For this episode of The Green Flame, we speak with Sergio Alexander Kochergin, a filmmaker, organizer, former U.S. Marine, and native of Ukraine. He did two deployments to Iraq in 2003, 2004, and 2005, and testified before members of Congress in 2008 as part of the new Winter Soldier hearings organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War. Sergio lives in Michigan City, Indiana where he is the co-founder of Politics Art Roots Culture, or the PARC center, which is an event and community space.
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
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All around the world, irrigation for agriculture is taking massive amounts of water from rivers, in many cases leaving them almost or entirely dry. This article comes from central Oregon, where 90% of human water use is for agriculture.
Low Flows Due to Irrigation Destroying Deschutes River
The recent article “Low Flows On Deschutes” highlights why irrigation is a significant threat to our river’s ecological integrity.
According to the report, flows on a portion of the Deschutes dropped to 60 CFS leaving many parts of the river channel dry. To put this into perspective, historically, before irrigators took our water from us, the river ran at 1000-1200 CFS year-round. As a spring-fed river, the Deschutes supported outstanding fisheries.
Huge trout caught out of the Deschutes near the turn of the century before irrigation destroyed the river.
This tragedy continues because the public is not standing up for its rights. We, the people, own the water in the river, not the irrigators. We allow the irrigators to take water from the river without any compensation to the public, and regardless of the damage done to aquatic ecosystems. This system was devised by irrigators to serve irrigators a century ago.
Isn’t it time for us to enter the modern age? Using water in the desert to grow hay for livestock is just a crazy waste of a valuable resource. Keeping water in the river would provide for greater recreational use. And maintaining viable flows would protect aquatic life like spotted frogs, trout, and salmon, not to mention all the other water-dependent species like eagles, mink, otter, and the rest.
Despite the claims to “water rights” the actual water in all state rivers belongs to Oregon citizens as affirmed by the Oregon Supreme Court.
“All water within the state from all sources of water supply belongs to the public,” including ground water. The Act allows for instream water rights for public uses, and public uses include but are not limited to recreation, “conservation, maintenance and enhancement of aquatic and fish life, wildlife, fish and wildlife habitat and any other ecological values,” pollution abatement, and navigation. In addition, “public uses are beneficial uses,” but “[t]he recognition of an in-stream water right . .. shall not diminish the public’s rights.”
The majority of water removed from the Deschutes is used to grow irrigated pasture and hay for livestock not crops consumed directly by humans. Photo by George Wuerthner
Technically speaking, degrading the river by irrigation should be illegal since the public values are supposed to be given priority in any water allotments.
Maybe it made sense to dewater our rivers to promote Ag a century ago when there were fewer economic opportunities. However, today Ag contributes only to 1.3% of Deschutes County income.
One can make a case that the 1% are degrading our river that belongs to all citizens for their private profit.
It is time to modernize our approach to water use. Growing cow food in the desert is a senseless waste of a valuable resource—water. We need to put the welfare of the river ecosystem and all citizens first.
George Wuerthner is an ecologist and former hunting guide with a degree in wildlife biology.
An ongoing blockade to protect old-growth forests in western Canada has now lasted more than a month, but blockaders hopes that a government report would help protect the Fairy Creek Valley have been dashed.
Forest Defenders Hold the Barricades as the BC Government Fails to Defer Road Building and Logging into the Fairy Creek Rainforest
September 14, 2020
Featured image: Road building in the old growth forests of the Renfrew Creek Watershed, part of the greater Fairy Creek Rainforest. (Photo Credit: Ken Dawson)
The forest defenders blocking road and logging access to Fairy Creek are devastated that it was not included in the government’s announcement of deferrals of forest areas of the province. The Old Growth Strategic Review recommended: “immediate response to ecosystems at very high risk,” through deferrals. That would emphatically include Fairy Creek, which lies within unceded Pacheedaht Territory. Instead the government included Clayoquot Sound that the review did not recommend deferring.
Roads accessing Fairy Creek were going forward and poised to enter the watershed when stopped. This constitutes imminent threat. Other old growth forests in southern Vancouver Island, either under immediate threat or where active logging is taking place are: the Caycuse where there is active logging and roading; Edinburgh Mountain and the Central Walbran, both with multiple new approved cut blocks and road proposals; and the Nahmint Valley, where BC Timber Sales was censured by an internal review for violating its own legal requirements.
All of these areas deserve, and must receive, permanent protection from logging.
Among other areas of concern on Vancouver Island are the West Kauwinch River, and the Zeballos Lake watersheds, both similarly intact watersheds at imminent risk from new logging and road building. Fairy Creek has spectacular yellow cedar stands, a highly endangered and underrepresented species in BC’s forest inventory. The review calls for further protection of these species, yet the headwaters of Fairy Creek, and several adjacent old growth forests remain slated to be logged. Surely, the last intact watershed in the immense San Juan River drainage deserves a permanently protected designation.
We demand that the government immediately defer Fairy Creek and the other contiguous old growth forests from further incursions and permanently protect them from logging.
Until that happens, the blockades of the accesses into Fairy Creek will remain in place as support grows for protection following the OGSR report that highlights gross mismanagement, misinformation and collusion between government and the forest industry, where the public interest and that of the standing forests seldom enters their calculations.
This is the fourth part in the series. In the previous essays, we have explored the need for a collapse, the relationship between a Dyson sphere and overcomsumption, and our blind pursuit for ‘progress.’ In this piece, Elisabeth describes how the Dyson sphere is an extension of the drive for so-called “green energy.”
Techno-utopians imagine the human population on Earth can be saved from collapse using energy collected with a Dyson Sphere–a vast solar array surrounding the sun and funneling energy back to Earth–to build and power space ships. In these ships, we’ll leave the polluted and devastated Earth behind to venture into space and populate the solar system. Such a fantasy is outlined in “Deforestation and world population sustainability: a quantitative analysis” and is a story worthy of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. It says, in so many words: we’ve trashed this planet, so let’s go find another one.
In their report, Mauro Bologna and Gerardo Aquino present a model that shows, with continued population growth and deforestation at current rates, we have a less than 10% chance of avoiding catastrophic collapse of civilization within the next few decades. Some argue that a deliberate and well-managed collapse would be better than the alternatives. Bologna and Aquino present two potential solutions to this situation. One is to develop the Dyson Sphere technology we can use to escape the bonds of our home planet and populate the solar system. The other is to change the way we (that is, those of us living in industrial and consumer society) live on this planet into a ‘cultural society’, one not driven primarily by economy and consumption, in order to sustain the population here on Earth.
The authors acknowledge that the idea of using a Dyson Sphere to provide all the energy we need to populate the solar system is unrealistic, especially in the timeframe to avoid collapse that’s demonstrated by their own work. They suggest that any attempt to develop such technology, whether to “live in extraterrestrial space or develop any other way to sustain population of the planet” will take too long given current rates of deforestation. As Salonika describes in an earlier article in this series, “A Dyson Sphere will not stop collapse“, any attempt to create such a fantastical technology would only increase the exploitation of the environment.
Technology makes things worse
The authors rightly acknowledge this point, noting that “higher technological level leads to growing population and higher forest consumption.” Attempts to develop the more advanced technology humanity believes is required to prevent collapse will simply speed up the timeframe to collapse. However, the authors then contradict themselves and veer back into fantasy land when they suggest that higher technological levels can enable “more effective use of resources” and can therefore lead, in principle, to “technological solutions to prevent the ecological collapse of the planet.”
Techno-utopians often fail to notice that we have the population we do on Earth precisely because we have used technology to increase the effectiveness (and efficiency) of fossil fuels and other resources* (forests, metals, minerals, water, land, fish, etc.). Each time we increase ‘effective use’ of these resources by developing new technology, the result is an increase in resource use that drives an increase in population and development, along with the pollution and ecocide that accompanies that development. The agricultural ‘green revolution’ is a perfect example of this: advances in technology enabled new high-yield cereals as well as new fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, irrigation, and mechanization, all of which prevented widespread famine, but also contributed to an ongoing explosion in population, development, chemical use, deforestation, land degradation and salinization, water pollution, top soil loss, and biodiversity loss around the world.
As economist William Stanley Jevons predicted in 1865, increasing energy efficiency with advances in technology leads to more energy use. Extrapolating from his well-proved prediction, it should be obvious that new technology will not prevent ecological collapse; in fact, such technology is much more likely to exacerbate it.
This mistaken belief that new technology can save us from collapse pervades the policies and projects of governments around the world.
Projects like the Green New Deal, the Democrat Party’s recently published climate plan, and the UN’s sustainable development goals and IPCC recommendations. All these projects advocate for global development and adoption of ‘clean technology’ and ‘clean industry’ (I’m not sure what those terms mean, myself); ’emissions-free’ energy technologies like solar, wind, nuclear and hydropower; and climate change mitigation technologies like carbon capture and storage, smart grids, artificial intelligence, and geo-engineering. They tout massive growth in renewable energy production from wind and solar, and boast about how efficient and inexpensive these technologies have become, implying that all will be well if we just keep innovating new technologies on our well worn path of progress.
Miles and miles of solar panels, twinkling like artificial lakes in the middle of deserts and fields; row upon row of wind turbines, huge white metal beasts turning wind into electricity, and mountain tops and prairies into wasteland; massive concrete dams choking rivers to death to store what we used to call water, now mere embodied energy stored to create electrons when we need them–the techno-utopians claim these so-called clean’ technologies can replace the black gold of our present fantasies–fossil fuels–and save us from ourselves with futuristic electric fantasies instead.
All these visions are equally implausible in their capacity to save us from collapse.
And while solar panels, wind turbines, and dams are real, in the sense that they exist–unlike the Dyson Sphere–all equally embody the utter failure of imagination we humans seem unable to transcend. Some will scoff at my dismissal of these electric visions, and say that imagining and inventing new technologies is the pinnacle of human achievement. With such framing, the techno-utopians have convinced themselves that creating new technologies to solve the problems of old technologies is progress. This time it will be different, they promise.
And yet if you look at the graph of global primary energy consumption:
it should be obvious to any sensible person that new, so-called ‘clean’ energy-producing technologies are only adding to that upward curve of the graph, and are not replacing fossil fuels in any meaningful way. Previous research has shown that “total national [US] energy use from non-fossil-fuel sources displaced less than one-quarter of a unit of fossil-fuel energy use and, focussing specifically on electricity, each unit of electricity generated by non-fossil-fuel sources displaced less than one-tenth of a unit of fossil-fuel-generated electricity.”
In part, this is due to the fossil fuel energy required to mine, refine, manufacture, install, maintain, and properly dispose of materials used to make renewable and climate mitigation technologies. Mining is the most destructive human activity on the planet, and a recent University of Queensland study found that mining the minerals and metals required for renewable energy technology could threaten biodiversity more than climate change. However, those who use the word “clean” to describe these technologies conveniently forget to mention these problems.
Wind turbines and solar arrays are getting so cheap; they are being built to reduce the cost of the energy required to frack gas: thus, the black snake eats its own tail. “Solar panels are starting to die, leaving behind toxic trash”, a recent headline blares, above an article that makes no suggestion that perhaps it’s time to cut back a little on energy use. Because they cannot be recycled, most wind turbine blades end up in landfill, where they will contaminate the soil and ground water long after humanity is a distant memory. Forests in the southeast and northwest of the United States are being decimated for high-tech biomass production because of a loophole in EU carbon budget policy that counts biomass as renewable and emissions free. Dams have killed the rivers in the US Pacific Northwest, and salmon populations are collapsing as a result. I could go on.
The lies we tell ourselves
Just like the Dyson Sphere, these and other technologies we fantasize will save our way of life from collapse are delusions on a grand scale. The governor of my own US state of Washington boasts about how this state’s abundant “clean” hydropower energy will help us create a “clean” economy, while at the same time he fusses about the imminent extinction of the salmon-dependent Southern Resident Orca whales. I wonder: does he not see the contradiction, or is he willfully blind to his own hypocrisy?
The face of the Earth is a record of human sins (1), a ledger written in concrete and steel; the Earth twisted into skyscrapers and bridges, plows and combines, solar panels and wind turbines, mines and missing mountains; with ink made from chemical waste and nuclear contamination, plastic and the dead bodies of trees. The skies, too, tell our most recent story. Once source of inspiration and mythic tales, in the skies we now see airplanes and contrails, space junk and satellites we might once have mistaken for shooting stars, but can no longer because there are so many; with vision obscured by layers of too much PM2.5 and CO2 and NOx and SO2 and ozone and benzene. In the dreams of techno-utopians, we see space ships leaving a rotting, smoking Earth behind.
One of many tales of our Earthly sins is deforestation.
As the saying goes, forests precede us, and deserts follow; Mauro Bologna and Gerardo Aquino chose a good metric for understanding and measuring our time left on Earth. Without forests, there is no rain and the middles of continents become deserts. It is said the Middle East, a vast area we now think of as primarily desert, used to be covered in forests so thick and vast the sunlight never touched the ground (2). Without forests, there is no home for species we’ve long since forgotten we are connected to in that web of life we imagine ourselves separate from, looking down from above as techno-gods on that dirty, inconvenient thing we call nature, protected by our bubble of plastic and steel. Without forests, there is no life.
One part of one sentence in the middle of the report gives away man’s original sin: it is when the authors write, “our model does not specify the technological mechanism by which the successful trajectories are able to find an alternative to forests and avoid collapse“. Do they fail to understand that there is no alternative to forests? That no amount of technology, no matter how advanced–no Dyson Sphere; no deserts full of solar panels; no denuded mountain ridges lined with wind turbines; no dam, no matter how wide or high; no amount of chemicals injected into the atmosphere to reflect the sun–will ever serve as an “alternative to forests”? Or are they willfully blind to this fundamental fact of this once fecund and now dying planet that is our only home?
A different vision
I’d like to give the authors the benefit of the doubt, as they end their report with a tantalizing reference to another way of being for humans, when they write, “we suggest that only civilisations capable of a switch from an economical society to a sort of ‘cultural’ society in a timely manner, may survive.” They do not expand on this idea at all. As physicists, perhaps the authors didn’t feel like they had the freedom to do so in a prestigious journal like Nature, where, one presumes, scientists are expected to stay firmly in their own lanes.
Having clearly made their case that civilized humanity can expect a change of life circumstance fairly soon, perhaps they felt it best to leave to others the responsibility and imagination for this vision. Such a vision will require not just remembering who we are: bi-pedal apes utterly dependent on the natural world for our existence. It will require a deep listening to the forests, the rivers, the sky, the rain, the salmon, the frogs, the birds… in short, to all the pulsing, breathing, flowing, speaking communities we live among but ignore in our rush to cover the world with our innovations in new technology.
Paul Kingsnorth wrote: “Spiritual teachers throughout history have all taught that the divine is reached through simplicity, humility, and self-denial: through the negation of the ego and respect for life. To put it mildly, these are not qualities that our culture encourages. But that doesn’t mean they are antiquated; only that we have forgotten why they matter.”
New technologies, real or imagined, and the profits they bring is what our culture reveres.
Building dams, solar arrays, and wind turbines; experimenting with machines to capture CO2 from the air and inject SO2 into the troposphere to reflect the sun; imagining Dyson Spheres powering spaceships carrying humanity to new frontiers–these efforts are all exciting; they appeal to our sense of adventure, and align perfectly with a culture of progress that demands always more. But such pursuits destroy our souls along with the living Earth just a little bit more with each new technology we invent.
This constant push for progress through the development of new technologies and new ways of generating energy is the opposite of simplicity, humility, and self-denial. So, the question becomes: how can we remember the pleasures of a simple, humble, spare life? How can we rewrite our stories to create a cultural society based on those values instead? We have little time left to find an answer.
* I dislike the word resources to refer to the natural world; I’m using it here because it’s a handy word, and it’s how most techno-utopians refer to mountains, rivers, rocks, forests, and life in general.
Our use of plastics has threatened oceans and the marine biodiversity. But our efforts for plastic cleanup, may well threaten a less-known marine ecosystem. This article was originally published in DW.com
Little is known about the neuston, but marine biologists fear this community of organisms living on the ocean surface could be decimated as nets sweep up plastic pollution.
In May 2017, shells started washing up along the Ligurian coast in Italy. They were small and purple and belonged to a snail called Janthina pallida that is rarely seen on land. But the snails kept coming — so many that entire stretches of the beach turned pastel.
An unusual wind pattern had beached the animals. And for the people who walked the shore, this offered a rare encounter with a wondrous ecosystem that most of us have never heard about: The neuston.
The neuston, from the Greek word for swimming, refers to a group of animals, plants and microorganisms that spend all or large parts of their life floating in the top few centimeters of the ocean.
It’s a mysterious world that even experts still know little about. But recently, it has been the source of tensions between a project trying to clean up the sea by skimming plastic trash off its surface, and marine biologists who say this could destroy the neuston.
A world between worlds
The neuston comprises a multitude of weird and wonderful creatures. Many, like the Portuguese man-of-war, which paralyzes its prey with venomous tentacles up to 30 meters long, are colored an electric shade of blue, possibly to protect themselves against the sun’s UV rays, or as camouflages against predators.
There are also by-the-wind sailors, flattish creatures that raise chitin shields from the water like sails; slugs known as sea dragons that cling to the water’s surface from below with webbed appendages; barnacles that build bubble rafts as big as dinner plates; and the world’s only marine insects, a relation of the pond skater.
Between the Worlds
They live “between the worlds” of the sea and sky, as Federico Betti, a marine biologist at the University of Genoa, puts it. From below, predators lurk. From above, the sun burns. Winds and waves toss them about. Depending on the weather, their environment may be warm or cool, salty or less so.
But now, they face another — manmade — threat from nets designed to catch trash. A project called The Ocean Cleanup, run by Dutch inventor Boyan Slat, has raised millions of dollars in donations and sponsorship to deploy long barriers with nets that will drift across the ocean in open loops to sweep up floating garbage.
Plastic and marine life are moved by currents
“Plastic could outweigh fish in the oceans by 2050. To us, that future is unacceptable,” The Ocean Cleanup declares on its website. But Rebecca Helm, a marine biologist at the University of North Carolina Asheville, and one of the few scientists to study this ecosystem, fears that The Ocean Cleanup’s proposal to remove 90% of the plastic trash from the water could also virtually wipe out the neuston.
One focus of Helm’s studies is where these organisms congregate. “There are places that are very, very concentrated and areas of little concentration, and we’re trying to figure out why,” says Helm. One factor is that the neuston floats with ocean currents, and Helm worries that it might collect in the exact same spots as marine plastic pollution. “Our initial data show that regions with high concentrations of plastic are also regions with high concentrations of life.”
The Ocean Cleanup says Helm’s concerns are based on “misguided assumptions.”
“It’s true that neustonic organisms will be trapped in the barriers,” says Gerhard Herndl, professor of Aquatic Biology at the University of Vienna and one of project’s scientific advisors. “But these organisms have dangerous lives. They’re adapted to high losses because they get washed ashore in storms and they have high reproductive rates. If they didn’t, they’d already be extinct.”
Helm says they just don’t know how quickly these creatures reproduce, and in any case recovering from passing storm is very different from surviving The Ocean Clean Up’s systems which could be in place for years.
Still a lot to learn about the neuston
In December, The Ocean Cleanup and Helm participated in a symposium on the topic hosted by the Institute for Risk and Uncertainty at the University of Liverpool in the UK. Since then, direct communication between them has stopped, says Helm. “They’re not interested in talking to me anymore.”
Both sides agree that much is still unknown about the neuston. But one thing that has been established is that most of the oceans’ fish spend part of their lifecycle in the neuston. “More than 90% of marine fish species produce floating eggs that persist on the surface until hatching,” Betti says.
The Ocean Cleanup has undertaken one of the few studies into this ecosystem, collecting data on the neuston on the relative abundance of neuston and floating plastic debris in the eastern North Pacific Ocean during a 2019 expedition to the Pacific Garbage Patch, an area where plastic pollution has accumulated on a vast scale. But it is not yet sharing what it has found. The information was being prepared for publication in an as of yet unspecified journal, probably some time next year, an Ocean Cleanup spokesperson said.
Is the solution inshore?
Helm believes the best way to tackle the marine plastic problem would be to position the barriers closer to land — across river mouths and bays — to catch garbage before it reaches the sea.
“Stopping the flow of plastic into the ocean is the most cost-effective — and literally effective — way to ensure that it’s not entering our environment,” she says. As for the plastic already floating in open waters, she does not believe it is worth sacrificing parts of neuston and wants to see more research first.
The Ocean Cleanup has made barriers across rivers a part of its mission. But it is also going ahead with its original vision of pulling trash from the open water. In late 2018, the project deployed a 600-meter, u-shaped prototype net into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
The system ran into difficulties, failing to retain plastic as hoped, and needing to be brought shore for repairs and a design upgrade, after which Ocean Cleanup says it gathered haul of plastic that it will recycle and resell to help fund future operations. Over the next two years, the project hopes to deploy up to 60 such barriers to collect drifting flotsam. Helm isn’t the only one concerned about these plans.
“We should think twice about every action we take in the sea,” Betti says. “In nature, nothing is as easy as we think, and often, we’ve done a lot of damage while trying to do a good thing.”
This article was first published on www.dw.com. You can find the full and original article here:
JUNEAU, ALASKA (Tlingit: A’aakw Kwáan lands) — The Trump administration announced plans today for yet another massive timber sale that would destroy more than 5,100 acres of critical old-growth habitat in the Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska.
“Shame on the Trump administration’s Forest Service for having the gall to continue to burden and overwhelm Southeast Alaskans with yet another needless and money-losing timber sale when we are in the midst of a pandemic and a controversial Alaska Roadless Rulemaking process,” said Dan Cannon, Tongass Forest Program Manager for Southeast Alaska Conservation Council. “As Alaskans await Secretary Perdue’s decision on the Roadless Rule, they will yet again have to advocate for the protection of critical old-growth habitat in their backyards. We don’t know how many times we need to say it: Timber only contributes 1% to Southeast Alaska’s economy, while the fishing and tourism industries contribute 26%. Stop making Southeast Alaskans’ lives more difficult by threatening our true economic drivers.”
The U.S. Forest Service’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the South Revilla Integrated Resource Project timber sale proposes chainsawing 5,115 acres of old-growth forest near Ketchikan. It also would allow bulldozing or rebuilding more than 80 miles of damaging logging roads costing U.S. taxpayers more than $11 million. The public will have until Oct. 19 to provide comments.
“This assault on America’s largest rainforest will destroy important habitat for salmon, bears and wolves, and worsen the climate crisis,” said Randi Spivak, Public Lands Director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Clearcutting the Tongass and wiping out enormous carbon stores is like cutting off part of the planet’s oxygen supply. It’s mind-boggling that the Trump administration wants to decimate this spectacular old-growth forest and erase one of the solutions to averting catastrophic climate change.”
This project and the proposed elimination of the Roadless Area Conservation Rule on the Tongass are part of the Trump administration’s relentless efforts to clearcut large swaths of remaining old-growth across the national forest, consistent with its policy of increasing logging nationwide.
“As forests across the America’s burn, the last thing we need to do is destroy old-growth forests in the Tongass Rainforest — one of the United States’ best defenses against furthering the climate crisis,” said Osprey Oreille Lake, Executive Director for the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN). “Existing within the territories of the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsmishian peoples, the Tongass is a vital ecosystem necessary to the traditional life-ways of local Indigenous communities. Destroying critical old-growth in the Tongass, not only devastates wildlife habitat and harms the climate, but disregards the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples and further perpetuates modern genocidal policies. We must stand together for our forests, communities and the climate.”
The roughly 17 million-acre Tongass is the largest national forest in the United States. Since time immemorial it has been the traditional homelands of the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian peoples. Alaska Native people rely on the area for culture, traditional hunting, fishing and livelihoods. People from around the world visit the Tongass for world-class recreation, sport and commercial fishing.
“It was just over two months ago that a federal judge threw out the largest logging project we’ve seen in decades because the Forest Service failed to provide communities with basic information like where it intended to log,” said Olivia Glasscock, an attorney at Earthjustice. “Nevertheless the agency is back again with another massive timber sale targeting irreplaceable old-growth trees in the same cherished national forest. Urgent action is needed to address the climate crisis, and that includes efforts to preserve the magnificent trees that absorb carbon. Unfortunately, this destructive logging plan will only make the problem worse.”
The Tongass is the largest intact temperate rainforest left on Earth and provides vital habitat for eagles, bears, wolves, salmon and countless other species. It is a globally recognized carbon sink and helps to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change, storing approximately 8% of the total carbon stored in all U.S. national forests.
“Alaska Rainforest Defenders asked, plain and simple in our September 2018 scoping comments on the South Revilla project, that the Forest Service drop the timber part of the project,” said spokesman Larry Edwards. “As with our recently successful lawsuit against the timber component of the POWLLA project, environmentalists have no complaints over the non-timber components of this project.” Edwards added, “In the DEIS, all of the alternatives for the project are estimated to have a timber sale value appraised at a loss to taxpayers, which means that legally a timber sale could not be offered. Continuing to a final EIS would be gambling with millions of dollars of Forest Service planning effort at taxpayer expense.”
Logging the Tongass has been tremendously costly for taxpayers. A new report estimates that timber sales from the forest have cost taxpayers $1.7 billion over four decades.
“Despite a commitment to move away from unsustainable old-growth timber sales, the U.S. Forest Service continues to offer these sales in the Tongass National Forest. More clearcutting will damage the real drivers of southeast Alaska’s economy: fish, wildlife and tourism. Defenders won’t stand by and watch as the Forest Service despoils irreplaceable wildlife habitat and threatens sustainable jobs and livelihoods in Southeast Alaska,” said Nicole Whittington-Evans, Alaska Program Director for Defenders of Wildlife.
The Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International www.wecaninternational.org – @WECAN_INTL
The Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) International is a 501(c)3 and solutions-based organization established to engage women worldwide in policy advocacy, on-the-ground projects, direct action, trainings, and movement building for global climate justice.
