If you’ve gotten this far, congratulations! MY apologies for being too lazy to provide captions. Guess you’ll have to visit Pittsburgh and see for yourself!
Stream Bank erosion destroys land, soil, water quality, fisheries, and community assets
unnamed tributary, Ringoes, NJWith all the recent focus on the Wall Street “financial crisis”, I thought I’d illustrate erosion of real assets. These assets took hundreds of years to build and provide billions of dollars in annual benefits and avoided costs. These real erosion problems are caused by increasing volumes and velocity of stormwater runoff, not Wall Street bandits.
storm water outfall below Rt. 202 erodes hillside (tributary of Alexauxen Creek, West Amwell) The narrow and shortsighted obsession surrounding this “financial crisis” reminds me of the wisdom of Wendell Berry, one of my favorite writers on land use and right livelihood:
“We are involved now in a profound failure of imagination. Most of us cannot imagine the wheat beyond the bread, or the farmer beyond the wheat, or the farm beyond the farmer, or the history beyond the farm. Most people cannot imagine the forest and the forest economy that produced their houses and furniture and paper; or the landscapes, the streams and the weather that fill their pitchers and bathtubs and swimming pools with water. Most people appear to assume that when they have paid their money for these things they have entirely met their obligations.”
[…]
One way we could describe the task ahead of us is by saying that we need to enlarge the consciousness and the conscience of the economy. Our economy needs to know — and care — what it is doing. This is revolutionary, of course, if you have a taste for revolution, but it is also a matter of common sense.”
Essay: “In Distrust of Movements”
http://thegreenhorns.wordpress.com/essays/essay-in-distrust-of-movements-by-wendell-berry/
Trees and vegetative cover along stream banks help intercept rainfall, thus reducing the amount and speed of stormwater as they filter pollutants that eventually flow to streams.
This is what a healthy stream looks like:
headwaters of Stony Brook. Hopewell
Portion of Stony Brook, HopewellBut as developers destroy forests and pave over natural landscapes, rainfall has nowhere to go. When rainfall hits rooftops, roads, and parking lots, it warms up and picks up various pollutants. Huge volumes of water are created that rapidly overwhelm streams, causing erosion, sedimentation, flooding, and water quality problems, especially for sensitive species like trout and small invertebrates that are essential to healthy ecosystems. These problems impose hundreds of millions of dollars of costs on local governments, flooded out homeowners, and water purveyors for additional drinking water treatment. Take a look at the damage – photos all shot downstream of roads or new development – Alexauxen Creek (West Amwell), Jacobs Creek (Hopewell), and Stony Brook (Hopewell):
Alexauxen Creek, West Amwell
Jacobs Creek, Hopewell
Jacobs Creek, Hopewell
Jacobs Creek, Hopewell
Jacobs Creek, Hopewell
Stony Brook, Hopewell
stormwater outfall below Rt. 202 in West Amwell erodes hillside (tributary to Alexauxen Creek)Just like “Bridge to Nowhere”, the facts contradict the campaign ads
[Update: 10.05.08] This post makes the point far better than I do:
Sarah Palin puts polar bears on thin ice
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/10/5/1902/72063/35/616261
I recently listened to an extraordinary interview with University of Alaska marine sciences professor Rick Steiner, a world recognized expert. Professor Steiner tried to uncover the scientific basis for Alaska Governor Palin’s opposition to federal protections for polar bears under the Endangered Species Act, due to global warming and melting of the bear’s polar ice habitat. Palin sued the federal government to block those protections and wrote an Op-Ed piece in the NY Times that basically echoes the oil industry’s arguments: Bearing Up http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/05/opinion/05palin.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
According to Professor Steiner’s interview -Listen to the full interview on mp3 here: http://www.democracynow.org/2008/9/17/sarah_palin_and_global_warming_alaska
“First of all, a little context: Alaska–big business here is producing hydrocarbons, and so Alaska is in the business of producing carbon that ultimately winds up into the global atmosphere. So there’s this inherent political tension between the big business in Alaska–oil and gas–and the notion that carbon emissions are causing climate change that’s ground zero impacts right here in Alaska.
Anybody who runs for office in Alaska has to embrace totally the oil and gas business in order to have a chance of getting elected. That’s sort of the politic here. When Governor Palin was running for the governor’s mansion, she supported more oil and gas development and never mentioned a thing about the threat of climate change here in Alaska.
As soon as she took office is when Dirk Kempthorne, the Secretary of the Interior, announced that indeed polar bears were endangered. They were proposing to list them under the Endangered Species Act as threatened. Immediately after that, Governor Palin, then-Governor Palin–this is in December of ’06 or January of ’07–called him and opposed the listing, before they had ever looked at the science.
Subsequent to that, the state’s marine mammal experts–and there’s only three or four of them on the state payroll–looked at the federal proposed rule to list polar bears, sent a nice long memo that basically concluded that, yes, the federal science behind the listing, you know, documenting that polar bears are indeed threatened, was solid science, and they agreed with it.Later in the year, the USGS, which does most of the research on polar bears, United States Geological Survey, put out nine studies. This was in September of ’07. And again, the state’s marine mammal scientists were asked to comment, to review that science, comment on it. They did, and they found that the conclusions were solid. That was the scientific work that predicted that two-thirds of the world’s polar bears would be gone by mid-century, and all of the polar bears off of Alaska would be gone. And then they had a caveat about that, saying they thought that was a conservative estimate and that it would probably happen faster than that.
So, here you have the state’s marine mammal experts, three or four of them, very reputable scientists, agreeing with the federal proposed rule to list polar bears and with the USGS studies showing that polar bears are in serious trouble, yet the governor maintaining her political position that polar bears are not threatened by anything, and they’re opposing the listing.
So what you had, essentially, was a situation where the governor made a political decision, not a scientific-based one, to oppose the listing. Secondly, she misrepresented the basis of her decision to the public, saying it was based on science, when indeed it really wasn’t, and then, thirdly, tried to conceal all of that, when I was simply asking for that scientific review to be released. So there’s three red flags there for the public. ”
Adding further outrageous detail, a quick Google discloses that Alaska had eliminated its own scientists and Palin’s decision was based on the analysis of a hired gun – a private consultant who had denied global warming.
According to the Alaska Daily News and many other scientists:
Political science – Lacking studies, state still disputes polar bear ‘doom’ By TOM KIZZIA
http://www.adn.com/polarbears/story/295420.html
[…]
The state’s own scientific credibility hasn’t been helped by the fact that the Fish and Game Department no longer has any polar bear experts of its own.
[…]
The Palin administration’s effort to block action by raising uncertainty has moved the state to the dubious margins of scientific credibility, according to environmentalists.
“They’re not presenting a fair picture of the science,” said Deborah Williams, a former Interior Department official who now heads the climate nonprofit Alaska Conservation Solutions. “It’s a terrible disservice, to release something so irresponsibly biased.”
…
ALASKA AGAINST EVERYONE ELSEBiologists who contributed to the federal endangered-species process have been told not to respond publicly to the state’s comments, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. Their response will be incorporated in the final decision, the agency said.
But Andrew Derocher, one of Canada’s two top polar bear biologists, says the state is presenting a “bizarre” view of wildlife conservation.
“There’s a very clear consensus that the population in the Beaufort Sea is not doing well,” said Derocher, the current chairman of the international Polar Bear Specialist Group. “Polar bear scientists without exception are very concerned about the long-term preservation of the species.”
…
The state’s critique was based on the work of a consultant, J. Scott Armstrong, a University of Pennsylvania expert on mathematical forecasting who has elsewhere challenged former vice president Al Gore to a $10,000 bet on whether the globe is truly warming.
[…]
“They’ve done a clever thing,” said Jack Lentfer, a retired polar bear biologist who managed the last state polar bear program, switching to the feds after 1972. Lentfer thinks the state is ignoring the consensus of active researchers. “They’ve got someone who can write in a scientific way. But if you look at it, it doesn’t have any substance. They’re speaking in generalities.”
This story highlights many red flags and abuses we’ve seen by the Bush Administration:
1) misrepresentation and suppression of science for political objectives
2) slash budgets and replace public sector science with private consultants
3) gag scientists from communicating their findings to the public
4) allow oil industry to control government policy and science
Sarah Palin is a slick and dangerous threat – she carries the oil industry’s water, which, just like the “bridge to nowhere” is exactly the opposite of the claims she has made that she has taken on the oil industry in Alaska.
For additional reading, see:
Progressive Alaska
http://progressivealaska.blogspot.com/2008/05/conference-to-nowhere.html
Alaska editorial: Palin administration ignores bear science
Juneau Empire
http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/061308/opi_290344577.shtml
Palin Echoes Whitman: “Wasilla is open for business.”
I prefer to write my own stuff and am extremely reluctant to simply pass on the work of others. But, I write about the environment and sometimes a story or quote is so good – particularly on a critical issue – that I feel compelled to pass it on. In this case, with many stories about how over-development is destroying water quality here in NJ, the environmental issues resonate as well (see: More Bad News on Water Pollution http://blog.nj.com/njv_bill_wolfe/2008/09/more_bad_news_on_water_polluti.html
In addition to similar environmental problems, amazingly, Governor Palin has taken a slogan from our own NJ Governor Whitman:
“But while Mayor Stein tried to impose some reason on Wasilla’s helter-skelter development, and its growing pressures on Mat-Su Valley’s environmental treasures, when Sarah Palin took his place, she quickly announced, “Wasilla is open for business.”
So here goes – just another in an escalating series of McCain/Palin lies:
“Palin recently told the New Yorker magazine that Alaskans “have such a love, a respect for our environment, for our lands, for our wildlife, for our clean water and our clean air. We know what we’ve got up here and we want to protect that, so we’re gonna make sure that our developments up here do not adversely affect that environment at all. I don’t want development if there’s going to be that threat to harming our environment.”
But as mayor of her hometown, say many local critics, Palin showed no such stewardship.
“Sarah’s legacy as mayor was big-box stores and runaway growth,” said Patty Stoll, a retired Wasilla schoolteacher who once worked in the same school with Palin’s parents, Chuck and Sally Heath. “The truth is, Wasilla is just plain ugly, it’s not a pleasant place to live. It’s not thought out. And that’s a shame.
“Sarah fouled her own nest, and I can’t understand why. I hate to think it was simply greed or ambition.”
Among the environmental casualties of Wasilla’s frenzied development was Palin’s own front yard, Lake Lucille. The lake was listed as “impaired” in 1994 by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, and it still carries that grim label. State environmental officials say that leaching sewer lines and fertilizer runoff caused an explosion of plant growth in the lake, which sucked the oxygen out of the water and led to periodic fish kills.
[…]
“I try to avoid driving to Wasilla so I won’t get depressed,” added the official, who asked for his name to be withheld, to avoid Palin’s “wrath.”
“You get visually mugged when you drive through there. I take the long way, through the back roads, just to avoid it.”
Wasilla City Council member Dianne Woodruff hears the same lament about her town all the time. “Everywhere in Alaska, you hear people say, ‘We don’t want to be another Wasilla.’ We’re not just the state’s meth capital, we’re the ugly box-store capital. Was Sarah a good steward of this beautiful valley? No. I think it comes from her lack of experience and awareness of other places, how other cities try to preserve what makes them attractive and livable.
“The frontier mentality has prevailed for so long in Mat-Su Valley — the feeling that ‘you’re not going to tell me what to do with my land,‘” added Woodruff. “That’s fine as long as you have endless open space. But when you start to fill in as a city, you can end up with a sprawling mess. With million-dollar homes next to gravel pits — and dead lakes.”
Read the complete story here: Sarah Palin’s dead lake
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/09/19/palin/
[Update: looks like words out on Sarah:
