Terrain » Spring 2003

Terratorial

Amy Standen — Sun, 16 Feb 2003 06:56:25 +0000

This issue of Terrain goes to print on the eve of what will likely be the largest show of anti-war sentiment since Bush’s infamous “axis of evil” speech morphed the war on terrorism into a renewed war on Iraq. This time, environmentalists will lead the march in their own contingent of bicycles and alternative fuel vehicles, making the case that being a patriot in this country isn’t just about wearing a flag on your t-shirt, or even exercising your First Amendment rights, it’s about doing what you can to make this a safer, healthier country to live in.
For a while there, it looked like the war on Al Qaeda and then the war on Iraq might completely eclipse some of the grimmest maneuverings yet of the Bush Administration: the steady undermining of years of environmental protections, from slashing aid at Superfund sites, to pushing for offshore oil drilling on the California coast, to loosening emissions standards for cars and power plants and ending many habitat protections. How much of this could pass unnoticed while Americans looked to the Middle East?
Well, a lot of it could, and will. But something’s bubbling up from beneath. Recently, a coalition of Christian groups banded together to launch the What Would Jesus Drive campaign, making the case, we hope, to millions of Christians that reducing auto emissions is “about loving your neighbor.” Meanwhile, the Detroit Project is pooling money for network TV commercials showing the link between terrorism and American oil addiction. At a gas station on I-5 last month, a woman raved to me about her new hybrid car. “My friend got one,” she said, “and I liked hers so much that I sold my car and bought one just like it.” So what if automakers, bowing to the oil industry, refuse to market their alternative fuel cars? Little by little, environmental awareness makes its way into the common consciousness. As well it should: We all share this air, drink this water, and pay the consequences of the oil we consume.
Just as Americans need to make the connection between the wars we wage, and the way we consume, so we need to be making those kinds of connections on a local level. That’s where Terrain comes in.
For the past five years, that’s where Laird Townsend has come in. He leaves the rest of us at Terrain with a mandate: Find the global story within every local one. Make the connections, always.
Dig out all your old copies of Terrain and you’ll have in your hands a library: hundreds of thoughtful, exhaustively reported stories of environmental happenings in northern California and beyond — told with wisdom and compassion.
Looking through those Terrains, you’ll notice something else. Terrain sticks with the story.
In Laird’s first Terratorial, he described a story from that issue of Terrain about “how one group, PUEBLO, has found allies in fighting a medical waste incinerator in Oakland.” The article, by then-board member John Dury, chronicled a community’s fight to shut down a dioxin-spewing medical waste incinerator run by Integrated Environmental Systems (IES). Like most Terrain stories, it took a local issue and teased out the universal one: When the regulators charged with protecting our air and water fail to do so, what’s a community to do?
This quarter, we’re hearing about IES again. Only now, we have a victory to report: A year after shutting down the East Oakland incinerator Dury wrote about, Stericycle, which has since bought IES, has been forced to close another medical waste incinerator on the Gila River reservation in Arizona. The places have changed, but the Big Questions haven’t. When can we say truly that waste has been taken care of? What does it take for a community to reclaim control over the air it breathes?
Other stories in this issue strive to make those same connections between the local issue and the broader implications. Residents of two overcrowded Oakland neighborhoods hope to see a contaminated brownfield blossom into a badly needed park. It’s a local story, but with far-reaching implications: When polluters fail to clean up their mess, who’s left holding the bag?
Another story, this one from the wilds of northern California, asks the question: How far are Californians willing to go to bring back native species? Or, as author Jim McCarthy puts is, how wild do we want our Wild West to be?
As John Muir said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” Make the connections, always.
Laird Townsend, Dan Rademacher, Ron Sullivan, Mary Vance, the Editorial Board, and the rest of the Ecology Center have all helped to make this transition and this issue possible. Thank you!

Biowarfare in the Andes

Jeffrey St. Clair — Sun, 16 Feb 2003 06:53:42 +0000

Hostile intentions toward the people of another country. Deployment of chemical weapons and biological agents. Pursuit of a scorched earth policy. Sound like Saddam’s Iraq? Think again. This neatly capsulizes the Bush administration’s ongoing depredations in Colombia, all under the shady banner of the war on drugs.
Indeed, as Bush offers pious homilies on Iraq’s possible hoarding of so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction, his administration and its backers from both parties in Congress are poised to unleash a new wave of toxins in the mountains of Colombia, including a dangerous brew of biological weapons its proponents rather quaintly call mycoherbicides, a.k.a. Agent Green.
Agent Green is a fungal pathogen conjured up by the US Department of Agriculture’s experiment station in Beltsville, Maryland. It is now being produced with US funds by Ag/Bio Company, a private lab in Bozeman, Montana, and at a former Soviet bioweapons factory in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The labs are brewing up two types of killer fungi, Fusarium oxysporum (for use against marijuana and coca plants) and Pleospora papaveracea (to destroy opium poppies).
The leading germ-war hawk in the congress is Rep. Bob Mica (R- Florida). In mid-December, Mica fumed, “We have to restore our mycoherbicide. Things that have been studied for too long need to be put into action.”
Even the perpetually conflicted Colin Powell is on record supporting the use of biological agents as a key part of “Plan Colombia.” Anne Peterson, the US ambassador to Bogota, testified recently that she believed bioweapons had already been deployed in Colombia. Bizarrely, she later retracted this chilling observation, saying that it had been made under duress. Ms Peterson didn’t say who had applied the thumbscrews.
Back in the late 90s, Rand Beers, now one of the few Clinton holdovers at the State Department, was all for using germ weapons on crops in drug-producing countries. As Assistant Secretary of State for narcotics, Beers is forced to defend against charges that the US violates, among other treaties, the Biological Weapons Convention. Beers often says that the toxic weapons are needed to fight international crime syndicates.
So, as in Macbeth, sin plucks on sin.
The problem is that both fungi are indiscriminate killers, posing threats to human health and to non-target species. When sprayed from airplanes and helicopters, Agent Green will inevitably drift over coffee plantations, fields, farms, villages, and water supplies.
Agent Green also threatens the ecology of the Colombian rainforest, one of the most biologically diverse on the planet, already under frightful siege from gold mining, oil extraction, logging, and cattle ranching. By one count, Colombia has already lost more than a third of its primary forest and continues to lose forest at a rate of 3,000 square miles (nearly 2 million acres) a year.
So it’s likely that Amazonia could become collateral damage in the Bushites’ biowar adventurism.
This grim prospect may place the US squarely in violation of yet another international treaty with which Bush, the former cocaine tooter, is charmingly unacquainted: the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD). ENMOD grew out of worldwide outrage at the use of Agent Orange and other malign potions plastered across Southeast Asia during the Vietnam war. Adopted by the UN in 1976 and signed by the US, ENMOD prohibits using the environment as a weapon of war.
Like the pesticides and fumigants already dropped, the US bio-bomblets will inevitably stray across the border into Ecuador and Peru. Both nations vehemently oppose the US biowar plan and charge that it violates international law; they cite a non-proliferation section of the Biological Warfare Convention that prohibits the transfer of germ weapons and technology from one nation to another.
Back in Clintontime, none other than Rand Beers swore that spray-and-burn tactics would “eliminate the majority of Colombia’s opium poppy crop within three years.” Congress bought it, approving $1.3 billion for Plan Colombia. (As a pre-condition for receiving the money, Congress required Colombia to begin operational testing of bioweapons. Bowing to world pressure, Clinton waived the requirement.)
In the past five years, nearly a million acres of land in Colombia has been blitzed by pesticides and fumigants, rendered as sterile as the fields of Carthage after Scipio Africanus’ last cruel visit. But over the same period production of cocaine in Colombia has more than tripled. Opium production is also soaring, increasing by more than 60% since 2000.
The reason for this will be obvious to anyone who has read our book Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press. War, especially covert war, and drugs go hand in hand. Colombia is mired in a three-way civil war, with guerrillas, paramilitaries, and government troops funding their operations from drug proceeds. The bloodier the conflict, the greater the flow of drugs.
Don’t say the toxic warriors in the Bush administration aren’t bibliophiles. Obviously they’ve read Silent Spring. Only not as the stark warning Rachel Carson intended, but as a war plan which they are now bent on putting into global action.

Fasting for Old Growth

Amy Standen — Sun, 16 Feb 2003 06:52:12 +0000

In 1998, then-Lt. Governor Gray Davis made a promise to the Conservation League Foundation: If he were elected governor, Davis vowed to ensure that “wetlands are preserved, rivers are clean and all old-growth trees are spared the lumberjack’s ax.” Five years later, old-growth redwoods and Douglas-firs hit the ground every day.
Last October, after six years of fighting for old-growth, Susan Moloney began a hunger strike to remind the world of Davis’ promise. The fast, which received scant attention from the mainstream press, finally ended on day 52, when Moloney was promised a hearing in front of the Senate Natural Resources and Wildlife Committee. Moloney spoke to Terrain from her cabin in Humboldt County.
Terrain: Politicians make campaign promises all the time. Why did you decide to take this one so seriously? What was your initial reaction to it?
Susan Moloney: At first it was disbelief. But I kept remembering that it was there. I kept remembering that, Wow, Davis said he was going to stop old-growth logging. And [my] optimism is that it’s not just about Maxxam, it’s not just about Humboldt County, it’s not just about Headwaters Forest; it is truly about all old-growth trees. And that was the beauty of that speech: that somebody, some speechwriter that Davis trusted enough to say those words, knew it was important, knew what environmentalists wanted to hear.
I went to see if there were any laws that said if a candidate makes a campaign promise, he can be held accountable. So many people have been saying, “You’re not taking that seriously, are you? He’s just another politician.” That’s what it’s come to in this society. We don’t trust, we don’t put any faith or hope in our politicians. Damn it, we have to hold them accountable! Especially when it’s a clear statement about something that is so critical right now. We don’t have the time to be talking for another six months or a year.
[After I read the speech] I kind of got buried. You get sucked into this issue, and you get so involved, and there are so many intricacies, and there are so many issues of the day, but it was always in the back of my mind. And it wasn’t until June that a friend of mine and I wrote a petition, [which] we’ve been circulating for four years, that says, “We expect our leaders to keep their promises.” So we’ve been having people sign this thing and we’ve been delivering it to Davis’ office for four years. I feel like it’s my responsibility to keep the focus on this. And I feel that with this quote, and with that speech that he made, we’ve been given a gem.
Terrain: After Davis made the pledge, he pulled back from it a bit, right?
SM: Yes, and this is the thing I’ve been hounding him on. His response is, “I’ve saved all the old growth, I was talking about Headwaters.” And “all old growth trees” are not just Headwaters. I hiked in a place out near Scotia last night, which is a virgin grove they’re destroying now. The bottom line is, until there is a law that says a landowner or a corporation cannot cut old-growth, we will, as a state and as a society, be cutting old-growth. There’s no law right now that says you can’t. There’s no law on the books.
Terrain: When did the idea for the hunger strike hit?
SM: I have felt very committed to working on forest issues, specifically old-growth issues, for about six years now. And I considered everything. I became a nonviolent trainer; I moved down to LA to get an initiative campaign qualified; I’ve done substitute tree-sitting. I’ve supported every aspect, and I was just open to it for a long time. Like: “Universe, what can I do here? What is the best use of my energy?”
And the answer came to me from, as I discovered, outside of my head. It wasn’t something that I had thought of in the past. It never ever occurred to me until one day I was sitting here in my cabin, and I literally saw this … It sounds nuts, I know it, but I looked out over the trees, and this ball of white light came over them, and when it got to me, it had words in it, and it said “HUNGER STRIKE.” And it blew me away. This stuff doesn’t happen to me. I don’t see apparitions, and I don’t see figures, and trees don’t talk to me. I was emotional and upset and thinking to myself: “Is this really what I have to do?” And then everything just fell into place.
Terrain: You fasted for 52 days. How do you feel?
SM: It’s great. I’m eating a lot now.
Terrain: You seemed pretty healthy and clear-headed, even at the end.
SM: I felt really guided and determined. I felt like I was being taken care of on some incredible level, during this entire thing. There were a couple of questionable days around days nine and ten, which were tough. I thought, “Oh gosh, if it’s going to get worse than this…” But it got better. For the most part I had incredible energy. And I feel like coming out of it has been basically the same.
Terrain: Is it disappointing that even after 52 days of a hunger strike, you never got to see Governor Davis?
SM: Yes, it’s frustrating. But the other outcomes of this were just so encouraging. To know that a lot more people now know that we’re still cutting old-growth, that’s crucial. You know if you can’t get exactly what you want, you take the next best thing. And the beauty of it is we’ve got a few senators who are willing to bring this thing to a committee meeting in the [state] Senate, and that’s really key. Who knows how far that will go, but it’s a step in the right direction and it keeps it in the public eye.
Terrain: What happens if they postpone the meeting or they cancel it, or nothing really happens?
SM: We’ll see. Who knows? When I undertook the hunger strike I never knew what the end was going to be like. I just knew I had to do it and I felt really committed and determined in doing it.
Terrain: Hunger striking is such an extreme gesture. Does it have a different meaning from other kinds of protest?
SM: It’s is just another tool in a nonviolent toolbox. We’re more familiar with the usual scenario of tree-sits, and protests, and sitting down in the road, and blocking gate access. There are a lot of things that people do, depending on their level of commitment, their physical makeup, and the timeframe they have to work in.
For me, it was definitely to bring attention to this issue. One of the comments from [Governor Davis’s] office during this hunger strike was, “She should be working within the system.” I have. I have. We tried an initiative campaign, we’ve met with people in his administration, we’ve gone to the Board of Forestry, and nothing stops the cutting of old-growth trees in California. So what do you do, other than lie down in front of a logging truck? We’ve tried all these different tactics. We’ve tried everything. Direct action is the last resort. People have been trying to do acquisition and legal work for years.
As we sit here, they’re there cutting old-growth trees. Loggers are out there with huge chainsaws at the base of these huge old-growth trees and they’re cutting them down and we’re never going to get them back. It’s more upsetting to me sitting here right now than it was 60 days ago when I decided to do this. The forest is hitting the ground, and it is so sad. We are talking about virgin areas right now. Redwood and Douglas-fir forests that have no roads, that have no stumps, that are being cut right now. What else can we do?
Terrain: What have you learned about what works and what doesn’t?
SM: I think — and this sounds nuts to some of my wonderful tree-sitting friends and younger people — you have got to dress the part. I know it’s nuts, but I was willing to do that because if they can’t look past what you look like to hear what you’re saying, you’re going to lose them. You have to be able to look “normal,” like the people that they’re used to seeing, that they listen to. That they don’t write off immediately because of the visual image.
Terrain: Do you do that? Do you dress a certain way?
SM: I maintain that that’s an important thing we have to do. I mean, where are our priorities: saying screw the whole system? My priority is saying we’ve got to all get together on this old-growth issue. Dressing up is not a big deal. I don’t want to get in trouble with my young friends whose hearts are so in the right place; they’re doing the right thing. I think maybe that comes with age.
Terrain: With everything wrong in the world, why do this for old-growth trees?
SM: I know that there are so many huge issues out there that need our attention. I encourage people to take on whatever issue is important to them. Some people say to me,“Well, this isn’t going help healthcare,” or “This isn’t going to help the children.” Cutting these trees isn’t going to help them either. So if there’s an issue that you think is important, please take it on. Please go work on it.

The Road Not Taken

Dan Rademacher — Sun, 16 Feb 2003 06:50:07 +0000

The most heated controversies over genetic engineering in this country have centered on millions of acres of genetically altered corn and soybeans across the Midwest. Here in California, corn and soybeans are small potatoes compared with crops like grapes, lettuce, rice, and strawberries, which have no genetically engineered (GE) varieties on the market. But one GE crop, cotton, is already being planted here on a massive scale, and new GE food crops could be grown in California as soon as 2004.
The stakes could hardly be higher for California, where agricultural production amounts to a $26 billion-a-year industry, more than the next two states combined. Farmers in states like Iowa and Nebraska confronted a biotech worst-case scenario this summer when experimental drug-producing crops escaped their fields. Small mistakes and freak weather led to the potential contamination of 550 truckloads of soybeans with corn engineered to produce a pig vaccine, according to a December Washington Post article. The soybeans had to be destroyed, and Prodigene, Inc., the corn’s developer, will pay $3.25 million in fines and restitution.
And, as Terrain has been reporting for over a year, organic farmers from Iowa to Saskatchewan are finding it more and more difficult to get non-GE seed. “The hard lessons learned from the Midwest and Canada and Argentina are that you cannot control genetically engineered crops once they are released,” said Ellen Hickey, with the Pesticide Action Network in San Francisco.
Two kinds of genetically altered herbicide-tolerant rice, from Monsanto and Aventis, are the major food crops closest to commercialization for California farmers. “It could be as soon as the next growing season in 2003, or it could be 2004,” said Hickey.
For organic rice farmer Bryce Lundberg, whose family’s farm sits about 80 miles north of Sacramento, a rice control bill passed by the legislature in 2000 holds out some hope that California rice farmers can avoid the plight of farmers in the Midwest and the Canadian plains. “The biggest protection we have in California is the Rice Seed Certification Act of 2000,” Lundberg told Terrain. It requires all varieties of rice in California to be identified and classified, and those that might taint a neighbor’s crop are regulated by the state Rice Commission.
For the 3,200-acre Lundberg operation, which grows over a dozen kinds of rice, from arborio to black, that law imposes heavy restrictions to keep these specialty rices from contaminating neighbors’ fields — red rice intermixed with white can wreak havoc on a crop. Special rice varieties are kept in isolated warehouses and all seeding is done from the ground, rather than by plane as many California farms do. “We’re probably going to be the most regulated rice company in California until the biotech companies come in,” he said. “We fully accept that, because we want to see the biotech varieties regulated.”
The irony of organic rice’s being isolated just like Roundup Ready rice is not lost on Lundberg, but the precedent is important in a state where most conventional rice fields are seeded by marginally accurate low-flying airplanes. “We’re on record with the Rice Commission that we want a mile from where they’re producing those [GE] varieties to where we’re planting organic varieties,” Lundberg said.
Pesticide Action Network, Greenpeace, the Organic Consumers Association, and other groups are launching a campaign to push even further: no new GE food crops in California. For Pesticide Action Network’s Hickey, a mile between GE and organics is not nearly enough to avoid contamination. “We are the number one fruit and vegetable producer in the country, we are the number one organic fruit and vegetable producer, and we have a choice to make,” she said. “We will either go down the road of genetic engineering or we go down the road of sustainable agriculture. You cannot do both.”
A Stitch Too Late
But it may already be too late for cotton, the state’s second largest crop in acreage, after hay and alfalfa. About a third of California’s cotton consisted of GE varieties in 2002, according to the US Department of Agriculture. That amounts to nearly 230,000 acres.
Consumer and activist outcry over GE cotton in California and elsewhere has been almost nonexistent — at least in part because cotton isn’t considered a food crop. “With the food crops, especially fresh foods, consumers will be much more concerned,” says Rebecca Spector with the Center for Food Safety. “Cottonseed oil does end up in food, but it’s very hard to make that connection.”
That’s just the kind of connection that the advocacy group Organic Consumers Association (OCA) wants people to make when they’re buying things like mass-produced cookies and other baked goods, which often contain cottonseed oil. “By weight, two-thirds of the cotton crop either ends up in food or gets fed to animals,” said Simon Harris, OCA’s California campaign coordinator. OCA is launching a campaign this spring to raise public awareness of the risks of genetically modified cotton, along with pesticide use in conventional cotton farming and the sweatshop labor practices that pervade the garment industry.
According to Ron Vargas, a University of California Extension cotton farm advisor in Madera County, GE cottonseed gets mixed with conventional seed and sold mostly as feed. “Most of that goes to the dairy industry,” Vargas said. California’s dairy industry is the largest in the country, bringing in $4.6 billion in 2001.
Vargas supports careful use of GE cotton, and so far he has seen none of the problems of contamination that have occurred in the Midwest with corn and soy. But weed resistance is a potential problem. The bulk of GE cotton in California is herbicide tolerant — resistant to either Monsanto’s Roundup (glyphosate) or to Bayer CropScience’s Butril (bromoxinyl). According to data from the National Center for Food and Agricultural Policy, a Washington, DC-based think tank that supports biotechnology, the percentage of all California cotton acreage treated with Roundup more than doubled to 34% between 1998 and 2000. Bromoxinyl use went from nothing in 1998 to 9% of the state’s cotton acreage, all in areas planted with the resistant cotton.
“We have cautioned growers not to get into a situation where they’re relying solely on one herbicide,” Vargas told Terrain. “You will develop resistance, it’s not a question of ‘if.’”

Unions, Environmentalists Unite Against Wal-Mart

Dan Rademacher — Sun, 16 Feb 2003 06:48:24 +0000

Anti-sprawl groups and the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union have teamed up to fight Wal-Mart’s plans to build 40 “Supercenters” in California over the next four years, saying such stores block union organizing, worsen air pollution, and destroy habitat loss on the urban fringe.
“Historically, we’ve had the jobs- versus-environment debate, but sprawl has brought traditionally disparate groups together,” says Stacy Mitchell of the anti-sprawl group New Rules Foundation. “It’s a growing connection.”
Supercenters, 24-hour discount-goods-and-grocery outlets surrounded by acres of parking lots, destroy local businesses by drawing shoppers away from local downtown areas and towards the outskirts of cities, say sprawl opponents. “Supercenters are worse than [any other big-box development], whether you’re a union or an anti-sprawl activist, partly because of sheer size,” Mitchell said.
Wal-Mart employs no unionized workers. Employees pay extra for a Wal-Mart benefits plan, which is available only to those working more than 32 hours a week. In addition to all the discount goods and clothes of a regular Wal-Mart, Supercenters add a complete grocery and produce market, and often a full pharmacy, nail and hair salon, bookstore, and gas station.
When a Supercenter opens, says Mitchell, “you have one or two grocery stores that close within one year. Within three to five years, you’ll have dozens of other stores that close. Grocery stores go under very quickly, whereas hardware and other stores last a little longer, but eventually they too will succumb.”
The UFCW, which represents one million grocery store clerks, considers Supercenters a major threat to unionized grocery stores like Albertson’s and Safeway. In September, the union successfully lobbied for the first anti-Supercenter ordinance in northern California, in the union stronghold of Martinez, where the city council voted to ban all stores over 90,000 square feet from selling more than 5% groceries.
Sprawl opponents have their own reasons to target Supercenters, which are often built from scratch, leaving behind the shells of outmoded Wal-Marts, says Al Norman of Sprawl Busters, a Massachusetts-based advocacy group. “At any point in time they’ve got thirty-two and a half million square feet [nationwide] of unproductive space that’s been paved over and taken out of use,” he says. “It’s no longer open space, no longer habitat, no longer a groundwater collector.”
And Supercenters only exacerbate the environmental hazards of smaller big-box developments, says the Sierra Club’s John Holtzclaw. “It’s traffic; it’s air pollution,” he told Terrain. “They buy the cheapest piece of land — often a wetland or a former wetland — they fill it in, flood their neighbors [with rain runoff from parking lots], and they pollute the water.”
About 20 communities across the country — from Ashland, Oregon to Northampton, Massachusetts to San Francisco’s Castro, North Beach, and Noe Valley neighborhoods — already have anti-big-box ordinances, which set square foot limits on retail. But the UFCW has targeted Superstores specifically.
In 1999, the UFCW lobbied for AB 84, a California bill which would have prohibited local governments from approving the construction of stores over 100,000 square feet from selling more than 15% food items — a law aimed directly at Superstores. After Governor Gray Davis vetoed the bill, the UFCW focused locally. Over the last two years, the union, in alliance with anti-sprawl groups, has fought for several anti-Supercenter ordinances in California towns, including Bakersfield, Arroyo Grande, San Luis Obispo, Paso Robles, Inglewood, and most recently, Martinez. Of the 40 Supercenters Wal-Mart says it plans to build, it will confirm only three locations: Bakersfield, La Quinta, and Chico.
The UFCW-backed ordinances may keep out Supercenters, but, say other opponents of sprawl, they can be limited in scope.
The Martinez ordinance, for instance, prevented an existing Wal-Mart from expanding into a Supercenter, but did nothing to prevent the construction or expansion of other big-box stores, like Home Depot or Costco, which don’t compete with union grocery stores.
“Any road that leads to smaller stores is good,” says Norman, “[but] my preference is for a simple cap on the size of the building. I don’t care if it’s a Costco or a Home Depot or a Lowe’s. To me, if it’s over 60,000 square feet, we don’t need it.”

Chevron Gets the OK to Pollute Bay

Amy Standen — Sun, 16 Feb 2003 06:47:07 +0000

Instead of keeping ChevronTexaco’s Richmond refinery from polluting San Francisco Bay with dioxin, mercury, nickel, and selenium at excessive levels, regulators have issued a permit for it, according to a lawsuit by Communities for a Better Environment.
In its the initial petition in the lawsuit, CBE charges that the regional water board violated the Clean Water Act by basing the permit on the refinery’s current emission levels — instead of on existing effluent limits. The state water board upheld the permit.
“State and regional water boards are selectively erasing the [water standards] that are being violated or close to being violated,” said Greg Karras of CBE, which filed the August 2002 lawsuit. “They are getting pressure from industry.”
The refinery is the largest single industrial source of dioxin and mercury in the Bay. “The state tells families who fish the Bay to limit their fish consumption or risk cancer and childhood developmental problems,” Karras said, “but does not tell Chevron to limit its pollution.”
Larry Kolb, assistant executive officer at the regional water board, defended the permit: “If [refineries] can’t meet the conventional water quality objectives, the board gave dischargers interim temporary standards that they could meet based on their current performances.” But he said the permits allow “no net loading” of dioxin, mercury, and other pollutants; increases in emissions theoretically must be offset by decreases elsewhere in the region. He argued that refineries are not a significant source of these pollutants — pointing instead to dioxin from air pollution settling into the Bay, and mercury runoff from past mining.
“No net loading doesn’t mean zero,” said Mike Lozeau of EarthJustice, a co-counsel in the suit. “It means some estimate by a discharger that they can do something at other sources that can offset whatever they’re emitting. They’re replacing rational standards with wishful thinking.”
Lozeau agrees with Kolb that the board could be doing a lot to regulate dioxin and mercury, including cracking down on dioxin in the air. “The stacks of the refineries are some of the biggest contributors of dioxin in the area,” he said. “All of these pollutants already have well-identified numeric standards that the board has been applying in the past.”
This isn’t the first time regulators have approved limits in excess of water quality standards. As Terrain reported in Fall 2000, the regional water board loosened dioxin standards 40-fold at the Tosco Refinery, now owned by Tesoro. In July 2001, San Francisco Superior Court Judge James McBride struck down those standards. “We basically won a very similar case against Tosco,” said CBE staff attorney Adrienne Bloch. “The only difference in this case is that we’re alleging more constituents — mercury and nickel [as well as dioxin and selenium].”
If the Tesoro case is upheld on appeal, it will set a precedent statewide. No court date has been set in the Chevron case.

Dental Mercury

Amy Kiser — Sun, 16 Feb 2003 06:46:04 +0000

California dentists have agreed to adhere to state Proposition 65 and warn patients that mercury can “cause birth defects or other reproductive harm.” This follows a December $350,000 settlement with the San Francisco-based environmental group As You Sow.
The 18,000 members of the California Dental Association can still use mercury in amalgam fillings.
Beside the low-level health risk from inhaling mercury vapors or swallowing worn-away particles, the mercury in fillings can threaten ecosystems, according to state and federal studies. Discarded with pulled teeth, left in cadavers, ingested, or washed down the drain in minute amounts, amalgam mercury often gets incinerated, vaporizing and falling out into watersheds. There, it methylates, drastically increasing its danger to ecosystems. Mercury fillings are 25% cheaper than the next cheapest option.
According to surveys by the US Bureau of Mines/US Geologic Survey and Chemical Engineering News, dentists nationwide use an average of 40 tons of mercury annually. “Mercury is being phased out in every kind of product,” said As You Sow’s Larry Fahn. “But the [dental industry] is very reluctant to change.”
Abandoned mines are the largest source of the mercury in the San Francisco Bay. According to a 1997 US EPA report, coal-fired power plants are the largest source of atmospheric mercury emissions nation-wide, releasing about 50 tons annually.
“The amount of mercury that gets methylated in the environment from the dental industry is probably much less than that from power generation,” said Davis Baltz of Health Care Without Harm, “They don’t allow it in thermometers, thermostats, but the fact is, the dental industry has been in denial that mercury is a problem.”
HR 4163, introduced in the California Assembly in April, 2002 would phase out mercury fillings by 2007.

S. F. Bus Standoff

Amos Kenigsberg — Sun, 16 Feb 2003 06:46:03 +0000

A standoff between the San Francisco Municipal Railway (Muni) and the city Board of Supervisors may result in Muni’s adoption of a diesel-electric hybrid technology that does not meet California’s new, more stringent emissions standards.
At issue are over 80 heavily-polluting diesel buses, some 20 years old, currently belching three tons of soot and 100 tons of smog-creating nitrogen oxides into the city’s air each year.
On December 16, Muni unveiled plans to replace these and other aging buses with a new generation powered by either liquefied natural gas (LNG), battery electric, or diesel-electric hybrid engines.
“The problem,” said Ina Shlez, a member of the SF Department of the Environment and Muni’s Independent Oversight Committee, “is that none of [those] technologies is currently available.” Two of the buses that Muni is pursuing — the LNG and the battery electric — are still in development, while the diesel-electric hybrid is unavailable because it fails to meet the state’s emissions standards on nitrogen oxides.
The only buses that meet the California Air Resource Board’s (CARB) emissions guidelines are powered by natural gas (NG), a fuel that Muni has resisted for years, even in the face of a November Board of Supervisors resolution supporting it. Muni spokesman Joe Speaks says NG buses did not perform well in recent tests.
Representatives of CARB say they will let Muni skirt the emission law and buy diesel-electric hybrids if concerned environmental groups consent. Diane Bailey, a scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council and a member of the Oversight Committee, says that if Muni shows “a good faith effort [to replace its old buses], we could consider looking the other way.”

Forest Plan on the Block

Amy Standen — Sun, 16 Feb 2003 06:46:00 +0000

The Bush Administration is attempting to remove key protections for forests and waterways in the 24 million acres covered by the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, the landmark plan governing logging in Oregon, Washington, and northwestern California.
The US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management are proposing to eliminate the Northwest Forest Plan’s requirements to “survey and manage” logging impacts on old-growth habitat. They are also drafting a statement that would weaken stream protection, opening the way for 250 million board feet of previously blocked timber sales.
The effects on the ground could be catastrophic. “We’re looking at watersheds that are on the brink of complete collapse,” said Susan Jane Brown with the Vancouver, WA–based Gifford Pinchot Task Force. “One additional timber sale, even if it is just a couple hundred acres, is likely to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”
The proposals, due in the next few months, will consider a variety of regulatory options, but likely not what activists prefer: “Drop the logging of old-growth in the Northwest Forest Plan,” said Anthony Ambrose of the Environmental Protection Information Center.
Rex Holloway, media relations officer for the Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest region, said that the agency has already received many comments pushing for such an option, last considered in 1994.
The survey-and-manage proposal is set for release in late January 2003. The draft statement on changes to stream protection is due in February 2003. Each will be open for comment for 90 days after release.

No Water Bags for the Gualala

Dan Rademacher — Sun, 16 Feb 2003 06:45:55 +0000

World Water SA president Ric Davidge has withdrawn his company’s application to haul water from the Gualala and Albion rivers in polyfiber bags for sale to San Diego. World Water SA is the first private company to have submitted a major water export scheme to state regulators, said Juliet Beck from the advocacy group Public Citizen.
“It’s a huge victory,” Beck said. “It’s a testament to the growing strength of the movement to protect water as a shared resource, not a source of private profit.”
On September 27, Governor Gray Davis signed AB 858, which requires anyone proposing to take water from a north coast river to fund a five-year study of the effects of that taking on endangered fish populations. In his December letter to regulators, Davidge cited the new law and the $2 million it would have cost to do studies of the two rivers as a reason for his withdrawal.
Davidge’s proposal required the approval of the State Water Resources Control Board and the California Coastal Commission. But in December, the Commission voted to protest the proposal to the state water regulators.
Critics of water commercialization charged that Davidge’s proposal would have set a dangerous precedent in international trade laws by stripping local autonomy over water supplies and watershed protections. “Under NAFTA,” said Beck, “once you’ve allowed bulk water export to begin, it’s very difficult to turn it off.”
In an interview with Terrain, Davidge said he’s through with California rivers. “I’m not going to put in any applications for water rights in California.” But, in January, the Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District told Terrain that Davidge has expressed interest in purchasing water from the municipality for a similar water-bag export deal. No details were available.