by Daniel Cusick, E&E reporter
But the animals that inspired Bullwinkle are not what they were. Here, even healthy bulls — whose size, strength and rutting prowess make them the undisputed kings of the North Woods — are dying from what appear to be a combination of exhaustion, exposure, wasting disease triggered by parasites and other maladies.
The biologists are baffled and also helpless.
New York, NY- May 12-
Occupy Wall Street partnered with Occupy Well Street, a regional, direct action oriented anti-fracking group, and other city and regional environmental groups to voice resistance to the Spectra Energy Natural Gas Pipeline and the issues associated with hydraulic fracturing. A broad coalition of groups were present, including New York’s Sane Energy Project, Reverend Billy, OWS’s Environmental Solidarity Group, Times Up, Eco-Buddies, and Earth First!. Colorful and joyful, many protesters arrived in a costumed bike brigade and participated in some clown trainings on Pier 54, the proposed entry point for the pipeline. Some of the groups present say they were acting in solidarity with a day of action called for May 19th by Occupy Well Street.
There was unity in the broad coalition in the message that those opposed to the Spectra Pipeline will not compromise in protecting the safety of their communities and will pursue a variety of strategies to see this project ended. “The Spectra Pipeline isn’t being built in a vacuum,” said a protestor affiliated with Occupy Well Street. “There is a natural gas boom in our region right now that’s threatening our rivers, our homes and the eco-systems that we rely on. We stand in solidarity with all the groups resisting fracking and the transportation infrastructure that will allow the natural gas industry to expand.”
The Spectra Pipeline is a 16 mile natural gas pipeline that will run through Jersey City, Hoboken, and Bayonne under the Hudson River to New York City’s West Village. Spectra Energy claims that it will provide necessary natural gas for New York City and surrounding areas. Activist groups opposed to the pipeline claim that inadequate safety standards, a history of accidents and the fact that the gas will be provided by hydraulic fracturing in the Marcellus Shale are unacceptable risks for the highly populated areas the pipeline will pass through. There have been numerous protests at Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) hearings throughout the environmental review process. Continue reading
Until their reintroduction in the 1990s wolves were all but wiped out in the Northern Rocky Mountains. No wolves had been spotted in Eastern Oregon since 1946, and further west, the last sighting of a wolf in California was in 1924.
The formation and spread of the Imnaha wolfpack in Eastern Oregon, however, has returned the apex predators’ howls to the Northwest. Following the birth of wolfpups in 2010 in the Imnaha region of Oregon, a lone wolf, tagged as OR-7 by Oregon Fish and Wildlife, and Journey, by Oregon school children, wandered over a thousand miles into Northern California in late 2011 with the hope of a wilder future for us all.
But starting in 2012 wolves have been delisted in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming and are well on their way to being legally hunted in the Great Lakes Region further East. The demonization of wolves by ranchers and other interests has already lead to the murder of at least one wolf in Oregon. In California, anti-wolf alliances are already forming should a pack form there.
for more information and analysis on the Imnaha wolfpack and the wolf wars in Oregon read The Howls of Reprisal: Wolf Defense in Oregon by Portland Animal Defense League, printed in the Brigid 2012 issue of the Earth First! Journal.
by the Center for Biological Diversity
Navajo Mine, by Kelly Michals
After decades of coal pollution from the 2040-megawatt Four Corners Power Plant and BHP Billiton’s 13,000-acre Navajo Coal Mine that supplies it, Navajo and conservation groups filed suit against the federal government late Tuesday for improperly rubber-stamping a proposal to expand strip-mining without full consideration of the damage and risks to health and the environment.
“The Navajo mine has torn up the land, polluted the air, and contaminated waters that families depend on,” said Anna Frazier of Diné CARE. “Residents in the area deserve a full and thorough impact analysis that is translated into the Navajo language to provide for real public participation, not another whitewash for the coal industry.”
Navajo Mine is located in San Juan County, N.M., on the Navajo Nation. Four Corners Power Plant, built in 1962, provides electricity to California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas and is the largest coal-fired power plant source of nitrogen oxides (NOx) in the United States. (NOx is associated with public-health impacts including respiratory disease, heart attacks and strokes). The legal action, brought under the National Environmental Policy Act, challenges the Office of Surface Mining’s decision to allow BHP Billiton to expand strip-mining operations into 714 acres of a portion of land designated “Area IV North” and the agency’s claim that the mine did not cause significant human health and environmental impacts.
The present Area IV mine expansion was proposed in the wake of Diné Citizens Against Ruining our Environment v. Klein (Diné CARE), 747 F. Supp. 2d 1234, 1263-64 (D. Colo. 2010). In that case, the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado ruled that a previous proposal to strip-mine all 3,800 acres of Area IV North violated the National Environmental Policy Act and ordered OSM to revisit its analysis under the Act.
Unfortunately, OSM’s new analysis only exacerbates the deficiencies of its first analysis. OSM’s analysis justified a finding of no significant impact in a vacuum by focusing only on a cursory analysis of impacts within the mine expansion’s perimeter and ignoring indirect and cumulative impacts from mercury, selenium, ozone, and other air and water pollutants caused by the combustion of coal at the Four Corners Power Plant and the plant’s disposal of coal ash waste generated by the coal mined from the expansion area. Continue reading
Environmental Magazines Today
by nettle
I have been interested in where environmental news can be found in our society of endless choices, outside of the internet. When you check-out at the grocery store, you have the choice between six different celebrity gossip magazines, but you most likely will not find the Earth First! Journal on the rack. Nor will you find E the Environmental Magazine, Orion or the Earth Island Journal – three titles on the short list of environmental magazines in print.
When I visit the mega newsstands the choices of magazines is over-whelming! There are dozens of magazines published monthly about dogs, marijuana, tattoos. There are dozens of magazines about cars, hunting, guns. Endless glamour magazines. If there are any environmental magazines they can be found in the “Lifestyles” section. If environmentalism is a part of your lifestyle, you have very few choices of literature. Mostly you can read Mother Earth News, which is a bit on the light side as far as “environmentalism” goes. Luckily, Orion can usually be found as well, once you dig through magazines that are so strong in numbers you literally have to pull back the layers to reveal what is underneath.
Print media is not a dying breed. Not anymore than coal-burning power plants or oil rigs are dying out. Sure, one-by-one, we have lost some – Wild Earth, for example, finished it’s run in 2004. Wild Earth was a publication that was born out of the split within Earth First! in the US in the late 90’s. Dave Forman, left the movement he co-founded and started the Wildlands Project and Wild Earth – a publication that focused more on conservation and science vs. direct action.
The Earth First! Journal is alive and well, though – like every non-profit, independently and collectively-run project under the sun – we need your support! The EF! Journal has been growing strong since we began work on the two volume anniversary issues in the summer of 2010. While working with the rich content of submissions and printed history of our 30-year-old movement, the Earth First! Journal Collective grew and gave the publication some needed revisions in content. If you have not picked up a copy in awhile, please do! By supporting the EF! Journal through subscribing or purchasing the publication on the newsstands, you are in turn supporting the work that we are also doing on the internet. Continue reading
Turning back the trucks at Shell’s construction site, once again
Welcoming in the Spring, a blocakade on May 3rd held up traffic for over 3 hours between Bellanaboy and Shell’s Aughoose compound. A concrete lock-on in the middle of the road stopped the morning’s haulage – the first truck to come along was a huge concrete pumping machine which had to turn in the road and go back the way it had come.
The following day, Friday May 4th, the simple the announcement of a “Day of Solidarity” successfully stopped all Shell haulage. Once folks were satisfied that Shell wasn’t going to try and do any major work, they went to the Rossport Solidarity Camp to start moving the camp to the new location Continue reading
Crossposted from Causes.com
Monsanto’s Mon810 corn, genetically engineered to produce a mutant version of the insecticide Bt, has been banned in Poland following protests by beekeepers who showed the corn was killing honeybees.
Poland is the first country to formally acknowledge the link between Monsanto’s genetically engineered corn and the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that’s been devastating bees around the world. Many analysts believe that Monsanto has known the danger their GMOs posed to bees all along. The biotech giant recently purchased a CCD research firm, Beeologics, that government agencies, including the US Department of Agriculture, have been relying on for help unraveling the mystery behind the disappearance of the bees.
Now that it’s owned by Monsanto, it’s very unlikely that Beeologics will investigate the links, but genetically engineered crops have been implicated in CCD for years now.
Learn & Take Action: http://capwiz.com/grassrootsnetroots/issues/alert/?alertid=22033501
On May 10th 2012 animal liberation prisoner Victor VanOrden was released from prison after a successful parole hearing. He and his wife Kellie (who was living in Iowa waiting for him to be released) have found their way back to Maryland where they will reside with Victor’s family. Thank you everyone for all of your wonderful support, loving letters, and financial generosity. Victor and Kellie are extremely grateful to everyone who thought about them which they were inside, and showed their support in one way or another.
In perhaps the strangest and yet somehow most symbolic moment in the history of the rural part of the Occupy movement, riot police aided the bulldozing of an occupied farm in Albany, CA, by chasing down an activist with a watering can. Environmental news of the weird, eat your heart out. There will be a reconvergence tonight at 5:00 p.m. at the Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Ave.
The Molycorp mine at Mountain Pass. Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired
By Danielle Vinton / Wired.com
The fight over the minerals that run the electronic world entered a new phase in March when the United States, the European Union and Japan collectively filed a case against China, accusing the rare-earth powerhouse of violating world trade rules to manipulate mineral prices.
At the heart of argument are 17 little-known elements with whimsical names like europium and praseodymium, that are found in everything from mobile phones and computers to smart bombs and large wind turbines. Traces of the metals can be found around the world, but rarely in high enough concentrations for mining to be convenient or profitable.
China now controls 95 percent of total rare-earth supply. A figurative sneeze on its export policy is all that’s needed to shake global markets, and in 2010 China began restricting rare-earth exports. International prices spiked, reaching near-dizzying levels last summer before crashing in the fall. In the wake of the World Trade Organization case, they’ve perked up again.
Foreign companies buying rare earths from China must now pay more than twice the rate paid by companies inside China Continue reading
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