plastic
The effects of the waste generated by our reliance on plastics for many of the goods we consume everyday are no secret. There is an island of garbage the size of a small continent floating around in the Pacific Ocean, and we see the litter everywhere we look. The stuff will damn near last forever, and the toll it’s taking on our environment, especially wildlife, is staggering.
Following the California Senate’s failure to pass a ban on plastic grocery bags, environmental photographer Peter Bennett posted a powerful piece over at his fine blog, Citizen of the Planet, on the mushrooming problem of plastic waste. The photo of the contents of the Albatross carcass speaks volumes. Go check out Peter’s work for yourself.
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great outdoors initiative
Here’s an item from today’s inbox. It’s from the Sierra Club:
Protect Our Public Lands
On April 16th, the Obama Administration launched the America’s Great Outdoors initiative to develop a conservation agenda for the 21st century. After hearing from thousands of conservationists across the country, the Administration has begun drafting their new rules for land management. These new rules will shape our conservation efforts for years to come.
This is our best opportunity to make conservation a national priority. You can influence their report by signing on to our suggestions below.
You can do that right here.
tongass
Most of us I’m sure are familiar with the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. At 16.8 million acres it’s the largest National Forest in the US. It’s made up of glaciers, alpine tundra, temperate rainforest, and rugged coastline. It’s the only ecosystem of it’s kind on the planet, and is considered by many as the crown jewel of our National Forest system. It also faces constant threats from commercial interests. Here are two brief items about the Tongass.
David Leland Hyde has an excellent post at his Landscape Photography Blogger featuring the work of photographer Amy Gulick, recipient of the NANPA 2008 Philip Hyde Grant, done in the Tongass and published in a recent book, Salmon In The Trees: Life In Alaska’s Tongass Rain Forest. Interesting post, and some fine photography. Take a few moments to check it out.
On another note, Alaska’s senators Lisa Murkowski and Mark Begich have a bill in the Senate, S881, that would transfer roughly 70,000 acres of the Tongass to the Sealaska Native Corporation. It’s an attempt to privatize a sizeable chunk of prime forest in the Tongass. You can take action here to let your senators know you don’t support the idea of privatizing parts of the Tongass National Forest.
bad call
- Image via Wikipedia
This showed up in my inbox this morning:
- On April 1, Lisa Jackson of the EPA announced strong new guidelines for mountaintop removal mining, and valley fills in particular, saying few if any valley fills would meet the standards. Then at the end of June EPA greenlighted a permit for a huge new MTR mine, the Pine Creek Mine in Logan County, West Virginia. Rainforest Action Network is holding a protest at EPA headquarters today. You can add your voice to the protest here.
You can check in throughout the day and follow the action here.
Do what you can and will.
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- EPA Inexplicably Greenlights WV Mountaintop Removal Permit (switchboard.nrdc.org)
senseless
Sometimes you just can’t help but wonder.
Item: Massey Energy has committed hundreds of environmental and safety violations in their mining operations, some of which contributed to the deaths of 29 miners in their Upper Big Branch mine explosion. The US Attorney General’s office is still looking into possible criminal activity in that incident. They’ll no doubt keep looking until they don’t find anything wrong.
Item: BP knowingly and intentionally sidestepped regulations to get their Deepwater Horizon oil rig up and running as soon as possible. We all know what happened there. The Justice Department is thinking about maybe looking into possible criminal activity there too. How long will they think about it? Until it’s forgotten maybe?
Then there’s the case of activist Ted Glick. He was arrested for unfurling a ‘Green Jobs Now’ banner in the hall of the Hart Senate Building last fall. Is the Attorney General’s office thinking about maybe charging him with criminal activity too? No, they’re not thinking about it — they’ve done it. Glick is being sentenced today and could get three years in federal prison. For rolling out a banner urging Congress to get busy with clean energy and green jobs legislation.
Let’s see… you run a huge mining operation that ignores regulations and poisons and flattens the surrounding area and kills people, and no one can quite determine if it’s a crime or not. The same if you run a deep sea drilling operation that subverts regulations and suffers the worst blowout in history. But just go and drop a banner in the halls of Congress and you could end up in federal prison. Does that even begin to make sense?
You can find out more about the Ted Glick case right here.
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troubling…
(cross posted at photomontana.net)
It seems to me that I’ve been running into more and more stories like this one lately.
Freelance photographer Lance Rosenfield was detained by police and BP security guards yesterday after taking photos near a BP refinery outside of Texas City, Texas. Police reviewed his photos and took down his personal information and then gave it to the BP security guards, after threatening to take him in if he didn’t comply. There was nothing to hold him on, and they gave the photos back and sent Rosenfield on his way.
It sounds to me like plain old intimidation tactics. Rosenfield is a seasoned freelancer and handled it well, but what if it had been a more timid soul? I’m not a photojournalist, but I find these types of incidents troubling. Are the authorities and the big corporations getting more aggressive with their scare tactics designed to keep citizens and journalists from photographing and reporting on things they don’t want the public to see? Will cases like this discourage others from covering stories that the public has every right, and need, to know? Troubling…
Have a safe and enjoyable Fourth.
pj
bioregionalism… a different way to live
- Image via Wikipedia
(Here’s a post from about a year ago from my archives. I edited it a bit and will let it stand here for the time being while I adjust to some sudden changes.)
It has been said that to maintain the modern life humans live on this earth requires the resources of nearly two planets. Unfortunately we only have one. The system we live in and labor under is broken, and all of our attempts to repair it and restore it to it’s former glory are likely futile.
We need a new approach, a new way to see our place in this world. Bioregionalism is one such approach. It’s the polar opposite of our one size fits all corporate global marketplace mentality. But what exactly is bioregionalism? It isn’t exactly any one thing. It encompasses any number of ways to live more locally, more in touch with our earth and hence more sustainably and in tune with our surroundings. Here’s one look at it from the Bioregional Congress:
What is Bioregionalism?
Only around 30 years old, Bioregionalism – and the Bioregional movement – represent a comprehensive way of defining and understanding the places where we live, and of living there sustainably and respectfully through ecological design. The bioregional movement has helped spawn and support other movements and trends, such as the Green Party, Permaculture, Ecovillages, Ecological Restoration, Eco-Poetics and much more. At the same time, bioregionalism’s essence has been reality and common sense for native people living close to the land for thousands of years; even beyond human experience, bioregionalism is rooted in the ecological principles of all life. Bioregionalists are lifelong students of how to live in balance with our eco-communities. We recognize that we are part of the web of the life, and that all justice, freedom and peace must be grounded in this recognition.
Bioregionalism re-connects us into the living biosphere through the Places where we live. Bioregionalism acknowledges that we not only live in cities, towns, villages and countrysides; we also live in watersheds, ecosystems, and ecoregions. The awareness of those connections to the planet is vital to our own health and the health of the planet. By discovering our connections to the planet, we find a context for our lives to grow in. This context allows us to find ways to live sustainably in our settlements while at the same time provides us ways to nurture and restore the more-than-human community that surrounds us and which we are dependent on in so many ways.
Let’s call this an open thread — if you have any thoughts, ideas, links, perspectives, or opinions on bioregionalism feel free to chime in and start something. Here are a couple of links for starters:
Planet Drum
Bioregional Congress
Cascadia Wildlands
We need real change, not the patch and paint policies we’re getting, so have at it…
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