Better Planet » species displacement

Palin’s Achilles Heel

Benjamin Nugent — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 18:05:55 +0000

There is much speculation about how Obama should go after Sarah Palin. If he goes after her resume—she was mayor of a town of 7,000, then the governor of a state of 680,000—that leaves him open to the absurd but potentially effective argument that these credentials are superior to those of a senator. If he goes after her evident backwardness or unusually conservative religious beliefs, the gun/bikini photo, the never traveled anywhere thing—well, we know how the clinging to guns and religion thing went over.

It seems to me you say, she thinks the melting of arctic ice isn’t caused by humans. She thinks polar bears aren’t endangered. She doesn’t think Exxon should have to pay up. All those non-radical conservatives in Colorado, Ohio, and Nevada care about this. (See this recap of her record so far). It’s not a personal attack, and it’s not just a reiteration of the tired McCain administration = Bush administration charge.

It’s just a way of making the effects of her ignorance concrete. She’s not just a smiling hick in a bathing suit holding a gun by a pool. She’s a smiling hick in a bathing suit standing on a melting iceberg.

Image: flickr/Chesi – Fotos CC

Sneaky Rollback of Endangered Species Act Draws Fire

Benjamin Nugent — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 21:57:05 +0000

The White House got caught scheming to dilute the endangered species act today, and the first volleys in a potentially fun Washington rhetoric battle have been fired. To summarize:

REPORTERS: Somebody leaked an early draft of this administration proposal to us and it says it will let the various federal agencies decide for themselves whether a road or tunnel, or whatever thing they want to build, will put rare wildlife at risk. They won’t have to consult with Fish and Wildlife anymore.

SEN. BARBARA BOXER (D-CALIF): That’s illegal. If you want to do that, you’re going to have to try to hammer legislation through congress.

LOBBYIST FOR DEVELOPERS: We just want to be able to build things faster, and right now it really sucks for us how long we have to wait before we build things.

WILDLIFE CONSERVATION GROUP: If the government lets you do that, bald eagles may die.

DEPT. OF INTERIOR BUSH UNDERLING: We know that secretly this whole wildlife thing you guys are always talking about is actually about curbing carbon emissions. You just want to find a way to help halt global warming by stopping some developments that create emissions. You are obsessed with that or something.

One potential way for greens to stop this proposal would be to try to find a legal basis on which to stall it until later in the year. If we then got Obama, he’d be able to erase the proposed Bush changes no problem because such edicts take a little while to go into effect. But if we got McCain, we’d probably be screwed on this.

Image: flickr/graybeard763

Aliens Wreak Havoc on Great Lakes Economy

Benjamin Nugent — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:33:10 +0000

If you’re a yellow perch or a walleye, native to the Great Lakes, the last fifty years have been something out of War of the Worlds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Earth Girls Are Easy et al. Strange alien species fiercer than their American and Canadian counterparts, like the Eurasian ruffe, have been arriving out of nowhere, taking your food, ruining your habitat. If you’re a smallmouth bass, the distinctly unattractive round goby, pictured below, eats your egg nests. As a result, humans in the area are suffering about $200 million worth of ecological damage every year, a new study says.

This is a matter of ocean vessels accidentally dragging species from far away into the lakes through their ballast water. A big chunk of the estimated annual loss, $123.6 million, comes from the loss of recreational fishing money—those hobbyists love the bass.

Which brings us to tourism as an important economic argument enviros can deploy. People don’t come to your lake if all it has in it is fugly nest-eaters like this guy, and people don’t come to your lake if it has toxic sludge in it.

Those “green-collar jobs” everbody’s talking about?

In a sense we’ve already got a lot of them. Despite fuel procies, tourism continues to be one of the biggest industries in places like my own California. Fine, argue that a fish doesn’t matter as much as a fisherman’s job, or an owl doesn’t matter as much as a logger’s job, but by that logic a tour guide’s job or a waiter’s job surely count for something.

Image: flickr/milesizz