Terrain » Summer 2003

Border Patrol

Amy Standen — Fri, 16 May 2003 06:56:46 +0000

One of the challenges of working for a local magazine is deciding what to do when international events threaten to eclipse every other story. Neither Terrain’s mission nor its budget would have one of us tromping through the Middle East, reporting environmental stories overseas.
But you don’t have to get on an airplane to be a war correspondent: the US war on terrorism has very real environmental effects at home. In this issue, Joe Eaton reports on an astonishing move by the Department of Defense, buried amid the headlines about war in Iraq. Should the Readiness and Range Preservation Initiative pass, the military will be allowed to dump explosives or run tanks in desert tortoise habitat, with impunity. Collateral damage isn’t limited to the Middle East.
From the vantage point of California, it’s clear that collateral damage isn’t just a military fact, either. In Earlimart, three hours north of Los Angeles, pesticides doused on potato fields have been drifting onto nearby schools and homes, raising alarms about public health. Lisa Stapleton’s “Catching Drift” shows how pesticide laws ignore a basic fact of nature: that the lines we draw on land do not contain the air above them.
Borders — whether they’re between elementary schools and agricultural fields, or between the war in Iraq and the war on environmental protections here in California — seem to serve a psychological need more they do the truth. It’s much easier to live in wartime if you can convince yourself that war’s effects are confined within other borders, thousands of miles away. But if making borders is a human drive, so is crossing them.
This spring, trade representatives from around the world are meeting to talk about the GATS treaty — another event eclipsed by war talk. GATS is the latest scheme whipped up by the World Trade Organization, which wants goods and services to flow easily, without tariffs or regulations, between countries. This time, it’s US resources that may be at stake: after years of exporting globalism, Americans will find themselves on the other side of the equation. We tell that story in “When Water Goes Global.”
Back in California, we have a history of ignoring the boundaries set by nature; we’ve built our cities where we want them to be, not where nature’s given us the resources to put them. “Were it not for a century and a half of messianic effort towards [the manipulation of water],” wrote Marc Reisner in Cadillac Desert, “the West as we know it would not exist.” Vanessa Gregory’s “From Rice to Riches,” shows how these efforts persist — and, as a result, how the lay of California may change.
Change is afoot at Terrain, too. In May, we welcome our new editor, Linnea Due, a veteran reporter and editor who comes to Terrain from the East Bay Express. We’re eager to see what comes next. The terrain ahead is wide open.

Hot Lunch

Dan Rademacher — Fri, 16 May 2003 06:53:55 +0000

When Bill Myers and other residents of Point Arena, California, heard last winter that the US Department of Agriculture was planning to send irradiated meat to school lunchrooms, there was a bit of a panic. The school board quickly floated a preemptive ban on any irradiated food.
“We thought they were going to start sending irradiated food as early as January of this year,” said Myers, president of the school board in this small town in Mendocino County.
In February, the school board approved the ban by a vote of four to two, despite a 90-minute presentation by an advocate of food irradiation from UC Davis, brought in by the two board members who voted against the ban.
The Point Arena school board became one of only a handful of school districts in the country, including Berkeley, that have passed policies or resolutions against irradiated foods. Now, Public Citizen, a national advocacy group, is looking to replicate that action across the nation — in advance of reported USDA plans to make irradiated food available next year through its school lunch supply programs. “If school districts banned it, that would not only send a message [of consumer resistance] to the USDA,” said Public Citizen’s Tracy Lerman, “it would also keep the foods out of the lunchroom.”
The issue of food irradiation raises passions on both sides. Critics like Myers and Lerman see a potentially serious lack of safety testing and long-term data. Advocates like Christine Bruhn, the UC Davis professor who made the presentation to the Point Arena school board, champion irradiation as a technology that can save the thousands of lives lost every year to food poisoning from pathogens like E. coli and Listeria.
Irradiation does not involve any of the complex genetics or potential ecological impacts of genetically engineered crops, but it is just as much a product of industrial farming. And, compared to most of those technologies, it seems to offer both more immediate benefits — fewer children dead from E. coli poisoning — and more immediate dangers: Will meat processors throw caution to the wind on the assumption that they can zap away impurities? Does irradiation create toxic substances in foods, as some studies suggest? And will food irradiation, which also stretches shelf life exponentially, hasten the flood of cheap imported fruits and vegetables?
Studies on the use of radiation to treat food go back at least to the late 1970s, and experts on both sides parade an array of apparent proof that irradiation is either dangerous or wholesome. As far as both the USDA and the US Food and Drug Administration are concerned, food irradiation is both completely safe and potentially a great boon for food safety — but they say the same thing about big agribusiness’s millions of acres of genetically altered crops. Bruhn, who has a grant from the USDA both to study consumer attitudes on irradiation and to promote the technology, sees the issue one way: “My mind is made up firmly about this because I have heard from families who have lost family members because of ground beef contamination,” she said. “I don’t want that to happen to anyone.”
But to critics like Public Citizen and Dr. Samuel Epstein, chairman of the Cancer Prevention Coalition at the University of Illinois-Chicago, the issue is not so simple. While Bruhn insists that the scientific consensus is overwhelmingly in favor of food irradiation, studies both here and in Europe have suggested that it might reduce nutritional value and create “unique radiolytic compounds,” which be carcinogenic. In response to such concerns, the European Union in spring 2002 delayed new international standards allowing irradiation, pending more safety studies.
Targeting Beef
Meat is the current target of food irradiation (dried spices and herbs have been irradiated for years). Last year saw two of the largest meat recalls in history, after tainted meat got out of packing plants and onto supermarket shelves all over the country. The pathogen E. coli O157:H7, the most dangerous strain and the one most often found in beef, causes some 73,000 infections and 61 deaths annually in the US, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
According to the Denver Post, the massive Swift slaughterhouse in Greeley, Colorado, which under its previous owner ConAgra had the largest beef recall ever last year, is pushing irradiation as a solution: irradiate any meat suspected to contain E. coli, and it won’t make anyone sick.
That this is most likely true is small comfort to Paul Johnson, acting chairman of the National Joint Council of Food Inspection Locals, the union representing federal meat inspectors. The union has come out strongly against irradiated food.
Johnson explained that you find E. coli in meat that’s contaminated with manure. He spelled out his objection to irradiation plainly: “It doesn’t take the shit out of there, it just sanitizes it. And who wants to eat sanitized shit?”
Certainly not Samuel Epstein, of the University of Illinois. Epstein explains that, in his view, none of the many studies done on irradiation have sufficiently examined long-term nutritional effects, nor have they followed standard practices for discovering whether a substance causes cancer — extracting the suspected carcinogens, concentrating them, and feeding them to lab animals.
“You’re dealing with a complex of carcinogenicity problems, nutrition problems, and genetic damage, and industry has not published a single peer-reviewed study refuting these findings, period. Period. Period,” Epstein said. “What the industry wants is to maintain its horrid slaughter lines, its horrid feedlot conditions.”
Enforcing basic sanitation is becoming increasingly difficult for federal meat inspectors like Paul Johnson. Public Citizen obtained a memo the USDA sent out to inspectors last year warning them not to stop slaughter lines unless they can visually verify contamination: “You are responsible for the time the line is off. Remember, YOU are accountable for the very serious responsibility of stopping the company’s production for the benefit of food safety.”
Marketing Irradiation
While Epstein dismisses pro-irradiation claims as industry propaganda, UC Davis’s Christine Bruhn just as quickly brushes aside criticism as anti-science fear-mongering. She believes that if people are just given the right information, they’ll see things her way: “It’s to enhance safety, and that’s really why I’m involved at all. It can actually save lives.”
Dairy Queen has become the first restaurant chain to publicly market irradiated beef. Current labeling requirements require consumer notification only in supermarkets; restaurants are not required to notify customers if they sell irradiated foods. But in test markets around Minnesota, Dairy Queen chose to use brochures, posters, and buttons touting the safety of their burgers. A company spokesman told Terrain that burger sales have remained steady (especially among people who eat at Dairy Queen two to four times a month), and the company hopes to expand its marketing campaign nationwide.
The USDA’s school lunch program looks to be the next target. Last year’s Farm Bill stipulated that the USDA cannot exclude foods treated with any approved food safety technology, including irradiation, from its subsidized school lunch supply program. Cindy Schneider, in the USDA’s Sacramento office, would say only that the school lunch program was looking into the technology and had no set schedule for making it available. In any case, the USDA has said irradiated meat will be segregated, giving the school districts a choice. Several school districts in Minnesota were considering irradiated meat for their cafeterias this past spring.
But Bruhn’s audience in Point Arena remained solidly against irradiation.
To Tracy Lerman at Public Citizen, that was a triumph of truth over marketing. Lerman points out that Bruhn is actually a professor of consumer science. Bruhn’s main goal is to find a way to make irradiation acceptable to consumers — even if that means calling it “cold pasteurization” or “electronic pasteurization,” both of which are, strictly speaking, misnomers, since pasteurization is specifically sterilization with heat.
Irradiation and the Global Food System
Other dangers of food irradiation are, like those of genetic engineering, the long-term implications for our dysfunctional corporate food system. Not only can irradiation let slaughterhouses worsen already horrendous conditions, but it may also make the import of fresh fruits and vegetables even cheaper and easier than it is now. Irradiation can increase shelf-life of strawberries from three days to 14.
Brazil has positioned itself to become a major exporter of irradiated produce. In 2001, the US irradiation firm SureBeam struck a deal with a Brazilian company to build a network of 32 food irradiation facilities across the country. “Brazil is where the crosshairs are for the irradiation industry,” said Patty Lovera, from Public Citizen’s Washington, DC office. “Even a US agricultural official told us that irradiation is necessary to do the kind of trade in food that’s talked about in free-trade treaties.”
To Bruhn, more shelf life means more availability and lower prices for shoppers everywhere. Irradiation might even be the replacement of choice for the highly toxic pesticide methyl bromide, used to fumigate some exports. Methyl bromide, a significant greenhouse gas, is slated to be banned under the Montreal Protocol, unless the Bush administration gets its way [see p. 22].
Irradiation advocates even tout their technology as the only feasible replacement for methyl bromide, but Gay Timmons, a consultant for California Certified Organic Farmers, dismisses that idea, given the vibrant and growing export trade in organics. “[Organics] have very good control systems,” she said. Foods can be heated, frozen, or put in a chamber filled with nitrogen — killing all oxygen-breathing pests. “It’s not brain surgery. There are numerous options.”
But if irradiation is not necessary for pest control or for food safety, then the only advantages left are freakishly long shelf-life and the ability to sanitize manure-tainted hamburgers right in the box. And those are advantages only for the big growers and meat packers — for industrial agriculture itself.
With foods already traveling an average of 1,500 miles from farm to table, and with US net farm income at its lowest point since the 1980s farm crisis, the specter of the globalization of lettuce, carrots, and raspberries is cold comfort at best.

Salad Days

Susan Derby — Fri, 16 May 2003 06:50:04 +0000

The 580 freeway sideswipes West Oakland just a few blocks away, but you might not notice its hum once amid the explosion of greenery at 3032 Linden Street, where the Paul and Inez Jones Neighborhood Garden sits, tucked behind two Victorian houses. A jet flies over, or a stereo booms across the road, but once the noise diminishes you notice birds’ chatter in the neighboring treetops. A breeze drifts through, carrying the light fragrance of the white alyssum flowers growing next to the Southern curled mustard. In one end of the garden, a patch of red-veined chard soaks up the strong sun.
Any afternoon at the garden, the scarecrow hanging from the fence might see a group of children picking spearmint for hot tea or learning about the nutritional value of the cabbage they’ve just harvested. Kindergarten students up through eighth graders walk to the site from nearby schools to work in the dirt, an unusual curriculum in a neighborhood more accustomed to aisles of corner store junk food than rows of vibrant greens.
West Oakland, the industrial gateway to the East Bay, is boxed in by freeways, rattled by the continual rumble of thousands of trucks blazing through, and infused with the smells of emissions from local industry, like Red Star Yeast [see “Red Star Falls,” p. 14 ] and ED Coat, a metal finishing company. Its roughly 30,000 residents share one grocery store, the government-subsidized Gateway Grocery on 7th Avenue. The 30-odd liquor stores and corner shops in the neighborhood offer a plethora of alcohol and snacks, but little in the way of fresh foods.
According to People’s Grocery, one of a handful of non-profit organizations aiming to bring fresh produce to West Oakland, half of the money spent on food by local residents is spent outside of West Oakland. This means that not only are people unable to find nutritious food locally, but the community reaps no economic nourishment from food profits.
But there’s plenty of room for gardens. About 500 parcels of land in West Oakland are vacant or unused properties, representing about 7% of the total acreage of the neighborhood. “That’s a significant amount of the local land that has been marginalized from community use and serves no economic or social benefit,” says People’s Grocery co-founder Brahm Ahmadi. “We believe that it’s possible not only to transform those lands, but to create viable food-producing farms in urban communities, and that’s really a key foundation for revitalizing a local economy and increasing open green spaces in urban neighborhoods.”
The Jones Neighborhood Garden is just one of the community gardening projects sponsored by Oakland Butterfly and Urban Gardens (OBUGs), a non-profit neighborhood gardening organization. OBUGs gardens are managed by hired neighborhood residents and feature educational programs for children both at the Linden Street garden and at nearby Lafayette School.
OBUGs founders Margaret Majua and Dorothy Noyon, friends of 30 years, started the Jones garden in the fall of 2000 with money from the Northern California Land Trust. Noyon and Majua transformed an abandoned lot and two ramshackle Victorian buildings into four low-income units, which were purchased by four families who moved in last September. In the back of the lot, OBUGs created a garden with food-producing beds and space for programs and events.
All the surrounding homes have views of the garden; all the neighbors have access to it. Anybody who is interested is encouraged to water, weed, and harvest. “The primary aim is that the food gets to the community,” says program coordinator Susanna de Angelo.
OBUGs has a 99-year lease on the garden, says Majua. “I hope it’s still feeding the people in the neighborhood until then,” she says.
By providing education for children and work for teenagers and adults, the Linden Street garden has created a social structure for the area. “Neighbors talk to each other more,” says Dana Harvey of the West Oakland Food Security Council. “At least on a micro-scale, it’s really helped to build a sense of community.”
“It has brought a lot of services, keeps kids off the streets, and keeps elders busy,” says Ted Dixon, a gardener and self-described jack-of-all-trades who has worked at the garden since its inception.
Majua would like to see more intercultural activities at the garden. “Right now it is used primarily by African American kids and families. We want to integrate some of the Hispanic families in the neighborhood, which is not going to be that easy,” she says. “There’s a lot of distrust and lack of understanding between blacks and browns. You can’t change that overnight.” Recently OBUGs held a neighborhood potluck where both African American and Hispanic families congregated over food. “We just think that kids and food are the way to change the world,” says Majua.
City Slicker Farm is just a mile away from the OBUGs’ Linden Street garden; you’d have a hard time missing it in this residential neighborhood dotted with old cars, abandoned lots, and faded storefonts. Inside a chain-link fence, a dome-shaped gun turret, salvaged from a ship and donated by a neighbor, is painted with a mural and serves as a garden shed. The surrounding 4,000-square-foot jungle has it all: “We’ve got tons of snap peas, pod peas, chard, kale, collards, beets, lettuce, and three beehives which a neighbor tends. The bees basically stay in the gardens — it’s the only green space around — and they pollinate all the flowers,” says Malaika Edwards, a co-founder of People’s Grocery. Edwards is also a site manager for Farm Fresh Choice, an Ecology Center project that promotes and distributes fresh produce in south and west Berkeley, and she’s well versed in the art and science of urban greenery. Stacks of old tires clustered near the City Slickers entrance contain potato plants. “As potatoes grow, they need to be mounded,” explains Edwards, “so we keep putting tires on and filling them with dirt. Some of our potato plants are six feet high.”
Bernard Scoggins, who has lived in West Oakland for 40 years, describes City Slicker Farm as “a place of serenity.” It has beautified the corner, he says. “It was nothing but weeds before.”
Before it could transform weeds into produce, City Slickers had to deal with a common urban blight: lead-tainted soil.
Although lead-based paint was banned in 1978, it’s still a problem for urban gardeners. Lead makes its way into children’s bloodstreams through paint particles in old houses or lead-contaminated soil that kids ingest. Once there, it can have tragic effects: lead has been linked to mental impairment, cancer, and damaged nervous and reproductive systems.
“Lead is a big problem in abandoned lots,” says Edwards. “If the lot is abandoned, it’s probably because the house burned down, so the lead paint is concentrated in the soil.” Our bodies can mistake lead for calcium, which is why it is a significant risk for those — particularly small children who are developing rapidly — who lack nutritionally sound diets.
City Slicker Farm is developing methods to address the issue locally. The group has experimented — with limited success — with growing mushrooms and other plants known to take up soil contaminants. Another strategy involves food. “If you get leafy greens out into the neighborhood and the children eat them, their bodies absorb calcium as calcium, instead of lead,” says Willow Rosenthal, City Slickers’ founder.
For almost two years, the garden has hosted workshops for neighborhood residents on topics such as permaculture, composting, and soil remediation. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, the farm sets up a produce stand onsite selling pesticide-free foods — black-eyed peas, collard greens, and other seasonal vegetables that the farmers feel are “culturally appropriate” to the neighborhood.
“We try to grow produce that people in the neighborhood want,” says Edwards. “So we probably grow a lot more collard greens, for example, than we would in a different neighborhood. We also grow a lot of peas and raspberries, munchy things that kids like.”
People’s Grocery’s Brahm Ahmadi agrees. “On a community-relations level, we feel it’s more respectful to prioritize what residents do actually like as opposed to growing something that we might like but they might not,” says Ahmadi. “It’s not just a matter of making food accessible, it’s creating the desire for it.”
On a recent Friday at City Slicker Farm, Malaika Edwards asked a group of students from Berkeley High, “What does ‘food security’ mean?” One senior volunteered an answer: “When everyone is fed now, and they know that they’ll be fed in the future.”
That’s what these urban gardeners are aiming for. “Linked together, these community-based food systems can begin to make a real difference in the way food is produced and distributed in this country,” says Andy Fisher, executive director of the non-profit Community Food Security Coalition, based in Venice, California.
People who grow some of their own food become more self-reliant and more connected to their food source as well as to the natural world, says Fisher. “Community gardens help to build social capital. The average food item travels 1,300 miles from field to table, so growing your own — or buying directly from a local farmer — has environmental benefits.” As to why a community resident might want to think twice about relying on a grocery chain instead, he asks, “Where do you want your dollars to go? To support a large corporation, or to a farmer you know?”
If urban gardens are a place to work for community self- sufficiency on the ground, farmer’s markets are where neighbors can come together to exercise their rights to healthful, affordable foods.
Since 1999, David Roach, founder of the non-profit Familyhood Connection, has been getting fresh foods into West Oakland with his project, Mo’ Better Food. Roach, formerly a teacher at McClymonds High School, has organized with a group of African American farmers in Fresno County, a major agricultural region, to bring their produce to farmers’ markets in primarily African American neighborhoods.
Most of the farmers “grow crops that traditionally have been eaten and prepared by African American people, for example okra and collard greens,” he says. “If they don’t have a connection to the community that normally eats those foods, it is hard for those farmers to make a living.”
According to Roach, African American-owned farmland has been decreasing at astounding rates throughout the last century: African American farmers owned about 15 million acres in America in the early 1900s; today, they own only two million acres. There are about 280 African American farmers left in California, many of them in Fresno County. “We’re trying to build resources for research and markets to assist them and keep them viable. We want to help them get food to the inner city,” Roach says.
Mo’ Better Food, West Oakland Food Security Council, and a host of organizations in Oakland and Berkeley, including the Ecology Center, recently got West Oakland its first weekly farmers’ market, which at least initially will be stocked with produce from African American-owned farms. The farmers’ market runs every Saturday at Mandela Transit Center next to the West Oakland BART station.
Often projects like these take on a life of their own in the hands of the community. “Mo’ Better Food,” says David Roach, “doesn’t even belong to me anymore, which is a beautiful thing. We planted a seed with the farmers’ market, and people came out and supported it. We have youth creating our flyers, putting out posters on the streets, and helping the farmers sell their produce. The market really became a community food project.”

The War at Home: Tanks vs. Tortoises

Joe Eaton — Fri, 16 May 2003 06:48:54 +0000

On the eve of war with Iraq, the Pentagon launched a less-publicized offensive in Washington. The Readiness and Range Preservation Initiative (RRPI) targets five basic environmental laws that have allegedly hindered military training. The Department of Defense (DOD) has asked Congress for exemptions from the Endangered Species, Clean Air, Superfund, Marine Mammal Protection, and Resource Conservation and Recovery acts (RCRA). The blanket exemptions are scheduled for review in Congress in May. A waiver of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act was approved last year.
“The Bush administration is using the drumbeats of war to try to gut 30 years of public interest legislation,” says Daniel Patterson of the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD).
Patterson’s main concern is the Endangered Species Act (ESA). According to a 1996 report by DOD and The Nature Conservancy, more than 220 federally listed plant and animal species live on or migrate through military lands; that doesn’t include at-risk species that haven’t yet been listed. The DOD also has a disproportionate share of federal holdings in sensitive ecoregions, including California coastal chaparral. Some of the last refuges of such rare creatures as the red-cockaded woodpecker and the red wolf are on active military bases.
The waiver would exempt the military from designating critical habitat for endangered species on land it owns or controls. Patterson points out the troubling elasticity of that definition, which could include closed bases and overflight corridors. In California, the greatest impact would fall on south coast and desert military lands. Fort Irwin, a tank warfare training center 120 miles east of Bakersfield, is already pretty much trashed, Patterson says. But the Army wants to expand the base into the Superior Valley, the only known locale for the Lane Mountain milkvetch, an endangered plant, and home to one of the healthiest remaining populations of desert tortoises. Beyond easing that expansion, Patterson sees a danger that existing protection for the tortoise and other species could be removed.
In southern California, Edwards Air Force Base is home to the rare plant desert cymopterus, a candidate for ESA listing. The Marines’ Camp Pendleton, 45 miles northwest of San Diego, has 15 endangered or threatened species, including birds like the least Bell’s vireo, southwestern willow flycatcher, and California gnatcatcher, and one of the region’s last riparian communities; less than 5% of the base has any habitat protection. The Marines have already chafed under environmental restrictions. “They’ve claimed ESA has prevented troops from digging foxholes,” says Patterson.
And that’s just ESA. The law governing marine mammals would be undermined by redefining “harassment,” expanding the allowable “take” of sea mammals, and allowing the Pentagon to bypass review for such activities as active sonar, which has been implicated in mass whale strandings.
The DOD also wants to exclude unexploded munitions from the RCRA’s definition of “solid waste.” According to the Center for Public Environmental Oversight, a Washington, DC public interest group, this could affect 15 million acres where bombs and shells are leaching toxins like the explosive RDX (which can cause seizures) into soil and groundwater — a monumental problem at closed facilities such as Fort Ord, as well as at active bases. The exemptions would also excuse the military from cleaning up contamination from perchlorate, a rocket fuel constituent. In the Wall Street Journal, Peter Waldman reports that the RRPI “would grant the military greater training flexibility without having to worry about private or state suits over pollution,” and “shield the Pentagon from liability… even on bases that haven’t been used for years.”
Environmental organizations, members of Congress, and even some administration figures question the need for such sweeping changes. Except for the Marine Mammal Protection Act, all the affected laws already allow exceptions in the interest of national security. But the exception process has never been invoked. This is about to change: In a March 7th memo, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz ordered the Army, Navy, and Air Force secretaries to request national security exemptions from ten environmental laws, including the Clean Air, Safe Drinking Water, and Noise Control acts. Wolfowitz claimed the ability to conduct military training and testing was threatened by “environmental regulation and litigation.”
But a General Accounting Office study last year found that compliance with environmental laws had not impaired military readiness. Environmental Protection Agency head Christie Whitman testified to a Senate committee: “I don’t believe there is any training mission in the United States that is being held up by environmental regulations.” The National Park Service has also voiced concerns about impacts on marine mammals, migratory birds, and water quality.
The effects of these exemptions could be disastrous, says the NRDC’s Michael Jasny. “The Defense Department is the country’s largest polluter; it controls over 25 million acres of land in the United States. The laws that they want to change are the laws that keep our air and water clean, that protect us from cancer, that protect our most endangered species.”
Jasny also worries about the precedent these exemptions might set for industries who claim their work to be vital to national security interests. “The issue of oil development is one that proponents of drilling have already tried to haul in under the banner of patriotism and war. The [Department of Defense exemptions] only pave the way for broader incursions.”

Oil consumption by the numbers

Josh Wein — Fri, 16 May 2003 06:46:56 +0000

• Average US daily petroleum consumption for 2002: 19.636 million barrels (1 barrel = 42 US gallons)
• Average 2002 daily petroleum consumption for France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and 14 other European countries, combined: 15.083 million barrels
• Proven world crude oil reserves as of December, 2001: 1.074 trillion barrels
• Percentage of proven crude oil reserves located in OPEC member countries: 78
• Number of years OPEC estimates its oil reserves to last at the current rate of consumption: 80
• Number of discovered oil fields in Iraq: 73
• Number of producing oil fields in Iraq: 24
• Rank of Iraq behind Saudi Arabia among world’s largest oil proven reserves: 2
• Percentage of US oil consumption that is motor gasoline: 45
• Maximum one-time deduction for businesses buying “light trucks” (a category including Hummer 2, the Cadillac Escalade, and Mercedes M Class SUV): $24,000
• Maximum one-time deduction for individuals or businesses buying the 2003 Honda Civic Hybrid: $2,000
• Combined miles per gallon for the 2003 Cadillac Escalade: 15
• Combined miles per gallon for the 2003 Honda Civic Hybrid: 51

Water Board Fails Forests

Josh Wein — Fri, 16 May 2003 06:46:54 +0000

In April, the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC) requested a stay to prevent logging operations that may damage watersheds in Freshwater Creek and other northern California forests.
The request comes during a protracted legal battle between forest activists and regulators who, says EPIC, are failing to protect forest watersheds, as the Clean Water Act requires.
Currently, the Water Quality Control Board — the California agency charged with enforcing the Clean Water Act — does not require logging companies to file permits with the Board before proceeding with timber harvest plans. That pass is the result of a “waiver” that effectively exempts most logging operations from the Clean Water Act. Since the waiver was issued in 1987, says EPIC’s Cynthia Elkins, “more than 85% of our watersheds have been listed as impaired and all of our salmon listed as threatened. All of these problems happened under this waiver.”
“The Water Board,” continues Elkins, “cedes the authority [to regulate logging] to the California Department of Forestry, which has miserably failed to protect water quality.”
Senate Bill 390 was supposed to change all that. The bill, passed in October 1999, set a December 31, 2002 “sunset” date for the waivers. It gave California’s regional water boards an opportunity to re-establish authority to protect watersheds from pollution — whether from logging, as in the north coast, or agriculture in the central valley.
EPIC and EarthJustice urged the boards to adopt permit systems to regulate water quality. Up on the north coast, says Mike Lozeau of EarthJustice (which is representing EPIC), this would mean much-needed regulation of loggers. “The California Department of Forestry hasn’t listened to the regional board. So rather than having to tag along and be ignored, the Water Board should have permits in place that require loggers to meet standards, and establish effluent standards that are enforceable.”
When the sunset date arrived, some boards, like the Central Coast Regional Board, opted for tighter control. But up on the north coast, where massive logging operations have left many watersheds on the verge of collapse, Board officials extended the waiver, leaving forestry officials in charge of water quality for one more year.
“The Water Quality Control Board clearly has the authority to prohibit activity that would further degrade our waterways,” says Alan Cook of the Freshwater Working Group, “but they won’t do it.”
EPIC and Humboldt Watershed Council have filed a lawsuit against the North Coast Board for failing to protect the region’s watersheds from destructive logging practices. EPIC is also pursuing legal action against the Central Valley Board, which adopted a similarly lax policy.
The motion for a stay would protect watersheds on the north coast as EPIC’S petition makes its way to court. EPIC has requested a court date of May 5th to have the motion heard.
“Exempting logging operations, an activity that we know is causing tremendous damage, from the regulations of the Clean Water Act just doesn’t make sense,” said Elkins.

Red Star Falls

Mary Vance — Fri, 16 May 2003 06:45:45 +0000

Following pressure from community and environmental activists, West Oakland’s LeSaffre Yeast (formerly Red Star Yeast) closed its doors in April after nearly a century in operation.
The company blamed “market economics” and “challenging California environmental conditions” for its closing, but the plant and its noxious emissions had been the target of intense community protest for 12 years, according to the Coalition for West Oakland Revitalization (CWOR), a community group.
Focus is now turning toward the Red Star property. “One of our immediate concerns will be to make sure there’s a comprehensive and safe clean-up of any contamination at the [LeSaffre] plant,” said Bradley Angel of Greenaction, an activist group. Negotiations are underway to create a transit village on and adjacent to the site.
Angel added that community coalitions and elected officials will be working with LeSaffre to provide job retraining and other compensation for laid-off workers.
Yeast once manufactured at the Oakland plant will now be made at LeSaffre’s other US locations, including its headquarters in Milwaukee. The Milwaukee LeSaffre factory was responsible for 63% of the county’s total release of carcinogens in 2000. Milwaukee ranks within the five worst Wisconsin counties for carcinogens, according to a report by a local nonprofit advocacy group.
Local activists said that the Oakland factory’s closing represents a great victory for the coalition of community groups that fought to close the plant. “It’s our issue; it’s our community,” said CWOR chair Monsa Nitoto. “We don’t have any money, but we did it by getting the community involved.”

Showdown at Freshwater Creek

Tracy Perkins — Fri, 16 May 2003 06:45:34 +0000

Tensions have run high in the 15,000-acre Freshwater Creek watershed east of Eureka since Pacific Lumber was granted its request for a temporary restraining order against forest activists on March 10th. Representatives from Pacific Lumber nailed copies of the order to 18 trees in the area and used a bullhorn to order tree-sitters to leave the premises within 24 hours. None complied.
On March 17th, “Remedy” (profiled in Terrain, Winter 2002) became one of six treesitters forcibly removed from platforms as high as 200 feet above ground by climbers hired by Pacific Lumber. Remedy was three days short of her one-year anniversary in the tree-sit. After another treesitter took Remedy’s place, the tree’s top and limbs were cut off to deter other activists. But treesitters, like the one at left, continue their occupations. “There are even more people in trees now than there were when the evictions started,” said forest activist Karen Pickett.

Precaution in Berkeley

Mary Vance — Fri, 16 May 2003 06:45:20 +0000

After “fierce opposition” from Berkeley City Council members, environmental and public health advocates have postponed a proposal for a city-wide precautionary principle ordinance.
The proposal, scheduled for March 18th, was shelved after councilman Gordon Wozniak and others charged that the principle was too vague. “How would you enforce it?” asks Wozniak, “there is harm associated with essentially every action.”
But councilman Kriss Worthington, who introduced the resolution on behalf of the Bay Area Working Group for the Precautionary Principle, says: “We’re not saying you shouldn’t cross the street because you might get run over. The precautionary principle is about making informed decisions and being cautious when hazards are seemingly present.”
Where science has only suggested links between diseases like cancer and environmental factors, the principle “enables you to say that the evidence is here,” says Kendra Klein at San Francisco-based Breast Cancer Action, “and we need to act now, rather than wait to prove a link while the body count rises.”
Worthington calls the retreat a “tactical move” to allow activists time to educate the city council and other Berkeley residents about the precautionary principle.
Meanwhile, San Francisco’s precautionary principle policy, introduced on March 18, has been sent to the Board of Supervisors for review.

New Rules on Runoff

Amy Standen — Fri, 16 May 2003 06:43:53 +0000

In February, the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board adopted new measures for San Mateo, Alameda, and Contra Costa counties to control stormwater runoff. Such runoff causes significant erosion and has become a major source of pollutants like mercury, copper, petrochemicals, and other poisons that are either trapped in the soil from past contamination or generated from such things as spilled motor oil, lawn and garden pesticides like diazinon, or copper dust from brake pads.
“Stormwater is the biggest problem mainly because we spent the last 40 years controlling point sources [like factories and refineries],” said Water Board spokesman Wil Bruhns. “It’s the second largest source of mercury in the Bay. In every urban creek we’ve looked at, we’ve found diazinon and other things at toxic levels.”
Stormwater runoff includes all the water that runs off lawns, streets, and parking lots into curbside drains. As a source of mercury, it far outstrips all current industrial emissions. Runoff also erodes creeks, turning them into bare gullies with increasingly erratic flows.
Under the new regulations, starting in 2005, new developments with one acre or more of impermeable surface (roof or pavement) must include measures to reduce runoff. The threshold will drop to 10,000 square feet of roof or pavement in 2006. According to Bruhns, runoff mitigation measures could be as simple as a grassy swale to absorb rain running off a parking lot, or as complex as an underground drainage and filtration system.
Leo O’Brien, executive director of the watchdog group Waterkeepers Northern California called the new provisions “a modest step forward.” But he said much more must be done, including requiring the retrofit of existing development — even if those retrofits involve little more than many grassy swales. “If we developed and designed and built our cities appropriately, and retrofitted our urban landscape,” O’Brien said, “we could reduce the effects of things like dioxin, copper, and mercury.”