Sarito Carol Neiman : Hill Country Environment Threatened by 'Green Energy' Transmission

Lattice towers like this one will carry high-voltage electrical power lines from West Texas wind farms through the Texas Hill Country.

Proposed high-voltage power lines
Endanger unique Hill Country habitat

By Sarito Carol Neiman / The Rag Blog / July 31, 2010

When I came back to New York City a couple of years ago after a year’s “sabbatical” in my native Texas, I signed up for wind as the source of my electricity to be delivered by ConEd.

Being a “green” kind of person, I felt somewhat virtuous about this, despite the patent ridiculousness of the very idea that my personal kilowatts would now magically come from a windmill somewhere upstate, while those of my heedless neighbor in the next apartment would still be generated by planet-heating coal.

Then the news came from the folks back home, and the bigger picture was suddenly thrust before my city-dwelling, can’t-see-past-the-next-corner eyes.

On July 29th, the Lower Colorado River Authority (LCRA) submitted its revised “Certificate of Convenience and Necessity” (CCN) to the Texas Public Utilities Commission (PUC) for the construction of high-voltage electric transmission infrastructure across the Texas Hill Country.

After months of hearing from the public about the potential irreversible damage to the environment, the economy, and the livelihoods of those affected by the proposed lines, the revisions looked very much like the original proposals, only just more complicated and with a clearer effort to do a better PR job than the first time around.

Here’s what I posted to my Facebook page as soon as I got the latest, updated aerial photo of the patch of ground in that affected region closest to my heart.

See the three yellow boxes just above and to the left of the words "Llano River." That's the family farm. See the white dots... numbered 66 & 67. Those are where I have enjoyed some of the best meals and most loving gatherings I've ever experienced in my life, with family and friends. See the big red lines. That's where the "preferred route" is located for sending West Texas wind energy to the I-35 corridor to light up and air condition urban landscapes where you can't see the stars or smell the breeze blowing out of the hills. See the big red spot. That's where one of those big, 14-story made-in-Mexico steel lattice towers will be planted to hold up the lines (those lines where you can stand underneath and hold a fluorescent bulb in your hand and it will light up on its own).

Meantime the bro' in his Kerrville TV station interview the other day took the lady's question about his personal property situation and turned it round immediately to the question even closer to his heart, which is about preserving one of the most amazingly ecologically diverse open spaces left in the state of Texas, and among the top 20 in the world. I am not so generous as he is. I am really, really pissed. Because my brother and his family -- my family -- are the connection of this old city-dweller and rootless vagabond to my roots, and to the land.

Run, Spot, run. Or else I am coming after your head on a platter.

If, like me, you’re a city dweller who wants to support green energy, here are some links to the bigger picture. Between now and the end of August there is an opportunity for more public input -- and I’m sure those who live in the Hill Country and will be directly impacted by this very un-green infrastructure would appreciate support from some of the intended consumers living at the end of the line along the I-35 corridor.

[Carol Neiman, a founding editor of the original Rag in Austin, coauthored A Disrupted History: The New Left and the New Capitalism, and has written or edited a number of other books. She lives in New York City but wishes she were back on a front porch in Texas, drinking a margarita.]

• Watch the Clear View Alliance informational videos and send a message (provided on the website) to the Public Utilities Commission affirming your support for "green" power transmission infrastructure as well as green energy.
• Find out other ways you can lend your support to Hill Country landowners and environmentalists.
• Also see "Blowing Through Texas: Renewable Energy Ploy Brings an Ill Wind" by Sarito Carol Neiman / The Rag Blog / June 18,2009

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View From Texas Coast : Stop the Drilling Now

In better days: Brown Pelican off the Texas Coast. Photo from Amber Coakley / Birders Lounge.
BP oil disaster demonstrates
Need to end offshore drilling

...our love for the abundant life [on the Gulf Coast] is so woven into our lives that we can’t imagine what we will experience if it is diminished permanently.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / June 16, 2010

Growing up on the Gulf Coast at the Louisiana-Texas border makes it difficult to consider the BP oil disaster unemotionally. Nevertheless, I will try to sort the facts from my emotional response, and acknowledge my personal and financial interest in the damage this oil gush is causing on the Gulf coast. But if you’re not sickened by the sight of oil sludge-saturated sea life, then this column will not be worth your time to read.

I lived in Port Arthur beginning in 1948 and left to attend college in central Texas in 1962. I returned to the coast many times in the intervening years and began doing serious and regular salt-water fishing there in the mid-80s.

I (along with my wife) own a beach house with six other friends near where the Colorado River joins the Gulf of Mexico. Now when I fish, it is in the estuaries, bayous, and bays in that area, and in the surf of the Gulf of Mexico about 60 miles southwest of Galveston Island.

We share the same marshland wildlife that people on the Louisiana coast enjoy. Brown Pelicans, Sea Gulls, migrating ducks, Whooping Cranes, Bald Eagles, owls, countless other sea birds, Red Fish, Black Drum, Spotted Sea Trout, Flounder, Dolphin, Pompano, Whiting, assorted shark species, crabs, shrimp, bivalves and mollusks, turtles and many other birds, fish, and mammals that thrive along the Gulf Coast.

While our livelihoods don’t depend on the coastal ecosystem, our love for the abundant life there is so woven into our lives that we can’t imagine what we will experience if it is diminished permanently.

Oil-blackened marshes and sea birds and other sea life gasping for oxygen make clear that we are witnessing a vast destruction of life. While BP will pay for the dead workers killed by the explosion on its Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, it will not pay for the suffering of the sea birds and sea life, nor does this cold, calculating, greed-driven corporation care. Its view is that the earth and water are there for its exploitation and views to the contrary can be damned.

An exhausted oil-covered brown pelican sits in a pool of oil along Queen Bess Island Pelican Rookery, near Grand Isle, Louisiana on Jun. 5, 2010. Photo by Sean Gardner / National Post.
The people along the Louisiana coast are learning firsthand what we hoped never to experience. The loss of a significant amount of wildlife can cause grief as profound as the loss of a family member. As a child, I remember when two whales beached themselves on the coast between Galveston and Sabine Pass. Some wildlife researchers put tents around them and performed necropsies to determine why they died.

They let people into the tents to examine the whales up close. It was the first and last time I touched a whale. From my young perspective, they were several times bigger than an elephant, though I’m sure that they were closer to an even match with a full-grown pachyderm. I was in awe of the large creatures. We walked around their carcasses with reverence.

Before seining by hand with 200-foot nets was prohibited, such activity was great fun for family and friends on holiday weekends. An uncle of mine would always take hold of the lead pole and walk into the Gulf until it was so deep he had to bob up and down using the pole to keep his head mostly above water. He would then lead the procession of helpers spread out along the seine in an arc and start heading back into the shore.

It took everyone -- maybe 20-25 people -- to pull the net ashore to learn what we had caught. There was always much sea life in the net, including some that no one in the group could identify, though some guessed at the name of this creature and that one. The fish we cleaned and cooked for supper and we helped the crabs and other creatures we weren’t afraid to touch go back into the water.

That life is no more because of overfishing, which led to outlawing seining in the 70s. But that government rule and other conservation measures aimed at saving numerous species have saved the Spotted Sea Trout, Red Fish, Black Drum, Flounder, Brown Pelican, sea turtles and other sea life from extinction. At least that was the situation before the BP oil disaster.

We don’t yet know what effects it will have, but we are beginning to get an idea. The one lesson I have already taken from the disaster is that BP is incapable of restoring the sea and shore life that have been killed and will continue to be killed for decades as a result of BP’s negligence and greed.

In 1989, the Exxon Valdez leaked about 22.2 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound in Alaska, despoiling some 1,230 miles of coastline and killing as many as 250,000 birds and sea mammals immediately, along with billions of fish eggs for many years and contributing to reproductive failures in other species for several generations.

In comparison, it is believed that the BP gusher has yielded about 20,000 barrels a day by conservative government estimates. This is the equivalent of 840,000 gallons a day times 56 days (as of June 14), which totals to a conservative estimate of over 47 million gallons, more than twice what the Exxon Valdez spilled, and there is no end in sight.

It is too early to know how many miles of coastline could be affected, but the State of Florida (which appears vulnerable) has just over 1230 miles of coastline, and about 120 miles of Louisiana coast already has been affected.

Scientists estimate that it will take mussel beds fouled by the oil leak in Alaska at least 30 years to substantially, but not fully, recover from the Exxon Valdez disaster, which was caused by the failure of Exxon to repair an expensive, but highly effective, sonar system that would have allowed the third mate (who was at the helm at the time of the disaster) to guide the ship safely through Prince William Sound. No one knows how long it will take the oyster beds along the Gulf coast to recover.

As reported by David Biello in the Scientific American:

More than 20 years after the Exxon Valdez foundered off the coast of Alaska, puddles of oil can still be found in Prince William Sound. Nearly 25 years after a storage tank ruptured, spilling oil into the mangrove swamps and coral reefs of Bahia Las Minas in Panama, oil slicks can still be found on the water. And more than 40 years after the barge Florida grounded off Cape Cod, dumping fuel oil, the muck beneath the marsh grasses still smells like a gas station.

Biello reports also that Texas A & M University marine biologist Thomas Shirley has found that there are nearly 16,000 species of plants and animals in the Gulf of Mexico, not counting microbes. U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) marine biologist Jane Lubchenko pointed to another aspect of the release of oil: "There are a diversity of types of habitats in the Gulf, many very important in support of a variety of wildlife and fisheries... Many are at risk of being affected..." With these facts in mind, the situation in the Gulf of Mexico looks absolutely dismal.

Already, conservative and Libertarian voices are advancing the notion that BP has no responsibility for this environmental debacle. Rand Paul said, “I think it's part of this sort of blame-game society in the sense that it's always got to be somebody's fault instead of the fact that maybe sometimes accidents happen." David Brooks, the Barack Obama of conservative confabulation, has attributed the cause of the Gulf gusher to the complexity of the technology that exceeds the ability of humans to cope

Boom deployed by Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, on June 12, 2010 in attempt to protect nearby islands. Photo by Kurt Fromherz / WDSU.com.
To these political voices, no one can be held responsible for such events. They prefer to ignore BP’s long history of recklessness toward its employees and the environment, and its disdain for and venality toward those employees who report safety concerns. Would that we all could get off so easily for our transgressions.

The people and institutions at the top of the economic food chain generally have limits on their accountability, such as the $75 million plus cleanup costs limitation on damages for oil companies who spill oil into coastal waters, which was enacted by a unanimous Congress in 1990 (the Oil Pollution Act of 1990). But those at the bottom of the economic food chain are often dealt with harshly, out of all proportion to their wrongdoing. Just walk into any criminal courtroom in the country to confirm this.

Recently, Dr. Rafe Sagarin, a marine ecologist and policy researcher at the University of Arizona's Institute of the Environment, and Mary Turnipseed, a graduate student in Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment, wrote about a legal doctrine known as the Public Trust Doctrine:

...the Public Trust Doctrine (PTD), established in the earliest days of this country and since expanded through courts and state and federal legislative bodies, provides the power -- and the legal responsibility -- to manage public trust assets in a comprehensive fashion that balances competing short and long-term needs of all American citizens. It's a mandate that if it had been implemented properly would likely have prevented the current catastrophe, and if applied to the full extent of its powers could prevent similar disasters in the future.

Sagarin and Turnipseed, writing for McClatchy News, concluded:

... the Deepwater Horizon spill is a catastrophic failure to protect the public trust. Millions of animals; a $2.5 billion fishing industry and a $3 billion tourism sector imperiled; the toxic legacy of dispersants; and up to 17,000 barrels of oil spilling into the Gulf every day, all are a shocking blow to the value of the coastal and marine resources that are a vital part of our nation's public trust.

BP understands nothing about the public trust.

The world’s recoverable oil reserves are about 1,200 billion barrels. North America accounts for about 6% to 9% of those reserves, and the Gulf of Mexico only a portion of that. Even if we produced all the oil that is currently producible in the United States, it would last from three years to nine years, depending on which expert you believe.

Destroying our coastal environment is not worth a few years of oil production, whether it is three years or nine, or 19 if the experts are way off in their estimates. The facts are that we don’t have to drill in the Gulf of Mexico to get the oil we need until green alternatives become both feasible and abundant.

Among Americans who depend on the Gulf Coast and its waters for recreation, living, and work, few believe that BP should not have to pay for the damage it has done and will continue to do, for generations, to the Gulf of Mexico and its environs from this one incident. Ruining the natural world for oil is not a good trade-off for Americans.

The lesson we should take from BP’s negligence is that green energy should become the “race to the moon” of the second decade of the 21st century. If the government could be the stimulus for winning that race in the 1960s, it can be the stimulus for winning this new race to produce feasible and affordable alternative energy before the end of the next decade. The government, along with entrepreneurs and creative scientists and technologists, can assure that we can continue to lead good lives while we protect the natural world from man-made disasters.

It is time to accept that offshore drilling is as much a certain killer of the creatures in the sea as is overfishing. I agree with the conservative and Libertarian BP apologists on one point -- it is inevitable that such disasters will occur again as long as we allow offshore drilling. We need the same no-nonsense rules that protect specific species to protect all of the sea life in the Gulf of Mexico.

Undoubtedly, the oil companies have escaped effective regulation because of their political power, while fishermen and shrimpers have been forced to accept regulations needed to conserve sea life. Now, we must force our politicians to accept the indisputable reality that oil production in the Gulf is inevitably destructive of the environment.

An end to offshore drilling is the most effective action we can take to protect our coastal waters and environs to ensure that we are taking care of a resource that provides food, recreation, and a way of life for many Americans. And it is equally important to protect all life, whether human or other species, because we are all related, and it is the responsible thing to do.

© Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins

[This article was also published in the San Marcos Mercury.]

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Nearly Half of all the World's Primates at Risk of Extinction

The endangered golden lion tamarin. Photo by Anup Shah/Getty Images.
Study paints bleak picture for hundreds of species: Loss of habitat and boom in bushmeat trade blamed
By James Randerson / August 5, 2008

Nearly half of all primate species are now threatened with extinction, according to an evaluation by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

The study, which drew on the work of hundreds of scientists and is the most comprehensive analysis for more than a decade, found that the conservation outlook for monkeys, apes and other primates has dramatically worsened.

In some regions, the thriving bushmeat trade means the animals are being "eaten to extinction".

The 2007 IUCN "red list" has 39% of primate species and sub-species in the three highest threat categories - vulnerable, endangered and critically endangered. In today's revised list, 303 of the 634 species and sub-species - 48% - are in these most threatened categories.

The two biggest threats faced by primates are habitat destruction through logging and hunting for bushmeat and the illegal wildlife trade.

"We've raised concerns for years about primates being in peril, but now we have solid data to show the situation is far more severe than we imagined," said Dr Russell Mittermeier, the chairman of the IUCN Species Survival Commission's primate specialist group and the president of Conservation International.

"Tropical forest destruction has always been the main cause, but now it appears that hunting is just as serious a threat in some areas, even where the habitat is still quite intact. In many places, primates are quite literally being eaten to extinction."

The picture in south-east Asia is particularly bleak, where 71% of all Asia primates are now listed as threatened, and in Vietnam and Cambodia, 90% are considered at risk. Populations of gibbons, leaf monkeys and langurs have dropped due to rapid habitat loss and hunting to satisfy the Chinese medicine and pet trade.

"What is happening in south-east Asia is terrifying," said Dr Jean-Christophe Vié, the deputy head of the IUCN species programme. "To have a group of animals under such a high level of threat is, quite frankly, unlike anything we have recorded among any other group of species to date."

In Africa, 11 of 13 kinds of red colobus monkey have been listed as critically endangered or endangered. Two - Bouvier's red colobus and Miss Waldron's red colobus - may already be extinct.

Overall, 69 species and sub-species (11% of the total) are considered critically endangered, including the mountain gorilla in central Africa, Tonkin snub-nosed monkey in Vietnam and grey-shanked douc langur from Asia.

In the endangered category are another 137 species and sub-species (22%) including the Javan gibbon from Indonesia, golden lion tamarin from Brazil and Berthe's mouse lemur from Madagascar. Species are judged to be in these categories if they have a small population size, are suffering rapid population declines and have a limited geographic range.

The apparent jump in the numbers of threatened primates from 39% to 48% has not in reality happened in the course of one year. The major new analysis has filled in missing data that was not available previously, according to Michael Hoffman at Conservation International. The last major assessment was carried out in 1996.

"The situation could well have been as bad as this, say, five years ago, we just didn't know. But now we have a much better indication of the state of the world's primates - and the news is not good," he said.

The review, which is funded by Conservation International, the Margot Marsh Biodiversity Foundation, Disney's Animal Kingdom and the IUCN is part of an unprecedented examination of the state of the world's mammals to be released at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Barcelona in October.

However there was some good news for primates. In Brazil, the black lion tamarin has been brought back from the brink of extinction and shifted from the critically endangered to endangered category. This is the result of a concerted conservation effort which has also benefited the golden lion tamarin - it was downlisted to endangered in 2003.

"The work with lion tamarins shows that conserving forest fragments and reforesting to create corridors that connect them is not only vital for primates, but offers the multiple benefits of maintaining healthy ecosystems and water supplies, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change," said Dr Anthony Rylands, the deputy chair of the IUCN primate specialist group.

The scientists also came close to downlisting the mountain gorilla to endangered following population increases in their forest habitat that spans the borders of Rwanda, Uganda and Democratic Republic of Congo. However, political turmoil in the region and an incident in which eight animals were killed in 2007 led to the decision to delay the planned reclassification.

Primates under threat

There are 634 species and sub-species of primate including apes, monkeys, tarsiers and prosimians. Of these, 69 are now categorised as critically endangered, 137 as endangered, 97 as vulnerable and 36 as near threatened.

In Africa, 63 species or subspecies are in the top three categories (37% of African primates). The new assessment moved L'Hoest's monkey (Cercopithecus l'hoesti), which is found in Nyungwe National Park, Rwanda, from vulnerable to endangered, for example.

In Asia, 120 species or sub-species are threatened (71%). The grey-shanked douc langur (Pygathrix cinerea) in Vietnam has been moved from endangered to critically endangered.

In Madagascar, 41 species and sub-species are threatened (43%). The black-and-white ruffed lemur, (Varecia variegata) for example, was endangered and is now considered critically endangered.

In Mexico, south and central America 79 species and sub-species are listed as threatened (40%). The cotton-top tamarin (Saguinus oedipus) is now critically endangered, but was endangered.

Source / The Guardian, U.K.

Thanks to CommonDreams / The Rag Blog

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