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February, 2009
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Kingston Coal Diary, February 7-10
February 7
United Mountain Defense volunteers started working on compiling a comprehensive list of all of the video tapes they have recorded to date. UMD volunteer Tom Swinford has volunteered to start the task of converting the Mini DV tapes into DVD’s and has begun reproducing the DVD’s for distribution.
United Mountain Defense has the most comprehensive video documentation of TVA’s response to the Coal Ash Disaster of Dec 22, 2008. United Mountain Defense has more than 60 hours of footage including two aerial videos and hours of local interviews.
February 8
United Mountain Defense volunteers were tasked with getting more medical release forms from residents who got free heavy metal exposure screenings. Their medical results are being analyzed and will be released as an anonymous pool of data. UMD volunteers got two more residents to sign release forms.
UMD volunteers also video taped the changes to the disaster site. It was a mostly quiet day with only a few machines working ...
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One Woman's Quest Against Naval Testing on the Oregon Coast
Oregon Shores, a 500 member-strong Oregon environmental group, sends out periodic emails to alert members to Oregon-related issues and actions of interest. In late January 2009 an email arrived in my Inbox stating the US Navy was conducting on January 31st an Open House and Hearing called “Northwest Training Range Complex Environmental Impact Statement”. This sounded ominous so my interest was piqued and I ended up attending both the Open House and the Hearing.
What an eye opener.
I was told by one of the Navy’s representatives that the Navy wants to take over the two training areas currently used by the Oregon Air National Guard. This includes almost the entire coastal waters of Oregon, extending from near shoreline out to over 250 miles offshore. Their plans include using live war heads, live missiles, EA-18G Growler aircraft (which can fly at Mach 1.6), guided missile submarines, P-8 Multimission Maritime aircraft, unmanned aerial systems, air and sea surface targets, porta... -
Out West, Algae Cauldrons Bubble
If algae is going to take over the world (or at least make airplanes fly), we're going to need to work out a few kinks that come with growing the autotrophic organism. Lucky for us, a group outside Seattle thinks they've got some answers.
To start: there are three main problems with growing algae on an industrial scale.
One. Scientists are trying to find that perfect algae -- one that literally drips with the oily lipids that engineers and chemists can refine into a biofuel. Researchers are wondering if there is such a naturally occuring algae out there, or if scientists will have to create it (the latter option then opens the door to discussions about genetically modified organisms).
Two. Algae love light, but they are sooo selfish. Give 'em a few rays, and they grow and grow, multiply and multiply, into a thin layer all over the surface of the water. The layer then becomes a barrier, blocking the sun from penetrating deeply; block out the sunlight, and algae can't grow any deeper...
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Serving is Swell: Surf Voluntourism in Peru
NRDC superstar Courtney Hamilton has treated us these past few months to a series of pieces on her experiences in "Volunteer Tourism" - namely, using her vacation time and money to take care of elephants in Thailand. Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting a man with a similar plan, though he calls it "Adventure Voluntourism," and as far as I can tell, no elephants are involved - but the idea of recreational altruism remains the same.
While enlisted in the Peace Corps in Peru, David Aabo watched traveling surfers pass through town without meaningfully contributing to the local community, so he devised a method to "help communities connect surfing and sustainable development." Alongside co-founders Daniel Amico and Jim Clark, Aabo launched a pilot project in the Peruvian town of Lobitos this year called WAVES for Development, and their dynamic mission has begun to blossom. WAVES spurs local development by training local youth in a variety of skills; meanwhile, the organization provi...
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The Factory Farm and Water Pollution
In a factory farm, the animals live on a perforated floor over a concrete slab. Especially for the wellbeing of pigs during hot weather, the buildings and pigs are watered down to bring down body temperature, and also to gather the urine and manure. The whole mix flows in a containment pit and is then pumped into the concrete pit outside.
[Photo: One of the two liquid manure pits built in Richelieu for the pig CAFO]
In my town, so that the manure pits don't fill up too quickly, a roof was built above the concrete construction. Public relations propaganda says that it is so that the smell doesn't waft out. The reason the farmer doesn't want the pit to fill up too quickly is that the only way to empty it is to spread the content on his land: something to be done as infrequently and as quickly as possible in order to keep public outcry to a minimum. So the pits come in big sizes. One manure pit in my town can hold 4 million liters (or more than 1 million gallons) of what some call slurry... -
Debate on California Water Crisis Missed Real Issues
In a classic case of mainstream media's corporate bias and conflict of interest, a KMPH reporter Ashley Ritchie, the recipient of over $300,000 in farm subsidies and member of a wealthy South Valley farming family, decided to include without context the most damning remarks of her interview with local environmentalist and thorn in agribusiness' side, Lloyd Carter. Journalistic ethical standards recommend that reporters avoid and at the very least disclose financial conflicts of interest. Ritchie did neither and should not have been covering agricultural issues, particularly those as contentious as the ones discussed at the Fresno State water debate February 4th. In the highly edited clip broadcast on the news and oft repeated on air and in print over the following days Carter says with respect to some farmworkers, "They're not even American citizens for starters. Do you think we should employ illegal aliens? What parent raises their child to be a farm worker? These kids are the leas...
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Lament for the Honeybee
As this priceless pollinator vanishes from the face of the earth, North American regulators refuse to protect it from a known toxin
The crop chemical clothianidin, approved almost five years ago by the Pest Management Regulatory Agency, (PMRA) a division of Health Canada, has since its approval been found to be very highly toxic to the honeybee, apis mellifera. Despite knowing this for at least four years, the PMRA has kept the product's temporary license in place. So it continues to be used! Clothianidin is a member of the chemical family, neonicitanoids, used, among other things, to treat canola seed to ward off flea beetles. Another family member, imadacloprid, has been used in Canada for years. In 2004, the PMRA and its American counterpart, the Environmental Protection Agency, jointly reviewed data on clothianidin. In addition to their conclusion of very high toxicity, they found that other studies into the question had been "deficient in design." Those studies found...
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The Factory Farm and Air Pollution
In my previous entry, "The Small Town and the Factory Farm", I wrote about how factory farms are forced upon a community in a very undemocratic process. Political, corporate and financial priorities tend to push aside community and environmental concerns about intensive agricultural practices and factory farms. I also wrote about my emotional attachment to the river in front of my home and how I feared the new pig farm upstream would jeopardize the health of the river's ecosystem. You might wonder why a citizen of the United States should worry about how pigs are raised in Canada; consider this: Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada says that in 2007, Canada exported 1.03 million tons of pork to the USA.
I would now like to go into some of the nuts and bolts that bring credibility to the gut reaction when a factory farm becomes part of everyday life in a community. The first problem that comes to mind when "pig farm" and "neighborhood" have to coexist is the smell.
Keeping a safe distance...
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The Moral Case Against Tar Sands
The internet's abuzz as President Obama makes his long anticipated across the northern border. Environmentalists have been knawing their knuckles wondering how he's going to handle the issue of tar sands--which Prime Minister Harper is certain to bring up. There's no question that tar sands extraction is a climate catastrophe, or as some would say, "the biggest global warming crime ever seen." Over on Switchboard, NRDC has a whole host of climate and energy experts explaining just how dangerous these tar sands are from a greenhouse gas perspective. And Obama seems to get it, saying in an interview with the CBC on Tuesday:
What we know is that oil sands creates a big carbon footprint. So the dilemma that Canada faces, the United States faces, and China and the entire world faces is how do we obtain the energy that we need to grow our economies in a way that is not rapidly accelerating climate change.
Nice.
He hedges, though, when following up, and starts talking about the pote...
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Kingston Coal Disaster Diary, February 3-6
February 3
Diana Anderson of the Tennessee Coal Ash Survivors Network and Matt Landon of United Mountain Defense arose bright and early, fought the Washington D.C. traffic, and caught our flight back to the big city of Knoxville, TN. The volunteers were coming back from a weekend of air quality training with the Global Community Monitor/ Bucket Brigade. The informative training session was video taped to provide a good reference for future trainings and community refresher courses.
After arriving back in Knoxville Anderson and Landon drove to TVA’s Bull Run Coal Burning Plant to document the coal ash piles on site. The coal burning dinosaur appeared to be in working order with a HUGE coal ash pile. Unlike TVA’s Kingston plant there were houses directly at the toe of the coal ash pile.
This weekend was a pleasant retreat from the dusty, toxic air of Harriman, TN. As the volunteers drove the back roads and approached TVA’s coal ash disaster their chests began to tighten and their...
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Cree Elder Speaks Out Against Alberta Oil Sands
Here are clips from an interview with Celina Harpe, an elder in the Cree community of Fort Mackay, about 40km downstream from Suncor and Syncrude oil sands processing plants on the Athabasca River. She describes the increase in cancer, the lowering of the water levels on the river, and the disappearance of wildlife in the area.
Produced by Macdonald Stainsby of Oil Sands Truth, with Maya Rolbin-Ghanie and Dru Oja Jay of The Dominion.
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Pondering Penguins: Thoughts from Antarctica
We’ve all heard that Antarctica is beautiful, that it is icy, and that it is melting fast. All these things are true. But it was not until I traveled there myself, as part of a family trip, that I really started to understand the immensity and complexity of each of these statements.
As the coldest, windiest, highest, driest, and most remote continent, Antarctica shimmers with a stark beauty that is unlike anything I had ever experienced. Huge mountains tower above the coastline, blanketed with ice sheets that glow in the summer sun. From the ice fields, sweeping glaciers pour down the flanks of the mountains, meeting the sea in a tumult of restless ice. Icebergs spawned at these violent junctions drift slowly across the surface of the water, spreading out to the horizon. Seen from the level of a kayak, this scenery is so vast that at times it appears to dwarf all life—especially me, the little paddler. It is awe-inspiring and overwhelming at the same time.
5:20 am, Paradise Harb...
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Kingston Coal Disaster Diary, January 31-February 2
January 31
Diana Anderson of the TN Coal Ash Survivors Network and Matt Landon of United Mountain Defense traveled to Deleware today to receive training from the Global Community Monitor (GCM) organization.
Matt Landon of UMD video taped the entire two day training session so that other community members in Deleware, TN, and the world could review the training. Today’s training consisted of learning about the history and successes of the Bucket Brigade, GCM’s most notable air monitoring project. The community that hosted us today was plagued by numerous polluting industries and was in the first steps of beginning to self monitor the air quality. One of the first steps in the process was called a log sheet. A brainstorming session led to the development of the “I SEE, I SMELL, I FEEL” sections for residents to fill out for each air pollution event. Based on these pollution log sheets GCM and the community would be able to decide where to put up Swipe Tests and then Mini Volume... -
The Small Town and the Factory Farm
I was asked to tell the story of a pig farm, a CAFO (concentrated animal feeding operation) that is, in my little town of less than 5,500 citizens, called Richelieu. My town is on the Richelieu River, outlet of Lake Champlain which divides New York and Vermont. Living in the province of Quebec, in Canada, things are a little different than is the U.S. of A. But not much.
Aerial photo of site of CAFO before it was built, Richelieu River in background
PROVINCIAL POLICY
First of all, I must explain that the nitty-gritty of agriculture is decided on the provincial level here in Canada. So about 10 years ago, our province decided we should go global, and because of our short summers, it was decided that the way to make money was to export pork. It was also decided that raising pork on litter (straw or woodchips) was not efficient enough. I also suspect that the concrete industry had some say in deciding the pigs should live all their lives on concrete grids over concrete slabs, with m... -
Exploring the Effect of Climate Change on Oceans
The author of this post, Howard Hall, specializes in making marine wildlife films and is the director of “Under the Sea 3D,” a new IMAX® 3D adventure.
There are many issues facing the marine environment. Within the context of one film, it's difficult to cover all of them, or even a number of them, so we try to target one topic that we want to emphasize. On the last film, Deep Sea 3D, it was the importance of biodiversity. For Under the Sea 3D, we're discussing the effect of climate change on the oceans.
There are very specific changes that the oceans will undergo because of increased carbon dioxide levels, and some of them are not well-known. One reason for making this film was to show people how important it is to do something about climate change and carbon dioxide excess.
Part of our purpose is to explain what goes on in the coral reef community, and what affects coral reefs. Some of these things are increasing water temperatures, increased carbon dioxide levels dissolved ...
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Disappearing Acts: Where Have All Our Neighborhoods Gone?
A commentary on the disappearance of America’s neighborhoods and a look into the “Local First” movement in Chicago as one way to combat it.
Walking out of the Galleria Mall outside St. Louis, MO, just leaving Anne Taylor and on my way to Best Buy, I had the uncanny feeling that I had just left the Galleria Mall in Cambridge, MA. When I look to one town center I increasingly I see the exact same stores there, as I would see 50 miles away. It appears that chain companies and corporations are overrunning America’s streets, pushing locally owned, independent stores out of business everywhere. But, what does the trend towards homogeneity mean for our country? What does it mean for our energy use and the sustainability of our way of life? And what can we do, if anything, to stop it?
On a drive from St. Louis to Chicago this winter (a part of a larger trip to various cities in the mid-west and northeast), I took note of the number of times we passed, not silos and farm fields, but ...
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Kingston Coal Disaster Diary, January 27-30
January 27
United Mountain Defense volunteer staff person, Matt Landon called all of the regulatory agencies to report the problems of coal ash tracking. Landon called TN Highway Patrol, TN Bureau of Investigation, Bob Alexander of TDEC, EPA criminal division. After speaking with the EPA criminal division Landon was told he would be called by TVA’s OIG in the next week. Landon learned that EPA can’t regulate coal fly ash tracking. EPA doesn’t investigate it because it is not a hazardous waste. After speaking with the TBI, Landon emailed the District Attorney about the tracking problem to file an official compliant.
United Mountain Defense volunteers worked on gathering releases from residents who received heavy metal exposure screening. They picked up disaster photos that were taken to Washington DC. Bonnie and Tom picked up some more human samples for the heavy metal exposure testing. These samples were kept on ice then refrigerated until they were delivered to Internal Balanc... -
The Ends of the Earth in NYC: Polar-Palooza Tells Stories from a Changing Planet
I've got something of an unhealthy obsession with the ends of the earth. Since contracting the "arctic fever" (as those in the know have come to call it) on climate change science and arts voyage from Svalbard to Greenland in the fall of 2007, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get back to the North. In the meantime, I settle for whatever writing, photos, videos, or discussion I can find about the poles. It's typically a pretty thin diet--an article here, a poorly produced public television segment there. Imagine my delight, then, when I caught word of Polar-Palooza--something of an online portal and traveling roadshow featuring a wealth of info and multimedia presentations that highlight the importance of the poles on the entire Earth's system, while also delving deep into the effects of climate change on the regions.
Lucky for me, and all New Yorkers, Polar-Palooza came to the Big Apple this past weekend, settling in at the American Museum of Natural Histo...
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Gates Releases Mosquitoes. But What About Climate Change?
A recent, high-profile gesture has provoked wide ranging debate and has me plotting another, similar move.
At a recent TED Conference, a self-described conference of the world’s “leading thinkers and doers,” Bill Gates gave a speech on malaria. He described its effects, its history, and its treatments. In this story, two themes were prominent: mosquitoes spread the disease amongst only the world’s poor. More money, he said, is spent on baldness than malaria. And then, in a much-discussed gesture, he released small cloud of mosquitoes on his audience.
There was some nervous laughter and some clapping. He then simply moved on. But to judge from the response on the internet –- here, here, here -– and TED’s response of immediately releasing the video clip, the move had its intended effect: it attracted attention.
Through this simple gesture, it was no longer simply a speech about infectious disease. It provoked debate. It engaged more people than merely his audience. It sp... -
Greenwashing Water Bottles
What makes Poland Springs Eco-Friendly water bottles good for nature? According to the improved label, the new eco-friendly shape "looks and feels different because it is purposely designed with an average of 30% less plastic to be easier on the environment." The label on the bottle neglects to mention that the water bottles are one of the most detrimental products for the world, even if they have less plastic than their competitors. Lately, the environmental movement has coined a new word for companies that use fake green credentials to deceive consumers into believing their products help the natural world: greenwashing. The Poland Spring Company pretends to care about the Earth, but that's a thin façade. They just want to satisfy their voracious appetite for money.
A Poland Springs Eco-Friendly water bottle begins as a dinosaur. After dying, the dinosaur rots away, along with other ancient species, in the ground for a long time. Millions of years later, long after the ...
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Victory for the Public's Land in Utah
The American public just scored a major victory on behalf of our public lands. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has announced that he is cancelling all 77 contested leases surrounding some of Utah's most stunning national parks. Now, instead of being drilled and industrialized, this redrock wilderness can remain part of our natural heritage.
I see this announcement as a sign that after eight long years of rapacious greed and backdoor dealings, our government is returning a sense of balance to the way it manages our lands.
The Bush administration made oil and gas drilling the dominant use of public lands, placing it above recreation, preservation, and wildlife habitat. Considering America has less than 3 percent of the world's oil reserves and couldn't possible drill its way out of our energy problems, the policy amounted to little more than a giveaway of public resources to the administration's energy industry friends. The Utah leases, announced in November, were just one last parti... -
Kingston Coal Disaster Diary, January 23-26
January 23
United Mountain Defense volunteers have been waiting to get new carpet put in the UMD volunteer house since we had an indoor flood on sunday night. We've still been helping organize between vacumming water and working with carpet specialists, and the insurance man.
So we have also been hounding TVA about the Material Safety Data Sheets AND WE FINALLY GOT A COPY OF IT TODAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The copies that we have are for Class F fly ash and for bottom ash. The main chemicals listed are aluminum oxide, iron oxide, calcium oxide, magnesium oxide, titanium oxide, and inorganic arsenic at varying ranges. We will try to get these sheets up on UMD's website and this blog.
We have also spent the day working on figuring out the air quality thing. WE HAVE GOOD NEWS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The Swan Pond community is so much further ahead than other communities because of all their documentation, diaries, doctor's visits, and keeping track of their symptoms. The community listserve serves a... -
Infertility and Tainted Breastmilk: Side Effects of Our Drinking Water
ALBUQUERQUE- As a new mother, I've done everything I can to keep my son healthy and increase his chances of becoming a strong, successful individual. I had a natural childbirth with no drugs. He was exclusively breastfed. At 9 months, he now only eats organic fruits, vegetables, grains and meat, and he continues to breastfeed. I braved the mess of cloth diapers, and use only gel-free, fragrance-free, dye-free disposables as an alternative. I've tried to educate myself about all the harmful contaminants he could be exposed to, and do my best to protect him from them.
Yet there is one source of contaminants that I haven't been able to do much about: Our drinking water.
Sure, we have a PuR filter to help filter the water from our tap and I read the water quality reports from my local water authority. But the local water authority is only required to report on contaminants...
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England: A Dusting of Snow, A Climate of Chaos
I went to bed last night with Oxford covered in a thin, quiet blanket of snow. I woke up to find the country in chaos.
The Telegraph ran a headline saying, "Britain paralyzed by worst snowfall for 20 years." Meanwhile, the usually reserved Times of London reported: "Chaos after huge snow blanket hits UK." The Guardian followed suit: "England wakes up to snow chaos."I read these headlines with the shades still drawn. Outside my windows, where usually birds signal the shift from the gloom of England's night to the grayness of its days, there were students trilling about the snow. I threw open the window and found not a blanket of snow, but streets mostly black but for pockets of white and a chill in the air. So little snow, I thought, for so much disruption.
And so I took the streets. Experience bore out the papers. Many of the businesses along Turl Street -- one of the quiet streets that typify Oxford, its pubs, clothiers and nested Colleges -- were closed, or just opening, at 10am. A...
Mowing the Lawn