Alan Gregory’s Conservation News

Sure it’s tough, financially, for most local or regional conservation organizations to fund TV spots. But the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance has done at least two.

You can view one of the spots here.

A new report says it would cost twice earlier estimates to shackle the American River upstream of Sacramento, California’s capital. The new estimate: $6 billion to $10 billion. The Sacramento Bee has the story.

What’s even more amazing is that someone somewhere is even talking about building another huge dam and shackling yet another river. Didn’t the era of the big dams end with the failure decades ago of the Teton Dam in southeastern Idaho? That someone is, of course, a politician. In this case it’s Rep. John Doolittle, the Republican congressman from Roseville, Calif.

Doolittle apparently believes that even $10 billion is chump change.

Here’s what the congressman told the newspaper: “Cost is only relevant when compared to something else. This dam will pay for itself through sale of hydropower and flood control benefits. This report doesn’t detract from the compelling need for this dam.”

Taxpayers have already been hit hard. The dam was first authorized in the mid 60s and then halted. The latest report detailing how much it would cost to finish the job and kill the river outright cost $1 million. And we thought those expensive Air Force toilets were bad.

This is the same American River that Jordan Fisher Smith wrote about in “Nature Noir.”

And here’s a nice overview of the American.

And rightfuly so. The 700-unit Adirondack Club and Resort would overwhelm Tupper Lake and the community of the same name. The Adirondack Park Agency, as this Albany Times-Union story notes, is prepared to recommend that the agency’s commissioners hold a full-blown hearing on the resort proposal.

Among the awful aspects of this project: The Franklin County Industrial Development Agency would sell bonds to foot the bill for infrastructure at the resort. That’s public financing. And it’s reminiscent of the pleas for public financing of stadiums we’ve all heard in recent years from the poor, struggling owners of pro sports franchises.

Reintroduced (to Colorado) lynx are wandering eastward into Kansas, according to this Wichita Eagle story. Meanwhile, mountain lions continue moving around, a few trekking eastward as well, but not yet into Kansas, reporter Michael Pearce’s article notes.

Here’s The Washington Post’s latest coverage of the floundering cleanup/restoration effort. Dream on, baby. What’s needed most is a complete across-the-board ban on development, coupled with mandatory zero-level dumping on lawns and farm fields of fertilizers.  No politician, especially in development-happy Pennsylvania, is likely to even mention, in public, such measures.

The Bangor Daily News up in Maine has the story about the Bush administration’s inclusion of $10M in the forthcoming budget for restoring the dam-shackled Penobscot River. The river with the second largest watershed in New England has not had sea-running Atlantic salmon since the first of its dams were erected. The plan is to remove two dams and bypass a third.

I fished the Penobscot for smallmouth bass in September 2005. And nearly camped on one of its rocky islands (until rain pushed us inside).

There are literally thousands of dams in the Northeast, shackling streams big and little. Removing even a select handful would go a long way toward restoring long-lost fisheries.

Hang around progressive-thinking conservationists in Pennsylvania long enough and invariably the discussion turns to the big what-ifs: What if mountain lions (cougars? panthers? catamounts?) and wolves (timber wolf? red wolf? gray wolf?) could again find a home here?

There’s an apparently on-going discussion about wolves taking place here.

And for the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s standard response regarding such reintroductions, read this.  In short, the wildlife agency doesn’t like the idea at all. But then the agency also has a longstanding antipathy to the word “wilderness,” especially when applied to one or more of its own “game lands.”

Ralph Maughan just posted this item to his blog, but given the topic and crying need for immediate refutation, I’m throwing it onto my blog as well. And I urge other conservation-minded bloggers to follow suit. This hysteria-whipping bit of hogwash needs to be exposed for what it is: wildlife sliming in the Swift Boat tradition.

10 percent? 15 percent? 5 percent over here, and 10 percent over there? What about floodplain forests? The high rock-and-ice country? The arid plains? 2 percent of the remaining tallgrass prairie? 5 of every 10 forested ridgelines in the Alleghenies? 40 of the Adirondacks’ 4,000-footers? Or all 46? Just how much is enough? This thought-provoking message greets casual hikers along the nature trail behind the visitor center at Bandelier National Monument in northcentral New Mexico.

The president, as this Seattle Post-Intelligencer report notes, devoted a whopping one full sentence to the topic of climate change in his “state of the union” speech the other night. Oh sure the man is concerned, believing that any one of several technological fixes will save the day and the big oil party will continue on its merry way.

From James Howard Kunstler’s cogent “grunt” page:

It was a speech that any county planning board chairman might have made, which is to say a lame defense of the status quo. Missing is the comprehension of a crisis that is gathering like a hurricane unseen from the shore but visible to anyone with rudimentary radar. This president will use every last corn kernel and every last wood chip to keep 260 million cars and trucks running. Better prepare to cut down on the Cheez Doodles, America. He wants to reduce gasoline usage by 20 percent over the next ten years. Guess what: circumstances will probably do that for us involuntarily, because the sheer amount of petroleum available to the US is certain to decline substantially by then, whether we like it or not. Real leadership would recognize this and propose making other arrangements, like getting the trains running again or ending incentives for suburban sprawl. A big tax deduction on health insurance would work for me, but what about the millions struggling to get by on WalMart global-labor-arbitrage wages with no health insurance benefits? They’re just fucked. The obvious flaw in the new Iraq initiative: it’s worse than “Vietnamization.” South Vietnam at least had a legitimate army and real police. Iraq’s army and police are shams, completely corrupted by Shia militia and other sectarian rogue forces, with no chance of imposing order on that fictive nation. Just looking at the many non-entities in the Bush cabinet sitting in the front row prompted me to realize what a sclerotic government ours has become. When was the last time the Secretary of Health and Human Services uttered a coherent public statement? Does anyone even know the names of the Secretaries of Labor or Transportation? And why don’t they have anything to say about the great issues of our day? Who, in the mainstream press, is even asking them questions?