British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest is the one place in the world where grizzly bears, black bears and the iconic white spirit bear all live together.
The nine members of Coastal First Nations—Wuikinuxv, Heiltsuk, Kitasoo/Xai’xais, Nuxalk, Gitga’at, Metlakatla, Old Massett, Skidegate, and the Council of the Haida Nation—banned the trophy hunt for bears in their territories effective September 2012.
This year, British Columbians and allies from around the world are coming together to show their support for this tribal ban and an end to the practice of trophy hunting bears in the Great Bear Rainforest.
By Karen Pickett, Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters
On Monday morning, Sept. 9, organizers from Idle No More Bay Area and supporters converged on the Canadian Consulate in San Francisco, Calif. to say “Shame on Canada.” They called for a stop to the disastrous effects on First Nations people and others in the sacrifice zone in Alberta, Canada due to tar sands mining and steam drilling, citing loss of livelihood, toxic contamination, cancers, and damaged and sick children. People called for a rapid wind down of tar sands mining, a halt to Keystone XL pipeline, sequestration of the wastewater, restoration of the devastated region, and reparations. Pull in the tentacles of the oil companies from around humanity’s neck!
During the several hours that people demonstrated, sang, prayed and drummed at the Consulate, a proclamation and list of demands was signed by everyone present and delivered to Consulate officials by Penny Opal Plant, one of the organizers of the demonstration.
Other co-sponsors of the on-going protests against Tar Sands development and the Keystone pipeline include Rising Tide, Do the Math and 350.org.
Video: Neil Young says Fort McMurray looks like ‘Hiroshima’
Paul Koring and Kelly Cryderman
WASHINGTON/CALGARY — The Globe and Mail
Sep. 10 2013
Canadian rocker Neil Young has waded into the bitter debate over Alberta’s vast oil sands and the controversial Keystone XL pipeline planned to funnel one million barrels a day of Canadian crude to huge refineries in Texas and Louisiana.
Mr. Young said in a news conference on Monday that oil sands extraction was killing native peoples, igniting a new firestorm in the ongoing battle between proponents who want the massive reserves extracted and an array of opponents who argue that burning the carbon-heavy crude will seriously exacerbate global warming that threatens the planet.
Neil Young arrives for the film “Neil Young Journeys” at the Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto on Sept. 12, 2011. (Nathan Denette/THE CANADIAN PRESS)
“The fact is, Fort McMurray looks like Hiroshima,” Mr. Young said in Washington. “Fort McMurray is a wasteland. The Indians up there and the native peoples are dying.”
Keystone opponents were quick to cheer Mr. Young’s blunt intervention.
Sierra Club spokesman Eddie Scher said: “Neil Young has been expressing and exposing hard truths his whole career,” adding: “Looks like he’s at it again.”
Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver – who was in Washington himself on the same day for a meeting with U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, took a different view.
“I am a big fan of Neil Young’s music,” Mr. Oliver told the Globe. “But on this matter we disagree because Keystone XL will displace heavy oil from Venezuela which has the same or higher greenhouse gas emissions, with a stable and secure source of Canadian oil.”
The singer is among a growing number of well-known activists speaking out against Keystone XL “Neil Young is speaking for all of us fighting to stop the Keystone XL,” said Jane Kleeb, Executive Director of Bold Nebraska, a coalition of landowners and others opposed to the $5.3-billion Keystone XL pipeline. “When you see the pollution already caused by the reckless expansion of tar sands, you only have one choice and that is to act.”
Mr. Young, one of Canada’s best-known singer-songwriters since the 1960s, told a conference in Washington Monday that he recently travelled to Alberta, where “much of the oil comes from, much of the oil that we’re using here, which they call ethical oil because it’s not from Saudi Arabia or some country that may be at war with us.”
As for Keystone, Mr. Young lampooned claims that it would create lots of jobs.
“Yeah it’s going to put a lot of people to work, I’ve heard that, and I’ve seen a lot of people that would dig a hole that’s so deep that they couldn’t get out of it, and that’s a job too, and I think that’s the jobs that we are talking about there with the Keystone pipeline,” he said.
He spoke at the U.S. National Farmers Union conference in Washington, intended to support alternative fuels, such as ethanol, which he did at length, slamming Big Oil and talking about his own LincVolt, an old Continental that runs on ethanol and electricity.
Young said he drove the 1959 Lincoln, which runs on ethanol and electricity, to Fort McMurray while traversing the continent from his California home to Washington over the last two and half weeks.
At the same time, Canada’s Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver was making the latest in a long series of lobbying visits by ministers and premiers intended to sway President Barack Obama to approve the long-delayed pipeline.
Ms. Kleeb wasn’t impressed. “Prime Minister Harper can write all the memos he wants, Joe Oliver can say anything but the reality is people are dying and the alliance between cowboys and Indians is stronger than any K Street lobbyists Canada hires.”
All Risk, No Rewards, another group opposed to Keystone XL also echoed Mr. Young’s comments.
“Canada’s First Nations know all too well the risks of Keystone XL and the risks of expanding the tar sands,” said Rachel Wolf, a spokeswoman for the group. Ranchers in Nebraska and First Nations peoples in Canada have more in common than one might think: they’re ‘Ordinary People’ who share a common goal to protect their land and protect their water, and they both know that these tar sands expansion projects are all risk and no reward.”
Mr. Young described his recent visit graphically. “The fuel’s all over – the fumes everywhere – you can smell it when you get to town. The closest place to Fort McMurray that is doing the tar sands work is 25 or 30 miles out of town and you can taste it when you get to Fort McMurray. People are sick. People are dying of cancer because of this. All the First Nations people up there are threatened by this.”
Mr. Young’s comments don’t sit well with Fort McMurray’s mayor, who called them “blatantly false.”
Melissa Blake, mayor of the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, which includes Fort McMurray, said she has no problem with people having environmental interests at heart.
But she said Fort McMurray is totally different from Mr. Young’s characterization. With his power in the music industry, she’s disappointed “there wasn’t more rationality to it.”
“When people say it’s a wasteland, it really and truly isn’t,” Ms. Blake said. “When it comes to the community of Fort McMurray, you’re overwhelmed frankly by the beauty of it. You’ve got an incredible boreal environment that’s all around you. You proceed further north into the oil sands and inevitably, there’s mining operations that will draw your attention because they take up large chunks of land.”
The mayor said she always invites outsiders to the region to see the landscape, and to see oil sands companies’ reclamation efforts.
Danielle Droitsch, director of the National Resources Defense Council, said “Seeing tar sands development up close is shocking” adding “these are massive operations and industry hopes to triple its production over the next 20 years.”
Blocking Keystone XL will thwart expansion of oil sands production, according to the NRDC, but Mr. Oliver says Canada will just export its reserves elsewhere.
With files from Steven Chase and The Canadian Press
A judge finds that the city failed to turn over emails requested by Cedar Grove Composting as public records.
September10, 2013
By Bill Sheets, Herald Writer
EVERETT — The city of Marysville was ordered Monday by a judge to pay more than $143,000 to Cedar Grove Composting for violations of the state public disclosure law.
The Everett composting company last year sued Marysville in Snohomish County Superior Court over the city’s withholding of emails between it and a consultant.
In an unusual move, Judge Richard T. Okrent also ruled that the city should have disclosed emails related to Cedar Grove that were sent internally at the consulting firm, Strategies 360.
Cedar Grove officials did not respond Monday to an email seeking comment.
The city of Marysville, the Tulalip Tribes and many who live in Marysville and Everett have been battling Cedar Grove for several years over allegations that the company’s Smith Island plant has been emitting offensive odors in the area.
Strategies 360 was performing public relations work for Marysville related to the issue.
The consulting firm already had been hired by the city to lobby on transportation and other issues and had been paid a flat rate of $7,500 per year for all the combined work, according to city administrator Gloria Hirashima.
Last year, Cedar Grove filed a public disclosure request with the city for all written communications with Strategies 360 related to the composting company. The city supplied most of the emails but withheld a number of them, claiming they were exempt from public disclosure because of attorney-client privilege. The emails contained discussions of legal strategy, Hirashima said.
Okrent ruled that 15 of those emails did not meet that standard. Though Marysville released the emails before Cedar Grove filed the lawsuit, the city should have released them sooner, the judge ruled.
The emails contained possible strategies and approaches, some of which the city used and some it didn’t, Hirashima said. For example, the city acted on the consultants’ suggestion to have city and Tulalip tribal leaders send letters to elected officials, she said.
The emails also revealed that the city and Strategies 360 helped residents write letters to newspapers and with other activities, such as applying for grants, according to the original complaint by Cedar Grove.
Hirashima said there’s nothing wrong with that in itself.
“We had literally hundreds of citizens asking us for help on this issue,” she said.
Mike Davis, leader of the Cedar Grove opposition group Citizens for a Smell Free Snohomish County, acknowledged he had help with letter writing but said he took the initiative.
“Any implications that we were created by the city of Marysville or that they ran the citizens group is not true,” he said. “I went to my elected officials as any citizen should. We were offered and gladly accepted help from the city. Fix the smell, I go away, it’s that simple.”
Also, Okrent ruled the city was negligent in failing to track down 19 other emails in response to Cedar Grove’s disclosure request.
Marysville also should have released internal Strategies 360 emails pertaining to Cedar Grove, the judge wrote in the ruling signed on Monday. The firm was acting as an employee of the city on the matter, he said.
“Marysville knew what Strategies was doing, paid them for those activities, was generally aware that there were documents in Strategies’ possession created during those activities, and discussed the contents of some of those documents with Strategies,” Okrent wrote.
The attorney working on the case for Marysville, Jeff Myers of Olympia, said the ruling broke new legal ground.
“I think it caught everyone by surprise that the court did what we thought was an unprecedented extension of the public records act to records the city never had,” Myers said. “Those were things the city never saw, didn’t possess and some of it was done for other clients.”
Myers said he’s specialized in public disclosure law for nearly 10 years and “it’s the first time to my knowledge it’s been done anywhere,” he said of the ruling.
Hirashima said the ruling sets an ominous precedent in terms of how the city and other government agencies must respond to disclosure requests in the future.
“This is a distraction from trying to get the (odor) issue addressed,” she said. “There are tools Cedar Grove has to inflict punishment back.”
Cedar Grove two years ago was fined $119,000 by the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency for odor violations at its plants in Everett and Maple Valley in King County.
That amount was applied toward Cedar Grove’s $200,000 contribution to a $375,000 study of odors in the Snohomish River Delta run by the Clean Air Agency.
The city of Seattle and King County, both of which send yard and food waste to Cedar Grove, put up $100,000 and $50,000, respectively. The Clean Air Agency is spending $25,000.
Northern Spotted Owl Photo source: WikipediaBarred Owl Photo Source: Wikipedia
September 10, 2013 @ 9:14 am
GRANTS PASS, Oregon (AP) – Federal wildlife officials are moving ahead with an experiment to see if killing a rival owl will help save the northern spotted owl from extinction.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Tuesday it gave final approval to a plan to send trained hunters into the woods to shoot barred owls.
Barred owls migrated from the East and arrived in spotted owl territory in 1959. The agency says they have since become the biggest threat to spotted owl survival.
Plans are to kill or capture barred owls in four study areas in Washington, Oregon and Northern California over the next four years.
The spotted owl forced big changes in management of national forests when environmentalists won lawsuits to protect the old growth forests where the owls live from logging.
(Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
A company hauling human waste from Spokane into Idaho as fertilizer has sparked a legal fight with the Coeur d’Alene Tribe.
Gobers Pumping and Repair, with business partner St. Isidore Farms, will have to prove that injecting 54,000 gallons of sewage from septic tanks and portable toilets into a 150-acre patch of privately owned farmland just inside the reservation boundary near Plummer poses no health risk.
The case has prompted a visceral reaction from tribal leadership and pits expert witnesses testifying to the safety of the interstate sludge against worried hunters and anglers.
“It makes me sick just thinking about it,” said Chief Allan, chairman of the Coeur d’Alene Tribal Council.
The tribe filed suit against the two companies in its own tribal courts earlier this year seeking to ban the delivery of waste onto St. Isidore property. While the farm’s property lies outside tribe-owned lands, it is on the reservation, the tribe contended, and the injection process was feared to pose a health risk to grazing animals near the site hunted by tribal members.
In March, the tribal council passed a resolution aimed at forcing the fertilization process off reservation lands by limiting solid waste disposal to council-approved locations.
St. Isidore and Gobers took the dispute to U.S. District Court and used testimony from Tom Hess, a professor of biological and agricultural engineering at the University of Idaho.
“The land treatment is … one of the main ways they treat septage,” Hess said, referring to the semisolid waste that is pumped from residential retention tanks. The process is particularly common on the East Coast, he said.
Hess visited the St. Isidore site in June, gathering soil samples and testing for the presence of disease-causing bacteria in the soil. He determined the site “poses neither threat nor harm to the health and welfare of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe or its members,” according to court records.
Scott Fields, Water Resource Program administrator for the tribe, disagreed.
After reviewing the St. Isidore application approved by the Department of Environmental Quality, Fields expressed concern that the waste posed “a risk to the water quality of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe of Indians’ Reservation.”
Several tribal members also offered declarations expressing concern about the animals grazing nearby.
The injection process shoots the sewage into the ground about eight inches beneath the surface, said Gregg Smith, lead counsel for St. Isidore and Gobers. Hess also concluded the sewage posed no risk to wildlife.
Returning the case to the tribal court to settle the health risk, U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge said the question of whether a threat exists “must be analyzed objectively based on all the facts available.”
Smith called the ruling “frustrating,” disputing many of the claims made by the tribe in response to the ruling. A determination has not yet been made whether to pursue an appeal in federal court or take the argument back to the tribal court in Plummer.
The Puyallup Tribe of Indians is looking at this year’s large pink salmon run that is showing up in the White River but is causing a backup in the fishway, causing a problem for other salmon species to make it upstream. The study will look at the delay associated with the arrival of pinks.
People are now used to long-term weather forecasts that predict what the coming winter may bring. But University of Washington researchers and federal scientists have developed the first long-term forecast of conditions that matter for Pacific Northwest fisheries.
By Hannah Hickey | University of Washington News and Information
“This is an experiment to produce the first seasonal prediction system for the ocean ecosystem. We are excited about the initial results, but there is more to learn and explore about this tool – not only in terms of the science, but also in terms of its application,” she said.
A school of sardines. The tool will soon produce a months-long outlook for Pacific Northwest sardine habitat.Image-Wikimedia / Alessandro Duci
In January, when the prototype was launched, it predicted unusually low oxygen this summer off the Olympic coast. People scoffed. But when an unusual low-oxygen patch developed off the Washington coast in July, some skeptics began to take the tool more seriously. The new tool predicts that low-oxygen trend will continue, and worsen, in coming months.
“We’re taking the global climate model simulations and applying them to our coastal waters,” saidNick Bond, a UW research meteorologist. “What’s cutting edge is how the tool connects the ocean chemistry and biology.”
Bond’s research typically involves predicting ocean conditions decades in advance. But as Washington’s state climatologist he distributes quarterly forecasts of the weather. With this project he decided to combine the two, taking a seasonal approach to marine forecasts.
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration funded the project to create the tool and publish the two initial forecasts.
“Simply knowing if things are likely to get better, or worse, or stay the same, would be really useful,” said collaborator Phil Levin, a biologist at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center.
Early warning of negative trends, for example, could help to set quotas.
“Once you overharvest, a lot of regulations kick in,” Levin said. “By avoiding overfishing you don’t get penalized, you keep the stock healthier and you’re able to maintain fishing at a sustainable level.”
The tool is named the JISAO Seasonal Coastal Ocean Prediction of the Ecosystem, which the scientist dubbed J-SCOPE. It’s still in its testing stage. It remains to be seen whether the low-oxygen prediction was just beginner’s luck or is proof the tool can predict where strong phytoplankton blooms will end up causing low-oxygen conditions, Siedlecki said.
The tool uses global climate models that can predict elements of the weather up to nine months in advance. It feeds those results into a regional coastal ocean model developed by the UW Coastal Modeling Group that simulates the intricate subsea canyons, shelf breaks and river plumes of the Pacific Northwest coastline. Siedlecki added a new UW oxygen model that calculates where currents and chemistry promote the growth of marine plants, or phytoplankton, and where those plants will decompose and, in turn, affect oxygen levels and other properties of the ocean water.
The end product is a nine-month forecast for Washington and Oregon sea surface temperatures, oxygen at various depths, acidity, and chlorophyll, a measure of the marine plants that feed most fish. Coming this fall are sardine habitat maps. Eventually researchers would like to publish forecasts specific to other fish, such as tuna and salmon.
The researchers fine-tuned their model by comparing results for past seasons with actual measurements collected by theNorthwest Association of Networked Ocean Observing Systems, or NANOOS. The UW-based association is hosting the forecasts as a forward-looking complement to its growing archive of Pacific Northwest ocean observations.
Siedlecki’s analyses suggest the new tool is able to predict elements of the ocean ecosystem up to six months in advance.
Researchers will present the project this year to the Pacific Fishery Management Council, the regulatory body for West Coast fisheries, and will work with NANOOS to reach tribal, state, and local fisheries managers.
If the forecasts prove reliable, they could eventually be part of a new management approach that requires knowing and predicting how different parts of the ocean ecosystem interact.
“The climate predictions have gotten to the point where they have six-month predictability globally, and the physics of the regional model and observational network are at the point where we’re able to do this project,” Siedlecki said.
Turns out sea otters do much more than just explain discount rates with aplomb: The adorable little buggers also clean up our oceanic messes. Nitrogen and phosphorous runoff from agricultural pollution creates algal blooms that choke the life out of estuaries — unless these thoughtful, fuzzy Dysons are around. With sea otter populations expanding into California habitats like Elkhorn Slough, where they haven’t been seen for 100 years or more, scientists are watching sea grass and kelp ecosystems return, even though humans are still proverbially shitting the proverbial waterbed. Sci-blogger-genius Ed Yong has more:
Sea otters grab shellfish and other prey from the sea floor and smash them open on the surface, using rocks as hammers and their own bellies as anvils. This makes it very easy for scientists to record what they’re eating, and Hughes used decades of such records to show that the Eklhorn sea otters are crab-specialists. “We estimate that they can easily remove 400,000 crabs per year in an area the size of 7 football fields,” he says. “That’s a huge effect, which cascades down to affect the seagrass.”
The crabs eat other animals including an orange sea slug and a shrimp-like isopod, both of which graze on algae. So by killing the crabs, the otters inadvertently protect the slugs and isopods, which in turn protect the seagrass by nibbling away at encroaching algae. This complicated four-part chain reaction (or “trophic cascade”) is what keeps Elkhorn Slough in its current healthy state.
To make sure the otters were responsible, researchers ran otter simulations — which sadly did not include grad students in discount otter suits bought from the local Furry-in-a-Hurry outlet. Ahem:
His team ringed off small areas of estuary and added fixed amounts of seagrass, slugs and isopods. Then, they added either the small crabs you find when sea otters are around, or the large ones you get when the otters are absent. The bigger crabs did indeed eat more grazers, leading to more algae and less seagrass.
Sea otters are near the top of their food chain, and it’s not surprising that they exert a strong top-down influence upon other local animals. In iconic studies during the 1970s, James Estes established them as classic examples of keystone species – those that are disproportionately influential for their numbers. They protect kelp forests by eating the sea urchins that would otherwise raze them down. With otters, you get underwater jungles of wavy green kelp. Without the otters, you get bare “urchin barrens”.
“The really interesting discovery here is that otters counter the detrimental impact of eutrophication,” says Estes. In other words, their top-down influence is strong enough to nullify the bottom-up effects of nutrients entering the slough.
As sea otter populations expand into their historic range, their tidy aftershocks could help rehabilitate ecosystems all the way to Baja California. If this also means I can get to Mexico by hugging one ultra-plush otter belly after another instead of waiting behind grinding I-5 traffic, I fully support redirecting the entire federal budget to an emergency militarized otter reintroduction plan. (What? It just makes fiscal sense, people.)
Aww, you adorable sea otters — you shouldn’t have. (Wait, no, you should!)
All that combustible fuel being produced by America’s fracking boom has federal transportation safety officials on edge.
Inspectors have started scrutinizing train manifests and tank car placards on trains departing from North Dakota’s Bakken region. The region is producing copious quantities of fracked oil, which is being carried to refineries in railway cars — many of them in a railcar model that’s prone to explode.
Operation Classification, aka the Bakken Blitz, was launched last month, just weeks after one such train carrying Bakken oil derailed and exploded in Quebec, killing 47 people and leveling much of the formerly scenic town of Lac-Mégantic. The U.S. Department of Transportation says it began planning the inspections in March after officials noticed discrepancies between the contents of rail cars and the hazardous warnings they bore. From Reuters:
“We need to make sure that what is in those tankers is what they say it is,” Cynthia Quarterman, administrator of the Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, told reporters.
Highly combustible, light crude from the Bakken region is particularly dangerous, Quarterman said, and inspectors will make sure the fuel is properly labeled and handled with care.
Officials want to make certain that those responsible for the shipments know how dangerous their cargo is.
“The flashpoint needs to be taken into account,” Quarterman said, referring to the combustibility of flammable liquids that can vary according to the type of crude.
The Obama administration is also mulling new safety rules to address the boom in oil hauling; a draft version should be released within weeks. On Friday, the administration introduced temporary emergency rules designed to prevent a repeat of the Lac-Mégantic disaster on American soil, including a ban on leaving vehicles unattended if they are carrying hazardous materials.
The 
