When we walk out of a lit house into the dark, it takes a while for our eyes to adapt to the darkness. 

“The same is true in bats – they are dazzled by bright light and it takes time for their eyes to re-adjust.   This could affect their ability to navigate.   

“People rarely see bats, and when they do it is usually because they are silhouetted by a light. 

“Because clouds of insects accumulate around lights, there has been an assumption that the bats were getting an easy lunch. 

“However, it seems that their ability to hunt insects is reduced in the light.  So although a bat may be seen flying round and round a streetlamp, it may actually be struggling to catch anything.” 

The findings have important implications for conservation, overturning the previous assumption that common bats benefited from artificial lights for feeding.

The research, published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, found that the activity of soprano pipistrelle, noctule and serotine bats was similar or lower in areas with street lighting compared to dark areas.  

The only species for which lighting appeared favourable was Leisler’s bat, a species common in Ireland but rare in Britain.

An increase in the activity of our most common bat, the common pipistrelle, was only seen in locations where there was also a good amount of shelter from trees or hedgerows. 

Dr Mathews says: “What our work shows is that they are actually usually just as active, if not more so, in adjacent dark areas. 

“We already knew that lighting was bad news for rare species such as horseshoe bats.  Now we have demonstrated that, for the common species which are of vital importance to our ecosystem, lighting is not helpful.

“Over recent decades, the number of streetlights, and the brightness of lighting, has grown enormously.  We also use increasingly powerful lights to illuminate outdoor areas around our homes. 

“We urgently need to reverse this trend.”

The research analysed large-scale surveys conducted in Britain and Ireland, involving more than 265,000 bat calls at over 600 locations. 

The links between lighting and bats were explored at several spatial scales including car-surveys conducted by volunteers across Ireland, to shorter surveys conducted by bicycle, and detailed monitoring over multiple nights at specific sites. 

Dr Niamh Roche of Bat Conservation Ireland commented: “Leisler’s bat is considered very special in Ireland since its population here is of international importance, so it is good to know that this species at least may not be so negatively impacted by street lighting.

“Nonetheless, we are extremely concerned that, with just one out of our nine Irish species showing a positive association with street lighting, much more needs to be done to lessen negative impacts of lighting. 

“This can be achieved by considering lighting scheme designs more thoroughly from the planning stage.”

Mystery surge in starving sea lion pups washing up on Californian shores, as rescue centers struggle to cope with weight of numbers

Rescue centers are struggling to cope with a mystery surge in the numbers of starving sea lion pups which have washed up on Californian shores since January.

More than 1,100 starving and sick pups have been rescued from California’s beaches, as well as public bathrooms, behind buildings and along railroad tracks since the beginning of the year.

The number is almost five times higher than the 250 pups which would usually be expected in the key monitoring period between January and April – and no one knows why. 

Crisis: More than 1,100 sick or starving sea lion pups have washed up on Californian shores this year

• More than 1,100 starving or sick sea lion pups rescued  since January
• Rescue centers would usually expect to only see about 250 in the period
• Situation so dire California’s SeaWorld has suspended its sea lion show
• Famous attraction treating 400 pups in two specially constructed pools
• Rising sea temperatures could be one cause of the surge in numbers

It’s not unusual to have some sea lions wash up each spring as the pups leave their mothers, but Keith A. Matassa, executive director at the Pacific Marine Mammal Center, said they started getting calls in December.

His center, in Laguna Beach, is currently rehabilitating 115 sea lion pups.

On a recent day, over the course of two hours, five suffering animals came in. One was brought in by a police officer, three more came in with an animal control team and the fifth was called in by a couple walking along beach.

The last pup, at almost a year old, weighed just 23 pounds – a third of what it should have. It was so ill, staff had no choice but to put it down.

Matassa explained pups that should be gaining 20 to 40 pounds in a two-month period have put on just two pounds.

‘These animals are coming in really desperate. They’re at the end of life. They’re in a crisis … and not all animals are going to make it,’ he said.

An hour down the coast, the situation is so bad that SeaWorld, in San Diego, suspended its sea lion show so it can focus on rescue efforts.

The theme park has treated 400 pups – more than twice the number it would care for in a typical year – and constructed two temporary pools to house them.

Scientists aren’t sure what’s causing the crisis, but suspect that warmer waters from this winter’s mild El Nino weather pattern are impacting the sea lion birthing grounds along the Channel Islands off the Southern California coast.

The warm water is likely pushing prime sea lion foods – market squid, sardines and anchovies – further north, forcing the mothers to abandon their pups for up to eight days at a time in search of sustenance.

The pups, scientists believe, are weaning themselves early out of desperation and setting out on their own despite being underweight and ill-prepared to hunt.

‘They’re leaving with a very low tank of gas and when they get over here, they’re showing up on the beach basically … starving to death,’ said Justin Viezbicke, a coordinator with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s California Stranding Network.

For rescue centers like Pacific Marine Mammal, that translates into round-the-clock, back-breaking work for dozens of volunteers who’ve arrived from all over the U.S. to help.

The center in one of Southern California’s premiere beach communities has rescued more than 213 pups since the beginning of the year and has treated ones that weighed as little as 14 pounds at eight-months-old.

Volunteers have been arriving from all over the U.S. to help with the escalating crisis.

Crates holding animals awaiting assessment are crammed into every corner, including the laundry room, as those already housed in communal pens barked and bleated in a deafening racket as mealtime approached.

Each incoming pup has its temperature taken and is weighed, measured and given a blood sugar test before the team decides if they can save it.

Most of them are so weak they barely resist. 

Those that make the cut are tube-fed a gruel of pureed herring, Pedialyte, vitamins and milk three or four times a day after starting out with a simple broth of hydrating fluids and dextrose.

Those that graduate to whole fish are playfully called ‘feeders’ and those that can once more compete for fish tossed into a pool are called ‘fighters.’

The goal is to get the pups strong enough to swim free again – but the volunteers who nurse them back to health may never know if they make it in the wild.

Only a handful will be fitted with expensive tracking devices. The rest are tagged with a number and fall off the radar unless they are rescued again.

‘The tricky part is we’re putting them back into the same environment that they just came from. And that’s going to be a challenge for them,’ Viezbicke said. 

Flora Drury|For Mailonline|16 March 2015

How Tchimpounga Is Saving Wild Chimpanzees ‏

The Jane Goodall Institute’s (JGI) Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Rehabilitation Center in the Republic of the Congo has provided lifetime care for orphaned and rescued chimpanzees for over 20 years.

After two decades, JGI is now caring for over 150 chimpanzees in a sanctuary originally designed to hold only 30. Luckily, our recent island expansion project will create room for even more chimpanzees in need of rescue.

However, Tchimpounga has an even greater part to play in chimpanzee conservation rather than simply acting as a home for these vulnerable chimpanzees; specifically in regard to curbing the illegal bushmeat and exotic pet trades. Both of these markets for chimpanzees, alive and deceased, are contributing to the decimation of wild chimp populations.
To find out more about how Tchimpounga aids chimpanzee conservation efforts, check out JGI’s Chimpanzee Blog!

State continues to follow reckless path on wolves

After being given a do-over on managing the state’s small wolf population, Michigan politicians and bureaucrats are following a familiar path of reckless behavior with their effort to restore trophy hunting of the now-endangered animals.

Last November, Michigan voters sent policymakers a strong message by defeating Proposal 1 (naming wolves as a game species) and Proposal 2 (giving the politically appointed Natural Resources Commission the power to decide which species can be hunted). Proposal 2 was rejected in 69 of Michigan’s 83 counties and in all 15 congressional districts.

Six weeks later, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell restored federal protection (after a three-year hiatus) for the Great Lakes gray wolves under the Endangered Species Act, while chastising wildlife managers in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota for killing more than 1,500 wolves in “virtually unregulated” hunting and trapping.

The judge’s decision bans further wolf hunting and trapping in those three states for the foreseeable future. It also prohibits killing problem wolves in Michigan and Wisconsin that threaten livestock or domestic animals.

There is a pathway forward and a middle-ground on this controversial issue. The Humane Society of the United States and 21 other animal protection and conservation groups, including the Detroit Zoo and Detroit Audubon Society, have petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to “downlist” gray wolves from endangered to threatened. This would retain federal protections for wolves, but also provide more flexible management so wildlife officials could kill or remove the occasional problem wolf.

Seventy-nine members of Congress sent a letter to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell urging her to support the petition. And more than 50 world renowned wildlife biologists and scientists, including nine from Michigan, sent a letter to Congress urging members to oppose stripping federal protections from wolves. Presented with a reasonable compromise that would respect the will of Michigan voters who wanted wolf protection, but also provide practical assistance to farmers in the U.P. who are dealing with wolf conflicts, Michigan politicians turned a blind eye to it.

Sen. Tom Casperson, the state’s leading wolf hunt supporter, convinced his fellow Republicans to approve a resolution, full of inaccuracies and distortions, urging Congress to remove g ray wolves from the Endangered Species Act. Apparently the Upper Peninsula lawmaker’s cronies forgot about his five-minute apology speech in November 2013 for fabricating a story about wolves appearing “multiple times in the backyard of a daycare center” in the text of a similar resolution he authored in 2011.

T he Michigan Department of Natural Resources filed an appeal of the federal court ruling. DNR Director Keith Creagh said, “Returning wolf management to wildlife professionals … is critical to retaining a recovered, healthy and socially-accepted wolf population in our state” — conveniently forgetting the overwhelming vote of the people rejecting wolf hunting.

It’s obvious that Sen. Casperson and Director Creagh didn’t consult Michigan’s 12 federally recognized Indian tribes, who have the most experience in co-existing with wolves. The United Tribes of Michigan recently adopted a resolution opposing the removal of federal protections for wolves and calling on people to recognize their historical and ecological significance.

To these Native Americans, wolves are sacred animals who taught their ancestors the importance of families and how to hunt and forage for food.

It’s unfortunate our state officials thumb their noses at Michigan voters, reject practical compromises and problem solving on this issue and ignore wildlife experts, all in the name of trophy hunting and trapping a shy animal that is just beginning to recover from near extermination.

Jill Fritz|director|Keep Michigan Wolves Protected

How Honey Bees Can Alleviate World Hunger

Humans will miss more than the honey if bee die-offs continue

Bees have a lot going against them, most notably colony-collapse disorder, which many researchers now believe is the result of widespread use of neonicotinoid pesticides. The great bee die-off caused honey production in the U.S. to decline by one-third between 2000 and 2011. But what would a life without bees actually look like?

Wild and managed pollinators like honey bees are essential to the production of 75 percent of the 115 major global crops. Take a moment and consider your life without another:

Avocado

Plum

Peach

Apricot

Coconut

Melon

Pumpkin

No juicy peaches in the summer time. No apricot marmalade on toast. No pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving. These are the fruits that are especially reliant on pollination. Eliminate the bees, and crop yields dwindle. To make matters worse, these scrumptious plants are the primary source of vitamin A, iron and folate for billions of people around the world, according to a new study by the Royal Society. Declines in pollinator populations could mean more than just shrunken produce departments—it’s an issue of global malnutrition.

Areas already suffering from poor nutrition also happen to be areas dependent on bees and wild insects to pollinate their main food crops—talk about bad luck. Typically, it’s poor, tropical areas that are hit hardest. Bee population’s decline, fruit production drops, farmers are malnourished and less food is produced. “It’s a vicious cycle,” said Megan Mueller, the nutrition consultant who worked on the study. “It’s happening in areas that are already poverty stricken.”

Vitamin A deficiency, which can lead to blindness, is 30 percent more common in pollinator-dependent areas, such as Southeast Asia. Iron deficiency, particularly among pregnant women, is 15 percent more common in these areas and can lead to still-births and birth defects.

“A lot of people say, ‘Why can’t you just take a vitamin?’” said Emily Dobek, analyst for the study. Fresh fruits, such as mangoes, deliver not only vitamins, but also fiber and other nutrients. And vulnerable communities simply don’t have access to supplements—they eat what they grow.

“These are the people who have the least amount of flexibility and purchasing power,” said Becky Chaplin-Kramer, lead researcher of the study. They can’t just go to the store. Communities could plant more pollinator-independent crops like carrots, corn and potatoes, but in most places this isn’t as simple as it seems. “It has to do with culture, and people not wanting to give up their pumpkins,” said Chaplin-Kramer.

Communities that rely on native and traditional crops for their cuisine are reluctant to switch what they grow.

“We’re not going to feed the world on rice and corn alone,” Dobek said.

The problem is sticky with cultural complexity and regional economics. But the answer is tiny: bees. Beekeeping directly helps stabilize crop production. Managed colonies also strengthen wild pollinator populations by providing competition.

Chaplin-Kramer and Dobeck think more policy makers should regard bee conservation as an issue of environmental justice. Saving bees, whether by reducing pesticide use or donning a veil and starting a hive, unites conservation and public health strategies; and the benefits could be global.

Mikey Jane Moran|3/19/15

Wood Bison, North America’s Largest Land Mammal, Will Soon Return To Alaskan Wilderness

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Alaska wildlife officials are preparing to release North America’s largest land mammal into its native U.S. habitat for the first time in more than a century.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game on Sunday plans to begin moving wood bison from a conservation center south of Anchorage to the village of Shageluk, the staging area for the animals’ release into the Innoko Flats about 350 miles southwest of Fairbanks.

A hundred wood bison will be released after they’re acclimated in a few weeks.

“This has been an incredibly long project — 23 years in the making,” biologist Cathie Harms said. “To say we’re excited is an understatement.”

Wood bison are the larger of two subspecies of American bison but did not roam in Lower 48 states. The smaller subspecies are plains bison, which were not native to Alaska but were introduced to the state in 1928, where they have thrived.

Bull wood bison weigh 2,000 pounds and stand 6-feet-tall at the shoulder. They feed on grasses, sedges and forbs and wider variety of other plants, including Alaska’s abundant willow.

Wood bison flourished for thousands of years in Alaska but disappeared in the 1800s or early 1900s. No one knows why.

The state had a strong interest in reintroduction as a source of food for subsistence hunters and as a game animal for sport hunting, but plans ran into a political snag.

In 2008, the state imported 53 wood bison from a national park in Canada, adding to a smaller herd that was held at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center in Portage.

However, wood bison are a threatened species and state officials worried that the federal government would designate their new home in the wild as critical habitat, requiring consultation with federal agencies before oil and gas drilling or other development could occur.

The problems were worked out. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2013 declared that wood bison reintroduced in Alaska would be considered an experimental population not essential to the continued existence of the species. Wood bison will be managed by state wildlife officials and exempt from certain restrictions in the Endangered Species Act.

The bison will be flown in 20-foot containers that can hold seven adult cows in individual stalls or up to 17 younger bison. Two containers will be trucked Sunday to Anchorage and flown by commercial carrier for the hour flight to Shageluk. A C-130 from Lynden Air Cargo, one of the multiple corporate sponsors involved, can carry two containers each flight.

Half the initial herd moved will be adult cows. About 25 are pregnant.

The rest of the initial herd will be juveniles 2 years old or younger. Bulls will be barged to the area in summer.

The Fish and Game Department does not expect predators to be a problem. Canada has reintroduced five herds, Harms said.

“Wolves don’t seem to know what to do with them,” she said, and Alaska did not record a bear or a wolf killing a plains bison until nearly 30 years after they were introduced 87 years ago.

The state hopes to complete the flights by Tuesday but will proceed slowly if there are snags. Wood bison are very large, very powerful wild animals, Harms said.

“We’re making them do something they don’t want to do,” she said. “Calming agents” will be available to sedate bison if needed.

Once in Shageluk, the bison will be kept in pens several acres large before release in two or three weeks.

“When they’re in good shape, that’s when we’re going to start opening the door and letting them go,” Harms said.

DAN JOLING||03/20/2015

Cornwall Has its First Pine Marten Sighting in Over 50 Years

A pine marten was recorded in West Country, an area where this animal was presumed as extinct, by a student with a night-vision camera. This is the first pine marten sighting in over fifty years.

The Cornwall student, Jack Merritt, had set up the camera near his home in Bude, and that is how he was able to spot the pine marten.

Merritt said of his rare pine marten sighting: “I knew I had captured something different. I had no idea of its significance to start with. I spoke to a few friends who had some suggestions but decided to send it to someone who may have a better idea of what it was all about.”

Merritt then sent the footage to a wildlife expert, Derek Gow, based out of Devon, to get the scoop on this infrequently seen critter, and that is when the little animal’s identity was revealed to him. It is clear that Merritt has caught the attention and excitement of the wild animal guru.

“It’s amazing. It’s definitely a pine marten,” said Gow. The wildlife specialist also expressed that he has no idea where it came from, but thinks that perhaps someone had deliberately moved pine martens from Scotland and released them in Cornwall. Gow explains, “That part of Cornwall is well suited for them – remote and very scrubby. People sometimes think they need coniferous forests but they don’t – that area would be fine for them.”

Pine martens are still found in Scotland, and it is believed that there are a few groups of them in the far north of England. The pine marten has been extinct in this particular southern Britain region and hasn’t been seen here since the 1960s. Pine martens belong to the mustelid category, the same family as mink, otter, badger, wolverine and weasel. They only weigh between one to three pounds, and primarily eat voles, but have also been known to eat mice, birds, flying squirrels, reptiles, rabbits, honey, insects, conifer seeds, worms, eggs and even berries.

Spottings like this one highlight the amazing progress that we’ve made in areas of preserving extinct and diminished population animals. This pine marten sighting can also be thought of as a hopeful sign that conservation is working. Due to wildlife conservation efforts, we are actually seeing endangered species numbers go up, when they were once dwindling. We’ve seen this recently, with some examples being the Indian tigers, the big cat populations in the eastern Serengeti, and interestingly with the beaver population led by Gow himself. Gow’s successful campaign allowed the West Country beavers to stay and thrive; they are now back when they were once considered extinct in the area.

We must continue to aggressively conserve and protect wildlife, eliminating illegal hunting, poaching and all other obstacles that these animals face. Eliminating criminal activity against these animals and also participating in wildlife conservation in an assertive way might mean that we’ll see a lot more of these promising cases.

Catherine Gill|March 19, 2015

Wild & Weird

Seattle Girl Befriends Neighborhood Crows, Making Bird Lovers Everywhere Jealous

In return for food, Gabi Mann gets some bizarre gifts from her feathered allies.

What if we could be friends with wild birds? Seattle-native Gabi Mann seems to have achieved that goal with one of the smartest species on the planet: the American Crow. Never mind that she’s only 8-years old. This imaginative kid has a unique relationship with her neighborhood corvids, as told in a story by the BBC News Magazine.

It all started two years ago, when Gabi began feeding local flocks of crows. At first it was haphazard—a dropped chicken nugget here, a crumb from a sandwich there. But the crows took notice, and soon enough Gabi’s hospitality went from being accidental to intentional. These days, Gabi’s crows perch nearby whenever she’s outside, hoping for a feast or even just a morsel. But the spirit of giving inhabits both the girl and the beast. Soon enough, the crows were showering Gabi with all sorts of loot.

Every day, Gabi leaves out food (mostly peanuts, which are a big hit) in the backyard for her groupies. In return, they leave her gifts—shiny baubles like polished sea-glass, and odder trinkets, like a rusty screw or tube of chapstick. In what could have been a coincidence or a lovely curiosity, the crows promptly returned a lens cap that Gabi had lost while taking some photographs (of a bird, naturally) in an alleyway. And so the plot thickened.

Crows, and all other members of the corvid family (which also includes jays, magpies, and ravens), are renowned for their intelligence. They’re known to be prodigious tool-users, and are more adept with tools than all other animals short of the great apes. Even their social behavior mirrors ours in some ways; they’ve been observed performing funeral rites for their deceased members of their murder (it’s the name for a group of crows—not sinister at all!).

Gift-giving isn’t uncommon among crows; John Marzluff, a professor of wildlife science at the University of Washington who studies the relationship between crows and people, said in an interview with the BBC, “I can’t say they always will [give presents], but I have seen an awful lot of things crows have brought people.” (Dead birds are one grisly example.) Sometimes those gifts aren’t entirely welcome: Gabi’s mother once had to throw out a rotting crab claw that the crows had so lovingly bestowed upon her daughter. But Gabi doesn’t seem to be perturbed by the oddities she receives; she keeps all her gifts carefully labeled and stored, treasuring them like precious jewels. “You may take a few close looks,” she said to the BBC reporter, “but don’t touch.”

Dan Nosowitz|Mar 02, 2015

Everglades

Everglades rescue plan lags far behind schedule

At halfway point, restoration projects for vast wetlands continue to languish

WASHINGTON – Fifteen years ago, officials in Florida and Washington announced a bold partnership to restore the Everglades by 2030. Today, with that ambitious effort to save one of the world’s ecological jewels nearing the halfway point, the finish line still appears decades away. None of the 68 projects originally included in the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan has been completed, and only 13 have been authorized.

The project’s original price tag of $7.8 billion has nearly doubled and continues to rise.

The Great Recession is partly to blame for squeezing federal and state spending, and an increasingly fractious Congress has failed to pass bills authorizing water-related projects.

“There hasn’t been a sense of urgency,” said former Florida Gov. Bob Graham, a Democrat and former U.S. senator who cosponsored the restoration law.

The Everglades, the largest subtropical wetland ecosystem in the world, once stretched over 8 million acres — from the southern suburbs of present day Orlando down to the Florida Keys. As recently as the early 1900s, the southern interior “was a vast and foreboding swampland, largely inaccessible,” according to the South Florida Water Management District, the state agency that oversees the restoration.

That changed when hurricanes in the 1920s struck communities around Lake Okeechobee, prompting calls for drainage and flood-control measures designed to protect lives and property. By the 1940s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had begun designing the patchwork of canals and other “plumbing ” components that fostered massive growth in the region.

The Everglades began shrinking as human activity increased. Thanks mainly to expanded farming and creeping development, it has lost more than half its acreage.

There have been a few recent signs that the effort to get the plan back on course might be gaining momentum.

Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott unveiled a budget in January that includes $130 million for key components of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan.

And in November, Florida voters overwhelmingly approved amending the state’s constitution to require that the state devote one-third of certain real estate transaction fees to water conservation projects. One catch: The amendment doesn’t require that any of the revenue be spent on the Everglades specifically.

There’s also talk in Congress that bipartisan passage of a water bill last year could pave the way for a new water bill by 2016 that could mean hundreds of millions more in federal aid for Everglades restoration. Advocates say any real progress depends on the state’s willingness to exercise an option it holds to buy land owned by U.S. Sugar Corp. that’s considered vital to the project’s future. Those 46,800 acres are in addition to 26,000 acres the state bought from U.S. Sugar several years ago that already are being used for water quality efforts. The state must exercise the option by mid-October or lose control of the land, which is vital for the water storage capacity at the heart of restoration efforts.

It’s not clear whether Scott will exercise the option.

Ledyard King|USA TODAY|3/15/15

GOV. Scott: Tamiami Trail Project Will Help Move Water South

TALLAHASSEE – Governor Scott today announced that the Florida Department of Environmental Protection recently issued a permit to the Department of Interior’s National Park Service, Everglades National Park, for the construction of 2.6 miles of bridging and road raising along the Tamiami Trail (U.S. 41) in Miami-Dade County. The project will deconstruct a section of the Tamiami Trail and replace it with a bridge so that water north of the road may flow into the Everglades, providing needed water to the Everglades National Park. This project will result in enhanced movement of water south from Lake Okeechobee.

Governor Rick Scott said, “Restoring the Florida Everglades and protecting Florida’s natural treasures is incredibly important to protect the natural beauty of our state. The Tamiami Trail project will help move more water south from Lake Okeechobee which directly benefits the Everglades, as well as the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie Estuaries. On top of completing critical projects, we have proposed a dedicated source of revenue that will provide more than $5 billion for Everglades restoration over the next 20 years. This funding will ensure that future generations of Floridians can enjoy our state’s natural beauty.”

The Tamiami Trail currently inhibits water flowing south into Everglades National Park. By constructing bridges, water will be able to flow more naturally to the Park.

DEP Secretary Jon Steverson said, “This is a huge step forward in our efforts to restore the Everglades. Moving water south through the Everglades is critical for wildlife, and keeping it out of the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie Estuaries is vital to protecting these important waterbodies.”

The total cost of the 2.6 mile Bridge Phase of the project is estimated to be $144 million. Governor Scott has committed up to $30 million/year over three years or $90 million total for this project.

In addition to long term investments, the department is working with the South Florida Water Management District and local partners to take aggressive action on both coasts to improve the quantity, quality, timing and distribution of water in Florida.

Governor Rick Scott’s 2015-2016 “KEEP FLORIDA WORKING” budget provides a total of $150 million for Everglades restoration, including $20 million for Kissimmee River restoration. The “KEEP FLORIDA WORKING” budget also creates a dedicated source of revenue for Everglades restoration that provides more than $670 million for ecosystem restoration over the next four years and more than $5 billion over the next 20 years.  This means that during the Governor’s second term alone, South Florida’s families will know the state has the ability to fund its share of the restoration of the Kissimmee River and the construction of the C-43 and C-44 reservoirs – projects that will provide almost 100 billion gallons of storage to protect Florida estuaries.

nataliarodriguez2015|March.17.2015

DEP Grants Permit for Rolling Meadows Restoration Project

TALLAHASSEE – The Florida Department of Environmental Protection issued a permit to the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) for the first phase of the Rolling Meadows Restoration Project. The project will restore about 2,000 acres of natural wetland habitat and reconnect hydrologic flows to Lake Hatchineha, ultimately restoring water flow into the Kissimmee River and helping restore Lake Okeechobee.

“Restoring the health of the Lake Okeechobee watershed is a challenging and important undertaking,” said DEP Deputy Secretary for Ecosystem Restoration Drew Bartlett. “Restoring the Rolling Meadows property is an essential step in promoting healthy water flow from the Kissimmee Lakes into Lake Okeechobee.”

The Rolling Meadows Restoration Project is part of a statewide effort to restore and protect Florida’s water quality. It is the first new restoration project to be permitted within the Lake Okeechobee Basin Management Action Plan (BMAP), since the restoration plan’s adoption in December 2014. The Lake Okeechobee BMAP identifies a variety of projects to relieve the lake of large influxes of phosphorus-rich water.

“We have seen great success to date with Kissimmee River restoration and continue to focus efforts on this crucial area in the headwaters of the Everglades,” said Jeff Kivett, SFWMD division director of operations, engineering and construction. “We can now get to work on Rolling Meadows and its designed improvements to water quality and for additional water storage north of Lake Okeechobee.”

The Rolling Meadows Restoration Project is located on property that encompasses approximately 5,787 acres in eastern Polk County, bordered to the north by Lake Hatchineha, to the west by Catfish Creek and to the south by Camp Mack Road. It is part of the federally authorized Kissimmee Headwaters Revitalization Project, under the larger Kissimmee River Restoration Project that is being undertaken by the SFWMD in conjunction with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The construction portion of project is scheduled to occur from May 2015 to July 2016.

nataliarodriguez2015|March.9.2015

Water Quality Issues

California only has one year’s worth of its water supply left, NASA scientist warns

Plagued by prolonged drought, California now has only enough water to get it through the next year, according to NASA.

In an op-ed published Thursday by the Los Angeles Times, Jay Famiglietti, a senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, painted a dire picture of the state’s water crisis. California, he writes, has lost around 12 million acre-feet of stored water every year since 2011. In the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins, the combined water sources of snow, rivers, reservoirs, soil water and groundwater amounted to a volume that was 34 million acre-feet below normal levels in 2014. And there is no relief in sight.

“As our ‘wet’ season draws to a close, it is clear that the paltry rain and snowfall have done almost nothing to alleviate epic drought conditions. January was the driest in California since record-keeping began in 1895. Groundwater and snowpack levels are at all-time lows” Famiglietti writes. “We’re not just up a creek without a paddle in California, we’re losing the creek too.”

On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that one-third of the monitoring stations in California’s Cascades and Sierra Nevada mountains have recorded the lowest snowpack ever measured.

“Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing,” Famiglietti writes.

He criticized Californian officials for their lack of long-term planning for how to cope with this drought, and future droughts, beyond “staying in emergency mode and praying for rain.”

Last month, new research by scientists at NASA, Cornell University and Columbia University pointed to a “remarkably drier future” for California and other Western states amid a rapidly-changing climate. “Megadroughts,” the study’s authors wrote, are likely to begin between 2050 and 2099, and could each last between 10 years and several decades.

With that future in mind, Famiglietti says, “immediate mandatory water rationing” should be implemented in the state, accompanied by the swift formation of regulatory agencies to rigorously monitor groundwater and ensure that it is being used in a sustainable way—as opposed to the “excessive and unsustainable” groundwater extraction for agriculture that, he says, is partly responsible for massive groundwater losses that are causing land in the highly irrigated Central Valley to sink by one foot or more every year.

Various local ordinances have curtailed excessive water use for activities like filling fountains and irrigating lawns. But planning for California’s “harrowing future” of more and longer droughts “will require major changes in policy and infrastructure that could take decades to identify and act upon,” Famiglietti writes. “Today, not tomorrow, is the time to begin.”

Zoë Schlanger|Newsweek|13 Mar 2015

Designing Wetlands to Remove Drugs and Chemical Pollutants

Drinking water supplies around the world often contain trace amounts of pharmaceuticals and synthetic compounds that may be harmful to human health. One solution being tried in the U.S. and Europe is to construct man-made wetlands that naturally degrade these contaminants.

Rising high in the San Bernardino Mountains in Southern California, the Santa Ana River flows westward through cities and towns with a total population of nearly 5 million. Along the way, it receives so much sewage that 90 percent of its flow during the dry summer season is effluent, which is cleaned again and again at several dozen wastewater treatment plants.

Near the end of its 96-mile course, the Santa Ana comes to a seeming standstill in the Prado Wetlands. Covering 425 acres, the wetlands site — designed by engineers — consists of a series of rectangular ponds, through which the river’s gentle flow is controlled by dam-like weir boxes. It takes about a week for water to traverse the wetlands, during which time cattails and other vegetation help remove nitrogen, phosphorous, and other contaminants.

Today, the Prado Wetlands, which are operated by the Orange County Water District, are part of a new project to remove a different kind of pollution: the residues of medical drugs and synthetic organic compounds, such as herbicides, that are found in small concentrations in rivers but that may affect endocrine activity, metabolism, and development in humans. A year-old pilot project at the Prado Wetlands channels river water through three ponds, each about the length of five Olympic swimming pools. Sunlight and bacteria degrade residues of antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, sex hormones, and other drugs and man-made chemicals before the Santa Ana reaches Anaheim, 20 miles downstream. There the river provides the drinking water for 2.5 million people in northern Orange County.

Concern has risen about the potential danger that may come from drinking water tainted by small concentrations of pharmaceuticals that pass through our bodies and are flushed down the toilet, not to mention other synthetic compounds discharged by agriculture and industry. Research has shown that endocrine disruptors and antidepressants may harm reproduction in fish, and endocrine-disrupting compounds also have been linked to adverse health effects in humans. Scientists also fear that the persistence of antibiotics in the environment could promote the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Currently, there are no U.S. regulations for medical drugs under the Safe Drinking Water Act, and only a few for the residues from consumer products. However, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Contaminant Candidate List, which establishes what chemicals should be evaluated for possible regulation, in 2009 included several endocrine disruptors called estradiols, found in products such as birth control pills. The list also included erythromycin, an antibiotic. The European Commission placed two types of estradiols and a painkiller called diclofenac on a similar watch list in 2013.

As a result of growing concerns, scientists and government authorities in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere are experimenting with the use of so-called “constructed wetlands” to remove these pharmaceuticals and chemicals from effluent released by wastewater treatment plants.

Constructed wetlands have been used for several decades in the United States and Europe to remove nitrogen and other traditional pollutants from wastewater. In the U.S., roughly 250 constructed wetlands have been built to treat effluent from wastewater treatment plants, and in Europe thousands of constructed wetlands exist, mainly for treating wastewater from smaller communities.

”There are a lot of potential applications of this technology to give communities a more cost-effective treatment than traditional approaches,” says Larry Barber, a researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

About 10 years ago, thanks to the development of sensitive detection methods, it became possible to measure trace levels of these compounds in surface water bodies such as rivers. Tests reveal that many of the compounds survive passage through wastewater treatment plants. The EPA is currently investigating how well facilities that treat drinking water remove pharmaceutical products, and whether retrofitting these plants with steps such as reverse osmosis could improve removal. But there are financial and practical drawbacks. Reverse osmosis systems are expensive, and constructed wetlands need tens to hundreds of acres to process large volumes of wastewater.

One of the early indications that constructed wetlands could help treat pharmaceuticals and other synthetic contaminants came from a study of nonylphenol, which is widely present in laundry detergents. Nonylphenol is an endocrine disruptor and has been shown to have potent toxicity in fish. When a research team led by the USGS was testing the ability of a small-scale wetlands system outside of Phoenix, Arizona, to diminish nitrogen levels in the wastewater treatment effluent, they noticed that nonylphenol and its breakdown products were also reduced, some by 90 percent.

Since those tests, the team has built a full-scale, 380-acre constructed wetlands at the site, called the Tres Rios Wetlands. It is one of the largest in the U.S. and provides water for irrigation and wildlife habitat. It also has three main ponds that remove chlorine, heavy metals, herbicides, nitrogen, and nonylphenol.

Numerous studies have shown the effectiveness of constructed wetlands in removing such contaminants. A 2004 study of the Prado Wetlands found that the site helped reduce levels of ibuprofen and organic chemicals found in pesticides and flame retardants. Scientists in Spain have reported that natural systems efficiently removed a number of anti-inflammatory drugs and pesticides.

Still, many compounds, including some estradiols and antibacterials, are more resistant to treatment in constructed wetlands, with their levels dropping by only about half. “In my mind you definitely want more than 50 percent removal, or why bother?” says David Sedlak, a professor of environmental science and engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

Sedlak and his collaborators are behind the pilot project at the Prado Wetlands. Inspired by experiments showing that drugs are degraded by sunlight as they move down a river, they worked on developing a new type of constructed wetland design specifically to remove these compounds.
In typical constructed wetland designs, weedy aquatic plants are the focal point, because of the myriad ways they break down contaminants. But they also overshadow, literally, the contribution of sunlight. So about a year ago, Sedlak’s team started testing what they call open-water units at the Prado Wetlands. Now, before wastewater enters the series of cattail-filled ponds, it drifts through one of three large ponds over the course of a day or two. To prevent plant growth, engineers used a simple approach: They put down a tarp along the bottom of the ponds.

Although the researchers are still in the first phase of data collection, the new ponds at the Prado Wetlands seem to work as well as a similar pilot-scale system in Discovery Bay near San Francisco that has been operating for about seven years. Early data suggest that open-water units at Discovery Bay remove 90 percent of sulfamethoxazole, an antibiotic often resistant to removal in waste treatment plants. An unexpected benefit is that a layer of algae and bacteria that grows on the tarp-covered pond bottoms appears to bind and degrade compounds.

Ponds similar to open-water units will also be incorporated into the Brazos River Demonstration Wetland, a 12-acre site that engineers started building in January in Waco, Texas. Construction should finish later this year. The project marks the first constructed wetlands designed to optimize the breakdown of drugs while also removing traditional contaminants found in wastewater treatment plant discharge. Brazos will not rely solely on photo-degradation to remove compounds. Water will travel through weedy ponds to remove nitrogen and then through subsurface wetlands with very low oxygen levels to help strip out chemicals.

Barber, the USGS geologist who worked on the Tres Rios wetlands in Arizona and also helped design the Brazos site, hopes that what they learn will improve design of small constructed wetlands nationwide, as well as larger wetlands that treat wastewater treatment effluent.

Recent research in Europe supports the idea that hybrid constructed wetlands — a combination of surface-level and subsurface ponds that do not freeze in colder climates — most effectively remove endocrine disruptors and other compounds. Environmental agencies in countries such as Denmark, Austria, and Germany currently provide guidelines and set standards for removal of nitrogen, phosphorus, and other contaminants in constructed wetlands. Researchers do not expect official guidelines on levels of drugs and other micro-contaminants until those substances are regulated.

Even without regulations, some communities are willing to invest in constructed wetlands, as evidenced by the Brazos site. “It’s about being proactive in terms of the right way to do water reuse,” says Barber.

carina storrs|3/17/15

Sao Paulo Could Run Out of Water by June

Yesterday we told you about a NASA scientist who estimates that the state of California has about one year left of water, which is bad, but not nearly as bad as São Paulo.

The water situation in São Paulo is so bad, that South America’s largest city will likely run out of water in June. As in about 2-and-a-half months from now.

That is the estimate set forth by Brazil’s own government.

According to Climate.Gov, the region is experiencing its worst drought in 80 years.

“The reservoirs that service the metro area of São Paulo and its 20 million residents were only at 8.9 percent of capacity during the middle of February, a shockingly low level.”

The Associated Press reported in January that the biggest problem may be the Cantareira water system. That system is the largest of six reservoirs that provide water to nearly one-third of the people living in the metropolitan area of São Paulo city.

“The water supply situation is critical and could become even more critical if the lack of rain and hot weather continue and effective demand management techniques are not created,” Mario Thadeu Leme de Barros, head of the University of São Paulo’s hydraulic engineering and environmental department, told the AP by phone in January.

Good news? Some rain at the end of February bumped them up to 11 percent.

As Climate.gov notes, low water levels are affecting more than just the drinkable stuff.

“The low water levels have also impacted electricity outputs, as hydroelectric dams simply cannot produce as much energy with reduced water flows.”

The government has announced a potential water rationing program to help stem the issue as well as announced planned blackouts to conserve electricity.

This year’s water issue is compounded as it’s actually the second year in a row that the region has faced severe droughts during what is normally considered their rainy season.

PRI notes that in August of 2014, the city turned off the water supply to area homes.

Residents were forced to use public taps, and “neighbors fought neighbors as dozens of people swarmed around the faucet. The outage went on for weeks, stretching into September.”

Eventually water trucks were called in to bring water to homes, but never to the city’s poorer neighborhoods and favelas. Elsa Barbosa, who lives in the favela of Chácaras Reunidas Ypê, told PRI that she eventually had to to use water from a disused old well. “We had to boil it a lot,” she said. “There were stomach aches and vomiting.”

This time, the drought has become so severe that some Brazilians have taken any rainstorm as an opportunity to bathe themselves. As RYOT reported in February, “when rain hit São Paulo, residents took to the streets to shower and clean their cars.”

What’s to blame for this drought? A mix of Mother Nature and humans.

Delcio Rodrigues, physicist with the Alliance for Water, told API that an unusually hot air mass above much of South America, paired with the fact that nearly 20 percent of the Amazon rainforest has now been deforested, was the perfect recipe for disaster.

Worst of all, none of this was a surprise. In fact, the Brazilian government released a warning six years ago predicting this exact scenario in this exact timeframe.

The warning’s solution to the issue then? Stop deforestation now. Perhaps this time, people will listen.

Stacey Leasca|RYOT |March 16, 2015

This post originally appeared on RYOT.

Water Hoarding Begins in Brazil as One of the World’s Largest Cities Runs Out of Water

The historic drought gripping South America’s largest nation is deepening, leading to rationing and forcing residents in one of the world’s biggest cities to hoard water.

As reported by Reuters, besides hoarding, Brazilians in Sao Paulo are drilling homemade wells and implementing additional emergency measures ahead of forced rationing that could lead to water being shut off at taps for as long as five days a week.

In Sao Paulo, a major metropolitan city of 20 million, the main water reservoir has fallen to just 6 percent of its capacity, and the peak of the rainy season has recently passed.

The drought is more heavily concentrated around Sao Paulo, but other cities in Brazil’s southeast, which is heavily populated, are also facing shortages and could eventually experience some rationing as well. Rio de Janeiro, a favorite tourist spot, is one of the cities that is facing less dire drought conditions.

As Reuters further reported:

Uncertainty over the drought and its consequences on jobs, public health and overall quality of life have further darkened Brazilians’ mood at a time when the economy is struggling and President Dilma Rousseff’s popularity is at an all-time low.

J. D. Heyes|naturalnews.com|March 15, 2015

World Could Have 40 Percent Water Shortfall By 2030, UN Warns

NEW DELHI (AP) — The world could suffer a 40 percent shortfall in water in just 15 years unless countries dramatically change their use of the resource, a U.N. report warned Friday.

Many underground water reserves are already running low, while rainfall patterns are predicted to become more erratic with climate change. As the world’s population grows to an expected 9 billion by 2050, more groundwater will be needed for farming, industry and personal consumption.

The report predicts global water demand will increase 55 percent by 2050, while reserves dwindle. If current usage trends don’t change, the world will have only 60 percent of the water it needs in 2030, it said.

Having less available water risks catastrophe on many fronts: crops could fail, ecosystems could break down, industries could collapse, disease and poverty could worsen, and violent conflicts over access to water could become more frequent.

“Unless the balance between demand and finite supplies is restored, the world will face an increasingly severe global water deficit,” the annual World Water Development Report said, noting that more efficient use could guarantee enough supply in the future.

The report, released in New Delhi two days before World Water Day, calls on policymakers and communities to rethink water policies, urging more conservation as well as recycling of wastewater as is done in Singapore. Countries may also want to consider raising prices for water, as well as searching for ways to make water-intensive sectors more efficient and less polluting, it said.

In many countries including India, water use is largely unregulated and often wasteful. Pollution of water is often ignored and unpunished. At least 80 percent of India’s population relies on groundwater for drinking to avoid bacteria-infested surface waters.

In agriculture-intense India, where studies show some aquifers are being depleted at the world’s fastest rates, the shortfall has been forecast at 50 percent or even higher. Climate change is expected to make the situation worse, as higher temperatures and more erratic weather patterns could disrupt rainfall.

Currently, about 748 million people worldwide have poor access to clean drinking water, the report said, cautioning that economic growth alone is not the solution — and could make the situation worse unless reforms ensure more efficiency and less pollution.

“Unsustainable development pathways and governance failures have affected the quality and availability of water resources, compromising their capacity to generate social and economic benefits,” it said. “Economic growth itself is not a guarantee for wider social progress.”

KATY DAIGLE||03/20/2015

Great Lakes & Inland Waters

Sturgeon population estimated at 50,000

There are more lake sturgeon in the waters touching St. Clair County than in any other spot in the Great Lakes — and the population of the threatened species appears to be growing.

“Our best current estimate is in the 50,000-fish ballpark,” Mike Thomas, a fisheries biologist with the Department of Natural Resources in Harrison Township, said in an email.

He said the largest known spawning area in the Great Lakes is at Port Huron’s doorstep — the St. Clair River just south of the Blue Water Bridge.

“It is likely that this spawning site has been the critical habitat feature t hat has allowed this major sturgeon population to survive while most other sturgeon populations around the Great Lakes have been exterminated or greatly reduced in abundance,” he said.

The Blue Water Sturgeon Festival is May 30, during the sturgeon spawning run. The festival is in its third year.

“It’s unique to the area,” said Sherri Faust, environmental health educator at the St. Clair County Health Department and president of the Friends of the St. Clair River, the nonprofit that is host to the festival. “That’s what makes it so exciting and such a neat opportunity. Families should come down and see the sturgeon.

“We have more sturgeon here than any other place in the Great Lakes,” she said. “It’s a narrow window of time when they migrate through for spawning. That’s what we’re capitalizing on, the opportunity.”

The event includes demonstrations where people can touch a live sturgeon. The Huron Lady II will offer three sturgeon cruises, trolling a diver with a camera so people can watch live video of sturgeon. Seymour Sturgeon, the festival mascot, will be in costume.

“That’s the whole purpose of it,” said Jim Felgenauer, president of St. Clair-Detroit River Sturgeon for Tomorrow, one of the groups collaborating to produce the sturgeon festival. “To bring the sturgeon to the people.

“People who normally don’t get a chance to interact with the fish, to see the fish, are going to get an opportunity to view them up close.”

The sturgeon festival this year will include a 5K race and a 1K fun run. Runners who sign up today for the 5K can participate for $20. Proceeds will be split between the Friends of the St. Clair River and St. Clair-Detroit River Sturgeon for Tomorrow “We hope that brings more families down to the sturgeon festival that might not otherwise participate,” Faust said.

The 5K race and the 1K fun run are at 9 a.m. — an hour before the start of the sturgeon festival. Both runs start at Vantage Point and proceed south along the Blue Water River Walk. The price of the fun run will remain $10. The price of the race goes up to $25 after today and possibly to $30, Faust said, the day of the race. The price includes a T-shirt; fun run participants also get a medal.

Felgenauer said he expects about 5,000 people to attend the festival, which is in its third year.

“We like to bring people to Port Huron to spend money,” he said.

He started fishing for sturgeon in 2003. In all that time, he’s harvested one fish — the rest have been catch and release.

“We encourage fishing,” he said. “The best experience is when people catch one of these fish and get to handle and hold it. They typically don’t want to kill it.”

The sturgeon season is July 16 through Sept. 30. Felgenauer fishes in the lower St. Clair River most nights during those 77 days.

“We like to call Clay Township the sturgeon angling capital of the Great Lakes,” he said.

Thomas said the lower river and delta area has more lake sturgeon than any other area in the state, and local anglers have developed techniques targeting the big fish.

“As a result, more fishing effort for lake sturgeon takes place here than in any other waters of the state, and more lake sturgeon are caught and released here than in any other place in the state,” he said Catching a fish that weighs more than 100 pounds and is more than six feet long is the thrill of a lifetime, Felgenauer said.

“It’s pretty exciting when you have a six-foot fish three feet out of the water behind the back of your boat,” he said.

B ut he said sturgeon are more than an exciting gamefish.

“Everybody should care, and I’ll tell you why that is,” Felgenauer said. “They are considered a keystone species. If you manage for sturgeon, all the other fish will thrive.

“If the lake sturgeon goes bye-bye, that means we have something unhealthy happening in the environment, and we’re going to be affected by what that is.”

BOB GROSS|TIMES HERALD|3/15/15

Offshore & Ocean

Protected Pitcairn Seas Are 3 Times Size of U.K.

Today, the United Kingdom government announced the creation of the Pitcairn Islands Marine Reserve, the largest fully protected marine park on the planet. Here, in one of the world’s most remote places, more than 322,000 square miles of South Pacific waters will be fully protected.
Why does it matter? Because large, highly protected marine reserves help counter the global effects of overfishing, pollution, and development.

Full story, facts, photos »

Two West Coast Marine Sanctuaries More Than Doubled in Size

After more than a decade of efforts to expand protection for California’s coastal ecosystems, the White House has announced approval of a plan that will more than double the size of two major marine sanctuaries in the region.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which just published the final rule, the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary, located 42 miles north of San Francisco, will be expanded  from 529 square miles to 1,286 square miles, while the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary will be expanded from 1,282 square miles to 3,295 square miles of ocean and coastal waters that will include areas as varied as estuarine wetlands, rocky intertidal habitat, open ocean and shallow marine banks.

                                                                    Image Credit: NOAA

“We are thrilled to announce the expansion of two of our sanctuaries in California,” said Holly Bamford, Ph.D., acting assistant secretary of conservation and management and NOAA’s deputy administrator. “It’s important to conserve these special places that encourage partnerships in science, education, technology, management and community.”

Dubbed the “blue Serengeti” by scientists, these sanctuaries are home to an incredibly diverse array of species, including 25 endangered or threatened species, 36 marine mammals, more than 300 species of fish and more than a quarter million breeding seabirds, the largest colony of seabirds in the United States.

These sanctuaries have also been identified as some of the most nutrient-rich upwelling zones in North America, where nutrients from deeper, colder water come to the surface to support the numerous species who call them home.

Life there ranges from coral reefs, sea stars and tiny invertebrates, to some of the world’s largest animals. Some of the species who will now have an expanded haven to live and breed in, and to migrate through, include leatherback turtles, pacific white-sided dolphins, Risso’s dolphins, northern fur seals, northern elephant seals, Steller sea lions and harbor porpoises, in addition to a variety of whales including beaked, minke, blue, humpback, fin, gray and orca. This area is also believed to be home to the most significant population of great white sharks on the planet.

Previous legislative efforts brought by the state’s congressional representatives Senator Barbara Boxer and former Rep. Lynn Woolsey were thwarted by pushback from the oil and gas industry, but despite opposition these sanctuaries will now be permanently off-limits to offshore drilling and other disturbances. Boxer, who will retire in less than two years, told the San Francisco Chronicle the expansion will be one of her top legacies.

“This expansion is the outcome of a tremendous collaborative effort by government, local communities, academia and elected officials to provide additional protection for critical marine resources,” said Daniel J. Basta, director of the NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. “It presents a bold vision for protecting the waters off the northern California coast for current and future generations.”

According to NOAA, the new boundaries will take effect after a review period of 45 days of a continuous session of Congress that began on March 12.

Alicia Graef|March 17, 2015

Humans Killed Nearly 3 Million Whales In The 20th Century

  It’s long been known that whales were seriously endangered during the 20th century, but new research shows just how close we came to wiping them out completely.

A study published in the March 4 issue of “Marine Fisheries Review” shows that, between 1900 and 1999, a staggering 2.9 million whales were killed commercially for food, oil or bone.

“Remarkably, despite the importance of industrial whaling to several economies and more recently as a symbol of human misuse of the world’s resources, there has until now been no attempt to estimate the total catch for the 20th century,” the study, entitled “Emptying the Oceans: A Summary of Industrial Whaling Catches in the 20th Century,” says.

Using current data from the International Whaling Commission, along with data from the USSR (which hunted whales illegally for 30 years) the researchers found that 276,442 whales were killed in the North Atlantic, 563,696 in the North Pacific and 2,053,956 in the Southern Hemisphere.

Researchers only counted whales killed industrially and found the numbers peaked in the 1960s and 1970s. (The number of whales killed for sustenance by native communities was a negligible amount in comparison.) Amazingly, the number of sperm whales killed between 1900 and 1962 was the same number of sperm whales killed in all of the 18th and 19th centuries combined. That record was then repeated in the decade spanning 1962 and 1972.

Howard Rosenbaum, the director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Ocean Giants Program, told NBC News that the question facing researchers now is, “given the state of today’s oceans and the status of some whales, can depleted populations recover to their pre-whaling historical levels?”

According to the study, Southern Ocean blue whales are said to be at less than 1 percent of their pre-whaling numbers, and while no species was brought to extinction as a result of industrialized whaling, some subpopulations were completely destroyed (such as a community of humpbacks off the coast of South Georgia from 1904 to 1915).

Public opinion turned against whale hunting in the early ’70s. Judy Collins released “Whales and Nightingales,” an album featuring duets with Collins and the recordings of humpback whale songs, and Rex Weyler, then-director of Greenpeace, set a new agenda for conservation efforts.

“Saving the whales became the issue that we believed would introduce humanity to the idea of ecology and saving nature,” Weyler told NPR in December.

Other organizations joined Greenpeace, and by 1985, there was a moratorium on commercial deep-sea whaling.

Norway, Japan and Iceland still hunt whales for commercial reasons, and others for aboriginal sustenance.

Today, there are only about 500,000 whales left in the ocean.

“The total number of whales we killed is a really important number,” Stephen Palumbi, a marine ecologist at Stanford University in California, told Nature about the study’s findings. “It does make a difference to what we do now: it tells us the number of whales the oceans might be able to support.”

James Cave|The Huffington Post|03/18/2015

Wildlife and Habitat

Florida Wildlife Corridor Expedition Completes 900+ Mile Journey at Gulf Islands National Seashore

The Florida Wildlife Corridor Expedition has been on the trail for 900+ miles and nearly 70 days. On March 19th, they will complete their epic journey which led the team through some of Florida’s most beautiful ecosystems including the Rainbow River Springs made famous by the recent congregation of hundreds of manatees.

The Florida Wildlife Corridor Expedition team welcomes you to join them as they complete their journey at Gulf Islands National Seashore — Fort Pickens at Battery Langdon Pavilion. Join the expedition team on Thursday, March 19 from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. CDT as the team celebrates their final miles of their expedition. To RSVP to the finale, please click here.

Although the Glades to Gulf Expedition is almost complete, the work of Florida Wildlife Corridor is far from over. The passage of Amendment 1 and the awareness of the need for wildlife corridors is just the beginning.

In 2014, more than 93 million people traveled to see the natural beauty we have here in Florida. We are more than just beaches. Florida is home to coral reefs, oyster beds. dunes, marshes, swamps, hardwood hammocks, mangroves, pinelands and scrubs. With Florida becoming one of the most populated states in the country, the journey has not ended in connecting, protecting and restoring corridors of conserved lands and waters that are essential for the survival of Florida’s diverse wildlife.

To learn more about the Florida Wildlife Corridor Expedition, the team members and the mission of the journey, please visit www.floridawildlifecorridor.org.

Mallory Dimmitt|floridawildlifecorridor.org|3/16/15

Suit Launched to Protect Pollinators, Frogs From New Pesticide

The Center for Biological Diversity and other public-interest groups notified the Environmental Protection Agency on Monday of our intent to sue over its failure to protect a range of federally protected species — including bees, butterflies, amphibians and birds — from a powerful, newly approved insecticide called “flupyradifurone.”

Even though the EPA recognized the chemical could harm endangered species, it didn’t consult with any wildlife agencies to protect those species. The insect poison could be particularly harmful to solitary bees that are often important crop pollinators — 4,000 species of which live in the United States.

“This systemic insecticide makes a plant highly toxic to any birds, butterflies and bees that feed on it, but the EPA has turned a blind eye and approved it without considering how it will hurt imperiled wildlife like the endangered Karner blue butterfly,” said Lori Ann Burd, director of the Center’s new Environmental Health program. “It’s our government’s duty to investigate how dangerous insecticides might affect wildlife — not just rubberstamp their approval.”

Read more in The Oregonian.

Forestry

This ecologist wants to plant a “pop-up” forest in Times Square

Marielle Anzelone, a botanist and urban ecologist, wants to grow a forest in Times Square … overnight.

Anzelone launched a Kickstarter campaign today, asking backers to help raise $25,000 by April 17 to transform a chunk of the glitziest block on Earth into a forest. The installation, which she’s calling PopUP Forest: Times Square, would feature shipping containers filled with trees, flowers, and soil, with the sounds of birds and other wildlife piped in from nearby woods.

The goal, said Anzelone, is to put the spotlight on the thousands of acres of New York City that are not paved over, and need additional protection. “At the end of the day it’s about helping people see that nature exists in cities,” said Anzelone, “and its real nature, not necessarily weeds.”

If the campaign makes its fundraising goal, the money will go toward creating a design and a prototype in Brooklyn. After that, she’ll seek sponsorship money to find the final project — and of course the green light from the Times Square Alliance board. (But hey, they have experience handling outlandish projects like this — after all, they’ve dropped a giant ball from a skyscraper every year since 1904.)

If the project proposal is approved, the forest will pop up in June 2016, staying up for three weeks before being dissembled, its parts distributed around local parks and schoolyards. Anzelone hopes the final result will be “a crazy PR event for nature.”

“Nature gets so little attention, but biodiversity loss is at the same crisis level as climate change,” she said. “I want to get people’s attention — and what’s one way to get attention? Grabbing public space, and setting up a forest in the most incongruous place imaginable.”

Imagine: You’re heading to your office job in Manhattan when you glance up from your iPhone to see a full-grown forest where, yesterday, there was only a hundred-foot wristwatch ad. Instead of being barraged by horns, you’re serenaded by a springtime warbler.

I don’t know about you, but I’d do just about anything to trade billboards for spruce trees on my morning commute.

Liz Core|16 Mar 2015

[The importance of urban forests cannot be over-emphasized.]

Dog and Drones Battle Deadly Avocado Fungus

In just a few weeks, redbay ambrosia beetles will be on the move in Florida, a major concern for the state’s multimillion dollar avocado industry. Florida International University researchers believe a combination of drones and dogs could be game-changers in the fight to stop a deadly fungus spread by these invasive pests.

The beetles, which first appeared in the United States in 2000, carry the fungus Raffaelea lauricola, which causes a vascular disease in trees called laurel wilt. With devastating effects on avocado groves, more than 90 percent of trees die within six weeks of infection. 

Detection is a major challenge. Diseased trees can begin to wilt within two weeks, and by the time symptoms are visible, the fungus has likely spread to nearby trees via root grafting. This is a particular problem in commercial groves, where trees are planted close together.

As part of an FIU research program, three specially trained canines were recently deployed in a grove where the beetles were suspected. The dogs identified three infected trees, though the trees were not yet showing symptoms.

FIU Provost and Executive Vice President Kenneth G. Furton and Biological Sciences Professor DeEtta Mills have developed the detection program, which couples drone surveillance with canine scent detection. Furton, a forensic chemist, has spent most of his career studying scent and canine detection. Mills, a forensic biologist, specializes in DNA research. 

“This isn’t just a Florida problem,” Furton said. “From California to Latin America, there are growing concerns about how to respond to this aggressive disease.”

FIU’s hunt begins with the drones. The vehicles carry thermal digital imaging instruments that search for stressed trees before symptoms are visible. However, the drones cannot identify the cause of the stress. That’s where the dogs come in.

Canines have up to 50 times more olfactory receptors than humans and can be hundreds to thousands of times more sensitive to detecting odors. By using drones to isolate areas of concern, it provides manageable areas for a dog to search. The research team includes a certified dog trainer, drone operator and FIU graduate students.

Of the recently deployed dogs, all alerted to the same three trees in the commercial grove during separate searches. Students from Mills’ lab conducted DNA tests on samples to look for the laurel wilt fungus. The DNA tests confirmed the trees were infected, meaning the dogs detected the pathogen much earlier than any other method available.  Currently, diseased trees must be removed, along with surrounding trees. More than 6,000 of Miami’s 74,000 avocado trees have been destroyed due to laurel wilt. But early detection could mean fewer surrounding trees would require extraction. In some cases, diseased trees could even be treated if the laurel wilt is detected early enough.

The research is funded by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. Furton and Mills believe the unique detection program could have far-reaching applications for the entire agriculture industry.

Florida International University|March 18th, 2015

Brazil: the fight is on to save millions of trees

The Mundurukú people are fighting for their ancestral land

The planned São Luiz do Tapajós dam looms over the future of millions of trees and numerous villages. The government of Brazil is pushing ahead ruthlessly to tame Amazônia’s rivers and generate cheap electricity for mines and aluminum smelters – a healthy environment and the rights of indigenous peoples are clearly lower priorities.

The forests along the Tapajós river are among the most biodiverse in the world. If the dams are realized, it would be the death of the region as we know it.

Reinhard Behrend|Rainforest Rescue|3/18/15

[Please sign #8 in “Calls to Action” above.]

Global Warming and Climate Change

New documentary exposes the corporate-backed ‘experts’ who lie about climate change

For Naomi Oreskes, professor of scientific history at Harvard, there’s no more vivid illustration of the bitter war between science and politics than Florida’s ban on state employees using terms such as “climate change” and “global warming”. No matter that the low-lying state is critically vulnerable to rises in sea level, or that 97% of peer-reviewed climate studies confirm that climate change is occurring and human activity is responsible, the state’s Republican governor, Rick Scott, instructed state employees not to discuss it as it is not “a true fact”.

In one sense, news of the Florida directive could not have come at a better time – a hard-hitting documentary adaptation of Oreskes’s 2010 book Merchants of Doubt is just hitting US cinemas. In another sense, she says, it is profoundly depressing: the tactics now being used to prevent action over global warming are the same as those used in the past – often to great effect – to obfuscate and stall debates over evolutionary biology, ozone depletion, the dangers of asbestos or tobacco, even dangerous misconceptions about childhood vaccinations and autism.

Scott’s de facto ban is, she tells the Observer, “a grim state of affairs straight out of a George Orwell novel. So breathtaking that you don’t really know how to respond to it.”

It is also a display of just the kind of prevarication and intransigence that Oreskes studied to establish her formidable scholarly reputation. Each argument – if that is the correct term – has followed a strikingly similar path, and in each case, scientists have been drawn into debates that have little to do with a sound-science, rigorous exchange of knowledge.

Directed by Robert Kenner, best known for the hard-hitting Food, Inc., and backed by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, the Merchants of Doubt film exposes the tactics of climate change “experts”, who are often in the employ of think tanks funded by industries invested in maintaining the status quo.

It’s a fascinating look at how overwhelming certainty acquired through rigorous scientific enquiry has been time and again upended and delayed by a small group of spin doctors. As one scientist points out in the film, they have to prove their case while their opponents only have to sow the seeds of doubt. Nowhere is that more keenly felt than in climate change, with a massive disconnect between public acceptance and the political will to act.

“The scientific community feels it worked incredibly hard on this issue,” Oreskes says. “It has done exactly what it is supposed to do, which is study the question carefully from many angles, publish the results in peer-reviewed journals, explain it to the public and in reports. Yet it has gained no traction. Or worse – scientists are facing active attempts to deny, discredit, harass and, in some cases, sully their reputations.”

The political split on the issue grew last week when secretary of state John Kerry warned climate-change deniers and obfuscators – presumably including 2016 presidential contender Jeb Bush (who accepts global warming but not that it is disproportionately caused by human activity) – that there is no time to waste on debating the subject. Fail to act, he said, and future generations will want to know how world leaders could have been “so blind or so ignorant or so ideological or so dysfunctional and, frankly, so stubborn”.

As a historian of science, Oreskes is better-positioned than research scientists to challenge the situation. She recently suggested that the threat of climate change is so extreme, and time to curb its accelerating effects so short, that the scientific community should abandon its conservative, 95% confidence standard – which, she argues, is an unfair burden of proof that has no actual basis in nature. The science community is unlikely to back Oreskes in that opinion but her point is clearly made: there is no debate, and by entering the semantics of a debate, you’ve already lost.

Yet the cost to moderate Republicans of bucking approved party thinking are well-known. The filmmakers visit Bob Inglis , a South Carolina congressman who lost his seat four years ago after being targeted by the Tea Party following a radio interview in which he said he believed humans were contributing to climate change.

Oreskes’s study in Merchants of Doubt centered on a group of distinguished scientists, veterans of the cold war arms race, who came out in support of the tobacco industry and later cropped up opposing climate-change science. Since the research science on both issues is so clear, how could they be confused on the subject?

“We found that they really believed they were defending the freedom, free-market capitalism, liberty and lifestyle they believe go with a laissez-faire economy,” says Oreskes. “It’s essentially a slippery-slope argument. If you allow the government to regulate tobacco or restrict the use of carbon-based fuels, it’s a step toward tyranny.”

And that, Oreskes points out, goes back to Milton Friedman, and Freidrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom . “The original argument was authentic, if misguided. In recent years it has been cynically manipulated by the Tea Party and others supported by vested interests.” (Oreskes mentions Charles and David Koch, the industrialists who have already pledged to contribute $1bn toward influencing the 2016 elections.)

In short, it’s a perversion of American notions of freedom, one that scientists are ill-equipped to counter. “The argument is, if you allow government to impose a carbon tax, then you’re going to surrender your liberty, personal freedom and individual choice,” says Oreskes. “That helps explain why this is such an American pathology. It plays into the cultural valences of individualism and choice.”

At times, the argument has become entirely obfuscated and contorted by politics. It was, after all, George HW Bush who introduced the idea of carbon emissions trading . Liberals and Democrats opposed it. When it was found to work, and environmentalists embraced it, conservatives turned against it. That showed that Republicans have no serious interest in negotiating on this issue, says Oreskes. “They rejected their own principles!” [Emphasis added.]

Clearly there’s more than enough blame to go round. In the US, one green advocacy group recently ran ads asking: “How many light bulbs does it take to change an American?”

Oreskes comments: “If you tell people it’s about changing them, it’s not helpful. We need to say, ‘Look, this is a problem we could actually fix if we stopped being in denial about it.’” She argues that the media is also to blame. The idea of presenting balanced arguments – to give an opposing view – does not serve an issue such as climate change well, especially when social media has power to transmit discredited or perilous misconceptions. “Sometimes the evidence and the data are all on one side,” Oreskes points out.

Last week she found herself on the receiving end of climate deniers’ outrage. Ninety-year-old Fred Singer, profiled at length in Merchants of Doubt, threatened to sue Oreskes and Kenner, following a pattern of response often used to raise the profile of climate contrarians.

But it is becoming harder to imagine a happy conclusion. In her most recent book, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future , Oreskes and co-author Erik Conway imagine looking back on the world in 2093 from the year 2393. It’s a dismal view of floods, droughts, mass migrations and the depopulation of entire continents. In Merchants of Doubt Oreskes writes that industrial society has been “dining out” on fossil fuels for 150 years, and now we’ve equated ideals of freedom with the right to a lifestyle that those fuels permit.

Even those who profess to be on the green side of the debate, including Hillary Clinton, are prevaricating on their opposition to the XL pipeline , designed to carry dirty tar sands oil into the US from Canada. Prevarication paid off for the tobacco industry, which profitably resisted science and government regulation for half a century, and it is paying off now for the oil industry. Rising temperatures are making previously inhospitable regions, including the Arctic, accessible to exploration and drilling.

But it’s with no pleasure that Oreskes reports that the very groups that most detest regulation will ultimately see more of it when the consequences of inaction on climate change become unavoidable.

“This story is riven with ironies, and that’s one of the most profound if we don’t get this situation under control.”

Edward Helmore|The Guardian|14 Mar 2015

Climate change is baking Alaska

Earlier this winter, Monica Zappa packed up her crew of Alaskan sled dogs and headed south, in search of snow. “We haven’t been able to train where we live for two months,” she told me.

Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, which Zappa calls home, has been practically tropical this winter. Rick Thoman, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Alaska, has been dumbfounded. “Homer, Alaska, keeps setting record after record, and I keep looking at the data like: Has the temperature sensor gone out or something?”

Something does seem to be going on in Alaska. Last fall, a skipjack tuna, which is more likely to be found in the Galápagos than near a glacier, was caught about 150 miles southeast of Anchorage, not far from the Kenai. This past weekend, race organizers had to truck in snow to the ceremonial Iditarod start line in Anchorage. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK.) tweeted a photo of one of the piles of snow with the hashtag #wemakeitwork.

But it’s unclear how long that will be possible. Alaska is heating up at twice the rate of the rest of the country — a canary in our climate coal mine. A new report shows that warming in Alaska, along with the rest of the Arctic, is accelerating as the loss of snow and ice cover begins to set off a feedback loop of further warming. Warming in wintertime has been the most dramatic — more than 6 degrees F in the past 50 years. And this is just a fraction of the warming that’s expected to come over just the next few decades.

Of course, it’s not just Alaska. Last month was the most extreme February on record in the Lower 48, and it marked the first time that two large sections of territory (more than 30 percent of the country each) experienced both exceptional cold and exceptional warmth in the same month, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. All-time records were set for the coldest month in dozens of Eastern cities, with Boston racking up more snow than the peaks of California’s Sierra Nevada. A single January snowstorm in Boston produced more snow than Anchorage has seen all winter. The discrepancy set off some friendly banter recently between the Anchorage, Boston, and San Francisco offices of the National Weather Service.

Alaska is at the front lines of climate change. This year’s Iditarod has been rerouted — twice — due to the warm weather. The race traditionally starts in Anchorage, which has had near-record low snowfall so far this winter. The city was without a single significant snowstorm between October and late January, so race organizers decided to move the start from the Anchorage area 360 miles north to Fairbanks. But when the Chena River, which was supposed to be part of the new route’s first few miles, failed to sufficiently freeze, the starting point had to move again to another location in Fairbanks.

On March 9, Zappa and her dogs set out on the 1,000-mile race across Alaska as one of 78 mushers in this year’s Iditarod. A burst of cold and snow are in the forecast this week, but for most of the winter, the weather across the interior of the state has also been abnormally warm. To train, many teams of dogs and their owners had to travel, often “outside” — away from Alaska. Zappa ended up going to the mountains of Wyoming.

For Iditarod entrants, the warm weather can mean life or death. Last month, along the Iditarod route, a snow-mobiler had to be rescued after unknowingly trying to cross open water. A recent study said that Alaska’s rivers and melting glaciers are now outputting more water than the Mississippi River. Last year was Alaska’s warmest on record and the warm weather has continued right on into 2015. This winter, Anchorage has essentially transformed into a less sunny version of Seattle. As of March 9, the city has received less than one-third of its normal amount of snow. In its place? Rain. Lots of rain. In fact, schools in the Anchorage area are now more likely to cancel school due to rain and street flooding than cold and snow.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. Alaska’s recent surge of back-to-back warm winters comes after a record-snowy 2012, in which the National Guard was employed to help dig out buried towns. Then, about two years ago, something in the climate system switched. The state’s recent brush with extreme weather is more than just year-to-year weather variability. Alaska is at the point where the long-term trend of warming has begun to trump seasonal weather fluctuations. A recent shift toward warmer offshore ocean temperatures is essentially adding more fuel to the fire, moving the state toward more profound tipping points like the irreversible loss of permafrost and increasingly violent weather. If the current warm ocean phase (which began in 2014) holds for a decade or so, as is typical, Alaska will quickly become a different place.

The Pacific Ocean near Alaska has been record-warm for months now. This year is off to a record-wet start in Juneau. Kodiak has recorded its warmest winter on record. A sudden burst of ocean warmth has affected statewide weather before, but this time feels different, residents say. In late February, National Weather Service employees spotted thundersnow in Nome — a city just 100 miles south of the Arctic Circle. “As far as I know, that’s unprecedented,” Thoman told me. Thunderstorms of any kind require a level of atmospheric energy that’s rarely present in cold climates. To get that outside of the summer is incredibly rare everywhere, let alone in Alaska.

Climate scientists are starting to link the combination of melting sea ice and warm ocean temperatures to shifts in the jet stream. For the past few winters, those shifts have brought surges of tropical moisture toward southern Alaska via potent atmospheric rivers. This weather pattern has endured so long it’s even earned its own name: the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge. The persistent area of high pressure stretching from Alaska to California has shunted wintertime warmth and moisture northward into the Arctic while the eastern half of the continent is plunged into the deep freeze, polar-vortex style.

Slate

The warm water is making its way north into the Arctic Ocean, where, as of early March, sea ice levels are at their record lowest for the date. The resurgent heating of the Pacific (we’re officially in an El Niño year now) is also expected to give a boost to global warming over the next few years by releasing years of pent-up oceanic energy into the atmosphere, pushing even more warm water toward the north, melting Alaska from all sides.

That means Alaska’s weather, according to one Alaska meteorologist, is “broken.” Dave Snider, who reports statewide weather daily for the National Weather Service’s Alaska office in Anchorage, tweeted the sentiment back in mid-January. Snider emphasizes that this isn’t the official view of the National Weather Service, “of course.” Snider told me he made the comment “sort of in jest” but points to the nearly snow-free Iditarod start as evidence.

Here’s another example he could have used: In early November, Super Typhoon Nuri morphed into a huge post-tropical cyclone, passing through the Aleutians very near Shemya Island on its way to becoming Alaska’s strongest storm on record. Despite winds near 100 mph, Shemya emerged relatively unscathed. A few days later, the remnants of that storm actually altered the jet stream over much of the continent, ushering in a highly amplified “omega block” pattern that dramatically boosted temperatures across the state and sent wave after wave of Arctic cold toward the East Coast. Barrow was briefly warmer than Dallas or Atlanta.

The warm weather isn’t all bad news. The city of Anchorage has saved an estimated $1 million on snow removal this year and is instead pouring the money into fixing potholes and other backlogged maintenance issues. But getting around the rest of the state hasn’t been so easy.

There are few roads in rural Alaska, so winter travel is often done by snowmobiles over frozen rivers. Not this year. Warm temperatures in February led to thin ice and open water in the southwest part of the state near Galena and Bethel. David Hulen, managing editor for the Alaska Dispatch News in Anchorage, has spent nearly 30 years in the state. He says the freeze-thaw cycle is out of whack, “changing the nature of the place.” Usually, things freeze in the fall and unfreeze in the spring; this winter, they’ve seen a nearly constant back-and-forth between freezing and thawing.

That’s made it difficult for skiers and those enjoying other outdoor activities, like riding fat-tire bikes attuned to the snow. Julie Saddoris, of the Bike Me Anchorage Meetup, says attendance in her group is down this winter. Because of the lack of snow and ubiquitous slick ice, “riding conditions [are] very poor and hazardous,” she wrote in an email. Hulen agrees that it’s been frustrating. “I mean, what’s living in Alaska if it’s not cold and snowy?”

Those are city problems. Meanwhile, along the state’s west coast, some native coastal villages are facing an existential threat, as sea levels rise in response to the warm water. Earlier this winter, the Washington Post’s climate reporter Chris Mooney visited Kivalina, one of the six villages considering plans to relocate due to climate change. “Here, climate change is less a future threat and more a daily force, felt in drastic changes to weather, loss of traditional means of sustenance like whale hunting, and the literal vanishing of land,” Mooney wrote. Another village, Newtok, is a bit further along in the relocation process, with construction on their new village — Mertarvik — already under way.

The rapid change has brought U.S. Arctic policy to a crossroads. The United States is set to take over a rotating two-year chairmanship of the Arctic Council next month — a mini-United Nations of the north — and has listed climate change as a top agenda item. At the same time, it’s also laying the ground rules for increased oil and gas exploration. In a warmer 21st century, Alaska may be more important than ever — which explains the increased pressure for a boosted military presence there.

But for now, the most visible change is still in the shifting habitats of the fish, birds, trees, and animals. Permafrost still covers 85 percent of the state, but “almost everywhere, the depth of the active layer is increasing over the last few decades,” said Thoman. Since the active layer — the zone of soil above the permafrost that thaws out each summer — now penetrates deeper down, that means landforms are shifting, lakes are draining, and new forests are springing up.

Patricia Owen is a biologist at Denali National Park and Preserve who studies grizzly bears. Last winter, warm weather brought blueberry blossoms earlier than normal. The blossoms then froze, making foraging for food more challenging for bears. Mother bears need to have good health in the fall to support their cubs during the long winter months of hibernation. Owen is seeing evidence of other changes within Denali: More episodes of freezing rain are having a big impact on sheep, which have to scrape through ice to eat. In low snow years like this one, wolves seem to suffer, since caribou and moose can escape more quickly. Studying these changes is difficult because the scientists don’t want to disturb the animals more than necessary. “It takes a while to really see the effect of some of these things,” Owen told me.

Recent warming appears to have pushed Denali’s poplar forests across a threshold toward rapid expansion. Carl Roland, a Denali plant ecologist who has compiled a trove of repeat photographs around the park spanning decades of environmental change, says that what he’s seeing is “dramatic.” Still, says Roland, “it’s kind of a complicated story, because you have patches of the landscape that have remained pretty much exactly the same, and then you’ve got other patches that have gone off in this other direction.”

Once the permafrost goes, Roland says to expect a “regime shift” in the park and across the state. The northward spread of tree-killing insects is also a “really big unknown” in interior Alaska. Last spring, a huge forest fire in a beetle kill area of the Kenai Peninsula sent smoke plumes hundreds of miles northward toward Fairbanks.

For southern Alaska, fire season has been coming earlier in recent years, and 2015 looks to be no exception. Melvin Slater, a representative for the Alaska Fire Service, told me that the agency is making changes in response to the warm, nearly snow-free winter. “AFS will accelerate the availability of eight smokejumpers and a smokejumper aircraft by April 9, with an additional eight smokejumpers available by April 16,” Slater wrote in an email. That’s about 30 days earlier than normal. A few years ago, the Alaska Division of Forestry moved the start of the fire season up from May 1 to April 1 “as a result of climate change,” Tim Mowry, a division spokesman told me. The changes were intended to elicit “a sense of urgency,” Mowry says.

But there’s a kink in these plans. Alaska government is strongly dependent on oil revenue — and falling fuel prices are forcing budget cuts to state agencies like the Division of Forestry.

But for now, the Iditarod will continue. “Honestly, I’m thinking of moving, whether it be further north in Alaska or somewhere where they can guarantee snow,” Zappa said. “If you’re going to be a dog musher, you need snow. That’s the bottom line.”

Eric Holthaus|13 Mar 2015

This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration; this article is part of Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate.

Big news: CO2 emissions flatlined last year

Solar, wind, and other renewables are making such a big difference in greenhouse gas emissions worldwide that global emissions from the energy sector flatlined during a time of economic growth for the first time in 40 years.

The International Energy Agency announced Friday that energy-related CO2 emissions last year were unchanged from the year before, totaling 32.3 billion metric tons of CO2 in both 2013 and 2014. It shows that efforts to reduce emissions to combat climate change may be more effective than previously thought.

“This is both a very welcome surprise and a significant one,” IEA Chief Economist and incoming IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement. “It provides much-needed momentum to negotiators preparing to forge a global climate deal in Paris in December. For the first time, greenhouse gas emissions are decoupling from economic growth.”

Following an announcement earlier this week that China’s CO2 emissions fell 2 percent in 2014, the IEA is crediting 2014’s progress to China using more solar, wind, and hydropower while burning less coal. Western Europe’s focus on sustainable growth, energy efficiency, and renewables has shown that emissions from energy consumption can fall even as economies grow globally, according to the IEA.

Global CO2 emissions stalled or fell in the early 1980s, 1992, and 2009, each time correlating with a faltering global economy. In 2014, the economy grew 3 percent worldwide.

In the U.S., energy-related CO2 emissions fell during seven of the past 23 years, most notably during the recession of 2009, U.S. Energy Information Administration data show. Emissions in 2013 — the most recent year for which U.S. data is available — were higher than they were in the previous year, but 10 percent lower than they were in 2005.

At the same time, the carbon intensity of the U.S. economy — CO2 emissions per dollar of GDP — has been trending downward over the past 25 years, according to the administration.

Steven Cohen, executive director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, said the globe is starting to see the benefits of energy efficiency and the use of renewables, but those improvements may not last.

“The decline in oil prices and the massive increase in fossil fuel use in China and India will push in the opposite direction in 2015,” he said. “We still need to develop a transformative renewable energy technology that is less expensive than fossil fuels and can match the reliability and convenience of fossil fuel technology. I believe we will develop such a technology, but the sooner the better. Our goal should be to drive fossil fuels from the marketplace.”

The IEA will release a more detailed analysis of global energy-related CO2 emissions in a special energy and climate report to be released in June.

“The latest data on emissions are indeed encouraging, but this is no time for complacency and certainly not the time to use this positive news as an excuse to stall further action,” IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven said in a statement.

Bobby Magill|13 Mar 2015|Cross-posted from Climate Central

How does climate activism differ in the U.S. and Germany?

A survey of American climate activists by Grist inspired us to conduct our own survey on the priorities of German activists. Both surveys include a dozen or so leading figures of the climate movement in each country. Before comparing the two, let’s first look at what sticks out in each country’s survey.

The causes of and solutions for climate change are highly complex, so it is not surprising that responses vary. Across the 15 answers from the United States, however, we identified the following common themes for priorities in 2015:

1. Grow the climate movement: The top priority for American activists is building and strengthening the U.S. climate movement. It should not only become bigger, but also become more inclusive. More than half of the responses argued that the movement should go beyond tackling climate change and also address social justice and diversity.

2. Fight fossil fuels: Many groups have joined the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline, against fracking, and against allowing oil and gas companies to drill on more land or off the coasts.

3. Enforce existing climate policies: A number of respondents mentioned their support for President Obama’s plan to limit emissions from power plants — the main federal climate program — and called for it to be implemented in a strong and fair way. Only a couple called for new federal climate legislation, likely because the current Republican-controlled Congress would be sure to reject any such new proposal. A few also called for new aggressive policy at the state level, where there’s more of a possibility of success.

The word cloud above shows how often issues were mentioned in U.S. responses. Other priorities noted include preparing for the next presidential election, working on energy efficiency, and making the U.N. climate talks in Paris a success. From a German perspective, one gap seems obvious: None of the U.S. activists talked about the role of nuclear power.

The responses from the 11 German climate activists and researchers also ranged across the whole action toolkit for tackling climate change. But also here, clear priorities can be identified:

1. Accelerating a coal phase-out: The top priority for German activists for 2015 is new legislation to speed up a phase-out of coal power, such as a climate action program, a new electricity market design, and the E.U.’s cap-and-trade program.

2. Making the U.N. climate negotiations in Paris a success: Mentioned by more than half of respondents, a new climate treaty is the second highest priority for German activists.

3. Expanding the energy transition beyond the power sector: Almost half of respondents called for the Energiewende, Germany’s shift to cleaner energy, to get going in the heating/cooling and transportation sectors.

Interestingly, the above word cloud made from the German responses also reveals the different governance levels that Energiewende activists have to navigate: German, European, and international.

A comparison of the two surveys reveals a few salient differences:

1. The American activists are fighting stronger opponents. The main natural resource left in Germany to exploit is lignite, the dirtiest form of coal. The passage of the Renewable Energy Act in 2000 enabled citizenry to compete with incumbent electric utilities profitably, thereby breaking the stranglehold on energy markets. Furthermore, money is not nearly as influential in German politics as in the United States. The U.S., on the other hand, is still home to very powerful oil, gas, and coal companies (the Germans never had enough oil or gas to bring forth big firms in those sectors). American activists therefore still fight the further expansion of fossil fuels. They have a much more uphill battle than their German colleagues, and this fiercer opposition must be kept in mind before we overly praise the Germans for what looks like greater progress on renewables. Simply put, the Germans have had weaker opponents.

2. German activists have made up their mind on saying “Auf Wiedersehen” to nuclear power. The American public continues to debate the role of nuclear, and it is interesting that nuclear is not included in the U.S. responses. Only the executive director of the Sierra Club mentions that “nukes” are often more expensive than “clean energy” — a subtle indication that, at least for him, the latter does not include the former. The Germans, on the other hand, are vocal in rejecting a simple decarbonization strategy if nuclear is a part of it.

3. U.S. activists set a greater focus on racial equality. Heavily emphasized by U.S. activists, this aspect was not mentioned at all in Germany. Why the silence? Germany is clearly multicultural today, the second biggest country for immigrants after only the U.S. In 2012, roughly 400,000 people moved to Germany, a trend that is expected to continue. Foreigners now make up nearly 10 percent of the German population. One possible reason that German activists aren’t focused on this: Dirty energy infrastructure is not disproportionately dumped on immigrants and minorities in Germany the way it is in the U.S.

4. U.S. activists set a greater focus on the impact on the poor. Most German activists see energy poverty as a subset of poverty, which is a social issue. They therefore address energy poverty with social policy, not energy policy. In the midst of rising electricity prices, the Germans did not add coverage of power bills to welfare programs, which already cover heating bills, but rather implemented the country’s first nationwide minimum wage. The goal was to ameliorate the condition of the working poor in general. In addition, the budget for energy auditors who visit households was doubled this year. So Germany is reacting to energy poverty by giving citizens greater spending power and helping them reduce consumption.

5. The German responses reveal a more international focus. Only a couple of U.S. responses mentioned the upcoming climate summit in Paris, while many more of the Germans highlighted it. The U.S. is largely free to design its own energy policy, with some coordination with Canada. In contrast, Germany physically borders on nine countries and has additional grid connections with Norway and Sweden. More importantly, as a member of the European Union, Germany is institutionally embedded in European federalism, so German policy makers and activists keep an eye on E.U. regulation, coordinate energy policy with other E.U. member states, and forge international alliances to pursue interests.

6. German activists focus on new legislation, while U.S. activists focus on enforcing existing legislation and building a stronger movement. German activists’ biggest achievement has been the political consensus around the Energiewende on moving beyond fossil fuels and nuclear power. But it didn’t come overnight; it was hard work over many years. A strong movement came about by including faith groups, unions, farmers, and even manufacturers. This broad political consensus allows the German activists to focus on pushing through new or improving existing climate and energy legislation, both on the national and European level. German and European lawmakers are responsive and willing to act. In contrast, U.S. activists face a political roadblock in Congress. The 2010 climate bill was the last serious attempt in the United States to implement new comprehensive climate legislation on the federal level.

Overall, the American activists have clearly identified steps that will make a difference. In several respects, the Germans have already taken such steps, so the success has been demonstrated. Several of the Americans in the survey talk about engaging with and protecting communities. One secret to the success of the German grassroots energy transition is that communities were the drivers. Ordinary citizens came together to create new energy cooperatives for their own wind, solar, and biomass projects when the energy sector and public officials showed little interest. But we should not oversimplify the matter by leaving the impression that the Germans are a decade or two ahead of Americans. In reality, activists in the two countries face quite different situations, particularly in terms of moneyed resistance.

Finally, the question posed by Grist — “What should climate activists focus on this year?” – might have been posed differently if the idea had originated in Germany. Because Germany has a clear energy policy laid out through 2050 — the Energiewende — it is likely that the question in Germany would have been, “What should be done to speed up the Energiewende this year?” The U.S. is still debating fundamental directional issues, while the Germans are debating details about the direction already decided on. For instance, Americans argue about whether the Keystone XL pipeline is needed for domestic energy security. In contrast, the Germans are not debating whether they need coal power or not, but how specifically it can be phased out.

Craig Morris and Arne Jungjohann|15 Mar 2015

Obama: It’s ‘Disturbing’ That A Climate Change Denier Chairs Senate Environmental Committee

President Barack Obama told Vice News in an interview released on Monday that it was “disturbing” that the chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works denied the existence of climate change.

Obama was referring to Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), who threw a snowball on the Senate floor earlier this month to help make his case that climate change isn’t real. Even though Inhofe cited record low temperatures across the country as evidence that climate change was overplayed, the country has actually been experiencing a warmer than average winter.

“That’s disturbing,” Obama said when Vice’s Shane Smith pointed out that the stunt would have been funny if it weren’t for Inhofe’s chairmanship.

Inhofe, who wrote the book The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, has also cited Scripture as part of his argument for why climate change isn’t real.

Obama said he couldn’t fault people who were concerned about gas prices and that climate change was a difficult political issue address because it had no immediate payoff. But he also attributed some of the challenge to the influence that the oil and gas industry holds with elected officials.

“In some cases, though, you have elected officials who are shills for the oil companies or the fossil fuel industry and there’s a lot of money involved,” he said. “Typically in Congress the committees of jurisdiction, like the energy committees, are populated by folks from places that pump a lot of oil and pump a lot of gas.”

As president, Obama said that he hoped to get the country to get the country to see climate change “as a serious, immediate threat, not some distant vague thing.”

Obama added that he recognized that even if he was able to secure international commitments on climate change and improve fuel and appliance efficiency standards, climate change would still be a big problem when he left office.

“If I’m able to do all those things now, when I’m done we’re still gonna have a heck of a problem, but we will have made enough progress that the next president and the next generation can start building on it and you start getting some momentum.”

The way that his daughters understood the science of climate change, Obama said, gave him hope that future generations would force politicians to take on the threat.

“I guarantee you that the Republican party will have to change its approach to climate change because voters will insist upon it,” he said.

Sam Levine|The Huffington Post|03/16/2015

Florida Environmental Staffer Says He Was Reprimanded For Talking About Climate Change

A Florida Department of Environmental Protection land manager says he was sent home and formally reprimanded for speaking about climate change and the Keystone XL pipeline at an inter-agency meeting last month.

The Tallahassee Democrat reported on the disciplinary measures Thursday, following a complaint filed on the employee’s behalf by the Florida chapter of the group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER.

Bart Bibler, a land management plan coordinator, was served with an official reprimand “concerning his discussion of climate change, together with his position that the Keystone XL Pipeline would further aggravate this environmental problem,” according to the complaint filed with the DEP inspector general. Bibler was placed on personal leave, was told to stay out of the office for two days, and was “directed to seek what appears to be a mental health evaluation from his doctor to verify his ‘fitness for duty,'” the PEER complaint says.

The sanctions against Bibler follow reports from former DEP staffers that Gov. Rick Scott (R) had barred state employees from using the words “climate change” or “global warming.” Scott has denied prohibiting the use of the terms.

Jerry Phillips, the Florida PEER director, argued in the complaint that Bibler’s reprimand is emblematic of the state’s approach to climate change and “underlines the extent to which it demonstrates the fear that employees have in being made to appear as though they wish to discuss climate change or global warming.”

Bibler was disciplined after a Florida Coastal Managers Forum on Feb. 27, according to the complaint. “[A]fter the meeting agenda had been largely discussed by every other participant, Mr. Bibler was asked to introduce himself and provide an agency update,” the complaint states. “He provided that update and also expressed his opinion that the Keystone XL Pipeline, if built, would further jeopardize the stability of our climate, which would also negatively impact the State of Florida.”

Lauren Engel, DEP communications director, said in a statement Thursday that Bibler “was reprimanded for violating three DEP standards of conduct, including poor performance, insubordination and conduct unbecoming a public employee.”

Engel said Bibler “engaged in personal political advocacy related to the Keystone XL pipeline,” even though the pipeline wasn’t on the meeting agenda. She said Bibler “failed to provide an accurate summary of the meeting” to his supervisor and “instead responded in a disrespectful and argumentative fashion by simply providing an attachment with the ‘Keystone XL Pipeline’ with a red circle and a cross through it.” She said the department’s leaders “respect all our employees’ personal beliefs,” but “expect them to perform their duties in an impartial and appropriate manner and to stay focused and engaged on job-related activities during work hours.”

The complaint alleges that Bibler’s manager was upset about references to climate change in his written summary of the meeting. Bibler said he was asked to change the summary to exclude “any hot button issues, especially explicit references to climate change.” He refused, he said, “because it would have been untrue.” He said he added a symbol meant to express “Stop the Keystone XL Pipeline” in response to a request to change the summary.

PEER has requested protection for Bibler under Florida’s Whistle-blower’s Act.

Kate Sheppard|huffingtonpost.com|03/19/2015

China, U.S. May Be Moving Closer To A Climate Deal

BEIJING (AP) — A U.S. envoy for climate change said Friday that China and the U.S. are working more closely than ever ahead of a conference this year in Paris that raises hopes for a global plan to cut greenhouse emissions.

Special Envoy Todd Stern told reporters in Beijing that he still expects hard negotiations between many countries in advance of the U.N. summit. But he told reporters there’s “a greater level of convergence on some very important structural issues” compared to the months before the last major U.N. climate summit, which ended without a significant agreement in 2009.

With China emitting more greenhouse gases than any other country, and the U.S. a distant second, many are watching if the two countries can agree to a plan before the Paris meeting.

“I think we’re on the same page on some issues, not every issue probably,” Stern said of the U.S. and China. “But we are working I think in a closer and more cooperative basis than we ever have before.”

Similar bilateral meetings resulted in major announcements by both countries in November of landmark climate change plans, including China’s pledge to peak carbon emissions by around 2030.

In response to a reporter’s question, Stern said he hadn’t seen any sign from his Chinese counterparts that they planned to advance that deadline, although some experts say China’s emissions need to peak much earlier to stave off major climate consequences.

“We didn’t have any sense from within the (Chinese) government that there were views on their readiness to announce 2025 or 2020” as a peak date, Stern said.

He said Chinese and U.S. negotiators also hadn’t discussed how quickly, or even if, Chinese emissions would begin dropping after reaching their peak.

Stern said the U.S. would like a Paris deal to set hard immediate carbon reduction targets and then a series of future reduction targets as well as pledges to generally move economies away from fossil fuels and other sources of carbon emissions.

JACK CHANG| |03/20/2015

10 Places You Have to Visit Before They’re Gone

There are some places in this world that are uniquely beautiful, but are very likely to disappear soon. I comprised a list of the top 10 places you should visit before they’re gone.

1. The Alaskan Tundra – The coldest biome in the world, Alaska’s Tundra is severely affected by global warming and is at risk of disappearing very soon.

2. The Great Barrier Reef – At 500,000 years old,  it is the world’s most complex ecosystem, larger than the Great Wall of China, the Great Barrier Reef is slowly dying due to pollution and climate change.

3. The Dead Sea – The lowest place on earth, the Dead Sea is also a natural wonder. Its water’s healing properties and renowned and its below-sea-level altitude makes it one of the only places people with psoriasis can get out in the sun without suffering. Sadly, with diversion of water from the Jordan River as well as industrial harvesting of the salt, the Dead Sea has been shrinking. Visitors today can see hotels and resorts that were once on the shoreline, now hundreds of meters away.

4. Madagascar – World-famous for its lemurs, Madagascar has over 20 different species of lemurs and 80% of the flora and fauna on the island are unique to Madagascar. Sadly, the island’s entire eco system is being destroyed because of logging, poaching and land-burning (a way to clear land for farming). It is estimated that if nothing is done to stop this, Madagascar’s eco system will disappear in 30 years. 

5. The Maldives – A Chain of roughly 1,900 islands in the Indian Ocean, the Maldives are a small taste of paradise. Most of the land in the Maldives is no higher than 5ft (1.5 meters), and with predicted rise in water levels, there is a great chance they’ll disappear in the next 10 years.

6. Glacier National Park – Located in Montana, the park is losing its signature glaciers at an alarming rate. Where once there were 150 glaciers, nowadays there are 25 left with experts warning that they might be gone by the end of the decade. 

7. Patagonia – The largest ice fields in the world after Antarctica and Greenland, are in Patagonia. A recent study found that about 90 percent of the mountain glaciers in the region are melting up to 100 times faster than at any time in the past 350 years, and at least a dozen glacier-fed lakes have vanished virtually overnight in the last five years alone.

8. The Taj Mahal – One of the 7 wonders of the world, the Taj Mahal attracts over 3 million people every year. Sadly, due to air pollution and the crowds its white stone facade is slowly eroding. It has become so problematic that tourism officials are considering closing this monument to the public by 2020.

9. Venice – With origins as far back as the 2^nd century C.E., Venice is one of the most renowned cities in the world, made famous for its canals and gondolas. Venice makes this list because it’s still sinking. At a rate of 2 millimeters a year (0.02 inches), the city is likely to either sink slowly to its final rest under the Adriatic Sea, or crumble as the sea-water corrodes the foundations of the buildings. And if that wasn’t enough, scientists now discovered that the city is also tilting to the east…

10. The Florida Everglades – The largest subtropical wilderness in America and the largest mangrove ecosystem in the Western Hemisphere. With urbanization and water diversion, thousands of acres have disappeared, leaving the Everglades half the size it was a century ago. There is a national plan to save the Everglades, but whether it happens or not, only time will tell.

Sasha K.

Extreme Weather

Cyclone hits Vanuatu islands ‘like a bomb’

Cyclone Pam, possibly the worst cyclone in the Pacific’s history, slammed directly into the tiny South Pacific archipelago Vanuatu early Saturday, killing at least eight people and leaving thousands homeless, according to aid organizations.

The sheer size of the devastation is only beginning to trickle out because almost all power and communications have been cut to much of Vanuatu, a string of 65 islands a quarter of the way from Australia to Hawaii.

Its population of 267,000 is spread over the islands, with about 47,000 living in the capital, Port Vila.

Save the Children’s Nicola Krey told CBS Radio News that she expects many homeless as rescue teams fan out across the archipelago.

“Today we’ve only counted 1,500 people in an evacuation center in Port Vila,” she said. “That leaves tens of thousands of people unprotected from that type of storm.”

Save the Children’s director, Tom Skirrow, told Reuters the conservative figure of eight dead so far came from the country’s National Disaster Management Office and was based on reports from hospitals and paramedic services.

Oxfam, the international aid agency, said its staff in Vanuatu reported a “complete destruction of homes,” with three-story- high trees uprooted and small communities left with almost no homes standing.

“We have no power or running water and are still not able to move around freely,” Collett van Rooyen, Oxfam’s Vanuatu director, reported. “The scale of this disaster is unprecedented in this country and the proud people of Vanuatu are going to need a lot of help to rebuild their homes and their lives.”

UNICEF New Zealand Executive Director Vivien Maidaborn said the disaster “could potentially be one of the worst in Pacific history,” The New Zealand Herald reported.

The huge cyclone, as hurricanes are called in the Pacific, hit Vanuatu dead center after a change of course to the west.

Alice Clements, a spokeswoman for UNICEF in Port Vila, said, “It looks like a bomb’s gone off,” NZME News Service reported. “Tourists who have been to Port Vila wouldn’t recognize it.”

Authorities in New Zealand are preparing for the storm, which is forecast to pass north of the country Sunday.

Doug Stanglin|USA TODAY|3/15/15|Contributing: Associated Press

Update: Pacific nation reeling from Cyclone Pam

Vanuatu death estimates vary; destruction challenges communication, access to water

Communities were in a shambles, communications remained near zero and access to clean water was a severe challenge Sunday on the Vanuatu archipelago, almost two days after Cyclone Pam blasted through the remote South Pacific island chain, the International Red Cross said Sunday.

Estimates on the death toll varied widely, with some officials reporting at least six dead while unconfirmed reports put the death toll at more than 40. The immense devastation, damage to the communications systems and remote nature of the chain of 65 inhabited islands made damage assessments difficult. Pacific Red Cross chief Aurelia Balpe told The Australian that a pilot flew over the islands, reporting that on the southern island of Tanna, many buildings were destroyed. The southern end of the chain appeared to take the direct hit.

“What he told me is that he could land — that was the first positive,” Balpe said. “But as they flew in and out they saw lots of trees uprooted and, what was most striking, all corrugated iron structures were destroyed as far as the eye could see.”

CATEGORY 5 STORM

Cyclone Pam, possibly the worst cyclone in the Pacific’s history, slammed into Vanuatu late Friday. Wind speeds of more than 165 mph made Pam a Category 5 storm.

Vanuatu, about a quarter of the way from Australia to Hawaii, has a population of 267,000. About 34,000 live on Tanna and tiny nearby islands at the south of the chain.

But the entire nation appeared to be devastated. The New Zealand Herald reported that 90 percent of homes in Port Vila, with a population of almost 50,000, were damaged or destroyed.

“The immediate concern is for a very high death toll but also an enormous amount of destruction,” Sune Gudnitz, regional director for the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination for Humanitarian Assistance (UNOCHA), told Reuters.

There were unconfirmed reports that 44 people had died in Panama province in the northeast of Vanuatu, UNOCHA said in a statement quoted by Reuters.

Oxfam, the international aid agency, said its staff on the ground in Vanuatu reported a “complete destruction of homes,” with three-story-high trees uprooted and small communities left with almost no homes standing.

“We have no power or running water and are still not able to move around freely,” Collett van Rooyen, Oxfam’s Vanuatu country director, reported. “The scale of this disaster is unprecedented in this country, and the proud people of Vanuatu are going to need a lot of help t o rebuild their homes and their lives.”

Vivien Maidaborn, New Zealand executive director for the relief organization UNICEF, said early reports indicate the disaster “could potentially be one of the worst in Pacific history.”

DIRECT HIT

The huge cyclone, as hurricanes are called in the Pacific, hit Vanuatu dead-center after a last minute change of course to the west.

Alice Clements, a spokeswoman for UNICEF in Port Vila, said the capital had been devastated.

“It looks like a bomb’s gone off,” she told NZME News Service. “Tourists who have been to Port Vila wouldn’t recognize it.”

John Bacon and Doug Stanglin|USA TODAY

Update: Climate Change to Blame for Devastating Cyclone, Says President of Vanuatu

You may never have heard of the republic of Vanuatu, an island nation located in the south Pacific. But, like many island nations, it’s on the front lines of climate activism because of its vulnerability to climate change.

Just how vulnerable it is was demonstrated last week. Category 5 Cyclone Pam swept across Vanuatu on Friday with winds more than 200 mph, damaging or destroying virtually every building on the main island of Port Vila, wrecking most of its infrastructure and killing at least 10 people. The damage, death and injury toll is still being assessed, especially on outlying islands where communication is limited. Seventy percent of its population lives in these very poor remote areas, which already have minimal infrastructure. It’s said to be one of the worst disasters in the region’s history.

Tropical Cyclone Pam eventually grew to winds of more than 200 mph by the time it hit the islands that comprise Vanuatu. Image credit: @NOAASatellites.

“This is a very devastating cyclone in Vanuatu,” Vanuatu President Baldwin Lonsdale to Al Jazeera. “I term it as a monster, a monster. It’s a setback for the government and for the people of Vanuatu.”

Lonsdale put out a call for humanitarian aid for the most basic necessities, including drinking water, medicine, clothing, eating utensils and other household items. Australia, New Zealand and the UK have already responded to his pleas.

And in an interview with Associated Press, Lonsdale put the blame squarely on climate change.

“Climate change is contributing to the disasters in Vanuatu,” he said. “We see the level of sea rise. Change in weather patterns. This year we have heavy rain more than every year.”

Anote Tong, president of the Pacific island nation of Kiribati, whose existence is jeopardized by rising sea levels, which was hit by Cyclone Pam to a lesser extent, agreed, saying, “Climate change has exacerbated the severity of natural disasters and frequency, that’s worsening the impacts on different communities. I put forward this argument that climate change and disasters are so integrated and so related.”

When the hurricane hit, Lonsdale and other Vanuatu government officials were in Sendai, Japan, attending the 3rd World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction. They immediately headed home, where action was needed more than conversation.

And World Bank vice president and special envoy for climate change Rachel Kyte told Agence France Press that those at the conference seemed not to connect climate policy and the growing number of extreme weather events such as Cyclone Pam.

“I worry that a sense of urgency and a sense of shared ambition is not at the right level,” she told AFP at the Disaster Risk Reduction Conference. “It’s hugely ironic that this storm should hit Vanuatu while we are all here. If we truly care for those people, we have to respond. I think we have to hold ourselves accountable.”

“I don’t think I would say climate change caused (Cyclone) Pam, but I would say the fact is in the past three or four years we’ve seen category fives coming with a regularity we’ve never seen before,” added Kyte. “And that has some relationship with climate change. It is undisputable that part of the Pacific Ocean is much warmer today than in previous years, so these storms are intensifying. We may have helped communities become resilient to the kinds of storms we experienced in the past, but resilience to a storm with wind speed of up to 300 kilometres per hour— that’s a whole new intensity.

Anastasia Pantsios|March 16, 2015

Vanuatu Islanders Running Out Of Food, Water After Cyclone

TANNA, Vanuatu, March 17 (Reuters) – Residents of the southern Vanuatu island of Tanna said they were running out of food and basic supplies on Tuesday, after a huge cyclone tore across the South Pacific nation wreaking widespread devastation but not the heavy death toll initially feared.

Relief workers were still battling to reach many of the islands pummel by Cyclone Pam’s gusts of more than 300 kph (185 mph) on Friday and Saturday.

With communications cut off and reconnaissance flights revealing destroyed houses, shredded forests and damaged buildings, international aid agencies had been particularly worried about Tanna, which bore the full force of the storm.

A Reuters witness on the island of 29,000 people, about 200 km (125 miles) south of the capital, said that while damage was extensive, it appeared most of the population had survived by sheltering in schools, churches and other sturdy buildings.

“People sheltered in school buildings. We were helping one another,” Ropate Vuso, 67, told Reuters in Tanna township.

“We are running short of food, water, shelter and electricity. We have no communications, we are still waiting for the people from parliament, the chief and the president, but still nobody is coming.”

There were unconfirmed reports of four deaths in and around the main town of Tanna.

Daniel Dieckhaus, an adviser for USAid, said hard-hit communities were showing remarkable resilience.

“You can see them out there now, rebuilding with whatever they have,” he said.

The United Nations said on Tuesday the official death toll from the cyclone was 11, revising down its earlier figure of 24, but many officials anticipate that number would rise once they are able to more thoroughly inspect the outer islands of the scattered archipelago.

“The aerial reconnaissance flights confirmed significant damage in the southern islands, particularly Tanna island, where it appears that more than 80 percent of houses and buildings have been partially or completely destroyed,” Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop told reporters in Canberra.

HEALTH CONCERNS

In Vanuatu capital Port Vila the clean-up was progressing after trees were uprooted and homes flattened, but there were worries about food scarcity and health after the main local food market was destroyed and the city’s hospital severely damaged.

Bishop said Australia was sending a 20-strong emergency medical assistance team of doctors, nurses, paramedics and a pharmacist. They plan to set up a temporary ward in the car park of the damaged Port Vila hospital capable of treating up to 40 patients. Thousands are still staying in shelters overnight, with a 6pm-6am curfew in place to prevent looting.

The majority of locals rely on foods sold at the downtown market such as taro, island cabbage, bananas, kumara and yams for their staple diet.

Shops selling tinned food were open and stocked in the capital, but many locals do not have the money to buy them.

“We have water, but the situation is very bad because people don’t have local food,” shop owner Colette Calvo said. “All they can eat is food like bananas that they pick up off the ground and they can get sick.”

Australia, which has already sent five planes with personnel and humanitarian supplies, dispatched another three planes on Tuesday. It also began loading its emergency response ship HMAS Tobruk, which is capable of driving onto beaches, for possible deployment. A French navy ship was also being sent from nearby New Caledonia, while a U.S Marine Corps-based Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief team was also being made ready, Australian defense officials said.

TOURISM HIT

Formerly known as the New Hebrides, Vanuatu, one of the world’s poorest nations, is a sprawling cluster of more than 80 islands and 260,000 people, 2,000 km (1,250 miles) northeast of the Australian city of Brisbane.

Perched on the geologically active “Ring of Fire,” it suffers from frequent earthquakes and tsunamis and has several active volcanoes, in addition to threats from storms and rising sea levels.

Tourism, which accounts for about 40 percent of Vanuatu’s economy, has been badly affected, with Port Vila closed to cruise liners indefinitely.

“We are keen to go back as soon as possible, given how important this industry is to the Vanuatu economy, but we won’t go back until the authorities give us the all clear,” said David Gray, a spokesman for the Australian arm of cruise company Carnival Corp.

Almost 200 people, most of whom were Australian tourists or workers, were evacuated on two Australian military flights. Australia had another plane on standby on Tuesday to evacuate the elderly, the sick, pregnant women and children.

Aid officials said the storm was comparable in strength to Typhoon Haiyan, which hit the Philippines in 2013 and killed more than 6,000 people.

Stephen Coates|Reuters|03/17/2015  (Additional reporting by Jane Wardell, Lincoln Feast and Colin Packham in Sydney, Gyles Beckford in Wellington; Editing by G Crosse and Will Waterman)

Al Gore at SXSW: We Need to ‘Punish Climate-Change Deniers’ and ‘Put a Price on Carbon’

The South by Southwest (SXSW) Festival is happening now in Austin, Texas. Running from March 9 to 22, it’s a massive film, interactive and music festival that is nearly 20 years old. The festival brings together designers, developers, investors, entrepreneurs and politicians for panels and discussions about technology and innovation.

For the third time in the last few years, Al Gore, founder and chairman of the Climate Reality Project, spoke at the festival on Friday. Naturally, his interactive discussion focused on addressing the climate crisis. The former vice president focused on the need to “punish climate-change deniers, saying politicians should pay a price for rejecting ‘accepted science,’” said the Chicago Tribune.

Gore said forward-thinking investors are moving away from companies that invest in fossil fuels and towards companies investing in renewable energy. “We need to put a price on carbon to accelerate these market trends,” Gore told the Chicago Tribune, referring to a proposed federal cap-and-trade system that would penalize companies that exceeded their carbon-emission limits. “And in order to do that, we need to put a price on denial in politics.”

He called on the tech-minded SXSW crowd, which is dominated by Millenials, to harness technology to launch a grassroots movement to tackle climate change and call out climate deniers. “We have this denial industry cranked up constantly,” Gore said. “In addition to 99 percent of the scientists and all the professional scientific organizations, now Mother Nature is weighing in.”

Years from now, Gore said the next generation will look back at us and ask: “How did you change?,” according to Macworld. “Part of the answer may well be that a group of people came to South by Southwest in Austin, Texas in 2015 and helped to make a revolution,” Gore said.

Gore wanted these young, tech-savvy attendees to start a grassroots movement using social media like they did when “net neutrality was threatened or when the Stop Online Piracy Act threatened to blacklist websites that offered so-called illegal content,” said Macworld. That means signing petitions to fight climate change, utilizing social media to call out climate deniers in Congress and streaming the Live Earth Road to Paris concert on June 18, an event designed to draw attention to the climate talks in Paris this December.

The former Veep even gave a nod to Pope Francis during his talk, showing a slide of the pontiff and saying “How about this Pope?” Pope Francis celebrated his two-year anniversary as Pope on Friday, riding a wave of popularity “that has reinvigorated the Catholic Church in ways not seen since the days of St. John Paul II,” said the Chicago Tribune. Gore said he was looking forward to the Pope’s highly anticipated encyclical on the environment which is due to be released in June or July. “I’m not a Catholic,” Gore said, “but I could be persuaded to become one.”

Cole Mellino|March 16, 2015

Arctic Sea Ice Hits Record Low Winter Maximum, Points To Evidence Of Long-Term Climate Change

OSLO, March 19 (Reuters) – Arctic sea ice this year is the smallest in winter since satellite records began in 1979, in a new sign of long-term climate change, U.S. data showed on Thursday.

The ice floating on the Arctic Ocean around the North Pole reached its maximum annual extent of just 14.54 million square kms (5.61 million sq miles) on Feb. 25 – slightly bigger than Canada – and is now expected to shrink with a spring thaw.

“This year’s maximum ice extent was the lowest in the satellite record, with below-average ice conditions everywhere except in the Labrador Sea and Davis Strait,” the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said in a statement.

A late season surge in ice was still possible, it said. The ice was 1.1 million sq kms smaller than the 1981-2010 average, and below the previous lowest maximum in 2011.

With the return of the sun to the Arctic after months of winter darkness, the ice shrinks to a minimum in September.

The U.N. panel of climate scientists links the long-term shrinkage of the ice, by 3.8 percent a decade since 1979, to global warming and says Arctic summertime sea ice could vanish in the second half of the century.

“The majority of models point in the same direction – less ice,” said Sebastian Gerland, an expert at the Norwegian Polar Institute. And he said far less ice was surviving more than one winter – such ice is often thickest and most resilient.

The U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization says 2014 was the warmest year since records began in the 19th century. Almost 200 nations have agreed to work out a deal in December in Paris to slow global warming.

The Arctic thaw is disrupting indigenous hunting lifestyles in the Arctic while making the region more accessible. But low oil prices have discouraged exploration and tensions between the West and Russia have limited interest in Arctic shipping.

“This new data on sea ice loss sends a clear message to the global community that the Arctic is unraveling, warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet,” Rafe Pomerance, chair of Arctic 21, a group of environmental groups, said in a statement.

At the other end of the planet, the NSIDC said earlier this month that sea ice around Antarctica was the fourth-smallest for summer. Climate scientists say the apparently contradictory trend may be tied to changing winds and currents.

Reuters|03/19/2015|Reporting by Alister Doyle|Editing by Tom Heneghan and Susan Fenton

Genetically Modified Organisms

MONSANTO LOSES GMO PERMIT IN MEXICO – JUDGE SIDES WITH THE BEES

A number of countries around the world have now completely banned GM food and the pesticides that go with them, or have severe restrictions against them. This comes after the world has experienced a massive resistance against Monsanto and other biotech giants that manufacture GMOs and pesticides.

It’s [the resistance] also a result of numerous studies that have emerged showing the environmental and health dangers that are associated with pesticides, as well as health dangers that could be associated with GMOs.

The latest country to make headlines with regards to banning Monsanto products is Mexico, as a group of beekeepers was successful in stopping Monsanto from the planting of soybeans that are genetically modified to resist their Round-up herbicide.

MONSANTO LOSES MEXICAN PERMIT

Monsanto had received a permit to plant its seeds on over 250,000 hectares of land, which equates to approximately 620,000 acres. That’s a lot of land, and they managed to get the permit despite thousands of citizens, beekeepers, Greenpeace, Mayan farmers, The National Institute of Ecology and other major environmental groups protesting against it.

According to The Guardian:

“A district judge in the state of Yucatán last month overturned a permit issued to Monsanto by Mexico’s agriculture ministry, Sagarpa, and environmental protection agency, Semarnat, in June 2012 that allowed commercial planting of Round-up ready Soybeans. In withdrawing the permit, the judge was convinced by the scientific evidence presented about the threats posed by GM soy crops to honey production in the Yucatán peninsula, which includes Campeche, Quintana Roo and Yucatán states. Co-existence between honey production and GM soybeans is not possible, the judge ruled.” (source)

Mexico is the fourth largest honey producer and fifth largest honey exporter in the world. 

BREAKING-NEWS.CA|3/15/15

GMO Science Deniers: Monsanto and the USDA

Perhaps no group of science deniers has been more ridiculed than those who deny the science of evolution. What you may not know is that Monsanto and our United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) are among them. That’s right: for decades, Monsanto and its enablers inside the USDA have denied the central tenets of evolutionary biology, namely natural selection and adaptation. And this denial of basic science by the company and our government threatens the future viability of American agriculture.

Third Grade Science

Let’s start with interrelated concepts of natural selection and adaptation. This is elementary school science. In fact, in Washington D.C. it is part of the basic third grade science curriculum.

As we all remember from biology class, when an environment changes, trait variation in a species could allow some in that species to adapt to that new environment and survive. Others will die out. The survivors are then able to reproduce and even thrive under the new environmental conditions. For example, if a drought were to occur, some plants might have traits that allow them to survive while other plants in the same species would perish. The drought-resistant plants then become the “evolved” species, and they are able to reproduce in the drought environment.

Obvious, you are thinking. But let’s explore how Monsanto’s top scientists and government regulators would have failed a third grade science class in D.C. and the dire consequences that it is bringing to us all.

Biotech’s Dirty Little Secret

First a little background. Since the early 1980s, Monsanto has endlessly hyped genetically engineered (GE) crops they claim could reduce hunger, reduce pesticide use, and survive droughts. In reality, no such “miracle” crops exist. No significantly greater yielding crops, no more effective drought resistance crops. And as for the claim of less pesticide use, behind this myth lies the “dirty little secret” of agricultural biotechnology. Namely, that GE crops actually add hundreds of millions of pounds of pesticides to our fields and crops, and create greater agrochemical residues on our food. Why? Because around 85 percent of all genetically engineered crops in the United States and around the world have been engineered to withstand massive doses of herbicides, mostly Monsanto’s Roundup. Usually, if toxic weed-killing chemicals such as Roundup come into contact with a crop they will destroy it as well as the weeds around it. But Monsanto scientists genetically engineered a cassette of bacterial and viral DNA into plants that allowed them to tolerate these herbicides. So the weeds are killed, but the crops remain.

In the United States, more than 50 percent of all our cropland is devoted to GE corn, soy and cotton. They are commodity crops that feed cars, animals in industrial meat production and are used for additives like high fructose corn syrup. Almost none directly feeds people. So rather than feeding the hungry, this technology is about chemical companies selling more chemicals, a lot more chemicals. So as noted, each year 115 million more pounds of Roundup are spread on our farmlands because of these altered crops.

Profits versus Science: Science loses

If half of our nation’s cropland is doused year after year with a particular herbicide, that is a significant change in the environment. The accompanying problem of adaptation and selection has probably already occurred to you. Wouldn’t that massive increase in Roundup use over that huge a portion of our cropland cause some weed populations to develop resistance? Wouldn’t weeds with natural resistance thrive in this new environment? Wouldn’t these new “superweeds” eventually become a major problem for U.S. farmers, overrunning their crops?

As government regulators were considering whether to approve these plants in the mid-1990s, they asked Monsanto just that question. No doubt considering the billions they were going to make selling more Roundup, this is a moment when Monsanto’s scientists seemed to find it convenient to their bottom line to deny basic evolutionary science. They stated, “Evolution of weed resistance to glyphosate (Roundup’s active ingredient) appears to be an unlikely event.” They also suggested that massive use of Roundup would lead to “no resistant weeds.” Independent scientists were aghast. They mocked Monsanto’s view that Roundup was somehow “invincible” from the laws of natural selection, and pointed out that the company’s scientists purposely ignored numerous studies that showed there would be weed resistance. But incredibly, despite the strong contrary evidence, the USDA regulators just nodded in science denying agreement with Monsanto.

Of course, adaptation and natural selection did take place. As a result, in less than 20 years, more than half of all U.S. farms have some Roundup resistant “superweeds,” weeds that now infest 70 million acres of U.S farmland, an area the size of Wyoming. Each year we see major expansion of this “superweed” acreage. Texas has gone so far as to declare a state of emergency for cotton farmers. Superweeds are already causing major economic problems for farmers with a current estimate of $1 billion lost in damages to crops so far.

Last year in a panel discussion with Robert Fraley, Chief Technology Officer for Monsanto and a founder of these herbicide tolerant crops, I confronted him. How could he and the other Monsanto scientists have claimed that natural selection would not take place? How could they ignore basic evolutionary science and clear contrary evidence? He just shook his head and said “You’re right, weeds have evolved resistance.” But apparently, Monsanto and their government regulators still haven’t learned this third grade science lesson. They’re denying science once again, and the stakes are even higher.

“Agent Orange Crops” and More Science Denial

Now Monsanto and Dow Chemical have received government approval to market new genetically engineered corn, soy and cotton, that are “stacked” with engineered DNA that make them resistant to Roundup as well as 2,4-D (one of the chief elements of “Agent Orange”). Monsanto has also gained approval from the USDA for the same three crops that can tolerate Dicamba. 2,4-D and Dicamba are older, more toxic herbicides than Roundup, and these companies are reverting to them because they have brought us to the point of peak herbicides. They simply don’t have any new ones, similar to the current crisis in antibiotics.

But won’t the weeds simply become resistant to these herbicides as well? Not according to the science deniers at Monsanto and Dow Chemical. Despite predictions that their new crops will add hundreds of millions more pounds of these herbicides each year, they say not to worry. They claim — as they did 20 years ago — that natural selection will not happen; that it is extremely unlikely for weeds to survive simultaneous attacks from two or more different herbicides with different methods.

Weed scientists have shredded this argument, noting that weeds in the past, through adaption, have done this and will almost certainly do it again. So in a few years we will be overrun with “superweeds” that are virtually indestructible by any known chemical. But by then Monsanto and Dow will have made billions selling their chemicals and can leave the “superweed” agronomic nightmare for others to solve. Nor will they have to deal with the other nightmares that could possibly occur: increased rates of cancer and diseases like Parkinson’s associated with exposure to these herbicides.

A Better Way

A science-based, and safer, way forward is to abandon this doomed-to-fail chemical arms race against weeds and use ecologically based weed control. There are proven organic and agroecological approaches that emphasize weed management rather than weed eradication, soil building rather than soil supplementing. Crop rotation and cover crops can return productive yields without ridding the land of genetic biodiversity, and could reduce herbicide use by 90 percent.

So it’s long past due that our government required real and rigorous science when regulating GE crops. It’s time for them to say “no” to these herbicide-promoting crops, and prevent the looming agronomic disaster they will inevitably bring with them.

In the meantime, the next time you read hear about “GMO science deniers” — think of 70 million acres of superweeds; think cancer, Parkinson’s and other diseases caused by this growing use of herbicides; think Monsanto and its enablers at the USDA.

  Andrew Kimbrell|Founder and Executive Director|Center for Food Safety|03/20/2015

Energy

Big Oil’s business model is broken

Many reasons have been provided for the dramatic plunge in the price of oil to about $60 per barrel (nearly half of what it was a year ago): slowing demand due to global economic stagnation; overproduction at shale fields in the United States; the decision of the Saudis and other Middle Eastern OPEC producers to maintain output at current levels (presumably to punish higher-cost producers in the U.S. and elsewhere); and the increased value of the dollar relative to other currencies. There is, however, one reason that’s not being discussed, and yet it could be the most important of all: the complete collapse of Big Oil’s production-maximizing business model.

Until last fall, when the price decline gathered momentum, the oil giants were operating at full throttle, pumping out more petroleum every day. They did so, of course, in part to profit from the high prices. For most of the previous six years, Brent crude, the international benchmark for crude oil, had been selling at $100 or higher. But Big Oil was also operating according to a business model that assumed an ever-increasing demand for its products, however costly they might be to produce and refine. This meant that no fossil fuel reserves, no potential source of supply — no matter how remote or hard to reach, how far offshore or deeply buried, how encased in rock — was deemed untouchable in the mad scramble to increase output and profits.

In recent years, this output-maximizing strategy had, in turn, generated historic wealth for the giant oil companies. Exxon, the largest U.S.-based oil firm, earned an eye-popping $32.6 billion in 2013 alone, more than any other American company except for Apple. Chevron, the second biggest oil firm, posted earnings of $21.4 billion that same year. State-owned companies like Saudi Aramco and Russia’s Rosneft also reaped mammoth profits.

How things have changed in a matter of mere months. With demand stagnant and excess production the story of the moment, the very strategy that had generated record-breaking profits has suddenly become hopelessly dysfunctional.

To fully appreciate the nature of the energy industry’s predicament, it’s necessary to go back a decade, to 2005, when the production-maximizing strategy was first adopted. At that time, Big Oil faced a critical juncture. On the one hand, many existing oil fields were being depleted at a torrid pace, leading experts to predict an imminent “peak” in global oil production, followed by an irreversible decline. On the other, rapid economic growth in China, India, and other developing nations was pushing demand for fossil fuels into the stratosphere. In those same years, concern over climate change was also beginning to gather momentum, threatening the future of Big Oil and generating pressures to invest in alternative forms of energy.

A “Brave New World” of tough oil

No one better captured that moment than David O’Reilly, the chair and CEO of Chevron. “Our industry is at a strategic inflection point, a unique place in our history,” he told a gathering of oil executives that February. “The most visible element of this new equation,” he explained in what some observers dubbed his “Brave New World” address, “is that relative to demand, oil is no longer in plentiful supply.” Even though China was sucking up oil, coal, and natural gas supplies at a staggering rate, he had a message for that country and the world: “The era of easy access to energy is over.”

To prosper in such an environment, O’Reilly explained, the oil industry would have to adopt a new strategy. It would have to look beyond the easy-to-reach sources that had powered it in the past and make massive investments in the extraction of what the industry calls “unconventional oil” and what I labeled at the time “tough oil”: resources located far offshore, in the threatening environments of the far north, in politically dangerous places like Iraq, or in unyielding rock formations like shale. “Increasingly,” O’Reilly insisted, “future supplies will have to be found in ultradeep water and other remote areas, development projects that will ultimately require new technology and trillions of dollars of investment in new infrastructure.”

For top industry officials like O’Reilly, it seemed evident that Big Oil had no choice in the matter. It would have to invest those needed trillions in tough-oil projects or lose ground to other sources of energy, drying up its stream of profits. True, the cost of extracting unconventional oil would be much greater than from easier-to-reach conventional reserves (not to mention more environmentally hazardous), but that would be the world’s problem, not theirs. “Collectively, we are stepping up to this challenge,” O’Reilly declared. “The industry is making significant investments to build additional capacity for future production.”

On this basis, Chevron, Exxon, Royal Dutch Shell, and other major firms indeed invested enormous amounts of money and resources in a growing unconventional oil and gas race, an extraordinary saga I described in my book The Race for What’s Left. Some, including Chevron and Shell, started drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico; others, including Exxon, commenced operations in the Arctic and eastern Siberia.  Virtually every one of them began exploiting U.S. shale reserves via hydro-fracking.

Only one top executive questioned this drill-baby-drill approach: John Browne, then the chief executive of BP. Claiming that the science of climate change had become too convincing to deny, Browne argued that Big Energy would have to look “beyond petroleum” and put major resources into alternative sources of supply. “Climate change is an issue which raises fundamental questions about the relationship between companies and society as a whole, and between one generation and the next,” he had declared as early as 2002. For BP, he indicated, that meant developing wind power, solar power, and biofuels.

Browne, however, was eased out of BP in 2007 just as Big Oil’s output-maximizing business model was taking off, and his successor, Tony Hayward, quickly abandoned the “beyond petroleum” approach. “Some may question whether so much of the [world’s energy] growth needs to come from fossil fuels,” he said in 2009. “But here it is vital that we face up to the harsh reality [of energy availability].” Despite the growing emphasis on renewables, “we still foresee 80 percent of energy coming from fossil fuels in 2030.”

Under Hayward’s leadership, BP largely discontinued its research into alternative forms of energy and reaffirmed its commitment to the production of oil and gas, the tougher the better. Following in the footsteps of other giant firms, BP hustled into the Arctic, the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico, and Canadian tar sands, a particularly carbon-dirty and messy-to-produce form of energy. In its drive to become the leading producer in the Gulf, BP rushed the exploration of a deep offshore field it called Macondo, triggering the Deepwater Horizon blow-out of April 2010 and the devastating oil spill of monumental proportions that followed.

Over the cliff

By the end of the first decade of this century, Big Oil was united in its embrace of its new production-maximizing, drill-baby-drill approach. It made the necessary investments, perfected new technology for extracting tough oil, and did indeed triumph over the decline of existing, “easy oil” deposits. In those years, it managed to ramp up production in remarkable ways, bringing ever more hard-to-reach oil reservoirs online.

According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the U.S. Department of Energy, world oil production rose from 85.1 million barrels per day in 2005 to 92.9 million in 2014, despite the continuing decline of many legacy fields in North America and the Middle East. Claiming that industry investments in new drilling technologies had vanquished the specter of oil scarcity, BP’s latest CEO, Bob Dudley, assured the world only a year ago that Big Oil was going places and the only thing that had “peaked” was “the theory of peak oil.”

That, of course, was just before oil prices took their leap off the cliff, bringing instantly into question the wisdom of continuing to pump out record levels of petroleum. The production-maximizing strategy crafted by O’Reilly and his fellow CEOs rested on three fundamental assumptions that, year after year, demand would keep climbing; that such rising demand would ensure prices high enough to justify costly investments in unconventional oil; and that concern over climate change would in no significant way alter the equation. Today, none of these assumptions holds true.

Demand will continue to rise — that’s undeniable, given expected growth in world income and population — but not at the pace to which Big Oil has become accustomed. Consider this: In 2005, when many of the major investments in unconventional oil were getting under way, the EIA projected that global oil demand would reach 103.2 million barrels per day in 2015; now, it’s lowered that figure for this year to only 93.1 million barrels. Those 10 million “lost” barrels per day in expected consumption may not seem like a lot, given the total figure, but keep in mind that Big Oil’s multibillion-dollar investments in tough energy were predicated on all that added demand materializing, thereby generating the kind of high prices needed to offset the increasing costs of extraction. With so much anticipated demand vanishing, however, prices were bound to collapse.

Current indications suggest that consumption will continue to fall short of expectations in the years to come. In an assessment of future trends released last month, the EIA reported that, thanks to deteriorating global economic conditions, many countries will experience either a slower rate of growth or an actual reduction in consumption. While still inching up, Chinese consumption, for instance, is expected to grow by only 0.3 million barrels per day this year and next — a far cry from the 0.5 million barrel increase it posted in 2011 and 2012 and its 1 million barrel increase in 2010. In Europe and Japan, meanwhile, consumption is actually expected to fall over the next two years.

And this slowdown in demand is likely to persist well beyond 2016, suggests the International Energy Agency (IEA), an arm of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (the club of rich industrialized nations). While lower gasoline prices may spur increased consumption in the United States and a few other nations, it predicted, most countries will experience no such lift and so “the recent price decline is expected to have only a marginal impact on global demand growth for the remainder of the decade.”

This being the case, the IEA believes that oil prices will only average about $55 per barrel in 2015 and not reach $73 again until 2020. Such figures fall far below what would be needed to justify continued investment in and exploitation of tough-oil options like Canadian tar sands, Arctic oil, and many shale projects. Indeed, the financial press is now full of reports on stalled or cancelled mega-energy projects. Shell, for example, announced in January that it had abandoned plans for a $6.5 billion petrochemical plant in Qatar, citing “the current economic climate prevailing in the energy industry.” At the same time, Chevron shelved its plan to drill in the Arctic waters of the Beaufort Sea, while Norway’s Statoil turned its back on drilling in Greenland.

There is, as well, another factor that threatens the well-being of Big Oil: Climate change can no longer be discounted in any future energy business model. The pressures to deal with a phenomenon that could quite literally destroy human civilization are growing.  Although Big Oil has spent massive amounts of money over the years in a campaign to raise doubts about the science of climate change, more and more people globally are starting to worry about its effects — extreme weather patterns, extreme storms, extreme drought, rising sea levels, and the like — and demanding that governments take action to reduce the magnitude of the threat.

Europe has already adopted plans to lower carbon emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 and to achieve even greater reductions in the following decades. China, while still increasing its reliance on fossil fuels, has at least finally pledged to cap the growth of its carbon emissions by 2030 and to increase renewable energy sources to 20 percent of total energy use by then. In the United States, increasingly stringent automobile fuel-efficiency standards will require that cars sold in 2025 achieve an average of 54.5 miles per gallon, reducing U.S. oil demand by 2.2 million barrels per day. (Of course, the Republican-controlled Congress — heavily subsidized by Big Oil — will do everything it can to eradicate curbs on fossil fuel consumption.)

Still, however inadequate the response to the dangers of climate change thus far, the issue is on the energy map and its influence on policy globally can only increase. Whether Big Oil is ready to admit it or not, alternative energy is now on the planetary agenda and there’s no turning back from that. “It is a different world than it was the last time we saw an oil-price plunge,” said IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven in February, referring to the 2008 economic meltdown. “Emerging economies, notably China, have entered less oil-intensive stages of development … On top of this, concerns about climate change are influencing energy policies [and so] renewables are increasingly pervasive.”

The oil industry is, of course, hoping that the current price plunge will soon reverse itself and that its now-crumbling maximizing-output model will make a comeback along with $100-per-barrel price levels. But these hopes for the return of “normality” are likely energy pipe dreams. As van der Hoeven suggests, the world has changed in significant ways, in the process obliterating the very foundations on which Big Oil’s production-maximizing strategy rested. The oil giants will either have to adapt to new circumstances, while scaling back their operations, or face takeover challenges from more nimble and aggressive firms.

Michael T. Klare|14 Mar 2015|Cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

Legendary Coal Miner Says We Must Stop the Insane Practice of Mountaintop Removal

With mountaintop removal mining on the ropes, as the last bank financiers ditch lending support amid new scientific research that demonstrates “solid evidence that dust collected from residential areas near mountaintop removal sites causes cancerous changes to human lung cells,” residents from across central Appalachia’s coal country are converging today on the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection headquarters in Charleston to demand an end to new permits.

A day of reckoning is arriving in Appalachia.

In the aftermath of last year’s world attention on the state’s handling of the coal chemical disaster on Elk River, and with the once invincible “dark lord” of mountaintop removal Don Blankenship facing criminal conspiracy charges, a renewed coalition of citizens groups called the People’s Foot movement is confronting state and federal agencies directly for their complicity in ignoring the growing and indisputable evidence on health damages from mountaintop removal mining.

“Our politicians and all government agencies need to stop running from the truth that we are forced to live and die with everyday,” said Maria Gunnoe, the Goldman Prize recipient and an organizer with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition in West Virginia. “The science shows that mountaintop removal kills people. Why is mountaintop removal still being permitted? Is it because we don’t matter or is it because someone’s financial status depends on us dying quietly one activist at a time?”

The writing is on the wall—and in two dozen peer-reviewed scientific studies: Newspapers will one day feature stories about “wrongful death settlements with the coal companies—such as last summer’s $26 billion verdict against the tobacco companies for lung cancer—and criminal charges of negligent homicide by policymakers and politicians who have openly allowed such a health crisis to take place,” as I’ve noted before.

No one knows this better than Stanley Sturgill, the legendary retired coal miner and mine inspector from Harlan County, Kentucky, who served 41 years in the mines.

“I’m traveling from Harlan County, Kentucky because I want to lend (100 percent) my hand in support of trying to stop the insane practice called mountaintop removal mining,” Sturgill said. “This practice of coal mining is not only killing the folks down stream of these mines, but also the very miners that blast our mountains away. ”

Now suffering with black lung disease, a preventable malady that still kills three coal miners daily, Sturgill has testified in hearings across the country, including the recent Climate March in New York City, occupied the Kentucky governor’s office, and been arrested on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC for simply requesting a meeting with his member of Congress to discuss the devastating impact of mountaintop removal operations on his community, his fellow miners and the environment.

Sturgill’s statement at today’s People’s Foot rally puts the state of West Virginia, and the nation, on notice:

Hello, my name is Stanley Sturgill and I am 69 years old. I’m a retired and very proud UMWA coal miner and federal coal mine inspector (MSHA) with 41 years of service to the coal industry.

I fully support all of our miners, I work for their health and safety every day, but in no way, do I support the mining method of MTR, whether it’s scab or UMWA doing the mining. That’s why I plan to attend the “People’s Foot” rally in Charleston, WVA. I’m traveling from Harlan County, Kentucky because I want to lend (100 percent) my hand in support of trying to stop the insane practice called mountaintop removal mining. This practice of coal mining is not only killing the folks down stream of these mines, but also the very miners that blast our mountains away.

I know coal bought politicians and King Coal don’t believe in science and scientific studies that prove mountaintop removal is killing people and they also refuse to stop this type of coal mining. So today I would like to let them know of one thing, there is no statutes of limitations on killing people, even the folks here in Appalachia.

Jeff Biggers|March 16, 2015

Researchers Discover New Material to Produce Clean Energy

Researchers at the University of Houston have created a new thermoelectric material, intended to generate electric power from waste heat — from a vehicle tailpipe, for example, or an industrial smokestack — with greater efficiency and higher output power than currently available materials.

The material, germanium-doped magnesium stannide, is described in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Zhifeng Ren, lead author of the article and M.D. Anderson Chair professor of physics at UH, said the new material has a peak power factor of 55, with a figure of merit — a key factor to determine efficiency — of 1.4.

The new material — the chemical compound is Mg2Sn0.75Ge0.25 — is important in its own right, Ren said, and he has formed a company, called APower, to commercialize the material, along with frequent collaborator Gang Chen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and two former students.

But he said another key point made in the paper is the importance of looking for materials with a high power factor, or output power density, in addition to the traditional focus on a high figure of merit, or efficiency, commonly referred to as ZT.

“Everyone pursued higher ZT,” he said. “That’s still true. But the way everybody pursued higher ZT is by reducing thermal conductivity. We were, too. But the reduction of thermal conductivity is limited. We need to increase the power factor. If thermal conductivity remains the same and you increase the power factor, you get higher ZT.”

Chart showing temperature-dependent thermal properties and ZT values.

Thermoelectric materials produce electricity by exploiting the flow of current from a warmer area to a cooler area. In the germanium-doped magnesium stannide, the current is carried by electrons.

“Pursuing high ZT has been the focus of the entire thermoelectric community …” the researchers wrote. “However, for practical applications, efficiency is not the only concern, and high output power density is as important as efficiency when the capacity of the heat source is huge (such as solar heat), or the cost of the heat source is not a big factor (such as waste heat from automobiles, steel industry, etc.)”

Germanium-doped magnesium stannide has a fairly standard figure of merit, at 1.4, but a high power factor, at 55, the researchers report. That, coupled with a raw material cost of about $190 per kilogram, according to the U.S. Geological Survey Data Series, makes it commercially viable, they said.

Ren, who also is a principal investigator at the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH, said several competing materials have lower power factors and also more expensive raw materials.

The material was created through mechanical ball milling and direct current-induced hot pressing. It can be used with waste-heat applications and concentrated solar energy conversion at temperatures up to 300 degrees Centigrade, or about 572 degrees Fahrenheit, Ren said. He said typical applications would include use in a car exhaust system to convert heat into electricity to power the car’s electric system, boosting mileage, or in a cement plant, capturing waste heat from a smokestack to power the plant’s systems.

Jeannie Kever|University of Houston|March 06, 2015

 

China Targets Big Oil In Wars On Corruption, Pollution

BEIJING — What do China’s “war on pollution” and campaign against corruption have in common? They’ve both placed China’s coal and oil empires in their crosshairs, and they’re firing away.

Over the past two years anti-corruption squads have investigated dozens of high-ranking officials in coal and oil bureaucracies, with the latest detention announced Monday night: The vice chairman of China National Petroleum Corp., Liao Yongyuan, was placed under investigation for “serious violations of discipline,” Communist Party-speak for corruption. In China, the announcement of corruption investigations virtually guarantees an eventual conviction.

When he assumed power at the end of 2012, Chinese President Xi Jinping vowed to purge the Chinese Communist Party of rampant corruption, and he’s since executed an anti-corruption campaign that has decimated patronage networks ranging from the coal industry to the People’s Liberation Army. As that anti-corruption campaign continued to gather steam in 2014, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang responded to the putrid haze blanketing Beijing by publicly “declaring war” on air pollution.

Though the parallel campaigns haven’t been explicitly linked by Chinese leadership, the drives to clean up China’s skies and the Communist Party leadership have both hit hardest in the country’s vast coal and oil empires. Over the past two years coal-rich provinces and CNPC, the fourth-largest company in the world by revenue, have respectively racked up some of the highest tallies of corruption detentions. At the same time, the central government has imposed strikingly ambitious targets for slashing coal consumption.

China incinerates nearly as much coal as the rest of the world combined, and fumes from low-quality gasoline contribute to air pollution that chokes the skies of northern China. Last year the mayor of Beijing described his own city as “unlivable” because of the pollution.

China’s two major state-owned oil companies — Sinopec and CNPC (also known as PetroChina) — came in for a scathing treatment in a viral pollution documentary released earlier this month. The film, “Under the Dome” — which was largely blocked from the Internet by government censors after one week — accuses the firms of stymying pollution controls and milking their duopoly position for corrupt profits.

The film was produced by former Chinese state television journalist Chai Jing, and China’s new minister of Environmental Protection compared it to Silent Spring, the book credited with helping launch environmentalism in the U.S. in the 1960s. In the film, an anonymous official with China’s main economic planning agency claims that the oil firms even threatened to cut off gasoline supplies if their demands weren’t met.

“You can’t control them,” the official from China’s National Development and Reform Commission said. “Say you have an only child and this child is picking up some bad behaviors. As his mother, what can you do? All you can do is give him one good beating, but you can’t beat him every day.”

This year corruption inspectors have vowed to deliver such beatings to corrupt officials at state-owned enterprises (SOEs), the bureaucratic and often monopolistic businesses that dominate key sectors like telecommunications, media and energy. SOEs intermingle government responsibilities and business functions, but they’ve also shown the ability to resist or twist directives from the central government. Monday’s investigation announcements included Liao from CNPC and Chairman Xu Jianyi from FAW, one of China’s largest state-owned automakers.

“Each [SOE] tends to be a mini empire,” professor Dali Yang, who researches Chinese politics at the University of Chicago, told The WorldPost. “They have become very powerful vested interests in the Chinese system, so anti-corruption is not only useful in fighting against corruption but … makes it possible for Xi’s agenda, for the agenda of the Communist Party, to be carried out, to be obeyed.”

Academics have long debated the true motivation for Xi’s corruption crackdown. Is it a move to clean up the party from within? A front for knocking off political rivals? A strategy to clear the way for ambitious reforms?

“All of the above and then some,” said Yang.

Just two years into office, Xi has already earned a reputation as the most powerful Chinese leader in decades. He has waged an extensive campaign to limit domestic dissent, and has put anti-corruption, major economic reforms and pollution alleviation at the center of his public agenda.

2014 proved to be a landmark year for curbing both corruption and pollution. As coal-intensive industries slumped and strict pollution controls started to bite, China saw its first fall in both coal use and carbon emissions in over 15 years. China’s air was made marginally more breathable, but coal-dependent northern provinces fell into deep economic ruts. Coal powerhouse Shanxi province barely achieved half of its 9 percent growth target.

At the same time, anti-corruption investigators had a heyday raking through Shanxi’s political circles: Last year the province reportedly ranked first in its percentage of high officials to be probed for corruption, with nearly one-third of the the province’s party committee coming under investigation. Last week, the governor of Shanxi said coal empires are deeply entwined with the province’s corruption cases.

But no bureaucracy has proved as ripe for investigators as CNPC. According to Chinese media reports, more than 45 CNPC employees and officials have come under investigation. Online news portal Sina Finance reports that CNPC has even instituted a policy to deal with a wave of secret detentions: High-ranking employees all have designated back-ups who will take over duties if they have gone missing for a set period of time.

Much of that activity has reportedly swirled around the patronage networks of Zhou Yongkang, the ex-security czar who last year became the highest-ranking official to come under investigation since the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. Zhou spent decades rising through the ranks of China’s oil bureaucracy, serving as the Chinese Communist Party secretary of CNPC before climbing into the Politburo Standing Committee, the most powerful body in China.

Anti-corruption investigators have spent over two years detaining and questioning many of Zhou’s associates, and on Monday, Liao became the latest in a long line of CNPC officials to fall. Liao had reportedly been nicknamed CNPC’s “Northwest Tiger” for his performance exploiting oil fields in China’s far western deserts.

His dismissal came just weeks after the spread of the pollution documentary “Under the Dome,” in which the filmmaker argues that CNPC and Sinopec essentially set their own fuel standards, and that their duopoly breeds corruption and stifles innovation in cleaner-burning natural gas.

At a press conference on Sunday marking the end of China’s annual National People’s Congress, The WorldPost asked Premier Li Keqiang if he agreed with the now-banned film’s depiction of Sinopec and CNPC as obstructing environmental reforms. Li didn’t mention the film or state oil companies in his reply, but called for continued vigilance in combating pollution.

“No one should use his power to meddle with law enforcement in this regard,” Li said.

Thirty-two hours later, the Chinese Communist Party’s anti-corruption commission issued a short notice on its website announcing that CNPC’s vice chairman had been placed under investigation.

Matt Sheehan|03/17/2015

Fracking opponents push statewide ban

Activists gathered Tuesday at the Capitol to push for a bill that would ban fracking in Florida and speak out against legislation they say would lay the groundwork for the controversial form of natural-gas extraction to occur.

Sen. Darren Soto, D-Orlando and sponsor of the bill (SB 166) that would ban the practice, said fracking would cause environmental damage and harm the tourism industry. Soto spoke during a news conference hosted by ReThink Energy Florida and the Sierra Club Florida.

“When you look at the fact that we get our water from underneath the ground, the fact that tourism is a major, major employer — the biggest industry we have here — we can’t afford not only to have a spill or an issue here but even the perception that Florida is slacking in preserving our environment,” Soto said.

The bill hasn’t been heard in committee yet, but Soto said Senate President Andy Gardiner committed to giving the bill “an up-or-down look.” Soto also said he could attach amendments to relevant bills for moratoriums, increased fines and public-notice requirements.

“If we continue to stand up and we continue to protest, it puts a chilling effect on people wanting to come here,” he said. “So we’re not going to give up no matter what happens.”

Hydraulic fracturing is a process in which water, sand and chemicals are injected under high pressure into rock formations to extract natural gas. Acid fracturing, used in places with porous limestone, employs acidic chemicals at lower pressure to release natural gas.

On Tuesday, members of the House Agriculture and Natural Resources Subcommittee approved a measure (HB 1205) that critics say would set up a regulatory framework for fracking in Florida. Activists spoke out against the bill, which is supported by the oil and gas industry.

Proponents say hydraulic fracturing is boosting domestic oil supplies and reducing the county’s dependence on foreign oil. But opponents say it causes great harm to the environment and people’s health.

Dr. Ray Bellamy of Tallahassee, a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility, said fracking poses a grave risk to Florida’s groundwater supply at a time when the state is already facing a water crisis. He said millions of gallons of water can be used for just one fracking episode and that the back flow, roughly half of the water used, comes back contaminated with heavy metals, radioactive substances and carcinogens.

“There are complaints in the thousands from people who feel their water’s been contaminated, their kids have been made sick and their farm animals have died,” he said.

David Cullen, lobbyist for the Sierra Club, said regulation isn’t the answer.

“We don’t think there is a regulatory regime that will protect Florida’s aquifers from contamination due to fracking,” he said. “And with the alternatives that are available now in terms of renewable energy and energy efficiency, we don’t need to put Florida’s residents and visitors at risk from water contamination.”

Brian Lee, director of research and policy for ReThink Energy Florida, said he is aware of only one instance of fracking in Florida, which occurred in late 2013 in rural Collier County, not far from the Everglades. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection fined the Dan A. Hughes Co. $25,000 for violating its permit and ordered it to conduct groundwater testing after it used a procedure that critics called fracking.

Lee, a Leon Soil and Water Conservation District supervisor, said regulations proposed in the House and Senate are inadequate because they wouldn’t have prevented the fracking episode. And while proposed fines for violations would go up under the House bill, Lee said they wouldn’t be cost-prohibitive for energy companies.

“That’s why we need a ban,” he said.

Jeff Burlew|Tallahassee Democrat|March 17, 2015

San Leandro City Council Says No to Dangerous Oil Train Project

San Leandro, Calif., became the latest city to oppose a proposed Phillips 66 oil train offloading facility in San Luis Obispo County when its city council unanimously passed a resolution Monday urging county supervisors to deny the project’s permit. The San Leandro Teachers’ Association and San Leandro Unified School District are also opposed.

If approved the facility would bring mile-long oil trains, carrying 2.5 million gallons of crude, through densely populated areas nearly every day. Oil train traffic in the United States has increased more than 4,000 percent since 2008 — bringing with it a steep rise in derailments, spills and explosions, with more oil spilled in rail accidents in 2013 than in the previous four decades combined.

“I look out my classroom door every day at the trains going by on the Capitol Corridor,” said schoolteacher Claudia McDonagh. “With the recent exploding derailments in West Virginia and Illinois it becomes easy to imagine one of those mile-long oil bomb trains coming off the tracks and into my classroom.”

Read more in our press release.

Center for Biological Diversity

Federal Gov.’s Proposed 5-Year Offshore Drilling Plan

By now most of you have heard about the Obama administration’s proposed 5-year plan for offshore oil and gas development, setting some areas in the Arctic Ocean off limits, but opening up a large chunk of the Atlantic Ocean for drilling along the East Coast off Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia.  Here’s the map:

Map showing areas in Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean (orange) proposed for oil and gas development in draft 5-year plan. Atlantic drilling areas begin 50 miles offshore. Source:  BOEM. 

And here is another interesting map, showing the cumulative oil slick “footprint” of BP’s 2010 spill in the Gulf of Mexico, superimposed on the Atlantic coast, assuming an out-of-control well located more than 50 miles offshore:

Cumulative 2010 BP oil slick “footprint” overlain on Atlantic coast. Source: Center for American Progress.

And here’s yet another map, showing the tracks of hurricanes along the Eastern seaboard from 2000 to 2013:

Tracks of hurricanes in the western Atlantic Ocean from 2000 to 2013. Source: NOAA.

In case you’ve missed our many posts on this topic, there is a continuous leak of oil in the Gulf of Mexico from the site of an oil platform that was knocked down by Hurricane Ivan more than 10 years ago. We’ve observed the slick at this location dozens of times since we “discovered” it in 2010, it’s been documented on over-flights by the Gulf Monitoring Consortium and others, and it’s been sampled by scientists from Florida State University. Our most recent observation of the leak at that site last month showed a slick about 13 miles long. At times the slick has been more than 20 miles long (big enough to span the Beltway, for you DC-area readers). Cumulatively, we now estimate this leak has spilled anywhere from 300,000 gallons to nearly 1.4 million gallons of oil.  
Not a very comforting prospect for those who live along the coast where new offshore drilling is being contemplated.  By the way, you are encouraged to let the feds know what you think about this plan. 

Go here to submit your comments.  The public comment period closes on March 30.

Skytruth|February 25, 2015

Land Conservation

Ignoring Voter Intent

As of today, both the Florida Senate and the House have released their draft budgets for Amendment 1 spending. Unfortunately, neither of them come close to what voters intended, which is renewed funding for the acquisition of parks and undisturbed natural areas. Instead, both proposed budgets provide millions to cover existing agency operating expenses and other spending that doesn’t meet the intent of the voters. This is starting to feel like the Lottery Amendment all over again.

The Tampa Tribune summed it up well:

“… for lawmakers and industry representatives to now proclaim that the state — where growth is back in the passing lane again — doesn’t need to preserve more land reflects a stunning disregard for Florida’s needs, Amendment 1’s language and the voters’ will.”

So, what can you do? Call the Speaker of the House, Rep. Steve Crisafulli, and Chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on General Government, Sen. Alan Hays. Before the draft budgets progress to the next committee stop, they need to hear from you!

Visit our action page to get their contact information and talking points.

It only takes a few minutes to make the call. Every call is a reminder to our legislators that they are accountable to the voters. 

We know how invested you are in seeing more money go toward protecting our environment and conserving the natural treasures we hold dear. That is the purpose of Amendment 1 and that’s why we need you to get on the phone and call these lawmakers to give them a piece of your mind.

Call today and every day next week.

They need to hear from us to know that we won’t take this blatant disregard for the voters’ will without a fight.

South Florida Water Management District’s US Sugar Purchase and Options

The South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD)   closed on the purchase of land from the United States Sugar Corporation, providing 26,800 acres of strategically located property south of Lake Okeechobee for Everglades restoration, on Oct. 12, 2010. The $194 million acquisition placed 42 square miles of agricultural land into public ownership for the construction of water quality improvement projects that will bring meaningful environmental benefits to the famed River of Grass.

Highlights of the acquisition include:  

• Acquisition of 17,900 citrus acres in Hendry County to improve water quality in the C-139 Basin, where phosphorus loads have been historically high. This parcel, just west of thousands of acres of existing constructed wetlands, can be used for additional water storage and treatment facilities that would improve the quality of water flowing into the Everglades.
• Purchase of 8,900 acres of sugarcane land in Palm Beach County to benefit the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge by expanding existing Stormwater Treatment Areas (STAs) and increasing water quality treatment for the S-5A Basin, just southeast of Lake Okeechobee.

The agreement contains options to purchase another 153,000 acres for up to 10 years should future economic conditions allow. The options to acquire additional lands, which provide further opportunities to benefit the Everglades, Lake Okeechobee and the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries, include:  

• An exclusive 3-year option to purchase either a specifically identified 46,800 acres or the entire 153,000 acres at a fixed price of $7,400 per acre expired on Oct. 12, 2013.
• A subsequent 2-year, non-exclusive option to purchase the approximately 46,800 acres at Fair Market Value expires on Oct. 12, 2015. U.S. Sugar can sell all or a part of the option property, but subject to a Right of First Refusal by the District.
• A subsequent 7-year, non-exclusive option to purchase the remaining acres at Fair Market Value. U.S. Sugar could sell all or a part of the option property, but subject to a Right of First Refusal by the District.

Documents relating to the U.S. Sugar acquisition are posted online at www.sfwmd.gov/riverofgrass

Florida State Legislation Urged to “Trust the Voters”

As the 2015 Florida Legislative Session kicks off, lawmakers have the important task of implementing Amendment 1, Florida’s Water and Land Conservation Amendment.

Audubon Florida helped lead the petition effort and campaign to make sure the amendment was approved last November. Now, Audubon Florida is leading the effort at the Capitol in Tallahassee to make sure Legislators trust the voters’ decision. The ballot was crystal-clear: “Water and Land Conservation – Dedicates funds to acquire and restore Florida conservation and recreation lands.”

Audubon’s message to Legislators is simple:

Trust voters by funding existing conservation programs, such as land acquisition, management, and Everglades restoration. Do not trust lobbyists who are arriving at the Capitol with shopping lists of projects that do not fit into the purposes of Amendment 1.

This Legislative Session will be a fight for what Amendment 1 stands for. The Audubon community stepped up to get the Amendment on the ballot. They stepped up to help get out the vote. And now they need to step up again to make sure Florida’s Legislators trust the voters.

Manage state land better AND buy more. It’s not either/or

Rep. Steve Crisafulli suggests the state needs to take better care of its land before buying any more with Amendment 1 money.

Amendment 1, approved by 75 percent of voters statewide in November, is expected to provide $757 million for water and land conservation programs in the coming year.

Crisafulli, a Republican from Merritt Island, told House members during the opening day of the Legislative Session on March 3 that “stewardship is much more than ownership.”

“Buying up land we cannot care for, that falls into disrepair or becomes a breeding ground for harmful invasive species, is not a legacy that I am interested in leaving,” Crisafulli said.

But some environmentalists say that there doesn’t need to be a choice between buying and taking care of what the state already owns. A University of Florida professor who served on a state panel overseeing state lands said land management is being used as a political scapegoat.

Crisafulli told reporters that the message coming from the state agencies is that better land management is needed before buying more.

Nick Wiley, executive director of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, says he doesn’t quite put it in those black-and-white terms, though he also doesn’t disagree.

“Taking care of the lands we have should be our first priority,” Wiley said.

“I don’t think we’ve put it quite that, ‘Don’t get any more lands until we can do land management,’” he continued. “But If I had to make a choice, I would make that choice.”

And he also explained that spending by his agency on land management was down about 40 percent from five years ago. It’s not because the Legislature cut spending, he said, but revenue from documentary stamp taxes was down during the economic decline.

An annual state land management report shows that spending increased last year for visitor services and capital improvements, such as bathrooms and parking lots, while spending for resource management decreased by 14.4 percent.

Florida had the largest land-buying program in the nation from 1990 until 2009, when its budget was slashed. With voter approval of Amendment 1 in November, environmental groups are pushing for more land-buying – in addition to improved land management.

“We view Amendment 1 as an opportunity to address unmet (land management) needs,” said Janet Bowman, The Nature Conservancy’s director of legislative policy and strategies. “But that’s not to say they (state agencies) are doing a bad job.”

Peter Frederick, who recently left the state Acquisition and Restoration Council after six years, said land management has become a political scapegoat. He is a research professor in the University of Florida’s Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation.

The state agencies that manage parks, forests and other state lands need relief from budget cuts in recent years, Frederick said.

Vehicles need to be repaired or replaced, he said. Many of the state jobs in land management are vacant. And he said those that are filled usually are low-paying, leading people out of state government into better paying federal jobs.

“We need some money in the system,” Frederick said. “It has traditionally been squeezed by the legislature with, ‘We can do more with less.’ I think we are well beyond the breaking point.”

Bruce Ritchie|editor,Floridaenvironments.com.|Mar 15, 2015|Column courtesy of Context Florida.

State Purchases Conservation Lands in Washington County

TALLAHASSEE – The Florida Department of Environmental Protection closed on the acquisition of 348 acres of conservation lands in Washington County within Florida’s First Magnitude Springs Florida Forever project.

The project, which cost $781,545, was ranked No. 1 in the Florida Forever Partnerships and Regional Incentives project category, and contains a third magnitude spring known as Brunson Landing Spring. It also includes two small unnamed seeps, which flow into Holmes Creek.

Holmes Creek is primarily a spring-fed creek containing a total of 51 springs within a 25-mile radius. The acquisition will ensure greater spring protection, while maintaining the current public access for fishing, hunting, canoeing, kayaking, boating and hiking. The Choctawhatchee River Water Management Area and Glover Conservation Easement are adjacent publicly-owned properties.

“Acquiring this land will help to protect the natural resources and water quality of Holmes Creek and the more than 50 springs that feed it,” said DEP Secretary Jon Steverson.

“The District is proud to be a partner with the department and FWC toward the shared goal of protecting this important resource for Florida and its visitors,” said Brett Cyphers, the executive director of the Northwest Florida Water Management District.

The Northwest Florida Water Management District will manage the property as part of the Choctawhatchee River Water Management Area in cooperation with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

nataliarodriguez2015|March.17.2015

Three Recreational Trail Projects to Begin

TALLAHASSEE – The Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s Florida Recreational Trails Program announces the execution of three contracts for the development and renovation of trails in south Florida. After being awarded competitive-grant funds during the 2014 submission cycle, these three projects can now begin construction.

The Recreational Trails Program provides competitive-grant funds to local communities to renovate, develop or maintain recreational trails and trail-side facilities.

“As the demand for affordable recreation and trail development continues to grow, we are pleased the Recreational Trails Program can help communities in south Florida build upon previous investments and expand their recreational trail systems,” said Rick Mercer, director of DEP’s Office of Operations.

The three south Florida contracts are as follows:

• The city of Deerfield Beach – Funding will be used to renovate 7,000 linear feet of trail and to extend the existing trail system at Johnnie McKeithen Park. Once complete, this system will enhance connectivity between the northern and southern annexes of the park and adjacent neighborhoods. Additional fitness stations are also being added along the trail.
• The city of Fort Lauderdale – Funding will be used to construct the Snyder Park Bike Trail, which is being designed for intermediate-level cyclists to hone their skills before advancing to the more challenging existing trails at other parks. Project elements include construction of 1,800 linear feet of 6-foot wide, compacted rock bicycle trail, with signage and related support facilities.
• The village of Royal Palm Beach – Funding will be used for the construction of 5,000 linear feet of 8-foot-wide concrete multi-use trail and the installation of benches and related support facilities. Once the “Commons Park Trail” is complete, residents of the surrounding neighborhoods will be able to access the project site by its connection to Bobbie Jo Lauter Park and the existing recreational trails system.

The Recreational Trails Program is a federally funded assistance program of the United States Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration. A portion of the grant awards must be matched by the grantee. In Florida, the competitive-grant program is administered by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s Land and Recreation Grants section within the Office of Operations.

nataliarodriguez2015|March.10.2015

Air Quality

U.S. and Indiana Settle Clean Air Act Case with Muncie Smelter to Reduce Lead Emissions

Chicago (March 16, 2015) – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced today that Exide Technologies has agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by the United States and the State of Indiana alleging Clean Air Act violations at the company’s lead smelter in Muncie, Indiana.  Exide Technologies has agreed to spend over $3.9 million to install state-of-the-art pollution control equipment to reduce harmful air pollution from the facility. The settlement will resolve claims that the facility’s failure to comply with national emission standards resulted in the release of excess lead in an area that does not meet the federal health-based air quality standard for lead.

“This settlement will protect Muncie residents from excess lead emissions from the Exide Technologies smelter and prevent future violations of the Clean Air Act,” said EPA Region 5 Administrator Susan Hedman. “Exposure to lead can impair children’s health and their ability to learn.”

“Addressing the complicated environmental and legal issues here required a carefully structured settlement agreement with this employer so that the public and nearby residents can be protected into the future. My office and our client the Indiana Department of Environmental Management worked closely with our colleagues at EPA in successfully bringing this case to a conclusion,” said Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller, whose office represented IDEM in court as the state government’s lawyer.

EPA expects that the actions required by the settlement will reduce harmful emissions of lead, particulate matter (soot), total hydrocarbons and dioxin/furans. The settlement also requires the company to pay a civil penalty of $820,000.  

Lead and soot, the predominant pollutants emitted from secondary lead smelters, have numerous adverse effects on human health. Lead can affect almost every organ in the body, but is most detrimental to the nervous system. For children, lead exposure can result in permanent damage to the brain and nervous system, leading to behavior and learning problems, lower IQ, hearing problems, slowed growth and anemia. In adults, lead affects the nervous and cardiovascular systems, and causes decreased kidney function. Soot contributes to irritation of the airways, coughing and difficulty breathing, decreased lung function, aggravated asthma, chronic bronchitis, irregular heartbeat, nonfatal heart attacks, and premature death in people with heart or lung disease.

The settlement was lodged with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana and is subject to a 30-day public comment period and final court approval.  The consent decree will be available for review at www.justice.gov/enrd/Consent_Decrees.html.

Reducing Mercury Use for Your Family and Our Global Community

At EPA, we work every day to reduce the use of mercury in products and processes, making them safer for you and your family. Lowering levels of mercury in our environment is important because at high levels, mercury can harm the brains, hearts, kidneys, lungs and immune systems of people of all ages. In the bloodstream of unborn babies and young children, high levels of methylmercury may harm the developing nervous system, making the child less able to think and learn.

We’ve been making great strides in the United States – over the last 30 years, our domestic use of mercury in products has declined more than 97 percent. The use of mercury in industrial processes has also fallen drastically.  Unfortunately, large amounts of mercury are still used in products and manufacturing processes worldwide, even though there are effective alternatives available. This is important to us both personally and professionally, since we want to make sure that children at home and around the world are not exposed.

Since mercury pollution has no boundaries, the United States joined the Minamata Convention on Mercury, a global environmental agreement designed to curb the production, use, and emissions of mercury around the world. In addition to provisions to reduce and eliminate mercury use in a wide range of products and processes, the Convention calls for control of mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants and boilers, waste incineration, cement production, and non-ferrous metals production.

Worldwide, one of the largest man-made sources of mercury pollution is artisanal and small scale gold mining. Although many of these miners use mercury, it is possible to safely and economically recover gold without it. Many are achieving high rates of gold recovery without mercury, benefitting their health, the health of their communities, and the environment.

To help miners reduce their mercury use, last week we launched a new website describing techniques for gold mining not requiring mercury. With the Argonne National Laboratory, we have also developed and field tested a mercury vapor capture system for gold processing shops, which can be used to reduce a significant source of mercury emissions. EPA also leads the UNEP Global Mercury Partnership Products Area, which aims to reduce and eventually eliminate the use of mercury in products. The partnership has completed numerous global projects to improve and monitor data baselines, and to demonstrate mercury-free alternatives. For example, we have worked with Health Care without Harm and the World Health Organization to reduce the use of mercury-added instruments in health care facilities worldwide.

We also want to address the remaining uses of mercury in the United States. To get started, EPA recently released the EPA Strategy to Address Mercury‐Containing Products. We will gather and analyze data about how mercury is used in products and certain processes in the United States, plan and prioritize additional mercury reduction activities, and take action to further reduce mercury use.

Mercury can cause serious health challenges in the United States and around the world. Our efforts are leading to safer products and a cleaner environment for you, and for all the members of our global community.

Marianne Bailey and Karissa Kovner|2015 March 17

Transportation

2014 was a record year for transit, but that’s not as rad as it sounds

We Americans have beaten our own record for riding public transportation! Gold stars all around!

Last year was a record year for mass transit ridership in the U.S., according to numbers released earlier this week by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA). We took 10.8 billion trips in 2014, up from 10.65 billion rides in 2013.

Pretty sweet right? Well, not really.

That “record year” title is rather misleading, as Grist’s Ben Adler reported last year, after APTA made a similar claim. Why? Because the group is comparing 2014’s trips to ridership levels in 1956 … when there were roughly half as many people in the U.S. So public transit usage has really just gone from crap to mildly-better.

But no. I’m not done raining on your public transportation parade! CityLab dropped yet another reality check earlier this week:

APTA figures show 101.1 million new transit trips across the country from 2013 to 2014. We tally 98.2 million new trips from metropolitan New York alone—or 97 percent of the total.

That’s right, all but 2 percent of our “progress” comes from just one metro area. And this has been true for a while. Last year, APTA reported that trips on public transit had increased by 115 million from 2012, but the Washington Post pointed out that New York City alone had 123 million trips: “In other words, transit use outside New York declined in absolute terms [in 2013]. This fact shows how crucial public transportation is to our largest city and how small a role it plays in most other Americans’ lives.”

Still, we are actually getting better at this alt-transit thing. More from CityLab about the numbers from 2014:

APTA says 18 local agencies set ridership records. Minneapolis light rail use jumped 57 percent on the strength of its new Green Line. Subway use increased in 8 of 15 cities (led by San Francisco’s 6 percent rise). Commuter rail increased 3 percent across the board, with huge bumps in Salt Lake City (16 percent) and Seattle (10 percent).

Here in Seattle, nearly 70 percent of commuters are opting to get to work by means other than a car. Granted, it’s because traffic here is horrendous, but still, it’s something. And we’re doing this despite cheap gas prices, so maybe we do deserve a few gold stars!

Still, it seems to me that outside the Big Apple, we have a long way to go in terms of actually using our cities’ modes of public transport. So do your sanity a favor and commit to using public transit more frequently. Besides, wouldn’t you rather be listening to Radiolab podcasts rather than another driver in the midst of a road-rage rant? Methinks yes.

Ana Sofia Knauf|13 Mar 2015

Solar Roadways: A Real Possibility, or Just a Pipe Dream?

Few people question the value of renewable energy sources, as our world continues on a rampage of consumption and environmental damage. The problem with renewable energy is its viability. Methods such as wind turbines create unique hazards to wildlife, and dams require a large amount of money to create with only a handful of suitable places for them to be built.

Solar energy offers a low-cost solution that can be applied anywhere the sun reaches, but it requires a large amount of area to become viable. This is where the proposal for solar roadways enters in. Solar roadways may be the way to overcome the land area requirement that solar energy needs, but are they truly a viable solution?

The Idea behind Solar Roadways

Solar roadways are much like normal roadways, save for the fact that they have solar panels built into the roads. This gives them a few unique advantages when compared to standard roads.

For example, they are able to translate a large amount of photons into usable electrical energy. They can be constructed from materials that aren’t prone to cracking or creating potholes like current road materials are, and they can have lighted lane markers to help drivers at night.

These types of roads could revolutionize renewable energy, but they still have a few distinct challenges to overcome.

Dixie Somers|March 19, 2015

Recycling

8 Ways We Are Killing the Planet and Don’t Even Realize It

You know an invention has its drawbacks when even the guy who invented it says he’s sorry he did so.

That would be John Sylvan, inventor of the easy-to-use Keurig coffee maker—an invention deemed “the most wasteful form of coffee” on the planet.

Sylan says he regrets the creation largely due to its severe ecological impact. The Keurig uses disposable plastic coffee pods, called “K-Cups,” which are not easily recyclable or biodegradable.

“I don’t have one,” Sylvan said of the Keurig. “They’re kind of expensive to use. Plus it’s not like drip coffee is tough to make.”

Convenience-obsessed America is the world’s largest coffee consumer. Nearly 85 percent of adults in America drink coffee. According to the National Coffee Association, nearly 1 in 5 adults drink single-cup-brewed coffee in a single day.

Last year, Keurig Green Mountain sold a whopping 9.8 billion K-Cups—enough to circle the Earth more than a dozen times. Keurig says it wants all K-Cups to be recyclable by 2020, but by then it could be too late.

Egg Studios CEO Mike Hachey created the viral video “Kill the K-Cup” last month, which highlights the fact that 13 billion K-Cups went into landfills last year.

“Do you feel OK contributing to that?” Hachey asks.

K-Cups are not the only culprits affecting the environment. America represents only 5 percent of the world’s population, but generates nearly a quarter of the world’s trash.

Many everyday items that we take for granted have a significant impact on Mother Earth. Here are a few humble household supplies that hurt the environment more than you’d expect:

1. Anti-bacterial soap

Nearly 75 percent of anti-bacterial liquid soaps and body washes in the US include an ingredient called triclosan. Research shows that small quantities of triclosan persist after being flushed down the drain, and even after water is treated at sewage plants.

These small quantities then end up in streams and other bodies of water. They can disrupt algae’s ability to perform photosynthesis and build up in fatty tissues of animals higher up in the food chain.

2. Lawn mowers

Mowing the lawn is actually terrible for the environment. According to a Swedish study, a lawn mower produces nearly the same amount of oily air pollution as a 100-mile car trip.

“Lawn and garden equipment really does add to air pollution,” Cathy Milbourn, spokeswoman for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), told ABC last year. “People can reduce the impact it has by using [lawn equipment] in the early morning or in the late afternoon. Or perhaps not at all.”

3. Tea bags

Most of the tea brewed in America is made with tea bags, which means that an average tea drinker consuming 5 cups a day gets through about 13 sq meters of perforated paper every year.

According to a report by Which? Gardening, teabags produced by the some of the top tea manufacturers—including Twinnings, Tetley and PG Tips—are only about 75 percent biodegradable.

While most teabags are made with paper fiber, they also include plastic polypropylene—an ingredient that makes teabags heat-resistant but is not fully biodegradable.

Whitney Kakos, the sustainability manager for Teadirect, says the use of polypropylene is an “industry-wide practice.” There are also the luxurious silken (basically plastic) tea bags. Supposedly of higher quality and visually appealing, these bags are actually harmful to consumers and contribute to landfill waste.

4. Plastic bottles

About 50 billion bottles of water are consumed every year, 30 million of which are consumed in the US alone. Nearly 1,500 water bottles are consumed per second in America. About 17 million barrels of oil are used every year to produce these bottles.

The national recycle rate for PETs, or bottles made with polyethylene terephthalate, is only 23 percent—which means 80 percent of plastic water bottles end up in landfills. And even if we were on our environmentally best behavior, not all plastic bottles placed in designated containers are recycled because only certain types of plastic can be recycled in limited municipalities.

5. Microbeads

Found in everything from toothpaste to exfoliating face washes and body scrubs, microbeads actually wreak havoc on the environment.

According to a recent study by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, these tiny pieces of plastic find their way down our drains through filtration systems to the ocean. Soaking up toxins like a sponge, they then contribute to the plastic pollution of water bodies, potentially starve coral reefs of proper food and negatively affect other marine organisms.

6. Disposable razors

According to the U.S. EPA, about 2 billion razors are thrown away every year. Although you can recycle the steel blades, your good ol’ disposable razor most likely makes its way to the landfill.

Add that to the higher environmental cost of production using raw materials and the water used while actually shaving and you’ve got one of the most wasteful bathroom products around.

7. Paper cups

If you think your morning paper cup of coffee is recyclable and environmentally friendly, think again.

Every year, Americans toss out more than 80 billion single-use cups, thanks to our morning coffee runs. These cups are also coated with low-density, heat-resistant polyethylene that is not biodegradable. In addition to these cups’ heading for a landfill and taking more than 20 years to decompose, the very process of making them is extremely harmful to the environment. Production consumes forests and large volumes of water, and expels dirty water.

8. Wooden chopsticks from restaurants

About 3.8 million trees are cut down to produce a staggering 57 billion disposable pairs of chopsticks every year, half of which are used within China. About 77 percent are exported to Japan, 21 percent to South Korea and 2 percent to America.

But despite taxes levied in 2006 and warnings of government regulations to monitor production in 2010, disposable chopstick use, production and discard is on the rise and continues to devastate forests in China at an alarming rate.

Hyacinth Mascarenhas|Mint Press News|March 10, 2015

Miscellaneous

Animal Activists Get Bull Running Booted From California

Thanks to the efforts of the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), California will never again play host to the Great Bull Run.

A Pamplona-style event, the Great Bull Run travels around the country to various venues, putting on an Americanized “running of the bulls.” Here’s what happens at a typical event.

The Great Bull Run transports a group of three dozen bulls by truck from state to state to participate in these shows. That means that in addition to the noisy, scary run itself, they must endure the discomfort of being dragged around the country from event to event. Organizers set up a large fenced-in track and release as many as 35 bulls weighing as much as 1,500 lbs. each. Those huge, frightened animals speed down the course, encouraged along by riders on horses behind them. The assembled crowd screams and hoots all around.

Participants line up along the fence, where run organizers urge them to run alongside the bulls, not in front of them. Do they listen? Not so much. Have they been drinking? For some, probably yes.

Meanwhile, the bulls just run, clearly not understanding what all the surrounding furor is. The paying participants run with them and in front of them, trying to avoid being trampled and injured. Not everyone succeeds. All this happens multiple times at each event.  To see what a run is like from a participant’s point of view, watch this video taken at a 2014 event in Pennsylvania:

After one such 2014 event in Alameda, California, PETA and ADLF joined forces to see if they could put a stop to this madness. In California, at least, they’ve succeeded.

In March 2014 PETA and ALDF brought a lawsuit under the state’s Unfair Competition Law. In California, anti-cruelty laws prohibit causing bulls unnecessary suffering and forbid staging “bloodless” bullfights or similar exhibitions. PETA and ADLF asserted that the Great Bull Run violated these state laws.

“As a bovine veterinarian, I can confirm that these bull runs are extremely stressful for the bulls and present substantial risk of injury to them, as well as an enormous public safety risk to the humans participating,” Dr. Holly Cheever, veterinarian and vice president of the New York State Humane Association, told the ALDF.

Ultimately, the parties settled this case out of court. In exchange for getting the suit dropped, the Great Bull Run agreed not to bring its bull running event to California again.

Oddly, the CEO of the Great Bull Run, Robert Dickens, is spinning this settlement as something of a victory for his company. He says the PETA and ADLF didn’t present any real evidence of animal abuse and “didn’t intend to win the suit. They simply wanted to waste our time and money in Federal Court — a game we were unwilling to play,” he told Reuters.

Spin it any way you want, but this is a win for the bulls and we all know it. Animal rights advocates got what they wanted.

Susan Bird|March 13, 2015

Spider monkeys point to new understanding of hand dominance

Spider monkeys aren’t the hook-handed primates scientists always believed they were.

FIU psychologist Eliza L. Nelson has observed several of the lanky-armed monkeys using individual fingers to grab food.

Previous work suggested the spider monkey hand operated like a hook. But in Nelson’s study the spider monkeys also were able to insert one or two fingers into a tube to grab a serving of peanut butter. It is the first time this type of independent digit control has been reported for this species.

The unexpected observation occurred during Nelson’s research study evaluating measures of handedness – the tendency to use one hand more naturally than the other – in nonhuman primates. Spider monkeys’ hands are not like most other primates – they have four fingers and no thumb – making them an interesting model for studying grasping and motor function.

“In this study, we used two popular measures that had never been administered to this type of spider monkey before,” Nelson said. “We collected a large number of data points on each measure to allow for analyses.

Nelson’s team analyzed reach and coordination – both of which are particularly difficult for spider monkeys given their unique hand structure. Comparing results of both tasks is critical for understanding the evolution of hand-use preferences in primates.

Contrary to predictions and previous findings, Nelson’s research shows multiple measures are needed to fully characterize the concept of handedness – the tendency to use one hand more naturally than the other. Nelson determined a single handedness test cannot effectively predict hand preference in nonhuman primates. The findings were recently published in the journal Animal Cognition.

“When we’re thinking about measuring handedness in any species, including humans, measures should assess multiple components of hand function,” Nelson said. “Handedness is not unique to humans, and this kind of work in cognition helps us understand how the primate brain works and how it has changed over time.”

Handedness is one example of hemispheric specialization – when a particular function is localized to one side, or hemisphere, of the brain. In the motor system, each hemisphere largely controls the opposite side of the body. It is important to understand patterns of how or why one hemisphere is dominant (lateralization) because a number of human disorders including autism, schizophrenia and developmental coordination disorder are associated with atypical lateralization.

“By studying how the hands are used using easily measurable behaviors, we can learn about how the brain is organized and also how it has changed over evolutionary time,” Nelson said. “I hope to make an important case for standardizing measures in this field as well as fill a gap in our knowledge of handedness in primates.”

Nelson is the director of FIU’s HANDS Lab focusing on motor skill research in children and nonhuman primates, specifically how the hands are controlled. Her work examines links between motor abilities and cognition including reasoning, communication and language. Nelson’s study was conducted at Monkey Jungle in Miami, Fla., with oversight from the DuMond Conservancy.

Ayleen Barbel Fattal|03/13/2015

Florida Park Service Volunteers Log 1.3 Million Hours to Help Visitors Enjoy Nature

TALLAHASSEE – The Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s Florida Park Service recognizes the invaluable contribution of the members of the Florida State Parks volunteer corps. More than 30,717 volunteers help with a variety of tasks, including picking up litter, landscaping park grounds and driving a tour boat. Last year, volunteers contributed 1,307,005.5 hours to the state park system.

“Florida’s state parks and trails are fortunate to have the most passionate and dedicated volunteers. We thank our volunteers for their time and expertise in helping us manage, protect and interpret Florida’s natural and cultural resources,” said Donald Forgione, director of the Florida Park Service.

At special events around the state, the Friends of Florida State Parks, Inc. have presented annual awards to individuals and groups whose volunteerism has made a significant impact in the past year.

The 2014 winners are as follows:

• Dr. Madeline Carr of Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park, adult female volunteer of the year
• Al Pendergrass of Silver Springs State Park, adult male volunteer of the year
• Anna Reeves of Oscar Scherer State Park, youth female volunteer of the year
• Justin Lee of Savannas Preserve State Park, youth male volunteer of the year
• Friends of Silver Springs State Park, Citizen Support Organization of the year
• Great Outdoors Adventure Day at Lovers Key State Park, special event of the year
• Marine Railway Restoration and Replica Skiff Construction at the Barnacle Historic State Park, long-term project of the year
• Event Tent and Parking Lot Lights Project at Dudley Farm Historic State Park, short-term project of the year
• Maintenance Team at Silver Springs State Park, team of the year

Last fiscal year, more than 27.1 million people visited Florida’s award-winning state parks and trails, generating nearly $2.1 billion in direct economic impact. Florida State Parks and Trails support 29,396 jobs for Floridians. For more information on Florida’s state parks and trails, click here.

nataliarodriguez2015|March.6.2015

 

Ecological engineering: a breath of life for marine ecosystems

Low oxygen levels in the oceans can dramatically change the community of organisms that live there — but new techniques to re-introduce oxygen have given a breath of life to a Swedish fjord.

Oxygen is essential for many life forms. But we don’t often give it the attention it deserves because we assume that it is always there. While oxygen is ubiquitous in our atmosphere, it is not necessarily the case for many bodies of water like rivers, lakes or even oceans. Here a lack of oxygen can result in significant impacts on the ecosystem like the killing of fish that subsequently float to the surface. But artificially oxygenating water can breathe new life, as we found recently while working with a fjord in Sweden.

Lack of oxygen and the death of wildlife is a phenomenon that can be observed not only in lakes but also in marine environments – which might seem surprising given the mixing of water by ocean currents. Oceans generally contain oxygen – we call them “oxic” – but we easily forget that this has not always been the case.

If we look back in Earth’s history the original oceans were without oxygen (anoxic) and had a significantly different water chemistry than today. With the advent of photosynthetic bacteria, the oceans became oxygenated over time. Initially the oxygen concentrations were fairly low (hypoxic) compared to present-day levels, but over time oxygen increased in the water and the atmosphere. This meant that hypoxic and anoxic areas were more and more on the retreat.

Nowadays, areas with hypoxic and anoxic waters are re-appearing all around the globe, from the eastern Pacific (several places on the west coast of Canada, the US, Central America, Chile, and Peru), to the Bay of Bengal (India), the Arabian Sea, the Black Sea, the Baltic and the Namibian shelf.

How do oxygen-deprived waters develop?

Different mechanisms drive the development of hypoxic and anoxic waters in different regions and will result in different water chemistries. In areas with upwelling of cold water to the surface (for example off the coasts of Peru and Chile), nutrient-rich deep water is transported to the surface. This causes blooms of photosynthetic bacteria and algae to form. The increased organic carbon in the water serves as a nutrient source for other microbes, and they in turn lower the oxygen concentration by respiration, creating hypoxic water.

In contrast, places like the Baltic have large and deep basins that have a naturally low frequency of water exchange (for example with the North Sea) and therefore receive little input of oxygen-rich water from outside. This often results in hypoxic conditions in these basins. In addition, non-treated waste-water, nutrient runoff from farmland and the dumping of organic waste increase the nutrient loading of Baltic waters. This results in blooms of photosynthetic bacteria and algae and, subsequently, the increased abundance of other bacteria which eat them. Their respiration draws down the oxygen concentration to a point where no oxygen is left.

Obviously, really low levels of oxygen (or its total absence) will be harmful to fish and many other life forms. Additionally, microbial processes that don’t require oxygen take over in waters where there isn’t any, creating further problems such as massive decreases in available nitrogen. When huge blooms of toxic cyanobacteria form, it is more likely that toxins will come into contact with humans.

Increasing surface temperatures in the oceans as a result of climate change will further decrease the oxygen content in surface waters, leading to the expansion of already known low to nil oxygen marine waters, and the formation of new ones. This is more than an ecological problem: the economy also suffers due to detrimental effects on fisheries, tourism and water quality.

Are there solutions? Yes and no. In some regions there is no obvious way to address the challenge. In others, such as the Baltic, remediation is possible and several ways to solve the problem have been suggested. Reducing the input of nutrients into the Baltic, for example, would treat the cause of the problem, and initiatives to improve waste-water treatment have been introduced.

Oxygenating the water

But we can also treat the symptom itself. One idea is to oxygenate the water by increasing the frequency of naturally occurring inflows of oxygen-rich water from the North Sea with the help of wind-driven pumps in an ecological engineering project.

Our Swedish colleagues tested this idea in a large-scale experiment in the Swedish Byford. Electrically-driven pumps were installed and the water column was mixed by pumping surface water to outlets in the basin that lacked oxygen. While the capacity of the pump was not high enough to introduce sufficient oxygen to completely oxygenate the basin, the disturbance of the water column triggered inflows of oxygen-rich water from a neighbouring oxygen-rich fjord. This resulted in a significant increase in oxygen throughout the water column, including the anoxic basin. Throughout this process we monitored the response of the bacterial community in the fjord using molecular methods.

Testing the waters

Our recent work shows that oxygen-requiring bacteria, initially only present in surface waters, could also be found in the deep basin after oxygenation. They replaced the community of anaerobic bacteria observed there previously, showing that oxygen had reached the depths of the fjord and was supporting life. Overall it became clear that the change of the bacterial community was similar to what could have been expected in a natural oxygenation event, such as the mixing of waters.

Could ecological engineering to oxygenate anoxic marine zones be the solution for the future? Maybe. Reducing human inputs of nutrients into these zones is important, and these programs should be continued as they address the root of the problem. However, ecological engineering is another option to oxygenate certain marine zones. This will especially help in systems where large amounts of nutrients are stored in the sediments; these would take a long time to be restored naturally even if all further nutrient input were stopped immediately.

But especially for the Baltic, the question is not only whether an oxygenation project is technically feasible or ecologically meaningful, but also whether it is economically viable and whether there is the political will to commit to a long-term project such as this.

Alexander Treusch|Associate Professor at University of Southern Denmark|March 17 2015

Bee Doctors: A New Way to Protect Fruit?

When it comes to ministering to plants, who better than a bee?

The hazards of spraying fungicides and pesticides on fruit and vegetables are well known: increased resistance to their efficacy by pests and weeds, expense of fuel, machinery and labor to apply them and the environmental hazards of runoff and spray drift.

Over the last several years, European fruit farmers have discovered that putting a tray of a safe fungicide powder in front of a hive allows departing bees to get it on their bodies and deliver it more precisely to fruiting flowers than any spray.

Finnish agricultural zoology professor Heikki M.T. Hokkanen first pilot-tested the process against one of the strawberry industry’s greatest nuisances, gray mold, at a strawberry farm in 2006. Gray mold has regularly destroyed between 10-20 percent of the Finnish strawberry crop, costing growers up to EUR 5 million.

Hokkanen devised a beehive attachment—a so-called “two-way dispenser”—that he uses with a bio-control agent called Prestop-Mix, which was designed by Finnish firm Verdera Oy for fungus control and is approved by the European Union for use in organic farming. Hokkanen says the dispenser allows the bees to exit only through the opening that takes them through the microbial powder; the separate hive entrance at the top has no dusting of Prestop. Thus, he says, the bees do not transport the agent “in the wrong direction” (into the hive), but come in with clean feet, having rubbed off the product during their foraging.

Since the pilot, researchers and fruit growers of greenhouse strawberries and raspberries, as well as orchard apples, pears and cherries in Europe and Australia have adopted or least tested the practice. They use products from both Hokkanen’s own company Aasatek Oy and Belgian bumblebee producer Biobest. Although figures on exactly how much less fungicide bee doctoring uses compared with chemical spraying were not immediately available, Hokkanen’s peer-reviewed paper on the pilot says the process is approximately one-third the cost of chemical control.

Jouko Mönkkönen, the strawberry farmer in Leppävirta, Finland who piloted Hokkanen’s “bee doctor” test, says the practice has also improved his strawberry yields: “When I first started cultivating strawberries 20 years ago, we moved yields per hectare to about 5000 kilos. When the farm started bee farming 10 years ago, that increased yields to between 6,000-9,000 kg. Now, for the last four years, it has not gone below 10,000 kilograms [per hectare].”

But it is the lessened environmental impact on the land that prompted the Finnish Government to subsidize its strawberry, raspberry and apple growers by 500 Euro per hectare if they switch to bee doctoring, says Dr. Katja Hogendoorn, a bee researcher at the University of Adelaide’s School of Agriculture, Food and Wine.

Hogendoorn organized the first demonstration of bee doctoring in Australia last fall with the Cherry Growers Association of South Australia at Lennane Orchards in Montacute. “Brown rot is caused by a fungus, which significantly impacts the $150-million Australian cherry industry through costs of applying fungicide, yield loss and fruit spoilage,” she says. She also used Hokkanen’s hives and Prestop.

Using bees to deliver bio-agents that kill plant disease could clearly cause some to question whether the practice is safe for bees.  Hokkanen asserts that Prestop-Mix poses no risk to the bees and does no harm to the berries. Hogendoorn said she lost only one of 20 hives in her cherry orchard test to meat ants and that most of the hives were very heavy, indicating thriving populations.

Both Hokkanen and Hogendoorn say tests have shown that honey from bee doctors contains no traces of the bio-agent or strange flavors.

Biobest presented the bee-doctoring concept to the Bio-Pesticide Industry Alliance (BPIA) conference about 18 months ago. (Aasatek has no sales presence in North America.) However, Dominique Demers, sales manager for Biobest Canada & U.S., says it is only selling the dispenser for its commercial bumblebee hives, as no bio-pesticide in the U.S. is yet approved for use by either honeybees or bumblebees.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Biopesticides and Pollution Prevention Division (BPPD) said it does not have any guidance on new technology to use bees to deliver biological agents that control diseases in fruit, and has received no application for its use. “If we receive a submission for this use, we will evaluate it under the standards of FIFRA (Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act),” the agency said.

Marsha Johnston|March 18, 2015

Environmental Links

SFAS International Wildlife News Audubon Advocate Audubon Restore Eco-Voice South Florida Wildlife Care Center Sawgrass Nature Center & Wildlife Hospital The Turtle Hospital The Marathon Wild Bird Center Climate change info Audubon’s Coastal Strand Audubon of Florida News Blog Bioenergy News Climate Progress – climate science, politics and solutions Collins Center for Public Policy Comprehensive Everglades Restoration News EcoWatch – feeds from the WaterKeeper Alliance Everglades Foundation – press releases Everglades Hub Fort Myers News – Press Green Front Pages from Florida Newspapers Herald Tribune Newspapers –  Environmental News KeysNews.com Naples Daily News  – Environmental News National Public Radio Eco-News Riverwatch News about the Caloosahatchee Sierra Club Sierra Club Florida South Florida Watershed  Journal South Florida Water Management District Union of Concerned Scientists – news Yahoo News Search: Everglades NASA Climate Information American Littorial Society log NASA Climate Information Sun Newspapers – Lake Okeechobee News Everglades City News  – Mullet Wrapper IFAW’s World of Animals Magazine

ConsRep 1503 C

“The Truly Healthy environment is not merely safe but stimulating.” William H. Stewart

Announcements

Two Final Chances For “Big Day Birding Adventures” At Everglades National Park

The winter and early spring seasons are especially fine times to enjoy birding at Everglades National Park,

and the staff has invited the public to participate in several “citizen science” activities to help count birds in the park.

The final two “Big Day Birding Adventures” programs for this year will be held on March 14 and 28, 2015.

Five sessions of the program have already been held in January and February, and a park spokesperson notes,

“This is a great chance to go out with experienced park staff to count birds within the varied habitats of Everglades National Park.”

No advance reservations are required, and anyone who enjoys birding is invited to meet at the Anhinga Trail parking area at 8:00 a.m. on Saturday March 14 and 28.

The Anhinga Trail is in the Royal Palm area of Everglades National Park, about four miles past the Main Entrance to the park, and 15 miles southwest of the town of Homestead.

The Ernest F. Coe Visitor Center is near the Main Entrance, and on the way to the Anhinga Trail parking area.

You’ll find driving directions to the Visitor Center here, and a park map is available at this link.

“This is a great opportunity for novice and experienced birders alike to observe and learn about the birds of the Everglades…

and to explore the park’s diverse habitats:

from freshwater marsh to pine Rockland to mangrove swamp to Florida Bay,” says park ranger Christi Carmichael.

“We usually see around 60 species of birds, with a possibility of viewing such feathered wonders as Purple Gallinules, Roseate Spoonbills, and rare Short-tailed Hawks.”

“The public is becoming increasingly involved in ‘citizen science’ activities,” says Carmichael.

“Bird count data can help to show trends in bird populations around the world, so scientists and managers

may decide if further research or conservation efforts are appropriate for particular species.”

If you’d like to join in the activity, be prepared to drive your own car over 40 miles one-way to points of interest along the Main Park Road.

The activity lasts about 6 hours and ends at Flamingo. Participants should pack a lunch and water and prepare for sun and mosquitoes.

Some walking is involved.

Count results will be posted on the park’s website and on Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology’s online bird database, eBird.

If you need more information, call Christi Carmichael in the park at 239-695-3092.

Florida Native Plant Society
Join our friendly group at our free monthly meeting, 7 p.m. Wednesday,  April 1st  (first Wednesday, each month) at Moccasin Lake Nature Park: 

2750 Park Trail Lane, Clearwater, for refreshments, plant sale, interesting talks and events.  727-322-3954.  

The April topic will be Botany Projects in the Florida Park Service:

the District’s herbaria; highlights of current field work (surveying, monitoring, exotics);

a few of the challenges in conservation – by Rosalind Rowe, Environmental Specialist.  

Announcing the 2015 Arthur R Marshall Summer Intern Program for interested parties!

Replies to sip@artmarshall.org

Everglades Summer Intern Program

May 15 – July 31, 2015

Application Deadline: March 30th

Arthur R. Marshall Foundation & Florida Environmental Institute, Inc. For the Everglades
A Hands-on grassroots.org

www.ArtMarshall.org

To Educate, Restore, Protect !
1028 N Federal Hwy, Lake Worth, FL 33460
Phone: 561-801-2165

16th Annual Everglades Day

Saturday, February 14
Join us for Everglades Day, our all-day family festival, with activities for all ages. 

This year’s theme is “Romance of the Everglades.”

Enjoy tours, nature walks, bird walks, wildlife demonstrations, presentations, exhibits, games, kids’ fishing,

kids’ archery, canoeing, music, dance, food trucks and much more!  All day free admission.  Details to follow!

Friends and Family Spring Fling Folk Music Festival

Saturday, March 22
Location:  South County Civic Center, Delray Beach

Enjoy the sounds of Rod MacDonald and his Big Brass Bed Band. 

Details to follow!

Travel to Costa Rica with Friends,

March 28 – April 3, 2015

ARTHUR R. MARSHALL LOXAHATCHEE NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE
New Smartphone/Cellphone Self-Guided Tour

The Friends are proud to announce our new self-guided tour that you can take using your smartphone or cellphone.

Look for the signs along the Marsh Trail and at the boat docks and Butterfly Garden across from the Visitor Center –

you can start your tour wherever you choose.

You can learn about birds, butterflies, alligators, invasive species and much more!

If you can’t come out to the Refuge right away, you can call 561-962-9451 and enter a topic number

from 1 to 13 or visit http://myoncell.mobi/15619629451 and view all 13 videos.

2015 Great American Arctic Birding Challenge Starts March 1!

Birds from across the country migrate to the Arctic to nest—

while they are still on wintering grounds or in migration, how many can your team find in your state?

Join the Great American Arctic Birding Challenge to find the answer!

The Challenge runs March 1-June 1, with teams of up to 6 birders competing across the country.

So find a warbler expert, someone with supersonic hearing to identify those sparrow calls…

or head out with your regular birding buddies.

Get the official checklist, contest rules, and list of prizes here.

Ms. Akiko Iwata, Renowned Landscape Architect to give seminar on April 16th at Tree Tops park ‏

Dear Friends, Colleagues, Veteran Master Gardeners, Master Naturalists, and other Stewards of our Earth:

As part of our Florida Master Gardener Training Course, on April 16^th, we are honored to have Ms. Akiko Iwata,

esteemed Landscape Architect, who will talk to us about her work and unique use of color, layering, hardscapes, texture and other factors to create landscapes that soothe the savage urbanite.

Ms. Iwata is a recent conversion to Florida-Friendly Landscaping in the formal sense,

yet her track record of sustainable landscaping spans her career.  A quick perusal on her Linked In page:

https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=83743206&authType=NAME_SEARCH&authToken=wVV0&locale=en_US&trk=tyah&trkInfo=idx%3A1-2-2%2CtarId%3A1425927282959%2Ctas%3Aakiko+iwata

will reveal that she has done fabulous work with the EDSA Corporation , whose principal web page

http://www.edsaplan.com/ also has an impressive portfolio section http://www.edsaplan.com/en/Portfolio/Selected-Projects

I am sure we will all be able to learn an immense amount from Ms. Iwata, who is sharing her knowledge in order to empower us

to address sustainability in terms of improving quality of life for our urban populations’ constituency.

It is my great pleasure to announce this and invite you to join us .

As this is a “live” Master Gardener training class, I will first start with talk on general Florida-Friendly Landscaping Design principles,

from 8 am to approximately 10:00 am, followed by a break, then Ms. Iwata’s lecture, questions and answers from 10:15  am to approximately 12:00 Noon.

Come meet this talented individual who is so generous to enlighten us with landscape design above and beyond our imaginations! 

See our newest Florida Master Gardener recruits as well as our indefatigable veteran Master Gardeners and Master Naturalists who unselfishly donate so much time to so many projects. 

Come one, come all…

Many thanks……   

Pipoly, John|broward.org|3/09/15

This month we’re celebrating Earth Hour 2015 and we want to ask you to participate.

The world is facing a climate crisis. If we don’t act, then humans, wildlife and the planet will suffer.

By turning off your lights for Earth Hour you’re helping us send a signal to world leaders that we want to fight climate change together and we must do it now.

On Saturday, March 28, from 8:30-9:30 PM local time hundreds of millions of people, businesses and cities around the world will turn off their lights for Earth Hour.

Take two easy steps to get involved:

1. Tell us you’re turning off your lights. It’s important we know how many people are participating because we report this number to leaders across the globe as a show of support for strong climate action.
2. Turn off your lights on Saturday, March 28, at 8:30 PM wherever you are and be a part of Earth Hour with millions of people around the globe, committing to a better future.

We know you care about our planet as much as we do, so we hope you’ll join us and make this Earth Hour bigger than ever.

Join the movement and make a commitment to protect the planet ►

Of Interest to All
Exposed monkeys were put outdoors

More than 175 monkeys that were potentially exposed to a bioterror bacteria inside a major Louisiana research complex were returned to their outdoor cages before officials knew the deadly pathogen was on the loose from a lab accident.

The new admission by the Tulane National Primate Research Center, in response to questions from USA Today, raises additional questions about contamination of the environment outside the massive research campus north of New Orleans. The bacteria, which is not found in the United States and can cause severe disease in people and animals, can live and grow in soil and water.

“Some animals were released from the vet clinic early on, but the key thing is that all the animals have been traced,” Tulane spokesman Michael Strecker said.

Testing of the 177 rhesus macaques is ongoing to determine whether they have been exposed to the bacterium, Burkholderia pseudomallei. The primate center is next to wetlands, a river and neighborhoods and across the street from a school.

If infected, animals that become ill can shed the bacteria in their urine and feces, and the organism can colonize in soil and water, said Jay Gee, a research biologist and expert on the pathogen at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The colonies can spread to other areas if carried by water runoff when i t rains.

Soil scientists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture are studying the bacteria’s ability to survive in North America, Gee said Thursday. USDA officials could not be reached for comment.

T he USDA has previously said it is still studying whether the situation at Tulane’s primate center in Covington, Louisiana, poses a risk to agriculture. The CDC has said there is no evidence of a public health threat.

T he veterinary clinic on the primate center’s 500-acre campus north of New Orleans is the focus of federal and state investigations as the likely place where five monkeys were infected or exposed to the bacteria in November or December. None of the monkeys were involved in experiments with the bacteria, and the pathogen should never have been in the clinic or anyplace else outside the high-security lab where Tulane was doing vaccine-development research.

Officials do not know when or how the bacteria got out of the lab, despite weeks of investigation by the CDC and numerous state and federal environmental, agriculture and emergency management agencies.

People and animals exposed to the bacteria can take several years to show signs of disease. Most of those exposed by contact with contaminated water or soil will never show signs of illness, Gee said, but the bacteria can hide for years in the body.

Burkholderia pseudomallei can cause a wide range of symptoms, from fever to localized skin infections to deadly pneumonias. For those who develop disease, the fatality rate can be as high as 50percent. Successful treatment with antibiotics can be long and difficult in severe cases, said Henry Walke, CDC’s branch chief for special pathogens.

Although a limited number of soil and water tests have not detected the bacteria outdoors, studies indicate too few samples were taken to detect what can be an elusive bacterium. Tulane has said it believes the soil testing was adequate because samples were taken in areas w here monkeys perch and their waste falls.

ALISON YOUNG|USA TODAY|3/7/15

Despite Protections, Miami Port Project Smothers Coral Reef in Silt

MIAMI — The government divers who plunged into the bay near the Port of Miami surfaced with bad news again and again: Large numbers of corals were either dead or dying, suffocated by sediment.

The source of the sediment, environmentalists say, is a $205 million dredging project, scheduled to end in July and intended to expand a shipping channel to make room for a new generation of supersize cargo ships.

The damage to the fragile corals was never supposed to have happened. In 2013, federal agencies created a plan to protect the animals from the churn of sand and rock by placing them at a distance from the dredge site. It was a strategy intended to balance Miami’s economic interests with the concerns of environmentalists, who worry about the rapid deterioration of reefs across South Florida.

Crucial to the plan was safeguarding the staghorn coral, a variety listed under the federal Endangered Species Act. But the vast majority of staghorn in the area was never relocated: Either it was missed during the initial 2010 survey by contractors for the Army Corps of Engineers, or it had spawned just as work began in 2013.

The corps, the agency in charge of the project, did relocate 924 other, non-endangered corals.

Florida and the Caribbean are rapidly losing their coral reefs, some of the most diverse ecosystems in the world, and the damage has raised intense criticism of how the Army Corps of Engineers has managed the project.

Environmentalists sued the corps in October, saying it violated the Endangered Species Act and the terms of a permit issued by the State Department of Environmental Protection.

“We’ve seen profound and severe impacts to our reef just off of Miami; it looks like a moonscape,” said Rachel Silverstein, the executive director of Biscayne Bay Waterkeeper, the lead environmental group bringing the lawsuit. “This damage stems from the fact that the corps and the contractors simply weren’t following the rules that were laid out for them when they started this project.”

Reefs around the world have experienced drastic declines as a result of pollution, acidification and overfishing. Higher ocean temperatures, which can bleach coral and kill it, have also damaged reefs. Some coral near the port suffered from bleaching last summer. In certain areas of South Florida, 90 percent of the coral is gone.

In Florida, coral reefs lure residents and tourists, who dive and snorkel to see their vivid colors and the tropical fish that they attract. Just as important, reefs serve as crucial wave buffers during tropical storms, protecting beaches and shoreline homes.

A report completed last month by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees endangered and threatened marine species, said 23 percent of the staghorn identified in the area by its divers in October was dead or dying. Another tract of nearby staghorn also appeared badly damaged but could not be fully surveyed.

The damage has prompted the corps and other federal agencies to dissect what went wrong, the extent of the harm and how best to avoid a repeat of similar problems.

A speedy review is especially important, environmentalists said, because Broward County, just north of here, is hoping to expand its shipping channel at Port Everglades, one of the country’s biggest ports and an area with considerably more staghorn than Miami. Environmentalists said they feared those plans repeated some of the mistakes in the Port of Miami dredging.

“The Army Corps will really need to sit down and try to figure out what happened in this case so we can design some better responses in the future,” said David Bernhardt, NOAA’s division chief for protected resources in the southeast.

The corps said it was possible that the Miami corals had been affected by the dredging, but it called the effects of the program “short term.” The corps defended its actions and said it had continually reported its concerns and findings to federal and state oversight agencies.

“We are reporting all of these things,” said Susan J. Jackson, a spokeswoman for the Army Corps of Engineers.

The corps, she said, is abiding by the rules of the permit and increased its monitoring of the corals once it learned they were ailing. In addition, Ms. Jackson said, the corps has not been charged with any violations by enforcement agencies and has diligently worked to correct problems as they have arisen. Lessons, she said, are always learned.

“We’re a learning organization,” Ms. Jackson said, adding that the corps was already better prepared for the Port Everglades expansion. “We take the lessons learned and apply them, not only to projects under execution, but to our future planning for projects.”

The loss of coral near the Port of Miami is indisputable. Federal and state divers reported finding some colonies so buried by sediment that they were virtually invisible. The sediment, reports by several government agencies said, was having a “profound” and “long lasting” effect on many corals.

Because coral needs light to survive, the cloudiness of the water has also worsened conditions. Divers reported difficulty seeing beyond five feet.

Though the dredge being used protects the reef from scraping, it appears to have caused more sediment than anticipated.

“Everyone was feeling the sedimentation issues would really be minor, so it sounded reasonable,” Mr. Bernhardt of NOAA said.

Shortly before dredging began, the corps realized it had significantly undercounted the staghorn near the channel; there were at least 243 colonies, not 31. NOAA approved a plan to move the 38 corals closest to the dredge about 820 feet away from the channel.

Things got worse from there. Underwater monitors created to measure the sediment did not work. The corps relied on divers to keep weekly tabs on the coral. Additionally, barges used to move the dredged material to shore were spilling or leaking sediment into the water.

Federal and state environmental agencies both asked the corps to remedy the barge problems. In a December letter to the corps, the federal Environmental Protection Agency listed 49 violations. The state sent its own letters about violations. The corps responded that it would fix the problems but denied that they were violations.

Last summer, NOAA, alarmed by the field reports, recommended the immediate relocation of the staghorns. After a delay, the corps paid NOAA to do the job in October. But half the dives were aborted, in part because the dredge was over the reef, making conditions dangerous. Divers managed to collect tissue from 77 percent of 205 ailing corals, though some had vanished or died.

Whatever the cause, in this case local taxpayers will bear the cost of the damage, which will be determined after the project is completed.

“I’m not quite sure that county taxpayers fully understand that they are on the hook for paying for this,” Ms. Silverstein said.

LIZETTE ALVAREZ|MARCH 7, 2015

Yet Another Oil Bomb Train Explosion Marks Fourth Derailment in Four Weeks

Once again this weekend, we saw scenes of tanker cars strewn across the landscape on their sides emitting huge billows of smoke and fire. On Saturday a 94-car train carrying Alberta tar sands oil derailed two miles outside Gogama, Ontario, with at least 35 cars going off the rails and at least seven igniting. Five cars landed in the Makami River, prompting a warning to residents not to drink the water as well as to stay inside to avoid possible toxic effects from the fire.

It follows fiery derailments of the so-called oil bomb trains carrying volatile crude oil that have occurred in Illinois, West Virginia and Ontario since the beginning of the year. In each of those cases, only about half a dozen cars derailed, making the Gogama derailment the biggest so far this year.

Gogama is about 60 miles north of the remote, unpopulated area outside Timmins, Ontario where a derailment occurred Feb. 14. And while Gogama itself is remote, it’s not unpopulated: the town has almost 400 residents and the nearby Mattagami First Nation community, and it’s a major center of outdoor tourism. The tracks the train was traveling go through the town, raising the specter of another tragedy like the one that killed 47 people and leveled much of the town of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec in July 2013.

“It’s frightening and nerve-wracking, especially after what happened in Quebec,” Roxanne Veronneau, owner of the Gogama Village Inn, told the Toronto Star. “People here are on pins and needles. The tracks run right through town. I’m sure that there’s going to be a lot of talk afterward that this shouldn’t be in the middle of our town.”

Mattagami chief Walter Naveau told northern Ontario news outlet Village Media that he had met with representatives from CN, the company whose train derailed and wasn’t comfortable with their reassurances.

“They’re saying it’s okay, and yet why are some of my band members feeling it in their chests and tasting it in their mouths?” said Naveau. “I’m very angry at CN right now, to put it mildly.”

He said he was concerned about the potential impact of oil spilling into the river. “The water is coming our way and that’s going to harm our fish habitat and tourist habitat,” he said.

“Anywhere you’re going to see a major spill of oil and chemicals onto the ground you’re going to see permanent contamination of the ecosystem nearby,” Adam Scott, climate and energy program manager for Canadian nonprofit advocacy group Environmental Defence, told Canada’s National Post. “They almost never are able to clean up all of the oil released in a spill like this and it’s much worse even when there’s a direct spill into a river because the oil gets moved down the river and the chemicals can spread.”

Each derailment suggests we’re a little closer to another Lac-Mégantic—or worse.

A recent study from the Center for Biological Diversity called Runaway Risks found that, with the 40-fold increase in rail cars carrying oil since 2008, 25 million people now live within a mile of tracks carrying these dangerous trains.

“Before one more derailment, fire, oil spill and one more life lost, we need a moratorium on oil trains and we need it now,” said Center for Biological Diversity senior scientist Mollie Matteson. “The oil and railroad industries are playing Russian roulette with people’s lives and our environment, and the Obama administration needs to put a stop to it. Today we have another oil train wreck in Canada, while the derailed oil train in Illinois is still smoldering. Where’s it going to happen next? Chicago? Seattle? The Obama administration has the power to put an end to this madness and it needs to act now because quite literally, people’s lives are on the line.”

While both Transport Canada and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have proposed new safety regulations for oil trains, including phasing out the old puncture-prone DOT-111 oil tankers, many of the recent derailment fires, including the one in Gogama, involved the new and supposedly safer CPC 1232 cars. And the industry is lobbying for a longer time frame in which to phase out the old cars.

“The cars involved in this incident are new models, compliant with the latest federal regulations, yet they still failed to prevent this incident,” said Glenn Thibeault, who represents the Gogama area in the Ontario legislature.

“It’s basically guaranteed to happen again; this is not an isolated incident,” Scott told The Star. “So until something dramatic is done, we’re going to see this continuing over and over again.

”Anastasia Pantsios|March 9, 2015

[Do you think its safe boss? “Yeah, go ahead and ship it.”]

Canada To Propose Tougher Oil Tank Car Standards

TORONTO (AP) — The Canadian government has proposed tough new standards for rail tank cars used to transport crude oil in response to a string of fiery crashes.

The proposal, posted online Wednesday by Transport Canada, would require the cars to have outer “jackets,” a layer of thermal protection, and thicker steel walls.

The requirements are tougher than the oil industry wanted. But the proposal doesn’t include electronically controlled brakes that automatically stop train cars at the same time instead of sequentially, which are opposed by freight railroads. Regulators said they will take that issue up separately.   

Final regulations are expected by mid-May. U.S. officials have been working closely with Canada on the regulations and the White House is reviewing a draft proposal.

There have been four oil train derailments in the U.S. and Canada since mid-February. A runaway oil train derailed in Lac-Megantic Quebec in 2013, killing 47 people.

A U.S. Transportation Department analysis predicts that trains hauling crude oil or ethanol will derail an average of 10 times a year over the next two decades, causing more than $4 billion in damage and possibly killing hundreds of people if an accident happens in a densely populated part of the U.S.

New standards were enacted after Lac Megantic, but safety officials on both sides of the border called for even stronger measures after fiery derailments continued to happen despite the new tank cars standards.

The newest standard calls for a hull thickness of 9/16th of an inch, up from 7/17th of an inch and makes thermal jackets mandatory.

“The proposed requirements are still subject to final approval,” said Zach Segal, a spokesman for Transport Minister Lisa Raitt. “We are working to have this done in an expedited manner.”

Segal said Transport Canada is working in collaboration with the U.S and “wants this done and published as soon as possible.?” Segal said Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s cabinet will have final approval.

The Transport Canada proposal is a “pretty clear indication” of what final regulations are likely to look like, said Ed Hamberger, president of the Association of American Railroads.

“These are important protections to both help mitigate the potential for rupture of a tank car, as well as limiting the severity of an incident,” he said.

The oil and rail industries want thinner tank walls — half an inch thick, instead of the 9/16ths-inch that regulators propose. The thicker the shell, the less oil a tank car can hold, and with about a half-million carloads of crude hauled by rail in the U.S. and Canada last year, the cost difference could add up.

The tank cars in the recent accidents were built to a voluntary standard written by industry representatives in 2011 to answer criticism that cars used to transport flammable liquids were prone to rupture in an accident and spill their contents and ignite spectacular fires. But most recent accidents show that the newer cars — known as 1232s — also are prone to rupture, even at slow speeds. Trains involved in four recent accidents were traveling under 40 mph (64 kph).

The White House budget office is reviewing a draft proposal for a sturdier tank car design, as well as other safety proposals. U.S. and Canadian officials have been working closely together to coordinate the regulations since the tank cars move back and forth across the border. Railroads and shippers have said if there were separate regulations in each country it could cause significant shipping delays and raise costs.

The railroad association and officials from CSX, Norfolk Southern and Burlington Northern-Santa Fe argued against requiring the electronically controlled breaks in a meeting with White House officials last week, according to a document posted online by the government. They say the government has underestimated the cost of equipping tank cars with the brakes and overestimated the safety benefits. Railroads complain that electronically controlled brakes would cost them $12 billion to $21 billion.

The oil industry has rapidly moved to using trains to transport oil, in part because of oil booms in North Dakota’s Bakken region and Alberta’s oil sands, and because of a lack of pipelines.

Celebrating National Groundwater Awareness Week

One of my favorite ways to travel is by bicycle. So, when I visited southern California last month, I jumped at the chance to ride along the San Gabriel River to see how Los Angeles County sustainably manages their drinking water supplies to support their growing population.

A recent defining experience for communities in California, and many other regions of the county, has been drought of an intensity that hasn’t been seen in generations.  The severity of this drought has forced communities to address questions about their ability to meet their basic water needs.  A common theme for many has been the critical role of a reliable supply of ground water in their ability to survive and thrive into the future.

I followed my ride along the San Gabriel with a visit to the extraordinary treatment facility operated by the Orange County Water District. Through a partnership with the Orange County Sanitation District, this facility takes highly treated wastewater and purifies it with a three-step advanced treatment process. This water is used to replenish their groundwater basin, preventing seawater intrusion and helping to supply drinking water to over 600,000 people.

I also visited the Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel in San Diego County, a small tribal community that is facing a diminished ground water supply. Chairman Perez and members of the Tribal leadership described their efforts toward water conservation, leak detection and repair, and identifying new drinking water supplies to support the needs of their Tribal members.

Communities large and small are taking on the challenge of ensuring a reliable water supply.  Clean ground water will play a vital role in their long term solution, as it currently does every day for over 100 million Americans.

These communities make clear that effective groundwater management will play a central role in keeping our communities healthy. During National Groundwater Awareness Week (March 8-14, 2015) let’s take time to celebrate all the great work across the country that is being done to protect our nation’s groundwater, so that communities can rely on this precious, limited resource now and in the future.

Dr. Peter Grevatt|2015 March 11

About the author: Peter Grevatt, Ph.D. is the director of EPA’s Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water.

Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed here are those of the author. They do not reflect EPA policy, endorsement, or action, and EPA does not verify the accuracy or science of the contents of the blog.

Calls to Action

1. Bats in Big Trouble – here
2. Tell Bumble Bee, Star-Kist, and Chicken of the Sea to stop destructive fishing – here
3. Help Protect Florida Panther Habitat – here
4. Tell EPA to limit dangerous ozone air pollution – here
5. Keep Chicken From China Out of School Lunches – here
6. Tell Buckeye Florida LP to stop fouling Florida’s water – here

Birds and Butterflies

Creating a safer owl habitat

Concern for burrowing owls living in the unstable sand under the sidewalk outside Cooper City’s Forest Lake Park recently prompted 80 volunteers to create six safe artificial nests.

Utilizing a $2,000 grant from the Captain Planet Foundation, students and parents from Griffin Elementary School, members of the South Florida Audubon Society’s Project Perch program, Cooper City’s Green Advisory Board and city staff teamed up for the project.

Volunteers dug into abandoned nests to create artificial nesting chambers and tunnels with PVC piping. White sand was spread at the entrance to attract owls. They surrounded the area with wooden fencing to protect the nests, and a sign was secured to the fence explaining what the owls eat, how they nest and their importance to the ecosystem.

“These were once active burrows, but sometimes they were in compromised areas,” said Diana Guidry, chairwoman of the city’s green board who works for NatureScape Broward. “The PVC doesn’t collapse if a mower or a car goes over it. Hopefully, (the owls) choose these spots.”

Residents expressed concern about the owls living underneath the sidewalk. Cars park in the swale, bicyclists, joggers and strollers use the sidewalk, and pesticides are sprayed along the concrete.

“We want to entice the owls to move where they’ll be better protected,” said city arborist Jeanette Wofford. “We want them to feel secure in their nests.”

Kelly Heffernan, avian biologist and founder of Project Perch, which works to protect burrowing owls, was thrilled with the volunteer turnout.

“It’s great when an event can draw this many volunteers,” she said. “… Almost all of our owls live in parks, schools or airports because it’s the last green space.”

Dawn Pitti wanted her son, kindergartner Aiden Pitti Short, 6, to gain a greater sense of responsibility for the environment.

“He learned about (burrowing owls) at school,” Pitti said. “Now when we come to this park, he’ll see he was part of building the owls’ habitats.”

Jackie Albanese said the learning experience for her son, kindergartner Connor Albanese Wickett, 5, was paramount. “We weren’t aware the owls can’t dig through grass, so they were having trouble building their nests,” Albanese said. “It was neat for him to see what (the nests) look like on the inside and for us to take the time to help animals.”

Jacqueline Sanchez, technology specialist at Griffin Elementary and adviser for the school’s environmental club, hopes the experience resonates with students. “The more we educate,” she said, “the more we can cohabitate.”

By Fallan Patterson|Forum Publishing Group|MARCH 5, 2015, 1:15 PM

National Wildlife Week: Cooper City Creates a Home for Burrowing Owls

In late February, more than 40 families joined together at Forest Lake Park in Cooper City, Florida to create 6 artificial burrows for its resident burrowing owls. Many of the children attend Griffin Elementary School and along with Teacher Jacque Sanchez have championed for the burrowing owls on school property as well. Kelly Heffernan, founder of Project Perch, started off the event by reading a children’s book about making a difference for wildlife in your community. Habitat Stewards and City Arborist Jeannette Wofford organized teams to install the burrows, signage and fencing.

Artificial Burrowing Systems have been in existence since the 1970s to help provide shelter for declining owl populations, since these small owls naturally live in open, treeless areas, which are in decline.

These burrows are simple to create and install, and other parks in Florida can follow Forest Lake Park’s lead. Their burrow includes pieces of PVC pipe to help protect the burrows from collapsing under the weight of mowers and other heavy equipment that maintain public spaces.

Residents can also create burrows in their own yards following these steps from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Cooper City is located in Broward County, which has been a Community Wildlife Habitat with NWF since 2005.  The county encourages its municipalities to do the same.  To date, 16 municipalities are registered or certified Community Wildlife Habitats. Burrowing owls are no strangers to the area. Portions of the movie “Hoot” were filmed in Broward County and Cooper City’s middle school celebrated the premier with a visit from cast and starring owls.

Broward County was recently named a Great Place for Wildlife as part of the National Wildlife Week 2015 Celebration. Did your city make the grade?

Jessie Yuhaniak|Wildlife Promise|0 3/9/2015

GBBC 2015 Overview

You did it!

Once again participants from around the world set new records for the number of species identified during the four days of the Great Backyard Bird Count and for the number of checklists submitted.

Total checklists: 147,265 (up 3,156)
Total species: 5,090 (up 794)
Estimated participants: 143,941 (up 1,890)

Bad weather really had an impact on participation in the heavily populated northeastern quadrant of the United States and across Canada. Bitter temperatures, snow, and high winds produced a noticeable drop in the number of checklists submitted from those regions. Kudos to those who braved the elements to count (humans) and be counted (the birds)! And congratulations to our outstanding performers across the globe. Below are the Top 10 countries ranked by number of checklists submitted:

Country	Number of Species	Number of Checklists
United States	671	108,396
Canada	241	10,491
India	717	6,810
Australia	524	812
Mexico	653	425
Portugal	559	303
Costa Rica	197	193
New Zealand	126	161
Ecuador	784	138
Honduras	353	133

Read the 2015 GBBC summary on the website.

Extinct Jerdon’s babbler found live and well in Myanmar

A bird thought to have been extinct has been spotted by scientists alive and well in Myanmar, 74 years after the last sighting.

Jerdon’s babbler was re-discovered near abandoned agricultural research station by a scientist from Wildlife Conservation Society National University of Singapore.

Jerdon’s babbler (Chrysomma altirostre) had not been seen in Myanmar since July 1941, where it was last found in grasslands near the town of Myitkyo, Bago Region near the Sittaung River.

The team found the bird while surveying a site around an abandoned agricultural station that still contained some grassland habitat. After hearing the bird’s distinct call, the scientists played back a recording and were rewarded with the sighting of an adult Jerdon’s babbler. 

Over the next 48 hours, the team repeatedly found Jerdon’s babblers at several locations in the immediate vicinity and managed to obtain blood samples and high-quality photographs.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the species was common in the vast natural grassland that once covered the Ayeyarwady and Sittaung flood plains around Yangon. Since then, agriculture and communities have gradually replaced most of these grasslands as the area has developed.

The Jerdon’s Babbler in Myanmar is one of three subspecies found in the Indus, Bhramaputra, and Ayeyarwady River basins in South Asia. All show subtle differences and may yet prove to be distinctive species.

“The degradation of these vast grasslands had led many to consider this subspecies of Jerdon’s Babbler extinct,” said Colin Poole, Director of WCS’s Regional Conservation Hub in Singapore.

“This discovery not only proves that the species still exists in Myanmar but that the habitat can still be found as well. Future work is needed to identify remaining pockets of natural grassland and develop systems for local communities to conserve and benefit from them.”

Record number of songbirds killed on British military base in Cyprus

BirdLife Cyprus reports the numbers of trapped songbirds illegally killed on a British military base in Cyprus last autumn reached an estimated 900,000 birds – the highest level recorded in 12 years. 

This is equivalent to almost 15,000 songbirds a day during the September-October migration period.

Following this dramatic increase in bird deaths on the Dhekelia Sovereign Base Area, close to the tourist hotspot of Ayia Napa, the RSPB and BirdLife Cyprus are urging the authorities to continue the positive start made late last year to clamp down on the illegal trappers.

Extensive areas of illegally planted avenues of acacia scrub have been allowed to be grown by criminals on MoD land. The acacia scrub attracts vast numbers of migrating songbirds, moving between Europe and Africa each autumn, and trappers use it as cover for their illegal activities. Removing the planted scrub prevents this.

Small-scale trapping of songbirds for human consumption on Cyprus was practiced for many centuries, but it has been illegal on the island for 40 years.

Unfortunately, organised crime now seems to be driving this illegal activity which is thought to be worth millions of Euros every autumn from the songbirds which are sold to consume illegally in the Republic of Cyprus.

Dr Tim Stowe, RSPB’s International Director, says: “The report highlights the illegal trapping of songbirds on the British military base has escalated and we are urging the Ministry of Defence and the Base Area authorities to resolve it before this autumn’s migration.

“Such extensive illegal activity requires all the Cyprus authorities to work together to combat it, and the Base Areas’ contribution should be zero-tolerance towards illegal bird trapping.

“We were pleased that the Base Area authorities have started to remove acacia scrub last December.  We believe the scale of illegal trapping requires continuing and sustained action, and we’ll continue to offer our support.”

Dr Clairie Papazoglou, Executive Director of BirdLife Cyprus, says: “Acacia isn’t a native plant in Cyprus, so the planting of extensive stands of this shrub by the trappers is a highly visible symbol of their flagrant disregard for anti-trapping laws.

“In fact, you can see these plantations from space. By removing the acacia, the Sovereign Base Area authorities would send a clear signal that they will not tolerate the slaughter of birds on British bases.”

The songbirds are trapped to provide the main ingredient for the local and expensive delicacy of ambelopoulia, where a plate of songbirds, such as blackcaps or robins, is served to restaurant diners. The illegality of the practice and the high profits are attracting the attention of organised crime gangs.

Today, most trappers will use long lines of nearly invisible netting, known as mist nets. They attract birds into them on an industrial-scale by playing birdsong to lure them in.

Traditionally, trappers had relied solely on lime-sticks, where stems of pomegranate are coated in a locally manufactured ‘lime’ and are then placed in trees and bushes.

Passing birds become stuck on the lime-coated sticks where they fall easy prey to trappers.

Whilst lime-sticks are still used in many areas, mist-netting between planted avenues of acacia has now taken the slaughter to a whole new level.

Since 2002, the monitoring program has recorded over 150 different bird species which have become trapped in nets or on lime-sticks.

Cyprus has two songbirds found nowhere else in the world: the Cyprus warbler and the Cyprus wheatear. Both of these songbirds are impacted by illegal trapping.

California Birds are Flying Safer Thanks to New Building Standards

San José is Stepping Up for the Birds

There’s good news for northern California‘s birds! San José, the capital of Silicon Valley, is looking out for then by adopting bird-friendly standards for the city’s buildings.

As reported in The Chattanoogan, San José is the fourth California city to adopt these building guidelines. San Francisco paved the way for helping birds in this way back in 2011, neighboring Oakland followed in 2013, and Sunnyvale joined in 2014.

Creating these new building standards was a real collaborative effort. The San José Environmental Services Department (ESD), Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society (SCVAS) and the Loma Prieta Chapter of the Sierra Club got together to create the city’s official Bird-Safe Building Design Standards.

The city’s location and commitment to wildlife made the new building guidelines a no-brainer. San José is situated smack-dab in the Pacific Flyway Migration Corridor. Two times a year, millions of birds will pass through the Corridor during migrations. The goal of the new standards is to reduce the number of (often fatal) collisions between birds and glass windows and the façades of buildings. The birds will “fly into reflections of trees and sky, or attempt to fly through transparent glass walls.” In San José, the frequent victims of these collisions are: Anna’s Hummingbird, Cedar Waxwing, Yellow-rumped Warbler, Lesser Goldfinch, Hermit Thrush, Varied Thrush, American Robin, and Cooper’s Hawk.

Keeping the birds safe isn’t rocket science, so it’s hard to understand why more cities aren’t adopting bird-friendly building standards. It can be as easy avoiding large chunks of transparent or reflective glass, shutting off non-emergency lights at night and adding fritting–ceramic lines or dots on glass–on existing structures. For example, Facebook is decorating its new campuses with frit.

This is Much More Than a Decor Issue

But this is much more than a decor issue. The bird collisions campaign manager for the American Bird Conservancy (ABC), Dr. Christine Sheppard explains in The Chattanoogan that, “Without question, bird collisions are one of the most significant causes of bird mortality worldwide.” And these collisions are on the rise.

The Washington Post reports that a 2014 survey found that, in the United States alone, between 365 and 988 million birds die from window collisions every year. That means that ten percent of all of America’s birds could be impacted. It also puts these collisions right behind stealthy feline predators as the “largest source of human-related menaces that kill birds directly.”

Interestingly, most of the bird crashes don’t happen on giant skyscrapers. In fact, 56 percent of the bird fatalities happen on buildings between four and 11 stories tall, or low-rises. After these smaller buildings, residential homes that range between one and three stories tall account for 44 percent of bird deaths. Skyscrapers come in at one percent.

The United States is home to “15.1 million low-rises and 122.9 million small residences, and only about 21,000 skyscrapers.” Overall, the black-throated blue warblers, ruby-throated hummingbirds, Anna’s hummingbirds, Townsend’s solitaires and golden-winged warblers are the most vulnerable species.

How You Can Help the Birds

If you care about the birds then there are a few ways that you can help at home or in the office. The Humane Society and Born Free USA  have compiled a list of tips on how to prevent these bird collisions and what you can do if you encounter an injured bird.

Jessica Ramos|March 9, 2015

Dumping dirty water threatens Bird Island

Florida’s newest Critical Wildlife Area, a tiny bird island in the Indian River Lagoon near Sewall’s Point, has survived erosion, hurricanes and the curiosity of boaters and fishermen. Now it faces a challenge – again – from an early dumping of Lake Okeechobee’s murky water.

The 1.5 acre spoil island, created from sand dredged from the lagoon’s bottom in the 1940s, remains a favorite gathering place for more than 40 different kinds of birds and a nesting choice for at least 15 bird species.

Martin County’s Bird Island in some ways is even more popular than Pelican Island, the nation’s first National Wildlife Refuge in Indian River County.

Why do birds love the island and keep coming back?

Ecologist Greg Braun, speaking to about 140 Martin residents at a Florida Oceanographic Society lecture last week, cites location, plus continued help from environmental advocates, government and residents.

Located too far from Sewall’s Point shores for such predators as raccoons to swim to it, the island at one point was stripped of all non-native trees and shrubs. Establishing healthy native plantings took years.

Wind and waves eroded the shoreline, so Martin County, which leases the land from Florida, won grants to build a protective breakwater north of the island.

When boaters and fishermen get too close to nesting birds, Braun said, determined Sewall’s Point residents use megaphones to yell “Stay away from the island!”

The endangered wood storks, oyster catchers, roseate spoonbills and others, unaware of all the protective activity, continue to show up at the island, along with white ibis, ospreys, double-crested cormorants and magnificent frigatebirds. The wood storks and others return year after year.

Nesting birds have faced other challenges, Braun said, such as marauding fish crows. These bird-world predators often strike when boaters or fishermen frighten parents away from nests, eating eggs or attacking hatchlings. Some birds get entangled in fishing lines.

The 2004 hurricanes blasted Bird Island, and plantings of mature black and red mangroves and sea grapes were uprooted.

And, while the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission posted polite “Please Keep Out” signs, many ignored them. Enforcement was difficult, Braun said. With no statute, for example, showing that chicks died because parents were frightened off nests was impossible to prove.

Since the FWC has declared the island a Critical Wildlife Area, more penalties come into play, ranging from warnings and fines as high as $500 to seizure of boats and equipment.

The effects of discharges from Lake Okeechobee, which surround the island with dirty, murky water, are easier to see, Braun said. “If you’re a bird that relies on seeing your prey, you’re going to leave the area, if you can. If you can’t see fish (to catch them to feed hatchlings), your chicks will die.”’

Summer discharges of dirty lake water are less troubling to Bird Island residents than those in the spring, when nesting season is at its height.

“This year is a problem,” Braun said, because so much water is being discharged now. “This may turn out to not be a good nesting season.”

Helping nesting birds on this little island turns out to be one more reason the state should buy sugar industry land south of the lake. Storing and cleaning water there, before sending it to the Everglades, would let the island’s birds fish clean waters to feed their hungry hatchlings.

Sally Schwartz|Context Florida|Mar 11, 2015

   Invasive species

Lionfish could be putting more than 109,000 recreational fishing jobs and more than 64,000 commercial fishing jobs at risk.

Invasive lionfish are a serious threat to Florida’s saltwater fishing industry — the second largest in the nation — and the thousands of jobs it supports, according to an economic commentary from Florida TaxWatch.

Some 109,000 jobs tied to recreational fishing, and the more than 64,000 dependent on the commercial fishing industry, bolster the state economy, the report reveals.

TaxWatch is a non-profit, non-partisan research institute devoted to protecting and promoting the political and economic freedoms of Floridians.

Dominic M. Calabro, president and CEO of Florida TaxWatch, pointed out that Florida fishing also “provides local food and unique tourism experiences, which must be preserved as they are critical pieces of Florida’s diversified economy.”

“By taking steps to control Florida’s lionfish population, the state is protecting valuable Florida resources and needed jobs,” he stated.

Florida Fish Wildlife Conservation Commission, according to the report, is working to control the population of lionfish by encouraging lionfish removal from reefs around the state, promoting a lionfish reporting smartphone app, and prohibiting lionfish from being imported for aquariums.

Ten lionfish derbies are planned this year starting in May throughout the state, including one in Pensacola, as a way to encourage spear-gun anglers to harvest the fish. The fear is the population is growing faster than the fish can be culled.

The TaxWatch report, however, does not cite a specific economic study.

Morgan McCord, spokeswoman for the Tallahassee-based TaxWatch, said the report is meant to only highlight issues impacting the state economy of which people should be aware.

“It’s something we put out every month and topics range from lionfish to the impact of football collegiate play-off games,” she said. “It’s more intended to start conversations than start policy changes.”

What makes the lionfish, native to Indo-Pacific waters, such a huge threat to the fisheries is they have no natural predators in Florida waters, their population is exploding exponentially, and they are competing with native fish, including grouper, for the same food source.

Since the first one was documented in the Gulf off of Pensacola in 2010, lionfish are believed to now number in the tens of thousands off the coast and are found on nearly every reef — 200 of them — off our coast. They are also being reported in Santa Rosa Sound and other inland waterways.

Rick O’Connor, Escambia County Sea Grant agent, is worried about the impact to the local economy from the invaders. He knows of no studies nationally or locally measuring those impacts.

He said scientists studying the stomach contents of lionfish in the Northern Gulf are finding them full of the same bait fish that snapper and grouper rely on, which could potentially be depleting important commercial and recreational fish stocks.

“A lot of (scuba) divers are reporting juvenile Mingo snapper are being consumed by lionfish, and we’re watching them to see if their numbers drop,” he said.

How this translate to the volume of fish being caught by vacationers or commercial fishermen is unknown, he said.

“We need an economist involved,” he said.

Locally, O’Connor has not found an economist who has the time between other projects they’re working to measure what’s happening in the Pensacola Bay Area.

He said he’s encouraged that TaxWatch is highlighting this issue, but at the same time he said it’s time for some sound research to be done to measure how this invasive species is or may in the future impact our economy.

Kimberly Blair|pnj.com|March 8, 2015

The dirty dozen: 12 of the most destructive invasive animals in the United States

For some animals, there’s no such thing as a dog-eat-dog world. They rule.

Animals from around the world that stow away in airplanes, ships and the luggage of some smuggler become almost bulletproof when they make their way into the American wilderness as invasive species. Why? They’re new here, and they don’t have predators to keep them in check. Animals that should be afraid of a vicious predator aren’t. Invasive species eat like kings.

Living high on the hog, these marauders aren’t going anywhere. Unlike many native animals that are disappearing from North America — vaquita porpoises, monarch butterflies, bottlenose dolphin and such — invasive species are growing faster than wildlife and game officials can manage them. In many cases, authorities have given up any hope of eradicating them.

Here are 12 of the most destructive invasive plants and animals in the United States, a dirty dozen. If it’s on this list, there’s a good chance that a government official in an office somewhere is trying to think of ways to kill it.

Burmese pythons

These long, lean eating machines are terrorizing the Florida Everglades. Humans don’t have much to fear, but native animals had better watch their backs. Alligators are being knocked off their perch as the swamp’s top predator. People ask why these snakes are such a problem. Why can’t experienced hunters walk into the Everglades and kill them? Burmese pythons from Southeast Asia are so stealthy that even experts with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission have a tough time spotting them, let alone killing them. Since they were determined to be established and put the squeeze on the swamp in 2002, deer, raccoon, marsh rabbits, bobcats and possum have declined by as much as 99 percent in some cases, according to researchers for the U.S. Geological Survey.

Emerald ash borer

This bug’s march across the Midwest is not the kind of green movement that conserves nature. It ruins ash trees that provide durable wood used for flooring, bowling alleys, church pews, baseball bats and electric guitars. The bugs sparkle like a jewel with their glittery hide, but the nickel-sized holes they bore into trees are ugly, and the squiggly trails their larvae etch on the bark can make your skin crawl. They arrived in southeastern Michigan in 2002 from their native habitats in Russia, China and Japan. Since then, tens of millions of ash trees have been killed, and their numbers continue to grow.

Nutria

The official name comes off like some kind of vitamin drink, so Louisianans came up with another that sounds more fitting: swamp rats. Nutria don’t just look like rats with long tails and orange buck teeth, they breed like them. Female nutria give birth to litters of up to 14 then go back into heat in two days. Federal wildlife officials say there’s no hope of eradicating them from Louisiana, where they were imported from South America for their fur in the 1930s and grew out of control after being released when the industry died. A Chesapeake Nutria Eradication Program is working furiously to push them off the Del Marva Peninsula and wipe them out in Maryland and Delaware. Their endless digging on the banks of rivers rips up plants by the root, causing soil to erode, destroying native habitat for everything from muskrats to crabs to juvenile fish.

European starling

Starlings are little birds that travel in huge packs, and they are known for wreaking havoc. Birders don’t like it, but starlings are generally regarded as pests. Every year, the Agriculture Department’s division of Wildlife Service’s kills 4 million animals identified by residents across the country as a nuisance, and starlings are targeted the most — by far. Moving in flocks that resemble small black clouds, they descend on cities, towns and mostly farms, beaks aimed at the ground in search of food. Starlings are known to swarm toward feeding cattle to steal their food, needling and harassing the bigger animals until they back off. Since their introduction to the United States by Shakespeare enthusiasts in the 1890s, they have become arguably the most successful foraging bird in the country, with a population of about 200 million.

Northern snakehead

It’s called a snakehead. That dreadful name pretty much sums up the most feared fish in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, a sharp-tooth monster so scary that fishing tournaments are held not to eat, or fight it on the line, but solely to kill it. Snakeheads look like some weird cross between a python and an electric eel, and attempts to get large numbers of people to fish and eat it so that snakeheads don’t eat too many other creatures in the estuary have failed. Stories about how this fish from China and Korea ended up in the bay in the early 2000s vary. Some say a clueless aquarium dumped several in a tributary; others say someone carried them from a fish market. Whatever happened, female snakeheads, which are baby factories known to carry up to 100,000 eggs, took it from there and have now spread to Delaware and Virginia.

Brown marmorated stink bug

Here’s a quick thought, in 10 words: A stink bug is probably in your house right now. They don’t seem to mind that you’re there. They just need a place to rest through winter and crawl out in spring to mate and make millions more stink bugs. Stink bugs annoy because they swarm and smell like cilantro, but they don’t bite or carry disease. They’re not to be confused with the growing swarm of Asian kudzu bugs in Georgia, although their behaviors are similar. Stink bugs destroy fruits and vegetables and drive up produce prices. They first showed up in Allentown, Pa., in 1998 after crawling out a cargo ship that probably stopped in China, their native land. There, stink bugs aren’t a problem because small wasps lay eggs on their backs and the babies use them for a meal as they grow. With no wasps in the mid-Atlantic, they became marauders.

Feral hogs

They have razor-sharp teeth, curling tusks and are so hot tempered that they charge humans. Otherwise, feral hogs, wild pigs or big boars are just farm pigs gone wild. They’re established in 47 states, with massive populations in Texas, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, and a growing one in Virginia. In most of those places, experienced hunters have a green light to shoot them on sight. Here’s why: They cause about $1.5 billion in damage nationwide each year. They’re also an ecological nightmare that eats turtle eggs, wild turkey eggs and quail that nest on the ground. Acorns and chestnuts that are the next generation of trees go into their stomachs. Feral pigs were introduced to the United States from ships centuries ago, but the recent population boom, state game officials and biologists say, is largely the fault of hunters who imported wild pigs to hunt year round.

Lionfish

Lionfish are very pretty. That ends the positive vibrations that marine biologists give this animal. They are exotic gluttons that eat everything they can stuff in their mouths, and they are destroying life on the coral reef that serves as habitat for thousands of species of other fish. That’s how they earned the name Norway rats of the Atlantic. Lionfish are native to the Pacific Ocean, but they were widely traded for their looks and were first spotted near Miami in the mid-1980s before proliferating in the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea near the turn of the century.

Norway rat

Norway rats have lived in the United States for so long that they’re like family. They were introduced in 1775 and are now everywhere, including Alaska and Hawaii, living under various aliases, including brown rats and sewer rats. Norway rats prefer to live near humans and they like choice meats, but really a rat will eat anything — eggs, young chickens, vegetables, garbage and wood. They’re a menace known to climb trees and skitter across thin branches to kill and eat wild chicks in their nests. They’re survivors, adept at avoiding things that eat them.

Tegu

Tegus look like little brown anolis lizards — on steroids. They’re muscular, fast and love eggs. They’re known to harass pets — some reports claim they have killed cats — and they invade homes. Tegus were brought to the United States as pets, and are still available for sale in some stores. They were released into the wild and have spread from the Florida Keys to the Florida Panhandle and are threatening to reach into southern Georgia. Like pythons, Florida officials have launched offensives designed to kill them. And also like pythons, those efforts have failed. There are now so many that Florida game officials have given up on the idea of eradicating them, and now only hope to manage the population.

Asian citrus psyllid

It’s a little farfetched, but this tiny bug could be the end of Florida orange juice. The Asian citrus psyllid carries a bacteria that goes by many names: huanglongbing, “yellow dragon disease” and “citrus greening.” But what people remember is that Florida orange growers, agriculturalists and academics compare it to cancer. Roots become deformed. Fruits drop from limbs prematurely and trees die. Half of all citrus trees in Florida, which provides 80 percent of the nation’s orange juice, are infected. The trees slowly die. Florida, which provides up to 80 percent of U.S. orange juice, has been hardest hit, but the psyllid and disease have been detected in Georgia, Louisiana, Texas and California, which provide most of the nation’s lemons. Psyllids were first detected outside Miami in 1998 and the bacteria was discovered near there in 2005. It spread to 31 other counties within two years.

Brown tree snake

Brown tree snakes are not in the contiguous United States. Be happy about that. Hundreds of thousands are in Guam, a U.S. territory, and are responsible for the decimation of birds there. Birds had no reason to fear an animal that didn’t exist until it was introduced accidentally in the 1950s. Brown tree snakes are so out of control that they’re known for causing power outages when they climb utility poles. Now that many of the birds are gone, the snakes have turned their attention to native lizards. Hawaii, 3,800 miles east of Guam, is on high alert to stop the poisonous, predatory snakes native to Australia and Indonesia.

Darryl Fears|February 23, 2015

Endangered Species

What Can We Do to Save the Bees?

Most of our favorite foods exist because of bees: Did you enjoy coffee this morning? Bees likely pollinated the coffee flowers. Eat an apple recently? You can thank a bee for that, too. 

Part 1 of this series exposed the serious threats that are putting honeybees in danger. Wondering what we can do to save the bees? Read on!

1) Garden Organically – Honeybees are very susceptible to pesticides and insecticides. In your own yard, choose organic means of pest control rather than toxic chemicals. Use companion planting techniques and disease-resistant seed varieties to reduce the need to spray more potent compounds in your garden or around your landscape.

2) Avoid Neonicotonoids – “Neonics” are toxic chemicals that treat the seed before it’s planted. They essentially render the entire plant that grows out of that seed toxic to whatever insect feeds on it. Do not buy seeds treated with neonics, or plants that have been cultivated from them. Ask your garden center for help so you can avoid neonic plants, and encourage the garden center not even to carry them. Consult this chart from Beyond Pesticides, which lists common home and garden products containing neonicotinoids.

3) Avoid Insecticidal Dusts – When bees collect pollen or nectar from a plant dusted with insecticide, they can carry the insecticide back to the hive, where it can cause serious bee kills within the hive for many months. If you must apply insecticides, do so in the late evening or very early morning when fewer bees will be foraging, and when it is not windy.

4) Support Local Beekeepers – Local beekeepers are on the front lines of keeping honey bees alive. Support their efforts to reduce pesticide spraying in their area; drift from the spray can infiltrate their beehives and kill off the bees.

5) Provide Water – Bees need lots of fresh, clean, unpolluted water to help them make their honey. Is there room in your yard or on your patio to add a small pond with a fountain or water filter to keep the water moving while providing lots to drink for the bees?

6) Urge the U.S. EPA to Test Pesticides That Could Be Causing Bees to Die Off – The Environmental Protection Agency should test any and all pesticides for the impact they could be having on beneficial insects like bees. Here is an explanation of how the EPA can intervene to protect honey bees. (And here’s a petition you can sign to urge the EPA to protect bees.)

7) Plant A Variety of Blooming Plants – Choose clusters of plants that bloom at different times of the spring summer and fall to provide a steady source of pollen. Native plants like purple coneflower (Echinacea) and Chokecherry can be ideal.

8) Get Involved in Your Community – Encourage your neighbors to care for trees, flowers and bushes organically. Identify fields that your city or town can leave un-mowed so that bees and other insects can feed on the pollen and nectar that will be available from weeds left to grow wild. Testify about the importance of protecting bees at your local city council or town hall meetings.

9) Buy Honey From Local Beekeepers – Local beekeepers are on the front lines of keeping honeybees alive. Support their efforts by buying their honey! You can find it online, at farmers markets and in natural and whole foods stores.

What Will Happen to the World If We Lose Bees?

Honeybees do more than make honey, though that in itself is a spectacular feat. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that “out of some 100 crop species which provide 90% of food worldwide, 71 of these are bee-pollinated.” Like apples? Thank the bees for pollinating apple blossoms. Enjoy a steak? Thank the bees for that one, too, since bees pollinate the alfalfa that cows consume. Chances are, almost every food you eat exists because bees pollinated the plant they came from.

As important as honeybees are, their populations should be a priority for protection. Instead, honeybees are dying out in alarming numbers. RevealNews reports that, since 2006, the percent of bees dying in their hives has jumped from an average 5 or 10 percent a year to 30 percent. About 10 million beehives, worth an estimated $2 billion, have been lost in the last nine years.

Why? And what can be done about it? This two-part series will first, examine some of the reasons why honeybees might be dying, and then offer suggestions that could make a difference.

Why Are the Bees Dying?

Scientists and beekeepers have several theories about why honeybees are dying off.

Not Enough Sperm for the Queens – Bees live in colonies, with one queen and many drones and worker bees. During winter, the queen lays eggs within each cell inside a honeycomb. Fertilized eggs hatch into females that become the worker bees. Their job is to forage for food and take care of the colony. Unfertilized eggs become drones or honey bee males. For any colony to survive, the queen must lay fertilized eggs and those eggs must become worker bees. There is only one queen per colony. She mates once, but it counts when she does, as normally she collects more than 5 million sperm, enough so she can fertilize eggs throughout her life. When a queen can no longer lay eggs, new queens become responsible for mating and laying honey bee eggs. One theory behind the collapse of  honeybee colonies is that the queen is not getting enough sperm from the male bee that she mates with. Another theory is that the queen is dying earlier than usual, which means she has less time to fertilize eggs. Either way, fewer fertilized eggs give rise to fewer worker bees that can help maintain the bee colony. If the queen dies out and is not replaced by a new queen, the hive will die out.

Mites and Viruses – Many bee hives have been found to be infected by a tiny parasite called a varroa mite. Though these mites were once rare, they have gotten a foothold in many beehives and are wreaking havoc on bee colonies. The mites suck fluid from bees’ bodies, making the bees weak and compromising their immune systems. The mites also pass along viruses that can paralyze the bees. It is hard to kill off the mites without harming the bees, too, so this is a particularly vexing problem.

Not Enough Food or Water For The Bees – Like other living animals, bees need food and water to survive. In their case, food comes from the pollen they collect from a variety of fruits, vegetables, and trees. They also need unpolluted water sources. Urban sprawl and industrial development are taking the place of fields that used to provide the plant variety that kept bees thriving. And as more farms are devoting themselves to just one crop, bees are finding that their diets are being whittled down to fewer and fewer nutritious options. In regions suffering from drought, annual flowers aren’t blooming in abundance, and perennials aren’t producing as much nectar.

Pesticides – Neonicotonoids – Pesticides intended to kill other insects could also be killing bees. One type of pesticide, a neonicotonoid, is a systemic pesticide. It’s not sprayed on plants. Instead, seeds are treated with the chemical. As the plant grows, the pesticide infuses its plant tissue. If a bee nibbles on a plant grown from neonic-treated seed, it could be lethal.

There’s a good chance that several of these threats are working together to take their toll on our honeybees. The question is, what can we do about them to keep honeybees alive?

Diane MacEachern|March 5, 2015

Bats in Big Trouble — Take Action ‏

If ever a species urgently needed the lifesaving protections of the Endangered Species Act, it’s the four-ounce furballs we know as northern long-eared bats.

A fungal disease called white-nose syndrome has swept through these bats’ colonies in 25 states and five provinces — and if we don’t act fast, they could disappear altogether.

In the past, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has recommended nothing less for these animals than the strongest protections the Act has to offer. But after industry pressure, the agency’s now considering downlisting the species to “threatened” and allowing logging, mining and drilling near bat colonies to continue.

But that’s not how the Act works. If the science says northern long-eared bats are endangered, then the law says they must be protected from all threats — not just white-nose syndrome — because the disease has made them even more vulnerable to other losses. 

Act now to urge the Service to jettison its “special rule” allowing for industry exemptions. It must set a course that will truly help these bats survive.

Please sign #1 in “Calls to Action” above.

Center for Biological Diversity|3/9/15

New monkey species discovered in the Amazon Rainforest

A new species of titi monkey has been discovered by scientists in Brazil. Titis are new world monkeys found across South America.

These tree-dwelling primates have long, soft fur and live in small family groups consisting of a monogamous pair and their offspring. Rather touchingly, they are often observed sitting or sleeping with their tails entwined.

After researcher Julio César Dalponte spotted an unusual looking titi monkey on the east bank of the Roosevelt River, whose coloration did not match any known species in 2011 a team of scientists supported by the Conservation Leadership Program decided to investigate.

Over the course of a number of expeditions, the team recorded several groups of these unusual monkeys, whose ochre sideburns, bright orange tail and light grey forehead stripe set them apart from other known species in the genus.

They have named Callicebus miltoni (or Milton’s titi monkey) in honor of Dr Milton Thiago de Mello, a noted Brazilian primatologist who is credited with training many of the country’s top primate experts.

Because they are not able to swim or cross mountainous terrain, these monkeys are restricted to a small area, effectively hemmed in by a number of rivers and hills. This small range could put the species at risk from human activities, particularly because only around a quarter of this area is protected.

“It goes without saying that we are really excited about this new discovery,” said researcher and CLP alumnus Felipe Ennes Silva.

“It is always thrilling to find something new in the Amazon, as it reminds us just how special this rainforest is and how lucky we are to have it on our doorstep.

“But it will take more than luck if we are to keep making scientific finds like this. The rainforest is under threat like never before, and it will take dedicated, hard work – not just by conservationists but by the government and every other sector of society too – to make sure that this forest ecosystem can continue to support a wide diversity of life and help regulate our planet’s climate.”

Endangered tigers suffering through spread of canine distemper

Big cats such as tigers and lions have been found to be suffering from infection by the canine distemper virus, which is closely related to the virus that causes human measles, reports the Cornell Chronicle.

Scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society, Cornell University and the University of Glasgow are urging swift action to address the crisis by developing control measures and a vaccine that is safe for the animals.

Canine distemper virus strikes wild carnivores of all kinds, including Amur tigers which, according to Colin Parrish, a virologist and director of the Cornell Feline Health Center, are under particular threat because they number in the hundreds and many live in sub-populations of fewer than 25 breeding adults.

Between 2007 and 2012, canine distemper contributed to the decline of one well-studied population of Amur tigers.

Their numbers dropped from 38 to only 9, a reduction from which the group may not be able to recover says Parrish.

Similarly, more than 1,000 lions in the Serengeti National Park disappeared in an outbreak of distemper that began in 1993 – a population decline of about 30 per cent.

Studies show that in many cases, wild carnivores are not contracting the distemper virus directly from domestic dogs, but they are getting it from other wild animals that act as intermediaries.

This makes controlling the virus exceedingly difficult, Parrish says, and efforts to vaccinate dogs or other wild carnivores may not offer protection for tigers or other large cats.

A meeting held on 21 January explored options for vaccinating at-risk wild carnivore populations against distemper.

Meeting participant Edward Dubovi, director of the virology laboratory at Cornell’s Animal Health Diagnostic Center, says because of this disconnect between dogs and animals like tigers and lions, “the most logical approach for protecting threatened carnivores from canine distemper virus may be to target the vaccine on the endangered species itself.”

The situation is urgent, but current distemper vaccines haven’t necessarily been thoroughly tested in the wild species that need protection.

While many vaccines appear to be safe, some may not be effective in generating long-lived immune defenses, Parrish says.

The meeting discussed ways to test the safety and efficacy of distemper vaccines in captive animals, as well as developing innovative means of immunizing wild animals using oral or aerosol formulations planted in bait or on marking posts.

Renaming the canine distemper virus may be in order, Parrish says, in part because the name is not a good reflection of its host range among carnivores; the virus can affect seals, tigers, bears and others.

Also, the word “canine” can lead to management efforts that place too much emphasis on controlling the infection in dogs, when other wild animals carry the virus to infect other species.

Andrew Allison, a postdoctoral fellow at the Baker Institute for Animal Health in Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine, who also attended the meeting, says the time to act is now.

“Rather than waiting for the possibility of future outbreaks and more extensive population declines to intervene, addressing the issue before it potentially causes irreversible impacts to tiger populations is likely the most important step,” he says.

First steps taken in lynx reintroduction into the UK

The Lynx UK Trust has announced a public consultation as a final stage in its preparations to formally request reintroduction licenses for the lynx to be brought back to England and Scotland.

The lynx was wiped out by hunting and habitat loss around 500AD, but is now seen as a valuable missing link in the UK’s ecology, providing a natural control for species such as deer.

Dr Paul O’Donoghue, Chief Scientific Advisor for Lynx UK Trust says, “People have talked about the reintroduction of lynx for the past 20 years but no tangible progress has been made.

“Over the last year we’ve brought together an incredibly experienced team of international experts which puts us in a unique position to take this exciting project forward.”

Three sites have been chosen as ideal trial-release locations, two in England and one in Scotland, after close consultations with the landowners.

Tony Marmont, owner of Grumack Forest, one of the potential release sites, comments, “Lynx will have an extremely beneficial effect on our forest ecosystems, both directly and as ambassadors for wider conservation projects.

“I also believe we should try to reintroduce an animal that humans made extinct here.”

Consultation has begun and will seek to gauge public opinion whilst highlighting any specific concerns which will then be researched and addressed during the trial.

If the license applications are successful, the trial will see the first lynx released onto privately owned land to be monitored 24 hours a day to see how they adapt and settle into the environment.

This data will then be used to decide whether a UK wide reintroduction should be progressed.

Lynx have been successfully reintroduced across numerous sites in Europe bringing a range of benefits such as improved conservation of forestry, improved balance of biodiversity, reductions in pest species and numerous economic opportunities for remote rural communities which have carefully developed eco-tourism around the presence of the cats.

“We’re confident that we can achieve exactly the same thing here in the UK,” says O’Donoghue. “Forests around these islands struggle against an over-abundance of deer, which is a classic problem to emerge when you lack apex predators.

“Wildcats and foxes can’t possibly control deer numbers, but lynx really can, and the economic possibilities for rural communities are incredible.”

Responding to questions from farmers and other owners of livestock, such as sheep, O’Donoghue states: “As a very dedicated forest animal, lynx will rarely come across agricultural animals; predation on them has been rare in Europe. We will be putting a full subsidy programme in place to reassure farmers anywhere near the reintroduction sites.”

In the coming months the University of Cumbria will carry out the consultation on behalf of Lynx UK Trust, speaking to the general public, landowners and other stakeholders to gauge levels of support for, or opposition to, the project.

Dr Ian Convery, who will lead the consultation with Dr Billy Sinclair, says, “We are very excited about our involvement in this lynx reintroduction project.

“There has been a great deal of interest and discussion in the UK concerning reintroductions over recent years, and it is hugely inspiring to see words translating into action.

“There is compelling evidence that carnivore reintroductions benefit both the ecosystem and the economy; we expect the proposed lynx reintroduction in the UK will do likewise.”

The initial public survey is available to all residents of the UK to fill out online via www.lynxuk.org

Environmental group wants to stop people from swimming with the manatees

An environmental group wants to stop all the “swim with the manatees” businesses that over the past 40 years have become the foundation of Citrus County’s tourism industry.

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility filed notice Monday that it intends to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over protections for the endangered animals. The suit, filed on behalf of four Citrus County environmental activists, calls for the federal agency to halt any program that lets humans get within 10 feet of a manatee.

“People do not need to pet manatees to learn about or appreciate them,” PEER lead lawyer Laura Dumais said.

But Diane Oestreich of Bird’s Underwater, which has been in the manatee ecotour business for 27 years, pointed to the increase in the number of manatees in Citrus County over decades as proof that humans petting and stroking and swimming beside manatees does not hurt them.

As for PEER, she said, “These people so need to back off and get a life.” Ending the manatee swims would “severely damage our jobs and economy.”

After Jacques Cousteau’s documentary on the manatees of Crystal River, Forgotten Mermaids, aired on ABC in 1972, tourists willing to pay for a chance to swim with the odd marine mammals began showing up in Crystal River.

Since then, the manatee tour business has boomed in Citrus County. Because such tours were operating before the passage of the Endangered Species Act in 1973, they were grandfathered in, and thus allowed to continue.

Last year, more than 265,000 people snorkeled with, paddled near or just looked at manatees during tours of the Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge, the Fish and Wildlife Service reported. Under such crowded conditions, one of PEER’s clients, Nature Coast Kayak Tours operator Tracy Colson, has ended tours of crowded Kings Bay because “it’s too stressful for the manatees, and it’s not a good experience for my customers.”

Colson and others have made repeated complaints about tourists — and sometimes tour-boat operators — harassing the manatees. Videos posted to YouTube have shown a tour operator grabbing a baby manatee that had been trying to swim to its mother, then holding it up for his customers to take photos of it.

In 2009, PEER petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to stop issuing commercial permits for swim-with-the-manatees tours, adopt rules forbidding swimming with manatees and expand the manatees’ critical habitat. The agency rejected the first two requests and said it was too busy to work on the third.

The group filed a notice to sue then, but held off because the agency promised improvements, according to a PEER news release. But new rules that the agency recently imposed for manatee protection in the Crystal River sanctuary do not go far enough, the group contends. PEER represents local, state and federal scientists, law enforcement officers, land managers and other professionals.

The notice filed Monday gives the Fish and Wildlife Service 60 days to negotiate a settlement with the environmental group before any suit can be filed. Agency spokesman Chuck Underwood said the wildlife service is “currently reviewing” the notice, and pointed out that the impact of the agency’s most recent rules is being monitored and they could be changed.

Meanwhile, a libertarian group, the Pacific Legal Foundation, is suing the Fish and Wildlife Service to have manatees lowered from “endangered” to “threatened” on the federal species list.

The foundation contends manatees should no longer be considered endangered because a February 2014 aerial survey counted 4,831 of them in Florida’s waterways, which is about 1,800 more than were counted in a 2001 aerial survey. The agency has agreed to consider the move.

Biologists warn against relying on those aerial survey numbers as if they were human census records. They compare the process of counting manatees as they rise to the water’s surface to breathe to trying to count popcorn as it pops — you can’t be sure you’re seeing every one.

CRAIG PITTMAN|Staff Writer|Tampa Bay Times|March 9, 2015

Good News: The Catalina Island Fox is Rebounding From The Brink

Once teetering on the brink of extinction, the Catalina Island fox has made such a strong comeback in the past decade that federal officials are now considering removing the fox from the endangered species list.

The Catalina Island fox is one of the smallest species of fox in North America who can only be found on Santa Catalina Island off the coast of southern California. In 1999 they were nearly wiped out by a canine distemper epidemic that brought their numbers down from an estimated 1,300 to only 100 individuals.

In 2000, the Catalina Island Conservancy, along with the help of the Institute for Wildlife Studies, initiated a $2 million recovery program that included captive breeding, vaccinations and relocations around the island. By 2004 there were 300 individuals, who were then granted federal protection under the Endangered Species Act.

Thanks to efforts to keep them from disappearing, today there are believed to be 1,700 foxes on the island whose growing numbers led the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to announce this week that it’s considering removing them from the Endangered Species Act.

While their comeback is fantastic news, their growing numbers are unfortunately leading to more conflicts with humans. With 1 million visitors to the island, which is only 76 square miles, there’s bound to be run-ins.

“The recovery of the island fox is one of the great success stories of ecological restoration,” Dave Garcelon, president of the Institute for Wildlife Studies, told the LA Times. “But with no natural predators, this little fox is the king of beasts on Catalina — and that can get it into trouble.”

According to the conservancy, last year 25 foxes died as a result of human-related activities–for example, being hit by cars is the main cause of death for this little fox. Of the ones who died last year, 21 were killed by motorists, but biologists believe more may have been injured by cars and died later away from roads. Signs have been put up to remind drivers to be vigilant when they’re on the road, particularly at times when foxes are most active, but accidents aren’t the only problem.

Their attraction to trash is another major issue the conservancy is having to deal with. The organization is now raising funds for animal-proof trash and recycling containers it hopes won’t just discourage them from seeking out food from the island’s residents and visitors, but will also keep them from eating something that’s potentially hazardous for them and prevent them from getting trapped inside rubbish containers.

“Recovering the endangered Catalina Island fox population so quickly is one of the great conservation success stories,” said John J. Mack, the Conservancy’s chief conservation and education officer. “The Conservancy is going to be engaged in active management of the foxes and many more species on this Island for generations to come because conservation work is never done, especially on an Island visited by nearly one million people each year. Humans have been a part of Catalina’s ecosystem for thousands of years, and the Conservancy is committed to becoming a leader in modeling conservation in a lived landscape. ”

Hopefully, continued efforts to keep the island fox safe and educate the public about their place on the landscape will keep this species from ever returning to its precarious past.

Alicia Graef|March 10, 2015

Citizen Rangers Combat Snow Leopard Poaching in Kyrgyzstan

Snow leopard poachers in central Asia will soon have a new enemy: better trained park rangers and eagle-eyed members of the general public. It’s all thanks to an aggressive new program headed up by the Snow Leopard Trust and the government of Kyrgyzstan.

Worldwide, only about 3,500 to 7,000 snow leopards remain in the wild today. For some time now, those seeking to stop poachers from preying on the iconic big cat in Kyrgyzstan faced serious problems. Park rangers there lack funds and resources to do their jobs effectively.

Worse, the poachers they’re fighting are often influential businessmen, politicians and other outside interlopers who are difficult to deal with. A project called the Citizen Ranger Wildlife Protection Program (CRWPP) aims to level the playing field.

The keys to the program are incentives: money and recognition. When park rangers, local citizens or other community members apprehend poachers and report and file cases against them, the CRWPP rewards them with about $250 in cash and a public ceremony at which they receive a certificate.

Recognition for these efforts means as much as the cash award. In fact, it’s probably the most important incentive of all. As the Snow Leopard Trust notes in its press release:

National recognition raises social profile and respect for rangers while publicly celebrating and positively reinforcing community collaboration and best practices.

Arrests and filling cause hassles and costs for poachers as an added deterrent, and placing cases on record is a critical first step towards stronger law enforcement.

“Although it involves a cash reward, recognizing the rangers’ and community members’ effort is an even more important aspect of the program,” according to Dr. Charudutt Mishra, Science and Conservation Director for the Snow Leopard Trust.

“Despite their limited resources, park rangers in protected areas as well as our partner communities work hard to stop these outside poachers – but their efforts too often go unrecognized,” said Dr. Mishra. “This project therefore will be a huge enabler.”

The CRWPP began as a pilot program in 2014 in a limited area. Success with that program led the Snow Leopard Trust and its partners to expand the program in 2015 to all 19 of Kyrgyzstan’s nature preserves and state parks.

A grant from from the U.K.’s Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund makes this expansion possible. That grant comes as a result of commitments agreed to at 2014′s London Conference on Illegal Wildlife Trade.

“Park rangers are working hard under difficult circumstances to protect endangered wildlife in Kyrgyzstan,” noted Snow Leopard Foundation Kyrgyzstan director Kubanych Jumabaiuulu. “I’m very pleased that we’ll now be able to assist and empower them in their efforts across all 19 Protected Areas of the country.”

The grant money will also provide a huge training boost for park rangers. INTERPOL has agreed to partner with the program to provide much needed high quality investigative and law enforcement training.

Poachers beware. Those who protect snow leopards and their prey in Kyrgyzstan aren’t pussyfooting around. They’re out to stop you. They mean business. They have the means and they have the motivation.

A lot more watchful eyes will be guarding the welfare of these beautiful big cats from now on.

Susan Bird|March 10, 2015

109-Year-Old is Helping Penguins Survive Oil Spills

At 109 years old, Alfred Date is Australia’s oldest person, but his centenarian status isn’t stopping him from giving back to some of the country’s tiniest residents. Thanks to the superior knitting skills that Date has been honing for more than eight decades, countless little penguins have received brightly-colored sweaters to protect them from oil spills.

Date’s knitwear designs range from superhero costumes, to tuxedos, to rainbow ombre, but the vivid garments do more than just make a fashion statement, the Philip Island Penguin Foundation uses sweaters donated by Date and others to help penguins whose naturally waterproof feathers have been damaged by oil. It was the staff at the nursing home where Date lives that first inspired him to participate in the foundation’s “Knits for Nature” program, reports The Telegraph.

Penguins who come in contact with as little as a thumbnail-sized amount of oil can quickly die from starvation and exposure, according to experts from the Foundation. Putting the affected birds in sweaters, helps them stay warm and prevents them from accidental poisoning that could occur if they try to lick the slick substance off their feathers.

It’s a strategy that’s proven to work. When more than 400 penguins encountered an oil spill in 2001, the sweaters helped keep 96 percent of them alive.

Using his talents to help the estimated 70,000 little penguins that make their home on Philip Island in Victoria, Australia, is a mission that aligns perfectly with Date’s number one tip for living a long life: “Don’t just live for yourself, but try and be of help or service to somebody else.”

Thanks to the largess of Date and other volunteers, the foundation says they now have plenty of knitwear for the penguins and no longer need sweater donations.

So, Alfred Date, on this International Day of Awesomeness, we salute you and your penguin-saving knitting prowess!

AgingCare.com|March 10, 2015

Aquarium Rushes To Save Stranded Leatherback Sea Turtle

Earlier this week, the South Carolina Aquarium’s Sea Turtle Rescue Program was called in to treat an injured reptile in urgent need of care. The patient: A 500-pound leatherback sea turtle that had stranded itself on the Yawkey-South Island Reserve near Georgetown.

This was the first time a leatherback had ever stranded itself in South Carolina alive. They’re a highly migratory species that usually swim far offshore, so when they’re sick or injured, they rarely make it.

“Some turtles wash up and whatever’s going on is internal and … we can only give some theories,” Kelly Thorvalson, Sea Turtle Rescue Program manager, told The Huffington Post. “It could be a net, it could be some sort of algal bloom or toxin, it could be an intestinal impaction that caused a gas buildup. But whatever it is, sea turtles don’t strand unless something’s wrong… So without some sort of medical intervention, this turtle possibly could not survive.”

The leatherback, nicknamed Yawkey in honor of the preserve where she was found, was taken to the rescue center’s hospital and discovered to have hypoglycemia.

“She was very lethargic, we gave her antibiotics, fluid therapy, vitamin injections, that supportive care over several days,” Thorvalson said.

Thankfully, the group’s quick action has helped Yawkey recover well and they’re planning to release her back into the wild on Thursday. Thorvalson told HuffPost it’s a logistical challenge to move such a large creature, but they’re thrilled that she’s recovered so well and it’s been an amazing opportunity to work with such a “dinosaur.”

“Yawkey could not have come at a better time,” she said. “The word has spread that she’s here, and it really shows the level of care that we’re able to provide.”

Should you come across a stranded animal in the wild, it’s important to remember that animals don’t strand themselves unless something is wrong. Immediately call your local stranding hotline (most states have a dedicated phone number), or your local police station and do not try to return the animal to the water.

“It’s critical to get them into a stranding facility immediately — the few that are alive are usually close to death,” Thorvalson says.

See Photos

Nick Visser|The Huffington Post|03/12/2015

Black Pine Snakes May Get 330,000 Acres of Critical Habitat

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed Tuesday to protect 338,100 acres of critical habitat in Mississippi and Alabama for black pine snakes, whose southeastern, longleaf pine forests have been reduced to less than 5 percent of their former glory by agriculture and pine plantations, fire suppression and sprawl.

The snakes — proposed for Endangered Species Act protection last fall after a Center settlement — can grow up to 7 feet long and hiss loudly when encountered. They are harmless to humans and eat mostly rodents.

“Designation of critical habitat is absolutely necessary for the survival of the black pine snake,” said the Center for Biological Diversity’s Collette Adkins, an attorney and biologist focused on the protection of rare reptiles and amphibians. “Like the red-cockaded woodpecker, gopher tortoise and dozens of other wildlife species in the Southeast, the black pine snake depends on longleaf pine forests. The South is losing its natural heritage through the destruction of this critically endangered ecosystem.”

Read more in The Mississippi Press.

[I’m still hoping against hope for critical habitat for the Florida Panther.]

Wild & Weird

Frogs That Freeze Solid

Different animals use different strategies to survive winter. Some species migrate south, others grow thick coats, and some fatten up or stash food reserves. Many species hibernate or go dormant to get through the cold, lean winter.

Amphibians are hibernators. Some species bury themselves at the bottom of ponds and others burrow into the leaf litter or even underground. Even so, amphibian species are less numerous the further north you go. Most species just can’t tolerate the deep cold and long duration of winters in extreme northern latitudes, even when hibernating.

Wood frogs (Rana sylvatica) are an exception. They are the only North American amphibian species whose range extends into the Arctic Circle. They can do this because they have the ability to survive being frozen solid. Check out this video about these amazing frogs.

Early Breeders

This ability to survive freezing also allows them to emerge from hibernation before most other frog species–sometimes when there is still snow on the ground. This early emergence allows them to breed early in the year, which gives their tadpoles more time to develop into adult frogs.

This is a big advantage, as wood frogs breed in temporary ponds called vernal pools that fill up with melted snow in late winter, but dry out completely by the end of summer. Tadpoles that don’t complete their metamorphosis before the vernal pools dry up don’t survive, so the longer they have to grow, the more will survive to adulthood.

Attracting Wood Frogs

Wood frogs can be found throughout the Mid-Atlantic, Northeast and Upper Midwest states, as well as Alaska and throughout Canada. They can survive in suburban and even urban areas if the right habitat exists for them. Here are some tips to attract wood frogs (or any amphibian) to your yard.

• Install a Small Garden Pond. Allow some leaves to accumulate in the bottom of your backyard pond, and make sure it has a shallow area for wildlife to enter and exit. Add plants around the banks and don’t put fish in it. If there are wood frogs in the neighborhood, they may show up in the late winter to lay their eggs.
• Leave Your Leaves. Wood frogs spend most of their time in the fallen leaves of the forest floor, where they hide from predators and lie in wait for insects, spiders and worms to feed upon. They also hibernate right in the this leaf layer. So if you have woods on your property, preserve them and don’t rake up all your leaves in fall.
• Don’t Use Chemicals. Chemical pesticides and fertilizers can kill frogs or eliminate their prey.
• Plant Natives. Frogs don’t eat plants, but they eat the insects and other small animals that do. Native plants support more insects than exotic ornamental plants. A good diversity of native plants in your garden will ensure that there is plenty of food for wood frogs.
• Give Cover. Plants also provide cover where wood frogs can hide. Consider creating a brush pile too, which mimics the fallen woody debris naturally found on the forest floor.

David Mizejewski|Wildlife Promise|3/5/2015

Everglades

To stop polluting rivers, buy land for reservoir

Only two months into the New Year and already the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has started to release polluted water from Lake Okeechobee, resulting in water flowing into the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers, and the Indian River Lagoon, which is expected to continue over the coming weeks and months.

Millions of Floridians are affected by the releases of this polluted water. Releases from Lake Okeechobee during the 2013 rainy season killed wildlife, depressed home values, hurt tourism and threatened the drinking water supply for eight million Floridians. Yet, since 2013, nothing has been done to address the problem. Nothing has been done to start sending Lake Okeechobee water south so that we can stop dumping polluted water into the estuaries. Today, water levels are even higher than we faced in January 2013 and we’re just one or two heavy rains away from re-living the “lost summer of 2013” disaster.

Right now, the State of Florida, through the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD), has the opportunity to buy land in the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) – namely, a strategic 26,100-acre area just south of Lake Okeechobee – to build a reservoir that has been congressionally authorized, and is scientifically supported and approved by state and federal governments, as part of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP).

The bottom line is simple: when water levels rise in Lake Okeechobee, there is a tremendous fear that the aging Herbert Hoover Dike may breach. Due to this concern, the only option available today is to dump billions of gallons of polluted water to the east and west, which brings toxic algae, dead fish, job loss and other detrimental impacts to the local areas and the state of Florida.

A reservoir in the EAA could store one foot of water off of Lake Okeechobee, and would not only aid in Everglades restoration, but would also reduce impacts to the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers, and the Indian River Lagoon, which have been severely damaged by these polluted discharges from Lake Okeechobee.

Florida voters made this solution possible with their overwhelming support of Amendment 1, which created a dedicated revenue source for the environment over the next 20 years. The Amendment specifically identified the goal of using the money collected to “purchase land in the Everglades Agricultural Area.” And, with the 2015 Legislative in session, lawmakers are busy deciding how to spend this Amendment 1 money.

This is a historic opportunity. But, with an October 2015 deadline, the opportunity to buy the land and build a reservoir is slipping through our fingers every day. The Florida Legislature and SFWMD must take action now so that we can protect the Everglades and the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers. Because, if the state and the SFWMD decide not to take advantage of this opportunity to buy the land, we need to be asking what their plan is for water storage? We simply cannot afford to keep wasting water and killing fisheries; and, we do not have the option to wait until this year’s rainy season is upon us and the funds have been squandered.

Seventy-five percent of Floridians showed their love of the Everglades and Florida’s environment in November and continue to stand united. We can’t afford to play politics. Legislators and SFWMD must act now before this option is completely off the table and Florida families are left facing a 2013-like crisis every year, and the drinking water for eight million Floridians and tourists is, again, in jeopardy.

Eric Eikenberg|CEO|Everglades Foundation|Mar 10, 2015 |Column courtesy of Context Florida.

Florida Everglades would be a winner, Louisiana coast a loser under proposed Obama budget

For centuries, long before hotel resorts sprouted along the Florida Keys, Florida bay was a wonderland.

The Everglades fed the blue green waters of the bay just enough fresh water to create a world-class estuary between the Keys and the mainland.

“It’s in sick shape,” said Dr. Jerry Lorenz of Audubon Florida, as he took FOX 8 on a tour of the bay last April.

The state of Florida, local water districts, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and environmental groups have worked for years on ambitious plans to rescue The Everglades.

Just as man sought to improve on nature, building levees to tame the Mississippi River, he also rearranged nature’s plumbing in central and southern Florida.

Historically, fresh water flowed south, beginning not far from Orlando, on a slow trek to the Gulf of Mexico, slower than the slowest Louisiana bayou.

As cities and farms sprouted, sticking more and more straws into what Floridians proudly call their “river of grass,” the system starved for fresh water.

“From that point on, things really deteriorated in Florida Bay,” Lorenz said.

However, Florida has a jumpstart on rescuing this wonderland and friends in powerful places.

Last week, President Obama proposed spending $195 million in the coming fiscal year for the Everglades through a series of projects aimed at restoring more of the nature water flow.

At the same time, the Obama budget would scrap plans to share half-a-billion a year in offshore oil royalties with Louisiana and other gulf coast states beginning in fiscal 2017.

Louisiana, home to much of the nation’s offshore oil and gas infrastructure, would tap into roughly one third of that money under the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act (GOMESA).

Instead, the president’s proposal would sprinkle the GOMESA funding onto conservation programs around the country.

“I mean, Chesapeake Bay and the Everglades don’t compare in terms of productivity,” said Jerome Zeringue, outgoing chairman of the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.

Zeringue noted Louisiana voters changed the constitution to dedicate the GOMESA funds solely to coastal restoration projects and hurricane protection.

The state’s estimated $170 million annual take represents one-third to one-half of the anticipated funding for the state’s Coastal Master Plan, Zeringue said, and the largest continuing source of revenue.

“What’s even more insulting is the fact that it’s even proposed,” Zeringue said.

While many observers believe the Obama budget will meet an early death in the Republican-controlled House and Senate, the president may have opened up a discussion in cash-hungry Washington about the use of GOMESA funds.

“When Louisiana loses guaranteed money, other states benefit with the chance to get that money,” said Tulane University Political Analyst Mike Sherman. “So, we’re going to see some strange coalitions probably on this one.’

Geologists estimate Louisiana is at risk of losing another 1,700 square miles of its coastline in coming decades. However, the issue may have more to do with another kind of map, an electoral one.

“Listen, most states in the country, we know how they’re going to vote for president in 2016,” Sherman said. “There’s just a few battleground states and then, there’s one super battleground. That’s Florida.”

Even without Barack Obama on the ballot 2016, Sherman said electoral politics still matter in Washington.

He believes the issue marks an early test for Louisiana GOP leaders, including Majority Whip Steve Scalise, the third-ranking republican in the House.

“Do they have the clout to stop President Obama from taking away this dedication?”

John Snell|fox8live.com|Mar 04, 2015

Major Expansion of Water Storage Program

New partnerships more than double the current storage capacity

West Palm Beach, FL – In an ongoing effort to increase water storage to protect South Florida’s coastal estuaries and natural systems, the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) Governing Board  approved agreements that more than double the overall water retention capacity in its Dispersed Water Management program.

The approved contracts will add a total potential of 95,812 acre-feet of storage to the program, or about 36 billion gallons annually. This is the equivalent of 1.5 inches of water in Lake Okeechobee, a 730-square-mile lake at the heart of South Florida’s water management system. The program currently has a retention capacity of 93,342 acre-feet across 43 sites.

“Storing water on ranchlands has proven to be an effective tool in the District’s ongoing effort to protect the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee estuaries,” said SFWMD Governing Board Chairman Daniel O’Keefe. “Today’s action shows this agency’s commitment to the Dispersed Water Management program, and we support its continued expansion to protect South Florida’s natural systems.”

In the largest storage contract, the District reached an agreement with Alico, Inc., on 35,192 acres of ranchland that will retain an annual average of 91,944 acre-feet of water from the Caloosahatchee River Watershed. This is an amount equal to approximately 34.5 billion gallons of water. This property also has the potential of sending water back into the Caloosahatchee River during the dry season.

Along with the Alico property in Hendry County, the District also signed separate agreements for water storage and nutrient removal:

• Rafter T, in Highlands County, for 1,298 acre-feet per year
• Babcock Property Holdings, at the border of Charlotte and Lee counties, for 1,214 acre-feet a year
• MacArthur Agro Research Center Component 1, in Glades County, for 620 acre-feet per year
• MacArthur Agro Research Center Component 2, in Glades County, for 1,567 pounds of phosphorus removal per year
• Adams and Russakis Ranch, at the border of St. Lucie and Okeechobee counties, for retention of 508 acre-feet per year
• Bull Hammock Ranch, at the border of Martin and St. Lucie counties, for 288 acre-feet per year

Dispersed Water Management Program

The District’s Dispersed Water Management program encourages private property owners to retain water on their land rather than drain it or to accept and detain regional runoff for storage, or do both. Landowners typically join the program through cost-share cooperative projects, easements or payment for environmental services.

Since 2005, the District has been working with a coalition of agencies, environmental organizations, ranchers and researchers to enhance opportunities for storing excess surface water on private and public lands. These partnerships have made thousands of acre-feet of water retention and storage available throughout the greater Everglades system.

When water levels in South Florida are higher than normal during the annual rainy season, the District can utilize this storage while taking further actions to capture and store water throughout the regional water management system. Holding water on these lands is one tool to help reduce the amount of water flowing into Lake Okeechobee and/or discharged to the Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie estuaries during high water conditions.

Managing water on these lands is one tool to reduce the amount of water delivered into Lake Okeechobee during the wet season and discharged to coastal estuaries for flood protection. Dispersed water management offers many other environmental and economic benefits to the region, including:

• Providing valuable groundwater recharge for water supply
• Improving water quality and rehydration of drained systems
• Enhancing plant and wildlife habitat

SFWMD

Water Quality Issues

Government Ignores Dangerous E. Coli Factory Farm Water Pollution

Waste water full of excrement and urine is being dumped into the ecosystems of North Carolina, causing untold environmental damage and putting human health at risk, yet the local government seems completely uninterested in investigating the situation.

Researchers found that nearly a quarter of water samples tested in the region contained unsafe amounts of E.coli and fecal bacteria, a direct result of the waste from huge scale factory farms.

North Carolina produces more than 4 billion pounds of pork per year, making it the second largest pork producer in the U.S., after Iowa. In some regions, such as Duplin County, there are more pigs than humans, with farmers raising 2 million pigs each year in a region with a population of just 60,000.

Despite the huge concentration of pigs in this region, government laws classify huge factory farm operations with thousands of pigs as “non-discharge facilities,” meaning that they are not regulated on the amount of sewage waste they produce, nor where they dump it.

Inside the factory farms, the pig’s excrement and urine is washed out of the pens through holes in the floor, and piped in to huge open lakes on the property. As there is a constant need for more waste to be pumped out, water from the sewage lakes are sprayed onto the surrounding agricultural fields at a rate of hundreds of gallons per minute, and it eventually seeps through into the waterways. The water is also indiscriminately dispersed into the surrounding environment and people’s homes during the spraying process.

Shocking Pollution Statistics

From 2010 to 2011 a research team from the university of North Carolina and John Hopkins University conducted extensive testing in the waters of North Carolina, specifically testing the water upstream and downstream from fields near the state’s major factory farms. Due to the lax regulations on the treatment of waste from these farms, millions of tons of sewage water are ending up in the waterways, and the stats are from the study are extremely worrying.

Out of 187 samples from Duplin County, over 40 percent were found to have fecal coliform and animal fecal bacteria counts exceeding safe water guidelines set by state and federal authorities. Almost a quarter (23 percent) of the samples tested were found to contain unsafe amounts of the E.coli bacteria, and around two thirds (61 percent) contained excessive amounts of Enterococcus.

Why Would the Authorities Ignore the Issue?

With such alarming readings being found in the county’s natural water systems, you might expect the government to be jumping into action to prevent the environmental and public health disaster from becoming any worse, but instead, they have done almost nothing about it.

Drew Elliot from the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources said that the study “seems to be inconclusive.” His statement also claimed that, “The information presented provides an indication of overall water quality in these [waters]; however, it is not an indication of a discharge of waste.” When questioned on the issue further, the response was that it was difficult to determine the source of the contamination as fecal pollution could include “any warm blooded animals and failing septic or sewage collection systems.”

It seems as if the large scale farming operations who are clearly responsible for this dangerous water pollution are being given a free pass from the authorities, who are refusing to accept the evidence presented to them by scientific researchers.

The authorities are unwilling to stand up against the animal agriculture industry in order to protect our precious environment, and the health of our citizens, but we don’t have to. We can use our collective voices to say no to factory farming and boycott the animal agriculture industry all together.

Abigail Geer|March 5, 2015

Great Lakes & Inland Waters

Mapping the Great Lakes’ Wetlands

Fluorescent bands of color outline the Great Lakes on a new, comprehensive map of the region’s coastal wetlands. This publicly available map is the first of its kind on such a broad scale — and the only one to trump political boundaries. Both Canadian and US wetlands are shown along more than 10,000 miles of shoreline.

The Great Lakes is an important focus of Michigan Technological University research. The coastal wetlands map is an extension of that focus, expanding on previous maps created through the Michigan Tech Research Institute (MTRI).

Laura Bourgeau-Chavez, MTRI research scientist and the project leader for the wetlands map, says establishing standard methods was crucial.  “This is the first map to span the entire basin, and it’s important to have a consistent map over the entire area,” she says, explaining that inconsistencies impact data analysis and implementation of management strategies “if you don’t know the accuracy of the map or how it’s changing from one place to another.”

Wetlands Changing

And wetlands are dynamic systems — there is a lot of change naturally happening, although most comes from humans. “We’ve lost more than 50 percent of coastal wetlands in the Great Lakes over the past century,” Bourgeau-Chavez says. “The wetlands are very important because they serve as filtration as well as habitat — and a lot of them are being degraded.”

Managing the remaining wetlands requires a 30,000-foot view.

Although it’s more like a million-foot view, since the satellites used to map the wetlands orbit at about 200 miles above the earth’s surface. Satellite imagery and measurements are techniques collectively called remote sensing.

“It’s studying something from a distance,” Bourgeau-Chavez says, adding that a lot of ground can be covered. “An example people are familiar with is using Google Earth, that’s remote sensing.”

Bourgeau-Chavez and her team specifically used three-season PALSAR remote sensing data, which is a 23 cm wavelength Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). SAR satellites are useful for measuring wetlands because the technique can distinguish flooded ground, vegetation’s vertical structure, soil moisture and the total mass of vegetation. All these wetland features can vary greatly between seasons, so the satellite data was collected in spring, summer and fall.

Remote sensing can’t replace field reports, however. Mixed readings — overlapping pixels in the data — blurred some of the map’s boundaries, making vegetation type difficult to distinguish. With such an extensive map, field checking every point was impossible, but “we tried to get as many as possible within each mapped area,” Bourgeau-Chavez says. To do so, her team visited more than 1,400 separate field sites.

Invasive Species

Visiting the sites allowed the researchers to double check the predominant vegetation, which is important for tracking invasive species like Phragmites (common reed) and cattails. Following Phragmites monocultures in the Great Lakes initiated the wetlands mapping.

In addition to keeping tabs on invasives, classifying different kinds of wetlands is a crucial map feature. For example, peatlands are an important wetland to separate out. The bogs are sometimes mined for peat, and they store large amounts of carbon.

“An emergent wetland that doesn’t have any, or very little, peat at the surface is very different from a peatland with peat that is meters deep,” Bourgeau-Chavez says.

Peatlands and other wetlands can be connected to water bodies even if they’re not directly on one of the lakeshores. To account for this water connectivity, the researchers mapped 6.2 miles inland, creating the map’s brightly colored band following the coast. Mapping inland also allowed the mapping team to see “the adjacent land that affects the quality of the water going into those wetlands,”  Bourgeau-Chavez explains.

There are a lot of other factors considered in land use management in addition to monitoring urban and agriculture proximity, invasive species and different wetland types. A variety of uses were built into the mapping interface, and viewers can also request data by clicking a button below the map legend.

So far, Bourgeau-Chavez says people have downloaded the data for everything from road building in Michigan to Lake Erie coastal restoration to research on grass carp.

“We have a whole list of people, both from Canada and the US, downloading the data,” Bourgeau-Chavez says, adding that as the first comprehensive wetlands map of the Great Lakes, it has many applications.

She also notes the map is part of a greater initiative to develop better science resources for the Great Lakes. While large, the map is only part of the picture — a picture that will keep expanding with more detailed satellite imagery and updates as the region’s wetlands change.

Allison Mills|awmills@mtu.edu|March 6, 2015

(Michigan Technological University (www.mtu.edu) is a leading public research university developing new technologies and preparing students to create the future for a prosperous and sustainable world. Michigan Tech offers more than 130 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in engineering; forest resources; computing; technology; business; economics; natural, physical and environmental sciences; arts; humanities; and social sciences.)

A world without rivers

Imagine a world without rivers. No digging in with your raft paddle as you shoot rapids. No guiding a canoe quietly downstream. No diving into deep river pools or standing in the mist of a waterfall. No casting fly lines into flowing water or watching for birds like American Dippers hopping off rocks.

No fresh water cascading from mountains and eventually out of your tap, onto your garden, or into your bathtub. Definitely NO FUN!

It’s not a very enjoyable world. It’s not a very healthy world.

But with increasing pressures caused by human influence, a changing climate, we are coming uncomfortably close to that world. While another snowstorm pummels the East Coast, California and much of the Western United States are suffering from a devastating drought. Ski resorts out west are closing from lack of snow and spring-like temperatures.

According to a new study from the Cornell University, the University of Arizona and the U.S. Geological Survey, this drought threatens to leave our rivers in peril for years to come. Meanwhile, our thirst for water shows no sign of diminishing. Every year competition for a clean supply of water for drinking, cooking, bathing, farming, and sustaining life intensifies.

And clean freshwater is not just critical for humans, but for fish and wildlife as well. Last year, a section of the Eel River in Northern California went dry. While other sections of the river have been known to go dry from time to time, this section at the mouth of the river has no known history of drying. This dry section created a barrier that prevented fish from migrating between the ocean and river, most likely a result of the drought and water withdrawals.

Several hundred miles to the south in California’s Central Valley, the San Joaquin River (America’s Most Endangered Rivers in 2014) also went dry due to the drought and high demands of agriculture and human consumption.

And the Truckee River, which starts at Lake Tahoe, has been reduced to just a trickle. Most years, thousands of people float down the Truckee River on inner tubes and rafts, but this year the rafting season was cut several months short. Also a very popular fly fishing spot, the low flows on the Truckee left anglers high and dry.

Rivers are a crucial part of the natural world, and we depend on them for so many things. Yet we mistreat them. We suck them dry with water diversions or drown them with dams, destroying wildlife habitat and diminishing the recreational opportunities we have come to enjoy. Additional pressures, like the current drought, only exacerbate these pressures.

Though we can’t control the drought, we can alleviate some of its impact on our rivers, increasing flows during the driest parts of the year.

We can start by: Capturing rainwater and using it for irrigation, Timing our agricultural water diversions with high river flows Gardening with drought-tolerant native plants Restoring degraded meadows and forests to increase summer flows I will leave you with this final thought: this past weekend my friend and I went for a hike in the Sierra Nevada along what is usually a beautiful river. This year, there was no water to be seen.

And while the colorful river rocks were beautiful, I think most people would agree crystal clear mountain water flowing over and swirling around those rocks would be even better.

Austen Lorenz February 24th, 2015

News Release: Public input sought on FWC permit request to restore 46 area lakes, water bodies ‏

Contact: Greg Workman, 352-732-1225

Photos available on FWC’s Flickr site. Go to: https://flic.kr/s/aHsk3fd2Vy.

Suggested Tweet: Public can comment to @MyFWC permit request for #lake restoration in NE #Florida: http://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/FLFFWCC/bulletins/f76daf #habitat

Public input sought on FWC permit request to restore 46 area lakes, water bodies

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) has applied for a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Jacksonville District to conduct restoration activities on 46 lakes and water bodies in the FWC’s Northeast Region.

This permit is required pursuant to Section 404 of the Clean Water Act and Section 10 of the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899. The request is part of an overall initiative in which the FWC is working with the Corps to obtain permits for routine restoration work in 95 lakes and water bodies throughout Florida.

The public can review the request and comment on it through April 8 (see link below).

The following water bodies within the FWC’s Northeast Region are included in the permit application:

• Fox Lake, Lake Hellen Blazes, Sawgrass Lake, Little Sawgrass Lake, South Lake and T.M. Goodwin Waterfowl Management Area in Brevard County;
• Lake Griffin and Lake Yale in Lake County;
• Lake Eaton, Lake Jumper, Lake Weir, Little Lake Weir, Little Lake Kerr, Marshall Swamp and Ocklawaha Prairie in Marion County;
• Johns Lake, Lake Apopka, and Lake Mann in Orange County;
• Alligator Lake, Brick Lake, Coon Lake, Cypress Lake, East Lake Tohopekaliga, Fish Lake, Lake Center, Lake Gentry, Lake Hatchineha, Lake Jackson, Lake Kissimmee, Lake Lizzie, Lake Marian, Lake Tohopekaliga and Trout Lake in Osceola County;
• Lake Jesup in Seminole County;
• Guana Lake/Lake Ponte Vedra in St. Johns County;
• Black Lake, Lake Deaton, Gant Lake, Lake Miona, Lake Okahumpka and Lake Panasofkee in Sumter County;
• Blue Springs, Lake Ashby and Lake Macy in Volusia County;
• St. Johns River in Indian River, Brevard, Seminole, Osceola, Orange, Lake, Volusia, Putnam, Marion, St. Johns, Clay and Duval counties.

The FWC seeks a permit that would authorize all of its routine mechanical aquatic plant maintenance activities related to habitat restoration and navigation maintenance within these water bodies for a period of 15 years. The proposed maintenance techniques include mechanical harvesting and shredding of aquatic vegetation and use of earth-moving and tilling equipment on vegetated areas during dry conditions.

The proposed restoration activities on lakes and other water bodies would improve habitat for fish and wildlife and provide outdoor opportunities for boating, angling and wildlife viewing.

The Corps permitting process requires the opportunity for public comment. The Corps has published a Public Notice for the proposed work on its website at: http://www.saj.usace.army.mil/Missions/Regulatory/PublicNotices.aspx. To view the notice, click on the following file number to open the Public Notice: SAJ-2015-00644 (SP-SLR). If you would like to provide comments or have any questions regarding the Corps permit process, please follow the directions included in the Public Notice. Note that the Web address is case sensitive and should be entered as it appears above.

Learn more about mechanical control of aquatic plants at http://plants.ifas.ufl.edu/manage/control-methods/mechanical-control.

Plastic pollution a growing concern

Microbeads used in personal care products are in the Great Lakes. Michigan legislators will consider a bill to ban the sale of products containing microbeads.

You might have them on the shelf in your bathroom and not even know it.

Personal care products containing microbeads — plastic particles less than 1.24 millimeters, or about the size of fine-grained salt — are becoming an increasing concern in states that border the Great Lakes.

The worry is they could concentrate harmful chemicals in the fish that people eat.

“From a chemistry standpoint, it has me very concerned that what we’re doing as a society is conducting a long-term chemistry experiment on ourselves without anyone’s consent,”said Sherri Mason, a professor of chemistry at The State University of New York-Fredonia who was one of the first researchers to find microbeads and other plastics in the Great Lakes.

Michigan lawmakers are considering a measure introduced in February by senators Steve Bieda, D-Warren, and Rebekah Warren, D-Ann Arbor, that would ban the sale of products containing microbeads.

“There are alternatives the industry can go to,” Bieda said. “Why are they putting potentially toxic materials into our shampoo?”

Microbeads and other plastics in the Great Lakes are a recent issue. Mason said she began thinking about freshwater plastics pollution in 2011.

She said she was teaching a course aboard the tall ship USS Niagara on monitoring and measuring things in the environment.

“I wondered if there’s plastic in the Great Lakes,” she said. “I was reading and teaching and was aware of the issue in the world’s oceans.”

At that point, she said, there were about 10 years of research into plastics in the ocean, she said.

“I was surprised nobody had looked,” Bieda said. “Nobody had looked in any of the freshwater systems.”

Researchers in 2012 started looking at water samples for plastic. Studies have found up to 17,000 plastic particles per square kilometer in Lake Michigan. Lakes Huron and Superior had similar amounts of plastics.

The 5 Gyres Institute in Los Angeles collaborated with Mason and brought its testing protocols to the Great Lakes. The group previously had done research into plastics in the world’s oceans.

Anna Cummins, the institute’s executive director, said “2012 and 2013 was the first time we ventured into a large freshwater body. We had no idea we would find those microbeads.

“It was a shock to see a sample from Lake Erie (in 2012) that had more plastic particles than most of our samples from oceans.”

Of the plastic found in the samples, 20 percent consisted of microbeads, Mason said.

“That caught our attention,” she said. “Plastic in the water that is perfectly round is not coming from something in the water. That is something that is being released into the water.”

Microbeads are in products such as facial scrubs and toothpaste. They typically are too small to be removed from the waste stream by conventional waste water treatment technology, so they go down the drain and out to rivers and streams.

“People are really surprised there is plastic in their face wash and in their toothpaste,” Mason said.

She said researchers have examined the gastrointestinal tracts of 20 species of Great Lakes fish and have found plastic in all 20.

“Smaller fish typically have less plastic, bigger fish that eat smaller fish typically have more plastic,” she said.

This past winter, researchers examined the catches of anglers as they came off the ice.

“For 100 different perch, we find on average 80 percent of them have plastic in them, and those plastic counts can vary from fish to fish,” she said. “On average, we find about eight pieces of plastic in each one of those fish.”

The problem, she said, is the pieces of plastic pick up chemicals in the water — and the tiny pieces of plastic look like food to fish.

“When the plastic gets eaten by the fish, those chemicals move into the fish,” she said.

And people eat those fish, Mason said.

“That’s what they feed their families with,” she said. “… You can tell them what’s in the fish,andthey’restillgoingto eat it.”

Jennifer Caddick, a spokeswoman for the Alliance for the Great Lakes in Chicago, said there are alternatives to microbeads in personal care products.

“Rather than using plastic as the scrubbing source in your facial scrub, they are using things like sand, ground-up almond shells and ground-up pumice,” she said.

“There’s lots of natural alternatives,” she said. “If you don’t have to have plastic in there, there’s no need for it.”

The alliance has started a campaign to rid the Great Lakes basin of products containing microbeads.

Caddick said Illinois has a law phasing out microbeads; New York, Michigan and Indiana have legislation; and Ohio is considering a bill and Minnesota considered one.

Legislation banning microbeads was introduced this past week in Connecticut. Legislation also is being considered in other states, including California.

“Basically, every Great Lakes state has legislation or legislators are talking about legislation,” Caddick said.

Some large companies, such as Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Unilever and L’Oréal, have agreed to voluntarily phase out microbeads, she said.

Cummins said her group took the results of its research to those manufacturers.

“That’s what started this effort to phase them out,” she said.

She said she is concerned, however, that manufacturers will look to insert a loophole in legislation allowing them to use biodegradable plastics.

Bieda said he introduced a similar bill in July, but it was never addressed in committee, in part because of the election.

The proposed legislation, SB 0158 would give manufacturers until 2019 to phase out plastic microbeads in their products.

“It’s a very worrisome issue,” he said. “We need to preserve and protect the Great Lakes.”

Bob Clegg, Port Huron city engineer, said removing the source would be more cost-efficient than to upgrade water treatment plants to filter out microbeads.

“The best way to control it is source control,” he said. “If there a problem in a product, why spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to bring plants up to deal with it?

… The more efficient way to address the issue is to see if you can prevent it from ever entering the waste stream.”

BOB GROSS|TIMES HERALD|3/15/15

Offshore & Ocean

In Defense of the Octopus, 8 Extraordinary Facts About the Clever Cephalopod

They’re not cuddly; they don’t have fluffy fur and big eyes and make us weak in the knees with cooing. Few swoon for the octopus. But if affection were commensurate with traits that are nearly supernatural in their power to wow, octopuses might be the world’s favorite animals.

But alas, instead they inspire legends of sea monsters like Kraken and Lusca, and give form to fictional villains like Ursula and Doc Oc. They incite cringing, not fawning. So with that in mind, allow us to present some arguments for why we think the graceful and brilliant unsung undulating creatures of the sea should be revered rather than vilified.

1. They are magicians

Just like a magician uses smoke and mirrors to make things appear and disappear, so does the octopus – but rather than employing mechanical devices to perform its trick, the octopus uses biology. Using a network of pigment cells and specialized muscles in its skin, the common octopus can almost instantly assume the colors, patterns, and textures of its surroundings. The camouflage is so expertly done that predators pass without notice. Watch one in action here (shown in reverse), it’s astounding.

2. They have the coolest escape mechanism

Another trick worthy of a magician or something dreamed up by Q for James Bond is an octopus’ inky cloud that upon release, obscures an aggressor’s view and allows the cephalopod to slip away. And if that weren’t nifty enough, the ink – mostly a mix of pigment and mucous – also contains a compound that irritates the eyes and dulls an attacker’s sense of smell, making the escape artist even harder to follow.

3. They’re Olympian in speed and agility

When threatened, octopuses propel themselves by expelling water from their mantles, reaching speeds as high as 25 miles per hour. Whoosh. They also have agility that is a wonder to behold: They can squeeze their soft bodies into the teeniest of cracks and holes, making a circus contortionist look feeble in comparison.

Watch this: Octopus Houdini escapes boat via tiny hole! And this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5DyBkYKqnM

4. They’re smarter than the average bear

CUNY biology professor Peter Godfrey-Smith says that octopuses are, “probably the closest we’ll get to meeting an intelligent alien.” While Aristotle called the octopus, “a stupid creature,” researchers say they have developed intelligence, emotions, and even individual personalities. The crafty cephalopod can navigate through mazes – and resist them if they’re not feeling cooperative. They, solve problems and remember solutions, and take things apart for fun. They can play fetch! They can unplug drains, disconnect wires, escape from labs and will even collect shells and other objects to build fortresses, or “gardens,” around their lairs.

5. They have far-reaching brains

This one is crazy: Two-thirds of an octopus’ neurons do not reside in their head, rather, in their arms. Which is to say, an octopus’ arms can take on a variety of independent tasks while their owner is attending to other matters. And if one of those arms becomes detached, researchers have found that the severed arm can crawl away on its own and even grab hold of food and direct it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still attached.

6. They can regenerate lost limbs

Lose one of those smart arms to a predator? No problem! The handy-dandy octopus can just grow a new one with no permanent damage. If only we were so lucky.

7. They have a lot of heart(s)

Yes, hearts – three of them in fact. Two work to transport blood beyond their gills, while number three keeps blood circulating for the organs. And oddly enough, heart number three shuts down when the creature is swimming, which explains why they are more prone to hiding than feeling quickly; swimming exhausts them.

Watch this octopus steal a video camera and make a short film:

8. They’re as old as the hills

And maybe even older. The oldest known octopus fossil comes from a creature that lived 296 million years ago, during the Carboniferous period – it is displayed at the Field Museum in Chicago. It displays the classic eight arms and two eyes, and possibly an ink sac as well. As Smithsonian notes, “long before life on land had progressed beyond puny pre-dinosaur reptiles, octopuses had already established their shape for the millions of years to come.” In terms of seniority, they totally dominate us young’uns.

Bonus: They defy common language

You say octopi, I say octopuses? While octopi has become standard in common usage, it’s not etymologically correct. Octopi was borne out of the incorrect notion that the word comes from Latin; but in fact it comes from the Greek, októpus, meaning “eight foot.” Technically the plural is octopodes, but as the Grammarist points out, “octopus has been in English for centuries and is now an English word when English speakers use it, so there is no reason not to pluralize it in the English manner. Which would mean: octopuses.

 

Melissa Breyer|TreeHugger|March 8, 2015

The siren song of deep water: Ports race to accommodate post-Panamax ships

Jacksonville, Florida, plans to deepen its shipping canal despite concerns over economic benefit and environmental risk

JACKSONVILLE, Florida — Jacksonville is one of many U.S. ports racing to accommodate the huge post-Panamax ships that will begin traversing the expanded Panama Canal next year. The city is considering deepening its St. Johns River shipping channel from 40 to 47 feet to handle them.

The $766 million project has environmentalists and fiscal conservatives pitted against business interests and politicians; the two sides disagree on essentially everything about the Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE) analysis of the project, including its cost, economic benefit and environmental harm.

And, thanks to President Barack Obama’s 2012 We Can’t Wait initiative, which shaved seven years off the timetable, the project is proceeding at a greatly accelerated rate. Jacksonville’s mayor has appointed a port task force that is scrambling to figure out how to pay the city’s estimated $416 million share of the cost — the state could also provide funding but has thus far not committed to do so — in time for a September 2015 deadline.

“The process is dysfunctional without the fast-tracking, and the fast-tracking just made it even more so,” said Lisa Rinaman of St. Johns Riverkeeper, a privately funded organization that aims to protect and promote the river, its wetlands and tributaries.

Jacksonville is one of 10 ports on the East Coast that are proposing, in the process of or have recently completed projects to accommodate post-Panamax ships. The total estimated cost of these projects is $5.49 billion. While it is of little question that the national economy will benefit from having more deep-water ports — critics point out that shipping companies certainly will — local economic benefits are far from certain. Nevertheless, Jacksonville’s and other deepening projects are being sold to the public with promises of economic growth.

The initiative has created the unlikely alliance of Jacksonville Mayor Alvin Brown, a Democrat, and Florida Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, who have repeatedly appeared together to laud port development. U.S. Reps. Corrine Brown, a Democrat, and Ander Crenshaw, a Republican, are also behind the project.

Jacksonville Port Authority (JaxPort) CEO Brian Taylor said that deepening is necessary to keep pace with the global shipping market. “If we do not deepen this harbor, we forgo these future opportunities,” he said.

There is some merit to this argument. According to The Washington Post, as of 2013, post-Panamax ships accounted for 16 percent of the world’s container fleet but carried 45 percent of its cargo. By 2030 it is predicted that these ships will carry 62 percent of the world’s cargo.

A 2013 economic assessment by Martin Associates — paid for by JaxPort —predicted that by 2035, deepening the channel will have created as many as 34,508 jobs and generated $10.8 billion to $12.7 billion in economic benefit. University of North Florida professor David D. Jaffee, who is an expert on the project, noted, however, that these jobs include related user jobs, which the assessment acknowledges are not dependent on JaxPort. These include manufacturing, wholesale and retail distribution jobs throughout the state in firms that receive and process cargo that arrives through the seaports.

Jean-Paul Rodrigue, a Hofstra University professor and an expert in the field of transportation economics, said that cities, including three within 240 driving miles (Jacksonville; Savannah, Georgia; and Charleston, South Carolina) of one another, are gambling that deepening their ports will bring more cargo ships in spite of the fact that competition among them is a “zero sum game,” in which “whatever somebody gains is going to be at the expense of the other.” He added that, particularly considering the current slowdown of global economic growth, there is not likely to be enough of an increase of traffic to justify all those projects.

“The bigger ships are not going to create by magic more business,” he said.

Spending $416 million to deepen the shipping channel (federal funding of $350 million was secured in 2014) is a big gamble for Jacksonville, which is mired in a pension crisis and other financial woes. And there are questions about the project’s actual cost, which Jaffee and Rinaman believe will be much higher than estimated, saying the ACOE either did not include or underestimated costs of improving transportation and other infrastructure, raising bulkheads, combating erosion caused by the larger wakes of bigger ships and mitigating environmental harm. ACOE project manager Jason Harrah said its estimate includes infrastructural improvements but acknowledged it does not include costs of maintaining the shipping channel, which it estimates at $800,000 to $1 million annually.

Controversy has recently arisen about the personal beliefs of the owner of the company the city hired to analyze the economics of the project, Xicon Economics. In his 2012 self-published book “Fall of a Nation: A Biblical Perspective of a Modern Problem,” Xicon owner Herbert M. Barber Jr. says Obama is “more anti-American than any 10,000 terrorists” and lumps Americans into two categories: “makers” and “takers,” the latter a broad category that seemingly includes stay-at-home moms, teachers, law enforcement, government workers and everyone who receives any form of government assistance. In his book Barber refers to racial integration as a “failed social experiment.” He recently defended himself in The Florida Times-Union, saying that criticizing him is a form of “Christian bashing” that “lends credence to my book.”

After local media brought the book to the mayor’s attention, the mayor released a statement that said, “I strongly condemn the views expressed in the book. The author’s commentary fails to reflect the values of our community and seriously undermines his credibility. We will be working with the port task force members to ensure that these unfortunate comments do not cloud their important efforts.” Amid cries for the city to back out of its $60,000 contract with his company, Xicon submitted its economic assessment on Feb. 26, and the city informed the company that its services were no longer needed. But Jacksonville will pay Xicon for the assessment, which concluded that the project is financially and economically feasible, will cost $813 million and will create $3.9 billion to $7.8 billion of economic benefits.

The environmental impact of the project is also hotly disputed.

The ACOE’s environmental impact statement concludes that removing 18 million cubic yards of sediment to deepen 13 miles of shipping channel will have a minimal environmental impact. But Rinaman believes that deepening the river will increase salinity, disturbing the delicate balance of the ecosystem and causing potentially great and irreparable harm to wildlife and aquatic vegetation, including submerged grasses that help protect the region from flooding and provide food and nursery resources for many species, including blue crab and shrimp, which are vital to the local fishing industry, as well as dolphins, sea turtles and the endangered West Indian manatee.

In an unconventional move, in January St. Johns Riverkeeper, Brown, the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce and JaxPort reached a nonbinding memorandum of understanding in which Rinaman agreed not to sue to block the project if funding and authorization were acquired to undam the Ocklawaha River. She believes that undamming the Ocklawaha, the largest tributary of the St. Johns, will mitigate increased salinity.

When the memorandum was announced on Jan. 10, it was the first anyone in neighboring Putnam County, the site of the dam and the Rodman Reservoir that it creates, had heard of it. The Rodman Reservoir is popular for outdoor recreation and bass fishing.

Putnam County Commissioner Chip Laibl told The Palatka Daily News, “We’re outraged that a regional decision would be discussed without input from Putnam County.” While Congress or the Florida Legislature can authorize and fund undamming the Ocklawaha, supporters have vowed to fight to keep the dam for the reservoir’s recreational and economic benefits as well as its effect on property values along its shores.

The St. Johns River already suffers from pollution, which in recent years has resulted in mass fish kills, a mysterious foam and algal blooms. During one such bloom in 2013, toxin levels 100 times higher than what the World Health Organization considers safe were found. Dredging and blasting, which is necessary to deepen the shipping channel to 47 feet, have the potential to exacerbate environmental problems.

“The environmental risks [of deepening] are multifaceted,” said Rinaman.

According to the Riverkeeper website, “blasting and dredging may increase the chances of saltwater intrusion of the [surficial] aquifer,” which the ACOE reports provides 5 percent of the city’s water. The ACOE holds that the risk of intrusion is low.

Harrah said that the ACOE will monitor the project’s environmental impact during the anticipated four to six years it will take to complete and for one year after that — the port has agreed to monitor for 10 years after completion — and require additional mitigation if it finds any harm.

But not everyone believes monitoring is a sufficient safeguard. Kevin R. Bodge, a certified coastal and port engineer with Florida coastal consulting company Olsen Associates, said, “I could tell you definitively that you could conclude from monitoring anything you want … You can never isolate the deepening from all the other things that are going on.”

St. Johns Riverkeeper believes that the ACOE’s monitoring of the port of Miami deepening project in Biscayne Bay is evidence that it cannot be trusted to protect the St. Johns River. After finding that protected coral reefs were being suffocated by sediment to a much greater extent than predicted, Biscayne Bay Waterkeeper sued the ACOE. Only then did the ACOE intervene.

“That’s the model you see. That’s what’s happening in Biscayne Bay … They do the very least they have to do to protect these resources, and then they may add some back in mitigation,” said Rinaman.

Harrah acknowledged that the ACOE originally allotted for $80 million of environmental mitigation but reduced it to $3 million after determining that deepening the St. Johns River will have minimal environmental impact.

A. Quinton White, the executive director of Jacksonville University’s Marine Science Research Institute and a member of the port task force, said that models like the one the ACOE uses to determine environmental impact are only as good as the data that go into them.

“The water management analysis says that deepening will have greater effect [on salinity] … The [ACOE] uses the same model and gets the opposite result,” he said.

In spite of the many questions and controversies associated with deepening the St. Johns River shipping channel, to many there is a sense of inevitability about the project that comes at least in part from the united front being presented by politicians and business interests who are convinced it will be a boon for Jacksonville’s economy.

“Our community is getting shortchanged. Our river is getting shortchanged,” Rinaman said.

Claire Goforth|March 9, 2015

[If Jacksonville can get by with 47’ depth why do Port Miami and Port Everglades say they need 50’?]

Recovery Plan: To Save Florida’s Corals, Cut Carbon Pollution

Many of the world’s corals are in dire trouble — and their survival depends on what actions we take to save them. That’s why a new federal recovery plan for elkhorn and staghorn corals near Florida and in the Caribbean is so important: It calls for much-needed cuts to carbon emissions that are driving ocean acidification and increasing ocean temperatures.

The plan, just released by the National Marine Fisheries Service, is a roadmap for saving the two corals, which were protected under the Endangered Species Act in 2006 in response to a Center for Biological Diversity petition. The recovery plan — the result of a court-approved settlement between the Center and the Fisheries Service — identifies local, regional and global threats to the species, including climate change and ocean acidification, and details specific targets for alleviating those threats.

“The clock is ticking to save these beautiful corals so I’m happy to see there’s finally a concrete plan to move them toward recovery,” said Shaye Wolf, the Center’s climate science director. “The plan rightly recognizes that we’ll need to manage local threats like near-shore pollution, but also address complex global threats like climate change.”

Read more in our press release.

Gulf oyster harvest has nose-dived since BP spill

Gulf Coast oyster harvests have declined dramatically in the four years since a BP PLC oil well blew wild in the nation’s worst offshore oil disaster. Even after a modest rebound last year, thousands of acres of oyster beds where oil from the well washed ashore are producing less than a third of their pre-spill harvest. [Source: AP]

Wildlife and Habitat

Alcoholic Russian Bears May Finally Get the Treatment They Nee

Taken in as cubs, two bears have been living in a small trash-ridden cage at a restaurant in Sochi, Russia, for over 20 years. In an effort to help the bears, some local animal advocates notified Anna Kogan, founder of Big Hearts Foundation (BHF), an animal welfare organization that helps animal causes in Russia.

BHF worked along with the Prosecutor General in Sochi to get the bears released and sent to a sanctuary and, on February 3, 2015, the court ruled in favor of the bears.

The Story of Misha and Pasha

Never receiving veterinary care and given inappropriate food–as well as alcohol by restaurant patrons–the two male bears, named Misha and Pasha, have become addicted to alcohol.

Their life together has been one of abuse and neglect. The cage they were housed in does not permit them to perform normal bear behaviors like foraging for food and hibernation. Years of patrons parking directly in front of the cages at night time and flashing headlights in their eyes has caused one bear to become blind. Their emotional needs have been so thwarted they will physically fight each other, causing them both serious injuries. What a horrible life these innocent bears have been made to suffer!

Kogan told Care2 that Misha and Pasha were given to the restaurant owner as cubs by a photographer. A common practice on Sochi beaches is for photographers to take pictures of tourists with baby wild animals like bears, lions, leopards and crocodiles. Then, when the season is over, the baby animals are usually killed.

A Look to the Future

The current plan is for Misha and Pasha to be transported to Liberty Bear Sanctuary (LBS) located up in the Carpathian Mountains above the town of Zarnesti in the Transylvania area of Romania. LBS was established in 1998 and has rehabilitated many abused bears since then. Some were baiting bears who were chained and secured to the ground while hunting dogs are made to attack them. LBS has even successfully rehabilitated other alcoholic bears at its sanctuary.

The problem is, their transfer is currently held up due to the logistics of transporting the bears out of Russia to another country.

BHF is looking to send the bears to Romania by boat across the Black Sea rather than flying them, so the move will be less stressful for Misha and Pasha.

Kogan said after the February 3 court case ruling allowing Misha and Pasha to be removed from the restaurant owner, The Ministry of Natural Resources waited until the last possible appeal date of March 2 to appeal the ruling, citing lack of an appropriate place to house the bears and no funding available to accomplish it. The World Animal Protection organization has stepped up to assist with funding.

For now, Misha and Pasha are still living in the tiny cage at the Sochi restaurant until an appropriate place can be found for them to live in Sochi and until transportation arrangements can be made for their move to Romania.

About Big Hearts Foundation

BHF is a UK-based non-profit organization with the goal of changing Russian animal welfare laws and teaching humane education.

“Our charity lobbies and advises the Russian government on animal welfare law changes and improvement” Kogan told Care2. “We stay aware of all cruelty and issues going on in former USSR.”

Kogan explained, “Many bear cubs end up in private hands in Russia after the hunts in spring – mothers are killed, cubs are left to starve. Sometimes they end up picked up by people unable to provide them with proper care, who hold them in cages next to their house or sell them to circus or traveling zoos. Our charity is helping build up a rehabilitation place in Russia for cubs to be returned back into the wild.”

BHF is the only non-governmental organization that advocates for animal welfare in Russia. Animal cruelty laws in Russia are small, ineffective and virtually unenforced–basically, they’re nonexistent. BHF assists with rewriting legislation and advocating for change. It also promotes affordable spay/neuter programs and humane education.

There is no doubt humane education is the most effective way to change societal attitudes toward animal welfare causes whatever the country. The earlier children are given an awareness of animals as sentient beings and taught empathy toward them, the better the world will become for the animals who suffer at the hands of humans.

An innovative way BHF is working on this goal is having developed a humane cartoon series that will be seen on three Russian television channels.

Megan Drake|March 6, 2015

5 Reasons Why Women Make Great Leaders for the Animal Rights Movement

International Women’s Day, which is this Sunday, is the perfect opportunity to honor how far women have come. Admittedly, women’s rights still has a way to go (as Patricia Arquette’s Oscar speech painfully reminded us). But women are also in a unique position — intrinsically and from experience — to lead one of the most pressing social justice issues of our time: the fight for animal rights.

Why Animal Rights?

Animal rights encompasses everything: health, the environment and our moral stance. Here is some evidence that our carnist culture is destroying us:

• Factory farming is creating antibiotic resistant superbugs.
• Farm fertilizers are largely responsible for our ocean dead zones.
• Most of our water resources are going to the animals that we consume (even in times of drought).
• We’re cutting down our trees — our second pair of lungs — to make room for livestock.
• We’re feeding grains that could nourish the world’s hungry (870 million people) to livestock.
• Experts fear that times of war, conflict and terror will come down to water and food scarcity.

Saying we’re not going to use (for entertainment), abuse, eat, wear and experiment on animals is the ultimate rejection of speciesism — a system built on oppression, exploitation and violence.

Why Women?

In essence, oppression recognizes oppression. Women can help us heal, and here are a few reasons why, largely inspired by Feminists for Animal Rights:

1. The gaze. While the entitled male gaze strips women of their identity to focus on her assets, the entitled carnist gaze strips animals of their identity to focus on how the animal tastes. Both require detaching the personhood from the body.

For some perspective, in a short 2012 essay, user vegetarianmythmyth writes, “So often, I feel hunted, I walk down the street with the male gaze gauging me like a gun. I understand the deer’s predicament, her fear of men.”

2. Language. Language is powerful because it reinforces what the gaze wants to see. Joan Dunayer writes a fascinating piece on how, “Just as sexist language demeans women and excludes them from full consideration, speciesist language demeans and excludes nonhuman animals. When we consign other animals to the category thing, we obscure their sentience, individuality and right to autonomy.”

It isn’t a coincidence that when someone wants to attack a woman, they will resort to invoking an animal-related slur, e.g. the word that starts with “B” and rhymes with itch. And if the woman is overweight than she’s no better than a fat cow, an elephant, a “landwhale” or a “hamplanet.”

If that doesn’t shock you, then how does “rape rack” (a common dairy industry term where cows are artificially inseminated) make you feel? Could it contribute to our rape culture of violence against all female bodies?

3. Property. Like women, animals are property — objects — to be owned. While this is sadly true in some parts of the world today, the idea that women were property was a popular and accepted belief.

Animals of all types are sold, bought and auctioned off every single day. I mean, in 2015, a progressive nation like France stepped up and said that animals are sentient beings, not furniture.

4. Motherhood. Animals aren’t property because nonhuman mothers love and want to bond with their babies. Renee King-Sonnen, who went from a cattle rancher’s wife to a vegan animal sanctuary owner, felt that longing as she saw baby calves being driven off, “Mammas were running after the trailer. It just blew my mind. And then they cried for, like, a week or more.”

Mother pigs are known to sing to their piglets while nursing. And we’ve heard about the strong bonds that orcas and their babies share.

5. Culture. The good news is that women can put an end to this. As Phylicia Rashad says, “Where the women go, the culture goes.” It’s not a surprise that more women are rejecting animal cruelty by adopting a veg-friendly lifestyle. According to the Huffington Post, 79 percent of vegans are women and 59 percent of vegetarians are women. If veganism keeps its momentum, then by 2050 the United States could be vegan.

But we need women to keep the momentum going, and it’s as easy as starting in the home. After all, we still do most of the cooking and cleaning anyway. Let’s fill those bellies, minds and hearts with compassionate choices, so that our children 1) have a planet to live on and 2) have a more compassionate world to live in.

And to the men: we will always need your support.

watch Videos

Jessica Ramos|March 6, 2015

South Florida National Parks Trust awards grants for habitat conservation

The SFNPT announced $190,000 in new grants  to restore native habitat, protect wildlife and support visitor programs in South Florida’s four national parks. The new funding will create native habitat on an island in Biscayne Bay, restore the flow of fresh water in the Turner River in Big Cypress, protect nesting sea turtles in the Dry Tortugas and support ongoing visitor & volunteer programs in the Everglades.  The $190k includes grants of $33,535 to Everglades National Park to promote better stewardship of Florida Bay through community outreach, education and enhanced law enforcement.

https://www.facebook.com/SouthFloridaNationalParksTrust

Helicopter Gunner Wipes Out 19 Wolves in Idaho ‏

We’ve learned that last month Wildlife Services, the animal-killing program in the federal Department of Agriculture, used a sniper in a helicopter to gun down 19 wolves in Idaho’s Lolo Pass.

The Center for Biological Diversity and our partners have just filed suit to halt Wildlife Services’ war on wildlife in Idaho.

Wildlife Services operates like a black-ops agency for wildlife, carrying out a secret war with little accountability. Considering itself exempt from most environmental rules, the program kills as many as 3 million native animals a year — in addition to wolves they destroy bears, beavers, otters, foxes, prairie dogs, coyotes, mountain lions, birds and other creatures. Over the past 15 years they’ve spent a billion dollars to wipe out wildlife.

Wildlife Services are contract killers, always willing to do the dirty work of special interests, especially those in the meat industry and corporate agriculture. In Idaho they destroy wolves and other predators to appease ranchers and big-game hunters. They have no regard for maintaining the integrity of nature and no respect for the decades-old struggle to return wolves to their homes in the once-wild West.

We must end their secret war on wildlife.

Kierán Suckling|Executive Director|Center for Biological Diversity

Here Are The Best 10 Cities To Live In If You Love Wildlife

Do you live in one of the most wildlife-friendly cities in the country?

A new list from the National Wildlife Federation ranks U.S. cities with the most park area and citizen engagement for protecting wildlife.

“The common thread between these cities is that citizens are coming together for a common purpose — to create a community where people and wildlife can thrive,” NWF president and CEO Collin O’Mara said in a news release.

The rankings were determined by comparing the percentage of parkland in each city, each city’s number of NWF Certified Wildlife Habitats per capita, and the number of schools per capita participating in two NWF outdoor learning programs.

NWF’s Certified Wildlife Habitat program allows people to register their gardens or areas of their property as suitable places for animals. Along with proper food and water sources, the habitats must provide cover and places for wildlife to raise their young. Owners must also make use of sustainable gardening practices.

10. New York, New York

9. Charlotte, North Carolina

8. Indianapolis, Indiana

7. Albuquerque, New Mexico

6. Seattle, Washington

5. Washington, District of Columbia

4. Baltimore, Maryland

3. Atlanta, Georgia

2. Portland, Oregon

1. Austin, Texas

Honorable Mention: Broward County, Florida and Los Angeles, California

James Gerken| The Huffington Post|03/11/2015

Federal Court Dismisses Nevada Cattlemen’s Anti-Mustang Lawsuit

Court Grants AWHPC Motion to Dismiss Legal Action Seeking Roundup & Slaughter of Wild Horses

Reno, NV (March 12, 2015) . . . Today, the U.S. District Court in Nevada Judge Miranda Du granted a motion by the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign (AWHPC), author Terri Farley and photographer Mark Terrell to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Nevada Association of Counties (NACO) and local ranchers against the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) seeking the removal of thousands of wild horses from public lands and the sale for slaughter of wild horses warehoused in government holding facilities. 

The motion was granted “with prejudice,” which means it cannot be amended or refilled. Judge Du ordered the Clerk “to enter judgment in favor of Federal Defendants and Defendant-Interveners American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign, Terri Farley, Mark Terrell, and Laura Leigh.”

“We are pleased that the Court declined to allow these grazing interests to use the judicial system to revamp the priorities of the 1971 Wild Horse and Burros Act – to protect wild horses on the public lands as much as possible,” said Katherine Meyer of Meyer, Glitzenstein & Crystal, which represented AWHPC, Ms. Farley and Mr. Terrell in the case. 

“This frivolous bid by cattlemen to roundup and slaughter America’s iconic wild horses to clear the public lands for commercial livestock grazing has now been soundly rejected by the federal court,” said Suzanne Roy, director of AWHPC. “Public lands management must reflect American values for wild horse and burro protection. The days of preferential treatment of ranchers who receive taxpayer subsidies to graze private livestock on public lands must come to an end.” 

Filed on behalf of Nevada ranchers, who graze their private cattle and sheep on American public lands that they lease at well-below market rates, the NACO lawsuit sought to compel the BLM to immediately round up and remove more than 6,000 wild horses from Nevada public lands, conduct wild horse and burro roundups every two months in the state, and to “auction, sell or otherwise dispose of” the 50,000 wild horses and burros currently stockpiled in government warehousing facilities.

According to AWHPC, the NACO lawsuit was part of a broader strategy by ranchers to use the courts to compel the BLM to remove an increasing number of wild horses from public lands and sell captured wild horses for slaughter. AWHPC has been granted the right to intervene in similar lawsuits in Utah and Wyoming.

National opinion polls indicate that 80 percent of Americans oppose horse slaughter, 72 percent support protecting wild horses on public lands, while just 29 percent want public lands used for livestock grazing.

For more information on this legal action, please click here. 

The American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign (AWHPC) is a coalition of more than 60 horse advocacy, public interest, and conservation organizations dedicated to preserving the American wild horse in viable, free-roaming herds for generations to come, as part of our national heritage.

Terri Farley,Mark Terrell|3/12/15

Forestry

Destruction of Carbon-Rich Mangroves Costs up to $42 Billion in Economic Damages Annually

Globally Coordinated Action and Policy Interventions Required to Stem Loss of One of the Planet’s Most Threatened Ecosystems

ATHENS – Mangroves are being destroyed at a rate 3 – 5 times greater than the average rates of forest loss, costing billions in economic damages and denying millions of people the ecosystem services they need to survive, according to a new report launched today by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).

The Importance of Mangroves: A Call to Action launched today at the 16th Global Meeting of the Regional Seas Conventions and Action Plans, describes how emissions resulting from mangrove losses make up nearly one-fifth of global emissions from deforestation, resulting in economic damages of some US$6 – 42 billion annually. Mangroves are also threatened by climate change, which could result in the loss of a further 10 – 15 per cent of mangroves by 2100.

Found in 123 countries and covering 152,000 square kilometers, over 100 million people around the world live within 10 kilometres of large mangrove forests, benefiting from a variety of goods and services such as fisheries and forest products, clean water and protection against erosion and extreme weather events.

UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner said, “Mangroves provide ecosystem services worth around US$33 – 57,000 per hectare per year. Add to that their superior ability to store carbon that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere and it becomes clear that their continued destruction makes neither ecological nor economic sense.”

“Yet, the escalating destruction and degradation of mangroves – driven by land conversion for aquaculture and agriculture, coastal development, and pollution – is occurring at an alarming rate, with over a quarter of the earth’s original mangrove cover now lost. This has potentially devastating effects on biodiversity, food security and the livelihoods of some of the most marginalized coastal communities in developing countries where more than 90 per cent of the world’s mangroves are found.”

“By quantifying in economic terms the value of the ecosystem services provided by mangroves as well as the critical role they play in global climate regulation, the report aims to encourage policymakers to use the tools and guidelines outlined to better ensure the conservation and sustainable management of mangroves,” he added.

The report argues that in spite of the mounting evidence in support of the multitude of benefits derived from mangroves, they remain one of the most threatened ecosystems on the planet. The report describes financial mechanisms and incentives to stimulate mangrove conservation, such as REDD+, private sector investments, and the creation of Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions for developing countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while increasing national capacity.

Mangrove degradation and loss is predicted to continue into the future if a business-as-usual scenario prevails. The Importance of Mangroves: A Call to Action offers readers and especially policymakers many management and protection measures and tools that are available for use at national, regional and global scales to help ensure a sustainable future for mangroves.

Policymakers, it says, should consider several of these, including integrating mangrove-specific goals and targets into the post-2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals agenda, as well as better coordination of global action on mangroves through the development of a Global Mangrove Commission, and the streamlining and coordination of Multilateral Environmental Agreements.

Protecting these long-term reservoirs of carbon, and preventing their emissions from being released back into the atmosphere is, the report says, a sensible and cost-effective measure that can be taken to help mitigate climate change.

Key Findings

Ecosystem Services

· By 2050, South-East Asia will potentially have lost 35 per cent of the mangrove cover it had in 2000, with associated negative ecological and socio-economic impacts.

· Ecosystem service losses in South-East Asia from the destruction of mangroves has been estimated at more than US$2 billion a year over the period 2000 – 2050, with Indonesia predicted to suffer the highest losses at US$ 1.7 billion per year.

Climate Change Regulation and Mitigation

· Research is increasingly pointing to the role of mangroves as significant carbon storage systems, sequestering vast amounts of carbon – about 1,000 tons per hectare – over thousands of years, making them some of the most carbon-rich ecosystems on the planet.

· One study carried out in the Potengi Estuary in Brazil on 1,488 hectares of mangroves found that the forest trees and sediments were retaining concentrations of heavy metals that would otherwise cost US$13 million to treat in a zeolite plant.

Livelihoods

· A large number of commercially important fish species such as snapper, mullet, wrasse, parrotfish, sharks and rays utilize mangroves during all or part of their lives, with the mangrove providing critical food, shelter and refuge functions.

· It has been estimated that 30 per cent of the fish caught in South-East Asia are supported in some way by mangrove forests; a figure approaching 100 per cent for highly mangrove-dependent species including some species of prawn.

· It was estimated that the annual average landing of mangrove-associated fish and blue crab in the Gulf is 10,500 tons, with an estimated total value of US$19 million to local fisheries.

Extreme Weather Events

· The complex network of mangrove roots can help reduce wave energy, limit erosion and shield coastal communities from the destructive forces of tropical storms, cyclones and tsunamis.

· The mangrove-lined “hurricane holes” in the Caribbean have been a well-known safe haven for vessels for centuries, and of the 20-odd established hurricane holes recommended for boaters needing to ride out storms in the Antilles, 16 gain such a reputation because of the presence of mangroves.

· In Vietnam, extensive planting of mangrove has cost of US$1.1 million but has helped reduce maintenance cost of the sea-dyke by US$7.3 million per year.

Biodiversity Hotspots

· Mangroves form the foundation of a highly productive and biologically rich ecosystem that is home to a spectacular range of species of birds, mammals, invertebrates and fish which help to support people through fisheries, tourism and cultural heritage.

· The combination of clearance and degradation has meant that globally about 16 per cent of mangrove tree species and some 40 per cent of the animal species dependent on these ecosystems are now considered vulnerable and/or at risk of extinction. The mangroves of Australia are home to over 200 species of birds, and at least 600 different fish species are known to occur in mangroves across the Indo-Pacific region.

Recommendations

Policymaker guidelines for the improvement, management and protection of mangroves include the development of protocols to Regional Seas Conventions that promote protection and sustainable use of mangroves, and the implementation and enforcement of national laws and policies relevant to mangrove protection and management. Others include:

· Create a Global Mangrove Fund to support “climate resilience” actions that conserve and restore mangroves, and protect the carbon stored within them;

· Encourage mangrove conservation and restoration through carbon credit markets such as REDD+, the “Bio-Rights” mechanism and corporate and private sector investments;

· Promote economic incentives such as Payments for Ecosystem Services as a source of local income from mangrove protection, sustainable use and restoration activities and ensure beneficiaries of mangrove services can find opportunities to invest in mangrove management and restoration planning;

· Explore opportunities for investment into Net Positive Impact biodiversity offsets by the corporate and business sectors as a way to finance the protection and sustainable use of mangroves;

· Ensure that mangroves are addressed in wider Marine Spatial Planning and policy frameworks.

Access full report here

Goodbye California Coastal Fog, Goodbye Redwoods

In Southern California they call it the “June Gloom” — the gray layer of heavy fog that drapes itself across much of Los Angeles in late spring. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, we just call it “summer”: The months-long cycle of overcast mornings and chilly evenings that supposedly* prompted Mark Twain to complain that “The coldest winter I ever saw was the summer I spent in San Francisco.” While coastal California’s summer fog has long annoyed residents and tourists alike, the regular rush of cool, wet air helps sustain coastal ecosystems, including the state’s iconic redwoods. Now, thanks to human development, that weather phenomenon is at risk.

According to a story published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, coastal fog in the Los Angeles region is on the decline. In the last 60 years, according to researchers, summer fog in the LA area has decreased by 63 percent. The culprit? The so-called “urban heat island effect” — a phenomenon in which the ambient temperature of cities is much higher (especially at night) than in surrounding undeveloped areas because of all the heat that builds up in our streetscapes of concrete and asphalt.

“We used cloud data from the last 67 years, and we can see that there have been huge declines in fog that have happened and that should continue happening,” says Park Williams, a researcher at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Williams based his findings on detailed, sometimes hourly, weather readings from Southern California’s many airports, and matched that against census data on population density to chart development across the region. He and his colleagues were then able to demonstrate a link between the heat island effect and the diminishment of coastal fog. “This is a really solid process that is going on, and we have enough confidence to predict that it will continue.”

Beachgoers might be pleased by the findings. More sunny days, what’s not to like? But Williams and other scientists caution that most coastal California ecosystems — from chaparral slopes to the oak-studded prairie grasslands to the towering redwoods — have evolved to rely on water they get from coastal fog.

Todd Dawson, a biologist at University of California, Berkeley, says that many coastal plants — not just trees, but also the understory of shrubs and grass — depend on the water they receive from fog drip. Coastal redwoods, for example, get up to one-third of their total annual water needs from fog. “You think that all of this water is coming from winter rainfall, and of course a lot of it does,” Dawson says. “But a lot of it also comes from fog, and that fog comes during a really important time, during the summer, the longest and warmest days of the year. The fog subsidy is really important for their ecology and their physiology.”

Williams says that it would be useful to have a better understanding of the degree to which coastal fog sustains chaparral ecosystems, and whether a decrease in fog cover could be making such areas more flammable and prone to wildfires. “I don’t think that anyone is studying whether chaparral has become more flammable in the last 30 years,” he says, “but I would hypothesize that they have.” In short: less fog could mean more intense wildfire seasons.

Williams’ current study only looked at Southern California. He says that he’s interested in extending his research into the San Francisco Bay Area, where more than 6 million people live in close proximity to some of the world’s most iconic redwood groves, such as Muir Woods National Monument. Biologist Dawson says, “The open questions is: OK, this is happening in Southern California, but what’s happening here in Northern California, where the coastal redwoods live?”

Jason Mark|Earth Island Journal|March 10, 2015

Global Warming and Climate Change

In Florida, Officials Ban Term ‘Climate Change’ ‏

The state of Florida is the region most susceptible to the effects of global warming in this country, according to scientists. Sea-level rise alone threatens 30 percent of the state’s beaches over the next 85 years. 

But you would not know that by talking to officials at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, the state agency on the front lines of studying and planning for these changes.

DEP officials have been ordered not to use the term “climate change” or “global warming” in any official communications, emails, or reports, according to former DEP employees, consultants, volunteers and records obtained by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.

The policy goes beyond semantics and has affected reports, educational efforts and public policy in a department that has about 3,200 employees and $1.4 billion budget.

“We were told not to use the terms ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’ or ‘sustainability,’ ” said Christopher Byrd, an attorney with the DEP’s Office of General Counsel in Tallahassee from 2008 to 2013. “That message was communicated to me and my colleagues by our superiors in the Office of General Counsel.”

Kristina Trotta, another former DEP employee who worked in Miami, said her supervisor told her not to use the terms “climate change” and “global warming” in a 2014 staff meeting.

“We were told that we were not allowed to discuss anything that was not a true fact,” she said.

This unwritten policy went into effect after Gov. Rick Scott took office in 2011 and appointed Herschel Vinyard Jr. as the DEP’s director, according to former DEP employees. Gov. Scott, who won a second term in November, has repeatedly said he is not convinced that climate change is caused by human activity, despite scientific evidence to the contrary. Vinyard has since resigned. Neither he nor his successor, Scott Steverson, would comment for this report.

“DEP does not have a policy on this,” the department’s press secretary, Tiffany Cowie, wrote in an email. She declined to respond to three other emails requesting more information.

Jeri Bustamante, a spokesperson with the governor’s office, wrote in an email that “There’s no policy on this.”

But four former DEP employees from offices around the states say the order was well known and distributed verbally statewide.

One former DEP employee who worked in Tallahassee during Scott’s first term in office, and asked not to be identified because of an ongoing business relationship with the department, said staffers were warned that using the terms in reports would bring unwanted attention to their projects.

“We were dealing with the effects and economic impact of climate change, and yet we can’t reference it,” the former employee said.

Former DEP attorney Byrd said it was clear to him this was more than just semantics.

“It’s an indication that the political leadership in the state of Florida is not willing to address these issues and face the music when it comes to the challenges that climate change presents,” Byrd said.

Climate Change Denial

Climate change and global warming refer to the body of scientific evidence showing that the earth’s environment is warming due to human activity including the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. It is accepted science all over the world.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established by the United Nations, wrote in a 2014 report for world policy makers: “Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history. Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems.” The report’s authors were scientists from 27 countries.

Still, many conservative U.S. politicians say the science is not conclusive and refuse to work on legislation addressing climate change. This type of legislation, such as a carbon tax or policies to encourage more sustainable energy sources, could be costly to established industry.

Among the skeptics is Gov. Scott. During his first campaign for governor in 2010, Scott told reporters who asked about his views on climate change that he had “not been convinced,” and that he would need “something more convincing than what I’ve read.” In 2014, he said he “was not a scientist” when asked about his views on climate change.

In response, a group of Florida scientists requested to meet with Scott and explain the science behind the phenomenon. Scott agreed. The scientists were given 30 minutes.

“He actually, as we were warned, spent ten minutes doing silly things like prolonged introductions,” geologist and University of Miami professor Harold Wanless recalled. “But we had our 20 to 21 minutes, and he said thank you and went on to his more urgent matters, such as answering his telephone calls and so on. There were no questions of substance ”

Scott’s predecessor, Charlie Crist, had been proactive on climate change, forming a statewide task force and convening a national summit in Miami in 2007. But evidence the issue has fallen out of favor during the Scott administration is apparent.

One example is the Florida Oceans and Coastal Council’s Annual Research Plan, put together by DEP and other state agencies. The 2009-2010 report, published the year before Scott was elected, contains 15 references to climate change, including a section titled “Research Priorities – Climate Change.”

In the 2014-15 edition of the report, climate change is only mentioned if it is in the title of a past report or conference. There is one standalone reference to the issue at the end of a sentence that sources say must have slipped by the censors. “It’s a distinct possibility,” said one former DEP employee.

Instead, terms like “climate drivers” and “climate-driven changes” are used.

Orders From the Top

Christopher Byrd said that he was warned not to use “climate change” and related terms during a 2011 staff meeting shortly after Gov. Scott appointed Vinyard as DEP director.

“Deputy General Counsel Larry Morgan was giving us a briefing on what to expect with the new secretary,” Byrd recalled. Morgan gave them “a warning to beware of the words global warming, climate change and sea-level rise, and advised us not to use those words in particular.”

Added Byrd: “I did infer from this meeting that this was a new policy, that these words were to be prohibited for use from official DEP policy-making with our clients.”

Morgan did not respond to a request for comment.

DEP dismissed Byrd in 2013. His termination letter states: “We thank you for your service to the State of Florida; however, we believe the objectives of the office will be accomplished more effectively by removing you from your position.” Byrd, now in private practice as an environmental lawyer in Orlando, said he was fired because he repeatedly complained the DEP was not enforcing laws to protect the environment.

Although he disagreed with the policy, Byrd said he nonetheless passed the warning down to the various offices he worked with, including the Coral Reef Conservation Program at the Biscayne Bay Environmental Center in Miami.

“As you can imagine with the state of coral reef protection,” Byrd said, “sustainability, sea-level rise, and climate change itself were words we used quite often.”

The Coral Reef Conservation Program is where Jim Harper, a nature writer in Miami, was working as a consultant in 2013. He had a contract to write a series of educational fact sheets about how to protect the coral reefs north of Miami. Climate change was one of the issues Harper and his partner on the project, Annie Reisewitz, wanted to address.

“We were told not to use the term climate change,” Harper said. “The employees were so skittish they wouldn’t even talk about it.”

Reisewitz confirmed Harper’s story. “When we put climate change into the document, they told us they weren’t using the term climate change,” she said.

Harper and Reisewitz completed the assignment as instructed.

A year later, in November 2014, the Coral Reef Conservation Program held a meeting to train volunteers to use a PowerPoint presentation about the threats coral reefs faced. Harper attended the meeting, held at DEP’s Biscayne Bay office in Miami. Doug Young, president of the South Florida Audubon Society and a member of the Broward County Climate Change Task Force, also attended.

Two DEP employees, Ana Zangroniz and Kristina Trotta, showed the presentation to the volunteers and then asked if anyone had a question.

“I told them the biggest problem I have was that there was absolutely no mention of climate change and the affect of climate change on coral reefs,” Young said.

He continued: “The two young women, really good people, said, ‘We are not allowed to show the words, or show any slides that depicted anything related to climate change.’ ”

Young and Harper said they could not participate if climate change was not mentioned. “The women kept saying, ‘Work with us; we know you are frustrated,’ ” Harper said.

On Nov. 19, 2014, the DEP’s Zangroniz wrote Harper and Young an email stating she had talked to her manager about their concerns.

“Unfortunately at this time,” she wrote, “we can’t make any alterations or additions to the presentation. … If you do choose to continue as a volunteer, we would have to request that you present the information as is. If you choose to add in an additional presentation or speaker that addresses climate change and coral reefs, there would have to be a very clear split between the two.”

Trotta left her position as a field and administrative assistant in January. She told FCIR that when it came to scrubbing the term “climate change” from projects, she was following orders. Those orders came from Regional Administrator Joanna Walczak during a staff meeting in the summer of 2014.

“We were instructed by our regional administrator that we were no longer allowed to use the terms ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’ or even ‘sea-level rise,’ ” said Trotta. “Sea-level rise was to be referred to as ‘nuisance flooding.’ ”

When staff protested, Trotta said, “the regional administrator told us that we are the governor’s agency and this is the message from the governor’s office. And that is the message we will portray.”

The order pained her, said Trotta, who has a master’s degree in marine biology, because she believes climate change is an imminent threat to Florida.

Walczak declined to comment citing DEP policy.

While state officials are still not using the terms ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming,’ any prohibition of the term “sea-level rise” seems to have ended. In a February press conference, Scott unveiled $106 million in his proposed budget to deal with the effects of rising oceans. But $50 million of that is for a sewage plant in the Keys, and $25 million is for beach restoration, which critics say is hardly a comprehensive plan to protect homes, roads and infrastructure.

Wanless, the University of Miami professor, said the state government needs to acknowledge climate change as settled science and as a threat to people and property in Florida.

“You have to start real planning, and I’ve seen absolutely none of that from the current governor,” he said.

In Florida it will be hard to plan for climate change, he said, if officials can’t talk about climate change.

“It’s beyond ludicrous to deny using the term climate change,” Wanless said. “It’s criminal at this point.”

Tristram Korten|Florida Center for Investigative Reporting|Posted by: “Barbara Ruge|Broward Sierra Group”

[I wonder if they will get their heads out of the sand when they start to smell the fumes from fracking.]

Earthjustice, Florida Dems slam Rick Scott over ‘ban’ on ‘climate change’

Democrats and some environmentalists blasted Gov. Rick Scott on Monday after a weekend news report that Florida Department of Environmental Protection employees had been banned from using the term climate change or global warming after he took office in 2011.

The report by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting appeared in the Tampa Bay Times and was referenced in The Washington Post and The Atlantic. The report said the  policy was unwritten but was “distributed verbally statewide” through the department of 3,200 employees.

The report said four former employees confirmed the existence of the policy. Scott’s office and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection denied there was such a policy.

In a statement issued Monday, the nonprofit Earthjustice law firm said the “anti-science rhetoric” is dangerous for low-lying Florida, which it said has more to lose from the effects of sea-level rise than any other state.

“This (is) like the governor saying that the 1969 Moon landing was faked and then telling state workers to never use the words ‘Moon landing,’” David Guest, managing attorney of Earthjustice’s Florida office, said in the written statement.

The Florida Democratic Party cited the report in an email seeking donations.

“Climate change is scientific fact,” the email said, “and Rick is misleading Floridians about how dangerous this problem is! Will you help us hold him accountable?”

In response on Monday, John Tupps, deputy communications director for Scott, said only that there was no such policy.

Lauren Engel, DEP communications director, added in reference to the story, “It is simply not true.”

Scott had said before 2014 that he was not persuaded that climate change is real.

In 2014, he responded to reporters’ questions about the issue by saying he’s “not a scientist.” And after a meeting with scientists in the governor’s office, Scott said he instead is focused on solutions.

The Florida Department of Economic Opportunity has a web page with links to documents related to sea- level rise but doesn’t refer to climate change.

Florida law (377.601) states that the human and economic costs of climate change can be reduced through the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

The language was added in 2008 in HB 7135, a sweeping energy bill that passed unanimously. But major portions of the legislation, such as a proposed carbon emissions credit system, have been repealed by the Legislature.

Bruce Ritchie|March 9, 2015

Ban On ‘Climate Change’ Widespread Across Florida Government Under Rick Scott

Florida’s ban on using the words “climate change” and “global warming” in official communications goes beyond just the state’s Department of Environmental Protection to other government agencies under Gov. Rick Scott (R), according to a new report by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.

FCIR previously reported that four former DEP officials had come forward about the unwritten policy.

Now, employees who worked at other government agencies are speaking out, as well.

Until last year, Bill Taylor was a manager at the Florida Department of Transportation’s office in Fort Lauderdale. He said that at a meeting in 2012 or 2013 — Scott took office in 2011 — “it was mentioned very casually that in our future dealings with the public, we were not to use the terms ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming.’ But it was OK to talk about sea-level rise, because for some projects that had to be taken into consideration.”

A former employee at the South Florida Water Management District had a similar story.

“It was widely known that you couldn’t put those words into a report,” the former employee told FCIR. “They just wouldn’t make it through the editing process.”

A Florida scientist who co-authored a study about how climate change affects a certain marine food-borne illness told The Washington Post that the state Department of Health told her to excise every mention of “climate change” from her paper.

Florida officials, including Scott, have denied that there’s any policy banning these words. The governor told reporters Monday that the FCIR report was “not true” although he refused to say whether he believes man-made global warming is a problem.

Scott has been an outspoken skeptic of global warming, despite the fact that his state is at risk of losing its coastal communities to rising sea levels. A Southeast Florida Regional Climate Compact paper has warned that water in the area could rise by as much as 2 feet by the year 2060.

Last year, a reporter asked Scott whether man-made climate change “is significantly affecting the weather, the climate.” Scott tried to change the subject and replied, “Well, I’m not a scientist.”

When asked by the Tampa Bay Times in 2010 whether he believed in climate change, Scott simply replied, “No.”

FCIR noted that although the words “climate change” and “global warming” still slip through and make their way into government reports, there has been a “steep decline” in their use since Scott came into office.

The state’s senior Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson has a very different take on what climate change means for his state: Video

Amanda Terkel|The Huffington Post|03/12/2015

John Kerry Calls Out Florida’s Ban On Saying ‘Climate Change’

Secretary of State John Kerry, challenging climate change deniers to face reality, not-so-subtly called out Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s (R) administration on Thursday for banning the term “climate change” from all government communications.

“We literally do not have the time to waste debating whether we can say ‘climate change,'” Kerry said in a speech hosted by the Atlantic Council. “We have to talk about how we solve climate change. Because no matter how much people want to bury their heads in the sand, it will not alter the fact that 97 percent of peer-reviewed climate studies confirm that climate change is happening and that human activity is largely responsible.”

News of Florida’a ban, which also extends to the term “global warming,” came to light over the weekend in a report by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.

Scott in May declined to say whether he believed in climate change, but has said repeatedly that he is is not convinced by the science.

Such thinking is far too prevalent in Washington, and politicians who ignore the facts will not be remembered favorably by those who will face global warming’s worst perils, Kerry said in his speech.

“If we fail, future generations will not and should not forgive those who ignore this moment, no matter their reasoning,” Kerry said. “Future generations will judge our effort not just as a policy failure, but as a collective moral failure of historic consequence. And they will want to know how world leaders could possibly have been so blind or so ignorant or so ideological or so dysfunctional and, frankly, so stubborn.”

Kerry called for transitioning away from “dirty sources of energy.” But, as Politico noted, he didn’t mention whether he would approve the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline, which would link Canada’s oil sands to the U.S. Gulf Coast. The project, which needs State Department approval to cross an international border, has been awaiting Kerry’s decision since early February. He will hand his recommendation to President Barack Obama, who will make the final decision on the project.

Environmental groups opposed to the pipeline said Kerry’s failure to mention it may be a positive sign.

“While Kerry didn’t bring up Keystone, he sure brought up more and more reasons why it should be rejected,” Sierra Club legislative director Melinda Pierce told Politico. “And he’s absolutely right: Burning fossil fuels has long-term costs that have to be at the front of our minds when evaluating both the pipeline project and development of the tar sands.”

Lydia O’Connor|The Huffington Post|03/12/2015

The Rising Tide Within: From coastlines to the Everglades, researchers tackle sea level rise

Under the streets of Miami Beach, seeping up through the limestone, water creeps into storm drains and pours into the streets. It happens once a year when the sun and moon align in such a way that gravity pulls at Earth’s water. The phenomenon is known as King Tide. It is the highest of high tides, and every year, it puts Miami Beach at risk of major flooding.

FIU researchers were on-site during the latest King Tide event to collect and assess data. The efforts are part of a university-wide initiative to study, better understand and develop solutions for sea level rise. Plans are under way to create an institute dedicated to the interdisciplinary work being done at FIU, which includes collaboration among researchers from Arts & Sciences, Architecture and the Arts, Business, Law, Public Health and Social Work, Engineering, Hospitality and Tourism Management, as well as Journalism and Mass Communication.

South Florida ranks as the world’s most vulnerable urban region in terms of assets exposed to the effects of sea level rise. FIU’s research is dedicated to developing and implementing solutions for the major environmental and economic challenges created by the rising seas.

Beyond the Shoreline

When King Tide arrived in October of 2014, all eyes were on Miami Beach and a new pump system that helped to keep the water off the streets — this time. But the manner in which the water traditionally invades is a stark reminder that when it comes to sea level rise, there is more to be concerned about than just the shoreline. The hidden danger is largely the water within. In South Florida’s case, that means the Everglades.

“The greater South Florida ecosystem is predicated on the balance of freshwater and saltwater,” said Todd Crowl, researcher within the institute and director of FIU’s Southeast Environmental Research Center. “When that ecosystem hits its tipping point and an imbalance occurs, that’s when this whole
thing collapses.”

A natural region of subtropical wetlands, the Everglades is a complex system that features sawgrass marshes, cypress swamps, mangroves and marine environments. The Everglades is also the main source of freshwater for the Biscayne Aquifer, South Florida’s primary water supply. Beneath the river of grass, rising sea levels are pushing saltwater inward into the Everglades.

This intrusion is already affecting South Florida residents  through a shrinking and tainted aquifer. Some communities, such as Hallandale Beach, can attest to the problem as underground wells have been closed due to saltwater, forcing communities to buy water from other sources.

“Few people might make the connection between sea level rise and the water pouring out of their faucets,” said Evelyn Gaiser, a wetland ecologist and interim executive director of the School of Environment, Arts and Society. “We simply don’t have freshwater moving in at the rate we need it, but Everglades restoration provides a solution for that.”

The River of Grass

In 2000, the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan was approved as part of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Water Resources Development Act. The 30-year plan provides a framework to restore and protect the water resources of Central and South Florida.

Every two years, the National Research Council issues a report evaluating the progress of the plan. In the 2014 report, the authors raised concerns about slow progress, noting sea level rise is causing new concerns for the already troubled Everglades.

“Climate change and sea level rise are reasons to accelerate restoration to enhance the ecosystem’s ability to adapt to future changes,” authors of the report wrote.

Much of FIU’s work in the Everglades is based on research conducted within its Florida Coastal Everglades Long Term Ecological Research program, which studies how hydrology, climate and human activities interact with ecosystem and population dynamics in the Everglades. With 9 million residents in the greater South Florida region, long-term data will be the key to long-term solutions.

Certainty in Uncertain Times

One of the greatest uncertainties with sea level is just how high and how fast the seas will rise. Without that knowledge, it’s difficult to plan for how South Florida should adapt. Conservative projections suggest sea levels could rise by almost a foot by 2100, but some scientists believe that number will be closer to three feet.

Earth and Environment Professor René Price, along with a team of international researchers, recently completed a study, based on historical data that identifies the timings at which accelerations might first be recognized.

While she can’t say for sure today, Price knows a data-driven prediction about rate and height is near.

“Our results show that by 2020 to 2030, we could have some statistical certainty of what the sea level rise situation will look like in 2100,” Price said. “That means we’ll know what to expect and have 70 years to plan. In a subject that has so much uncertainty, this gives us the gift of long-term planning.”

Even with long-term predictions on the horizon, immediate action is still required as sea level rise is the reality today. Communication and collaboration among scientists, policy makers and community members are crucial in FIU’s efforts to not only study climate change but also to help define how South Florida responds to the rising seas.

Hydrologist Henry Briceño spends much of his time in the community sharing what he and his students are working on and engaging policy makers in the issues they uncover.

“It’s really not enough what we do in the lab and field. What we discover has to transcend the decision-makers,” Briceño said. “We have to take this crisis and turn it into an opportunity. South Florida has the opportunity to become a leader worldwide to tackle sea level rise. We have a way out. We can adapt. Humanity can deal with this and can prevail.”

Evelyn Perez |03/05/2015

Let’s not sacrifice freedom out of fear

A scientist, or any knowledgeable person, will tell you climate change is a serious threat for Canada and the world. But the RCMP has a different take. A secret report by the national police force, obtained by Greenpeace, both minimizes the threat of global warming and conjures a spectre of threats posed by people who rightly call for sanity in dealing with problems caused by burning fossil fuels.

The RCMP report has come to light as federal politicians debate the“anti-terrorism” Bill C-51. Although the act wouldn’t apply to “lawful advocacy, protest, dissent and artistic expression,” its language echoes the tone of the RCMP report. It would give massive new powers to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to prevent any person or group from “undermining the security of Canada,” including “interference with critical infrastructure” and the “economic or financial stability of Canada.” And it would seriously infringe on freedom of speech and expression. The new CSIS powers would lack necessary public oversight.

The RCMP report specifically names Greenpeace, Tides Canada and the Sierra Club as part of “a growing, highly organized and well-financed anti-Canada petroleum movement that consists of peaceful activists, militants and violent extremists who are opposed to society’s reliance on fossil fuels.” The report downplays climate change, calling it a “perceived environmental threat” and saying members of the “international anti-Canadian petroleum movement … claim that climate change is now the most serious global environmental threat and that climate change is a direct consequence of elevated anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions which, reportedly, are directly linked to the continued use of fossil fuels.” It also makes numerous references to anti-petroleum and indigenous “extremists”.

Language in the RCMP report and Bill C-51 leaves open the possibility that the act and increased police and CSIS powers could be used against First Nations and environmentalists engaging in non-violent protests against pipelines or other environmentally destructive projects.

As University of Ottawa law professor Craig Forcese points out, with its reference to “foreign-influenced activities within or relating to Canada that are detrimental to the interests of Canada,” the anti-terrorism law could be used in the case of a “foreign environmental foundation funding a Canadian environmental group’s secret efforts to plan a protest (done without proper permits) in opposition to the Keystone Pipeline Project.” Considering that government ministers have already characterized anti-pipeline protesters as “foreign-funded radicals”, that’s not a stretch. The RCMP could consider my strong support for greenhouse gas emissions reductions and renewable energy as “anti-petroleum”.

Combatting terrorism is important, but Canada is not at war, and we already have many laws — and enhanced police powers — to deal with terrorist threats. More importantly, the RCMP report fuels the legitimate fear that the new law could be used to curtail important civil liberties, affecting everyone from religious minorities to organized labor and First Nations to environmentalists.

If, for any reason, someone causes another person harm or damages infrastructure or property, that person should —and would, under current laws — face legal consequences. But the vast majority of people calling for rational discussion about fossil fuels and climate change — even those who engage in civil disobedience — aren’t “violent anti-petroleum extremists.” They’re people from all walks of life and ages who care about our country, our world, our families and friends and our future.

Canada is much more than a dirty energy “superpower”. Many people from different cultures and backgrounds and with varying political perspectives have built a nation that is the envy of the world. We have a spectacular natural environment, enlightened laws on issues ranging from equal rights to freedom of speech, robust social programs and a diverse, educated population. We mustn’t sacrifice all we have gained out of fear, or give up our hard-won civil liberties for a vague and overreaching law that, as Forcese and University of Toronto law professor Kent Roach point out, “undermines more promising avenues of addressing terrorism.”

Pollution and climate change caused by excessive burning of fossil fuels are real threats, not the people who warn that we must take these threats seriously. And while we must also respond to terrorism with the strong tools already in place, we have to remember that our rights and freedoms, not fear, are what keep us strong.

Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor Ian Hanington.

No, Climate Change Is Not Experiencing a Hiatus

No, climate change is not experiencing a hiatus. No, there is not currently a “pause” in global warming.

Despite widespread such claims in contrarian circles, human-caused warming of the globe proceeds unabated. Indeed, the most recent year (2014) was likely the warmest year on record.

It is true that Earth’s surface warmed a bit less than models predicted it to over the past decade-and-a-half or so. This doesn’t mean that the models are flawed. Instead, it points to a discrepancy that likely arose from a combination of three main factors (see the discussion my piece last year in Scientific American). These factors include the likely underestimation of the actual warming that has occurred, due to gaps in the observational data. Secondly, scientists have failed to include in model simulations some natural factors (low-level but persistent volcanic eruptions and a small dip in solar output) that had a slight cooling influence on Earth’s climate. Finally, there is the possibility that internal, natural oscillations in temperature may have masked some surface warming in recent decades, much as an outbreak of Arctic air can mask the seasonal warming of spring during a late season cold snap. One could call it a global warming “speed bump.” In fact, I have.

Some have argued that these oscillations contributed substantially to the warming of the globe in recent decades. In an article my colleagues Byron Steinman, Sonya Miller and I have in the latest issue of Science magazine, we show that internal climate variability instead partially offset global warming.

We focused on the Northern Hemisphere and the role played by two climate oscillations known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation or “AMO” (a term I coined back in 2000, as recounted in my book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars) and the so-called Pacific Decadal Oscillation or “PDO” (we a use a slightly different term—Pacific Multidecadal Oscillation or “PMO” to refer to the longer-term features of this apparent oscillation). The oscillation in Northern Hemisphere average temperatures (which we term the Northern Hemisphere Multidecadal Oscillation or “NMO”) is found to result from a combination of the AMO and PMO.

In numerous previous studies, these oscillations have been linked to everything from global warming, to drought in the Sahel region of Africa, to increased Atlantic hurricane activity. In our article, we show that the methods used in most if not all of these previous studies have been flawed. They fail to give the correct answer when applied to a situation (a climate model simulation) where the true answer is known.

We propose and test an alternative method for identifying these oscillations, which makes use of the climate simulations used in the most recent IPCC report (the so-called “CMIP5” simulations). These simulations are used to estimate the component of temperature changes due to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations and other human impacts plus the effects of volcanic eruptions and observed changes in solar output. When all those influences are removed, the only thing remaining should be internal oscillations. We show that our method gives the correct answer when tested with climate model simulations.

Estimated history of the “AMO” (blue), the “PMO (green) and the “NMO” (black).

Uncertainties are indicated by shading. Note how the AMO (blue) has reached a shallow peak recently, while the PMO is plummeting quite dramatically.

The latter accounts for the precipitous recent drop in the NMO.

Applying our method to the actual climate observations (see figure above) we find that the NMO is currently trending downward. In other words, the internal oscillatory component is currently offsetting some of the Northern Hemisphere warming that we would otherwise be experiencing. This finding expands upon our previous work coming to a similar conclusion, but in the current study we better pinpoint the source of the downturn. The much-vaunted AMO appears to have made relatively little contribution to large-scale temperature changes over the past couple decades. Its amplitude has been small, and it is currently relatively flat, approaching the crest of a very shallow upward peak. That contrasts with the PMO, which is trending sharply downward. It is that decline in the PMO (which is tied to the predominance of cold La Niña-like conditions in the tropical Pacific over the past decade) that appears responsible for the declining NMO, i.e. the slowdown in warming or “faux pause” as some have termed it.

Our conclusion that natural cooling in the Pacific is a principal contributor to the recent slowdown in large-scale warming is consistent with some other recent studies, including a study I commented on previously showing that stronger-than-normal winds in the tropical Pacific during the past decade have lead to increased upwelling of cold deep water in the eastern equatorial Pacific. Other work by Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) shows that the there has been increased sub-surface heat burial in the Pacific ocean over this time frame, while yet another study by James Risbey and colleagues demonstrates that model simulations that most closely follow the observed sequence of El Niño and La Niña events over the past decade tend to reproduce the warming slowdown.

It is possible that the downturn in the PMO itself reflects a “dynamical response” of the climate to global warming. Indeed, I have suggested this possibility before. But the state-of-the-art climate model simulations analyzed in our current study suggest that this phenomenon is a manifestation of purely random, internal oscillations in the climate system.

This finding has potential ramifications for the climate changes we will see in the decades ahead. As we note in the last line of our article,

Given the pattern of past historical variation, this trend will likely reverse with internal variability, instead adding to anthropogenic warming in the coming decades.

That is perhaps the most worrying implication of our study, for it implies that the “false pause” may simply have been a cause for false complacency, when it comes to averting dangerous climate change.

Michael Mann|February 27, 2015

Carbon Emissions Stabilized In 2014; Shows Efforts To Combat Climate Change May Be Working

Solar, wind and other renewables are making such a big difference in greenhouse gas emissions worldwide that global emissions from the energy sector flatlined during a time of economic growth for the first time in 40 years.

The International Energy Agency announced Friday that energy-related CO2 emissions last year were unchanged from the year before, totaling 32.3 billion metric tons of CO2 in both 2013 and 2014. It shows that efforts to reduce emissions to combat climate change may be more effective than previously thought.

“This is both a very welcome surprise and a significant one,” IEA Chief Economist and incoming IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said in a statement. “It provides much-needed momentum to negotiators preparing to forge a global climate deal in Paris in December. For the first time, greenhouse gas emissions are decoupling from economic growth.”

Following an announcement earlier this week that China’s CO2 emissions fell 2 percent in 2014, the IEA is crediting 2014’s progress to China using more solar, wind and hydropower while burning less coal. Western Europe’s focus on sustainable growth, energy efficiency and renewables has shown that emissions from energy consumption can fall even as economies grow globally, according to the IEA.

Global CO2 emissions stalled or fell in the early 1980s, 1992 and 2009, each time correlating with a faltering global economy. In 2014, the economy grew 3 percent worldwide.

In the U.S., energy-related CO2 emissions fell during seven of the past 23 years, most notably during the recession of 2009, U.S. Energy Information Administration data show. Emissions in 2013 — the most recent year for which U.S. data is available — were higher than they were in the previous year, but 10 percent lower than they were in 2005.

At the same time, the carbon intensity of the U.S. economy — CO2 emissions per dollar of GDP — has been trending downward over the past 25 years, according to the administration.

The IEA will release a more detailed analysis of global energy-related CO2 emissions in a special energy and climate report to be released in June.

“The latest data on emissions are indeed encouraging, but this is no time for complacency and certainly not the time to use this positive news as an excuse to stall further action,” IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven said in a statement.

Bobby Magill|Climate Central|03/13/2015

South Florida Lawmakers Take On Sea Level Rise

It is time for the South Florida real estate community to understand that sea level rise is a reality that we will likely be dealing with increasingly over time. There may be an ongoing debate about the exact cause and nature of climate change, but there are two facts that are impossible to ignore.

The first is that sea levels (including those in South Florida) have risen at least eight inches over the past century and are projected to rise at least another foot this century. The second is that more than two million people and one million homes sit within four feet of the local high tide line.

In fact, South Florida has the fourth largest population vulnerable to sea rise in the world, according to a University of Miami study. This is not something that has been lost on our local governments or on our state legislature. In 2009 Broward, Miami-Dade, Monroe and Palm Beach Counties entered into the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact where those counties and many associated municipalities agreed to collaborate to develop a joint policy to promote federal and state action to address climate change impacts. The requested actions range from requests for increased funding for infrastructure projects to designation of areas that are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of sea level rise.

In response to the priorities highlighted in the Compact, in 2011 the Florida legislature added to Chapter 163 the term “adaptation action area” and authorized local governments to enact code provisions developing an adaptation action area designation. An adaptation action area is a designation within the local government’s comprehensive plan which identifies one or more areas that experience coastal flooding due to extreme high tides and storm surge and are vulnerable to the related impacts of rising sea levels for the purpose of prioritizing funding for infrastructure needs and adaptation planning.

The City of Fort Lauderdale has instituted a pilot program to designate adaptation action areas and then implement public infrastructure projects to mitigate the risk of sea rise events posed to those areas.

The first leg of the pilot program involved an outreach effort where city officials visited community associations and other citizen groups to explain the benefits of adaptation action areas and the reasons for creating them.

The City is now embarking on “Phase 2” which is designation of these areas and implementation of public projects. Among the first projects arising from this new initiative is the installation of back-flow preventers in the Las Olas Isles community.

There are multiple similar projects going on throughout South Florida, including the installation of pumps in Miami Beach to mitigate the “king tides” and backflow preventers in the South Lake community in Hollywood.

Broward County has gone a step further by amending its comprehensive plan to recognize adaptation action areas. This means that when a property is considered for development, Broward County’s staff can take into account the vulnerabilities of the property to sea level rise events, and can recommend the construction of, or allocate resources toward, infrastructure necessary to mitigate that vulnerability.

These developments should not be seen as a threat as much as an opportunity for developers and innovators. Developers who are willing and able to construct resilient projects that can mitigate the impact of sea rise events stand to do very well in the coming decades. Similarly, companies that create cost-effective infrastructure projects that can assist cities and counties in addressing sea rise issues will become a valuable resource.

 Mark Lynn|Mar 11, 2015

Extreme Weather

3 Connections Between Climate Change and Extreme Weather

More than 98 inches of snow has fallen in Boston this season, while workers have spent about 170,000 hours plowing the streets and distributed more than 76,000 tons of salt on roadways. At the same time, much of the American West, Rocky Mountains, and Northern and Central Plains have experienced warmer-than-average temperatures. California, in the grip of an epic drought, had its fourth-driest January ever recorded with just 15 percent of average precipitation.

So what is going on with this extreme weather, and what does it have to do with global climate change?

Due to recent analytical advancements, climate scientists are now able to more accurately determine how climate change impacts the odds of an individual extreme event occurring.

More research is planned in coming years to examine links between extreme weather and climate events and climate change, and global research already tells us a lot about the trends, including these three counterintuitive connections between climate change and extreme events:

1. Record cold temperatures can still occur in a warming world.

During 2014, cities in regions like the Midwest and Northeast endured record cold months. Zoom out to the state level, however, and three states (California, Nevada and Arizona) saw record warm annual temperatures in 2014, while none experienced record cold annual temperatures. The national average temperature was warmer than normal, and at the global scale, last year was more than just above average—2014 was the warmest year ever recorded.

While portions of the eastern United States have faced historic snow totals and frigid temperatures this year, the opposite can be said for much of the western U.S.

A growing body of research suggests that a contributing factor of this drastic east-west temperature contrast could be the accelerated warming taking place in the Arctic, which can have a weakening effect on the polar jet stream, a west-to-east river of wind in the atmosphere where cold Arctic air meets milder subtropical air in the mid-latitudes (e.g., the U.S.) of the Northern Hemisphere. A weaker polar jet stream creates more favorable conditions for a “wavy” north-south oriented path around the Arctic, which can increase the frequency of phases where Arctic air seeps south into regions like the eastern United States while warmer air protrudes north in the western half of the country.

2. A warming planet can make some regions much snowier.

The warmer the air is, the more water vapor it can hold. This additional moisture can bring more intense rain or snowfall. In addition, when sea surface temperatures are warmer than average (as they are currently in the Northeast Atlantic Ocean), the atmosphere becomes fueled with more moisture and energy.

Precipitation amounts vary by region, but in the United States, all regions except Hawaii have experienced an increase in very heavy precipitation events since the late 1950s. However, snowfall has decreased in most parts of the country since recordkeeping began, in large part because more winter precipitation has come from rain instead of snow. Thus, temperatures play a significant role.

Gradual warming is reducing the number of very cold days in many regions, but when temperatures are cold enough, the increased moisture can cause heavier snowfall events. In fact, the heaviest snowstorms occur when temperatures are just below freezing as opposed to when they are much colder (when available moisture is reduced)—conditions becoming more likely in mid-winter in a warmer world.

3. Climate change can contribute to a double whammy of drought and extreme precipitation in the same location.

As mentioned above, a warmer atmosphere can hold more water, fueling more intense rain and snow events. But at the other end of the spectrum, the warming climate can amplify conditions conducive to drought—like heatwaves, evapotranspiration and reduced soil moisture. The combination of these two extremes in one location can increase disasters like flooding and landslides, and recent history suggests parts of the United States may already be grappling with these double-whammy impacts.

Since 2010, regions like the Midwest have been impacted by numerous extreme drought and flooding events that have each exceeded $1 billion in losses. Right now, California is in the midst of a drought that researchers have found to be its worst in at least 1,200 years. And while not found to have been caused by climate change, scientists have determined the drought has been driven by record warm temperatures and reduced precipitation. These prolonged warm and dry conditions were then met with an incredible deluge of rainfall in some areas of the state last December (San Francisco received more rain in a matter of days than it did all of 2013) causing flooding and mudslides, washing out roads and damaging homes.

A Need for Action

A growing body of evidence shows strong connections between climate change and extreme events, and impacts once thought of as a distant future threat are already occurring and widespread.

As decision-makers scramble to keep trains and buses running among feet of snow, make plans to save infrastructure from flooding, and revise planning to contend with drought, it’s time they pause to acknowledge the role that human-induced climate change is playing in our changing weather—and commit to ambitious policy changes that reverse these trends.

Kelly Levin and C. Forbes Tompkins|World Resources Institute|March 1, 2015

Epic Drought Spurs California to Build Largest Desalination Plant in Western Hemisphere

“The U.S. Drought Monitor shows nearly 40 percent of the state of California remains in exceptional drought, the highest level of drought and many communities are working to come up with long-term solutions as reservoirs and rivers continue to diminish,” says Jeremy Hobson of NPR’s Here and Now.

On the show yesterday, Hobson discussed desalination as a solution to the drought with David Jassby, assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering at the University of California, Riverside and Sandy Kerl of the San Diego County Water Authority. There are currently 13 desalination projects under consideration along the California coast.

Jassby explains how desalination works, why in the U.S. we rely on reverse osmosis rather than thermal-based plants and the environmental impacts of the process. Desalination has been proposed for years in the U.S., but has always been shot down for being too expensive and requiring too much energy. Now, “the first desalination plant in Carlsbad is coming online in 2016 or maybe even sooner,” says Jassby.

The cost of desalinized water has come down significantly in recent years, making it “pretty comparable” to conventional water sources, according to Jassby. He expects that places that have “ready access to the ocean” and are water-stressed will employ desalination in the coming years. It’s already widely used in other parts of the world such as the Middle East, Australia and parts of Southern Europe.

When the Carlsbad Desalination Project is completed this fall, it will be the largest desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere. Kerl of the San Diego County Water Authority, which is partnering with Poseidon Water on the project, explains why she believes the desalination plant is environmentally sound and also necessary for the state of California. The state’s recent snowpack survey reveals that the snowpack, a major source of drinking water for residents, is currently five percent of average, according to Kerl.

Cole Mellino|March 10, 2015

Blizzard On Hawaii Summit Delays Construction Of Thirty Meter Telescope

HILO, Hawaii (AP) — Construction of one of the world’s largest telescopes is being delayed because of blizzard conditions on a Hawaii mountain summit.

The Thirty Meter Telescope will be built near the summit of Mauna Kea. If not for the winter storm, construction preparations would be getting underway at the site of the $1.4-billion project, Sandra Dawson, telescope spokeswoman, told Hilo newspaper Hawaii Tribune-Herald ( http://ow.ly/Kae0Z ).

The Mauna Kea access road was closed Monday because of snow and wind. Because of frozen weather gauges, it was difficult to estimate snowfall and wind speeds, said Ryan Lyman, meteorologist for the Mauna Kea Weather Center. He’s expecting up to 2 feet of snow and winds of 50 mph to 70 mph, with a break Tuesday and then snowing again Tuesday night. Conditions may improve to reopen the road by Friday or during the weekend, he said.

“The winds are pounding,” he said. “Snow is all over the place.”

When telescope construction can begin will depend on when the weather clears, Dawson said. “We have to do some re-planning based on the weather,” she said.

Even though access to the construction site will be restricted, there are plans to accommodate protesters, Dawson said.

Some oppose plans to build the telescope near the summit of a mountain held sacred by Native Hawaiians. Protests disrupted a groundbreaking and Hawaiian blessing ceremony last year.

The telescope should help scientists see some 13 billion light years away for a glimpse into the early years of the universe. Astronomers say Mauna Kea is the ideal location for observing the most distant and difficult to understand mysteries of the universe.

|03/10/2015

One of Boston’s Snowiest Seasons in History

This is now Boston’s second snowiest season on record. In the last 21 years, Boston has now had 4 of its top 5 snowiest seasons. (These counts cover the period from July 1 through June 30, to include snow in the fall and spring months.)

1. 1995-1996: 107.6 inches
2. 2014-2015: 105.7 inches
3. 1993-1994: 96.3 inches
4. 1947-1948: 89.2 inches
5. 2004-2005: 86.6 inches
6. 1977-1978: 85.1 inches
7. 1992-1993: 83.9 inches
8. 2010-2011: 81.0 inches
9. 1915-1916: 79.2 inches
10. 1919-1920: 73.4 inches

For perspective, the average seasonal snowfall at Logan Airport is 43.5 inches. 

February has obliterated the previous snowiest month on record in Boston.

1. February 2015: 64.8 inches
2. January 2005: 43.3 inches
3. January 1945: 42.3 inches
4. February 2003: 41.6 inches
5. February 1969: 41.3 inches

Winter Storms Juno and Marcus each made the top 10 heaviest Boston snowstorms, all-time.

1. Feb. 17-18, 2003: 27.6 inches
2. Feb. 6-7, 1978: 27.1 inches
3. Feb. 24-26, 1969: 25.8 inches
4. Mar. 31 – Apr. 1, 1997: 25.4 inches
5. Feb. 8-9, 2013 (Nemo): 24.9 inches
6. Jan. 26-28, 2015 (Juno): 24.6 inches
7. Feb. 7-10, 2015 (Marcus): 23.8 inches
8. Jan. 22-23, 2005: 22.5 inches
9. Jan. 20-21, 1978: 21.4 inches
10. Mar. 3-5, 1960: 19.8 inches

In just over two years, we’ve had three of the top seven heaviest snowstorms in Boston. 

Other records Boston has set during this stretch include:

– Record 30-day snowfall: 94.4 inches from Jan. 24- Feb. 22, 2015, inclusive (previous record: 58.8 inches from Jan. 9 – Feb. 7, 1978). Incredibly, this 30-day total would be the third snowiest season!

– Record snowfall for meteorological winter (December, January and February): 99.4 inches (previous record: 81.5 inches in 1993-94; of the 107.6 inches in 1995-96, only 79.4 inches came in December, January and February)

– Record snow depth*: 37 inches on Feb. 9 (previous record: 31 inches on Jan. 11, 1996; * gaps in this dataset exist)

– Fastest six-foot snowfall: 72.5 inches in 18 days from Jan. 24 – Feb. 10, 2015 (previous record: 73 inches in 45 days from Dec. 29, 1993 to Feb. 11, 1994)

– Fastest 90-inch snowfall: 23 days from Jan. 24 – Feb. 15, 2015 (previous record: 78 days from Dec. 30, 1993 to Mar. 17, 1994)

– Four calendar days with at least 12 inches of snow, a first for any snow season (previously, only two seasons had as many as two such days, in 1977-1978 and 1960-1961 seasons)

– At least 0.5 inch of snow had fallen 6 straight days through Feb. 12, topping the previous such record stretch of 5 days in 1943. The record stretch of measurable snow (at least 0.1 inch) was 9 straight days ending on Mar. 10, 1916.

– Most days with measurable snow in a month: 16 in February, topping the record of 14 days in March 1916, January 1923 and January 1994. It also breaks the record for the month of February, which was previously 13 days set in 1907 and 1967.

– Finally, the Blue Hill Observatory in Milton, Massachusetts set an all-time snow depth record on the morning of February 15.

– While not a snow record per se, part of the difficulty Boston has faced in dealing with the snow is the persistent cold weather, which has prevented any meaningful snowmelt. The city recorded 28 consecutive days with lows 20 degrees or colder from Jan. 25 through Feb. 21 (inclusive), breaking the all-time record of 27 consecutive days set Jan. 12 through Feb. 7, 1881.

– Boston also failed to reach 40 degrees from January 20 through March 3, a record streak of 43 consecutive days. The previous such record streak of 42 straight days was set in the winter of 1968-1969.

Jon Erdman|March 8, 2015

Italian Village Gets 8 Feet Of Snow In 24 Hours, May Break Global Record

Snow news is good news, unless you live in Capracotta. The Italian village may have just set a record for the most snow ever to fall in 24 hours.

A storm on March 5 dumped just over 100.8 inches (or 8 feet, 4 inches) of snow there in 18 hours, reports the Italian weather website Meteoweb. The snowfall inundated the city and left some in the region without power and water.

“It was a spectacle that took our breath away. In some parts of the village the snow was like a long white wall,” village mayor Antonio Monaco told the Italian news agency ANSA, as translated to English by the Telegraph.

“It was tough but everybody pulled together and made sure that the old people who couldn’t leave their houses had the food and medicines that they needed.”

Capracotta sits at an elevation of 4,662 feet in central Italy, just an hour and a half drive from the country’s eastern coast.

CNN cautions the record isn’t official yet. Assuming the World Meteorological Association verifies the amount of snowfall, however, the storm would break previous records dating back to the 1920s.

In 1921, a mid-April storm in Silver Lake, Colorado dropped 75.8 inches of snow in a day, setting a record for the most snow to fall in the U.S. in 24 hours. Over the course of 32 and a half hours, the storm ultimately deposited more than 95 inches of snow.

Ryan Grenoble|The Huffington Post|03/11/2015

Check out some photos

‘Unforgettable’ ice chunks dot Cape Cod shore

This winter produced human- sized chunks of ice washing ashore on Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts.

Eric Fisher, chief meteorologist for CBS Boston, called it a “once-in-a-generation” event because of New England’s weather conditions in 2015.

Fisher said via email he’s never seen ice like this off Massachusetts.

“It’s been an amazing winter with some unforgettable scenes. By most accounts, this is likely the most ice we’ve seen develop since the 1977-78 winter, and perhaps farther back than that.”

He added, “It’s definitely a limited attraction. … The chunks are getting smaller and whatever gets stranded on the beach is melting away.”

Twelve winter storms affected the U.S. from Jan.21 through March 5, the Weather Channel reports. Eleven of the storms struck New England with “at least light snow accumulations,” according to the Weather Channel. For Boston, this is the second snowiest season on record with 105.7 inches of snowfall, according to the Weather Channel.

USA TODAY|3/12/15

Snow Trucked in for Iditarod, Ski Resorts Remain Closed as February Experienced Most Extreme Weather in History

A new report this week from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory finds that the rate of climate change, which has increased in recent decades, will increase even more in the 2020s. And Alaska, along with the rest of the Arctic, has been warming even faster with six degrees of winter warming as the loss of snow and ice cover triggers a feedback loop of further warming, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Alaska’s rapid warming is very evident. It wasn’t enough that they moved the start of the Iditarod 300 miles further north this year to Fairbanks from the traditional start of Anchorage, which has had record low snowfall. They had to reroute the course again when the Chena river, a part of the new course, failed to freeze sufficiently.

The ceremonial start of the race was still held in Anchorage, which as of March 9 received less than one-third of its average snowfall, according to Slate. So, the city had to truck in snow for the event. Sen. Lisa Murkowski tweeted about it with the hashtag “we make it work.” I think the planet begs to differ. In a Senate hearing last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders brilliantly grilled Alaskan leaders for not only failing to address climate change but advocating for increased production of fossil fuels, despite leading scientists saying we need to keep fossil fuels in the ground to prevent catastrophic climate change.

A ski area outside of Juneau had to close temporarily due to lack of snow. They are still way below average, but they opened back up for the rest of the season. Boston received more snow in a single storm than Anchorage has seen all winter. 

And it’s not just Alaska. As we all know, the drought-stricken West is having another exceptionally warm winter. Last month, the West cooked while the East froze. Ski resorts in California, Oregon and Canada closed due to lack of snow. One Southern Californian told me he had to use his air conditioning a few times this winter, while those of us in the East have had record snow and sub-freezing temperatures.

This past February was the most extreme on record, marking the first time that one-third of the U.S. experienced exceptional cold while another third experienced exceptional warmth in the same month, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “All-time records were set for the coldest month in dozens of Eastern cities, with Boston racking up more snow than the peaks of California’s Sierra Nevada,” said Slate‘s Eric Holthaus. Meteorologists have even come up with a nickname for the phenomenon, “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge.”

“It’s the weather-controlling polar jet stream—a fast river of wind in the upper atmosphere—that has been locked in an extreme pattern for the past few years,” explained Climatologist Bill Patzert of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “Rather than circling in a relatively straight path, the jet stream has meandered in great north-south waves. In the west, it’s been bulging northward, arguably for the past two winters. Over frigid northern Canada, the jet takes a hard right turn and plunges into the upper Midwest and East Coast, plummeting temperatures and creating punishing ice and snow storms.”

Cole Mellino|March 12, 2015

Genetically Modified Organisms

Is GMO Soybean Oil Healthier Than Non-GMO?

University of California researchers studied how GMO soybean oil impacts our health and found that claims about the oil’s health may not be accurate.

Soybean oil is in many of the processed foods on store shelves. It’s cheap, plentiful, and makes food taste good. Ninety percent of the soybeans produced in the U.S. are genetically modified, and a new GMO soybean has been marketed as producing healthier oil than its conventional counterparts.

The new oil — DuPont’s Plenish – contains zero trans fats and it being marketed to restaurants and food producers as a way to offer zero trans fat food. The company website calls the oil “heart-healthy.”

After testing by independent researchers at the University of California Riverside and UC Davis, though, it’s looking like this new soybean oil may not be as healthy as DuPont says it is. In lab tests, mice that ate Plenish oil were just as likely to develop obesity, diabetes and fatty liver as mice eating conventional soybean oil. The only benefit they found was the the Plenish mice didn’t develop insulin resistance.

Senior investigator Frances Sladek, a professor of cell biology and neuroscience at UC Riverside, said, “While genetic modification of crops can introduce new beneficial traits into existing crops, the resulting products need to be tested for long-term health effects before making assumptions about their impact on human health.” (emphasis mine)

This was the first study looking at the long-term health impacts of Plenish oil.

Of course, direct impacts are only one part of how GMOs affect human health. We can’t ignore how these soybeans go from seed to bottle and indirectly impact our health along the way.

Plenish soybeans — like other GMO soybeans in the U.S. — are engineered to also be tolerant to pesticides. In this Growers Guide from DuPont, the “Science Rules” section on page 11 talk about producing beans with a trans fat free profile that are still resistant to pests and herbicides.

Since Plenish soybeans are engineered to be pesticide resistant, they are subject the same public health pitfall as all pesticide-resistant GMO crops. In the long term, they lead to farmers use more pesticides.

There are two reasons that farmers growing GMO crops end up spraying more: they can, and then they need to. When pesticide-resistant crops first came on the scene, pesticide use did go down. But nature is resilient, and over time weeds and bugs have become resistant to pesticides like glyphosate. Farmers need to spray more to keep these superweed and superbugs at bay. And since you can saturate these resistant crops in pesticides without killing them, farmers can spray away without hurting their yields.

At this point, biotech companies are having to create crops resistant to even more toxic pesticides, because conventional ones aren’t working well for so many farmers.

All of those pesticides are bad news. They pollute ground water, contaminate soil, and make their way onto our dinner plates. Pesticide residues are linked to health concerns from lowered intelligence to autism.

DuPont has created a cooking oil that doesn’t cause insulin resistance but is linked directly to obesity, diabetes, and fatty liver. It’s also linked indirectly to the myriad of health problems that come from exposure to pesticide residues. Is it worth it?

Becky Striepe|March 7, 2015

Insecticides that will never wash off ‏

Did you know one of the goals of companies like Monsanto was to create crops that didn’t need to have insecticides sprayed on them?

That sounds like a great objective… until you realize how they went about accomplishing it.

The reason some GMO crops don’t require insecticides to protect them from insects is because they ARE insecticides. These plants have been engineered to produce the insecticide Bt. in every cell of the plant. When certain insects eat any part of a Bt.-producing plant, their stomachs rupture, and they die.

These Bt. plants are living pesticide factories. They’re literally registered with the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, as pesticides.

If Bt. ruptures the stomachs of insects, what do you suppose these crops are doing to you or your children? Is it possible that they could have an impact on your digestive tract or your bacterial balance? Monsanto wants you to believe that their crops are perfectly healthy. But I don’t suppose you’re the kind of person who believes everything Monsanto says.

Getting informed about the realities of GMOs, and what you can do to protect yourself and your loved ones, has never been more urgent.

That’s why we put together your free GMO Survival Guide. You’ll get short videos like GMOs 101 with Jeffrey Smith and a brilliant dismantling of Monsanto’s lies from my dad, John Robbins, plus the Non-GMO shopping guide and app, a GMO music video, and more.

Ocean Robbins|The Food Revolution Network

Get your complimentary GMO Survival Guide here.

Former Pro-GMO Scientist Blows The Whistle ‏

In his decades-long career as a leading research scientist for the Canadian government, Dr. Thierry Vrain was paid to reassure the public that genetically engineered foods were safe to eat.

But now, this insider is lifting the veil of deception and exposing the truth Monsanto doesn’t want you to know.

Dr. Vrain says:
“I refute the claims of the biotechnology companies that their engineered crops yield more, that they require less pesticide applications, that they have no impact on the environment and of course that they are safe to eat… The scientific literature is full of studies showing that engineered corn and soya contain toxic or allergenic proteins.”

Find out about his startling conclusions, here.

Check out his powerful essay here.

Energy

Inspectors Uncover Polluting Oil Wastewater Pits in Kern County

Tossing a cigarette butt on the ground and heedlessly walking away is an environmental no-no, but energy companies in Kern County, Calif., are doing the equivalent of just that, only on an industrial scale. Environmental inspectors are finding massive illegal waste pits filled with byproducts of oil production, and they’re not secured, creating pollution in the already embattled county. Investigators estimate that some 300 pits in the county are operating without permits, polluting groundwater and creating a significant and potentially expensive environmental hazard. What might be even more scary, if you can imagine it, is the lax inspection and enforcement that allowed oil companies to rampantly construct pits — and the limited regulations surrounding the environmental requirements for wastewater pits.

In the course of oil and gas production, particularly in the case of fracking, vast quantities of wastewater are produced. Theoretically, this water can’t simply be discharged, because it contains toxic byproducts like benzene. Oil companies are responsible for environmental remediation and disposal, but this is expensive — so many settle for digging out wastewater pits and just storing that water. That’s perfectly legal, as long as they get permits. Disturbingly, the laws for permits are quite lax — public officials aren’t picky about their position, for example, and they don’t even need to be lined or covered to prevent release of wastewater into the water table or the air.

In terms of agricultural income, Kern County is the second-highest ranking county in the nation, illustrating the huge volume of crops grown there. Wastewater seeping into the ground creates serious potential risks for crop production, including blights and crop failures as well as issues for consumers who could get sick from benzene-soaked plants irrigated with contaminated water. Likewise, Kern County accounts for an estimated 80 percent of California’s oil production, illustrating the huge scale of the industry. Thus, in precisely the same county the state counts on for crop production, a highly polluting industry is also thriving, and it’s not behaving in an environmentally responsible fashion.

Oil companies insist the pits were all legal or that they didn’t know about procedures they needed to follow. Some also add claims that no one can link the county’s pollution to unsecured oil pits, but farmers say otherwise. They claim to have smelled oil products around their farms, and some have identified signs of oil contamination in their irrigation supplies. They want action to increase environmental health and safety standards around oil wastewater pits, and to penalize the companies involved.

The issue also raises another problem: Remediation. The county’s water quality officials are going to be left picking up the tab for identifying, cleaning up, and controlling unpermitted and polluting pits if they can’t explicitly link them to specific oil companies. Even if they can, they will likely spend years in court fighting expensive lawsuits to compel companies to pay, during which they’ll need to initiate cleanup operations regardless to prevent environmental damage. Similar issues can be seen across the United States, where industrial pollution creates an expensive problem for environmental agencies while its originators metaphorically skip town, profits in hand.

Kern County is facing a lengthy investigation to evaluate each and every single oil pit to determine whether it has a permit and whether it is creating pollution. At the same time, the county needs to engage in environmental cleanup and chase down the oil companies who left their wastewater behind while it weighs the possibility of stricter health and safety requirements for future wastewater pits. Other regions of oil and gas production, meanwhile, might want to conduct a survey of their wastewater pits to see if they’re looking at a similar problem.

s.e. smith|March 5, 2015

Five Huge Advancements in Alternative Energy to Watch for in 2015

The alternative energy industry continues to surge in the global marketplace, and technological advancements promise rewards for both consumers and investors.

These innovations are normally brought about through improved renewable energy system efficiency and increased popularity for these systems in high growth, regional markets.

Here are some of the top renewable energy innovations that will be in the spotlight throughout 2015.

Marine Energy Technology

On the heels of hydroelectric renewable energy comes an effective new form of water power known by some as offshore marine energy. Since ancient times, sailors have maintained a love/hate relationship with the sea. The same body of water upon which they made their livelihood was the same foe that could kill them mercilessly when they came into contact with powerful, storm-induced waves.

Today, technological advancements can harness energy bound within the movement of ocean waves. Although the idea of producing energy from ocean currents is not original to offshore oil companies, these isolated oil rig crew members were some of the first to lend their voices for praise of the new technology.

It was a company called Minesto, however, that spent several years researching and developing ways to convert low velocity ocean current into usable electric current efficiently. The company is scheduled to go into full production in 2015.

Biofuel Development

While many are adopting a plant-based diet for health reasons, energy producers are spying out plants as a new source of renewable, clean energy.

Although there are mixed reviews on the ethical implications of producing energy with plants that could be used to feed the world’s growing population, there are more winning arguments for the use of these clean energy sources than there are for the opposition.

Renewable energy companies are currently conducting research and development on plants like marine algae for their renewable energy projects because cultivating and harvesting these aquatic plants do not require the use of scarce land resources.

Bio-Waste Energy Products

Some biofuel energy companies are attempting to kill two birds with one stone by using waste products for energy production. The waste products can include anything from unused plant-based food to sewage.

This form of alternative energy is attractive because it reduces waste products in landfills and it comes from an abundant renewable source.

When the new gas is used by vehicles, its emissions are significantly less than vehicles that use diesel fuels. An example of a recent success story is the bio-bus developed by GENeco that runs from Bristol to Bath in the United Kingdom on gas made only from treated human waste and food waste.

Landfill Gas to Energy

Clearing landfills seems to be the secondary mission of many renewable energy projects. The lure of taking a mass of unwanted material and turning it into usable energy is just too strong.

The organic matter in landfills decompose to produce methane gas that environmentalists claim contribute to global warming and poor air quality. United States-based renewable energy companies like LFG Technologies seek to turn the methane gas produced in landfills into usable energy, thereby reducing the amount of the gas that escapes into the atmosphere.

2015 promises to be the year that these companies press on with more landfill gas projects across the nation.

Offshore Wind Energy

Marine energy is not the only source of power that energy companies seek to capture on the high seas.

The unobstructed wind that characteristically blows over open water is now a candidate to be the energy source for the latest renewable wind energy projects of many alternative energy companies. While solar energy has been the alternative energy of choice for some time, innovation in wind turbine technology enables an increased capacity for wind energy systems.

When these higher capacity wind turbines are set afloat on offshore rigs, the opportunities for collecting substantial amounts of energy for use on land, on marine vessels or on offshore oil rigs are promising.

These types of renewable energy systems are not the only energy trend that will be evident in 2015. The popularity of traditional (as well as innovative alternative) energy systems is spreading—even to developing nations that have opportunities to build infrastructure from scratch to accommodate these efficient, cost effective renewable energy systems.

Dixie Somers|March 5, 2015

SWFL legislators propose oil drilling changes

A series of bills from two Southwest Florida legislators could shape the future of oil and gas regulations in the state, specifically the controversial technique called hydraulic fracturing.

“As drilling techniques change we need to look at the regulations and make sure they’re adequate to protect the safety and well being of the public,” said Sen. Garrett Richter, R-Naples, a sponsor of one of the bills.

Four bills – three, 1205, 1207 and 1209, from Rep. Ray Rodrigues, R-Estero, and one, SB 1468, from Richter – would reform drilling regulations in several ways, most importantly, explicitly legalize hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in Florida. The practice is in a regulatory gray area under current law. There’s no outright ban on fracking, instead it’s considered a “work-over” procedure and only requires a driller to notify the state before proceeding.

The proposed legislation would also require companies to disclose drilling chemicals to the state Department of Environmental Protection, raise the bond limit for drilling operations and raise civil penalties for violations. It would also establish a fund to finance any spill cleanup efforts as well as plugging and resealing old boreholes.

“I’m optimistic we’re going to have a successful year passing this legislation,” Rodrigues said.

Environmental advocates say the bills are a step in the right direction but don’t go as far as they should to protect natural resources and hold violators accountable.

This issue is a central one to Southwest Florida. Collier County has been the epicenter of the drilling debate since 2014, when the DEP disclosed it fined a Texas-based oil drilling company for an “unauthorized extraction procedure” it used at a well site near the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary.

The ensuing outcry from environmental groups and the Collier County Board of County Commissioners prompted the DEP to crack down on the Dan A. Hughes Co., eventually filing a lawsuit against the driller.

The company has since ceased operations at its Collier-Hogan well and stopped all activity in the county.

“What came out of that was the need to update and revise our statutes,” Rodrigues said.

Last year, Rodrigues sponsored a bill that would have required companies to disclose all drilling chemicals to the state. The bill passed the House, but failed in the Senate.

Rogrigues’ and Richter’s bills would require a company looking to frack to submit a list to the DEP of all the chemicals it planned to use. The public disclosure wouldn’t be complete, however. Companies would be able to request a trade secret exemption to public records laws.

The agency would then forward the restricted list to fracfocus.org, a widely used drilling chemical disclosure website. This is a point of contention with environmental advocates, who don’t want an outside company to handle this information.

“If we outsource this disclosure we don’t have the accountability of a public entity,” said Jennifer Hecker, director of natural resource policy for the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, which has been deeply involved in the drilling discussion.

The Conservancy is also concerned with the bills’ narrow definition of fracking – using at least 100,000 gallons of fluid to fracture rock in order to stimulate the production of oil and natural gas. There are other, similar well stimulation techniques, like acid fracking, that wouldn’t be included in this definition and could fall through the regulatory cracks, Hecker said.

“It seems like semantics, but the definition is what determines what’s legal,” she said.

Steve Doane|news-press.com|March 7, 2015

http://www.news-press.com/…/swfl-legislators-prop…/24571011/

Constitution Pipeline: ‘The Keystone Pipeline of Natural Gas’

“This Constitution pipeline is about enriching a few billionaires by impoverishing the people of New York State,” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. told Ed Schultz on MSNBC’s The Ed Show. “And the bullying that we’ve seen go along with this, the corruption—FERC is really a rogue agency, it’s a classic captive agency, it issued this permit illegally.”

A popular movement is building against the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), for its outrageous rubber-stamping of permits for expansion of the gas industry. Kennedy’s powerful indictment of FERC on national television last week was the latest manifestation of this hopeful, much-needed development.

Kennedy was speaking about the Constitution pipeline, one of about eight interstate pipelines originating in or going through Pennsylvania (ground zero for fracking in the Northeast) that are currently in some stage of getting approval from FERC, which interstate gas pipelines need to do. And the approval process is essentially pro-forma. In the two and a half or so years that I’ve been actively involved with this movement, I know of none proposed that have been rejected. It’s the same with proposed export terminals. At a federal Court of Appeals hearing last year in Washington, DC it was stated in open court that 95 percent or more of such proposed pipelines are approved, with no disagreement from the FERC lawyers present.

Some of the other pipelines which FERC will likely approve—barring the kind of organized people’s uprising we have seen around the Keystone XL pipeline—are: Penn East, Mariner East 2, Atlantic Sunrise, Atlantic Coast, Algonquin Incremental Market and Northeast Energy Direct.

Virtually all of these pipelines are being built, in part, to ship fracked gas from Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio and possibly elsewhere in the Marcellus Shale region to gas export terminals that are being built or projects that are proposed, including in Nova Scotia, off the coast of NY/NJ and Cove Point in Maryland on the Chesapeake Bay.

The leadership of FERC knows that they’ve got a problem. Here is how FERC Chair Cheryl LaFleur put it at the National Press Club on Jan. 27:

“These groups are active in every FERC docket … as well as in my email inbox seven days a week, in my Twitter feed, at our open meetings demanding to be heard and literally at our door closing down First Street so FERC won’t be able to work. We’ve got a situation here.”

Last week, at a meeting of the FERC Commissioners, there was reference a number of times to the problem of “environmental activists.” This was in reference to the planned expansion of the gas industry to replace expected coal industry retrenchment in coming years.

Actually, it’s a lot more than “environmental activists” who are angry at FERC. One of the noteworthy aspects of this movement is the involvement of affected landowners, property owners, farmers, impacted communities, local elected officials and others who definitely don’t see themselves primarily as environmentalists.

Who was Chair LaFleur referring to when she talked about groups “at our open meetings demanding to be heard, and literally at our door closing down First Street so FERC won’t be able to work?” She was referring to a network of groups and individuals a little more than a half year old, Beyond Extreme Energy.

Beyond Extreme Energy (BXE) grew out of the (continuing) battle to prevent an export terminal from being built at Cove Point in Calvert County, Maryland. Ever since its first major action, a week of nonviolent direct action in November at the FERC headquarters in DC that disrupted their functioning, it has stayed active: canvassing and getting arrested in Calvert County; disrupting a meeting of financial analysts and potential Dominion investors in NYC; supporting fracktivists in Pennsylvania who were arrested chanting “Ban Fracking Now” at the inauguration of Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf;  demonstrating at the inauguration of the new Maryland governor, who wants to open his state to fracking; and attending every monthly FERC commissioners meeting since November. At the January meeting Chair LaFleur, in an unprecedented move, adjourned it and cleared the room when we began speaking, one by one, about the human and environmental damage FERC’s decisions are having.

Now BXE is getting organized for another week-plus of actions in DC at FERC. From May 21-29 we will let FERC and the country know that we are not going away and that we will not stop until they become something very different than what they are right now. FERC says that its mission is to provide “safe, efficient, sustainable” energy for the country. It is failing on all counts. FERC must fulfill its mission and make decisions based on what’s best for all of us instead of the fracked-gas industry.

The issue of FERC is more than an issue for communities impacted by their decisions. It is a basic social justice issue, an issue of corruption of democracy.

It is unquestionably an issue that the climate movement has to take up and do so now. The proposed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Clean Power Plan explicitly lists a shift from coal to natural gas as a way for states to meet the plan’s emissions reductions objective, which is ridiculous given that gas is a fossil fuel and given the extensive methane leakage associated with gas production, distribution and storage.

The BXE actions in late May are coming at the right time. Let’s seize the time!

Ted Glick|March 2, 2015

Florida Power & Light aims to buy, close coal plant in Jacksonville

Concerns about climate change and expanding supplies of natural gas raise doubts about burning coal to produce electricity.

Florida Power & Light Co. announced Friday it wants to quickly purchase and then shutter a relatively modern coal-burning plant, saying the move would cut costs and cap “a very high emitter of carbon dioxide.”

With 4.7 million customers and the biggest utility in Florida, FPL has an extended contract to buy power produced by Cedar Bay Generating Plant in Jacksonville. The 250-megawatt unit is one of 13 plants in Florida that burn coal.

FPL proposes to purchase the plant from Cedar Bay Generating Co. for $520 million.

At least one environmental group, Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, applauded the move but also prodded FPL to pursue more solar energy.

Coal has been under assault by environmentalists as a prime contributor to climate change. More recently, fracking has boosted supplies of natural gas, making it competitive with coal.

Also a challenge to coal is the U.S. Clean Power Plan, which calls for reducing carbon emission from power plants by reducing coal usage.

FPL said in its proposal to the Florida Public Service Commission that its fleet of generators, using natural gas primarily, produces electricity that’s less costly than Cedar Bay power.

By shuttering the plant, FPL would cut costs by $70 million, according to the utility. FPL wants to finalize the deal by Aug. 31.

“Customer savings will diminish if the closing is delayed,” the utility said.

Once the deal is complete, FPL said it would operate the plant, which the utility said is “very well run and dependable,” at about 5 percent of its capability until next year.

In 2017, as FPL’s proposed natural gas pipeline begins to bring natural gas into Florida, the Cedar Bay plant would be closed. That would cap more a million tons of carbon emissions annually, according to FPL, which would be like taking 182,000 cars off the road.

Kevin Spear|Orlando Sentinel

AWED Energy & Environmental Newsletter: March 9, 2015

The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations interested in improving national, state, and local energy & environmental policies. Our basic position is that technical matters like these should be addressed by using Real Science.

It’s all spelled out at WiseEnergy.org, which is a wealth of energy and environmental resources.

A key element of AWED’s efforts is public education. Towards that end, every three weeks we put together a newsletter to balance what is found in the mainstream media about energy and environmental matters. We appreciate MasterResource for their assistance in publishing this information.

Some simply amazing articles this time, are:

Dr. Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit

College Professor Turns Whistleblower on Global Warming

Carmen Krogh’s Turbine Health Studies Synopsis

Wind Energy Chronology: A Timeline

New Study finds major error in climate models

John Droz, Jr.|March 9, 2015

Murray Energy Coal Mine Accident In West Virginia Leaves 1 Dead, 2 Injured

March 9 (Reuters) – One miner was killed and two injured in an accident at a Murray Energy Corp coal mine in West Virginia, the company said on Monday.

The accident took place late on Sunday at the Marshall County Coal Co’s Marshall County Mine near Cameron, West Virginia, said Murray Energy, the biggest privately owned U.S. coal company, in a statement.

A manager was killed. Two other workers were hurt but conscious and they were taken to hospitals for observation, it said.

WTRF-TV in Wheeling, West Virginia, quoted the state’s Office of Miners’ Health, Safety and Training as saying initial reports indicated that a roof and mine rib had fallen.

One of the hospitalized miners has been released, the station said, citing the statement. The investigation is ongoing.

The death was the first fatality this year in a West Virginia coal mine, the miners’ safety office said. There were five in 2014.

U.S. Department of Labor numbers show that there were 16 coal mining deaths nationwide last year. The Marshall County fatality was the third this year.

Reporting by Ian Simpson|Editing by Lisa Lambert|Reuters

[It is bad enough that we use coal, the dirtiest form of fossil fuel; it is pathetic that loss of human lives is considered as part of the cost of doing business.]

College Town Cuts Ties With TransCanada Over Keystone XL, Plans to Go 100 Percent Renewable

The battle over building the Keystone XL pipeline is having an impact far from its proposed route. One of those places is the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a city of 100,000 known for its educated and engaged citizens.

The city currently purchases the electricity that powers its municipal buildings from TransCanada, Keystone XL’s parent company. But now its city council has passed a unanimous resolution advising city manager Richard Rossi not to do business with the company once its current contract expires at the end of 2015 and to look at acquiring the city’s electricity from clean, renewable sources. The measure was sponsored by councillor Dennis Carlone.

In the distinctive language of such resolutions, Policy Order 18 made clear what motivated the demand for change, stating:

“Whereas: the City of Cambridge obtains electricity for municipal operations through a contact with TransCanada Corporation; and Whereas: TransCanada is the driving force behind Keystone XL, a proposal to create a 1,179-mile pipeline to deliver tar sands oil to the U.S.; and Whereas: Jim Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has stated that the Keystone XL pipeline would mean ‘game over’ for the environment, because exploitation of tar sands oil would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts; and Whereas: it has come to the attention of the city council that our contract with TransCanada is set to expire at the end of the year; now therefore be it Ordered: that the city manager be and hereby is requested not to enter into any future contracts to obtain electricity from TransCanada; and be it further Ordered: that the city manager be and hereby is requested to investigate the possibility of entering into an agreement to obtain up to 100 percent renewable power for all municipal electricity needs.”

In an email to constituents, Carlone said, “Let’s end our dealings with TransCanada. The same logic that applies to the fossil fuel divestment campaign applies here—if TransCanada is going to continue with its business of extracting oil from tar sands, then we shouldn’t be buying our electricity from them.”

Carlone was referring to the Divest Harvard campaign, in which hundreds of students and prominent alumni such as Natalie Portman, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Cornel West and Bill McKibben are pressuring the school’s administration to remove its endowment money from fossil fuel investments.

The policy order came out of a series of discussions Carlone had with Mothers Out Front, a two-year-old Cambridge-based grassroots advocacy group describing themselves as “mothers, grandmothers, and other caregivers who can no longer be silent and still about the very real danger that climate change poses to our children’s and grandchildren’s future.” The group provided testimony at city council on behalf of the resolution.

“Our organization has a strategy for creating a clean energy future but we need your help,” said Beth Adams, the mother of two young boys, in her testimony. “We are working on the ground to get individuals to weatherize their homes, conserve their energy and to switch to clean electricity. My family has made the switch, along with 100 other people in Cambridge including councillor Carlone. I am here tonight to ask for more bold climate action and leadership from the city of Cambridge to help us ensure a livable climate for our children and for future generations.”

“I am extremely proud that we have this possibility for the city to take this bold step to say no to continuing our contact with TransCanada which is actual the corporation that has brought us tar sands and the Keystone XL pipeline which I’ve been protesting for several years now,” added Mothers Out Front member Rachel Wyon. “We have an opportunity now to close down that end of that contract and open a new contract in a new era with clean, renewable energy. We need for Cambridge to be a leader, not only for Cambridge, but for the state and for the nation.”

TransCanada spokesperson Sharan Kaur minimized the company’s climate impact, telling the Boston Globe, “Regardless of the type of product we are transporting or the kind of energy we are producing, we will continue to do so safely and in an environmentally sustainable way.”

Cambridge residents clearly don’t agree.

“As a lifelong Cambridge resident and clean energy entrepreneur, I’m thrilled to see the city potentially making a real change in our energy supply,” said Eric Grunebaum. “I hope we can move towards the front of the pack of U.S. cities which recognize the grave risks that climate disruption and destabilization poses. It would be a great thing for Cambridge to use its buying power to spur new renewable power generation, while at the same time removing our financial support from TransCanada which has demonstrated itself to be a bad actor in the growing movement to reduce our dependence on planet-cooking fossil fuels.”

Anastasia Pantsios|March 5, 2015

Fukushima’s 4th Anniversary Brings Hope Amidst Radioactive Ruins as Renewable Energy Revolution Soars

The catastrophe that began at Fukushima four years ago today is worse than ever.

But the good news can ultimately transcend the bad—if we make it so.

An angry grassroots movement has kept shut all 54 reactors that once operated in Japan. It’s the largest on-going nuke closure in history. Big industrial windmills installed off the Fukushima coast are now thriving.

Five U.S. reactors have shut since March 11, 2011. The operable fleet is under 100 for the first time in decades.

Ohio’s Davis-Besse, New York’s Ginna, five reactors in Illinois and other decrepit American nukes could shut soon without huge ratepayer bailouts.

Diablo Canyon was retrofitted—probably illegally—with $842 million in replacement parts untested for seismic impact. Already under fire for illegal license manipulations and an avoidable gas explosion that killed eight in San Bruno in 2010, Pacific Gas & Electric has plunged into a legal, economic and political abyss that could soon doom California’s last reactors.

Meanwhile, Germany is amping up its renewable energy generation with a goal of 80 percent or more by 2050.

France—once nuke power’s poster child—has turned away from new reactor construction and is moving strongly toward renewables.

Worldwide the Solartopian revolution is ahead of schedule and under budget. Predictions about its technological and economic potential are being everywhere exceeded.

More than twice as many Americans now work in solar as in coal mines. As the head of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund recently put it: “We are quite convinced that if John D Rockefeller were alive today, as an astute businessman looking out to the future, he would be moving out of fossil fuels and investing in clean, renewable energy.”

Even America’s Tea Party has developed a green wing promoting renewables.

Vital focus now centers on battery breakthroughs needed to escalate rooftop solar, electric cars and other post-nuke game-changers.

But there’s plenty of bad news. The State Secrets Act of Japan’s authoritarian Abe regime renders unreliable all “official” information from Fukushima. Grassroots nuclear campaigners are under serious attack.

At least 300 tons of radioactive water still pour daily into the Pacific Ocean. The utility wants to dump even more untreated outflow into currents that are already testing radioactive along the California coast. Details of fuel rod bring-downs and site clean-ups remain unknown.

Thyroid damage rates are soaring among downwind children. Abe is forcing evacuees back into areas that are seriously contaminated. Fukushima’s owner (Tepco) is the #1 money funnel to his Liberal Democratic Party, which flips untold billions back to the utility.

More than 128,000 petitioners asking that the world community take charge at Fukushima have been ignored by the United Nations since November, 2013.

Throughout the world decaying reactors threaten our survival. Ohio’s Davis-Besse containment is literally crumbling.  Diablo Canyon is surrounded by 15 known fault lines, one just 700 yards from the cores. New reactor sites in Finland, France and Georgia show slipshod construction, substandard parts and corrupted supervision that would make them instant threats should they go on line.

Citizen activism challenges all that. Today Solartopian activists will picket Japanese consulates worldwide.

An evolving electricity boycott to “unplug nuclear” and a growing grassroots demand for green energy herald a new era of people power.

Four years after the endless Fukushima disaster began, that renewable revolution defines our survival.

It’s a fight we can’t afford to lose. It’s a victory we must soon embrace … with the utmost relief and joy.

Harvey Wasserman|March 11, 2015

Analysis of California’s Fracking Wastewater Reveals a Slew of Toxic Chemicals Linked to Cancer and Other Illnesses

California is currently the only state that requires chemical testing of fracking wastewater and public disclosure of the findings. That’s good. What’s not so good is what the testing and disclosure reveal.

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) has completed an analysis of data released by the state during the first year of new reporting requirements. It found that the high levels of the carcinogen benzene in California’s fracking wastewater isn’t the only thing Californians have to worry about from the state’s extensive oil and gas fracking operations and the injection of chemical-laced wastewater back into the ground once drilling is completed.

The study, Toxic Stew: What’s in Fracking Wastewater, revealed the presence of hundreds of chemicals, including many linked to cancer, nervous system damage and reproductive disorders. Among the chemicals found in up to 50 percent of the samples were chromium-6, lead and arsenic, all linked to cancer and/or reproductive damage. The samples also contained thousands of times more radioactive radium than the goals set by the state, along with high levels of nitrate and chloride ions. And an another analysis last month by the Center for Biological Diversity found that 98 percent of the fracking wastewater samples tested exceeded federal and state water safety levels for benzene.

“We have long suspected that California’s fracking wastewater was full of harmful chemicals, and the first publicly available data not only confirms our suspicions but reveals just how toxic this wastewater is,” said EWG senior scientist Tasha Stoiber, the report’s co-author.

The study comes on heels of revelations that almost three billion gallons of fracking wastewater was illegally dumped last year into central California aquifers that supply drinking and farm irrigation water, leading to the shutdown of 11 wells in the state’s fracking capitol of Kern County. It also comes on the same day that the California legislature was scheduled to hold a hearing on the topic “Ensuring Groundwater Protection: Is the Underground Injection Control Program Working?”

In September 2013, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 4, mandating that oil and gas extraction companies test and disclose of the chemical content of their wastewater. And while that law provided the unprecedented amount of information that EWG analyzed, it still fell short. For instance, Center for Biological Diversity found that 150 of the 479 tests performed reported no results for benzene. The EWG report drew a similar conclusion.

“EWG’s report concludes that California’s reporting system is plagued by major flaws,” it said. “Many drilling companies failed to report full details of the chemicals their testing found, and records for some wells are missing altogether.”

“As we reviewed California’s fracking wastewater data, it became clear that the first year of this reporting system is not fulfilling its promise of providing full and transparent information,” said Renee Sharp, EWG’s director of research. “There was too little oversight by the state and not enough communication with drilling companies, which led to massive gaps with missing or incomplete information.”

Because such a high chemical content is being found in fracking wastewater in the single state where reporting is required, it opens the door to questions about the safety of wastewater being injected into wells in states where it’s not required, allowing extraction companies to exercise less concern for what might be leaking into local water supplies.

“Our findings should be a wake-up call for other states where drilling operations may be inadequately regulated,” said Stoiber.

The EWG analysis recommends that reporting requirements be strengthened to offer the public more complete information about how wastewater is disposed and what it contains, and that testing be done at every site where illegal injection has taken place. EWG is also asking that the state stop any wastewater injection that puts drinking and agricultural water at risk, even if it means shutting down oil and gas extraction operations at those locations.

Center for Biological Diversity joined in that demand.

“Cancer-causing chemicals are surfacing in fracking flowback fluid just as we learn that the California oil industry is disposing of wastewater in hundreds of illegal disposal wells and open pits,” said Center for Biological Diversity lawyer Hollin Kretzmann, who conducted that group’s analysis. “Governor Brown needs to shut down all the illegal wells immediately and ban fracking to fight this devastating threat to California’s water supply.”

Anastasia Pantsios|March 10, 2015

Researchers Discover New Material to Produce Clean Energy

Researchers at the University of Houston have created a new thermoelectric material, intended to generate electric power from waste heat — from a vehicle tailpipe, for example, or an industrial smokestack — with greater efficiency and higher output power than currently available materials.

The material, germanium-doped magnesium stannide, is described in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Zhifeng Ren, lead author of the article and M.D. Anderson Chair professor of physics at UH, said the new material has a peak power factor of 55, with a figure of merit — a key factor to determine efficiency — of 1.4.

The new material — the chemical compound is Mg2Sn0.75Ge0.25 — is important in its own right, Ren said, and he has formed a company, called APower, to commercialize the material, along with frequent collaborator Gang Chen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and two former students.

But he said another key point made in the paper is the importance of looking for materials with a high power factor, or output power density, in addition to the traditional focus on a high figure of merit, or efficiency, commonly referred to as ZT.

“Everyone pursued higher ZT,” he said. “That’s still true. But the way everybody pursued higher ZT is by reducing thermal conductivity. We were, too. But the reduction of thermal conductivity is limited. We need to increase the power factor. If thermal conductivity remains the same and you increase the power factor, you get higher ZT.”

Chart showing temperature-dependent thermal properties and ZT values.

Thermoelectric materials produce electricity by exploiting the flow of current from a warmer area to a cooler area. In the germanium-doped magnesium stannide, the current is carried by electrons.

“Pursuing high ZT has been the focus of the entire thermoelectric community …” the researchers wrote. “However, for practical applications, efficiency is not the only concern, and high output power density is as important as efficiency when the capacity of the heat source is huge (such as solar heat), or the cost of the heat source is not a big factor (such as waste heat from automobiles, steel industry, etc.)”

Germanium-doped magnesium stannide has a fairly standard figure of merit, at 1.4, but a high power factor, at 55, the researchers report. That, coupled with a raw material cost of about $190 per kilogram, according to the U.S. Geological Survey Data Series, makes it commercially viable, they said.

Ren, who also is a principal investigator at the Texas Center for Superconductivity at UH, said several competing materials have lower power factors and also more expensive raw materials.

The material was created through mechanical ball milling and direct current-induced hot pressing. It can be used with waste-heat applications and concentrated solar energy conversion at temperatures up to 300 degrees Centigrade, or about 572 degrees Fahrenheit, Ren said. He said typical applications would include use in a car exhaust system to convert heat into electricity to power the car’s electric system, boosting mileage, or in a cement plant, capturing waste heat from a smokestack to power the plant’s systems.

Jeannie Kever|University of Houston|March 06, 2015

Senators’ New GEO Act Addresses Geothermal Exploration Catch-22

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Developers in the geothermal industry report a common challenge: they often must wait years for permits before they can even determine whether a site is worth the trouble. Something must be done to address this grueling Catch-22, the industry has been saying for years. The Energy Department’s Geothermal Technologies Office and National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have also identified permitting as a major barrier to geothermal development in the U.S.

With that in mind, Senators Dean Heller (R-NV) and James Risch (R-ID) have introduced S. 562, the Geothermal Exploration Opportunities Act (GEO Act) to expedite permitting for exploratory drilling for geothermal resources.

In a keynote address at the February 24 State of the Geothermal Energy Industry Briefing, hosted by the Geothermal Energy Association (GEA), Senator Heller said he recognizes that working on federal lands is tough. Nevada, in fact, which hosts extensive geothermal and mining resources, is 85 percent federal land. “At a time when Nevada is playing a major role in the United States’ ‘all-of-the-above’ energy strategy, the last thing our geothermal entrepreneurs need is unnecessary bureaucratic red tape,” he said.

“The legislation will simplify the review process for initial exploration activities and give developers the tools they need to unleash Nevada’s abundant geothermal potential,” Heller said in a statement.

The GEO Act creates a new categorical exclusion (CX) from the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) that allows developers to conduct exploration for potential geothermal resource sites on an expedited basis. NEPA would still be applied before leasing any lands and again if a company decides to develop a geothermal electric generating facility on the site. Also, the GEO Act provides for review in certain cases where there are “extraordinary circumstances.”

Speaking at the event, Katherine Young, Senior Energy Analyst at NREL said, “Geothermal development projects can go through as many as six NEPA analyses.” Delays are caused by a variety of reasons, including competing priorities at agencies, lack of geothermal-specific funding, lack of training or inconsistencies at field offices, weather, fear of litigation, and more, Young said.

A CX can be established administratively through agency rulemaking or legislatively through congressional action. Most agencies use information from past actions to determine whether a CX is appropriate, Young said.

GEA Executive Director Karl Gawell said, “We look forward to working with Senator Heller and his colleagues in the Senate to promote enactment of this important proposal.

“As a bill that addresses the industry’s issues with the permitting process, this measure would significantly lower the upfront cost of production in an industry that is considered capital intensive,” he said.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates nearly 90 percent of the geothermal energy potential in the nation is on federal lands. NREL estimates that approval for exploration activities takes between 18 to 24 months, and geothermal industry members have reported the process can take even longer than that.

Doug Glaspey, President at US Geothermal said, “The team that started US Geothermal came to the geothermal industry from the mining industry, and one of our goals for success was to avoid Federal property if at all possible, because we knew how long it took to get through the permitting process.  Focusing on private property is one of the primary reasons we were successful and now have three operating power plants.

“If geothermal exploration can get expedited treatment similar to the oil & gas and mining industries for the first phases of drilling, and we find out quickly whether there’s a commercial resource before we get into the lengthy permitting process, that will make a big difference to the development schedule and therefore cost for geothermal development,” Glaspey said.

“Ormat Technologies supports the GEO Act, and we commend Senator Heller for tackling this hurdle to geothermal development,” said Josh Nordquist, Director of Business Development at Ormat Technologies. “Geothermal is uniquely affected by federal environmental compliance rules — a single location may require developers to carry out the NEPA exercise many times. The GEO Act would do a great deal to simplify the exploration process and shorten timelines without undermining environmental quality at project sites.

“At the same time, it would reduce the labor burden on our friends at the Bureau of Land Management, who face an ever growing list of responsibilities. We look forward to working with Senator Heller to take this bill to the finish line,” Nordquist said.

Similar legislation was introduced last year in the House of Representatives. The bill has been referred to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Leslie Blodgett|GEA|March 04, 2015

Court Rejects Plan to Expand New Mexico Coal Mine

In a crucial win for both people and wildlife, a federal judge has rejected an Obama administration plan to expand coal mining at the 13,000-acre Navajo Mine near the San Juan River in northwestern New Mexico. The plan would have allowed strip mining of 12.7 million tons of coal.

The Center joined conservation and tribal allies in fighting the 2012 plan. Last week U.S. District Judge John L. Kane said the Office of Surface Mining’s assessment of the expansion ignored the toxic impacts of burning the coal at the nearby Four Corners Power Plant, one of the most polluting coal plants in the United States.

“Coal pollution problems in the San Juan Basin are extreme. Air is polluted, water is poisoned, and endangered species are being driven to extinction,” said the Center’s Taylor McKinnon. “We won’t rest until these problems are solved.”

Get more from Mining Technology.

Land Conservation

Tampa Bay legislator pushes overhaul of growth management laws

A Pasco County state senator is proposing the biggest changes to growth management since the Legislature eliminated most state oversight of development in 2011.

One bill filed by Sen. Wilton Simpson, R-Trilby, would scrap the 45-year-old process that helped shape some of Florida’s largest developments. Another bill would streamline newer guidelines for the conversion of vast ranches and timber lands into housing projects and industrial hubs.

The old rules are outdated, Simpson said, and some newer ones are overly complicated.

But one critic, Audubon Florida’s Charles Lee, said the bills’ real goal is to “stomp on the head of any surviving vestige of growth management on the state level.”

The 2011 changes to state growth management law encouraged the state’s largest projects to go through a process called sector planning.

This process allows land owners to receive designations for uses such as housing, shopping and conservation on tracts covering more than 15,000 acres. Examples of proposed sector plans include Plum Creek in Alachua County, 133,000-acre North Ranch in Osceola County and U.S. Sugar’s 67-square-mile Sugar Hill in Hendry County.

Simpson’s Senate Bill 832 reduces the detail required in these plans, calling them “long-term visions” instead and demanding only “general” descriptions of the roads and water lines needed to serve them and of the natural resources they could harm.

As a result, said Lee and Charles Pattison, policy director of anti-sprawl group 1000 Friends of Florida, local governments will be asked to grant long-term development rights based on very little detail.

It’s like trying “to pin Jell-O to the wall,” said Lee, who suspects the law is a response to the state’s unexpectedly sharp objections to Sugar Hill last year.

“By taking out the specifics, it removes the footholds and handholds that reviewing agencies can base objections on,” he said.

Simpson said his bill is designed to “clarify the timing” of when developers are required to provide detailed information about projects. The bill calls for that to come later, when local governments consider individual projects on smaller parts of these sectors.

As chairman of the Senate Community Affairs Committee, Simpson said, he will be able to steer the bill’s progress and give weight to the concerns of environmentalists.

“We expect to get a lot of discussion from all the stakeholders,” he said. “This is a starting point.”

As for his bill to eliminate the older process of reviewing so-called developments of regional impact, or DRIs, Simpson said it won’t bring an end to the scrutiny of large projects. It will just strip that role from the state’s 11 regional planning councils, which since 1972 have reviewed DRIs such as Tampa Palms, Wiregrass Ranch in Pasco and the Gateway area of Pinellas County.

As effective as this process might have once been, Simpson said, DRI review outlived its usefulness long ago. This same function is duplicated in local governments’ comprehensive plans, which must include arrangements for working with nearby cities and counties.

Moreover, he says, developers have learned to avoid DRI review by, for example, dividing big projects into smaller chunks. And the rules are so full of exemptions, including for projects in the state’s largest counties, that they have deteriorated into the worst kind of bureaucratic roadblock: expensive, time-consuming and toothless.

“It’s not at all binding,” he said.

His Senate Bill 562 would instead put DRI-sized developments through the state “coordinated review” that applies to other major developments, including sector plans. This process allows state agencies to study and comment on plans.

But the trigger in this process that lets these agencies object is very hard to pull, Pattison said.

The bigger problem with Simpson’s plan, he added, is that it does nothing to replace the original function of DRIs — to invite nearby cities and counties to comment on plans big enough to pollute their environment or clog their roads.

That regional perspective is not provided by the comprehensive plan requirement that Simpson cited, Jacksonville land use lawyer Bob Rhodes said.

“It’s essentially the stepchild of the (1985) Growth Management Act,” said Rhodes, who once helped administer growth management for the sate and later served as an executive for development giant St. Joe Co. “It’s never been taken seriously by state review. It’s never been taken seriously by local governments.”

Both he and Lee said the way to fix the weakness of DRI law is to beef up coordination between local governments.

Dan DeWitt|Tampa Bay Times|March 7, 2015

Miami-Dade County seeks to buy rare forest

An endangered forest where a developer wants to build a Walmart has a new suitor: Miami-Dade County.

Mayor Carlos Gimenez and Commissioner Dennis Moss said Friday the county would like to purchase 88 acres near Zoo Miami, hoping to derail plans by a Palm Beach County developer to build a shopping center on the land featuring the box store, an LA Fitness, restaurants and apartments. The development plans, announced last year, set off blistering protests from residents and environmentalists.

“We feel it’s the right thing to do,” Gimenez said after announcing the purchase plans in a meeting with the Miami Herald editorial board.

However, the deal hinges on whether the county can obtain money under Amendment 1, a state constitutional amendment to help buy endangered land now being haggled over in the Florida Legislature, Gimenez said. And it also depends on whether developer Peter Cummings wants to be courted.

In a letter to Gov. Rick Scott on Friday, Gimenez and Moss asked for money — but not a specific amount — spelling out the significance of the property, which is part of the last, largest intact tract of rockland outside Everglades National Park and is home to a menagerie of endangered bats, butterflies and plants. Pine rockland, a globally imperiled forest, once covered 185,000 acres in the county, the letter said. It now grows in fragmented chunks on just 3,700 acres.

Gimenez and Moss said the county has not yet approached Cummings, who paid $22 million for the land last year and has an option to buy about 50 more acres.

Cummings, chairman of Ram Realty Services, did not respond to a message left on his cellphone or email late Friday.

The county already owns a significant chunk of the tract, including the zoo property and Larry and Penny Thompson Park, as well as land where it hopes to build Miami Wilds, a controversial 70-acre amusement park. The remaining land is split among federal agencies, the University of Miami and Ram.

Moss and Gimenez said that information about the rareness of the critical habitat, provided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service which is managing efforts to preserve the land, influenced their decision.

“We should be in a position to try to acquire the Ram property, the Coast Guard pineland and any properties we don’t currently own and preserve them and be able to protect them,” said Moss, who conceded that Ram may not be a willing partner.

“I don’t know if Ram would be interested. But at least that’s an alternative they can consider going forward as they take a look at their options,” he said.

The Walmart project has drawn fierce opposition from neighbors and environmentalists, who staged protests and collected thousands of online signatures. Federal wildlife managers also rejected Cummings’ initial plans, saying they would almost certainly harm federally protected butterflies and bats, as well as four new species that were added to the Endangered Species List after he bought the property.

Federal law doesn’t prevent developing privately-owned endangered land, but it does require Cummings to submit a critical habitat plan or risk incurring fines. An agency spokesman said this week Cummings has not yet submitted a new plan.

If the county moves forward with the Miami Wilds project, it may face even bigger hurdles since plans include land now owned by the Coast Guard and rules for building on federally-owned endangered land are much stricter.

Critics of both the Walmart development and Miami Wilds welcomed the decision.

“I’m happy to see the county reacting to the people. It restores my faith that civic engagement does make a difference,” said Tropical Audubon executive director Laura Reynolds, who suggested UM, which obtained some of the land from the government for free, pitch in on the purchase. “They need to be helping out here.”

Jenny Staletovich|MiamiHerald.com|03/06/2015

Endangered and Drained in Polk

Development Interests Attacking Environmental Land Buying

Last  year Florida voters overwhelmingly voted to spend money to restore funding to the Florida Forever program to buy conservation land.

You wouldn’t know that by reading the propaganda coming out of a group called the H2O Coalition, which is backed by Associated Industries, one of Florida’s longtime lobbying groups representing the state’s corporate establishment.

In the latest mailing,  titled “Government Land Grabs Sparking Alarms,”  they  repeat the familiar complaint about the fact  there is already a substantial amount of public conservation land  in Florida and question why there’s a need to buy more.

The answer is  simple.

First, the government is not “grabbing” anything. All public land conservation land purchases  come only after negotiations, appraisals and that only occurs after there’s some consensus on whether the land is worth buying for conservation in the first place. Except in some isolate[d] instances involving inholdings, the purchases involve willing sellers.

Second, any land that’s not protected by  conservation purchases or easements is in play for conversion to whatever use local officials can be persuaded to allow.

As I’ve pointed out in this pace before, if you want to develop water supplies, fix inadequate sewer systems and perform other public works projects, there are other funding sources available for such projects. Tapping some of those sources would require the political courage and responsible fiscal management to  charge those who would directly benefit for this rather than plunder someone else’s trust fund.

Instead, there’s an active move afoot to hijack the voters’ intent–the lottery analogy is coming up often these days–to use money intended for one purpose to pay for something else entirely.

The decision will be a major test of the integrity of the Florida Legislature and other elected leaders in Tallahassee. It’s a real simple test. Who do you serve: voters or  corporate lobbyists?

Tom Palmer|March 9, 2015

Conservation Easement Incentive Act Passed in House

In mid-February, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Conservation Easement Incentive Act, a bipartisan bill to make permanent a tax incentive for ranchers, farmers, and other landowners to commit their land to conservation instead of development. Landowners who donate the right to develop their lands through a conservation easement can maintain ownership while receiving a tax deduction. This incentive expired at the end of 2014.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/49933

Air Quality

A New Documentary On Chinese Pollution Goes Viral Despite Censorship

A powerful new documentary from China is changing the way citizens are viewing the rampant issue of pollution inside their country. Created by a former journalist named Chai Jing, she narrates in the documentary that she was never terribly concerned about smog until she brought her baby home from the hospital.

Chai Jing describes driving home and holding a handkerchief up to her infant daughter’s nose to try to stem the flow of smog into her young lungs. She says she realizes now how silly this was, but the responsibility of caring for this young life in a city full of poisons caused her fear that she had never felt before. She funneled this fear into creating Under The Dome, which chronicles how China’s industries are polluting the nation’s air with near impunity.

Well produced and containing interviews from experts, government officials and citizens who have rarely seen a blue sky, the documentary shows a striking array of visuals. Scenes of deadly river run-off (and the subsequent dead fish heaping up on its shores) are mixed with almost unbelievable plumes of pollution billowing from factories. But what has caused this situation?

The rapid growth of manufacturing plants and factories is almost certainly to blame, and it’s causing real problems for China’s citizens. In 2013, smog led to the closure of Harbin Airport, and real time tracking apps and websites detailing air quality have become popular features for those living in some of the hardest hit cities.

This photo, entitled Haze in Shanghai, captures the deadly levels of smog within China. Image credit: Galaxyharrylion.

Information released by the US State Department showed that, “Beijing’s air-quality index has averaged above 100 for 1,632 days—or about four-fifths of the time—since April 2008. Based on Chinese standards, the air-quality index has averaged above 100 for 1,105 days—or a bit more than half of the time.”

Instances of cardiovascular disease and lung cancer have skyrocketed in highly polluted areas of the country. Features within the documentary, which show viewers in graphic detail what air pollution does to a human lung over time, seemed to resonate deeply with the audience.

The documentary has been seen by over 200 million people, and it’s caused a massive social debate inside China over what the Chinese government can do to crack down on the worst polluters. Although the government, which is known for heavy handed internet censorship, initially allowed the documentary to be shown on a number of sites, according to the Financial Times this has come to a roaring halt. According to their report, news outlets have been told not to publish articles relating to Under the Dome, news reports praising the documentary have been deleted at the Xinhua News Agency, and they’ve also asked other media houses not to republish any old works on the subject. Although the video is still accessible within China, the People’s Daily, the main site where the documentary was first aired, has also taken it down.

In the documentary, which is now translated and on Youtube for the world to see, Chai travels to some of the cities in the US, like Los Angeles which once dealt with crippling smog. She looks at ways that government and people can work together to clean up their environment.

There have been some promising new environmental policies from within China in recent years, though. A focus on different sources of energy and electric cars have all helped to a certain extent. However, government oversight in these sectors remains shaky and subject to corruption.

Yet what might be most notable about Chai’s documentary on pollution is the level of understanding that it gives the viewer. Most within the country, she says–including herself–did not know the difference between fog and smog. Chai breaks it down into easily understandable visuals which help the viewer grasp what they are breathing on a daily basis. With this new information reaching hundreds of millions around the country, it will be interesting to see if the government responds to their citizens’ cries for help.

Lizabeth Paulat|March 7, 2015

Los Angeles Kids are Healthier Since Pollution Levels Have Dropped

If you think adults have trouble breathing in Los Angeles, just imagine what the city’s infamous smog is doing to the bodies of local kids. Indeed, scientists discovered that kids in the city were at an increased rate of having underdeveloped lungs, but new academic research has shown that, fortunately, L.A.’s efforts to cut down on pollution has halved the number of cases of damaged lungs over a period of 20 years, reports USA Today.

The study, now published in The New England Journal of Medicine, examined the lung health of over 2,000 kids starting back in 1994. Researchers at the University of Southern California found that, in the first five years of the study, 7.9 percent of Los Angeles kids tested as having “abnormally low lung function.” However, by the last five years of the study, just 3.6 percent showed the same problems.

This data is important because L.A. has managed to reduce its pollution levels by 40 percent since the mid 1990s. Although there are currently more cars on the road than there were two decades ago, the city achieved this drop by enacting tougher emissions standards on its vehicles. The study strongly suggests that cleaning the air allowed kids’ lungs to develop properly. It’s not an exaggeration to say that protecting kids’ lungs today has an impact on their longevity, either. In general, people with healthier lungs live much longer, and also are less likely to have heart disease or respiratory illnesses.

While most people with common sense won’t exactly be surprised by the study’s findings, it is the first research of its kind to offer substantial scientific evidence that reducing pollution has a positive impact on kids’ health. Previous studies have found that children in cities with lower pollution are healthier than those in smoggy cities, but USC’s research is the first to demonstrate how a single community’s efforts over an extended period of time can make a significant difference in public health. Hopefully, that will inspire other city officials to tackle this matter in their own backyards as well.

Government and industry officials seem pleased with the current reduced rate of pollution, but some experts who have reviewed the study don’t think it should stop there. “The current report and other studies suggest that further improvement in air quality may have beneficial public health effects,” wrote James Ware and Douglas Dockery of Harvard’s School of Public Health.

The study’s authors cautioned Los Angeles that settling for “good enough” may not be enough to even keep the improved state of kids’ health, however. Not only are more cars popping up in the city, but corporations, particularly those on the ports, are adding undue amounts of pollution to the air as well. Researchers mention other studies that shows pollution increases during periods of drought, which looks poised to plague California in the decades ahead. “We have to maintain the same sort of level of effort to keep the levels of air pollution down,” said senior author Frank Gilliland. “Just because we’ve succeeded now doesn’t mean that without continued effort we’re going to succeed in the future.”

Kevin Mathews|March 7, 2015

Moms Clean Air Force

Transportation

New Ford E-Bikes Alert Riders of Encroaching Cars Through Vibrating Handlebars

Of all people and in all places, Ford unveiled two new e-bikes this week at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona.

According to gizmag.com, the two prototypes, known as the MoDe:Me and the MoDe:Pro, will come with a 200 W motor with a 9 Ah battery. An electric pedal assist will allow for speeds of up to 15.5 mph.

The MoDe:Pro, built for commercial use like courier deliveries can be stowed inside Ford’s commercial vehicles. While the MoDe:Me is easily folded up to afford greater space when riders transfer to public transit.

The bikes are the result of a company wide competition aimed at creating a safer and more efficient e-bike journey.

Ford has also created an iPhone app, the MoDe:Link, which can automatically trigger turn signals and provide haptic alerts in the handlebars.

Colin Rabyniuk|March 6, 2015

News Release: U.S. Responds to Galena Train Derailment ‏

Chicago, Illinois (March 6, 2015) – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is responding to the derailment of a BNSF freight train that occurred near Galena, Illinois on March 5th.  EPA is conducting air monitoring, taking water samples, assessing environmental damage and setting up booms to protect nearby waterways from oil leaking from the rail cars. So far, air monitors have detected airborne particles typically associated with fires but no chemicals.

EPA has established a command post near the scene of the incident and is serving as the Federal On Scene Coordinator for federal agencies involved in the emergency response and coordinating work with state and local agencies.

Phillippa Cannon|cannon.phillippa@epa.gov; |Heriberto Leon|leon.heriberto@epa.gov|March 6, 2015

Updates on the EPA response will be posted on at: http://www2.epa.gov/il/galena-train-derailment

Solar Impulse Plane Embarks On First Fuel-Less Flight Around The World

The Solar Impulse 2, takes off from al-Bateen airport in Abu Dhabi as it heads to Muscat, on March 9, 2015, in the first attempt to fly around the world in a plane using solar energy. The first attempt to fly around the world in a plane using only solar power launched on March 9 in Abu Dhabi in a landmark journey aimed at promoting green energy. AFP PHOTO / MARWAN NAAMANI (Photo credit should read MARWAN NAAMANI/AFP/Getty Images)

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A Swiss solar-powered plane took off from Abu Dhabi early Monday, marking the start of the first attempt to fly around the world without a drop of fuel.

Solar Impulse founder André Borschberg was at the controls of the single-seater when it took off from the Al Bateen Executive Airport. Borschberg will trade off piloting with Solar Impulse co-founder Bertrand Piccard during stop-overs on a journey that will take months to complete.

The Swiss pilots say their aim is to create awareness about replacing “old polluting technologies with clean and efficient technologies.”

The plane is expected to reach its first destination — Muscat, Oman — after about 10 hours of flight.

Some legs of the trip, such as over the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, will mean five or six straight days of flying solo.

The lightweight Solar Impulse 2, a larger version of a single-seat prototype that first flew five years ago, is made of carbon fiber and has 17,248 solar cells built into the wing that supply the plane with renewable energy. The solar cells recharge four lithium polymer batteries.

The company says the plane has a 72-meter (236-foot) wingspan, larger than that of the Boeing 747, but weighs about as much as a car at around 2,300 kilograms (5,070 pounds).

The plane in June made an inaugural flight of two hours and 17 minutes above western Switzerland, just two months after it was unveiled.

After Oman, the plane will head to India, where it will make two stops, then to China and Myanmar before heading across the Pacific and stopping in Hawaii. Then it will head to Phoenix, Arizona, and New York’s biggest airport, John F. Kennedy International. The path across the Atlantic will depend on the weather and could include a stop in southern Europe or Morocco before ending in Abu Dhabi.

The round-the-world trip is expected to end in late July or even August.

Borschberg and Piccard say they want to push politicians, celebrities and private citizens to “confront the Conference on Climate Change of the United Nations, which will define the new Kyoto protocol in December 2015 in Paris.” All countries are supposed to present targets for a new global climate agreement that governments plan to adopt at the meeting.

Solar Impulse supporter Prince Albert of Monaco was present at the Monaco control center during Monday’s takeoff.

The UAE-based Masdar, the Abu Dhabi government’s clean-energy company, is a key sponsor of the flight. Additional sponsors include Omega, Google and Moet Hennessey, among others.

AYA BATRAWY| |03/09/2015

Houston Ship Channel Remains Closed After Ships Collide, Spill Chemical

LA PORTE, Texas (AP) — Efforts to clean up one of the nation’s busiest seaports after a collision between two vessels on the Houston Ship Channel spilled a flammable chemical were expected to take at least several days, U.S. Coast Guard officials said Tuesday.

About a 4-mile to 8-mile stretch of the ship channel remained closed as crews worked to deal with the gasoline additive that spilled after two 600-foot ships collided on Monday in foggy conditions.

U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Brian Penoyer said the immediate goal is ensuring that there is no danger from the spilled additive — methyl tert-butyl ether or MTBE — as it is highly flammable and can be dangerous to people if inhaled in high doses. No injuries were reported from the collision.

Three cargo tanks of the chemical on the Danish-flagged Carla Maersk were ruptured when it collided with the Liberian bulk carrier Conti Peridot. A cause of the collision has not been determined. The Carla Maersk, which remains in the channel, was carrying approximately 216,000 barrels of MTBE before the collision but officials were still trying to determine how much had been spilled.

“We have to proceed step by step, making sure the flammability, the toxicity of this cargo is absolutely safe,” said Penoyer, commander of the Houston-Galveston Coast Guard District. “We need to recognize this is an enormously complex salvage operation. … We are driven by factors on the ground, not by a desired time frame. We all live here. We want to get back to business as usual. But we have to make sure people are safe.”

Penoyer said officials have found no detectable concentrations of MTBE in the air in the shoreline communities around the spill since about midnight Monday and no sheens of the chemical have been found on the water.

“This indicates to us the risk to the public from toxic vapors or flammability of this cargo is virtually nil,” he said.

There were no shelter-in-place orders on Tuesday for communities near the 50-mile channel that connects the Gulf of Mexico to the Port of Houston.

However, there was limited access into the Morgan’s Point area, a city of about 350 residents located 30 miles east of Houston and adjacent to Galveston Bay at the entry point to the ship channel. The limited access included the area around Barbours Cut Container Terminal on the ship channel and at least one road into Morgan’s Point, said Jeff Suggs, emergency management coordinator for the nearby city of La Porte.

The Port of Houston, a major part of the ship channel, is home to the nation’s largest and one of the world’s largest petrochemical complexes. It typically handles about 70 ships per day, plus 300 to 400 tugboats and barges, and consistently ranks first in the nation in foreign waterborne tonnage, U.S. imports and U.S. export tonnage.

The financial impact of the closure of the ship channel was not immediately known. But the Barbours Cut Container Terminal, run by the Port of Houston Authority, was closed on Tuesday due to the cleanup efforts.

On Tuesday, there were 28 ships waiting to go into the Houston Ship Channel and 24 waiting to come out, said Coast Guard Petty Officer Andy Kendrick.

Officials were also working to determine what kind of impact the spill might have on wildlife by taking and testing water samples, Penoyer said. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department and other agencies were helping with this effort.

JUAN A. LOZANO| |03/10/2015

Miscellaneous

Five Tips for Nesting Box Success

As winter wanes and our thoughts turn to springtime, it’s time to think about nesting boxes for birds.  Many cavity nesting birds scout out and select nest sites starting in late February through May, so now is the time to begin making preparations.

While you can purchase a nesting box from many stores (including from National Wildlife catalog), building your own is fun, educational, and often cheaper!  If you buy a nesting box, make sure it’s not just a decorative one, which might not be used or worse, result in nestling mortality or be occupied by invasive exotic birds such as starlings.

Whether you decide build or to buy, follow the tips below to make sure that your nesting box is a success:

1. Choose your tenant.  Different bird species have different nesting needs, so it is important to tailor the nest box to the species you want.  Bluebirds, chickadees, tree swallows, wrens, woodpeckers and even screech owls and wood ducks are all cavity nesters that will use a nesting box. On that note, make sure the species you want is actually found in your area! The National Wildlife Federation’s Wildlife Library has information on some of these nesters. Also, Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s All About Birds website is a great resource to learn about the ranges of birds.
2. Quality first.  You don’t want to live in a cardboard box covered in dangerous materials, and your feathered friends don’t want that either.  The wood should be thick enough to insulate (5/8” minimum) and not treated with preservatives which may be toxic. Install drainage holes in the bottom and at ventilation holes the top so birds don’t try to raise their babies in a swamp.
3. Location, location, location.  While various species have varying preferences for nesting box location, there are general guidelines that apply for all birds.  Make sure to place your box so that birds have a clear flight path to the entrance.  Avoid placing your box in direct sunlight, as that can make it too hot. The best position provides morning sunlight and shade in the afternoon. Make sure that it is at least 6 feet above ground to deter predators.
4. Beef up the security.  Even if you do everything to make birds feel welcome, predators like raccoons, snakes, and domestic cats and invasive birds like house sparrows and European starlings can destroy your nest.  To prevent this problem, don’t include perches with your box.  Ensure that the entrance hole is no bigger than 1 1/8”, and if it is larger, check that box often to see if house sparrows have invaded.  If you notice problematic species in your area, attach a predator block to the entrance hole or a piece of metal flashing to the nest-box roof.  The predator block makes it so raccoons can’t reach in the box and grab the eggs or chicks, while the flashing prevents house sparrows from perching on the roof and deterring desired species.  It’s also recommended to install a baffle around the pole to keep out pesky predators and squirrels.
5. Don’t forget to clean! Especially if you’ve used this nesting box before, make sure you’ve cleaned out last year’s nesting material as well as any critters that may have invaded over the winter. As soon as this spring’s birds head out, remove all nesting materials to make sure the nesting box remains pest free and increase the chances that another bird family might use it again.

Keep these tips in mind, and remember that not all nesting boxes will always be a success.  Many birds prefer natural cavities in snags and logs.  But with some patience, luck, and careful observation, you can increase the chances that some lucky birds will call your backyard home.

Darcy McKinley Lester|Wildlife Promise|3/26/2015

4 Senators Tackle Overuse of Antibiotics on Farms With New Bill

Four U.S. Senators are stepping up with legislation aimed at curbing the use of antibiotics used on farm animals in a seemingly never ending battle to get the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to do something about their overuse.

Antibiotics are routinely given to healthy animals on farms in a nontherapeutic manner, or before they actually get sick, to compensate for filthy living conditions and to promote growth. The problem with this is that animals receiving low doses of antibiotics on a regular basis become reservoirs for bacterial growth that can result in antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.

These antibiotic resistant strains can than spread to us and they’re posing a serious health risk.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), at least two million people get infected with antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria every year and at least 23,000 people die as a result of those infections.

Not only are these cases taking a serious toll on our health and well being, but they’re taxing our healthcare system. The CDC also estimates that antibiotic resistance adds $20 billion in excess health care costs, while costs for lost productivity may be as high as $35 billion annually.

Despite the dangers and continued warnings about their overuse, about 80 percent of all the antibiotics sold in the U.S. continue to go to healthy farm animals who don’t need them.

After repeated failed attempts to pass legislation that would curb their use, in December 2013 the FDA announced it would be implementing a voluntary program to phase out antibiotics in food production. The agency asked pharmaceutical companies to revise labels of antibiotics that are important for treating human diseases and remove growth promotion as a use, which would change their status from being available as over-the-counter products to requiring veterinary oversight.

It was a nice step in theory, but it lacked the teeth to bring any type of meaningful change in the way antibiotics are used and left the door open to continue their regular use as long as no one says they’re being used to fatten animals up.

This week Senators Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, along with co-sponsors Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., reintroduced the Prevention of Antibiotic Resistance Act (PARA), in an effort to protect public health by restricting the use of antibiotics on farms.

PARA would require drug makers to prove that antibiotics we need that are used on farms don’t contribute to antibiotic resistance, in addition to setting limits on how long they can be used. It would also require the FDA to withdraw its approval of antibiotics that are medically important for us and are at a high risk of abuse.

“Antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest public health threats we face and we need a comprehensive response to preserve the effectiveness of antibiotics,” said Senator Feinstein. “While FDA took an important step to reduce antibiotic overuse in agriculture, we need to do more. Our bill would ensure that antibiotics approved to treat disease are not used inappropriately. I am pleased that farmers and veterinarians are working to adopt FDA rules and I hope they will collaborate on this important piece of legislation.”

Alicia Graef|March 5, 2015

New Initiative Aims to Get Kids Outdoors

Having the opportunity to get outside and experience nature at a young age is more important ever – both for kids and for conservation!

Many of us have fond memories of playing outside, exploring nature not far from our homes, or family outings to a state or national park. However, not every kid has these same opportunities. It’s alarming how little time children today spend outside. They rack up more than 53 hours of screen time each week but spend less than 4 hours playing outside.

That’s why we’re excited about President Obama’s “Every Kid in a Park” initiative to connect kids and their families to the outdoors – no matter where they live. Read more in a blog by Rebecca Wadler Lase on our Web site.

5 Ways Vertical Farms Are Changing the Way We Grow Food

No soil? No problem. From Japan to Jackson, Wyoming, plucking fresh lettuce is as easy as looking up. Vertical farms have been sprouting around the world, growing crops in places where traditional agriculture would have been impossible.

Vertical farms are multiple stories, often have a hydroponic system and some contain artificial lights to mimic the sun. These green hubs are attractive in a variety of ways since food can be produced with less water (since it just recirculates), creates less waste and takes up less space than traditional farming, ultimately leaving a smaller footprint on the environment.

Additionally, the United Nations projects that the world’s population will reach 9.6 billion people by 2050, 86 percent of whom will live in cities. For swelling cities, these urban farms give city dwellers greater access to fresh, nutritious food-year round, reducing the distance it has to travel to get to forks. Here are five more reasons why the sky’s the limit with vertical farms.

1. Vertical farms can defy any weather: In perpetually wintry Jackson, Wyoming, residents will soon be able to find fresh tomatoes, lettuce and other produce that’s not hauled in by delivery trucks. The Vertical Harvest farm is a three-story 13,500 square foot hydroponic greenhouse that will sit on a mere 30 by 150-foot plot adjacent to a parking lot. Utilizing both natural and artificial lighting (especially since the area is blanketed in snow most of the year), three stories of plant trays will revolve inside the building as well as the ceiling in a carousel-like system to maximize light exposure. The company aims to supply 100,000 pounds of year-round produce that’s pesticide-free, and will use 90 percent less water than conventional farming because it recycles its water.

Construction of the $3.7 million greenhouse kicked off last November and has already pre sold crops to restaurants, grocery stores and a hospital. In the video below, E/Ye Design architects and Vertical Harvest co-founders Penny McBride and Nona Yehia talk about their innovative building and their mission to hire adults with developmental disabilities to spur local employment.

2. Vertical farms are a great response to climate change: Urban farming has been touted by many as a solution to increasingly extreme weather caused by warmer global temperatures. In very parched California, the Ouroboros Farms in Pescadero employs an unusual group of farmers: Catfish. The farm uses an “aquaponics” system, where 800 catfish swim and dine on organic feed, and as they create waste, the crops above suck up this nitrogen-rich fertilizer. All this means no soil, pesticides or other toxins are required for the stunning variety of vegetables that are produced at the farm, from spicy greens to root vegetables. In case you’re wondering, nothing goes to waste; these fish are also sold as food. The farm also saves 90 percent less water than traditional farming.

“I honestly believe [aquaponics] is the evolution of farming,” Ken Armstrong, the founder of Ouroboros Farms, said in the video below, “because of its ability to grow faster and more densely with fewer resources it will be the methodology of growing in the future.”

3. Vertical farms adapt to disaster: We previously featured Japanese plant physiologist Shigeharu Shimamura, who converted an abandoned, semiconductor factory into the world’s biggest indoor farm, Mirai. Shimamura built the farm in 2011 in response to the food shortages caused by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan, and sparked the Fukushima nuclear disaster which irradiated much of the region’s farmland.

At 25,000 square feet, the farm can yield up to 10,000 heads of lettuce a day. That’s 100 times more per square foot than traditional methods, and uses 99 percent less water usage than outdoor fields.

A press release said that the building is powered by special General Electric LEDs that “generate light in wavelengths adapted to plant growth. While reducing electric power consumption by 40 percent compared to fluorescent lighting, the facility has succeeded in increasing harvest yields by 50 percent,” and meant that Mirai was able to offset the cost of pricy LEDs. Watch how it all works:

4. Vertical farms are becoming more advanced: It’s only the beginning for vertical farms in terms of technology. At the New Buffalo, Michigan branch of Green Spirit Farms, some plants grow under pink-tinted LED lights which “provide the correct blue and red wavelengths for photosynthesis,” according to Harbor Country News. It’s so efficient, the farm can currently grow 10 tons of lettuce in only 500 square feet of space. Green Spirit Farms president Milan Kluko also told New Scientist that he and his colleagues are developing a smartphone or tablet app that can adjust nutrient levels or soil pH balance, or sound an alarm when a water pump is malfunctioning, for example. “So if I’m over in London, where we’re looking for a future vertical farm site to serve restaurants, I’ll still be able to adjust the process in Michigan or Pennsylvania,” he said.

5. Vertical farms are saving lives: Vertical farms are being used beyond food. In fact, they’re being used to aid human health. Caliber Biotherapeutics in Bryan, Texas is home to the world’s largest plant-made pharmaceutical facility. This 18-story, 150,000 square foot facility contains a staggering 2.2 million tobacco-like plants stacked 50-feet high, that will be used for making new drugs and vaccines. Because the indoor farm is so carefully monitored and tightly controlled by technicians, these expensive plants are shielded from possible diseases and contamination from the outside world.

Barry Holtz, the CEO of Caliber, told NPR that the facility is also efficient when it comes to water and electricity: “We’ve done some calculations, and we lose less water in one day than a KFC restaurant uses, because we recycle all of it.”

Lorraine Chow|March 10, 2015

Jupiter’s Moon Ganymede Has a Salty Ocean with More Water than Earth

A salty ocean is lurking beneath the surface of Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have found.

The ocean on Ganymede — which is buried under a thick crust of ice — could actually harbor more water than all of Earth’s surface water combined, according to NASA officials. Scientists think the ocean is about 60 miles (100 kilometers) thick, 10 times the depth of Earth’s oceans, NASA added. The new Hubble Space Telescope finding could also help scientists learn more about the plethora of potentially watery worlds that exist in the solar system and beyond.

“The solar system is now looking like a pretty soggy place,” Jim Green, NASA’s director of planetary science, said during a news teleconference today (March 12). Scientists are particularly interested in learning more about watery worlds because life as we know it depends on water to thrive. [See amazing photos of Ganymede]

Scientists have also found that Ganymede’s surface shows signs of flooding. Young parts of Ganymede seen in a video map may have been formed by water bubbling up from the interior of the moon through faults or cryo-volcanos at some point in the moon’s history, Green said.  

Scientists have long suspected that there was an ocean of liquid water on Ganymede — the largest moon in the solar system, at about 3,273 miles (5,268 kilometers) across — has an ocean of liquid water beneath its surface. The Galileo probe measured Ganymede’s magnetic field in 2002, providing some data supporting the theory that the moon has an ocean. The newly announced evidence from the Hubble telescope is the most convincing data supporting the subsurface ocean theory yet, according to NASA.

Scientists used Hubble to monitor Ganymede’s auroras, ribbons of light at the poles created by the moon’s magnetic field. The moon’s auroras are also affected by Jupiter’s magnetic field because of the moon’s proximity to the huge planet.

When Jupiter’s magnetic field changes, so does Ganymede’s. Researchers were able to watch the two auroras “rock” back and forth with Hubble. Ganymede’s aurora didn’t rock as much as expected, so by monitoring that motion, the researchers concluded that a subsurface ocean was likely responsible for dampening the change in Ganymede’s aurora created by Jupiter.

“I was always brainstorming how we could use a telescope in other ways,” Joachim Saur, geophysicist and team leader of the new finding, said in a statement. “Is there a way you could use a telescope to look inside a planetary body? Then I thought, the aurorae! Because aurorae are controlled by the magnetic field, if you observe the aurorae in an appropriate way, you learn something about the magnetic field. If you know the magnetic field, then you know something about the moon’s interior.”

Hunting for auroras on other worlds could potentially help identify water-rich alien planets in the future, Heidi Hammel, executive vice president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, said during the teleconference. Scientists might be able to search for rocking auroras on exoplanets that could potentially harbor water using the lessons learned from the Hubble observations of Ganymede.

 This cross-sectional illustration shows the interior of Jupiter’s largest moon Ganymede, based on theoretical models, in-situ observations by NASA’s Galileo orbiter, and Hubble Space Telescope observations of the moon’s magnetosphere. Image released March 12, 2015.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)

Astronomers might be able to detect oceans on planets near magnetically active stars using similar methods to those used by Saur and his research team, Hammel added.

“By monitoring auroral activity on exoplanets, we may be able to infer the presence of water on or within an exoplanet,” Hammel said. “Now, it’s not going to be easy — it’s not as easy as Ganymede and Jupiter, and that wasn’t easy. It may require a much larger telescope than Hubble, it may require some future space telescope, but nevertheless, it’s a tool now that we didn’t have prior to this work that Joachim and his team have done.”

Jupiter’s moons are popular targets for future space missions. The European Space Agency is planning to send a probe called JUICE — short for JUpiter ICy moons Explorer — to Jupiter and its moons in 2022. JUICE is expected to check out Europa, Callisto and Ganymede during its mission. NASA also has its eye on the Jupiter system. Officials are hoping to send a probe to Europa by the mid-2020s.

NASA will also celebrate the Hubble telescope’s 25th anniversary this year.

“This discovery marks a significant milestone, highlighting what only Hubble can accomplish,”  John Grunsfeld, assistant administrator of NASA’s Science Mission, said in the same statement. “In its 25 years in orbit, Hubble has made many scientific discoveries in our own solar system. A deep ocean under the icy crust of Ganymede opens up further exciting possibilities for life beyond Earth.” 

Miriam Kramer|Space.com Staff Writer|March 12, 2015

It’s time to end the grisly trophy hunt

Watching grizzly bears catch and eat salmon as they swim upstream to spawn is an unforgettable experience. Many people love to view the wild drama. Some record it with photos or video. But a few want to kill the iconic animals — not to eat, just to put their heads on a wall or coats on a floor.

The spring grizzly kill starts April 1 and extends for several weeks, followed by a second fall season. By year’s end, several hundred will have died at the hands of humans, close to 90 per cent shot by trophy hunters — many of them foreign licence-holders, as the B.C. government plans to enact new regulations to allow hunters from outside B.C. to take 40 per cent of grizzlies slated for killing. The government also plans to allow foreign interests and corporations to buy and run guide-outfitting territories previously run only by B.C. residents. Local hunting organizations say the new rules put them at a disadvantage.

According to the Vancouver Observer, hunting guide associations donated $84,800 to B.C. political parties from 2005 to 2013, 84 per cent to the B.C. Liberals.

In the controversy over regulatory changes, we’ve lost touch with the fact that the grizzly trophy hunt is horrific, regardless of whether bears are killed by resident hunters or big-game hunters who pay thousands of dollars for the chance to kill a bear here — often because it’s illegal in their home countries.

Grizzlies once roamed much of North America, from Mexico to the Yukon and from the West Coast through the prairies. Habitat loss and overhunting have since shrunk their range by more than half. In Canada, 16 subgroups are on the brink of extinction, including nine in south-central B.C. and Alberta’s entire grizzly population.

Just how many bears reside in B.C. is in dispute. The government claims more than 15,000 grizzlies live here, but Raincoast Conservation Foundation science director Chris Darimont, a University of Victoria conservation biologist, puts the number closer to the government’s earlier estimate of 6,600 — before it doubled that in 1990 based on a single study in southeastern B.C.’s Flathead area.

According to a Maclean’s article, in 2000, the government “suppressed the work of one of its own biologists, Dionys de Leeuw, for suggesting the hunt was excessive and could be pushing the bears to extinction. De Leeuw was later suspended without pay for having pursued the line of inquiry.” The government then pursued a five-year legal battle with groups including Raincoast Conservation and Ecojustice to keep its grizzly kill data sealed.

Allan Thornton, president of the British Environmental Investigation Agency, which has studied B.C. grizzly management since the late 1990s, is blunt about the government’s justification. “The British Columbia wildlife department does not use rigorous science,” he told the Vancouver Observer. In 2004, the European Union banned imports of all B.C. grizzly parts into member countries after its analysis found the hunt to be unsustainable.

Even the economic case is shaky. Studies by the Centre for Responsible Travel and Raincoast Conservation conclude revenue from bear-viewing is far higher than revenue from grizzly hunting.

Grizzly population health is an indicator of overall ecosystem health, and bears are important to functioning ecosystems. They help regulate prey such as deer and elk, maintain forest health by dispersing seeds and aerating soil as they dig for food, and fertilize coastal forests by dragging salmon carcasses into the woods. Hunting isn’t the only threat. Habitat loss, decreasing salmon runs, collisions with vehicles and other conflicts with humans also endanger grizzlies. Because they have low reproduction rates, they’re highly susceptible to population decline. Hunting is one threat we can easily control.

According to polls, almost 90 per cent of B.C. residents oppose hunting grizzlies for trophies, including many First Nations and food hunters. Scientists say it’s unsustainable. The Coastal First Nations coalition has banned grizzly hunting in its territories, but the government doesn’t recognize the ban. The Raincoast Conservation Foundation has bought hunting licenses in an attempt to reduce bear kills on the coast.

Simply put, most British Columbians — and Canadians — are against the grizzly trophy hunt. It’s time for the government to listen to the majority rather than industry donors and ban this barbaric and unsustainable practice.

Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor Ian Hanington.

In Memoriam

Eugenie Clark, longtime Sarasota resident and founder of Mote Marine Aquarium and Laboratory, passed away at the end of February at the age of 92

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