Terrain » Fall 2002

Joining the Chorus

Laird Townsend — Fri, 16 Aug 2002 06:56:25 +0000

Who needs concrete, billboards, and Homeland Security? Sometimes it helps to get out of the manufactured world and sit in nature a while — find a wild spot, just sit down, and observe. It helps if it’s a rich native habitat, full of the well-rehearsed chorus of that place. It helps if you stay put. Maybe you don’t need to go four days without food and water, sitting on a blanket, holding a sacred pipe full of red willow bark according to traditional Sioux practice. But the Native Americans said it would help — and it did. It was easier to stay still. And that’s how you see things. Only on the third evening, after making that hollow drumming sound somewhere out of view, did the pileated woodpecker finally come around, eyeing me from a branch. I barely moved. By then, I couldn’t have, really. And that was the point.
It takes time to know a piece of wild land, to know the sun’s angle on the boulder moss each evening. Sometimes it takes a four-day vision quest — so be it. Three days passed before I could remember what it feels like to sit on the ground beneath trees. I realized I was an animal, a primate among the other relatives, the human note in the song of stones, jays, orchids, leaves, and detritus eaten by tiny industrious beings.
We don’t know our earth. Even the human whose 10-million-year-old skull was found in July probably had enough sense to know the local territory, to quietly wait for plants and animals to reveal themselves. According to the Ohlone myth, the bear had enough sense to find medicine, and the man to patiently observe the bear.
If anything, we know only part of it. We are terrestrial creatures. Even the word “environment” is usually understood in land terms. Yet 95% of the earth’s living space lies in the sea.
In the depths of Monterey Canyon, the oceanographers in their ROVs have a fascinating chance to meet bizarre creatures who live in extreme conditions. But they — and we — see only a fraction of the life there. Everything flees from the ROV’s light and sound. The ocean is part of us. We came from it. But it is a difficult family reunion, which we need elaborate equipment to attend.
But we can’t forget to unite with our family. We spend fortunes trying to figure out when we separated from the apes, but we forget that we are still animals. From Mesa Verde, California, to the depths to the San Francisco Bay, we’re just behaving as if our relations — including our non-human ones — don’t matter, are not our community, as if everything out there is not us, can only hurt us, get in the way, or enrich us.
Out of the seed of separateness grows more separateness. We also spend fortunes trying to clean up Superfund sites, store radioactive waste, and heal the effects of industrial food — all of which requires more of our own technological intervention.
Yes, we know more things. In the history of the planet, we have never known more, or been able to do more things. And yet we’ve never been closer to the precipice, never had a less certain future to offer our progeny. What is the point of using our learning to make genetically engineered wheat? So a patentholder can profit, and a factory farmer can ride computer-driven machinery all the way to the bank?
Of course, the answer is not to stop learning. People need to think for themselves. Science itself is not the solution, nor is it the problem. You can learn how to culvert a creek — or how to break it up and plant willows. You can learn how to build a power plant, or to protect an aquifer from it. You can set up a study to find no impacts from bay-filled runways — or you can set up one to find devastating impacts.
In most major environmental issues, we find the illusion that “science” can provide conclusive proof of something’s harm — and that until it does, we can keep using, say, organophosphates instead of looking for alternative pest controls. The corollary is that any level of damage can be made acceptable by mitigation. Destroy wetlands to build runways? Build “new ones.” Destroy the livelihood and life source of a 2,300-person farmworking town? Promise to provide power, jobs, and deeper wells.
Ha! There’s a reason the Clean Water Act prohibits the degradation of wetlands, and why aquifers must recharge. I’d rather mitigate the loss of an airport, or a power company.
Why do we need alternatives? Why not just make the choice to go along with the destruction, go about our business as if it all will fall into place? I don’t know. I suppose we need to leave a gift for our progeny, if not for ourselves. After all, we’ve been given the same gift.
And by the end of the fourth morning, you feel the gift, that of being an animal on this earth — you feel what it’s like to be one more voice in the chorus — if not a creature of our ocean birthplace, at least of the land.

The Dirt on Biodiesel; Informative, Rousing

Staff Reporter — Fri, 16 Aug 2002 06:54:42 +0000

The Dirt on Biodiesel
Daniel Duart’s article [“Liquid Solar,” Summer 2002] on the use of biodiesel crops raises a question about fuel cycles, or chains. Because soil loss has been a major problem in North America for over 100 years, the real prospects for practical large-scale bio-fuels cycles will be limited. Take, for example, the cycle of soil, water, corn, yeast, methanol, vehicle fuel, carbon dioxide in North America and Brazil. It still requires large amounts of fossil fuel inputs and does not sustain soil health and reduce soil loss rates. In fact, since there are no indications that soil health is improving worldwide, establishing any larger-scale man-made bio-fuel cycles will just accelerate soil loss rates.
On soil life, read Peter Farb’s The Living Earth (1959); on fuel cycles, Howard T. Odum’s Environment, Power and Society (1971).
Carter Rose
Wolf Creek, Oregon

Informative, Rousing
I got the Summer issue, read through it, and was once again struck by what a superb magazine you have put together. Intelligent, informative, rousing. My sincerest admiration. I know first-hand what it takes to put a magazine together: great articles and a coherent vision do not just fall out of the sky and land in your lap. Congratulations, and thanks.
Malcolm Margolin
Publisher, Heyday Books

Only Who Can Prevent Forest Fires?

Staff Reporter — Fri, 16 Aug 2002 06:53:46 +0000

If you believe what the US Forest Service interrogators first said, Terry Lynn Barton started this summer’s big fire in Colorado’s Pike National Forest by burning a letter from her estranged husband. Maybe so, and possibly the jury will be forgiving when they hear more details of Ms. Barton’s married life. But a jury might well be equally forgiving if it turns out Terry Lynn started the fire by setting fire to her pay stub.
After 18 years of dedicated service, Terry Lynn Barton was being paid $1,485 a month, the equivalent of $17,820 a year. Try raising two kids on that in the greater metropolitan area of Denver. She’s being described in the press as “a Forest Service technician” which is FS-speak for an all-purpose manual laborer cleaning up campgrounds, doing trail maintenance and kindred grunt work.
Forget the Edward Abbeys, Jack Kerouacs, and Gary Snyders of the forest fire watches, turning out literature while communing with nature and scanning the ridge lines for tell-tale plumes. The Forest Service, part of the USDA, has long been notorious for exploiting its bottom-rung workers more than any other agency. The laborers are often forced to live in squalid housing under fairly harsh conditions with scant benefits.
These grunts are the ones who have to deal with visitors angered at having to pay as much as $40 in annual passes for visits to forests in a particular area. Having ponied up the money, these visitors often find nature’s temple scarred with logging roads, clearcuts, or the new RV-friendly rec sites blessed by recent administrations.
From the anguish and outrage of Barton’s superiors you’d think that the Forest Service has always regarded fire as the devil’s work.
A little perspective: this particular Colorado fire has so far burned through something over 100,000 acres. The implication is that all these acres are blackened zones of ash and carbonized stumps. Not so. Many of those acres will have suffered only minor scorching. And of course, healthy forests need fires as a natural and frequent catalyst to regeneration, particularly the conifer forests in Colorado.
But the Forest Service’s policy has been to suppress fires. In the middle and long term, this policy leads to huge fuel loads which, when the inevitable conflagration does come, burst out into the kinds of large-scale burns that we are now seeing across the West.
Responsibility for fires stretches far higher up the bureaucratic chain than to poor Ms. Barton. Since the days of Gifford Pinchot, the Forest Service has seen fire suppression as a sure way to get a blank check from Congress. Fire suppression gets the Service the big-ticket item — planes, helicopters, and so forth. Fire suppression is used to justify the Service’s road-building budget and even logging programs.
The Forest Service says all fires are bad and need to be suppressed with the help of huge disbursements from Congress plus public vigilance. All children have the ursine self-righteous smirk of Smokey the Bear dinned into their psyches, said bear having been conjured into icon status 60 years ago after the incredible popularity of that noted fire-fugitive, Bambi.
So the Forest Service needs fires, and diligently sets them each year, under the rubric of Controlled Burn, or Prescribed Fire. These regularly surge out of control, as did one in the Los Alamos forests a couple of years ago, started by the Park Service in Bandolier National Monument. The Forest Service bigwigs OK fires and then summon ill-paid fighters to do the dangerous work. Far more prudent would be to let the fires run, but that of course would leave idle all the costly fire-fighting machinery and expose the Forest Service to the wrath of the real estate industry, which raises million-dollar homes in areas certain to see a blaze some day.
Terry Lynn Barton faces 20 years in prison while the timber industry licks its lips at the prospect of “salvage logging” the Colorado forests. “Light it and log it,” as the old phrase goes. Once a forest burns, existing restrictions go out the window, the Forest Service offers up 100,000 acres for salvaging, and in go the timber companies, hauling out the timber, immune to environmental restrictions. You don’t think timber companies have been setting fires for years, often with Forest Service complicity?
We sure hope Terry Lynn Barton gets a good lawyer, who might start by asking a few pointed questions about her treatment. Is the Forest Service trying to paint Barton as the John Walker Lindh of Colorado?

Lines in the Sand

Michael Bhargava — Fri, 16 Aug 2002 06:52:36 +0000

In 1994, the U.S. Army abandoned its base in San Francisco’s Presidio. In the aftermath, local politicians fought for additional housing, businesses sought retail space, and environmentalists argued for the restoration of sand dunes and wetlands that once covered the area.
The battles continue. Between the restoration of Crissy Field and the leasing of the Letterman Complex to George Lucas, the process has been riddled with controversy. Now environmentalists and residents have squared off over a new plan: to take down a dying stand of trees the Army planted a century ago and replace it with an expanded native dune community.
The proposal and the controversy surrounding it raise questions at the heart of environmental restoration efforts across the country: What is the goal of an open-space restoration project? Is it to restore some of the land’s native ecosystem? Or is it to create and maintain an environment palatable to human tastes?
In May, local columnist Ken Garcia of the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story titled “Sand-huggers run amok at Presidio,” which accused “zealots” of proposing to “level a forest of mature trees to save some sand shrubs.” According to many environmentalists, the column contributed a disastrous dose of misinformation to the controversy.
“Ken Garcia killed it,” says Jake Sigg of the California Native Plant Society, referring to the dunes restoration project. “We’re talking about a public that has not been educated in terms of biology. Here we have a museum that is of living things, living processes, and we should cherish those.”
When the Army gave up its foothold in the Presidio, it transferred the land to the National Park Service. With its mission of “preserving unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System,” the Park Service began restoring portions of the Presidio to their natural states.
In 1996, it started with 12 acres of the Lobos Creek area — bordered by houses to the south and a stand of Monterey cypress and pine trees planted by the Army to the north and west. The Park Service ripped out concrete, removed invasive species such as iceplant, used bulldozers to re-mold hills out of sand from the creek bed, and planted the area with native species. With the help of hundreds of volunteers, the Lobos Creek Dunes eventually began to resemble what they might have looked like 200 years ago.
Sand dunes once covered much of what is now western San Francisco, along with shrubby plants that could survive in dry, windy conditions. The Xerces blue butterfly, the first North American butterfly known to have become extinct from human disturbance, was last seen in 1941 at Lobos Creek in the Presidio. Now, another dune resident, a tiny member of the sunflower family called the San Francisco lessingia, is in danger of extinction.
The San Francisco lessingia, endemic to the Bay Area, is an annual occurring only in coastal sand dunes. Of the five places the plant lives, four are in the Presidio. Lessingia sprouts in the spring from seed left the autumn before, and inconspicuously grows through the summer before exploding in a cluster of bright yellow flowers. In most of the sand dunes, it is dwarfed in size by native neighbors such as Chamisso’s lupine, coyote bush, coast buckwheat, and sticky monkeyflower, and in numbers by the ubiquitous California poppy.
“There probably was a lot of diversity that we don’t know about,” said Andy Baker of the National Parks Conservation Association. “What we have are the last remaining fragments of a larger, more-diverse ecosystem.”
After the restoration of the Lobos Creek Dunes, the San Francisco lessingia made a comeback, from a low of 19 plants to more than one million in 2000, according to Kevin Schwartz, an independent botanist who returns annually to monitor the dunes. “You see a mature dune community developing, which is great,” he said. “It’s very exciting to see such changes in just a five- or six-year period.”
But the flowers are not out of the woods yet. In 2001, the lessingia population plummeted to about 300,000 plants, and the area in which the plants were found fell by one-third.
The problem, say ecologists, is that at only 12 acres, the Lobos Creek Dunes are too small to be self-sustaining. Historically, the sand dunes were a fluid community, whose vegetated areas were interspersed with open spaces that could be colonized by lessingia and other annuals. Winter stormwinds shifted sand around, creating fresh patches to be colonized by annual species that would spring from seed in the spring. Plants that lived on the dunes evolved to take advantage of such disturbances. Non-native annual grasses, like the oats and ripgut brome that now dominate much of the dunes, cement the sand into place, preventing the wind from creating open space where native annuals can grow.
Furthermore, the wind that normally would sweep through the area is blocked by the trees, so the movement of sand so critical to the survival of native plants cannot occur. In addition, the dry dunes rely on water from ocean fog that blows into San Francisco. The trees keep fog from reaching down to the ground where the plant communities can use it.
As a result, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed removing the stand of 3,800 trees and replacing it with additional sand dunes, connecting fragmented plots of dunes that lay on either side of the trees. Separately, the Presidio Trust has also proposed removing a nearby complex of World War II–era houses, over the course of 30 years, and restoring the land to dune habitat.
The proposal has been met with significant opposition. The stand of trees is criss-crossed with paths used by runners and dog-walkers. Many of them argue that sand dunes would not serve the same purpose as the trees, which protect runners from the sun and provide an oasis in the midst of urban sprawl. Residents of Lake Street, which borders part of the Presidio, complain that their views of a forest would be replaced by ugly coastal scrub. Many cannot understand how supposed environmentalists would want to rip down a stand of beautiful trees.
But Jake Sigg says the trees are dying. “What does not come across in the stories I’ve read is that the trees that were proposed to be cut down for recovery are at the end of their lives,” Sigg says. “They are falling down as we speak. This is not a forest, it’s a plantation, built by human beings, that must be sustained by human beings.” That is, even if a decision is made to keep the trees, many would have to be cut down to allow in the sunlight needed to foster new trees.
By contrast, the restoration effort aims to bring back entire communities — and let them take hold on their own.
“What I see is a great variety of different kinds of plants and all sorts of insects, butterflies, birds,” says Sigg. “If you look closely, there is a great deal of excitement here. A natural history class or a biology class could spend a very exciting day out there just observing and discussing what all these organisms are.” Making the case for dunes over non-native trees might have to depend on the teaching in those classes: Without it, the public could continue to perceive the complex and vibrant ecosystems as so much “grainy dust,” as Garcia put it. “Once you understand the biological systems and how they work and their value and their beauty,” says Sigg, “you just can’t destroy them, you just can’t.”

The Fight To Save Seed

Dan Rademacher — Fri, 16 Aug 2002 06:50:14 +0000

Monsanto is pushing to get marketing approval for herbicide-resistant, genetically engineered (GE) Roundup Ready wheat — despite widespread farmer protests that GE wheat from open-air test plots could cross-breed with normal wheat. This would be the first GE wheat on the market, and any cross-breeding from tests could pollute conventional seed stock in states like North Dakota and Kansas, which export large amounts of wheat to countries in Europe and Asia that are unlikely to accept genetically engineered (GE) grain.
Who would pay for the economic fallout of a major contamination? Not farmers, if Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) succeeds with a legislative package he introduced in May. The Genetically Engineered Organism Liability Act, HR 4816, makes biotech companies liable for cross-pollination, crop failures, insect resistance, and superweeds. Another Kucinich bill, HR 4812, accuses biotech corporations of “systematically act[ing] to remove basic farmer rights enjoyed since the beginning of agriculture.” The bill would forbid biotech companies or seed sellers to transfer any liability to farmers, outlaw contract provisions that prohibit seed-saving, outlaw any seeds genetically engineered to produce sterile plants (Terminator seeds; see Terrain, Spring 2000), force companies to charge the same technology fees worldwide for GE seeds, and make publicly available all income reports from those fees and from sales of related herbicides like Monsanto’s Roundup.
“This legislation is basic to maintaining some competitiveness and farmer rights in the food system,” said Dan McGuire of the American Corn Growers Association, an advocacy group with members in 28 states. “These biotech corporations are going to control this food system from top to bottom, unless we get seed-saving rights back to farmers.” By selecting from their best plants each year, farmers can develop their own seed strains. And with free seed on hand, they can opt out of expensive seed markets.
The bills may succeed at least as amendments to other legislation, said Gene Paul, an agricultural policy analyst with the National Farmers Organization, which supports the legislation. “These biotech seeds and plants have been put out into public use long before they’ve had what we feel is adequate testing of their long-term effects. This legislation clears up some issues about who is liable and who isn’t.”
Despite the pending legislation, a Monsanto spokesperson told the industry publication Food Chemical News in May that it will formally begin seeking approval to market GE wheat in Canada and the United States. Approval processes in both countries could take from one to three years, but farmers are already concerned that ongoing GE wheat field trials pose serious cross-pollination threats to conventional seed supplies.
Two university extension research centers in North Dakota have refused to do open field trials of GE wheat, according to the Associated Press. Jay Fisher, director of the North Dakota State University’s North Central Research Extension Center at Minot, told the Associated Press that ensuring seed stock purity was a main reason for the decision. The board of farmers that directs research at the Minot center voted 14–2 against trials, said Todd Leake, a farmer and member of the Dakota Resource Council, a grassroots conservation organization. Centers like the one in Minot grow foundation seed, the source for the seed that farmers buy each year. If GE field tests contaminate foundation seed plots, farmers will have a harder time getting GE-free seed. “You couldn’t find a worse-case scenario than a [genetically altered] open-pollinated plant like wheat adjacent to the parent lines of all future seed development,” Leake said.
Nevertheless, the US Department of Agriculture had issued permits for over 380 acres of open-field GE wheat tests by May 2002, the third year of such testing.
In North Dakota, researchers use 330-foot buffers around test plots of GE wheat — small comfort to Leake. “Insects can pollinate wheat,” he said, “and they are not limited to 330 feet; neither is the wind. That’s not using the precautionary principle.”
Genetic Pollution in the Spotlight
According to a study commissioned by the European Union (EU), it doesn’t take much GE acreage to make trouble for conventional and organic farmers. Greenpeace reported in May that it had obtained a copy of what it called “a secret EU study” that suggested that even a 10% share of GE cropland in Europe could lead to what the report calls “significant levels of GE content in non-GE crops.”
According to the study, if 10% of EU cropland were GE, proposed “zero tolerance” contamination thresholds would be impossible to maintain. Maintaining current, less-stringent EU thresholds of 1% to 3% would require significant changes to farm practices, even a halt to seed-saving, to avoid transmitting contamination from one season to the next. If EU farmers, like US soy and cotton farmers, planted 50% of their acreage with GE crops, such changes could push up costs for EU farmers by 10% to 41% for canola, and 1% to 9% for corn and potatoes.
“The European Commission has tried to keep this study secret,” Lorenzo Consoli, Greenpeace EU policy advisor, said in a press release, “because it was afraid of its political implications. If the introduction of GE crops on a commercial scale in Europe increases costs of production for all farmers, makes them more dependent on the big seed companies, and requires complicated and costly measures to avoid contamination, why should we accept GE cultivation in the first place?”
On the ground in Canada, farmers are fighting genetic contamination — and taking their blows. Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser, who has been locked in a court battle with Monsanto since 1998, is now appealing a decision that required him to pay nearly $175,000 in court costs and damages for continuing to save and plant canola seed from his land after it had become contaminated with Monsanto’s Roundup Ready canola. This despite the fact that Schmeiser used Roundup itself only on the margins of his fields, and that he bought no canola seed of any kind after 1993. Roundup Ready canola was introduced in Canada in 1996. Schmeiser used only farm-saved seed from 1993 until 1999, when his lawyers advised him to destroy all the seed he had saved — after decades of seed-saving had produced what he called his own “relatively [disease-]resistant” strain of canola.
As reported in Terrain Summer 2002, the Saskatchewan Organic Directorate (SOD), a coalition of organic farmers and consumers, has filed a class-action lawsuit against Monsanto and Aventis CropScience, the two main sellers of GE canola. The suit alleges that Monsanto and Aventis have destroyed the organic canola industry in Canada and that they could do the same for organic wheat.
In late June, a damning report showed that Canada’s pedigreed seed growers — who specialize in growing certified purebred strains of various crop seeds — have been unable to keep their canola stocks free of GE contamination. The study examined 70 canola samples from seed growers who must grow strains over 99% free of other strains. Since these seeds are the source for much of the non-GE canola seed in Canada, any impurities can spread throughout the nation’s seed supply. Of the 70 samples, only two were sufficiently free of GE content to be acceptable for organic production. And 30 of the 70 were too contaminated with GE content to serve as source seed for conventional growers.
The study, commissioned by the Canadian Seed Growers Association, was withheld by the federal agency Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, which had conducted it. The SOD obtained a copy through public information laws, but got the complete copy only by threatening lawsuit. “[On the original] all the pertinent information was blacked out,” SOD President Arnold Taylor told Terrain. “This study may prove our case. If pedigreed seed growers can’t grow canola without GE contamination, who can?”

When the Well Runs Dry

jennifer barrios — Fri, 16 Aug 2002 06:48:48 +0000

If you drive through Mesa Verda in the desert of southeastern California, you get the sense that not much has changed in a long time. Along with a coffee shop, the only other businesses in town are two gas stations serving the freeway. Most of the town’s 2,300 residents have long depended on low-paying jobs in neighboring citrus orchards. Trailer homes, worn with age, sit in the middle of dirt fields behind broken-down fences. Although it’s California in 2002, some residences lack even the most basic services — like delivery of clean water.
Maria Luisa Garcia, a six-year resident, daughter of farmworkers, and president of the Mesa Verde Organizing Council, jabs her finger against the car window. “You see these houses right here?” she asks. “They don’t have water.” She describes how one resident, an old man, must haul a bucket to his neighbor’s tap to fill it with the murky stuff that passes for potable in this desert town. Especially in a desert, life hinges on water. Turning the car around, we drive slowly to Mesa Verde’s sole hold on life — an unimpressive, mid-sized community well, protected by a barbed wire fence. The water quality is poor, but it’s all the residents have. “Don’t even think about drinking the water,” Garcia says. “Sometimes it will be OK — it’ll smell bad and it’s really brown. But sometimes it will be worse.”
A few miles away, where pocked, gravelly roads give way to county- maintained asphalt, workers are constructing a machine that residents say could threaten even that well’s meager supply. Two gas-fired turbines, each as big as a yacht and housed in what looks like an airplane hangar, would produce 520 megawatts of power when the plant known as the Blythe Energy Project (BEP) is complete. The plant, approved in 2001 over the objection of residents like Garcia, would emit hundreds of tons of pollutants annually, including tiny particulate matter that would be easily breathed into the lungs of any nearby farmworkers and residents. The plant would also cool its two giant turbines with 2,200 gallons of water per minute, drawing from the same aquifer that the old man down the road uses for water to brush his teeth. In 2000 and 2001, Garcia and a woman from the surrounding community led the opposition to the approval of the plant, concerned that families could go thirsty and citrus orchardworkers jobless. [See Terrain, Summer 2001.]
But the California Energy Commission (CEC) rammed the plant through in the throes of the power crisis, promising that any damage would be mitigated. Now developers have applied to build a second, identical plant at the same site, using the same method to cool the turbines. “They’re taking our water,” Garcia says, anger showing on her face. “And water is the essence of life.”
Under the dilapidated trailers in the stark, dry landscape of Mesa Verde is something that turns the area into a desert gold mine for power companies — natural gas pipelines. High-pressure gas lines run under homes and fields, the only indication of their presence small orange signs that warn passers-by from digging.
The political pressure to build plants like Blythe’s came more than a year ago — amid spiraling prices and blackouts, now widely regarded as the result of manipulation. According to Portland energy consultant McCullough Research, whose work has provided the basis of Congressional investigations into energy “gaming,” California’s five largest energy suppliers had 50% of their power off-line from June 2000 to June 2001, triple the national off-line average from 1996 to 2001. Artificial or not, the crisis is over, and conservation measures appear to have taken hold. Between May 2000 and May 2002, weather-adjusted peak energy demand decreased by 4.9%, according to the CEC.
But that hasn’t stopped the commission from approving plants. According to its own records, the CEC has never turned down an application for a new power plant — and Blythe was no exception. After several ownership changes since its application in 1999, the Blythe Energy Project is currently owned by Florida-based FPL Energy; Caithness Energy, LLC, based in New York City; and Louisville, Kentucky–based Summit Energy Services, which had an ownership interest from the start.
Mesa Verde sits about 60 miles north of Mexico on the Arizona border. On the state line, a power plant in Mesa Verde would have easy access to several different “grids” to which to sell the power generated. The farther power travels, the more is lost. But the Blythe area is just four hours away from metropolitan Los Angeles, a lucrative power market.
“Blythe isn’t unique,” says Robert Looper of Summit Energy, the project manager for BEP. “It’s one of many desirable areas where you might want to build a power plant to service the load in San Diego and Los Angeles, where you have air quality problems.”
Another factor in Blythe’s favor, according to Looper, is its remoteness and demographics. “That’s why we located this in the desert,” Looper continues. “You try not to locate these in the middle of communities.”
But Mesa Verde is a community, says Garcia, and that’s the part that makes her livid. “You wouldn’t see a power plant in the middle of Beverly Hills,” she charges. “That’s just the reality of it. They come and build these power plants where they think people don’t have a voice. They come to these underdeveloped communities and dump these industries.”
A report issued last year by the San Francisco–based Latino Issues Forum supports Garcia’s concerns. The Forum studied the locations of 18 proposed new power plants, most of them peakers — small, especially polluting power plants approved on a 21-day expedited schedule in the wake of last year’s power crisis. The report found that 89% of these plants, specially exempted from state-mandated environmental reviews, were located in areas where “more than 50% of the population is people of color.” And of those groups, Latinos were “highly over-represented in the populations living near these plants.”
In a gas-fired power plant, the most important maintenance task is keeping the turbines cool — if they overheat, they can not only lose efficiency, but also be damaged. Developers can be required to cool turbines with fans, a technology known as dry cooling. In 1999, the CEC approved a plant in Sutter County similar to Blythe’s, but community leaders insisted that developers spare the local water supply by using dry cooling. In that method, extra equipment is required and fans draw their power from the turbines, cutting into profits. By far, the cheapest coolant is running water — and that’s what the CEC is allowing for Blythe.
In the desert, where temperatures top 105 degrees in the summer, water is liquid gold. Mesa Verde’s aquifer was hit hard during the 1970s and 80s by heavy agricultural usage, and the water level never fully recovered. The BEP plant approved by the commission would use 3,000 acre-feet of water per year — nearly as much as the entire agricultural use of water on the local mesa, which hovers around 3,700 acre-feet now. Once the water’s usefulness in cooling the turbines is exhausted, the contaminated outflow would go to evaporation ponds, not back into the aquifer. And no one, not even the regulators responsible for approving the Blythe Energy Project, knows for certain what the effect of additional pumping on the recovering aquifer would be.
Maria Luisa Garcia is not alone in her concern over the possible effects of the power plant on the fragile desert community. The question of the future of Mesa Verde’s water has also caught the eye of a schoolteacher with two disabled children in nearby Blythe. Carmela Garnica is no stranger to activism; her father was prominent in the United Farm Workers union during Cesar Chavez’s time, and he seems to have passed his legacy down to his daughter. In 1972, Garnica helped found an alternative school for Chicano students who felt that discrimination ran unchecked through the area’s school system. At 16 years old, she participated in a 15-day hunger strike that mirrored that of Chavez (it also nearly killed her). Nothing, however, could have prepared Garnica for the dizzying process of seeking to halt a power plant’s progress in front of the California Energy Commission — a challenge that had never before been successful.
Garnica became an intervenor in the Blythe Energy Project, a status that allowed her to become a third party in the California Energy Commission’s siting process. As an intervenor, she would be allowed to ask questions of CEC staff and the power plant applicant during the hearings, and could litigate if the final decision was not acceptable to her.
Although she was concerned about the particulate matter like nitrates and sulfates that would form from the plant’s emissions, Garnica says she was mainly interested in challenging the BEP’s water usage. The owners of the BEP predicted a negligible one-foot lowering of the aquifer, while the two CEC hydrologists said that the level could decrease as much as 19 feet and could have an impact on small, surrounding wells, including the ones used by Mesa Verde’s residents and its surrounding orchards.
Garnica did not have the funds to hire her own hydrologist to conduct tests on the water levels, and could only offer objections to the potential harm of the plant. “If I know that kids [in Mesa Verde] are going to be without water,” Garnica says, recalling her motive as intervenor, “and moms aren’t able to get up in the middle of the night to make a bottle for their kids because the Blythe Energy Plant took the water, I’m not going to stand for that.”
She was assured in hearings that if the aquifer did drop low, the company would pay to dig residents’ wells deeper, if necessary. Unconvinced, Garnica pressed the matter until, in one hearing, the presiding officer requested that she move from the topic.
The CEC does accommodate laypeople interested in its processes, says Paul Richins of the CEC. “If [the lay intervenor] is not represented by an attorney, [the commission] will give the citizen slack because they don’t know all the rules. [The commission] is not going to throw out stuff on a technicality. We do want public input.”
But during the 14-month siting process, many documents were available only in English, including the pivotal final staff assessment of the project — a hardship, Garnica says, for the majority of Mesa Verde residents who speak nothing but Spanish. And some meetings that could have been held in Blythe were instead held 600 miles away, in Sacramento, despite Garnica’s repeated requests to hold them on site. “People from Blythe have the concerns, and they’re the ones who are going to be impacted. And farmworkers make minimum wage, and work six or seven months out of the year. So you can’t just take a plane and leave your family. It takes a lot of planning.” Even so, Garnica and a group of Mesa Verde residents, including Maria Luisa Garcia, made a 12-hour bus trip to Sacramento for the final hearing in March 2001, hoping for one last chance to be heard.
In all, Garnica attended nearly a dozen hearings, workshops, and meetings from the time that she filed to become an intervenor in the case in September 2000, until the CEC made its decision in March 2001. During those six months, Garnica says that she found a disturbing pattern of treatment by the energy commission. She claims she received no notice of at least three pre-vote meetings between commission staff, the applicant, and its attorney. (CEC project manager Lance Shaw said that, except for one developer-initiated meeting, Garnica should have received mailed notices to all meetings.) She was often presented with technical answers she could not understand. And at one point, when she asked that the plant be placed at a nearby site on a different aquifer, she was told to produce the engineering studies to support her claims. Garnica was flabbergasted. She didn’t even have the money to hire a lawyer. “We’re a low-income family with two disabled kids,” Garnica points out. “A lot of our survival skills just go to that.”
In its official statements, the CEC claims that intervenors can be any kind of citizen. “It doesn’t say in there that I need to be an attorney, or a hydrologist,” Garnica says. “It doesn’t say in there that I need a team. And it doesn’t say that if I object to something coming to my community, that I need to have all those expertises in one.”
As Bradley Angel, executive director of Greenaction, a San Francisco-based environmental group, put it: “Unless you have an army of lawyers well-rehearsed in communication rules, you don’t even have a chance [in front of the commission].”
If Garnica wanted to hire someone with that expertise, she would have to dig from her own pockets — the CEC does not fund indigent citizen intervenors. The agency provides only a public adviser to explain CEC regulations and provide administrative filing help, not help with substantive issues.
Instead, the resources go toward helping the power plant applicant. It’s not surprising that the agency has never turned down an application for a new power plant. According to Paul Richins of the CEC, there are no filing fees for the energy company. The company pays nothing to file an application for a new plant — nor for the staff who review the application and prepare the assessments. And the eventual permit for building the power plant is, you guessed it, on the house. That’s not to say that it isn’t a costly process; Richins estimates the CEC spends an average of $750,000 per plant — money that comes from a few cents’ surcharge on everyone’s electricity bill, which funds the CEC.
Even a former CEC commissioner, Michal Moore, has denounced the process. In response to a CEC staff report that concluded that “the public generally supports” the siting process, Moore presented the commission with a blistering seven-page indictment in March 2000:
“I consider the system employed today to be hopelessly flawed, biased largely in favor of a single factor — getting an application in and out of the Energy Commission in the short amount of time called for in the statute — one year,” Moore wrote. “All this occurs using the worst possible combination of information gathering techniques, which ignore real cumulative regional or statewide issues, blur important costs and interrelationships with other agencies, and make the process of certifying a new facility a virtual crap shoot for the presiding member, who at the end of the process is left with no real decision other than ‘approval’ with various ranges of mitigation measures that can be applied.
“We need to recall that our process should not only serve the applicant and the staff — who ostensibly represent the public — but the affected public itself.”
In Blythe, that affected public included more than just Garnica, Garcia, and other concerned residents. Even local boosters of the plant had problems in the end.
Leaders from the neighboring city of Blythe had wangled a deal with the BEP owners that gave the city an option to purchase 50 megawatts directly from the plant, rather than continuing to buy from Southern California Edison. That way, city leaders reasoned, the city could set its own rates for power and emerge from under the high-priced thumb of the utility.
It turned out to be an empty deal.
In September 2001, Governor Gray Davis put the kibosh on such direct purchases so they would not compete with the utility companies bailed out by the state. The other option, forming a municipal utility district, is an arduous process that could take years. And while the company touted the new jobs that the plant would bring to the area — almost 400 construction jobs and 20 operational jobs — the company only hired 80 people who lived within 40 miles of the plant. Those who landed the highest-paying jobs moved temporarily to the area, according to Quenton Hanson, executive director of the Small Business Economic Development Center at the nearby Palo Verde College. Hanson said he could not break the numbers down further by city to determine how many Mesa Verde residents, if any, got construction jobs at the plant.
Despite not knowing the exact effect that BEP would have on Mesa Verde’s aquifer, in March 2001 the CEC approved the application. CEC hydrologist Linda Bond says that, although it was in the CEC’s purview to require the company to dig test wells to gauge the plant’s impact, the commission determined that computer modeling was sufficient to predict drawdown. “Putting in a well is an expensive proposition [for the company],” Bond says, noting the company’s concerns. “If the commission had decided that the power plant [required] dry cooling, they would have wasted $50,000 to $100,000.” To make up for any impacts on the aquifer, the company promised to drill surrounding wells deeper — or have the well pumps lowered — if the water level dropped by more than five feet during the plant’s 30-year life. The company predicted it wouldn’t come close to that mark. But the CEC’s own computer modeling had already indicated that drawdown would reach 5.7 to 19 feet, which could further reduce the supply and burn out pumps, Bond said. Instead of requiring dry cooling, however, or insisting on mitigation up front, or even requiring the test well before giving the green light, the CEC granted the permit. That allowed the company to dig its expensive well with approval secure in hand. The CEC did require that, before the plant went on-line, the company would have to draw water from the well, to test the impact on the aquifer. It conducted the tests, documenting its finding of negligible drawdown. And that meant no mitigation was required.
Once the plant is on line, the CEC’s mitigation agreement requires no ongoing monitoring to verify the company’s drawdown finding, Bond said. Bond’s supervisor Rich Sapudar also conceded that the agreement fails to stipulate, up front, how quickly the company would have to respond if drawdown does, in fact, exceed five feet, burning out pumps of surrounding wells. If it happened, the company would have to submit a new plan to CEC’s compliance unit. If the company balked at paying mitigation up front, or disputed the need, cost, or the project’s culpability in the overdrafting, a well owner could file a grievance with the CEC compliance unit, Sapudar said.
That deal was not good enough for Carmela Garnica.
After the CEC’s approval of the first energy plant, Garnica enlisted the aid of an attorney willing to work pro bono and filed suit in May 2001 against the power plant owners in Riverside County Superior Court. The suit alleged that the environmental analysis under which the plant was approved was flawed. That suit was thrown out on the basis that it was not filed in a timely fashion. In July, the court rejected an appeal of the dismissal on a technicality; the attorney, John Gabrielli, planned to re-file the appeal.
In Mesa Verde, Maria Luisa Garcia filed her own complaint — an environmental injustice claim with the federal Department of Energy. Then she forgot about it, because she never heard back from them, and because the Department of Energy has never, according to its own records, investigated the CEC — or any other governmental agency — on such grounds. However, this May, the DOE’s Office of Civil Rights and Diversity announced that they had decided to take the case. According to the DOE’s Sharon Wyatt, the most Garcia can expect from the DOE’s action is mediation with the company on her concerns.
That investigation could take years. In the meantime, the same companies that own BEP proposed a new idea in February of this year — Blythe Energy Project II, an identical 520-megawatt plant right next to BEP. Together, they would pollute twice as much as BEP alone, and would suck 6,000 acre-feet per year out of the aquifer — nearly twice the amount used by local agriculture. Despite the uncertain impacts, the companies are proposing that the CEC license Blythe II within a year. The CEC was expecting to start the licensing process in late July.
Garnica takes a deep breath when the topic of Blythe Energy Project II is broached. Although she says that local residents were dealt a setback by Blythe I’s groundbreaking in June 2001, people are starting to have meetings again. “I can tell you I’m not going at it alone,” Garnica says. “I’m not going to intervene by myself. This time I can make copies of the papers people can file to be intervenors. I can go out there and distribute all these copies and get their signatures so they can see we have 40 people [intervening], and we can ask all the questions we want, because we’ll all be sitting at that table.”
As for Garcia, she is going to continue as president of the Mesa Verde Organizing Council (or MiVOZ, my voice in Spanish). Boosted by a grant from the Washington, D.C.-based National Council of La Raza, MiVOZ is working with the Desert Alliance for Community Empowerment, a non-profit organization, to improve Mesa Verde. “We got organized because of this rude awakening. We got formed because we had concerns with this issue about the power plant. But we’ve already got two grants, and right now we’re going to build a basketball court for the community,” Garcia says. “We do clean-ups, we’ve put up stop signs. We’re like the community council now.”
Garcia hopes that this time, at least, others in Blythe will wise up to the empty promises that BEP I brought to the area. “What happened to all the cheap energy we were going to get? We’re not going to get it. What happened to all the jobs? All those people came in from somewhere else. All those broken promises, and nothing good happened. I want to get people to say, OK, they did this to us with the first power plant. Let’s not let them screw us with another.”

Airport Accused of Suppressing Runway Studies

Justin Scheck — Fri, 16 Aug 2002 06:48:24 +0000

Open-government advocates and environmentalists say the San Francisco International Airport is illegally blocking access to draft studies on the environmental impacts of its proposal to fill San Francisco Bay with new runways.
“We’ve been stonewalled,” said BayKeeper Jonathan Kaplan. “I think the airport and the city are depriving the people of their right to participate in a very important decision. The airport wants the media to be writing about flight delays, not about catastrophic environmental impacts.”
The airport proposes to fill two square miles for new runways to curtail flight delays in bad weather, which can shut down two of four current runways. The new, bigger ones would function in all weather, although opponents point out that most delays are not weather-related, and other options could prevent those that are. [See Terrains Winter 2000, Winter 2001.]
On April 23, two weeks after rebuffing a request for the studies by BayKeeper and Alliance for a Clean Waterfront, airport officials also refused a similar order from San Francisco’s Sunshine Ordinance Task Force. In 1999 and 2001, the airport issued gag orders on science panels assessing the studies.
The studies are required for state and federal environmental impact assessments of the plan. But the airport claims that a 2000 agreement with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) forbids the release of the preliminary data, or even a list of the studies under way.
Environmental advocates say that the airport is flouting city and state laws that mandate public access to draft studies.
The data in question — largely the results of computer modeling — predict the new runways’ effects on everything from the tidal flushing of South Bay toxics and stirring up of old industrial contaminants to the viability of fish, bird, and seal populations. Environmentalists are particularly concerned that the runway fill could cut tidal flows to the South Bay, rendering it stagnant and allowing increased deposits of industrial chemicals, heavy metals, and DDT breakdown products.
“The effect of the runways cannot be mitigated,” said Richard Zimmerman, chair of the airport task force for the Loma Prieta Chapter of the Sierra Club. “The impact of ten years of construction [would] degrade the entire Bay, not just a small percentage near the airport.”
The airport has already announced plans to restore North Bay wetlands as “environmental mitigation” for the construction. But there are few places to restore in the South Bay — where the construction would happen. As interpreted by a 1990 pact between the US Army Corps of Engineers and the US EPA, federal law requires a developer targeting wetlands to mitigate “when practicable, in areas adjacent or contiguous to the discharge site.”
In a study released last year, the airport identified the Cargill salt ponds — which span the southern perimeter of the Bay from Redwood City on the west side to Fremont on the east — as the only South Bay land available for mitigation. But Sen. Dianne Feinstein said in June that restoration of the Cargill salt ponds would be paid for by the state and federal governments and private foundations, and would not serve as airport mitigation. Another possibility — NASA-owned Moffett Field wetlands in Mountain View — is the subject of a Superfund cleanup that explicitly forbids tideland restoration.
According to environmentalists, the lack of mitigation options leaves the airport under pressure to find minimal potential damage to the South Bay — and to hide data.
“The first draft [of the environmental studies] probably said that there would be effects on the South Bay,” said Daniel Cooper of San Francisco-based Lawyers for Clean Water, who was involved in the Sunshine Task Force filing. “They probably said ‘holy shit,’ and that’s why they’re not releasing it.”
Darwin Helmuth, project manager in the San Francisco Planning Department, said the department has no position on whether the documents should be released. But if they were, “we would be dealing with comments and questions and phone calls,” he said, “and we would never get the draft done.”
Airport spokesperson Kandace Bender told Terrain that the press — which in recent months has reported on the airport’s financial problems and a decrease in air traffic since September 11 — has been unfair to the airport.
“Don’t believe anything you’re reading in the other papers,” she said, “because they’re all getting it wrong.” Financial problems haven’t hampered the planned runway expansion and it will likely involve restoring the Cargill salt ponds, she claimed.
As of July, the data had been seen only by project staffers and the Peer Review Panel, a group of scientists hired by the airport to analyze the studies’ methodology.
Panel members, in fields from hydrology to marine mammals, have cited their confidentiality vow in declining to comment.
But a source close to the panel told Terrain that panelists at their May meeting “trashed” the airport for inconsistencies between data and conclusions in the studies, conducted by contractor URS Corp. on behalf of the airport and the FAA. At least one analysis indicated severe environmental consequences, said the source.
In September, the panel is expected to release its analysis of the data, but not the data on which the analysis is based; those will be excised to prevent public access, said the planning department’s Helmuth. The data will be released in the draft EIR, expected no earlier than January 2003.
The federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) allows the FAA to withhold preliminary documents used to formulate a draft of its own documents. “That’s our standard agreement,” said FAA spokesman Jerry Snyder, referring to the airport pact, “not just with San Francisco, but with every airport we conduct this kind of work with.” The FAA owns the documents, will use them in the federal Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), and will reimburse the airport for most of the work (75%, according to airport officials), Snyder said. But he conceded that the airport so far has laid out all the money.
Regardless of who owns the documents, the FAA policy does not apply to studies used for state documents such as the airport’s required Environmental Impact Report (EIR), said Terry Francke, legal counsel for the California First Amendment Coalition. “It’s not enough to say ‘this is a federal document, so it’s up to the [federal government],’” said Francke. “If it’s in the possession of the [state or city agency] it’s under the California Public Records Act,” which permits release of drafts. And if documents involve a city project, the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance also explicitly prohibits the withholding of a“preliminary draft or department memorandum,” the ordinance states.
“It appears, and perceptions count, that San Francisco entered an agreement with the FAA just to exclude the public,” said Zimmerman of the Sierra Club.
“That is completely false,” airport spokesperson Bender told Terrain. “If people have a problem with this, they need to talk to the federal government.”
Alan Ramo, who filed the complaint with the Sunshine Task Force, said the airport’s refusal of the Task Force order has been forwarded to the San Francisco District Attorney (DA)’s office. Asked if the office is investigating the issue, DA spokesperson Reg Smith refused to comment.

County May Pay $20 Million for Timberland

Staff Reporter — Fri, 16 Aug 2002 06:45:20 +0000

The Mendocino Redwood Company (MRC), owned by the Fisher family that owns the Gap clothing chain, has obtained little-known development rights that boost the price of over 3,000 acres of timberland sought by Sonoma County for open space, Terrain has learned.
Through an obscure state real estate law, MRC has obtained the right to sell the Willow Creek property in parcels, and even develop it, which increases the price it can demand from the public in year-old negotiations.
In July, MRC spokesperson Nancy Budge confirmed that the company was negotiating a $20 million sale of roughly 3,200 acres on Willow Creek to Sonoma County. The company was also seeking a separate undisclosed price for a conservation easement that would pay it not to log 2,000 acres adjacent to the proposed park, she said.
Andrea Mackenzie, director of the Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District, and chief negotiator for the sale, said MRC’s cut-over swath of 3,200 acres “is our highest priority.” The park would be adjacent to the heavily trafficked Sonoma Coast State Beach, creating a 10,000-acre natural habitat and recreational spot with creeks draining into the Russian River. But at more than $6,000 per acre, the price would be about six times more than the $1,000 per acre MRC paid for all its cut-over land four years ago, before further logging it, Budge said.
One factor: MRC recently obtained development rights, called Certificates of Compliance (CCs), for the entire 5,200 acres.
“CCs are like paper gold,” said Sonia Jacques, Senior Project Manager with the San Francisco-based Trust for Public Land, which is facilitating the deal. “They are basically the ancient paper subdivisions, old deeds that show that the land was divided at one point in X ways.” With the CCs, she said, a landowner can develop the land according to the historical parcels, significantly increasing their value.
Since as early as the 19th century, California counties have allowed subdivisions on some land parcels. By the 1970s, responding to the loss of farms, rangeland, and forests to rampant development, legislators amended the 1907 state Subdivision Map Act to require each county and city to adopt a general plan and resulting zoning, with which development must be consistent. Limited zoning amendments could be allowed, say, from agriculture to residential. But by the mid-1980s, landowners had won a series of Map Act amendment loopholes: Filings of the original parcels, however antiquated, would become legal and valid, regardless of the county plan. These filings are the Certificates of Compliance.
“You do the research, find out if there are CCs for your land, take it to the local planning department,” said Jacques, “and if they agree with you, you can get the certificates. CCs can and do add value to property.”
Using CCs also keeps the public in the dark, says Norman de Vall, a former four-term Mendocino County supervisor. “There’s no hearing, there’s no agenda, there’s no notice, the public has no knowledge until a bulldozer comes in and all of a sudden you have three neighbors when you thought you were living next to a forest.”
De Vall says this state law is a giveaway to large-acreage landowners like MRC. “Any property owner who wants to [can] go back and dig into their history and try to parcel out their land. This really has to be understood because it’s carving up California outside of general plans, outside the Map Act, outside the planning process.”
MRC has no plans to develop the 5,200 acres, Budge told Terrain. “We have not developed except to build roads and repair roads to harvest the trees,” she said, “although we could subdivide if we wished.” But in any case, the CCs would influence the current appraisal of the Willow Creek property by a timber and a real estate appraiser, Jacques said. “It’s a way of getting a documented source saying their land would have residential value in the future,” she said. “MRC got their CCs to add value — potential residential value.” By a sales tax, county residents would fund the purchase, but would be prohibited from examining the private appraisal process that helps set the price; it will be reviewed only by state government officials, said Trust spokesperson Mary Menees.
Applying for CCs requires tedious paperwork. MRC has gotten few CCs beyond Willow Creek, but county planners could not say how many CCs exist for other parcels within MRC’s 232,500 acres. Purchased in 1998, those holdings stretch from Sonoma’s Willow Creek — the wooded lot in question — along the Albion River and into Mendocino County.
The previous owner, Louisiana Pacific, had already heavily logged and stripped the property of redwoods and much of the other coniferous growth, according to appraisers who viewed the land in 1998. “LP logged to infinity. They preferred their trees horizontal,” said de Vall, the former Mendocino County supervisor. “MRC is worse. They do not accept that LP left them depleted, ruined resources.” According to California Department of Forestry figures analyzed by a coalition of environmental groups, the acres in MRC’s timber harvest plans increased 200% in 2001 over LP’s in 1997.
MRC says it has halved its actual harvest in the past two years, engaged in restoration projects, and earned a certificate of sustainable forestry from the Forest Stewardship Council. “The philosophy of this company is to show you can own private timberland and still restore it,” said Budge.
But in Mendocino County, where MRC holds about 220,000 acres, environmental action groups have filed 10 lawsuits against MRC’s proposed timber harvest plans. In late July, the company was expected to announce public meetings to discuss their Habitat Conservation Plan, which would effectively waive the Endangered Species Act for their entire holdings.
The company has not spared Willow Creek from its logging plans. In 1998, according to LP’s assessments of the property, the area was already overlogged, registering no trees larger than 21 inches in diameter. Since 1998, the MRC has filed four timber harvest plans in Willow Creek. In 1999, Sonoma County offered an undisclosed amount to purchase the 3,000 acres of MRC’s holdings for a state park. MRC rejected the offer. The current plan could be presented to the sales tax authority and county supervisors by year’s end, said Mackenzie.

Plan to Bag Gualala, Albion Rivers Could Exploit Free Trade Laws

Staff Reporter — Fri, 16 Aug 2002 06:44:15 +0000

Luxembourg-based World Water SA has become the first multinational to seek water rights to northern California rivers, setting up a key test of local sovereignty in the face of international trade agreements, say public interest advocates.
World Water SA, through its partner Alaska Water Exports, wants to take up to 20-30 gallons per minute from the Albion and Gualala rivers during the wet season, filling 1.7-million-cubic-foot polyfiber bags to tow and sell to San Diego.
In its July application before the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB), the company proposes to take up to 10,000 and 20,000 annual acre-feet from spots about 1.5 miles upstream of the mouths of the Albion and Gualala, respectively. It’s the first application of its kind, said a board spokesperson.
According to environmentalists, the plan could disturb the habitat of endangered coho salmon and steelhead trout, with suction pumps diminishing current and stirring up sediment.
“There is no water to be given,” says Friends of the Gualala River’s Ursula Jones, noting that both rivers have already been degraded by logging and other industries in Mendocino and Sonoma Counties.
Near the Gualala River’s mouth, a naturally occurring sandbar creates an important nursery habitat for young fish. Winter storms break the sandbar open, allowing the previous years’ smolt to leave and spawners to enter the river system. But those storm flows are targeted by the proposal. On the Albion, the water grab would also deplete floods that maintain a delicate estuary system.
If his permit is approved, Alaska Water Exports owner Ric Davidge could use global trade agreements to “say that [any] restrictions on the amount of water he could take control his ability to make a profit,” said Nancy Price of the Waltham, Massachusetts–based Alliance for Democracy. Under Chapter 11 of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) [see Terrain, Fall 2001], US Sunbelt Water has sued Canada for $220 million, saying it “lost” profits when the country blocked its sale of Canadian water to the US, said Price.
Davidge’s permit request specifies San Diego as the place of use. But under Chapter 11, and pending Free Trade Agreement of the Americas statutes, Davidge could challenge the water board’s power to restrict water sales to San Diego over, say, Mexico, as “discriminatory,” says Price.
By as early as August, the SWRCB was expected to announce a public comment period on the plan.

Chevron Slammed for Plans to Store Explosive Gas

Justin Scheck — Fri, 16 Aug 2002 06:44:10 +0000

Chevron Richmond Refinery has illegally avoided environmental review of its plans to build storage tanks for highly explosive liquid petroleum gas (LPG), said Oakland-based Communities for a Better Environment (CBE).
CBE, which made the complaint in a July lawsuit in Contra Costa County Superior Court, is targeting a Richmond City Council permit for Chevron’s two proposed 30,000-gallon storage LPG “spheres.” They are comparable to one that exploded in Mexico in 1984, killing 500 people, said Fred Millar, a toxics consultant contributing to the CBE suit. A court hearing is set for August 5.
The potential impact of an LPG explosion increases when multiple LPG storage facilities are close to each other, as the Richmond spheres would be. The spheres would sit within a mile of the predominantly low-income African-American, Latino, and Asian neighborhood of North Richmond.
“That community is on the front line of the chemical assault,” said the West County Toxics Coalition’s Henry Clark, who said he would see the spheres from his backyard. “Richmond is caving into Chevron’s interests and not being consistent with [its 1999] principles of environmental justice.”
Under California’s Reformulated Gasoline Requirements, Phase Three (RFG3), effective December 31, 2002, refineries must eliminate the additive MTBE, replace it with the oxygenate ethanol, and reduce sulfur levels, among other requirements. If Chevron’s new spheres are part of a larger RFG3 project, state law would require an Environmental Impact Report (EIR). Similar RFG3-related projects are undergoing an EIR at Chevron’s El Segundo refinery, according to public records.
Chevron Richmond denies their spheres are part of that process.
But CBE says the company is breaking its RFG3 project into small parts to avoid doing a costly EIR and mitigation, violating the California Environmental Quality Act.
In an initial study for the spheres, Chevron said that it would be phasing in ethanol, “to comply with new California gasoline regulations,” and that that process would “increase the refinery’s need for LPG storage,” a move that would require an EIR.
But in a July interview, Chevron Richmond spokesman Dean O’Hair flip-flopped, claiming the spheres are simply part of the refinery’s plan to reduce dependence on railway cars for LPG storage. Despite that claim, O’Hair told Terrain that Chevron would not stop using the cars to store LPG, even once the spheres are in use.
Over the past two years, Chevron Richmond has applied for at least 12 permits that appear to add up to work needed for the RFG3, CBE said.
Chevron Richmond had originally denied its plans to build an ethanol-blending facility, crucial to the RFG process.
“There’s a letter that says that there would be no ethanol in the refinery at all,” said Richmond City Council member Tom Butt, who opposed the permit. “Then, simultaneous [to that], they have an application to put in an ethanol-blending facility in the refinery. They said, ‘well it’s not in the refinery, it’s next to the refinery.’”
O’Hair now acknowledges that the ethanol-blending facility would help the company “meet the oxygenate requirement,” but denied that it is related to RFG3 — even though oxygenate-adding is part of RFG3.
“We want them to produce cleaner gas,” said CBE’s Adriene Bloch, “[but] we want to see all parts of the project so that we can see the impacts, and [ensure] the appropriate mitigations.”