timber!

When is a logging road no longer a logging road?

When it is paved with concrete. Then, it isn't just for hauling trees out of the woods and off to markets - it is paving the way to build big fancy expensive houses in the forests in Montana. The benefits would flow to Plum Creek Timber, which is into real estate as well as chopping down trees.

The decision to allow these roads to be paved was made by the head of the Forest Service, a guy charged with managing our national forests for the benefits of the American people, NOT solely for timber companies and real estate developers. The head of the de facto Bush Administration's Forest Service? A guy called Mark Rey. His job before entering public service? He was a lobbyist for the timber industry.

And this is the sort of sweetheart deal you get when you allow foxes to oversee the chicken coop on behalf of other foxes.

coal, it gets you coming and going

Coal is so neat! When you burn it, it puts all that gas into the air that will eventually return us to the Jurassic climate! Nifty!

And it isn't just really really something when you BURN it, it ALSO makes a mess when you MINE it! Hey, ho!

And now, the lame duck de facto Bush Administration, seeing coal for the magnificent resource it is to all of us except the few of us who give a shit about clean water and maintaining a climate that has sustained civilization for lo these few thousand years, is going to make it even easier for coal miners to dump entire mountain tops into valley streams.

Hooray!

that burrowing sound

True to form, the de facto Bush Administration doesn't want to go quietly into the night and let that flaming radical socialist Barack Obama overturn all the nifty progress the Bushies have made on environmental protection. Specifically, giving protection to their friends in big business from environmental regulation.

So the EPA has been busy converting so-called Schedule C jobs - political positions - into career jobs and filling them with enemies of the environment. And it isn't just the EPA, other agencies are doing the same in an attempt to protect Bush policies and regulations from beyond the grave.

"Burrowing" - changing from political to career at the end of an administration to be able to keep your cushy government job - isn't new. Is the scale different this time?

We'll be sure it is if they convert the Deputy Administrator job at the EPA to a career position and appoint Dick Cheney to it.

enjoy your free perchlorate!

So what is more important in Bush's America - fuel for military rockets, or the health of pregnant women and their children?

Do you even have to ask?

So the EPA is going to knuckle under to pressure from the White House and the Pentagon and not set a standard for levels of something called perchlorate in our drinking water. So the Pentagon doesn't have to worry about stopping perchlorate from leaking from its rockets. Over 16 million Americans can expect to remain exposed to unsafe levels of this stuff.

palin, more of the same

You'd hope a so-called maverick Republican would rebel against the party's anti-environmental policies. It is not so with Sarah Palin - her Alaska administration has joined others in opposing the listing of polar bears as endangered species. They're endangered, of course, because climate change is melting the ice they live on. And Palin doesn't believe climate change is caused by humans.

It's amusing to read the reaction of Alaskans to Palin's selection... Even the REPUBLICANS there don't think she's qualified.

too many

There are quite a few species in the Virginia/Maryland/District of Columbia area threatened with extinction - things like the fringed mountain snail, not seen along the New River for years.

The cause? Us. There are just too many of us.

And that's the case around the world of course. I recently read Alan Weisman's The World Without Us. It includes interesting scenarios for what would happen to New York City apartments, New England forests, Houston oil refineries, and the Kenyan plains should every human disappear tomorrow.

But it ultimately is a book about the incredible damage we as a species are doing to our environment and to the other species that live here.

Our technological advances and economic prosperity are factors, but ultimately it's simple. There are too damn many of us.

One way or another, a day will come when there will be many fewer of us. There are two ways to achieve that. One way is through what Weisman advocates - limiting every woman to one child. Of course, that would be difficult to administer, though China has done a good job of it these past 40 years or so.

The other way is through some combination of mass death and involuntarily reduced fertility.

I know what the rational choice is. I fear we will not make it.

not just global warming

Joel Achenbach says he's concerned that the discussion about climate change may cause us to forget the OTHER major environmental issues that face us. As Achenbach, the real problem is, there are too many of us humans, who "are environment-destroying creatures by nature."

It's an interesting read. Achenbach concludes,

Last week, we saw reports of more wildfires in California. Sure as night follows day, people will lay some of the blame on climate change. But there's also the minor matter of people building homes in wildfire-susceptible forests, overgrown with vegetation due to decades of fire suppression. That's like pitching a tent on the railroad tracks.

The message that needs to be communicated to these people is: "Your problem is not global warming. Your problem is that you're nuts."

You should definitely worry about global warming. But you don't need to worry about global warming when your house is on fire.

not drinking the water may not help anyway

"Don't drink the water" is a reasonable thing to say to a human about a contaminated body of water. It's cold comfort for a fish, which has no choice but to swim through those waters.

Scientists are looking at a body of water that "contains an array of man-made chemicals that could play havoc with animals' hormone systems". That would be the Potomac River, the source of drinking water for the Washington DC area. And these chemicals are, among other things, causing male fish to grow eggs.

Scientists at a recent conference on the chemicals in the Potomac said there was "no evidence" of harm to humans.

Of course, there is also no evidence that these endocrine disruptors do NOT harm humans. In fact, with falling sperm counts happening in humans around the world, I think it is more logical to assume that chemicals that screw with fishes' reproductive systems are likely to be similarly harmful to humans' reproductive systems.

I'd like here to offer a suggestion how you can avoid these chemicals. But seeing as how they are found in isolated places like Inuit communities in the Arctic, I have no real good short-term suggestions, apart from avoiding giving foods like fish that have high concentrations of chemicals to pregnant women or young children.

In the long term of course, what might be smart would be if we quit spewing that crap into the environment. Not just because we're a nice species that gives a shit about fishes and plants and all that. But also because this crap ends up back with us anyway.

all we are is dust in the wind

I know we all get concerned when we know of a polluting factory a few miles away, or power stations burning acidic coal a couple of states away. But did you realize that dust from as far away as China and Africa can reach the US by the millions of tons? And better yet, that dust can actually carry microbes and germs that survive the trip and can infect people?

For example, scientists now thing that contaminants and microbes in dust clouds from Africa might be behind the rise in asthma in the Caribbean and southeastern United States.

Stories like this just underscore the importance of a sane approach to the environment. What happens on the other side of the world can touch you.

where's the beef?

Enjoy that burger. Meat will become more rare, and I don't mean how it's cooked. Why? As Mark Bittman writes, "Like oil, meat is subject to accelerating demand as nations become wealthier, and this, in turn, sends prices higher. Finally, like oil, meat is something people are encouraged to consume less of, as the toll exacted by industrial production increases, and becomes increasingly visible."

The toll includes rivers of pigshit in places like Iowa and North Carolina that make the neighbors (human, plant, animal) sick and contaminate the water, and the destruction of rain forests in the Amazon and Central America to accommodate the burger-on-the-hoof herd also known as cattle.

It's also bad from a climate change perspective, destroying carbon-absorbing forests and increasing the numbers of methane-belching animals. And you have to ship that meat from the former rain forest to the consumers in the US and elsewhere, using a lot of carbon fuels. And you have to plant a lot of grain for those animals, grain that competes for land with other human foods AND with the land needed to plant grain and sugar for (grossly inefficient, but that's another story) biofuels that are supposed to help somehow on climate change.

As Bittman writes, meat won't disappear from our tables. But you may not be eating as many 20-ounce steaks at the local bistro as before.

you know they just don't care

Numbers from the Department of Justice and Environmental Protection Agency show that the de facto Bush Administration is, surprise surprise, not pursuing cases against polluters. Prosecutions are down by a third, and although a 1990 law says EPA should have at least 200 investigators, they only have 172 now.

Not that this surprises me in the least - you know they just don't care.