Northwest Port Expansions will Fuel Coal Industry’s Contributions to Mass Extinction

By Rachel / Deep Green Resistance Cascadia

In the arid Powder River Basin of Northern Wyoming and Southern Montana, the long roots of sagebrush draw water from deep beneath the soil.  The ability to access water in this way makes sagebrush an important star of the Basin’s biotic constellation.  Species of grasses and herbs are allowed to thrive on the moisture that the sagebrush draws toward the surface.

Elk, mule deer, and pronghorn antelope access the water stored in the plant’s pale gray, three-pointed leaves.  Greater sage-grouse eat the sagebrush too, while making their nests and performing their complex courtship rituals among the plant’s low branches.  The soil is the basis for the lives of these creatures and countless others, and the precious moisture within the soil is thread that connects them in a web of relationship.

The Powder River Basin’s coal extraction industry doesn’t place the same value on soil, and neither does the government that serves the coal extraction industry.  The region extracts about forty percent of the coal mined in the United States.  More coal is mined annually from the Powder River Basin than is mined annually from the entire Appalachian region.

The industry calls the soil and rock that lies between their extraction equipment and the coal seams ‘overburden,’ and they don’t take kindly to being burdened with the survival of the beings that depend on that soil.  No soil means no sagebrush, and no sagebrush means no sage-grouse.

Though the threat posed to the sage-grouse by human activity is acknowledged by industry and governmental regulatory agencies alike, both have chosen to prioritize the economy over living beings both human and non-human.  Nevada, another state inhabited by sage-grouse, is developing a conservation plan intended to “sufficiently conserve the species while enabling our economy to thrive.”

This, of course, is nonsense.  Since coal is a non-renewable resource at the center of our culture’s one-time energy extraction blowout, the destruction of the land must continue, and the wasting of soil must accelerate, in order to keep the US coal profit machine running.   By definition, coal mining cannot coexist with the greater sage-grouse, and it is time to choose sides.

In 2010, the Fish and Wildlife Service decided that the listing of sage grouse as a species endangered by human activity was “warranted but precluded,” meaning that the bird needs protection but “other species in bigger trouble must come first.”  Presumably, the “other species” they refer to include the US coal industry – which is definitely in big trouble.  Though coal remains a major source of electricity generation, the combination of band-aid environmental protections and increased competition from cheap natural gas is driving the coal industry’s profits way down from previous levels.  The industry is not taking this decrease in revenue lying down.

The coal industry is looking to boost their profits by tapping into the Pacific market.  Unlike the US coal market, which has lately been flat, the Asian market’s demand for coal is exploding.  China is building at least one new coal-fired power plant every week.  A big obstacle to exploiting this market is a lack of coastal Pacific transport capacity.  To really cash in on Chinese demand, they’ll need more rail lines and expanded West coast ports, and there’s already a plan in the works to get those things in spite of the impact that their construction will have on marine life.

One of the most aggressively pursued port-expansion projects is the Gateway Pacific Terminal proposed for Cherry Point Washington, home to the Cherry Point herring.  As a keystone species, the herring support a variety of other species that share their habitat.  They provide as much as two thirds of the food supply for Chinook Salmon, who in turn provide as much as two thirds of the food supply for the Puget Sound Orcas.

Unsurprisingly, herring populations have decreased by ninety five percent since the late 1970’s.  Cherry Point is also already home to the largest oil refinery in Washington state.  Vessel traffic in this area is already bloated by a rise in exports and the promise of a new pipeline from Canada.  If this port were expanded as proposed, it would become the largest of its kind in North America.  The expanded port would allow the transport of an additional forty eight million metric tons to foreign markets each year, which would require the use of an additional four hundred and fifty vessels each year – each one containing a devastating spill, just waiting to be unleashed.

Another expansion has been proposed for the Millenium Bulk Terminal at Longview, also in Washington state.  The Millennium Bulk Terminal at Longview applied for 5.7 million tons but later admitted to plans for seeking 60 million tons once a permit was granted.  Other ports, including the Port of Grays Harbor in Hoquiam, Oregon International Port of Coos Bay, and Port of St. Helens are also under consideration. Also under consideration is Prince Rupert’s Ridley Island terminal in British Columbia, and other locations in BC may be under similar threat.

Right now, port expansion approval process for Cherry Point and Longview is in the scoping period, which means that hearings are being held for public comment across Oregon and Washington. 

The outcome of these hearings will be used to draft an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), and that statement will be used to inform permitting decisions. No doubt, government and industry will again be looking for a false compromise between living communities and extractive industry.  We can stand with the herring, the sage-grouse, and all the members of their extended family, or we can capitulate to the demands of a system with an infinite imperative to destroy the land, air, and sea.

The negative effects of the proposed expansions (not to mention the negative effects of not only transporting fossil fuels, but also mining and burning them) are not limited to the possibility of extinction for the Cherry Point Herring and the damage their absence would do to those species who depend on them.  Coal dust and noise pollution worsen in their effect on both humans and non-humans if this industry gets its way, and both the environmental and economic costs that big-coal externalizes will be forced back onto local communities.

All tactics must be on the table.  We will physically halt construction with our bodies when the time comes, but without a community of support, direct action is likely to fail.  Engagement with the hearing process will also likely fail unless it is accompanied by diverse tactics and practical strategy.  We must use these hearings to connect with others in the communities that stand to be affected, and to send the message  that omnicidal industrial projects like this one will not stand unopposed.

You can find more information about the proposed port expansions here: http://www.coaltrainfacts.org/key-facts

Oceans emptying out as 85% of fish species suffer severe decline

Oceans emptying out as 85% of fish species suffer severe decline

By Gaia Vince / BBC News

Global fish stocks are exploited or depleted to such an extent that without urgent measures we may be the last generation to catch food from the oceans.

It has been some time since most humans lived as hunter-gatherers – with one important exception. Fish are the last wild animal that we hunt in large numbers. And yet, we may be the last generation to do so.

Entire species of marine life will never be seen in the Anthropocene (the Age of Man), let alone tasted, if we do not curb our insatiable voracity for fish. Last year, global fish consumption hit a record high of 17 kg (37 pounds) per person per year, even though global fish stocks have continued to decline. On average, people eat four times as much fish now than they did in 1950.

Around 85% of global fish stocks are over-exploited, depleted, fully exploited or in recovery from exploitation. Only this week, a report suggested there may be fewer than 100 cod over the age of 13 years in the North Sea between the United Kingdom and Scandinavia. It’s a worrying sign that we are losing fish old enough to create offspring that replenish populations.

Large areas of seabed in the Mediterranean and North Sea now resemble a desert – the seas have been expunged of fish using increasingly efficient methods such as bottom trawling. And now, these heavily subsidised industrial fleets are cleaning up tropical oceans too. One-quarter of the EU catch is now made outside European waters, much of it in previously rich West African seas, where each trawler can scoop up hundreds of thousands of kilos of fish in a day. All West African fisheries are now over-exploited, coastal fisheries have declined 50% in the past 30 years, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

Catches in the tropics are expected to decline a further 40% by 2050, and yet some 400 million people in Africa and Southeast Asia rely on fish caught (mainly through artisanal fishing) to provide their protein and minerals. With climate change expected to impact agricultural production, people are going to rely more than ever on fish for their nutritional needs.

The policy of subsidising vast fishing fleets to catch ever-diminishing stocks is unsustainable. In Spain, for example, one in three fish landed is paid for by subsidy. Governments, concerned with keeping jobs alive in the fishing industry in the short-term, are essentially paying people to extinguish their own long-term job prospects – not to mention the effect on the next generation of fishermen. Artisanal fishing catches half the world’s fish, yet it provides 90% of the sector’s jobs.

Protect depletion

Clearly, industrialised countries are not about to return to traditional methods. However, the disastrous management of the industry needs to be reformed if we are to restore fisheries to a sustainable level. In the EU alone, restoring stocks would result in greater catches of an estimated 3.5 tonnes, worth £2.7 billion a year.

Rather than having a system in which the EU members each hustle for the biggest quotas – which are already set far beyond what is sustainable – fisheries experts suggest individual governments should set quotas based on stock levels in their surrounding waters. Fishermen should be given responsibility over the fish they hunt – they have a vested interest in seeing stocks improve, after all – and this could be in the form of individual tradable catch shares of the quotas. Such policies end the tragedy of the commons situation whereby everyone grabs as much as they can from the oceans before their rival nets the last fish, and it’s been used successfully in countries from Iceland to New Zealand to the US. Research shows that managing fisheries in this way means they are twice as likely to avoid collapse as open-access fisheries.

In severely depleted zones, the only way to restore stocks is by introducing protected reserves where all fishing is banned. In other areas, quota compliance needs to be properly monitored – fishing vessels could be licensed and fitted with tracking devices to ensure they don’t stray into illegal areas, spot-checks on fish could be carried out to ensure size and species, and fish could even be tagged, so that the authorities and consumers can ensure its sustainable source.

The other option is to take humanity’s usual method of dealing with food shortages, and move from hunter-gathering to farming.

Already, more than half of the fish we eat comes from farms – in China, it’s as high as 80% – but doing this on an industrial scale has its problems. Farms are stocked with wild fish, which must then be fed – larger fish like salmon and tuna eat as much as 20 times their weight in smaller fish like anchovies and herring. This has led to overfishing of these smaller fish, but if farmed fish are fed a vegetarian diet, they lack the prized omega-3 oils that make them nutritious, and they do not look or taste like the wild varieties. Scientists are working to create an artificial version of omega-3 – current synthetic omega-3 versions are derived from fish oils.

Fish farms are also highly polluting. They produce a slurry of toxic run-off – manure – which fertilises algae in the oceans, reducing the oxygen available to other species and creates dead zones. Scotland’s salmon-farming industry, for example, produces the same amount of nitrogen waste as the untreated sewage of 3.2 million people – over half the country’s population. As a result, there are campaigns to ban aquaculture from coastal areas.

Farmed fish are also breeding grounds for infection and parasites that kill off large proportions of fish – escapees then frequently infect wild populations. Farmers try to control infestations with antibiotics, but usually only succeed in creating a bigger problem of antibiotic resistance.

Read more from BBC News:

Extinction Rate For N American Fish 877 Times Normal

Extinction Rate For N American Fish 877 Times Normal

By US Geological Survey

From 1900-2010, freshwater fish species in North America went extinct at a rate 877 times faster than the rate found in the fossil record, while estimates indicate the rate may double between now and 2050.  This new information comes from a U.S. Geological Survey study to be published in the September issue of the journal BioScience.

In the fossil record, one freshwater fish species goes extinct every 3 million years, but North America lost 39 species and 18 subspecies between 1898 and 2006.  Based on current trends in threatened and endangered fish species, researchers estimate that an additional 53-86 species of freshwater fish may be extinct by the year 2050.  Since the first assessment of extinct North American freshwater fishes in 1989, the number of extinct fishes increased by 25 percent.

“This study illustrates the value of placing current events into the context of deep geologic time, as rocks preserve an unbiased record of natural rates of processes before human activities began to alter the landscape, the atmosphere, the rivers, and oceans,” said USGS Director Marcia McNutt. “Freshwater fish are a good choice for analysis as their bones make clear fossil impressions, and their lake and river environments produce excellent stratigraphic sequences.”

The study’s author, Noel Burkhead, used an established method to compare the rate of extinction found in the fossil record with modern rates.

“Estimates of freshwater fish extinctions during the twentieth century are conservative, because it can take 20-50 years to confirm extinction,” said Burkhead, a research fish biologist for the USGS.

Extinction is a natural process, Burkhead explained, so examining its rate over a long geological timescale provides biologists with a benchmark for comparing current extinctions to background rate. The accelerated pace of extinction observed since the beginning of the twentieth century suggests human causes.

In North America, assessments of extinctions are conducted by the American Fisheries Society’s Endangered Species Committee, using categories to factor in a lag time since the last observation of the species. The study used the categories “extinct” (species not seen for 50 years or more), “possibly extinct” (not been seen for 20 years or more), and “extinct in nature.” All these categories require that searches for the missing fishes must have been made by knowledgeable biologists.

“It is extremely rare that the death of the last individual is documented by biologists,” said Burkhead, “although it can happen when a fish only is found in a specific spring or caldera, and it dries up. That’s what happened with five species of desert pupfishes and the Alberca silverside—the last known fish to go extinct in North America.”

The Alberca silverside was found only in the Alberca Caldera, Guanajuato, Mexico; it went extinct when the caldera temporarily dried up in August 2006.

Surprisingly, Burkhead reported that 90-96 percent of fish extinctions in the fossil record were not linked to the five well-known mass extinctions.  Natural causes of fish extinction are linked to transitions in landforms and continental watercourses over time, but many twentieth century extinctions were caused by dams, channelization of rivers, water pollution, and other human-induced factors.

The background rate of extinction is based on the fossil record, which includes information on when ancient fishes lived and how long species survived in the geological past.  Burkhead used data on fish extinctions from well-known paleontologist Steven M. Stanley at the University of Hawaii.

“Another cause of extinction can be a change in a fish’s food chain, which is what may have happened to the harelip sucker, a really cool fish that used to live in seven states throughout the Ohio River basin,” said Burkhead. “It was a snail-eating specialist with cleft lips that used to pluck snails off river bottoms and manipulate the snail in its mouth in order to suck out the snail’s soft parts, perhaps making little popping sounds. Sadly, snails are highly sensitive to excessive sedimentation and in the late nineteenth century, large amounts of topsoil were washing into rivers along with sewage and industrial effluents from cities.  This likely caused snails to decline, which may have been what drove the fish to extinction.”

Declines in freshwater fishes are only the “tip of the iceberg” for freshwater ecosystems, with mussels and snails experiencing declines greater than that of freshwater fishes.

From US Geological Survey

US Fish and Wildlife orders killing of gray wolf matriarch in New Mexico

US Fish and Wildlife orders killing of gray wolf matriarch in New Mexico

By Russ McSpadden / Earth First! Journal

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife service has ordered the killing of an alpha female Mexican gray wolf for crimes against the cattle industry. She is accused of being the ringleader of a six member pack that has killed four cows in southwestern New Mexico over the last several months.

Extirpated from the wild by the 1950s, reintroduced through captive breeding programs in 1998, Mexican gray wolves are far from recovered. The outlaw matriarch of the Fox Mountain Pack—last seen roaming the mountainous woodlands of the northwest portion of the Gila National Forest—is one of only 58 of her kind left in the U.S. Southwest. And though Mexican gray wolves are endangered and federally protected she is now on the federal government’s hit list. There’s no telling how long she and her pups can hold out under the cover of pinion and ponderosa pine or the conifers of the colder peaks of the range with a warrant out for her life.

The ranchers who suffered the loss of cattle have already been reimbursed.

In 2007, the Fish and Wildlife service ordered the shooting of an alpha female of the Durango Pack in the Gila, also for cattle depredation. In a tragic twist of timing, then-governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson recalled the state’s order but his message arrived too late. She was killed in June of that year. Her lover and their pups disappeared and have not been spotted since. They are presumed dead.

Will the Fox Mountain Matriarch outwit the cattle lobbyists and government assassins long enough for an injunction?

From Earth First! Newswire: http://earthfirstnews.wordpress.com/2012/08/09/outlaw-matriarch-of-the-fox-mountain-pack-ordered-dead-by-feds/

 

 

Section of world’s largest elephant sanctuary opened for uranium mining

By Uranium Network

A foreign uranium mining conglomerate will be allowed to exploit the precious Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania after the World Heritage Committee (WHC) decided, at its July 2012 session in Russia, to accept what was described as a “minor boundary change” of the site. The change had been requested by the Government of Tanzania, in order to make way for the development of a major uranium mine, Mkuju River Uranium Project, owned by Russian ARMZ and Canadian Uranium One.

The decision to allow the boundary change would allow the Mkuju River uranium project, situated in the South of the Selous Game Reserve at its transition to the Selous Niassa Wildlife Corridor, to go forward.

The Tanzanian Government lobbied heavily for the boundary change, after declaring its intent to ” win the battle” against the UNESCO WHC.

Dozens of environmental groups around the world, many of them members of the German-based Uranium Network, decried the WHC decision which could lead to the creation of 60 million tons of radioactive and poisonous waste by the mine during its 10-year lifespan (139 million tons if a projected extension of the mine should be implemented). The radioactive wastes pose a serious threat to Selous Game Reserve which is home to the world’s largest elephant population and other wildlife. No proven methods exist to keep the radioactive and toxic slush and liquids from seeping into surface waters, aquifers or spreading with the dry season wind into the Reserve.

It remains completely unclear how the company or the Government of Tanzania will guarantee that the impact of millions of tons of radioactive and toxic waste will be “limited”. The WHC decision appears to be influenced by heavy corporate and government lobbying and not by sound science. It sets a horrible precedent that could threaten other World Heritage Sites with similar dangerous and damaging exploitation.

The decision is in stark contrast to previous decisions of the WHC of 2011 stating that mining activities would be incompatible with the status of Selous Game Reserve, a World Heritage site.

The environmental groups question whether WHC members have fully understood and given adequate attention to the implications of a uranium mine – including diesel generators, uranium mill, housing, heavy truck roads, as well as the creation of millions of tons of radioactive and toxic waste which should be contained safely and separate from the environment for thousands of years.

Uranium mining creates radioactive dust, contaminates waterways and groundwater aquifers and depletes often precious water supplies. Once abandoned, the radioactive contamination from the mines can persist for decades or even hundreds of years.

The WHC’s decision was made at a time when Russia was chairing the WHC session in St. Petersburg, Russia; Mkuju River uranium project – which basically lives or dies with the decision on the boundary change – is majority owned by Russian ARMZ, a subsidiary of ROSATOM – who bought it from Australian Mantra Resources earlier in 2012.

The environmental groups urge the World Heritage Committee to reconsider its decision on the Selous Game Reserve Boundary Change and call upon the Government of Tanzania to refrain from licensing a uranium mine in Selous Game Reserve or on lands cut out from it.

From Hamsayeh.net: