Thank you for considering my comments on the Draft Management Plan for the Papahanaumokuakea Marine Monument.
NOAA's recent report on the state of coral reefs in U.S. waters showed the critical importance of conservation within the monument's limits. Conservation must be the prime directive. Other objectives must be pursued only to the extent that they are compatible with conservation.
The Monument is critical habitat to highly endangered species.
I remember watching An Inconvenient Truth and being thoroughly unsurprised at much of the evidence - nonpartisan science has long since confirmed the fact that man's wanton burning of carbon-based fuels is contributing to the atmosphere in a way that gradually rises temperatures worldwide, leading to a host of complications. I considered myself an environmentalist before then, and I still do - Al Gore didn't make me into one, but he sure as hell helped keep me that way.
Then Leonardo DiCaprio made an environmental documentary. I knew then I had to do something different.
2,000 Watts per person per year (or 17,520 kWh) is what we produce now. It is a baseline for sustainability, at least, this is what the scientists of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology believe. This 2,000 Watts includes all activities - working, eating, traveling, and investment in common infrastructure. Currently, Switzerland is a 5,000 Watt society and most other Western European countries are 6,000 Watt societies. The USA and Canada consume 12,000 Watts per person per year.
"At first glance, the objective of a 2,000-watt society appears unrealistic, but the necessary technology already exists," says Moritz Leuenberger, head of the Swiss Federal Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy, and Communications.
Indulge me, please. One of my favorite Jimmy Buffett songs is A Pirate Looks at 40. Somehow it reaches out to that part of me that sometimes longs for a different world, different challenges, different opportunities. And sometimes you look back at a bright moment of opportunity and wonder if it'll ever come back.
Yes I am a pirate
two hundred years too late.
The cannons don't thunder
there's nothing to plunder
I'm an over-forty victim of Fate.
Arriving too late....
---A Pirate Looks at Forty
from Boats, Beaches, Bars and Ballads,
Jimmy Buffett
I'm looking at 58 this week and it's got me thinking about the miracles of the past year, from the candidacy of Barack Obama to the Peace Prize for Al Gore and the ICCC.
Congress and producer groups are pressuring the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to release millions of acres from Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) contracts and open them up to crop production. Supporters say this move would increase production and bring down food prices.
On the contrary, ripping up conservation lands would not make a big dent in commodity supplies or prices, but it would waste billions of taxpayer dollars of that have been invested in conservation on these lands. It also would be a tragedy for wildlife, water quality, and climate.
Earlier this year, on behalf of the American Hunters and Shooters Association (AHSA), I endorsed Barack Obama for President. My message was simple: He gets it. And, the NRA doesn't.
See, contrary to the punditry’s view of guns, the NRA doesn’t speak for all gunowners. In fact, the NRA leaders consistently ignore the concerns of our nation’s hunters and sportsmen and women.
I don’t get it. Gas is treading at about $4.10 a gallon. Oil is over $140 a barrel. Energy costs are going through the roof. Yesterday, billlaurelMD shared a diary concerning the North pole and the melting polar ice caps. (Santa has recently traded in his sled for water ski’s.) Where is the outrage? Where is the conservation? I see the same amount of drivers on the road today that I did five years ago. As a matter of fact, I ride my bike twenty miles round trip to work, and I am the only bicyclist on the road. Am I in the twilight zone?
The city of Dallas is on the verge of losing one of its valued citizens through "Extraordinary Rendition" to a foreign facility where she will be subjected to solitary confinement, social isolation, emotional stress, and public humiliation. Jenny has worked selflessly for the benefit of Dallas and its residents for the last 22 years and deserves a better fate.
It's been some morning. It started with 428 wolves, then I came here read Granny Doc's diary, and NCrissieB's diary, and a couple of others, and I just want to weep. Can't you see the big picture?
We are very excited about this new effort. We feel that we can do for candidates who care about the environmental what Emily's list is doing for pro-choice women candidates.
By contributing to candidates through http://givegreen.lcv.org -- you will let those candidates know you care about the environment.
With energy emerging as one of the key issues in this election cycle, it is going to be interesting to see how McCain talks about the conservation part of the equation. One of the core conservative beliefs of the last 30 years is the idea that Americans' heavy energy consumption is a human right of sorts that should never be infringed. Some part of this belief can be traced to Dominion Theology, but it mostly seems to stem from conservative opposition to government regulation and environmentalism.
I go back and forth over whether it is too late to get us all out of the Hummer before we head off the cliff. Every new "faster than predicted" or "worse than expected" data point that shows more melting, more dead species, or more climate instability drags me down. Jim Hansen recently had me losing sleep over the data.
But then some days look brighter. This week was one of those times. People really are acting--in several important and tangible ways--to change the status quo.
I've always been a liberal; even a rather radical liberal in my youth. But now I have to rethink all of that. I think I am becoming...it's hard to say it out loud...a conservative. It's been a frightening thought. I've been fighting it off for awhile. I've been trying to ignore it. I thought of trying to call it by a different name, to see it as just an aberration. I even considered joining a 12 step program that would help me rid myself of these awful obsessive thoughts. But now I have to face it squarely. I think I am really becoming a conservative. Not one of those neo-cons or fundis, but a real conservative.
To free my soul and go on I need to confess it publicly. Here, at D-Kos, may not be the best place to do this, it being such a liberal blog, but perhaps that's a good thing. I'll take my battering here, among old friends, rather than expose myself to Rush, or O'Reilly, or Hannity. I don't think they'd really understand anyway.
Yesterday, the Washington Post timidly reported that floods in Iowa and other Midwestern states may not be "natural" disasters . However, scientists have long warned that worsening floods are the predictable result of human intervention - of floodplains covered with impermeable concrete and stripped of vegetation; of river channels forced up and out of their beds by constricting artificial levees; of sprawling development offering more victims to raging rivers. The article's thesis is neither new nor controversial, but the story does include a revelation that deserves immediate, national attention.
Between 2007 and 2008, farmers took 106,000 acres of Iowa land out of the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to keep farmland uncultivated, according to Lyle Asell, a special assistant for agriculture and environment with the state's Department of Natural Resources (DNR)...
There was another one of those diaries recently... gloating about high gas prices.
It will make people drive less!
It will revitalize downtowns!
It's a good thing!
It must be nice to not care. But everyone should. I'm all for better gas mileage, vital downtowns, and public transportation. But let's take a reality check.
I finally finished a short video (less than two minutes) on WWII posters for the Homefront. These posters exhorted all of us to become part of the war effort. It wasn't about "going shopping" then, it was about energy and resource conservation, rationing ourselves for the benefit of our armed forces, and making the Homefront an effective front for fighting the Axis powers.
If you want to take a 30-minute breather from tonight's love fest for Barack (no offense intended for the man), you're invited to listen and call in to The Celsias Show.
This is mostly just photos as a follow up to my diary last week showing bird photos from Ecuador. This week I will show some examples of the non-avian fauna of eastern Ecuador. I'm going to use two themes to hopefully make this diary a bit more substantive: our perception of wilderness and what the current biodiversity loss really means.
