My friend Naomi Rachel has continued to tell me the environmental destruction we humans have created will destroy our planet long before our politics accomplish it. Naomi was a leading environmental activist in Canada before she moved to Colorado and became a professor at the University of Colorado.
I grew up in a mining family which meant we lived a life of constant moves to follow the work here in the Rocky Mountains. Much of my early childhood was spent in mountain towns like Breckinridge, Dillon, Leadville and a place that no longer exists called Kokomo, Colorado. This was before ski resorts dotted the Colorado mountains every hundred miles or so.
Kokomo was a company town for Climax Molybdenum. Climax mined molybdenum from a huge mountain peak at the top of Fremont Pass. Over the years that peak became a vast hollowed out mountainside and tailings from the mining stretched down a beautiful mountain valley for ten miles. The tailings eventually forced the closing of the small company town of my childhood to allow more room in the valley for the waste.
The ashes of both my parents were spread in the serene valley that was once Kokomo.The place where we spread their ashes is now covered with the waste product of the molybdenum mine. The once majestic peak on Fremont Pass has become an ugly eyesore of a mountain half collapsed in on itself.
The pristine forests my sister and I once spent entire days roaming have been taken over by ski resorts and condos. Pine beetles and various other virulent diseases of pines, Douglas fir, aspen and even ancient bristlecone occur with much more frequency and scar the beauty of a once glorious region of America.
In Rocky Mountain National Park glaciers that have been around for centuries are receding and expected to melt entirely in the near future. The clear mountain streams and remote lakes have become polluted from the nearby cities of Boulder and Denver spewing carbon wastes from automobiles and coal burning power plants. Rocky Mountain National Park is a crown jewel of mountain majesty that faces an ugly change in the eco-system. The beauty and serenity will be lost for the next generations of our families.
Colorado has over 300 days of sunshine annually. When the skies are blue and the winds lightly blow, I can think of no better place on Earth. Unfortunately, here in Denver an ugly brown cloud of pollution is about as common as the sunshine. Driving into Denver from any direction you can see the city lights from many miles away at night. And for the last thirty years you can see that ugly brown cloud of pollution during the day.
Living in Denver for people with respiratory problems used to be the ideal location. We had TB sanitariums that were known throughout the world. National Jewish Hospital is the leading research hospital for respiratory illnesses like asthma and COPD.
Today, living in Denver is a risky proposition for people with asthma and COPD. The pollution triggers the respiratory systems of the young and old struggling to breath. Ozone days have increased and lowered standards for polluting cars have caused even more “red” days of pollution.
It’s now more difficult to find the remote place to hike and be alone in Colorado. ATV trails scar the tundra and mountainsides. Four wheel drive roads are just as bad. Even we hikers have caused irreparable erosion with our lack of knowledge about the land and our ecosystems. We go off trails and create new erosion paths on tundra land, leave plastic and other trash along the way and demonstrate lack of respect for what we’ve been blessed with by carving initials and other stupid things into the trunks of trees.
I’ve been an activist in the peace and justice movement for over thirty years. I’ve gone to rallies and marches more than I care to remember. I’ve railed against the wars of our time and there are constantly injustices that need to be opposed and confronted. My friend, Naomi, has consistently pointed out the peace and justice community seldom mentions the deteriorating state of our environment. She’s right.
Part of a true peace and justice movement has to recognize the very ground we walk on is in jeopardy. If we fail to treasure our sunshine days and the places of nature to escape the madness of urban life, we fail in our quest for peace and justice. If we fail to understand we are responsible for trashing our cities, our forests and our open spaces we’ve failed as activists. Thinking “green” is the new buzz word but living in harmony with nature is a necessity.
So, as the criminal Bush regime comes to an end, there is great need to be on guard against the callous and calculated attempts to further weaken and destroy our environment. The further destruction has already started with Bush by use of “midnight regulations” which most outgoing Presidents use.
Bush’s regulations are another overt present to “Big Oil” and big business. The regulations are not at all regulations but instead deregulation of primary environmental protections. Clean water, clean air, logging, mining and drilling will all be affected for the worse while allowing corporate interests to have free rein in destroying wilderness areas, the air we breathe and the water we drink.
As we celebrate and contemplate the incoming Obama Administration most are distracted from what is happening in the Bush Administration. Much can be done in the final days of the tyranny of Bush and Cheney. The evil days of the neo-cons didn’t end on November 4, 2008 when Barack Obama was declared the winner in the Presidential election.
One of the biggest victims of the tyranny will be our environment. The giveaways to big business aren’t just happening in Wall Street or Main Street. The thefts of the corporate world are also going on in the rivers, the mountains and valleys so many of us cherish.
I’m including an article from the Guardian from recent days that reviews the Bush deregulations:
President for 60 more days, Bush tearing apart protection for America's wilderness
• Oil shale mining in Rocky Mountains gets go-ahead
• 'Midnight regulations' to dismantle safeguards
• Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday November 20 2008 00.01 GMT
• The Guardian, Thursday November 20 2008
• Article history
'They are taking down pollution controls' (link to audio)
George Bush is working at a breakneck pace to dismantle at least 10 major environmental safeguards protecting America's wildlife, national parks and rivers before he leaves office in January.
With barely 60 days to go until Bush hands over to Barack Obama, his White House is working methodically to weaken or reverse an array of regulations that protect America's wilderness from logging or mining operations, and compel factory farms to clean up dangerous waste.
In the latest such move this week, Bush opened up some 800,000 hectares (2m acres) of land in Rocky Mountain states for the development of oil shale, one of the dirtiest fuels on the planet. The law goes into effect on January 17, three days before Obama takes office.
The timing is crucial. Most regulations take effect 60 days after publication, and Bush wants the new rules in place before he leaves the White House on January 20. That will make it more difficult for Obama to undo them.
"There are probably going to be scores of rules that are issued between now and January 20," said John Walke, a senior attorney at the National Resources Defence Council. "And there are at least a dozen very controversial rules that will weaken public health and environment protection that have no business being adopted and would not be acceptable to the incoming Obama administration, based on stances he has taken as a senator and during the campaign."
The flurry of new rules - known as midnight regulations - is part of a broader campaign by the Bush administration to leave a lasting imprint on environmental policy. Some of the actions have provoked widespread protests such as the Bureau of Land Management's plans to auction off 20,000 hectares of oil and gas parcels within sight of Utah's Delicate Arch natural bridge.
The Bush administration is also accused of engaging in a parallel go-slow on court-ordered actions on the environment. "There are the midnight regulations that they are trying to force out before they leave office, and then there are the other things they are trying not to do before they go. A lot of the climate stuff falls into the category of things they would rather not do," said a career official at the Environmental Protection Agency.
Other presidents have worked up to the final moments of their presidency to impose their legacy on history. But Bush has been particularly organised in his campaign to roll back years of protections - not only on the environment, but workplace safety and employee rights.
"This is Bush trying to leave a legacy that supports his ideology," said Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, an independent Washington thinktank that monitors the White House office of management and budget. "This was very strategic and it was in line of the ideology of the Bush administration which has been to put in place a free market and conservative agenda."
The campaign got under way in May when the White House chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, wrote to government agencies asking them to forward proposals for rule changes. Bolten had initially set a November 1 deadline on rule-making. The White House denies that the flurry of rule changes is politically motivated. "What the chief of staff wanted to avoid was this very charge that we would be trying to, in the dark of night in the last days of the administration, be rushing regulations into place ahead of the incoming, next administration," Tony Fratto, the White House spokesman, told reporters.
But OMB Watch notes that the office of management and budget website shows 83 rules reviewed from September 1 to October 31 this year - about double its workload in 2007, 2006 and 2005.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration cut short the timeframe for public comment. In one instance, officials claimed to have reviewed 300,000 comments about changes to wildlife protection within the space of a week.
The new regulations include a provision that would free industrial-scale pig and cattle farms from complying with the Clean Water Act so long as they declare they are not dumping animal waste in lakes and rivers. The rule was finalised on October 31. Mountain-top mining operations will also be exempt from the Clean Water Act, allowing them to dump debris in rivers and lakes. The rule is still under review at the OMB. Coal-fired power plants will no longer be required to install pollution controls or clean up soot and smog pollution.
Yet another of the new rules, which has generated publicity, would allow the Pentagon and other government agencies to embark on new projects without first undertaking studies on the potential dangers to wildlife.
Announcements of further rule changes are expected in the next few days including one that would weaken regulation of perchlorate, a toxin in rocket fuel that can affect brain development in children, in drinking water.
The Bush strategy has prompted a fightback from environmentalists, the Democratic-controlled Congress, and members of the Obama transition team.
John Podesta, who is overseeing the transition, has said that Obama will review the last-minute actions, and will seek to repeal those that are "not in the interests of the country".
Pollute, baby, pollute
The last-minute rules passed during the "midnight hours" of the George Bush presidency differ from his predecessors because they are basically a project of deregulation - not regulation. Among the most far-reaching:
• Industrial-size pig, cow and chicken farms can disregard the Clean Water Act and air pollution controls.
• The interior department can approve development such as mining or logging without consulting wildlife managers about their impact.
• Restrictions will be eased so power plants can operate near national parks and wilderness areas.
• Pollution controls on new power plants will be downgraded.
• Mountain-top mine operators could dump waste into rivers and streams.
• 2m acres of land in Utah, Wyoming and Colorado opened to development of oil shales, the dirtiest fuel on Earth.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment