Environmental Musings

Please take a moment and consider this.

No one seems to care much about the environment and if they do, their concern is often expressed quietly and quickly forgotten. Perhaps since there are no visceral images of people dying, as there are in hurricanes, wars and famine, people just can't wrap their hands around the seriousness of the threat to our planet. It's not nightly news stuff and there are no images and sounds to convey the danger. Just scientists and activists trying their best to get people to care.

I'm going to try to do my part here and if some of my friends and acquaintances are offended, well I am sorry. I particularly want to address this to my friends who are hunters and fisherman and nature lovers and inexplicably . . . conservatives. If you care about the lands you hunt on, the waters you fish in and the air your family breathe, maybe you will set aside your political agenda and unite with us all to save the only earth we have. Or you can shut your eyes and ears to what you cannot see or hear and just go on and live your life without caring what kind of world your children inherit from you.

The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, our forests, wildlife, the atmosphere that protects us, the all important temperature of the oceans . . . . . they are all in dire danger of being damaged beyond repair. This current administration is supporting legislation and an activist agenda that clearly sacrifices the environment for the benefit of large corporate interests whose bottom line profits are intrinsically tied to exploiting the earth's resources and avoiding the financial commitments to curb their greenhouse gas emissions and polluting.

Corporations engaged in clear-cutting our forests including old growth redwoods, rampant drilling for oil, mining for coal, land development, chemical manufacturing and a myriad of other industries are being given a free pass to do as they will to the environment in pursuit of the bottom line. Aside from threatening this planets physical future, these polluters contribute substantially to lung disorders like asthma, heart disease, increased hospitalizations and medical costs and premature death for millions of unsuspecting people worldwide.

Let's look at some of the facts, not hyperbole but facts:

The Bush administration has recommended opening up all 155 of our National Forests to logging without concern or consideration for the wildlife that inhabits these lands.

1. The Bush administration wants to change the Clean Air Act to allow 20,000 power plants to release more pollutants into the air.
2. The Bush administration has recommended treating Mercury pollution released by power plants as a non-hazardous substance. There are 45 states currently that post mercury contamination warning signs and mercury is known to cause birth defects and learning disorders.
3. The Bush administration has recommended allowing oil drilling in some of America's most sensitive eco-systems such as Yellowstone Park, Otero Mesa in New Mexico, Canyonlands and Dinosaur National Monument in Utah.
4. The Bush administration is actively supporting logging in Alaska's Tongass Wilderness, the earth's largest remaining rainforest.
5. Cleanup work at toxic waste sites in eighteen states will be severely curtailed or in some cases halted under a Bush administration plan to reduce spending for the nation's Superfund program, according to an analysis by Bush’s own Environmental Protection Agency.
6. The Bush administration has also decided not to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and has rejected a 1997 climate treaty broadly accepted by our European allies.
7. We all know by now they support developing the environmentally fragile Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and their energy plan indicates their intention to drill for oil and gas under the Great Lakes.
8. Bush, after faulting the Kyoto climate treaty for excluding developing nations from its requirements, wants to cut U.S. aid for helping Third World countries combat global warming and proposes reducing assistance to other countries by $41 million from last year's $165 million.
9. A major tactic of the Bush administration has been to take advantage of the right wing’s ongoing smear campaign against former president Clinton to rollback many of the environmental safeguards he set in place. For example, the Bush administration wants to put on hold and re-examine a Clinton-era program spelling out federally required state cleanup plans for thousands of lakes and rivers around the nation The broad cleanup plans issued last year were intended to reduce storm water and agriculture runoff polluting about 21,000 lakes, ponds, streams and rivers across the country.
10. Bush wants to scale back a Clinton administration rule aimed at reducing pollution emissions from older coal-fired power plants.
11. Bush has revoked some requirements imposed on developers during the Clinton presidency, including one requiring them to restore or create an acre of wetlands for every acre they fill. This would allow speedy government approval of their projects if their impact on streams or marshes is considered minimal.
12. The corps also eliminated revoked some restrictions on development in flood plains. The Bush administration also proposed cutting NASA's climate change research by $90 million, or almost 8 percent from last year's $1.2 billion and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has repealed a Clinton-era rule favored by unions that prevents the government from awarding contracts to businesses that have broken environmental, labor, tax or other federal laws.

Do we care yet?