News Roundup

Kind of a lazy post, I have a series of more substantive topics that I hope to post soon but have been very busy this past month (when I wasn't on vacation in beautiful Arches National Park, which I will write about in depth with pictures soon). I'm hoping to write more frequently this year, maybe making that commitment on the internet will help? We shall see.

Why is it so important to protect open spaces and wild places? Because you never know what you will find there. The latest discovery is a brand new species of snake, the Matilda's Horned Viper, recently discovered in Tanzania (the exact location is being withheld from publication due to the rarity of the species and the threat posed by a sudden rush of collectors, trophy hunters, and other miscreants to what appears to be a very small population. Most new discoveries are small organisms, insects or microbes, but there are still large species that turn up from time to time.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has officially extended a moratorium on new mining claims around the Grand Canyon. I wrote about this issue last year in a piece critiquing media coverage of environmental issues. I'm not at all surprised by his decision, though he certainly didn't do much to publicize or celebrate it. In fact it looks like he is trying to hide it based on the timing (right before the New Hampshire primary when all media attention will be directed elsewhere). Look for various mining interests and their shills allies in Congress to continue complaining about this and making absurd claims about jobs created, minimal environmental impacts, and other outright falsehoods.

And speaking of hiding from the media while doing something laudable, today President Obama visited the EPA to give a campaign speech pep talk to agency employees on the importance of the work they do and the value of a clean environment. From the brevity and content it sounds to me very much like test driving campaign talking points for use against a republican opponent who will have spent years trying to be more anti-environment and anti-science than any other and not like a president actually praising an agency and its workers (remember, he let his Law and Economics friend and OIRA head Cass Sunstein kill the proposed smog rule based on industry lies and exaggerations about economic impact and without properly considering the value of health improved and lives saved, not to mention jobs created via regulatory forcing (it takes a lot of research and manpower to update all those factories and plants or replace unsustainable capacity)).

This is a light, yet interesting, article about what one of John Muir's great-great-grandsons is up to with the family name.

Yet another reminder that even once renewable energy projects are built or capacity installed it still needs to be connected to the grid and that can be a hassle. Sometimes its logistics, sometimes its infrastructure, and sometimes its corporate resistance or regulatory turf battles. The point is, renewables aren't like Field of Dreams, it takes more than just building it for the power to come.

Update 1/12: Today's NYT has an op-ed today by two fisheries scientists about some of the problems with the General Mining Law and some very needed updates and safeguards. There's not a chance of any of them happening any time soon, but it's important to keep raising these issues and building awareness for when conditions are more favorable. What struck me is how many of their proposals would bring hard rock mining into much closer alignment with coal and how that mining process is managed (the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act is a much more effective statute that raises more revenue for the sovereign, allows more land use flexibility and prioritization, and has much stronger and more effective environmental safeguards. If SMCRA were simply expanded to cover all mining that would be perhaps the biggest public land reform since FLPMA, if not ever and would be a huge accomplishment).

Amazon in Danger

This is an excellent Op-Ed by a Brazilian journalist about the threats the Amazon faces. What makes it so interesting is that it goes beyond recitation of distressing facts about rate of destruction, assassinations of activists, displacement of indigenous people, soil depletion and erosion, and the myriad other disasters the relentless expansion of sugar, cattle, and soy have caused. What caught my attention was the argument currently playing out in Brazil about its sovereign right to develop autonomously without interference and how the author used Brazil's history to counter it quite effectively.

While the "right to develop" is a common argument by some development theorists, and one that has a large amount of moral suasion--after all, why should the world's poor stay poor because rich countries now value the environment they spent centuries destroying as they developed--it is ultimately unsatisfactory. For starters, we now have technological options that can help developing nations bridge the gap over some of the dirtiest technologies. This is particularly true, ironically, in some of the least developed nations, such as Laos, where there is very little infrastructure that needs upgrading or replacing. One of my friends just finished a year working with a Laotian company that is working on installing small, locally assembled solar panels for off-grid villages. There are many other efforts do similar things on both small and large scales. There is also the substantial question of whether it is right to say that societies must develop, need to develop, and, most importantly, need to follow the pattern of the Industrialized West. While that is a very interesting and complicated philosophical and ethical question, it is not really what I want to discuss right now. Besides, there are much better places you can get a thorough examination of it.

Really what I wanted to highlight is the way Leão Serva takes the argument and demolishes its purported moral and nationalistic force by exposing both the corrupt corporate interests behind it and comparing it to another shameful piece of Brazil's experience: it's reluctance to abolish slavery and its claims that outsiders who condemned it had no right to meddle. He does it well, with grace but to devastating effect. Perhaps this will help clear the eyes of some who are less responsive to environmental concerns for their own sake (or their very real human consequences).