Category: Environment

A “plastic soup” of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States. But you knew that. It has been reported for some time. The question is: is there anyone out there doing anything about it? The answer is no. Eighty percent of the plastic comes not from ships but from land, where tossed consumer goods eventually travel from beaches and rivers into the ocean, according to Algalita.

It is already been reported by Chilean scientists that a similar mass exists in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica.

Cross-posted on the Big Orange and La Vida Locavore.

The modern history of the Great Lakes region can be viewed as a progression of intensifying use of a vast natural resource.   At first it was a matter of making use of the natural resources while avoiding its dangers.

This past week, the people of Ecuador voted to vest new constitutional “Rights of Nature, or ecosystem rights” in their natural resources to elevate their legal status from property to “right-bearing entities.”  Now, natural resources have legal rights, just like other nonhumans, such as corporations and ships. Citizens are now authorized to file lawsuits against corporations to prevent the destruction of natural resources and to recover damages.

Ecuador’s new constitution is part of a larger movement in the US.  The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) has been assisting local communities with drafting laws to provide legal rights to natural resources, stop corporations from raiding and destroying natural resources and protect the health and well-being of the community.  

In Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times, eco-contrarians Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger have weighed in again with an essay that deserves a lot of attention. The two first stepped into the limelight four years ago this month with the publication of their paper The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World. The flak started bursting before the ink was dry. Bill McKibben labeled them “the bad boys of American environmentalism,” and there were hot critiques by green notables and both alternative and mainstream media. Then, too, quite a lot of praise, both from the left and right.

Three years ago this month, they published the book version of their heretical paper, Breakthrough: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. If it could be synopsized into a single sentence, that might be: Though their hearts are in the right place, much of what eco-advocates are doing is wrong and, for everybody’s sake, they need to develop a new paradigm that will create a new, green economy that will ultimately do more to protect the environment that what they’re doing now.

Naturally, some environmentalists had a problem with that argument. But many also agreed with it, or half-agreed. And the debate has been going on ever since. Nordhaus and Shellenberger didn’t just talk, they co-founded the Apollo Alliance in 2003, a union-backed coalition with green-minded people put together with the idea that the right energy plan combined with the right attack on global warming could make for a lot of good things, including a rejuvenation of the well-paying manufacturing sector that continues to bleed jobs overseas. That same year they started the Breakthrough Institute, where the motto is “The Era of Small Thinking is Over.”  

“We should be worried – really worried.”

And you thought Wall Street was underwater now . . .

Want a safe place to put your money? How ’bout, higher ground, away from the coastline?

An analysis of new figures shows that even the worst-case scenario predicted last year by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has already been exceeded.

The world pumped up emissions of the chief human-produced global warming gas last year, setting a course that . . . exceeds the most dire outlook for emissions from burning coal and oil and related activities as projected by a Nobel Prize-winning group of international scientists in 2007.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, avid helicopter hunter and lifetime NRA member, has opposed native subsistence rights ever since she came into office.  Tuesday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said “Thanks but no thanks” to her ongoing efforts to ban indigenous moose harvest.

Federal trust responsibility for Native people meant that the Federal Subsistence Management program followed all appropriate procedures in its ruling for moose harvest by the Cheesh-na Athabaskans of the tiny inland village of Cristochina.

“Palin’s attack here has targeted (among others) the Ahtna Indian people in Chistochina; and although the federal court last year rejected this challenge, too, Palin has refused to lay down her arms,” wrote Kendall-Miller and her husband, Lloyd Miller, another prominent Native rights attorney.

The State’s challenge was rejected on straightforward legal grounds.  It seems unlikely that the Supreme Court will hear a further appeal should Palin take time out from the campaign trail to pursue it.  This decision will probably stand.  With more GOP judges appointed?  Perhaps not…

Now that the “bailout bill” has been labeled a fait accompli, it should be time for us (at least those of us who live in “safe states,” where  none of our screaming and shouting will affect the electoral count) to consider the possible invention of the practical art of the future: post-capitalist environmental design.  

The point of such a concept of design will be, among other things, to overcome the “merely reactive” nature of environmental/ Left alternatives to the status quo by suggesting that our efforts contribute to more than just efforts to mitigate the damage done by right-wing rule under capitalist conditions.  We do, indeed, have an alternative vision of the world: and this is a beginning discussion of its technics.

(crossposted to Big Orange)

Cross-posted at The Environmentalist (published at Reuters via The Environmentalist) and Daily Kos.

Next week Ecuador votes on providing constitutional rights to rivers, tropical forests, islands and air.  Polls now show that 56% support and only 23% oppose a bill of rights for nature, similar to legal rights provided to people. This bill of rights would change the legal status of natural resources from property to a “right-bearing entity.”

Ecuador is taking this approach to protect its people from the health care problems caused by pollution when multinational corporations swoop into their country to grab their natural resources, leaving behind damaged and polluted environments for the country to clean-up. This approach would also expedite lawsuits to protect both the environment and people while obtaining damages to pay for clean-ups.  

From Burning the Midnight Oil for a Green Keynesian Revolution (Midnight Thought First Draft posted on Agent Orange)

The thing about the New Deal … it provided a lot of “relief”(1) to a lot of people in desperate shape. But what cured the Great Depression was not the shock absorber of job guarantee programs like the two public works administrations and the Civilian Conservation Corps.

What cured the Great Depression was the massive Keynesian stimulus of World War II. Even before the US got into the war, armaments industries ramped up production in response to domestic re-armament and orders from overseas … including the gimmick of Lend-Lease to make sure that the UK had the money to buy the product of US arms factories.

We can do the exact same thing with the economic disruption that is coming, and if we learn the lessons of the Great Depression, we can do it again … with something far more useful than fighting another World War.

What’s Sarah Palin’s environmental record as governor of Alaska?

I asked an old friend, a college classmate of my wife, who’s been an environmentalist working in Alaska for three decades, most of her post-college life.  In a nutshell:

Her record is one of support for wolf control by illegal means, opposition to the listing of endangered species, and unethical intervention into public initiative processes.

But read her report yourself: