The Hallowich children were just 7 and 10 years old when their family received a $750,000 settlement to relocate away from their home in Mount Pleasant, Penn., which was next door to a shale-gas drilling site. By the time they’re grown up, they may not remember much about what it was like to live there — the burning eyes, sore throats, headaches, and earaches they experienced thanks to contaminated air and water. And maybe it’s better if they don’t remember, since they’re prohibited from talking about the experience for the rest of their lives.
The terms of Stephanie and Chris Hallowich’s settlement with Range Resources included, like most such settlements do, a non-disclosure agreement preventing them from discussing their case or gas drilling and fracking in general. But the agreement’s extension to their children is unprecedented; one assistant law professor at the University of Pittsburgh called it “over-the-top.”
According to the transcript [of the settlement hearing], the Hallowichs’ attorney, Peter Villari, said that in 30 years of practicing law he never had seen a nondisclosure agreement that included minor children.
And, although he advised the Hallowichs to accept the settlement, he questioned if the children’s First Amendment rights could be restricted by such an agreement.
According to Villari, the settlement wouldn’t have gone forward unless the couple also signed a document stating their health was not affected by drilling operations. So all the record will show, as a spokesperson for Range Resources put it, is that “clearly the Hallowichs were not in an ideal situation in terms of their lifestyle. They had an unusual amount of activity around them. We didn’t want them in that situation.” Man, if you could get $750,000 just for having an “unusual amount of activity” near your home — say, the construction of some microapartments — development-related NIMBYism would cease to exist.
For people whose property values, health, and quality of life have suffered thanks to fracking, settlements like these can be a bitter pill to swallow. In exchange for much-needed compensation for damages, they’re barred from speaking up about their experiences, which slows the spread of awareness about fracking’s potential risks and helps the cycle of exploitation continue. ClimateProgress explains:
The Hallowich family’s gag order is only the most extreme example of a tactic that critics say effectively silences anyone hurt by fracking. It’s a choice between receiving compensation for damage done to one’s health and property, or publicizing the abuses that caused the harm. Virtually no one can forgo compensation, so their stories go untold.
Bruce Baizel, Energy Program Director at Earthworks, an environmental group focusing on mineral and energy development, said in a phone interview that the companies’ motives are clear. “The refrain in the industry is, this is a safe process. There’s no record of contamination. That whole claim would be undermined if these things were public.” There have been attempts to measure the number of settlements with non-disclosure agreements, Baizel said, but to no avail. “They don’t have to be registered, they don’t have to be filed. It’s kind of a black hole.” …
Sharon Wilson, an organizer with Earthworks, said … “These gag orders are the reason [drillers] can give testimony to Congress and say there are no documented cases of contamination. And then elected officials can repeat that.” She makes it clear she doesn’t blame the families who take the settlements. “They do what they have to do to protect themselves and their children.”
The Range Resources spokesperson said the company doesn’t believe this settlement should apply to the children. But according to the hearing transcript, Range Resources’ attorney asserted not only that the order does indeed apply to the younger Hallowichs, but that the company “would certainly enforce it.”
If Range Resources ever gets its official position straight, the Hallowich kids could be released from the gag order. Until then, they better watch what they say on the playground.
By John Queally, August 2, 2013. Source: Common Dreams
With the passage of the Keystone XL pipeline uncertain and under financial pressure to find export terminals so to justify expansion of vast tar sands operations in Alberta, the Canadian pipeline company—with backing from the Harper government— announced on Thursday that it will seek to build an enormous eastward pipeline so it can bring what critics call “the world’s dirtiest fuel” to market.
Called the “East Energy Pipeline,” the $12 billion project would connect with existing pipeline networks in Quebec province and will be able to move up to 1.1 million barrels of tar sands oil a day up and over the northeastern United States to the coast of New Brunswick.
The new project, according to TransCanada’s CEO Russ Girling, is not intended to signal that the company has given up on building Keystone but shows it is willing (and able) to push for multiple pipelines at any given time.
“What we know in North America is production is continuing to grow,” Mr. Girling said at a news conference in Calgary. “The marketplace needs both of these pipelines and probably more.”
Joe Oliver, Canada’s natural resources minister, welcomed the TransCanada announcement and said the Canadian government would offer its full support.
“Our government welcomes the prospect of transporting Canadian crude oil from Western Canada to consumers and refineries in Eastern Canada and ultimately to new markets abroad,” Oliver said in a statement.
Critics, however, were unimpressed and vowed to fight the pipeline with the same energy and intensity that Keystone XL has faced.
“TransCanada is desperate to show that tar sands are viable, ” said Michael Marx, the ‘beyond oil’ campaign director for Sierra Club. “The truth is they are not. This announcement of an eastern Canada pipeline is a fantasy. It’ll face the same opposition dirty, dangerous pipelines to the west or south through the United States face, if not more. Tar sands is the dirtiest source of oil on Earth and running it through Montreal, Quebec and the Bay of Fundy is like running Keystone XL through Manhattan and the Grand Canyon. It’s not going to happen.”
TransCanada’s new plan involves converting 1,864 miles of a natural gas pipeline to carry oil, and the construction of 870 miles of new pipeline, mainly in Quebec and New Brunswick. It has long-term contracts to carry about 900,000 barrels of oil a day along the route, Mr. Girling said.
“They’re in for a fight,” John Bennett, the executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada, said shortly after the announcement. Mr. Bennett said he was particularly concerned about the possibility of oil spills in the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick and about harm to whales in the area from tanker traffic. In a statement, Environmental Defence said the plan was “yet another misguided scheme that puts Canadians in harm’s way for the benefit of the oil industry’s bottom line.”
While environmentalists, energy executives and elected officials across North America await the State Department’s critical decision on the Keystone XL pipeline, a little-noticed trial scheduled for next month in Nebraska could spell problems for the $5.3 billion project.
A win for the plaintiffs — three Nebraska landowners who oppose the pipeline — would force TransCanada, the company that wants to build the 1,179-mile northern leg of the project, to go through the entire siting process again. Even supporters do not believe that would permanently block the project, but it could add years to the timeline. Appeals through the Nebraska court system could have a similar effect.
“I don’t think [people] realize how Nebraska is a big monkey wrench in all this,” said Brian Jorde, attorney for the three landowners.
The State Department must sign off on the pipeline because it would cross a U.S. border, bringing as much as 830,000 barrels a day of diluted bitumen crude from oil sands in Alberta, Canada, to U.S. refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. A State Department official said the agency’s review of the pipeline is continuing and would not be affected by the Nebraska litigation.
But route decisions are left to the states along the way, which gives Nebraska jurisdiction over nearly 200 miles of the proposed project. That might not have been a problem for TransCanada until the state legislature, acting in the final hours of its 2012 session, took authority over review and approval of the route away from the five elected members of the Public Service Commission and instead gave it to Heineman and the state’s Department of Environmental Quality. The bill, LB 1161, passed by an overwhelming majority.
It also authorized the governor to give TransCanada the power of eminent domain over landholders, a valuable weapon as the company seeks easements from farmers and ranchers to run the pipeline through Nebraska.
“By all appearances, that bill was written by TransCanada. . . . I think at some point in time, ordinary citizens can’t tolerate that kind of behavior,” said Randy Thompson, a small farmer and one of the plaintiffs.
Shawn Howard, a spokesman for TransCanada, said in an e-mail that the company believes the Nebraska law “is constitutional and should be upheld.” The company will continue to plan the pipeline and seek easements, even with the threat of a new route review looming, Howard said.
The plaintiffs argue that, under the Nebraska constitution, the legislature had no authority to transfer route-approval powers from the commission to the governor or to give him the ability to delegate the power of eminent domain to TransCanada. The law also does not provide for judicial review of the governor’s decision, they contend, and is essentially “special legislation” designed to benefit the pipeline company only.
“The suit claims that the PSC has the exclusive jurisdiction” to review the pipeline and set its route, “and the legislature can’t take that power . . . and transfer the right to one person, a partisan person, the governor, to become the trigger for eminent domain,” Jorde said.
A spokeswoman for Attorney General Jon Bruning declined to comment on the case, but Deputy Attorney General Katherine J. Spohn argued in her brief that the legislature had acted lawfully. Spohn said lawmakers had the legal ability to give Heineman the power to delegate eminent domain authority to TransCanada.
Stacy, the district court judge, has scheduled an hour of arguments in her courtroom and subsequently could take months to rule on the issues, Jorde said. The losing side is expected to appeal as far as the state’s Supreme Court before the issue is finally decided, he said.
“When our legislature steps over the line,” Thompson said, “I think it’s important that ordinary citizens take them to task.”
The controversy over coal-export railway terminals at Cherry Point near Lummi territory in Washington State has drawn the attention of the venerable Public Broadcasting System.
PBS Newshour broadcast a story on August 2 detailing the brewing battle, from tribal opposition to the reservations of health professionals concerned about the respiratory effects of both coal dust and diesel exhaust. The report starts and ends with input from Lummi fisher Jeremiah Julius, who articulates the nation’s concern about the destruction to habitat, air and tradition.
“The whole landscape is sacred to us,” Julius tells a reporter at the beginning of the segment. “There’s not much contaminant-free lands left in the United States. This is one of them.”
The segment aired the same day that the Lummi Nation sent a letter to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers formally registering the tribe’s opposition to the plan.
Washington State officials along with other partners are conducting an environmental review of the shipping terminal project, which would entail exporting 54 million metric tons annually of “bulk commodities,” including as much as 48 million metric tons of coal per year, the Washington Department of Ecology said in a statement on July 31.
The Bellingham Herald reported on August 1 that a firm stance against the project “could stop the federal permit process for the coal terminal dead in its tracks.” Officials from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have said that if the tribe were to state in writing that there is no chance for an agreement with the company, SSA Marine, the federal agency would take that into account when evaluating federal permit applications.
“If the Lummis come to that position, it will make us reassess the direction we are going,” said Muffy Walker, the head of the Army Corps of Engineers’ regulatory branch in Seattle, at a press conference according to the newspaper. “We have denied permits in the past, based on tribal concerns.”
If Julius’s sentiments are typical, the Lummi Nation’s stance does not look likely to change.
“To me, these tankers are the trains that killed off the buffalo,” said Julius. “These tankers are going to kill my way of life. So to me, this is—it is a battle.”
Humanity’s difficulties dealing with climate change trace back to a simple fact: We are animals. Our cognitive and limbic systems were shaped by evolution to heed threats and rewards close by, involving faces and teeth. That’s how we survived. Those systems were not shaped to heed, much less emotionally respond to, faceless threats distant in time and space — like, say, climate change. No evil genius could design a problem less likely to grab our attention.
This is a familiar point, but some new research on sea level throws it into sharp relief. Let’s quickly review the research, and while we do, keep this question in the back of our minds: “Does this make me feel anything? Even if I understand, do I care?”
Sea-level rise is a vexed issue in climate discussions because everyone wants to know where sea level’s going to be in 2050, or 2100 — years that we can, at least dimly, imagine. I’ll still be alive in 2050, presumably, and my kids or grandkids in 2100, with any luck.
The problem is that it’s much easier to project long-term sea levels than short term. It’s difficult to nail down the near-term timing of “nonlinear” (abrupt) events involving, say, ice sheets, but over a few thousand years, it all evens out. A century just isn’t that long in climatic terms.
A team of researchers led by Anders Levermann at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research has done something novel. They said, screw the short term. We know that CO2, once it’s in the atmosphere, is effectively permanent. We know that for a given level of CO2 concentrations, eventually you get a given temperature, and for a given temperature, sooner or later sea level will rise to adjust. When you raise the temperature, you “lock in” a certain amount of sea-level rise, even if you don’t know exactly how quickly it will happen.
So Levermann and co. set out to determine how much sea-level rise gets locked in for every degree that global average temperature rises. They modeled all the main drivers — thermal expansion (warm water expands), glaciers melting, the Greenland ice sheet, and the Antarctic ice sheet — and then compared the results to the paleo data to make sure they matched up with the patterns in the historical record (they did).
This is, scientifically speaking, easier to do that predicting short-term sea levels. “On a 2,000-year time scale,” they say, “the sea-level contribution will be largely independent of the exact warming path during the first century.” A lot of stuff that might be abrupt or unpredictable over the next century or two washes out over the long-term.
So what’s the verdict? Long story short, for every degree Celsius that global average temperature rises, we can expect 2.3 meters of sea-level rise sometime over the ensuing 2,000 years. (U.S. translation: for every degree Fahrenheit, 4.2 feet of rising seas get locked in.) We are currently on track to hit 4 degrees Celsius by 2100, if not sooner. That means locking in 9.2 meters, or 30 feet, of sea level rise. Suffice to say, that would wipe out most of the major coastal cities and towns in the world.
There you have it: If we stay on our current trajectory, by the end of the century we will ensure the eventual destruction of our coastal developments. But! That destruction will happen at some point over the next 2,000 years. Maybe not for 100, maybe not even for several hundred, long after you and your children and your grandchildren are dead.
——
Do you care? Should you? Should you mobilize and put lots of money and effort toward an emissions-reduction regime that will prevent it? If you knew you were committing the place you live to destruction in 100 years, would it move you to action? What about 200 years? 500? 500 years ago was 1513, the year Juan Ponce de León “discovered” Florida and claimed it for Spain. I wonder if he worried what would happen in 2013.
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Sea-level “lock in” is happening 10 times faster than sea-level rise itself, but thanks to the long time lag, it’s even more invisible. To bring it a little closer to home, Ben Strauss at Climate Central follows up on Levermann’s analysis by examining what sea-level rise might mean for America. (It’s a preview of a new paper that will be published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.) [Editor’s note: Strauss is on Grist’s board of directors.]
There’s grim news right up front:
To begin with, it appears that the amount of carbon pollution to date has already locked in more than 4 feet of sea level rise past today’s levels. That is enough, at high tide, to submerge more than half of today’s population in 316 coastal cities and towns (home to 3.6 million) in the lower 48 states.
That’s a done deal. Those places are effectively doomed. But the choices we make today will have huge repercussions on sea levels to come:
By the end of this century, if global climate emissions continue to increase, that may lock in 23 feet of sea level rise, and threaten 1,429 municipalities that would be mostly submerged at high tide. Those cities have a total population of 18 million. But under a very low emissions scenario, our sea level rise commitment might be limited to about 7.5 feet, which would threaten 555 coastal municipalities: some 900 fewer communities than in the higher-emissions scenario.
If we take heroic measures, we could lose “only” 555 American towns and cities to the ocean. Whee!
If we do nothing and stay on our current trajectory, over 1,400 are threatened, including:
Nationally, the largest threatened cities at this level [50 percent submerged at high tide] are Miami, Virginia Beach, Va., Sacramento, Calif., and Jacksonville, Fla.
If we choose 25 percent [submerged] instead of 50 percent as the threat threshold, the lists all increase, and would include major cities like Boston, Long Beach, Calif., and New York City.
So, yeah, lots of American places are screwed over the long term. But how long? I mean, if it’s in 2,000 years … who knows if humanity will even exist? By then, surely the robots will have taken over.
Strauss addresses this question:
The big question hanging over this analysis is how quickly sea levels will rise to the committed levels. Neither Levermann and colleagues’ analysis, nor my new paper, address this question.
In a loose analogy, it is much easier to know that a pile of ice in a warm room will melt, than to know exactly how fast it will melt.
Levermann and company do put an upper limit of 2,000 years on how long it will take the sea level commitments described here to play out. Recent research indicates that warming from carbon emitted today is essentially irreversible on the relevant timescales (in the absence of its massive-scale engineered removal from the atmosphere), and will endure for hundreds or thousands of years, driving this long run unstoppable sea level rise.
On the other hand, our sea level rise commitment may be realized well before two millennia from now. The average rate of global sea level rise during the 20th century was about half a foot per century. The current rate is 1 foot, or twice that. And middle-of-the-road projections point to rates in the vicinity of 5 feet per century by 2100.
Such rates, if sustained, would realize the highest levels of sea level rise contemplated here in hundreds, not thousands of years — fast enough to apply continual pressure, as well as threaten the heritage, and very existence, of coastal communities everywhere. [my emphasis]
OK, so we’re probably talking hundreds instead of thousands of years. Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that business as usual will put Miami under water in 100 years.
What is Miami worth to us? What will it be worth to the humans of 2113?
It depends, I would say, on what you think of those 2113 humans. Most people assume that humanity is going to experience a continual rise in wealth, technological sophistication, and living standards. That’s certainly the assumption baked into most economic models. If it’s true, the people of 2113 are going to be immeasurably more wealthy than us. Perhaps they’ll live in floating cities, or space stations. Perhaps they will drive amphibious vehicles. Perhaps they will leave their corporal bodies behind entirely and live on as clusters of electrons in Google data centers. What need will they have of Miami? They have transcended Miami. At any rate, we’re not inclined to worry about them. They’ll be better prepared to deal with the loss of Miami than we are to prevent that loss. Or so the thinking goes.
But there’s another way of seeing it. What if, as many people fear, we are churning through irreplaceable natural capital and our descendents are going to have less to work with than we do? What if our descendents face a world of resource shortages, insane weather, and denuded biodiversity? What if they need all the help they can get? If that’s true, it seems unthinkably irresponsible to allow a huge swath of our invested energy and capital to wash away in the sea.
What do you think? Do you care — really feel it, in your gut — that we’re in the process of consigning hundreds of American towns and cities to destruction? What does being a good ancestor mean to you?
This week, the exiled head of the Syrian opposition movement said he would meet representatives of President Bashar al-Assad in Geneva, a promising turn for a conflict that has left 100,000 dead, including many civilians, since spring 2011. It has been a long, bitter battle, but for many Syrians one root of the violence stretches back to several years before al-Assad’s troops began picking off anti-government protesters. Beginning in 2006, a prolonged, severe drought decimated farmland, spiked food prices, and forced millions of Syrians into poverty — helping to spark the unrest that eventually exploded into civil war.
The Syrian conflict is just one recent example of the connection between climate and conflict, a field that is increasingly piquing the interest of criminologists, economists, historians, and political scientists. Studies have begun to crop up in leading journals examining this connection in everything from the collapse of the Mayan civilization to modern police training in the Netherlands. A survey published today in Science takes a first-ever 30,000-foot view of this research, looking for trends that tie these examples together through fresh analysis of raw data from 60 quantitative studies. It offers evidence that unusually high temperatures could lead to tens of thousands more cases of “interpersonal” violence — murder, rape, assault, etc. — and more than a 50 percent increase in “intergroup” violence, i.e. war, in some places.
“This is what keeps me awake at night,” lead author Solomon Hsiang, an environmental policy post-doc at Princeton, said. “The linkage between human conflict and climate changes was really pervasive.”
Any cop could tell you that hot days can make people snap — last summer veteran police boss William Bratton argued that a warm winter contributed to a rash of murders in Chicago. But Hsiang and his colleagues wanted to see how this pattern held up across the globe, at different times and with different kinds of conflict, to gauge just how much the climate can lead to violence.
So they rounded up recent studies that could reliably show a causal connection between climate and violence in a variety of contemporary, historical, and experimental settings. They re-crunched the raw data from these studies to smooth out details specific to each case (temperature data was converted to deviation from average, rather than absolute temperatures, for example) in order to make apples-to-apples comparisons across time and across the world. What emerged was an unsettling new picture of the exact effect climate changes have on our tendency toward violence: For every one standard deviation toward warmer temperatures, the median frequency of “interpersonal” violence rose 4 percent. In the U.S., that would translate to an additional 56,000 violent crimes every year on top of the average 1.4 million (according to FBI data) we’ve experienced annually in the last decade. And that could just be the beginning: Hsiang’s study points out that inhabited places on Earth are likely to see warming of two to four standard deviations by 2050.
Meanwhile, the study found the median frequency of “intergroup” violence jumped 14 percent for every standard deviation; again, in the context of projected future warming, this means that by 2050 the threat of war could climb more than 50 percent in some places.
The study also found general agreement amongst case studies that exceptionally high and low rainfall — particularly when it impacts agricultural production — can lead both to interpersonal and intergroup violence. But even looking only at scientists’ projections for future temperature increases, the statistical rise in violent tendencies is significant enough, the study claims, that “amplified rates of human conflict could represent a large and critical impact of anthropogenic climate change.” In other words, it’s something we might need to prepare for — just like rising seas or nastier wildfires.
It’s not just isolated hot days that spur increased violence; the study found increased conflict in warmer-than-usual periods over time spans ranging from an hour (in a controlled experiment where police trainees were stuck in rooms of different temperatures and asked to respond to a hypothetical aggressor; cops in the hot room were much more likely to fire their weapons) to thousands of years (in an anthropological study [PDF] of how summer temperatures drove the collapse of ancient human settlements in northern Norway).
With this connection nailed down, Hsiang said, the next step is to better understand what exactly about higher temperatures leads to conflict; he compared the pursuit to that of early 20-century medical researchers who knew smoking caused cancer but didn’t understand why at a molecular level. In the case of Syria, it’s easy enough to draw a line from heat and drought to civil unrest, but that doesn’t help explain why a protest is more likely to boil into a riot on a hot day, or why more murders are likely to happen in a hot decade.
“We have a mountain of evidence,” he said. “But we can’t completely explain all the intervening steps.”
By Eric de Place and Clark Williams-Derry, Cross-posted from Sightline Daily, Source: Grist.org
Editor’s note: The coal industry is desperate to ship its product to Asia because demand here in the U.S. has dropped. Three coal export terminals are currently proposed for Washington and Oregon (down from six a year ago). Before they can be built, their environmental impacts must be evaluated. Climate activists have been calling for broad evaluations of the myriad impacts, while industry wants just narrow studies done. Today comes word that the environmental impact study for one of the proposed terminals will be wide-ranging and rigorous — a win for anti-coal activists.
Hot off the presses: The three “co-lead” agencies in charge of reviewing the proposed Gateway Pacific coal export terminal at Cherry Point, Wash., have published the scope of their review. The major takeaway is that it’s bad news for the coal industry.
The industry did win an empty victory with the Army Corps of Engineers, the sole federal agency at the table, which opted for a narrow scope of review. But in the end it doesn’t much matter. One of the other lead agencies, the Washington Department of Ecology, is going to require in-depth analysis of four elements that the coal industry had desperately hoped to avoid:
A detailed assessment of rail transportation’s impacts on representative communities in Washington and a general analysis of out-of-state rail impacts.
An assessment of how the project would affect human health in Washington.
A general assessment of cargo-ship impacts beyond Washington waters.
An evaluation and disclosure of greenhouse gas emissions of end-use coal combustion.
Of those, two stand to be particularly damaging for would-be coal exporters: rail impacts and greenhouse gas emissions. There’s not a lot of wiggle room with either of those elements.
First, burning the 48 million tons of coal proposed for export at the terminal annually would release roughly 100 million tons of carbon dioxide, a staggering figure that amounts to as much carbon pollution as every activity in the state of Washington combined. In other words, it’s a clear environmental disaster that would overshadow every other effort the state has made to reduce climate-changing emissions.
Second, moving that much coal to a terminal will create congestion throughout the region. There’s simply no way around the math. In Seattle, for example, both Sightline and the traffic analysis firm Parametrix have confirmed that new coal export shipments would completely close major center city streets by an additional one to three hours every day, 365 days per year.
What’s worse for the coal industry is that the expansive scope of review will likely create further delay and uncertainty, potentially scaring off investors. Just yesterday, in fact, executives from Cloud Peak Energy, which plans to mine up to 10 millions tons of coal a year in Montana and ship it out through West Coast ports, griped about the slow progress on coal export terminals during a sad-sack discussion of its weak second-quarter earnings.
Now that public agencies will be tallying the manifest pollution, health, climate, and congestion impacts of the Gateway Pacific coal terminal, there’s likely to be even more opposition to planned export terminals. Plus, given more analysis and a wider exploration of the proposal’s problems, opponents will likely find abundant opportunities to litigate, which would of course create even more delay and uncertainty.
So the bottom line of today’s announcement for the proposed Gateway Pacific coal terminal: long delays, high costs, more opportunities for public opposition, and a near-certainty of litigation. Coupled with the ongoing collapse in Pacific Rim coal prices, it’s not a fun time to be in the Northwest coal export business.
Eric de Place is a senior researcher at Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based sustainability think tank.
Clark Williams-Derry is research director for the Seattle-based Sightline Institute, a nonprofit sustainability think tank working to promote smart solutions for the Pacific Northwest. He was formerly the webmaster for Grist.
OLYMPIA – The final push in a decade-long effort to clear Puget Sound of derelict fishing nets within 105 feet of the surface will get under way later this year with funding approved by the Washington State Legislature.
The state budget adopted last month provides $3.5 million for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) to complete the task in partnership with the Northwest Straits Foundation, which has led the net-removal effort since 2002.
Since then, divers working for the non-profit organization have removed 4,437 lost or abandoned fishing nets, 2,765 crab pots and 42 shrimp pots from the waters of Puget Sound. Animals found dead or entangled in that gear include porpoises, sea lions, seabirds, canary rockfish, chinook salmon and Dungeness crab.
According to one predictive catch model, those derelict nets were entangling 3.2 million animals annually every year they remained in the water.
Robyn du Pré, executive director of the foundation, said the new funding will support the removal of approximately 1,000 derelict nets in high-priority areas of Puget Sound after current funding runs out in December.
“These legacy nets have been fishing the waters of the Salish Sea for decades,” du Pré said. “We are thrilled to have the opportunity to finish the job and to celebrate a true conservation success story in 2015.” Du Pré added that current fishing net loss is minimal and commercial fishers are now required to report any lost nets.
State Rep. Norma Smith of Whidbey Island led the legislative effort to fund the net-removal initiative.
“I am deeply grateful to my colleagues who helped achieve the goal of a $3.5 million appropriation for the Northwest Straits Foundation to remove the last of the legacy nets from the Puget Sound,” Smith said. “Lost in previous decades, they have had a devastating impact on harvestable natural resources and marine life. Once removed, because of the reporting requirements now in place, this challenge comes to an end. What an achievement!”
WDFW Director Phil Anderson said the new funding is specifically designed to support the removal of derelict fishing nets in areas of the Sound where historic fisheries coincide with bottom conditions likely to snag nets. The foundation locates those nets using sidescan sonar surveys, then dispatches recovery vessels with dive teams to retrieve them.
Few efforts have been made to remove nets from depths of more than 105 feet, because of safety concerns. However, the foundation recently completed an assessment of deepwater net-removal strategies that include the use of remotely operated vehicles, grapples, and deepwater divers.
“Working in conjunction with our partners at Northwest Straits and in the State Legislature, we have made enormous strides toward eliminating the risks posed to fish and wildlife by derelict fishing gear,” Anderson said. “This is difficult work, and it requires a real commitment from everyone to get it done. We look forward to celebrating the next milestone in 2015.”
Remember in the old days before rope was made out of plastic? Back then (and sometimes even now), it was made from sisal. Sisal, Agave sisalana, is a type of agave. I saw it growing in Kenya during my visit. It’s still used there to make rope.
Here in San Diego, we don’t have sisal – but we do have plenty of agave. We’ve also got a few species of yucca, which are also in the Agave family (Agavaceae). So it’s no surprise that the Native Americans here use both yucca and agave to make their cordage.
They also use a plant called Dogbane (Apocynum cannabinum a.k.a. Indian hemp), which is related to Milkweed, and I prefer dogbane to agave or yucca. But dogbane is toxic to livestock, so once the Europeans arrived they did what they could to eliminate it. Today, you don’t see too much dogbane around.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve learned to make cordage from agave. Once the cordage is made, Native Americans used it to make everything from nets and fishing poles to bags and shoes. Join me below to see how it’s done.
Yuccas and agaves are in the Agave family, as I noted earlier, but they used to be classified in the Lily family. Like lilies, they are monocots. (Monocots are flowering plants that have one cotyledon, no taproot, flowers with petals typically in multiples of threes, and parallel leaf veins. Grasses, palms, lilies, and irises are also monocots.)
I’m more familiar with our local yucca species than I am with the local agave. We’ve got Hesperoyucca whipplei, a.k.a. Our Lord’s Candle or Chaparral Yucca, and we’ve got Mojave yucca. Both produce edible stalks and flowers, and the roots of the Mojave yucca can be used for soap. And, of course, both can be used for fiber.
It is hard to tell the difference between H. whipplei and Mojave yucca. When they are flowering, it’s easy to tell what’s what, because H. whipplei has a tall stalk with flowers on top, and Mojave yucca flowers are on such a short stalk that they appear adjacent to the leaves. But the leaves are actually quite different. H. whipplei leaves are very thin, and it’s easy to expose the fibers within them using a blunt tool like a rock. Mojave yucca leaves are thick and fleshy, with a thick skin and lots of flesh inside. You can scrape them with a rock all day and it won’t do a thing to them.
One of my Native American instructors told me that H. whipplei fibers are easier to obtain, but Mojave yucca fibers are better. I’d heard that one way to obtain the fibers from these plants was via soaking, so I soaked a Mojave yucca leaf for weeks and weeks. It worked, once the outer parts of the leaf rotted away, but it smelled so bad that I’d never want to use that fiber for anything other than compost. I’d never bothered with agave before because I heard that it can irritate your skin (and it can).
In my tool-making class, I was eager to find out how we would go about obtaining fiber for cordage. The class would be using agave, not yucca. And to get the fiber from the leaves, we would burn them.
One common agave is the Century Plant (Agave americana) but it’s non-native. There’s a native coastal agave that’s somewhat rare. For abundant, native agave, you need to head east into the desert. The instructor for my class, a Kumeyaay Indian, took a few students on a field trip out to the desert – nearly to the city of Borrego Springs, which is smack in the middle of Anza Borrego Desert State Park. There, they found Desert Agave (Agave deserti) and they brought a bunch of it back.
I was not present the day they burned the leaves, so I tried to ask a lot of questions to find out how they did it. The answer was simple: they tossed the leaves in the fire. Completely into the fire. And they let them burn. Not 100%, of course. But they were pretty charred up and burnt by the time they came out of the fire. Then they put them in a bucket of water to keep them moist until we would work with them.
I don’t know if burning the agave solved the problem of skin irritation, but I never had any skin problems with using the agave aside from when I accidentally touched it to a scab on my skin. That didn’t feel very good, but the irritation was pretty minor.
There are other methods besides burning one can use. I’ve heard boiling the leaves for hours can also work well. For the H. whipplei leaves, I’ve simply scraped them with a rock and that worked fine for me. I think the more elaborate processes are required for the fleshier species of yucca and agave.
Once that’s done, you remove everything but the fibers from the leaves. To start, you need a burnt agave leaf and a blunt knife, rock, or seashell.
You need to scrape the leaf with the shell to remove everything except for the fibers. The inside has a consistency almost like aloe, and the outside is a skin that can almost peel off. Scrape the skin and the gel and try not to break the fibers as you go. After I’ve got most of it done with the shell, I find it’s easiest to start pulling out small bundles of fibers and getting the goo off by hand.
Ultimately, you’ll end up with a big, bunch of fibers that can become your cordage:
Now you’re ready to actually make your cordage. Here’s a ball of cordage I made from 5 agave leaves. It took me a week, working a little each day:
So how do you do that? There are many other details that I can share, but the main thing is this: You are individually twisting two groups of fibers in one direction, then you twist them together in the opposite direction.
I am left handed, so I hold the two small bundles of fibers – maybe 5-10 fibers per bundle? – in my right hand between my thumb and my fingers. I have one group (let’s call it A) on the top and one group (B) on the bottom. With my left hand, I twist the top group (A) of fibers away from me. Then I twist both groups toward me a half twist. Now the B group is on top. I twist the B group away from me, and I twist both groups together toward me. Just keep repeating that.
This way, each bundle of fibers will be twisted in one direction (away from you) individually, and in the opposite direction (toward you) together. I hold them together with my right hand to prevent them from untwisting, but you’ll find that when you’ve done a little bit of this and you let go, it barely unravels.
The first problem you’ll encounter is when you do a bit of twisting and you’ve got an inch or two of cordage – but the agave or yucca fibers you’re working with are short and you’ve come to the end of them. How do you make a longer piece of cordage?
When you’re a few inches from the end of the fibers you’re working with, you add more and just twist them right in. Believe it or not, the cordage is so strong with all of your twisting, that the new fibers you’ve twisted in will stay put.
As noted above, the small ball made from five agave leaves took me a week. I didn’t work on it full-time of course, just a little every day. If you do more than that, you’ll chafe the skin on your fingers.
I am sorry that I don’t have better photos or a better description of how to do this. I’ve found instructions on the internet here and I think it confused me more than it helped me. But they’ve got good diagrams so you might like to take a look at it. There are more details I can provide but I’m afraid that without decent pictures to go along with them, more details would just serve to make readers more confused. So instead,
Lummi Nation Natural Resources Director Merle Jefferson says the tribe is ready to send an official letter to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announcing its opposition to the Gateway Pacific Terminal project at Cherry Point – a move that could stop the federal permit process for the coal terminal dead in its tracks.
The Army Corps has the authority to grant some key permits that SSA Marine of Seattle will need in order to construct its three-vessel pier at Cherry Point. On other projects, the federal agency has refused to process permit applications if Indian tribes contend that those projects would violate their treaty rights as defined by numerous federal court rulings.
During a Wednesday, July 31, press conference, an Army Corps official stopped short of saying that Lummi Nation has the power to block Gateway Pacific. But she indicated that her agency might decide to stop processing its permits if the Lummis raise formal objections.
Muffy Walker, Army Corps of Engineers regulatory branch chief in Seattle, said her agency was aware that Lummi leaders had spoken out against Gateway Pacific, but the federal agency had not received a “formal response” from the tribe saying they see no chance of reaching an agreement with SSA Marine to compensate for the project’s impacts.
“If the Lummis come to that position, it will make us reassess the direction we are going,” Walker said. “We have denied permits in the past, based on tribal concerns.”
Jefferson said tribal officials had assumed that their position was clear in the 34 pages of objections they had offered the Corps and other regulatory agencies as part of the environmental study scope process. Among other things, tribal officials say the project will interfere with tribal fishing and disrupt an important cultural site.
Once Lummi officials learned that the Corps wanted a formal letter notifying them of the tribe’s position, the tribal council quickly agreed to draft that letter. Jefferson said that letter should be on its way to the Corps by Friday, Aug. 2.
Jefferson also stopped short of saying that the tribe has the power to block the project. He did say that the tribe has a strong legal position based on treaty rights.
Lummi officials took a non-committal stance on Gateway Pacific when it was first announced, saying the tribe would take no position until its impacts got thorough study. The tribal newspaper published a series of reports outlining benefits as well as drawbacks from the project, and reported that SSA Marine had provided the tribe with $400,000 to help the tribe pay for its own study of the project.
But by September 2012, after an upwelling of opposition from tribal members, tribal council representatives met on the beach at Cherry Point to announce firm opposition to the project. Later in the fall, tribal officials were outspoken in their opposition when county, state and federal officials convened meetings to gather public comments.
SSA Marine Vice President Bob Watters said his company wants to continue to work with Lummi Nation to resolve the tribe’s concerns on both fishing rights and possible disruption of ancient tribal burials believed to exist at the site.
“We are committed to addressing Lummi concerns in detail,” Watters said in an email. “Our approach will be first to avoid impacts, then to minimize unavoidable impacts, and finally, to mitigate and positively address what remaining impacts there may be in a mutually satisfactory way.”
Watters added that his company is now conducting a study on the impacts of vessel traffic to the terminal site, with input from Lummi officials.
