The environmental depredations of Trump, his Secretary of Interior and EPA Administrator should cause every high school graduate in June 2018 to emulate their predecessors of 1970 and turn out voters for Democrats this November.
Read MoreSunday was a big day, at least for me: it was both the 48th Earth Day and my grandson’s third birthday, and I hope Jamie grows up to take good care of both of us.
Read More“What makes me so nervous about the changes that are happening with rapid climate change is less where we are going than the rate we are going there.”
Read More“The land was ours before we were the land’s,” Robert Frost, The Gift Outright
Read MoreIt’s a unique combination of art and social activism, which will, I hope, cause you to reflect on the beauty and the fragility of both our endangered birds and our imperiled neighborhoods.
Read More“One man’s meat is another man’s poison.” Lucretius
Some call bureaucratic regulations “job killers” that stifle economic growth
Others call them protections that safeguard human health and the environment.
Read MoreHey! You! Get off of my Coast (with apologies to the Rolling Stones)
In these days of intense partisanship and Congressional gridlock, here’s a plan for bringing the representatives of both parties together: propose drilling for oil and gas in their coastal waters.
Take the state of Maine, for example, which has a Republican senator (Susan Collins), an Independent senator who caucuses with the Democrats (Angus King), a Republican congressman (Bruce Poliquin), and a Democratic congresswoman (Chellie Pingree). All four expressed immediate opposition to the Department of the Interior’s announcement last week to open up over 90% of the outer continental shelf to oil and gas drilling – a modest expansion over the current limit of 6%.
Only Maine’s Republican governor, Paul LePage, who loves oil even more than he loathes environmentalists, refused to condemn the proposal on its face. “The governor believes in a balanced approach,” said a spokeswoman, using a phrase that long ago became a euphemism for “drill, baby drill.” But even LePage seems prepared to oppose some drilling sites to protect the environment, commercial fishing and tourism.
And it’s not only Maine. Almost every coastal state opposes drilling off its shores, which begs the obvious question: if this is such a great idea, why are those most directly affected by it so resistant? Is this just another example of NIMBYs who want to protect their neighborhoods? Of coastal elites who are pleased to fill their tanks and furnaces with oil, gas and coal from “flyover country,” happy to pollute the Gulf of Mexico but hands off the Gulf of Maine?
Maybe it’s all a cynical plot to stick it to the blue states. After all, the red state of Florida got an exemption almost before the ink was dry on Ryan Zinke’s press release.
But maybe these states are on to something. After all, the Interior Department didn’t just vastly expand the proposed areas of drilling, it simultaneously repealed the safety regulations put in after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, while Congress didn’t see fit to renew the oil tax that funds cleaning up the oil companies’ inevitable messes – all in the name of “the most far-reaching regulatory reform in history” we keep hearing is so good for America. Yet no one who has read Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land will soon forget the environmental damage the people in Lake Charles, Louisiana, endure every single day.
My local newspaper noted that Zinke’s call to achieve “American energy dominance” conflicts with our community’s current efforts to decrease our dependence on fossil fuels.
Maybe the NIMBYs in Maine are like the canaries in the coal mines who sense the danger of poisoning the places where we live.
Maine coast on a winter evening (photo by Daniel Blaine).
But what happens when our government not only doesn’t protect us from corporate exploitation, but actually enables it?
Read MoreI lugged what seemed like the 800th load of wood to feed the fireplace’s insatiable appetite, shoveled paths to the car, the compost, and the wood pile, endured two frozen pipes, two nights without heat, and two days when the thermometer never got above single digits . . . and that was just a warm-up (if that’s the word I’m looking for) to the “Bomb Cyclone,” which was heading up the coast of Maine with sub-zero temperatures trailing in its wake.
Read MoreThe price of Senator Lisa Murkowski’s vote to approve the tax bill and reverse herself on health care was to end 57 years – dating back to the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower – of protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Like her father who preceded her as Alaska’s senator, she has been fighting for years to open up ANWR to oil and gas drilling. It looks like she will finally get her wish.
Read MoreWhen Sam Clovis, President Trump’s nominee to be the Department of Agriculture’s chief scientist, was asked to list his academic credentials in science or agriculture, he answered, “None.”
Read MoreYou run into some odd people on the Appalachian Trail (when, that is, you run into anyone at all). My daughter Gayley and I once shared a shelter with two women who were through hiking from Georgia, and we occasionally met someone heading in other direction, but for the most part we had the trail to ourselves.
Read MoreRereading A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson’s riotous account of hiking the Appalachian Trail with the delightfully curmudgeonly Katz, made me think of two things.
Read MoreNot really, of course, as it’s still summer on the Gregorian calendar. But the light has changed, as has the angle of the sun, and the color of the sea.
Read MoreThink like a mountain, Aldo Leopold exhorted us 68 years ago in A Sand County Almanac. But how does a mountain think, I wondered one recent peaceful morning in Acadia National Park, as I climbed Brown Mountain (elevation: 852 feet)?
Read MoreOn June 30, 1864, President Lincoln signed the Yosemite Land Grant, the first time the federal government had set aside land for public use and protection.
Read MoreYesterday the United States joined the only other countries that have not signed the Paris climate accord: Syria and Nicaragua.
Read MoreTomorrow my grandson, Jamie Webb, turns two years old. It’s also Earth Day’s 47th birthday and, not coincidentally, the first anniversary of the signing of the Paris Agreement on global climate change.
Read MoreSakura Park lies just east of Grant’s tomb above the Hudson River on New York’s upper west side
Read MoreIt’s fitting, I guess, that yesterday’s evisceration of Barack Obama’s environmental and climate legacy came during the anniversary week of the Exxon Valdez’s 11-million-gallon crude-oil spill into Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay.
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