Northern California Students Call for Freedom From Fossil Fuels

Political support for divestment grows as more campuses and cities join the movement

Student groups at more than 60 colleges and universities across the country hosted events last Thursday, May 2, declaring “fossil freedom” as part of 350.org’s Fossil Freedom Day of Action. The “Day of Action” was meant to highlight the work students — often in partnership with alumni, faculty, and administrators — have done over the past six months to persuade their institutions to divest from fossil fuels.

Photo courtesy 350.orgStudents say the fossil fuel divestment campaign gives them the opportunity to take action
on climate change.

The largest event took place at the steps of San Francisco City Hall, where I joined other students from around Bay Area in a rally with 350.org founder Bill McKibben and city supervisors who recently voted unanimously to push the city’s pension fund to divest $583 million from the fossil fuel industry. San Francisco was inspired to work towards divestment because of the student movement. Now they’re helping students push our colleges and universities to divest.

Fossil Free SFSU, San Francisco State University’s (SFSU) divestment campaign, hosted the Bay Area event. The group collaborated with 350.org and colleges and universities all over Northern California to create a student-led event dubbed “Divest the West To Lead the Rest!” Students carried signs depicting the various regions of the United States, with California color-coded in rainbow stripes.

"I think California has amazing potential. We have multiple universities and an extremely diverse population that can lead this movement. Fossil Freedom is for everyone!" said Alex Ansari of Fossil Free SFSU.

Having been part of the national movement to divest from fossil fuels since last year, most students wanted to close out the school year with a bang. “One! We are the movement! Two! We want divestment! Three! We will not let rest; we have the power!” chanted the crowd, that included students from the University of San Francisco, City College of San Francisco, University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University.

Student leaders across the region are "fighting to highlight the insanity that the institutions that invest so much in our future leaders are also investing in the destruction of that future. And that's why we've gathered here today,” said Deirdre Smith, the West Coast organizer for 350.org

The Fossil Free SFSU campaign is “made up of mostly soon-to-be graduates, …more

by Daniel Adel – May 6, 2013

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US Rejects EU Claim of Insecticide as Prime Reason for Bee Colony Collapse

EPA study points to a combination of factors for decline in population, breaking away from singling out pesticides

A government report blamed a combination of factors for the disappearance of America's honeybees on Thursday and did not join Europe in singling out pesticides as a prime suspect.

Photo by Dennis GoedegebuureEnvironmentalists say the report missed an opportunity to build a case for action on a
pesticide that has been associated with the collapse of the honeybees.

The report, by the Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency, blamed a parasitic mite, viruses, bacteria, poor nutrition and genetics as well as pesticides for the rapid decline of honey bees since 2006.

Researchers said it was not clear whether a certain class of pesticides was a major cause of the colony collapse.

Environmental groups described the lapse as a missed opportunity to respond swiftly to a situation that has decimated the country's bee population.

The European Union voted this week for a two-year ban on a class of pesticides, known as neonicotinoids, that has been associated with the bees' collapse.

The US government report, in contrast, found multiple causes for the collapse of the honeybees.

"The decline in honeybee health is a complex problem caused by a combination of stressors," EPA's acting administrator Bob Perciasepe said.

But the report singled out as the main culprit a parasitic mite known as Varroa destructor as "the single most detrimental pest of honeybees".

Researchers ranked pesticides at the bottom of the list of potential causes, saying there is no clear evidence pesticides were the leading cause of colony collapse.

"It is not clear, based on current research, whether pesticide exposure is a major factor associated with US honeybee health declines in general, or specifically affects production of honey or delivery of pollination services," the report said.

"It is clear, however, that in some instances honeybee colonies can be severely harmed by exposure to high doses of insecticides when these compounds are used on crops, or via drift onto flowers in areas adjacent to crops that are attractive to bees."

The report, based on a large conference of scientists last October, said more research was needed to determine the effects of pesticide exposure.

But campaigners said the report had missed an opportunity to build a case for action on a pesticide that has been associated with the collapse of the honeybees.

"We've got …more

by The Guardian UK – May 3, 2013

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40 US Mines are Causing Water Pollution that Will Last for Centuries, Says New Report

Water treatment for these mines could cost as much as $67 billion per year

In the midst of declining fresh water supplies, an increasing number of hard rock mining companies are causing water pollution that will last for hundreds or thousands of years, says a new report published yesterday.

Photo by Maryland Attorney General/Doug GanslerAn acid drainage from an abandoned coal mine pollutes a creek in Barton, Maryland.
Acid mine drainage is the primary cause of lasting pollution of water sources
from mining operations.

The report by the mining watchdog group Earthworks, reveals that an estimated 17 to 27 billion gallons of polluted water will be generated by 40 existing hardrock mines (e.g. gold, copper, uranium mines) in the US each year, every year, in perpetuity. It says water treatment for these mines will cost as much as $67 billion per year.

Perpetual management of mines is a rapidly escalating national dilemma as several new mining projects are being planned across the United States. Yet, the enormous and increasing water use at mines has gone almost unnoticed, says the report titled, “Polluting the Future: How Mining Companies are Contaminating Our Nation's Waters in Perpetuity.” The report, also reveals that four proposed mines could additionally pollute for perpetuity, another 16 billion gallons of water a year.

“The scale of the problem is enormous, and growing,” says Bonnie Gestring, Earthworks northwest organizer and author of the report. “Every year, mines will pollute enough water to fill 2 trillion water bottles — enough bottles to reach to the moon and back 54 times.”

The report uses analysis of government data to show, for the first time, the staggering amount of US water supplies that are perpetually polluted by mining. Gestring defines “in perpetuity” as water pollution that will continue for hundreds or thousands of years, or for which government agencies can’t predict a point at which water quality standards will be met without treatment.

“Agriculture, energy development, municipalities and fish and wildlife are already competing for increasingly scarce water resources,” says Gestring. “The difference is, when these mines ‘use’ water, they pollute it forever.”

The primary cause of this lasting pollution is acid mine drainage. Mining exposes sulfide-bearing ore that generates sulfuric acid and mixes with water. This outflow of acidic water, otherwise known as acid mine drainage, contaminates drinking water aquifers, lakes, and streams, agricultural lands, and prime fish …more

by Daniel Adel – May 2, 2013

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Plans for Massive Salmon Farm in Ireland’s Galway Bay Run Into Troubled Waters

Environmentalists and local fishermen concerned that sea lice from farm will harm wild salmon and trout populations

Controversy surrounds plans for a huge offshore salmon farm near the Aran Islands — a set of three islands at the mouth of the Galway Bay, off Ireland's west coast.

Photo by Ivar Husevåg Døskeland/Flickr
A cliff on the largest of the Aran Islands:  Inis Mór. Critics of the proposed fish farm worry that the industrial scale of the development could hamper tourism, on which the Aran Islands are heavily dependent.

The project's backers say the over 1,000-acre farm will bring jobs to coastal communities, while helping to meet demand for salmon in a sustainable manner. But critics claim it threatens wild fish populations.

The Irish Sea Fisheries Board, a government agency, is planning to develop the salmon farm near Inis Oírr, the smallest of three Gaelic-speaking islands that are famous for their unique limestone geology, rare wildflowers, and ancient archaeology.The farm is slated to produce 15,000 tons of organic-certified salmon per year, more than doubling Ireland's production of farmed salmon.

But a coalition of environmentalists, anglers, and tourism-dependent businesses is fighting the project. They say the farm will provide a breeding ground for parasitic sea lice that could threaten wild salmon populations.

Environmental groups says that sea lice from salmon farms are one of the most significant threats facing wild salmon populations in Europe. Parasite infestations in fish farms, where thousands of fish are stocked in small netted areas all year round, is known to significantly increase the number of lice in surrounding waters. According to a study published last year, sea lice are responsible for 39 percent of deaths among young salmon at sea.

In March, up to 2,000 people, including Icelandic conservationist Orri Vigfusson, a Goldman Environmental Prize recipient, marched in Galway city to protest the proposed fishery.

Even government agencies are at loggerheads over the project: While the fisheries board is proposing the project, Inland Fisheries Ireland — the country's authority for recreational fishing— is against the fish farm. It has published a fact sheet(PDF) which says that sea lice from salmon farms are a risk to wild salmon and sea trout, and that interbreeding between farm escapees and wild salmon threatens native stocks.

“The scale of the present proposal is of a very significant concern as it provides for a greater production tonnage of salmon at this one location than is currently …more

by Lenny Antonelli – May 1, 2013

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Utah Ag-Gag Law Finds First Target — Woman Filming Slaughterhouse

Prosecutors dismiss two-month old case against animal welfare activist a day after it makes headlines

Update, 12.37 p.m.: Just as I posted this report, and one day after the case made headlines, The Salt Lake Tribune reported that Draper city prosecutors have dismissed the case today.

 

Industrial Agriculture has found its first “ag-gag” target — 25-year-old Amy Meyer.

Photo courtesy Farm Sanctuary
A file photo of a downed cow left to die at an Oklahoma stockyard as her frightened young calf looks on. Animal welfare advocates say this kind of abuse is pervasive in industrial farming facilities.

Meyer has been charged with a Class B misdemeanor for allegedly using her cell phone to film operations at a meat packing facility in Draper, Utah on February 8. If found guilty of “agricultural operation interference,” she faces up to six months in jail.

Meyer, an animal welfare advocate, says she went by the Dale T. Smith and Sons Meat Packing Co facility because she had heard reports that anyone standing on the public road nearby could witness the terrible way the workers there treated the livestock. She says she filmed the facility from the public sidewalk and didn’t trespass on the property. From her public statement:

“What I saw was upsetting, to say the least. Cows being led inside the building struggled to turn around once they smelled and heard the misery that awaited them inside. I saw piles of horns scattered around the property and flesh being spewed from a chute on the side of the building. I also witnessed what I believe to be a clear act of cruelty to animals – a live cow who appeared to be sick or injured being carried away from the building in a tractor, as though she were nothing more than rubble.

“At all times while I documented this cruelty, I remained on public property. I never once crossed the barbed wire fence that exists to demarcate private and public property. I told this to the police who were on the scene.

I am shocked and disappointed that I am being prosecuted by Draper City simply for standing on public property and documenting horrific animal abuse while those who perpetrated these acts are free to continue maiming and killing animals.

“It is my understanding that the Mayor of Draper co-owns this slaughterhouse.”

The slaughterhouse is indeed co-owned by Draper mayor Darrell H. Smith. …more

by Maureen Nandini Mitra – April 30, 2013

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Feds Plan to End Endangered Species Protection for Grey Wolves Across the US

Conservationists say delisting could push apex predator species back to the brink of extinction

The US Fish and Wildlife Service has drafted a plan to remove federal protection for grey wolves across most of the country — a move that would be a grave setback to nearly two decades of efforts to restore wolf populations in the United States.

Photo by courtesy USFWSProtection under the Endangered Species Act and the reintroduction of wolves in the northern
Rockies helped the wolf populations rebound in some parts of the country, but conservationists
say the species hasn't completely rebounded yet.

Earlier this month, in an effort to reach a compromise on the federal budget, House and Senate legislators added a bipartisan proposal to remove Endangered Species Act protection for grey wolves in most of the lower 48 states. The only exception, reports the LA Times, is a small cluster of about 75 Mexican grey wolves in Arizona and New Mexico. If passed, it would mean individual states would have to manage their wolf populations.

Environmental and wildlife conservation groups are dismayed, but not totally surprised, by the proposal. “There seems to be an all out war on carnivores in the last few years,” says Sharon Negri, director of Wild Futures, an Earth Island Institute project that works on carnivore and ecosystem protection. Negri, who’s been working with conservation groups across the country since the 1980s, says the proposal has more to do with politics than sound wildlife management. She says environmentalists haven’t yet managed to penetrate the “iron triangle” — a nexus of state and federal wildlife management agencies, state fish and game commissions, and hunters and anglers. “It doesn’t allow for a democratic decision-making process; our point of view is not considered,” she says.

In some ways the USFWS proposal seems an extension of the Congress’ February 2011 delisting of grey wolves in the northern Rockies from the Endangered Species Act protection, leading to renewed wolf hunts in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming even before the species had completely rebounded. (Read, “Cry, Wolf,” our Summer 2011 story on the politics behind the delisting.)

Before the 2011 delisting, the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s reintroduction of wolves to the northern Rockies in the mid-1990s appeared to be one of the greatest conservation successes in the country.  A key predator species, wolves once roamed freely throughout the United States. But by the early …more

by Maureen Nandini Mitra – April 29, 2013

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Resistance: Do the Ends Justify the Means?

Excerpts from Chapter 28 of State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible

Has the time come for a massive wave of direct action resistance to accelerating rates of environmental degradation around the world—degradation that is only getting worse due to climate change? Is a new wave of direct action resistance emerging, one similar but more widespread than that sparked by Earth First!, the first avowedly “radical” environmental group?

Photo by Elizabeth Brossa
It is not necessary to hold an anarchist or anti-civilization ideology to wonder if electoral politics, lobbying and educational efforts, or litigation-based strategies are enough.

The radical environmental movement, which was formed in the United States in 1980, controversially transformed environmental politics by engaging in and promoting civil disobedience and sabotage as environmentalist tactics. By the late 1980s and into the 1990s, when the most militant radical environmentalists adopted the Earth Liberation Front name, arson was increasingly deployed. The targets included gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles, US Forest Service and timber company offices, resorts and commercial developments expanding into wildlife habitat, and universities and corporations engaged in research creating genetically modified organisms. Examples of such militant environmentalism can be found throughout the world, and they are increasingly fused with anarchist ideologies. Given this history, the question arises as to whether direct action resistance is becoming unambiguously revolutionary, or perhaps even purposefully violent.

People attending the Earth at Risk: Building a Resistance Movement to Save the Planet conference in Berkeley, California, in November 2011 might well have thought so. Some 500 people joined this conference, which called for a new “deep green resistance” movement in response to intensifying environmental decline and increasing social inequality. The format of the conference was a scripted dialogue, or what might be called political performance art, with the writer and activist Derrick Jensen posing questions to a series of environmental activists and writers, including, most prominently, the Man Booker Prize winner from India, Arundhati Roy.

The tone of the meeting was sober and its messages radical. Succinctly put, the speakers issued the following diagnoses: Electoral politics and lobbying, as well as educational and other reformist conversion strategies that give priority to increasing awareness and changing consciousness, have been ineffective. Such strategies do not work because for 10,000 years agricultures have been established and maintained by violence. This violence has foremost targeted foraging societies (and later indigenous and poor people), nonhuman organisms, and nature itself. Fossil-fueled industrial-agricultur-al civilizations …more

by Bron Taylor – April 26, 2013

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