Wolves to be delisted; How do your Congressional members stack up on environment?

Gray wolves will be removed from the Endangered Species List unless litigation from a number of environmental groups delays delisting. After reintroduction to the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem 13 years ago, wolves have had impressive success at reproducing and dispersing, winning some enemies in the process. Management of the wolves would fall to the states of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, and would likely allow hunting; each state, however, has committed to maintaining its own population of 150 wolves, including at least 15 mating pairs.

While some groups (including NRDC, the Sierra Club, and Earthjustice) are disputing the decision, other environmentalists and biologists believe the gray wolf is truly an example of successful species recovery and that delisting is appropriate. The original goal was a stable Northern Rockies population of 300 wolves; current population exceeds 1500.

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If you are curious about a U.S. House or Senate member's environmental record, the League of Conservation Voters gives a quick, easy-to-use environmental scorecard.

Some links, 2-16-08: bats, beets, and budgets

A widespread affliction is threatening bat populations in the Northeast.

The disease was first discovered in a cave near Albany, N.Y., in January 2007 and was soon found in three more within 7 miles. In March, officials at the New York Department of Environmental Conservation determined that as many as 11,000 bats had died from the disease, dubbed "white nose syndrome" because of a flaky white fungus on the nose of many of the sick and dead bats.

[...]

Scientists say they are extraordinarily concerned because the disease is already affecting four species - including the Indiana bat, recognized by the federal government as an endangered species - and mortality has reached as high as 97 percent in some caves. In one New York cave, the population crashed from 1,300 bats several years ago to 38 this year.

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has asked the public to stay out of caves, mines, and other bat havens in the Northeast, for fear that humans may be serving as a vector of disease spread.

Bats are important in insect control, and diminished populations could have a negative impact on area crops.

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The Jew and the Carrot covers this year's big new GMO story: Roundup Ready sugar beets. Like Monsanto's other Roundup Ready products, the GE sugar beets will revel in the application of herbicides; the EPA has increased the allowable amount of glyphosate residues on beetroots by 5000% in a remarkably accommodating gesture. There are other problems, too. Read the post, by a lawyer for the Center for Food Safety.

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The new Bush budget for 2009 proposes to cut public funding for agriculture research at land-grant schools by nearly 1/3. Without public funding, our research institutions are dependent on corporate dollars to determine research priorities. As Nancy Scola writes at Alternet,

When it comes to how industry-university relations shape academic research, UCLA's Andrew Neighbour is the person to talk to. While an administrator at Washington University in St. Louis, Neighbour managed the school's landmark multiyear and multimillion-dollar relationship with Monsanto. (Note: WashU is a private institution.) "There's no question that industry money comes with strings," Neighbour admits. "It limits what you can do, when you can do it, who it has to be approved by."

And so the issue at hand becomes one of the questions that are being asked at public land-grant schools. While Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, et al., are paying the bills, are agricultural researchers going to pursue such lines of scientific inquiry as "How will this new corn variety impact the independent New York farmer?" Or, "Will this new tomato make eaters healthier?"

This is a fairly long and complex piece, which is definitely worth a read.

Conservation and Environment Links, 8/10/07

I've been quiet this week, but here are a handful of links to chew on in the meantime.

FishOutofWater at Daily Kos writes about a record minimum for Arctic sea ice.

A new study in Science suggests the endangered black-footed ferret population, supported by a captive breeding program, is making progress.

The El Segundo blue butterfly, on the endangered species list since 1976, is making a comeback too.

Biodiversity alert: a 386-square-mile tract of forest in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, long-inaccessible to biologists because of regional violence, is found to contain a number of previously-undescribed species as well as a very high level of animal and plant diversity. "The Wildlife Conservation Society notes that chiefs and elders at local villages are supportive of transforming the region into a protected park."

BP proposes coal-bed methane exploration in the Canadian portion of the Flathead River basin, near Glacier National Park. Montana politicians and scientists are alarmed.

Saturday Reading List, 7/22/07

The House Agriculture Committee passed their version of the Farm Bill yesterday. Here’s their press release. The bill as it stands is available here, not that anyone is likely to add the whole thing to their Saturday night reading list.

Ken Cook at Mulch is irate about the bill that’s come out of the Committee, and its stubborn attachment to corn subsidies above all else. He fears that Nancy Pelosi’s party discipline makes the current version a done deal. The Farm Bill is coming to the floor already this Thursday, July 26, and proposed amendments must be turned in by 6 pm Tuesday. Not much time.

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lineatus, who writes a weekly bird diary at Daily Kos, this week profiles Heron's Head Park, a reclaimed wetland in the heart of a San Francisco industrial area.

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Devilstower at Daily Kos reviews the tenure of Julie MacDonald, disgraced ex-deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. A few-- but only a few-- of her suspect involvements in endangered species rulings will be revisited due to "inappropriate influence."

Friday Night Newsy Links-- 7/21/07

Agriculture:
natasha at Pacific Views blogs yesterday’s vote by the House Agricultural Committee to continue to allow mandatory arbitration provisions in livestock contracts. Contracts between growers and processors that contain such provisions (as most do) prevent growers from taking their grievances to the courts, thereby solidifying the livestock company's control over smaller farmers.

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Environmental Justice:
FEMA ignored hundreds of complaints and the results of its own testing in declaring its trailers safe to house hurricane victims despite high levels of formaldehyde fumes. The AP story notes:

The House committee unearthed documents in which one FEMA lawyer advised: "Do not initiate any testing until we give the OK. ... Once you get results ... the clock is running on our duty to respond to them."

FEMA tested one occupied trailer at a level of 1.2 ppm (parts per million); a concentration of .016 ppm, over extended periods, is considered an appropriate threshold for use of a respirator. For the math-impaired, the Mississippi trailer was at 75 times the “safe” level.

It’s worth noting, in passing, that this is the same problem plaguing the guards’ sleeping trailers at our new embassy in Iraq. Your government at work.

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Conservation:
The BLM has agreed, as a consequence of pressure from state wildlife officials and environmental groups, to more closely review environmental impacts before issuing certain oil and gas leases in Montana. At particular issue is the well-being of the sage grouse, a species petitioned for ESA listing with significant populations close to many of the parcels. Says the AP piece:

“Grouse need vast swaths of undisturbed sage brush to thrive. In northeast and western Wyoming, southeast Montana, northern Utah and western Colorado, those swaths increasingly are crisscrossed by service roads leading to gas fields.”

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Cranes:
This afternoon two sandhill cranes flew over me, calling to one another in their weird voices. You can listen to audio of their call here.

The Preservation of Small Things

“And, for your information, you Lorax, I’m figgering
on biggering
and BIGGERING
and BIGGERING
and BIGGERING…”

I am small, and the things I love are often small too. Those who already know me know of my recent infatuation with tubificid worms. The spot after which this website is named is a tiny constructed wetlands, created in 1994 with funding from the Montana Department of Transportation wetlands mitigation program, near the East Gallatin River in Montana. (The East Gallatin was called the Cherry River by early European visitors, due to an abundance of chokecherry in the area.) In acreage, the place is highly unremarkable. Yet I love it disproportionately to its size; a brief circuit typically involves encounters with many blackbirds (both red-winged and yellow-headed), wild ducks, coots, muskrat, deer, wildflowers, bees and butterflies, and perhaps a graceful snake or two, slipping into the water. Not to mention an unsurpassed vista of lush grasses backed by the gorgeous Bridger mountains.

Small wetlands are not inconsequential. Seen from the perspective of an aquatic or semi-aquatic creature, each pond or marsh is an island. Small wetlands are the stepping-stones that make travel possible between one large island and another… as well as being valuable habitat in their own right. And yet isolated wetlands are not protected by the Clean Water Act (“isolated” = no surface water connection, due to a strict interpretation by the Supreme Court last year), and wetlands below a certain size often will not require a full permitting process to destroy.

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How often, as progressives, do we find ourselves defending things that are small? What do we fight for? “Small farms.” Small cars. “Local businesses,” which means small businesses—and if we discover a business we like is a chain, don’t we take comfort in its being “just a small chain”? Microcredit, the new fad. Small presses, small donors. “The little guy.”

The small arrays itself against the Big: “big business.” “Big Pharma.” Big honking SUVs. “Big Oil.” “Big Ag.” Big box stores. In what seems sometimes a startling turnabout, we’re not even the party of Big Government anymore.

So, we who embrace our littleness, maybe we have to relearn how to think in smaller ways. Everything in our culture teaches us to think big. To “see the bigger picture,” generalize, abstract, and never miss the forest for the trees. Why does no one ever point out that “the forest” is just a collective abstraction, and that focusing on it exclusively will cause one to miss the trees? And how many individual trees can be cut before the idea of the forest suddenly collapses?

Here are some small things that need protecting today:

• The Warm Springs Zaitzevian riffle beetle, a candidate for federal T & E listing that lives only in a warm springs on the grounds of the Fish Technology Center in Bozeman, Montana.

• The Moapa dace, endemic to the Warm Springs system in the Mohave Desert near Las Vegas.

• A small parcel next to downtown Bozeman’s beautiful Gallagator trail (disclosure: I walk it to work twice a week) which was until recently eligible for development. Neighbors and citizens banded together to purchase this parcel, and it became a small park in April of this year—a tremendous relief for those of us who do our best thinking and a good bit of birdwatching along this path. Now let’s do that kind of thing some more.

• My mom works hard to preserve her beloved adopted church in North Amherst, Massachusetts.

• farmerchuck’s farm could use more love, or just a decent mortgage...

• Your local bookstore. Put down that Amazon.com password and get over there—they’ll special-order whatever you want. Here’s mine: The Country Bookshelf. Turns out they don’t even have a web page.

Feel free to add whatever you want to the list. Doesn’t matter if nobody’s ever heard of it: that’s the point.

Let’s plan to save the world one atom, one tree, one woman, one half-acre at a time.

Dream small.