8/17/11

Ashley Donnell and her fellow students stood on the banks of Klamath River silently watching their professor and Yurok tribal officials inspect the body of the gray whale -- known as “MaMa” -- who died Tuesday after spending months swimming under the U.S. Highway 101 bridge to the delight of visitors and locals.

For 56 days, the undergraduate in Humboldt State University's Marine Mammal Education Research Program watched the 45-foot-long giant and her calf. Donnell was there three weeks ago when the calf separated from its mother and headed downstream. She was there when the whale took its last breath at 4:19 a.m.

”It's hard for everybody,” Donnell said. “Especially the community. They were all enamored by her.”

The whale had stationed herself near the bridge since late June, delighting throngs of motorists and tourists. Until Monday, biologists said her condition was typical of a female gray whale that had just weaned a calf. Then, the whale took a turn for the worse.

The whale was swimming in tight circles and drifting downstream when Donnell and her peers arrived at the bridge about 10 a.m. Monday. At 6:30 p.m., the whale beached herself on a sandbar about 200 yards south of the bridge. Later that evening, the whale was able to right herself and swim back up to the bridge, but she later stranded herself on the same sandbar.

HSU marine biology professor Dawn Goley was with the whale when it died, Donnell said.

On Tuesday, Goley and members of the Yurok Tribe used an excavator and other large pieces of equipment to move the whale to a shallower part of the river. Goley and biologists with the National Marine Fisheries Service, the North Coast Marine Mammal Center and the Yurok Tribe will conduct a necropsy to determine the cause of death, she said.

After weeks of monitoring the whale's behavior and condition, Goley said, scientists could see no outward signs of trauma. The necropsy will show if the whale suffered from internal trauma.

”This was one of the few opportunities we've had to see gray whales up close,” she said. “We learned more about this gray whale, and we learned a lot about the Klamath River.”

Goley said the barnacles gray whales typically have on their skin when they're in the ocean were gone from the Klamath River gray whale on Monday, and her skin was showing signs of wear.

According to Sarah Wilkin, stranding coordinator with the marine fisheries service, the Klamath River gray whale was first observed by scientists in 2001. She was included in a catalog of gray whales photographed in Baja California, Wilkin said.

”We all wanted a happy ending,” she said. “We wanted the whale to return to the sea, but she didn't. In my mind, it means there probably was something wrong with her physically or medically and this -- in some ways -- was the best ending that could happen.”

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8/5/11

The Oregonian's editorial "Timber country and you" (July 24) places the interest of the timber industry above the public's interest in clean water, wild salmon and healthy watersheds. The editorial ignored what science tells us about the impact of logging roads on the survival of wild salmon.

Those roads and stream crossings discharge large amounts of sediment pollution into salmon streams, degrading habitat and creating an impediment to the recovery of salmon across the West. A 2008 study prepared for the EPA confirmed that poorly maintained logging roads increase mortality of adult and juvenile salmon by increasing the amount of fine sediment in streams.

The recent decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, NEDC v. Brown, is a major step forward in addressing this long-standing problem. That decision will require the timber industry to get permits where they are discharging polluted stormwater from active logging roads directly to a river through a ditch or culvert. The permit program will apply to a small subset of logging roads that have the worst impacts on salmon habitat.

The court's decision in no way threatens the 25,100 jobs directly related to the timber industry (numbers from the Oregon Employment Department that conflict with the number of 125,000 claimed in the editorial). In response to the court's decision, a state-led permitting program would let local agencies such as Oregon's Department of Environmental Quality design permits for logging roads that take into account local conditions and proximity to salmon streams. The permitting process could recognize that the public has an interest in this issue and build in adequate accountability and transparency. Similar permit programs have been implemented all over the country for numerous industries, none of which have suffered dramatic job losses as a result.

Every Oregonian has a personal stake in clean water and salmon. We are investing billions of dollars in salmon recovery while at the same time we are being told to ignore one of the impediments to that goal. But it is more than just salmon recovery that is at stake; salmon-dependent communities and economies are also at risk.

The decision by the 9th Circuit Court will bring a long overdue measure of balance between two resource-extracting industries: timber harvesting and salmon fisheries. But there are those who oppose a balance and want to tilt the advantage back to the timber industry and let the salmon fisheries continue to bear the cost. Sen. Ron Wyden's proposed Clean Water Act exemption for the timber industry is clearly an attempt to circumvent the 9th Circuit's ruling and prevent any semblance of balance. It is an attempt to maintain the status quo, which has a century-long history of salmon impoverishment. It's the wrong policy and unfair to salmon-dependent communities and unfair to Oregon citizens who are spending so much of their time and money to recover local runs of native salmon.

Through its long history, The Oregonian's editorials have generally supported salmon, their wise management and their recovery. But in this case, it appears politics trumped science to the detriment of healthy rivers and salmon, both of which are important to the citizens of Oregon.

Chris Winter is an environmental attorney with the Crag Law Center who worked on the NEDC v. Brown case before the 9th Circuit. Bill Bakke is the executive director of the Native Fish Society. Jim Lichatowich is a fisheries biologist and author of the book "Salmon Without Rivers -- A History of the Pacific Salmon Crisis." 

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7/25/11

The world consumes 1 million plastic shopping bags every minute - and the industry is fighting hard to keep it that way

American shoppers use an estimated 102 billion plastic shopping bags each year — more than 500 per consumer. Named by Guinness World Records as "the most ubiquitous consumer item in the world," the ultrathin bags have become a leading source of pollution worldwide. They litter the world's beaches, clog city sewers, contribute to floods in developing countries and fuel a massive flow of plastic waste that is killing wildlife from sea turtles to camels. "The plastic bag has come to represent the collective sins of the age of plastic," says Susan Freinkel, author of Plastic: A Toxic Love Story.

Many countries have instituted tough new rules to curb the use of plastic bags. Some, like China, have issued outright bans. Others, including many European nations, have imposed stiff fees to pay for the mess created by all the plastic trash. "There is simply zero justification for manufacturing them anymore, anywhere," the United Nations Environment Programme recently declared. But in the United States, the plastics industry has launched a concerted campaign to derail and defeat anti-bag measures nationwide. The effort includes well-placed political donations, intensive lobbying at both the state and national levels, and a pervasive PR campaign designed to shift the focus away from plastic bags to the supposed threat of canvas and paper bags — including misleading claims that reusable bags "could" contain bacteria and unsafe levels of lead.

"It's just like Big Tobacco," says Amy Westervelt, founding editor of Plastic Free Times, a website sponsored by the nonprofit Plastic Pollution Coalition. "They're using the same underhanded tactics — and even using the same lobbying firm that Philip Morris started and bankrolled in the Nineties. Their sole aim is to maintain the status quo and protect their profits. They will stop at nothing to suppress or discredit science that clearly links chemicals in plastic to negative impacts on human, animal and environmental health."

Made from high-density polyethylene — a byproduct of oil and natural gas — the single-use shopping bag was invented by a Swedish company in the mid-Sixties and brought to the U.S. by ExxonMobil. Introduced to grocery-store checkout lines in 1976, the "T-shirt bag," as it is known in the industry, can now be found literally every­where on the planet, from the bottom of the ocean to the peaks of Mount Everest. The bags are durable, waterproof, cheaper to produce than paper bags and able to carry 1,000 times their own weight. They are also a nightmare to recycle: The flimsy bags, many thinner than a strand of human hair, gum up the sorting equipment used by most recycling facilities. "Plastic bags and other thin-film plastic is the number-one enemy of the equipment we use," says Jeff Murray, vice president of Far West Fibers, the largest recycler in Oregon. "More than 300,000 plastic bags are removed from our machines every day — and since most of the removal has to be done by hand, that means more than 25 percent of our labor costs involves plastic-bag removal."

The initial resistance to plastic bags came from manufacturers of paper bags, who saw them as a major threat. Environmentalists took up the cause of eliminating single-use bags in the 1990s, but they made little headway until a sailor and researcher named Charles Moore passed through the North Pacific Gyre in 1997 and drew international attention to the vast flood of plastic trash polluting the world's oceans.

The first nationwide ban was enacted a decade ago in Bangladesh, after plastic bags clogged storm drains and caused massive floods. China issued a top-down order banning plastic bags in June 2008 — just two months before it hosted the Olympics — in an effort to reduce the amount of "white pollution." Even though the ban is openly flouted by street vendors, it has still made a tremendous impact: In the first year alone, China decreased its use of plastic bags by two-thirds, eliminating some 40 billion bags — a move that saved the energy equivalent of 11.7 million barrels of oil.

The Indian city of Delhi boasts some of the world's most aggressive legislation on plastic bags, not only fining individual users and businesses that hand out the bags but also threatening jail time for offenders and plastic-bag manufacturers. This year, Italy became the first European country to issue a nationwide ban on plastic bags, while Ireland places a 15-cent fee on every bag — a move that reduced usage by 90 percent in the first three months. All told, 25 percent of the world's population now lives in areas with bans or fees on plastic bags.

While other nations have effectively cracked down on plastic bags, the U.S. government has left local communities to fend for themselves. In 2007, San Francisco became the first American city to ban plastic bags, and Washington, D.C., has imposed a five-cent fee per bag, cutting monthly use from 22.5 million bags to barely 3 million. Unlike attacks on plastic products such as Styrofoam, which were orchestrated by well-known environmental groups, the fight against plastic bags has been led for the most part by community organizers and concerned citizens who put pressure on their local businesses and governments. In recent years, a growing number of U.S. communities — from 30 townships in Alaska to the Outer Banks of North Carolina — have introduced some 200 anti-bag measures.

The widespread mobilization against plastic bags has sparked a counterattack by the plastics industry, which was slow to react to the rising tide of negative sentiment among consumers. Leading the charge to protect the plastic bag is the American Chemistry Council, an industry group whose members include petro-chemical giants like ExxonMobil and Dow Chemical. With 125 employees and more than $120 million in annual revenues, the ACC and its members are using their deep pockets and extensive political connections to overturn bans on plastic bags, cast doubt on legitimate scientific studies and even file lawsuits against anti-bag activists. The council, which spent $8 million on lobbying alone last year, has also put together a front group called the Progressive Bag Affiliates, made up of top bag manufacturers like Hilex Poly, Superbag and Unistar Plastics.

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Huffington Post

8/4/11

That title -- as a statement -- should be a no-brainer. Water makes up 60% of our body, 70% of our brain, and 80% of our blood; clean water certainly DOES matter. And who can argue against everyone's right to clean water for swimming, drinking, and fishing?

It turns out that some members of Congress DO take exception to that statement. In fact, Congress lately has been hell bent on eviscerating a hallmark piece of American environmental legislation -- the Clean Water Act. This law, which serves as a model for environmental legislation world wide, has been responsible for revitalizing streams, creeks, rivers, lakes, and bays across the nation, including iconic waterways like the Hudson River, which -- due to catastrophic pollution -- was a national laughingstock in the 1960s. The Clean Water Act is the most effective tool we have to protect our right to clean water. And now the Act is under assault.

You may know that this July, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 2018, which would strip EPA's powers to set national clean water standards and set up a race to the bottom for polluter friendly states to court irresponsible industry. H.R. 2018 is the most audacious attempt by Congress to gut the Clean Water Act and attack our right to clean water. Communities across the country are rallying to ensure the Senate isn't as short-sighted as our representatives. And fortunately, President Obama has threatened to veto the legislation.

Yet, the attacks don't stop there. The polluters' lackeys in Congress are serious about dismantling environmental protection, and are attacking our clean water protections from multiple angles. For example, The U.S. Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee approved H.R. 872, a bill euphemistically entitled "the Reducing Regulatory Burdens Act of 2011", that will allow polluters to spray pesticides in our waters without offering the protection of the Clean Water Act, despite a court ruling indicating that the such activities would require a Clean Water Act permit from the EPA. Additionally, the bipartisan H.R. 2541 -- "The Silviculture Regulatory Consistency Act" -- would exempt from the Clean Water Act water pollution from logging activities -- again contravening a court ruling that a Clean Water Act permit is required.

Despite the successes of the Clean Water Act, many of our waterways remain in decline. Critics -- and by critics, I mean those in the employ of polluting industries -- point to these declines as demonstrated failures of the Clean Water Act. It's an interesting point of view, as the decline in water quality in these examples is due, most commonly, to industry efforts to avoid compliance with the law, and a failure of local authorities to enforce environmental laws, including the Clean Water Act. If anything, these declines prove that the time is now to strengthen the Act and step up enforcement, rather than eviscerate the law ensuring that our waters stay safe. Everyone has the right to clean water for swimming, fishing, and drinking.

On October 18, 2012, the Clean Water Act turns 40-years-old. We have just over one year as a nation to decide if we truly believe in everyone's basic and fundamental right to clean water. To show that clean water matters, you'll need to call your Congressperson, and urge them to protect your rights, not the rights of corporate polluters. It's important that you do this, and that you motivate the people you know to do the same.

The health of the environment, the health of the people and the health of our economies are tightly interwoven. If the people win this battle, we will reject the false choice between economic development and environmental protection that some members of Congress are pushing. If the people win this battle, we ensure our own health and our nation's economic growth. But, if polluters and their political cronies win this battle, we allow the industries that pollute the most to take control of our destiny. We not only say goodbye to 40 years of progress, we say goodbye to our future.

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