Green Buzz: Week in Review

A subjective round-up of the week's top news stories, blog posts, and other online phenomena relating to the environment:

Nuke the Whales. Major fireworks attended the latest round of legal wrangling between the Bush administration and wildlife advocates over the U.S. Navy's use of intensely loud active sonar -- deadly to marine mammals -- during practice maneuvers. On January 4, after protracted study, U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper issued some pragmatic rules protecting whales and other marine life from sonar use during Naval maneuvers. But last Wednesday the White House simply exempted, in an order signed by President Bush himself, the Navy from compliance with the environmental law that undergirded the judge's decision. The president's decision to go outside the law did not escape notice; the story was massively popular on Digg Environment, and there are outpourings of comments on posts at Dot Earth, Island of Doubt and Uncertain Principles (both at ScienceBlogs.com), Daily Kos, and Grist. Also good posts at Plenty (background) and Overlawyered (legal considerations).

Mr. Stelmach Goes to Washington: The truth about extracting oil from Canada's tar sands -- it's simply an environmental horror that will turn a Florida-size chunk of forest into a smoldering sacrifice zone, all for the sake of feeding U.S. thirst for oil -- is beginning to register, and so this past week Alberta premier Ed Stelmach came to Washington to flack for the industry that may well make his province uninhabitable. NRDC bloggers Liz Barratt-Brown and George Peridas detail the not-so-warm reception he received, and don't miss Albertan KJ Pedersen's DailyKos take on Stelmach's travels. (If you haven't read Canada's Highway to Hell, Andrew Nikiforuk's compelling report from Alberta's tar-sands frontier, I highly recommend it.)

The Sixth Extinction. Feeling cheery yet? In a January 13 WaPo op-ed, paleontologist Michael Novacek gave us the scientific community's 35,000-foot view on the current state of the natural world:

More than a decade ago, many scientists claimed that humans were demonstrating a capacity to force a major global catastrophe that would lead to a traumatic shift in climate, an intolerable level of destruction of natural habitats, and an extinction event that could eliminate 30 to 50 percent of all living species by the middle of the 21st century. Now those predictions are coming true. The evidence shows that species loss today is accelerating. We find ourselves uncomfortably privileged to be witnessing a mass extinction event as it's taking place, in real time.

Or, as reviewer Bruce Barcott has said of the picture Novacek paints in his recent book, Terra, "we have met the next killer asteroid, and it is us." Have moicy. The Daily Green follows with a report on new research showing that the planet could face an especially long, slow recovery from this one. Novacek's piece has ruled the roost at Digg Environment all week, with nearly 1,400 Diggs. (You'd have to be a true glutton for gloom to slog through the hundreds of comments, most of which do not inspire hope that humanity's up to this challenge.)

Hope for Klamath River Salmon. The end appears to be in sight for one of the most intractable environmental struggles of the last decades, over the removal of four dams straddling California and Oregon that have crippled the Klamath River's salmon run. Treehugger, blogfish, and the High Country News' GOAT blog have coverage.

Big Coal Goes to the War Chest. On Friday the Washington Post reported that the coal industry, sensing momentum building behind climate legislation and against new coal-fired power plants, is spending millions during the presidential primaries on ads (TV, radio, billboard, newspaper, even video monitors at airport baggage carousels), large street teams at campaign stops, and every other PR trick under the sun to muddy public opinion. Good posts on this from Grist's Dave ("Coal is the enemy of the human race") Roberts and from Adam Siegel.

Green Apples? On hearing that Apple is touting the environmental bona fides of its new super-slim Macbook Air notebook, my first thought was "props to Greenpeace, and I wonder what they think of it?" In 2006, Greenpeace launched Green My Apple, a brilliantly conceived and executed campaign that enlisted Apple fanatics in an effort to push the company to clean up its business and manufacturing practices. By May 2007, a sufficiently scorched Steve Jobs began to talk about steps the company would take, and at last week's MacWorld Jobs pledged that every major Apple product launch would include info on environmental specs. Greenpeace's response to the Macbook Air? Apple is "on the right path," but has more work to do.

Science Blogfest. Finally, the place to be (at least for a geek of my sort) this past weekend would have been the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference. I wasn't able to attend in person, but thanks to the wonders of live-blogging and blog-search engines it's pretty easy to follow along.