According to a release put out Tuesday morning by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, a plan has been crafted by a diverse group of stakeholders that includes 35 representatives from Federal agencies, the state of Alaska, the North Slope Borough, Alaska Native organizations, industry and non-profit organizations and the Canadian Wildlife Service, to guide Polar Bear conservation in response to the 2008 threatened species determination.
“We are working with our partners here in Alaska, throughout the US, and internationally to address all threats to polar bears,” said US Fish and Wildlife Service regional director Geoffrey Haskett. “The team we have convened to develop the United States conservation management plan includes a diverse array of perspectives about polar bears, but the one thing everyone can agree on is that polar bears should be conserved, the question is ‘how?’”
The new plan being crafted, will meet the legal obligations under the Endangered Species and Marine Mammal Protection act’s and will contribute to a global plan being drafted by the parties to the 1973 agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bear.
Called the Polar Bear Recovery Team, the team’s goal is to have the draft plan available for a 60 day public comment period in the late fall of 2014. The final plan will be ready for presentation to the international partners during their 2015 meeting.
“The service received over 700,000 public comments during the listing process, so we know the public has a great interest in the fate of polar bears,” Haskett said. “The public will have a similar opportunity to weigh in on how we continue to conserve and manage polar bears into the future as outlined in the plan.”
A public announcement will be issued when the comment period opens on the draft polar bear conservation management plan.
steelhead trout in an Oregon stream. A new agreement restores buffer zones along streams where pesticides cannot be sprayed. | credit: Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife
Environmental groups and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced an agreement Friday reinstating rules meant to protect salmon and steelhead from insecticides.
The agreement sets streamside buffers prohibiting aerial spraying within 300 feet and ground spraying within 60 feet of salmon and steelhead streams. The restriction applies to five different insecticides: diazinon, chlorpyrifos, malathion, carbaryl, and methomyl.
“The agreement provides more certainty to farmers about how to protect fish. We know that our Northwest farmers and growers are good land and water stewards,” said Kim Leval, executive director of the Northwest Center for Alternatives to Pesticides, whose lawsuit along with other environmental groups prompted the agreement to restore the regulations on a temporary basis.
The center first sued the EPA 14 years ago, claiming the federal agency that regulates pesticides failed to consult with the National Marine Fisheries Service about how many different pesticides affect salmon. A settlement of that case resulted in a 2004 court-ordered injunction that first established the streamside buffers.
After that injunction expired, NCAP and other groups sued again in 2010, claiming the EPA failed to adopt permanent protections required by the fisheries service.
“It’s a long struggle to protect fish that really can’t wait to be protected,” Leval said.
The buffers remain in place until the Fisheries Service completes its analysis of how the five pesticides affect fish, at which point the EPA must implement permanent protections based on the Fisheries Service analysis.
Jawless and eel-like with concentric rings of teeth, the Pacific lamprey’s unsavory looks may be one reason why populations have declined. Now, some people are taking charge of restoring the fish.
While it’s an important source of food for juvenile salmon and contribute to rivers the way earthworms do to soil, the Pacific lamprey is not exactly a charismatic animal.
“When I first saw these fish, I thought, ‘My gosh, it looks like that Sarlacc mouth in Return of the Jedi.’ It just looks like something that’s going to swallow you up,” said Sean Connolly, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Portland, and collaborator on a 1o-year project to restore the fish. (In case you were wondering, a Sarlacc mouth is a gaping abyss of tentacles and teeth.)
“On the flip side of it, it has these incredible blue eyes. It has this look of something remarkable you’ve never see. And when you study these organisms and see them, they actually look quite vulnerable,” Connolly said.
They are vulnerable. In the past few decades, regional populations plummeted, hitting an all-time low in 2010. In the ’60s, people decided the lamprey was an eel-like river vermin worthy of extermination.
“Back in the ’60s and ’70s, people dropped rotenone in the rivers and streams to try to kill all the trash fish. Because that’s what they’re considered: trash fish,” said Patrick Luke, a biologist with the Yakama Nation Fisheries. “But at the same time, they tried to increase the production of trout, salmon, sturgeon, those types of species.”
As big hydropower project began to come online in the northwest, dams were problematic, too.
“When folks were building those facilities and thinking about passage for salmon and steelhead, they weren’t really thinking about a fish like a lamprey, which can’t jump,” Connolly said. “And so what we’ve seen is some pretty substantial declines, over time and definitely historically.”
Those declines were sharp enough to earn the lamprey the nickname “the lost fish.” Emily Washines, who works with the Yakama Nation Fisheries, says she remembers when they they started disappearing from the dinner table.
“It would be the equivalent, I guess, of going to a Mariners game and not having hot dogs anymore,” Washines said of the lamprey’s absence. “It was so much a part of our ceremonies, so much intertwined in our lives that to have the numbers sharply decrease, just within my generation, is so noticeable.”
The Pacific lamprey’s invasive cousin, the Sea lamprey, hasn’t helped. It has marauded Great Lakes waters for a while now. But here in the Pacific Northwest, where the fish is native, the larvae feed juvenile salmon and steelhead, rather than feeding on them. That’s one reason why tribes and government agencies have funded the Pacific Lamprey Restoration Plan, which involved releasing buckets of them into Yakama streams. It’s funded by government grants and through the 2008 Columbia Basin Fish Accords with Bonneville Power Administration.
“Just think what the earthworms do on land,” said Patrick Luke. “These lamprey larvae do the same thing in the substrates of rivers and streams: they aerate, they fix nutrients for microbes and organisms that feed salmon and other aquatic organisms.”
His goal is to get the fish populations back up, though maybe not to the level that earned them the nickname “Columbia River hot dog.”
Many people complain about advertisements as an obnoxious way for companies to invade our everyday lives and cram their products down our throats, but that’s not all that advertisements are good for. The advertisements on this list are excellent examples of effective advertising strategies for social issue campaigns that let their voices be heard.
A well-made advertisement is designed to grab your attention and to remain in your memory long after you’ve left it behind, and that is exactly what many of these social causes need. Getting people to think and worry about various social and environmental issues (or even simply getting them to be aware of them) is important for raising public supporting and affecting meaningful changes. A few of these ads are, in fact, commercial ads, but it’s still nice that they champion socially or environmentally aware causes/products.
Just like with commercial advertisements, having just the facts is not enough. They are important, but the ad must also appeal to the observer’s emotions. Many studies have indicated that emotion can have a powerful effect on memory formation, ensuring that memories with emotion will last longer than those without.
According to “Father of Advertising” David Ogilvy, his contemporary, Howard Gossage, said that “advertising justifies its existence when used in the public interest—it is much too powerful a tool to use solely for commercial purposes.” We definitely agree, which is why we wanted to share this list of social cause advertisements with you!
Kristin Butler George Toya, farm program manager at the Pueblo of Nambe
Indian Country Today
First Nations Development Institute announced June 3 that it is divying up $400,000 in grant awards to 12 Native organizations. The grants, made possible by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan, were awarded under First Nations’ Native Agriculture and Food Systems Initiative.
The NAFSI grant program is intended to help tribes and Native communities build sustainable food systems, increase healthy food access and awareness, and stimulate tribal economic growth and development. The 12 grants range between $20,300 and $37,500 to the following tribes and Native organizations:
Bay Mills Community College, Brimley, Michigan, $37,500
The grant will support the Waishkey Bay Farm 4-H Club and Youth Farm Stand. Waishkey Bay Farm is a sustainable farm and orchard located in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The club’s purpose is to recruit tribal youth to help grow, harvest and market fruits and vegetables.
The grant will be used to expand a small community garden. Food from the garden will be sold at the casino restaurant. Additionally, project organizers plan to sell surplus fruits and vegetables throughout the community via a mobile farmers’ market. The project aims to increase access to healthy food on the reservation while creating jobs and stimulating economic development.
Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission, Portland, Oregon, $28,125
The grant will assist tribal fishers as they build new relationships with tribes to develop and expand market opportunities for salmon products. The project aims to increase opportunities for the fishers of the Columbia River tribes.
Diné Community Advocacy Alliance, Gallup, New Mexico, $20,300
The funds will be used to help the alliance support the Healthy Diné Nation Act and Junk Food Tax, which was vetoed by the Navajo Nation president in February 2014. The act seeks to impose a 2 percent sales tax on sugar-sweetened beverages and junk food, and eliminate sales tax on fresh fruits and vegetables.
Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Community College, Hayward, Wisconsin, $37,500
The grant will be used to build capacity and expand the college’s Sustainable Agriculture Research Station (LSARS). LSARS will increase healthy food access by providing a mobile farmers’ market, online and telephone food-ordering service, and EBT-SNAP purchases.
Lakota Ranch Beginning Farmer/Rancher Program, Kyle, South Dakota, $37,500
The grant will be used to establish an active gardening club on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Fruits and vegetables harvested will be sold at a local farmers’ market to promote healthier food choices.
Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma, Ponca City, Oklahoma, $28,125
The funding will build capacity and expand the local community greenhouse. The goal is to produce twice as many fruits and vegetables in the expanded greenhouse. Additionally, the funds will be used to host weekly diabetes health education and cooking classes.
Pueblo of Nambe, Nambe Pueblo, New Mexico, $28,125
The Community Farm Project will focus on expanding to create more traditional meals with locally grown, highly nutritious food items. Nambe Pueblo is a food desert with issues of access and affordability of fresh, local produce. The farm can expand with eventual creation of a marketplace on pueblo land, instituting practices such as composting and seed saving, and working to revitalize Indigenous crops, harvesting wild plants, and raising hormone-free, locally slaughtered meats.
Sac and Fox Tribe of the Mississippi in Iowa, Tama, Iowa, $37,500
The grant will build capacity and expand the Meskwaki Grower’s Cooperative. The food co-op launched in 2013 and needs to expand to include a greenhouse, seed-saving program and food-preservation workshops, as well as increasing co-op membership.
Sust’ainable Molokai, Kaunakakai, Hawaii, $37,500
The grant will be used to launch the Molokai Food Hub, which will give the Native Hawaiian farming community better access and control over its local food system. The Food Hub will help accurately manage orders and monitor product quality.
Taos County Economic Development Corporation, Taos, New Mexico, $37, 500
The organization will lead and coordinate the Native Food Sovereignty Alliance (NAFSA), including coordinating board meetings, proactively recruiting and growing the membership base, and moving the organization toward achieving its 501(c)(3) nonprofit, tax-exempt status. The organization will also coordinate development of a three-year strategic plan and a priority list of policy areas to be addressed.
The grant will continue to fund the “Farming for the Working class” project and will enable another 10 Native Hawaiian homestead families to start actively farming their fallow land. The program consists of hands-on farm training, paired with classroom-based learning and business training.
FILE – In this Nov. 6, 2013 file photo is a warning placard on a tank car carrying crude oil near a loading terminal in Trenton, N.D. U.S. Matthew Brown AP Photo
The rapid increase of trains carrying crude oil across the region has raised alarm bells in the wake of a series of serious accidents. Communities and first responders say they can’t adequately prepare for possible disasters because railroads are not required to give any information on the shipments.
That’s about to change, at least to some extent, with a new regulation that takes effect Friday.
An emergency order from the U.S. Transportation Department will require railroads to tell states how many trains carrying highly-volatile Bakken crude are expected to travel through each week, and on which routes.
The order was issued just a week after the latest oil train accident — a derailment in Lynchburg, Virginia — that sent eight-story fireballs into the sky.
A ‘Small Step’; ‘Hardly Where We Need To Be’
“I think it’s a very small step in the right direction,” said Eric de Place, policy director with Seattle’s Sightline Institute, an environmental think tank that has been reporting on what it calls an emerging “pipeline on rails.” He says the new federal rules don’t go far enough.
“Let’s keep in mind, this is not requiring them to use safer tank cars. This is not requiring them to slow down in our neighborhoods. This is not requiring them to inform emergency responders of the dangers,” de Place said. “All they’re having to do is tell us some very rough figures about how many potentially explosive trains are in our states. So, it’s better than nothing, but it’s hardly where we need to be.”
Sightline has been documenting the growth in oil train traffic. DePlace says nationally, it’s increased nearly 60-fold over the past five years.
Info Will Help Communities Better Prepare
Barb Graf, director of emergency management for the city of Seattle, testified at a recent hearing on rail safety before the U.S. Senate.
She says fire departments need to know when mile-long oil trains are passing through. The new rule will help communities better prepare for disasters “in the same way that we have ongoing discussions with geologists and scientists about what’s our earthquake threat, what’s the recurrence rate and that type of thing,” she said.
“This just gives us more information about the kinds of hazardous materials that would be in our community at any given time,” Graf said.
Advocates for more regulation say they’ll keep pushing. They want more specifics on the shipments, as well as tougher standards for tank car safety. They also say it should apply to all shipments of oil by rail, not just the longest trains carrying Bakken crude.
“Pipelines aren’t normally shut down for maintenance shortly after being started up. They may have planned it but something is wrong,” an industry insider told DeSmogBlog. “A two day shutdown on a new line raises suspicions.”
“The Gulf Coast Pipeline is the safest oil pipeline built in the United States to date,” TransCanada spokesman David Sheremata told DeSmogBlog.
TransCanada states this claim often, despite the serious issues cited by pipeline regulators in warning letters, along with the two new special conditions added to the existing 57 required if the northern section of the pipeline is permitted.
Can that statement be true after an undisclosed number of new girth welds were introduced into the pipeline during the repair process? Despite the high weld rejection rate that regulators warned TransCanada about, a new pressure test was not required to check the new welds.
“During the first week 26.8 percent of the welds required repairs, 32.0 percent the second week, 72.2 percent the third week, and 45.0 percent the fourth week. On September 25, 2012, TransCanada stopped the Spread 3 welding after 205 of the 425 welds, or 48.2 percent required repairs.” PHMSA wrote TransCanada on September 26, 2013.
“Let’s remember, TransCanada claimed that the Keystone I pipeline system would be one that would ‘meet or exceed world-class safety and environmental standards’ and leak an average of 1.4 times a decade,” Rocky Kistner, a communications associate for the Natural Resources Defense Council, wrote on the NRDC‘s blog.
“In just its first year of operation, Keystone leaked 14 times, a hundred times more leaks than TransCanada predicted. On its Canadian side, the pipeline has leaked at least 21 times.”
TransCanada’s Bison Pipeline in Wyoming also had to be shut down after a portion of it ruptured six months after it was put into operation.
Evan Vokes, former TransCanada employee turned whistleblower, told the Wyoming Tribune that speed was put ahead of safety on that project. He noticed problems with pipe alignment welding, excavation and backfilling, among other things while working on that project.
“It is questionable that a pipeline which generates millions of dollars a day, in operation for barely six months, is suddenly off,” Kathy DaSilva, an activist representative of the Tar Sands Blockade, told DeSmogBlog.
This latest incident led the Tar Sands Blockade to renew its call for Keystone XL‘s southern leg to remain shut down until further testing is done to ensure the pipeline’s integrity.
The advocacy group Public Citizen also called for a new pressure test on the pipeline.
“Given the stakes – the looming potential for a catastrophic spill of a hazardous crude along a pipeline that traverses hundreds of streams and rivers, and that comes within just one or two miles of some towns and cities – it would be irresponsible for the federal government to allow tar sands crude to start flowing through the southern leg without ordering a complete hydrostatic retesting of the line and a thorough quality assurance review,” their report on the Keystone XL‘s southern route concluded.
The big question remains: is the Obama administration playing Russian roulette with Texas and Oklahoma aquifers by not requiring the retesting on the Gulf Coast Pipeline?
This image of the coal-fired plant in Colstrip, Mont., was made in the 1980s by Montana native David T. Hanson. It was part of an exhibit at Modern Museum of Art in New York. | credit: David T. Hanson |
SEATTLE — The Obama administration’s new rules to cut carbon emissions fueled energy sector leaders’ conversations about the future of coal in the West during their gathering here this week.
The Western Conference of Public Service Commissioners on Wednesday wrapped up its conference — a gathering of the people who decide where the region’s power comes from and how to regulate it.
“The answer is a resounding yes, the question is how much?” said Travis Kavulla with the Montana Public Service Commission. He’s one of the guys calling the shots on what kind of power his state produces, and what it will cost consumers. Montana mines and burns a lot of coal. So, as you might imagine, Kavulla’s not too pleased with the EPA right now.
“The bottom line is that the EPA seems set on establishing state by state goals, based on particular building blocks, a particularly infantilizing term, I think,” he told the crowd.
The “building blocks” include boosting energy efficiency, getting more renewable energy on the grid and using less coal.
Puget Sound Energy, an investor-owned utility based in Bellevue, Washington, gets more than 15 percent of its power from Montana coal. PSE is under mounting pressure from voters and the state government to kick its coal habit, and the new EPA rules add to that pressure.
“It’s very easy for part of our country to be rejoicing after yesterday and say ‘There, we’re just going to shut it all down.’” Well, that’s not going to work,” said Kimberly Harris, president and CEO of Puget Sound Energy. “You cannot just shut down coal units and expect for the grid to continue to operate. And we have an obligation to serve.”
Harris says that transitioning off of coal is possible, but it will take time – and states will have to work together.
“Any type of a retirement has to be transitional because we have significant decisions to make and investment and planning to do as a region. This really needs to be a regional approach,” Harris emphasized.
Washington’s in good shape to meet the EPA requirements, pretty much just by phasing out its only coal plant, which operates in Centralia. But Montana is going to need help lowering its CO2 emissions and getting more renewables online.
But who will will pay for it?
“From an investor’s point of view, all of this looks like a giant investment opportunity,” said Mike Weinstein, an investment analyst with UBS Securities in New York.
Weinstein said investors will be looking to throw money at new technology to cut CO2 emissions at the smokestack or sequester those emissions underground.
Some other winners, according to Weinstein? Renewable energy, natural gas and maybe nuclear power.
He also stressed the role of energy efficiency in helping utilities meet the EPA requirements, and keep costs down.
OccupyReno MediaCommittee/Flickr Creative Commons A Monsanto protest in Reno, Nevada
Indian Country Today
On May 8, Vermont set history by becoming the first state in the country to require genetically modified (GMO) food to be labeled.
When Gov. Peter Shumlin (D) signed the bill into law, he released the statement: “We believe we have a right to know what’s in the food we buy.”
But one hurdle still stands in the state’s way: a likely lawsuit from Monsanto, the world’s largest GMO producer.
According to a recent report on labeling requirements from the nonprofit Council for Agricultural Science and Technology, at least 25 states are considering similar legislation, but with trigger clauses like Connecticut and Maine that require multiple other states to pass GMO labeling laws before theirs take effect.
“If Vermont wins, it might not be long until the entire country mandates GMO labeling, giving consumers the information to make their own choices,” states a petition by the SumOfUs community (sumofus.org) that urges people to sign to protest Monsanto suing Vermont for its decision to label GMO foods.
Attorney General Bill Sorrell told Vermont Public Radio in May that he would be “very surprised” if Monsanto doesn’t sue the state, reported the Washington Post. State officials have even guarded against a lawsuit with a copy.5 million legal defense fund, which would be paid for with settlements won by the state.
Among Monsanto’s outlandish claims is that a labeling requirement would be a violation of the company’s freedom of speech. In recent years, Monsanto has even gone as far as to partner with DuPont and Kraft Foods to grossly outspend and defeat supporters of similar laws in California and Washington, explains sumofus.org.
Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead talks with Millennium Bulk Terminals general manager Bob Steward about the loading dock at the proposed coal export terminal site in Longview, Washington. | credit: Cassandra Profita
LONGVIEW, Wash. — A controversial coal export terminal proposed for this Columbia River town has a big supporter from the state of Wyoming.
Its governor was in Longview Tuesday to tour the old aluminum smelter where the The Millennium Bulk coal export terminal would move up to 44 million tons a year of Wyoming coal off trains and onto ships bound for Asia.
It’s a terminal he says is important to coal producers in his state – especially as the industry faces new regulations on coal-fired power plants in the U.S.
Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead said he sees coal exports as way to expand the market for the 400 million tons of coal his state produces annually. He’d like to see more terminals like the Millennium project, which would export up to 44 million tons of coal per year.
“That’s a lot of coal, but relative to the amount of coal we produce it’s 10 percent,” Mead said. “So this port and other ports are important to Wyoming in terms of the coal industry.”
Gov. Mead on the bridge of a ship delivering alumina.
But what he calls “unreasonable” new regulations on coal-fired power plants in the U.S. are making it harder to expand coal markets here. Even before those rules came out, coal producers in his state had been looking for Asian buyers for all that Wyoming coal.
“We’ve got to have a continuation in a real way, in an economical way so these companies can keep going, and exports are part of that future,” Mead said.
Companies hoping to be part of that future have proposed a half-dozen coal export terminals around the Northwest. The three proposals still under consideration face a long permitting process and strong local opposition.
In all they would help transport roughly 100 million tons of coal annually from Wyoming and Montana to Asia.
Mead said expanding the overseas coal trade with export terminals like Millennium will be good for the U.S. and its trading partners. But not everyone sees the benefits he does.
Mead’s visit sparked a protest from opponents of the Millennium project. Outside the terminal site, about 30 people gathered with a bucket of coal.
Protesters put a bow on a bucket of coal for Mead.
Diane Dick of the opponent group Landowners and Citizens for a Safe Community spoke at the protest. She said her group has a bucket of coal that came from Wyoming, and she wants to give it back to Gov. Mead while he’s in town.
“We believe his coal should be kept in the ground in Wyoming,” she said. “We don’t want it here. We don’t want it shipped to Asia, where it will be polluting the skies in Asia and will blow back pollution and creating poisonous air for us.”
Mead followed the terminal site tour by meeting with a group of Washington legislators in Longview. He said he wanted to hear their concerns and help answer their questions to build support for the Millennium project.
