We Need You to Help Us Choose a

for Santa Monica to Protect our Clean Water, Air and Land
and a Move to Amend Resolution!

Why? Big corporations are dominating people, Nature and our democracy.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012
5:30 p.m. Rally
Support Sustainability Bill of Rights on the steps of City Hall

6:30 p.m.
Santa Monica City Council Meeting
Santa Monica City Hall
1685 Main Street
Council Chambers, 2nd Floor
Santa Monica, CA 90401

Join with us, Santa Monica Neighbors Unite!

Urge our city council to agree!
council@smgov.net or (310) 458-8201

Who Decides, Santa Monica?

Just US—making sure that our community rights and the rights of Nature thrive so we survive!

For more information and to RSVP reach Cris Gutierrez
Crispeace@earthlink.net or (310) 487-1782

In 1994, Santa Monica established the city’s first comprehensive Sustainability Plan. The city and community have worked hard to protect the natural ecosystems that make life possible. It is time for these sustainability goals to be legal, enforceable obligations and not just voluntary intentions.

Highlights of the SBR ordinance:

• Mandates city decisions be guided by environmental concerns;
• Protects the right of people, over corporations, to access clean air, land, and water;
• 100% self-sufficiency in development of a local water supply by 2020;
• 100% sustainable net renewable energy used in the City by 2020;
• 50% increase by 2020 in total miles of bike paths and bike lanes over 2005 levels;
• 25% of the food sold in the City originating from sustainable food systems.

Read the current draft of a Sustainability Bill of Rights ordinance for Santa Monica.

Make contact: crispeace@earthlink.net or (310) 487-1782

Santa Monica Blue Bus Lines #2, #3, #4 and #8 serve City Hall.
Free parking (w/validation) on Olympic Drive, in the Civic Center Parking Structure

Both groups have worked the neighborhood council circuit with success that allows them to argue their case before City Council while holding handfuls of resolutions of support in the air.

Both groups have aligned themselves with like-minded organizations that lend their professional non-profit advocacy seal-of-approval to the cause, joining activists at the podium with an air of credibility that is supported by data, science and objectivity.

Both groups held events around town to engage the public who signed petitions and followed organizers to commission meetings, committee meetings, and eventually to City Hall where, some charge, all is for naught because when the fix is in, the fix is in.

This past week, LA’s City Council took public testimony on the proposed plastic bag ban, prompting Heal the Bay’s Mark Gold to point out, “This body acted in 2008 and committed to moving forward with a ban on single-use plastic bags.”

The City Council responded by taking testimony from a full house of proponents and opponents before continuing any Council discussion and action on the single-use plastic bag ban issue until their last meeting of the year on Friday, December 16, 2011.

In an odd bit of Kabuki Theatre, the issue went to City Council over the objections of Mayoral Candidate Jan Perry who had the issue agendized in the Energy and Environment Committee.

Whew! Three Council hearings in one week for an issue that has languished for years.

Optimists hold that this enthusiasm bodes well for the single-use plastic bag ban. Pessimists point out that by holding multiple meetings with public testimony, the Council can proceed with discussion and action during the last meeting of the year without the clutter of public comment.

In either case, this journey of anticipated success is in sharp contrast with the travails of those who sought a ban on advertising in city parks, an uphill battle that was made more difficult because of the potential to fatten the city’s coffers with revenue from the park advertising.

The campaign to ban advertising in city parks was mobilized when LA’s Rec & Parks Commission signed a deal with Warner Bros. that allowed signs promoting a “Yogi Bear” movie in return for $46,000.

Community activists rose to the occasion in a battle that saw LA’s City Attorney grapple with Rec & Parks Commission President Barry Sanders over the definition of advertising and the legality of park sign districts.

As the Parks Commission appeared to back down from its plan to sell advertising rights in city parks, it was a media investigation that revealed the plan that would allow the non-profit LA Parks Foundation to sell advertising in popular areas such as Griffith Park and Venice Beach.

In a clear demonstration of contempt for Griffith Park’s status as America’s largest urban wilderness park  and of the world’s 34 biodiversity hotspots for conservation, the Mayor looks at Griffith Park and sees a potential sign district with revenue potential.

As community activists continue to fight for a ban on city park advertising, the Mayor is pursuing an overhaul of LA’s sign ordinance that will create “innovative revenue sources” such as wilderness advertising.

When Colonel Griffith J. Griffith gifted the City of LA with the land that became Griffith Park, it came with conditions including a requirement that it remain open and free of charge, “a place of rest and relaxation for the masses, a resort for the rank and file, for the plain people.”

Mayoral Candidate Jan Perry has defended the proposed sign ordinance revisions that would allow advertising in public parks, most recently coming under fire at the Venice Neighborhood Council when she said “It provides opportunity for funding to continue in the parks and I think we should let them do it.”

Perry alluded to “opt-out” options that she indicated she would be willing to include in the sign ordinance, saying “I’m not interested in jamming something down people’s throats that they don’t want.”

If only it were that simple!

In both cases, community activists have engaged in journeys that are exhausting, filled with meetings and hearings that turn out to be tests of patience and endurance.

Weeks turn into months which turn into years. City staff members come and go, Commission members shuffle seats, City Council committee assignments change, and through it all, the issue is kept alive by community volunteers.

It’s a “Damned if you do, Damned if you don’t!” scenario that sees activists sit for hours in the hope of delivering a compelling argument in the 60 seconds that is typically allocated to speakers when a decent crowd shows up for public comment.

Failure to attend a meeting provides “silence is consent” coverage to the City Council, allowing them to conduct the legislative sleight of hand that is the hallmark of a body that votes unanimously in predetermined outcomes 99.3% of the time.

It’s been a long year and as the City Council looks back, typically with a celebratory tally of the motions they have passed, it remains to be seen whether the single-use plastic bag ban will materialize or if LA’s parks will turn into sign districts.

One thing is for certain, the unsung heroes in these battles are the individuals who stand up and engage the Mayor and the Council in the process, however flawed it may be, and defend our neighborhoods, our communities, and our city by fighting the good fight! Even if that process inevitably leaves those heroes with a sense that the fix is most likely in.

Stephen Box
CityWatch

The first step in raising our consciousness about our trash problem is to track where our waste goes. Trash | Track, a project out of MIT that builds on previous work of the SENSEable City Lab and is inspired by the NYC Green Initiative, is using sensors and mobile technologies to do just that. Seeking to understand the “removal chain,” Trash | Track tagged thousands of pieces of trash and tracked their journeys from curbside to final destination. Through real-time visualizations, the project tracked 3,000 trash objects as they embarked from Seattle, traveling to neighboring counties and states within a few days, with some objects heading cross-country over multiple weeks.

Watching the map as the thousands of lines representing Seattle trash crisscross and seem to expand endlessly, I can’t help but visualize what this must look like when it’s happening in every community across the nation. By making this invisible industry visible, Trash | Track is helping bring our trash problem out of the shadows and into public awareness. As we begin to visualize the scale, scope and impact of the banana peel tossed into the trash can, the packaging thrown into the dumpster or the glass bottle deposited in the blue bin, it becomes increasingly clear that this is a problem we can no longer afford to ignore.

Sabrina Bornstein
The Frying Pan 

Recycling may be all the rage these days, but here in L.A. and across the country vast amounts of recyclable goods end up in landfills every year.

Turns out we’re throwing away a lot more than bottles, cans and newspapers. Here’s why: recycling equals jobs.

The recent report More Jobs, Less Pollution: Growing the Recycling Economy in the U.S., commissioned by the national Blue Green Alliance and prepared by the Boston-based Tellus Institute, builds a compelling case for thinking twice before throwing that old carpet into the trash. According to the report, increasing the national diversion and recycling rate to 75 percent by 2030 would create over 2.3 million new jobs.

Reuse and recycling — from collection to processing and manufacturing — is much more labor intensive than landfilling and incineration. Take all of those aluminum cans you redeemed this year, for example. Throwing them in the trash would translate into one job at a landfill or incinerator for every 10,000 tons. Recycling or reusing those same cans or aluminum products  would create as many as 20 jobs in processing, 176 jobs in manufacturing or 200 jobs in reuse/remanufacturing.

This approach, called the “Green Economy Scenario,” not only leads to more jobs, but also will contribute to a cleaner and healthier environment. In fact, according to the report, if we can reach 75 percent diversion across the nation, it will be equivalent to shutting down about 72 coal power plants or taking 50 million cars off the roads.

So we have a choice: we can burn and bury our jobs or we can grow the local economyand significantly improve the environment and our health by passing zero-waste policies. The choice seems pretty clear to me.

Sabrina Bornstein
The Frying Pan 

Sabrina Bornstein is a research and policy analyst for LAANE’s Waste & Recycling Project.

Photo: The Port of Authority/Wikipedia

When my parents started to work longer and longer hours to support their five kids, they sat me down and told me I had to start taking the bus to school. At 11 years old, this was the best news I could have imagined. Yes, I had to wake up at 6 a.m. to get ready for school and catch the 212 and 33 bus lines, but that sense of independence I got from being able to “roam” around the city was priceless. (Well, almost…if you don’t include the price of a bus pass.) I learned to take the bus to Hollywood, the Montebello Mall, Santa Monica — places that seemed so far away from home in South LA. 

It wasn’t always fun, of course: I have many memories of sitting at the La Brea/Venice bus bench for 45 minutes trying to catch the Line 212 after a long school day. I eventually learned to cope by reading a lot, getting homework done and daydreaming. When bus rides turned into two-hour voyages home, the bus became my second “hangout spot” for me and my friends—the “bus crew.” We did “girl talk,” discussed politics and music and practically ran a mobile-tutoring lab in the back of the bus.

The thing is, when you grow up poor, the idea of taking public transit is a no-brainer. I learned very early that driving was a privilege, and that taking public transit was the only way I would be able to go to school and eventually get to work.

Source: Move LA

While mass transit was a necessity for me and many other working-class people of color, the service wasn’t exactly stellar. How I dreamed of one day being able to get around on a subway, like in D.C or New York, or taking the bus to the beach without having to crowd around with 50 other people wanting to do the same thing. I always wondered why public transit was so neglected by elected officials and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Agency itself. Was it because most of those who depended on it were poor folks and people of color?

The limited mobility options of working people of color was what initially drove me to urban planning, where I eventually ended up many years later. But the million-dollar question has always been: what is it going to take for everyone in L.A. to care about investing in public transit?

Source: Move LA

Similar to the economy, people really begin paying attention to the issue when it starts to affect their own wallets. With wages stagnating and prices at the pump increasing by the day, funding public transit became not just a concern for poor people but for all Angelenos. Since 2007, gas prices have been steadily increasing and I can’t remember the last time I paid under $3 for a gallon of gas (full disclosure: I do have a car on “retainer” that I occasionally drive…since after all, it is L.A.). Was this the wake-up call L.A. needed?

That seems to be the case.

A new survey of Southern California voters sponsored by Move LA, Natural Resources Defense Council and the American Lung Association in CA found that 80% of respondents supported local government expanding public transit — which includes trains, buses and light rail.

What I found most surprising was the response to this question: Which of the following do you think should be the highest priority for future investments to improve transportation in Southern California? Nearly two-thirds (66%) of voters surveyed indicated that the “highest priority for future investments to improve transportation in Southern California” should be the “expansion of public transportation, including trains, buses and light rail.” Only 29% of respondents actually mentioned the expansion of roads and freeways as a priority.

With budgets tightening in cities across the country, I am still concerned about how we’re going to pay for expanded public transit and keep the service running (Metro recently had to scale back a lot of bus service). But I’m still optimistic about Angelenos and residents across Southern California finally changing their attitudes towards public transit. And with Metro rolling out a plan to modernize our transit system with 12 bus rapid transit, light rail and subway lines, we seem to going in the right direction.

Jackie Cornejo
LAANE, Research/Policy Analyst

Jackie Cornejo is a research and policy analyst for the Construction Careers Project at LAANE.

Republished with permission from The Frying Pan.

I’ve seen a lot of sick stuff in my career, but this was sick on a new level.

Here was the handwritten log kept by a senior engineer at the nuclear power plant:

Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated. . . . In fact, the plant was riddled with problems that, no way on earth, could stand an earthquake. The team of engineers sent in to inspect found that most of these components could “completely and utterly fail” during an earthquake.

“Utterly fail during an earthquake.” And here in Japan was the quake and here is the utter failure.

The warning was in what the investigations team called The Notebook, which I’m not supposed to have.  Good thing I’ve kept a copy anyway, because the file cabinets went down with my office building ….

WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWER 1, FIFTY-SECOND FLOOR
NEW YORK, 1986

[This is an excerpt in FreePress.org from "Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Fraudsters".  Click here to get the videos and the book.]

Two senior nuclear plant engineers were spilling out their souls and files on our huge conference table, blowing away my government investigations team with the inside stuff about the construction of the Shoreham, New York, power station.

The meeting was secret. Very secret. Their courage could destroy their careers: No engineering firm wants to hire a snitch, even one who has saved thousands of lives. They could lose their jobs; they could lose everything. They did. That’s what happens. Have a nice day.

On March 12 this year, as I watched Fukushima melt, I knew:  the “SQ” had been faked.  Anderson Cooper said it would all be OK.  He’d flown to Japan, to suck up the radiation and official company bullshit.  The horror show was not the fault of Tokyo Electric, he said, because the plant was built to withstand only an 8.0 earthquake on the Richter scale, and this was 9.0.  Anderson must have been in the gym when they handed out the facts.  The 9.0 shake was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 90 miles away.  It was barely a tenth of that power at Fukushima.

I was ready to vomit.  Because I knew who had designed the plant, who had built it and whom Tokyo Electric Power was having rebuild it:  Shaw Construction.  The latest alias of Stone & Webster, the designated builder for every one of the four new nuclear plants that the Obama Administration has approved for billions in federal studies.

But I had The Notebook, the diaries of the earthquake inspector for the company.  I’d squirreled it out sometime before the Trade Center went down.  I shouldn’t have done that.  Too bad.

All field engineers keep a diary. Gordon Dick, a supervisor, wasn’t supposed to show his to us. I asked him to show it to us and, reluctantly, he directed me to these notes about the “SQ” tests.

SQ is nuclear-speak for “Seismic Qualification.” A seismically qualified nuclear plant won’t melt down if you shake it. A “seismic event” can be an earthquake or a Christmas present from Al Qaeda. You can’t run a nuclear reactor in the USA or Europe or Japan without certified SQ.

This much is clear from his notebook: This nuclear plant will melt down in an earthquake. The plant dismally failed to meet the Seismic I (shaking) standards required by U.S. and international rules.

Here’s what we learned: Dick’s subordinate at the nuclear plant, Robert Wiesel, conducted the standard seismic review. Wiesel flunked his company. No good. Dick then ordered Wiesel to change his report to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, change it from failed to passed. Dick didn’t want to make Wiesel do it, but Dick was under the gun himself, acting on direct command from corporate chiefs. From The Notebook:

Wiesel was very upset. He seemed very nervous. Very agitated. [He said,] “I believe these are bad results and I believe it’s reportable,” and then he took the volume of federal regulations from the shelf and went to section 50.55(e), which describes reportable deficiencies at a nuclear plant and [they] read the section together, with Wiesel pointing to the appropriate paragraphs that federal law clearly required [them and the company] to report the Category II, Seismic I deficiencies.

Wiesel then expressed his concern that he was afraid that if he [Wiesel] reported the deficiencies, he would be fired, but that if he didn’t report the deficiencies, he would be breaking a federal law. . . .

The law is clear. It is a crime not to report a safety failure. I could imagine Wiesel standing there with that big, thick rule book in his hands, The Law. It must have been heavy. So was his paycheck. He weighed the choices: Break the law, possibly a jail-time crime, or keep his job.

What did Wiesel do? What would you do?

Why the hell would his company make this man walk the line? Why did they put the gun to his head, to make him conceal mortal danger? It was the money. It’s always the money. Fixing the seismic problem would have cost the plant’s owner half a billion dollars easy. A guy from corporate told Dick, “Bob is a good man. He’ll do what’s right. Don’t worry about Bob.”

That is, they thought Bob would save his job and career rather than rat out the company to the feds.

But I think we should all worry about Bob. The company he worked for, Stone & Webster Engineering, built or designed about a third of the nuclear plants in the United States.

From the fifty-second floor we could look at the Statue of Liberty. She didn’t look back.

Greg Palast

Greg Palast is the author of Vultures’ Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores

which was released by Penguin USA.

Pinion Canyon, from Not 1 Acre More

Weaponized UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), also known as drones, have their own caucus in Congress, and the Pentagon’s plan is to give them their own state as well.

Under this plan, 7 million acres (or 11,000 square miles) of land in the southeast corner of Colorado, and 60 million acres of air space (or 94,000 square miles) over Colorado and New Mexico would be given over to special forces testing and training in the use of remote-controlled flying murder machines. The full state of Colorado is itself 104,000 square miles. Rhode Island is 1,000 square miles. Virginia, where I live, is 43,000 square miles.

The U.S. military (including Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines) is proceeding with this plan in violation of the public will, new state legislation on private property rights, an exceptionally strong federal court order, and a funding ban passed by the United States Congress, and in the absence of any approved Environmental Impact Statement. Public pressure has successfully put the law on the right side of this issue, and the military is disregarding the law.

I spoke with Jean Aguerre, whose organization “Not 1 More Acre” is leading the pushback against this madness. Jean told me she grew up, during the 1960s, on the vast grasslands of southeast Colorado, where the Comanche National Grasslands makes up part of a system of grasslands put in place to help the prairie recover from the Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl, Aguerre says, was the worst environmental disaster in the United States until BP filled the Gulf of Mexico with oil. The Dust Bowl, had been brought on by the government’s policy of requiring homesteaders to plow the prairie. The recovery programs created large tracts of land, of 100,000 acres and more, owned by “generational ranchers,” that is families that would hand the ranches off to their children.

Aguerre said she grew up on a ranch of incredible beauty and natural wealth, with a 165-million-year-old dinosaur track way and petroglyphs from 12,000 years back. Grasslands are the most threatened ecosystems in the world because they are so accessible, Aguerre says, and the only intact short grassland left in this country is the one being targeted for the “51st state.”

Round One began in the 1980s. Fort Carson, an Army base in Colorado Springs, had been kept open after World War II and now began looking for more land. The people of the area were opposed. The U.S. Congressman representing the area agreed to oppose any landgrab. But Senator Gary Hart took the opposite position. As a result, during the early 1980s, the Army Corps of Engineers started telling ranchers to sell out or risk seeing their land condemned and taken from them.

The ranch next to Aguerre’s is called Wine Glass Rourke. It was sold to a shill, as Aguerre describes the buyer. He ran the place into the ground with too many cattle, she says, and then sold it to the military, “And they were off and running!” With condemnations the military put together 250 thousand acres. Ranchers, along with their cattle, were moved off their own land by federal marshals. “We didn’t know when we’d be next,” Aguerre says of her own family.

Luckily for the people of Colorado and New Mexico, and all of us, Aguerre got involved in politics. She became a political director for Congressman Tim Werth who later became a U.S. senator. Aguerre took him to see the Wine Glass Rourke ranch and told him “Let’s take it back.” Werth dedicated his staff to the effort for three years, resulting in the transfer to the Forest Service of 17,000 key acres.

The Army used its new land less than twice a year for maneuvers, but caused horrible environmental damage whenever it did. That was the case for about 30 years, until the activity of recent years made everything that came before look sensitive and sustainable.

In the meantime, people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were theorizing the transformation of the U.S. military into a force for robotic warfare. Aguerre believes it was in 1996 that a decision was made that the military would need a robotic warfare center. Around 1999 the Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement was created. This precedes the more specific Site Environmental Impact Statements. The U.S. public, just like the public of any foreign nation where new U.S. bases are being planned, was told nothing.

In 2006, Aguerre was working in Oregon when friends started asking her to come home and help because something big was happening. An Army land expansion map had been leaked that showed plans for taking over 6.9 million acres, the whole southeast corner of the state. Aguerre thought she would come home for two weeks but has never left. An Environmental Impact Statement for the site was about to be released, and Aguerre knew that meant the project was pretty far along. She formed organizations and found a lawyer in Colorado Springs named Steve Harris to help. The two of them, she says, were absolutely dedicated to NEPA and FOIA. NEPA is the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. FOIA is the Freedom of Information Act of 1966. “NEPA is intended to prevent our government taking our world apart piece by piece without our knowing it,” explains Aguerre.

Aguerre and others persuaded the area’s county commissioners to vote against the military’s plans in 2006, and the state legislature to pass a private property rights bill in January 2007 – a bill that required approval of such plans by the state legislature.

Ken Salazar was the military’s hired servant. He had been Attorney General of Colorado from 1999 to 2005. He was a U.S. Senator from 2005 to 2009. President Barack Obama has made him Secretary of the Interior. Around 2007, Jean Aguerre recounts, Salazar held a public meeting in Pueblo, Col., with about 300 ranchers packing the room. He turned his palms up to the ceiling and announced: “I will lift the golden curtain that falls at the end of El Paso county so that prosperity can flow onto the eastern plains.” This meant that military spending was economically beneficial. Military expansion, people were being told, was good for them — even if it stole their families’ land, and regardless of what momentum it created for the launching and continuing of wars.

“Instead of putting together frameworks for nonproliferation,” says Aguerre, “Ken Salazar worked to destroy the last intact short grass prairie because the money was too good.”

Senators Wayne Allard, who would join the military lobbyist company the Livingston Group within weeks of leaving the Senate, and Ken Salazar passed an authorization for taking land as part of the 2007 John Warner Defense Authorization Act. “None of the ranchers knew they were in line to be condemned for the second damn time,” says Aguerre.

John Salazar, Ken’s brother, at this time represented Colorado’s third congressional district, while Republican Marilyn Musgrave represented the fourth. Musgrave was persuaded by ranchers that there was no need for the government to take their land. Aguerre worked with Musgrave’s staff to draft a one-sentence funding ban. Aguerre and her allies then organized massive public pressure to recruit John Salazar as a Democratic co-sponsor. Ken Salazar failed in his effort to block this measure in the Senate. The ban passed both houses and became law, but it must be renewed every year.

In 2009, Aguerre and her allies won a federal court ruling throwing out the military’s Environmental Impact Statement with harsh and unequivocal language — “one of the strongest court orders under NEPA,” says Aguerre. By 2008, the military had begun using its land a lot more, and the court ruling did not stop them.

The funding ban, too, is not stopping increased activity. This past year, the funding ban was missing from a committee chairman’s markup in which it had appeared in previous years. Not 1 More Acre and its allies pressured Third-District Congressman Scott Tipton. People from all over the country phoned his office. They were told that as non-constituents their views did not matter. Aguerre advised people to reply: “When you pick my pocket you don’t ask what district I’m from.” Tipton was won over, and the funding ban, for what it’s worth, remains for now.

Nonetheless, says Aguerre, the military is proceeding with and increasing trainings and environmental destruction daily .

Senators Mark Udall and Michael Bennet of Colorado and Tom Udall of New Mexico don’t receive high marks from Jean Aguerre. “Mark Udall on Armed Services and Michael Bennet on Agriculture sit with their thumbs in their pie. Udall has never once come to southeastern Colorado and looked young ranchers in the eye and said ‘this is why we need this military takeover of your lands.’”

Aguerre continues: “And Tom Udall puts out this pap the other day, mumbo jumbo about the Air Force. It’s not Air Force; it’s Special Operations. Aguerre said that her group and others are preparing a comment letter seeking legal standing to challenge the Air Force, and potentially to pry loose more information from the iron grip of our “transparent” government. Aguerre points out that the Air Force Special Operations Command Environmental Assessment was written by SAIC, a global military contractor that also makes voting machines.

“We found out that the state national guard is completely involved in UAV warfare,” says Aguerre. “So when your house floods and you don’t have the national guard there, they may be remotely piloting something somewhere else.”

Aguerre says that in 2006 she knew of four countries that were manufacturing armed UAVs, and that now she knows of 56. So, the argument that drones keep “people” out of harm’s way (with people redefined to mean U.S. citizens) doesn’t hold up very solidly. We have also already had a suicide bomb attack on a drone piloting location and had drone pilots commit suicide, not to mention the risks of long-term blowback, the damage being done to the rule of law, and all the human beings killed and injured from among the non-U.S. 95% of humanity.

Aguerre asks scientists who love unarmed UAVs to consider the full effect of supporting such technology. I would ask environmentalists to consider the full effect of not resisting the destruction of what Not 1 More Acre describes as:

• unique bioregions of canyonlands, forested mesas, grasslands and riparian systems providing habitat for diverse flora and fauna found nowhere else on Earth and the largest block of native prairie remaining on the High Plains;
• restored Dust Bowl lands – Comanche, Kiowa and Rita Blanca National Grasslands — offering robust safe haven to threatened and endangered species of plants and animals, including rare insects and reptiles yet to be named;

• wild rivers and complex wetlands vital to native fish, migrating birds, unique wildlife and environmental health.

I would ask opponents of drone warfare to consider the likely impact of setting aside 60 million acres of air space for testing drones.

“We cannot allow the sacrifice of our democracy to politicians who are bought by military contractors,” says Aguerre. “If they are able to get this 51st state for robotic warfare, I think the economy will be irretrievably lost. These are unbelievably beautiful and pristine lands. Our rural areas are where the genetically modified seeds are being planted, where the lands and mountains are being mined, and where the military is going to destroy an area the size of a state, because the rural people are so few. Gary Hart was able to attack the last short grass prairie without political cost.”

Why is there no political cost? Because “we can’t get the word out.”

Let’s help get the word out by sharing this link: http://not1moreacre.org

And I’m not unsympathetic. For decades, I thoroughly enjoyed unhealthy eating. For a while, I lived in New Orleans, the epicenter of unhealthy eating, where one famous chef was so obese he needed a scooter to navigate his kitchen.

Nevertheless, I object. I was miserable before I cut out meat and milk a few decades ago. I suffered from premature arthritis, and frequent illnesses. When I tried not eating meat and milk for a while though, the results were so dramatic that I’ve never gone back. My joint pain cleared up within two weeks. I had more energy, and became sick far less often. I’m not a purist about this—I’ll have some Thanksgiving turkey, for example—but eating healthy food yielded huge benefits and meant surprisingly little sacrifice.

Complaints about healthy eating are the stuff of popular humor in virtually every medium–and I dreaded changing my diet because of such “comic” portrayals of health nuts. Among the popular memes Austin repeats: Healthy eating is tasteless, bland, and requires a humorless ascetic temperament. Healthy eaters are common scolds, descending on poor meat-and-potato eaters “screeching ‘Heresy!’” like some humorless fanatics, etc.

But these caricatures lead to some distinctly un-funny results. American’s health is so bad that even pre-teens are at risk for type II diabetes in increasing numbers. Cancer, heart disease and obesity stalk the land. America spends twice what other developed nations do on health care because of its awful diet, among other reasons. Gluttony may have been one of the seven deadly sins, but it’s now got the official sanction of All-You-Can-Eat buffets and the Food Channel.

Worst of all, the comic caricature ignores human adaptability. Start drinking nonfat milk, or even better, rice milk, and at first it is “tasteless white water” as Austin says, but after two weeks, the unfamiliar taste becomes perfectly palatable on your cereal. Human taste buds can change – so much that drinking whole milk after this adjustment leads to comments like: “Hey! What is this, heavy cream?”

Far from the bland, tasteless food carnivores dread, vegetarians eat a completely satisfying diet. Every ethnic cuisine has vegetarian options, too. And remember: If you have good salsa you can cheerfully eat tree bark.

The worst of it is that “comic” writing like Austin’s encourages the public perception behind policies subsidizing our awful eating. Subsidies are the reason that a calorie of high-fructose corn syrup is cheaper than a calorie of carrots. Subsidies are why fast food places can offer dietary dreck so cheaply. Food writer Michael Pollan reports 40% of agricultural income is subsidy, quoting one farmer who says “It’s like laundering money for [agribusinesses] Cargill and ADM.”

Someone really interested in scolding meat eaters could remind them of the environmental destruction wreaked by destroying rainforest to make pasture for livestock, or for their feed. One UN study even concluded that livestock contributes as much toward global warming as human transportation.

Anyway, consider this an invitation to brother Austin, and others, to your local vegetarian society’s potluck. Spend a few weeks acclimating your taste buds to healthy eating. It’s really no sacrifice, and what you and Austin are laughing at right now…it’s just not that funny.

Mark Dempsey

Mark Dempsey is a member of the Sacramento Vegetarian Society, a group that has monthly potlucks and many other events of interest to the veggie-curious. You can join the likes of ex-president Bill Clinton, casino magnate Steve Winn, mixed-martial arts champion Mac Danzig, Olympic gold medal-winning sprinter Carl Lewis, 70-year-old triathlon champion Ruth Heidrich (who was diagnosed with fatal cancer 40 years ago). The recent documentary Forks over Knives covers this topic and is now available on Netflix.

Schumaker checking levels on her Cessna, Bessie Photo: G. Nienaber

It is over sixteen months since the BP oil disaster, now rebranded the Macondo oil “spill,” or the Deepwater Horizon “spill.”

The Financial Times reports the Obama administration has approved the sale of new oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico. Media has not scrutinized the safety of this decision, as all eyes are on the sinking economy and the emerging Republican field for the 2012 election. The lease sale, set for December in New Orleans, was welcomed by oil industry interests.

But there is another set of eyes intimately familiar with the Gulf of Mexico. These keen eyes observed disturbing evidence that all is not well in the area impacted by the estimated 200 million gallons of crude oil that spewed into the ecosystem after the April 20, 2010 explosion of the wellhead that killed 11 and injured 17.

Late last month, Schumaker was doing an aerial survey of whale sharks in collaboration with scientists in surface vessels. An optimistic flight in search of healthy wildlife turned into despair as Schumaker not only found dolphins and leatherback sea turtles, but oil, and lots of it.

“In fact, we found so much oil out in the Macondo Prospect (about 15 miles from the site of the April 2010 explosion), that we have an 11-minute video of it that never covers the same area twice. Not since last summer have we seen this kind of expansive surface sheen,” Schumaker says. You can read more from her logs on her website.

Schumaker notified two ships about the oil, and provided GPS coordinates to the US Coast Guard.

“The first was the NOAA ‘Okeanos Explorer,’ which was cruising alongside and then right through a line of those oily globs. The second was the ‘Sarah Bordelon,’ whose crew told us they were sampling the oil for BP,” Schumaker says.

Critical thinkers will ask the question. Why is BP sampling oil on August 30 while they maintain that there is no oil coming from MC252 (Macondo) in an August 26 press release? For those who have forgotten, there is an excellent time line of the disaster here.

Schumaker has been troubled since this sighting, and her concern prompted her to write a letter to legislators; a meditation that flows straight from the heart of scientist who takes her passion for wildlife and the environment seriously. She shared it with us, and we think it is worth reading.

An Open Letter to our National and Local Leaders and Legislators

2011 September 06

Honorable Ladies and Gentlemen,

You are in unique positions of privilege and authority that permit you to affect our lives, the lives of our children and their children’s children.

You and your predecessors never asked our permission to drill into the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico off of our shores or in our wetlands, or to litter our waters with oil and gas platforms and pipelines and abandoned oilfield structures.

You and your predecessors never asked our permission to use toxic chemical dispersants to dilute and sink the oil that spilled from wells or leaking pipelines. You never asked our permission to discharge drilling fluids and process waters that contain radioactive contaminants into the Gulf.

Had you asked us, you would never have received permission to do much of the drilling and poisoning of the Gulf that has occurred to date.

We understand how dependent our lifestyles have become on the short-term convenience and affordability of fossil-fuel energies, and how our states have earned money by compromising our waters and wetlands, our health and our food supplies, our beauty and our biodiversity.
We know what an adjustment and near-term hardship it will be for us to retrace this tragic path that was forged without our permission.

We want to live as we were intended to live, to breathe clean air, drink pure water, and eat food that is naturally wholesome and healthful and life-giving, not laden with unnatural, organo-toxic chemicals. We want to develop energy sources that are harmless to nature, our environment, and our lives. We want to fish and farm sustainably. We want to be true citizens and stewards of this planet, not exploiters, parasites, polluters, and tumors.

Your choices have killed generations of marine mammals, birds and other marine life, and have negatively affected human beings for generations to come. Your choices are continuing to contaminate the Gulf and all that lives therein and nearby.

You misled us about the safety of deepwater drilling. We knew it makes no good sense to drill too deeply into our mother Earth.

You misled us about the safety of diluting toxic oil spills with still more toxic chemicals. We knew it makes no good sense to fight toxins with yet more toxins, to hide huge slicks of surface oil from our sight by dispersing them into a pervasive underwater fog and submerged oil pools.

You misled us about the safety of eating seafood caught in the areas where oil and chemical dispersants abound. We knew that what tested toxic is toxic, regardless of its concentration.

Don’t tell us the oil is gone, that the Gulf is healed, and that our seafood is safe, when none of that is true.

And don’t try to give us our [old] lives back. We are taking our own lives back. We are re-claiming the lives of our children and their children’s children, the lives of our kindred beings, the lives of the Gulf, and the lives of this planet.

We are not running away and leaving the Gulf of Mexico to corporate and political agendas. We are here for the Gulf, and for the long-term.

THE OIL IS STILL HERE, AND SO ARE WE!
Bonny L. Schumaker, Ph.D.

Georgianne Nienaber

Lisa Jackson and President Obama.

Among the big political stories this past week, perhaps the biggest surprise was the decision by the President not to implement the proposed new regulations of air pollution that had been developed by the Environmental Protection Agency through a careful consultative process over the last three years. In a presidency that has held countless disappointments for his progressive supporters, this was the most stunning so far.

The President was certainly very clear in his environmental rhetoric in the last campaign, and his appointment of Lisa Jackson as the head of the EPA gave reason to hope that he was serious. Jackson and the EPA certainly would have coordinated the proposed regulations with the White House; there were multiple opportunities for the President and his advisers to shape—or even head off—the proposed regulations.

When the final version of the regulations was published by the EPA, it was subjected to an entirely predictable barrage of criticism by the Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce. They charged that the new rules would constitute a terrible burden on business, and would thus cost jobs at the very time when we need to find ways to promote new hiring (while cutting federal spending).

In what has become a pattern for Obama, he backed down, adopted the essentials of the Republican argument, and left his own EPA Director swinging in the wind.

It needn’t have been this way. Air pollution is a significant and growing national problem with clear implications for public health, not to mention (oh, we dare not mention!) global warming. The scientific consensus behind the EPA proposals is impressive. Characteristically, the Republicans simply pay alternative “experts” to support their contrary viewpoint.

The Republicans have shown repeatedly that they will not compromise with this president: they intend to make sure that he is not reelected, and that goal trumps any thoughts of accommodation in the common interest. And yet the President persists in moving toward Republican positions, only to have his adversaries retreat further toward the extreme.

There is no political gain for Obama in doing this. The Republicans will never agree to anything that Obama could call a victory. They will oppose him to the bitter end. The Chamber of Commerce may be happy with his ignominious retreat, but they will still provide heavy funding to the Republicans. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the American public supports the EPA and wants it to continue protecting our environment. They are not satisfied with the environmental status quo.

The Republican argument that these regulations would kill jobs is dubious at best. Companies that were planning to outsource production to China might now claim that they’re doing it because of the EPA, but they would have done it anyway. And companies that continue to produce goods here will employ more people to work on pollution control.

Just as he did on the issues of stimulating the economy and controlling the deficit, Obama on this issue completely failed to articulate the alternative story: that reams of economic research support the need for governmental expenditures to help the country out of recession; that the fiscal deficit is manageable in the long term and should not interfere in the short term with efforts to stimulate the economy; that the problem of air pollution cannot be dealt with successfully without intelligent government regulation.

Obama never told any of these stories. Instead, he bought into the Republican story, but tried to moderate it.

His campaign slogan for 2012 ought to be, “I’m Really Like Them, But Not So Much.”

And progressives who have supported him face the agonizing reality that it’s him, or Rick Perry. We’ve been had—again!

John Peeler