Alan Gregory’s Conservation News

The Anchorage Daily News refers to the refuge in the shorthand “ANWR” in this article. In any case, Ted Stevens, the senior U.S. senator from Alaska, just won’t give up on pushing to open the refuge to oil exploration. This guy never heard of the word “conservation.”

His latest plan? Lift the drilling ban and make the refuge part of the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve.

Let’s be clear on two points:

1. There’s likely not enough oil under the refuge’s coastal plain to fuel even half of the nation’s fleet of SUVs for one year.

2. The best legislative approach to take with the refuge is to designate all of it wilderness.

A wetland pool at Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge, Delaware. Photo copyright Alan Gregory

The Los Angeles Times (reporter Tom Reiterman) carried this localized version today of a story that broke in early January: the severe underfunding of the National Wildlife Refuge System.

Among the article’s highlights:

The San Luis National Wildlife Refuge Complex (three refuges under one management hat) continues to operate out of leased office space in a strip mall some 12 miles from the nearest refuge property.

More than 225 jobs at refuges were cut between fiscal 2004 and 2006, leaving some refuges with no employees. Many refuges operate without full-time law enforcement. Some are losing battles against invasive plant species that choke out wildlife habitat. Education programs for schoolchildren and others are being curtailed or dropped at some refuges. At the 1.5-million-acre Desert National Wildlife Refuge, the largest in the lower 48 states, there is no money to fix a washed-out stretch of a 75-mile dirt road from Las Vegas across the Mojave Desert in Nevada. Some visitors insist on driving through the closed section and get stranded. “I just hope someone does not die before I have the opportunity to have it fixed,” manager Amy Sprunger said.

Another 240 field jobs are scheduled to be cut as the system enters another budget cycle.

And in the Southeast, the flat budget means cutbacks in the red wolf reintroduction program.

Many of our 500-plus refuges are among the most heavily visited fish and wildlife enclaves in North America. It is shameful that the Refuge System is treated in this fashion.

Chuck Pezeshki’s op-ed column, posted this morning to Ted Williams’ Conservation Connection blog, first appeared in the Moscow-Pullman Daily News of north Idaho.

The introduction to Chuck’s article:

The latest scandal coming out of Idaho, ecologically speaking, is Butch Otter’s publicly displayed bloodlust for shooting endangered wolves in Idaho. With such public pronouncements, he is putting undue pressure on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to de-list the wolf from the Endangered Species Act, and the protections it provides.

Amazing that guys like Butchy Otter — living in one of the most beautiful places in North America — continually try and trash the very thing that sustains their state. Amazing.

(Visit Chuck’s photo page).

I posted a note about this recently, but I want to revisit it today. BRT Insights - Whitewater Kayaking has posted additional information about the proposed Auburn Dam on California’s American River. Let’s start with this concise overview of the risk to downstream residents of a new dam on the American. Professors Tony Finnery and Jimmy L. Spearow, in their article, note the following:

An even worse man-made disaster would threaten Sacramento if an Auburn Dam is built. Because there are no more good dam sites in the region, the original Auburn Dam was being built at a risky location within the Bear Mountain fault zone. When the northward extension of this fault ruptured near Oroville in 1975, causing a magnitude 5.7 earthquake, construction was halted in Auburn.

And note this as well:

A Bureau of Reclamation study in 1980 confirmed this scenario, predicting that a failure of an Auburn Dam, when full, would send a nightmare wave surging across the Sacramento metropolitan area, topping the Folsom Dam within five minutes, then sweeping 70 feet over the Nimbus Dam. It would hit the federal building on Cottage Way in one hour and 40 minutes, peaking at 46-feet deep. The flood would hit the Capitol building in two hours and six minutes, peaking at 40 feet. Such deep and turbulent flood waters likely would overtop and destroy many houses, lowering chances of rooftop survival.

Rivers are critical for our environment, wildlife habitat, recreation, drinking water, irrigation water and flood control. Water development projects should be scrutinized carefully to minimize environmental impacts and use taxpayer dollars efficiently.

Why is that so hard for some folks to comprehend?

Because, as BRT Insights notes:

An Auburn Dam porkbarrel project would enrich a few contractors who would build it, a few landowners whose property would be along the shore of a new reservoir, and a few more landowners who could develop housing subdivisions based on water from a new reservoir. These few powerful people will continue to fight for their porkbarrel project forever with the help of local politicians who are willing to work against the greater public good.

Here’s the West Branch Ausable River running along the flank of Whiteface Mountain through the McKenzie Mountain Wilderness in New York’s Adirondack Park in October 2006. This section of the wild river is catch-and-release only, ranking in the top tier of fly-fishing streams in the East. Peregine falcons nest on cliff ledges overlooking the Wilmington Notch just downstream from this spot.

This is what Eastern wilderness is all about — rocky, wet, and rich in diversity and wildness.

I used to perform Air Force Reserve duty down in the Hampton, Va., area (Langley AFB), and I still follow the goings-on down there. The Newport News Daily Press reported the other day on mercury contamination in fish.

An excerpt from Patrick Lynch’s report:

“Testing for mercury in fish tissue the past few years has revealed a startling problem: Remote rivers in Southeastern Virginia, even the supposedly ‘pristine’ Dragon Run, are tainted with the toxic metal. Now a new study will seek to learn more about mercury sources in Virginia and whether the state’s regulations on mercury emissions need to be tweaked.”

I wouldn’t eat any fish caught in Pennsylvania waters either. The contamination is just too great. Consumption advisories, first issued more than a decade ago by the state Department of Health, are renewed annually with only minor changes — usually more stringent guidelines.

You can read Pennsylvania’s 2007 consumption advisory here.

When I was catching cutthroats out of a mountain stream in central Idaho half a lifetime ago, we always kept a few for breakfast. Those days are long gone. Our industrial “economy” is to blame. What would Teddy say about that?

It’s snowing lightly in eastern Pennsylvania — a fresh inch of powder on top of old, crusty snow leftover from the big Valentine’s Day storm. Even so, resident songbirds, like this song sparrow, are establishing breeding territories.

The tale of Jim Zumbo, late of the hook-and-bullet rag “Outdoor Life,” has flowed onto the pages of The Washington Post. Fly here to read Blaine Harden’s report on Zumbo’s blog remarks and his subsequent firing from the gutless NRA-chummy “Outdoor Life” — a magazine where boring readers comes first and caving into NRA-sponsored pressure is a close second.

Just for the fun of it, you can read the magazine’s cop-out piece right here.

Then, zip over here to read a careful overview of the controversy that Mark Henckel wrote for The Billings (Mont.) Gazette. And to read an on-going thread about the free-speech debacle, check out Ted Williams’ blog here.

What’s Zumbo’s “crime” as perceived by the gun mafia? Having the guts to note, on his “Outdoor Life” blog, that assault rifles have no place in fair-chase hunting, referring to certain firearms as “terrorist” rifles that don’t belong in a true outdoorsman’s hands.

Zumbo, in part, said this:

“Sorry, folks, in my humble opinion, these things have no place in hunting. We don’t need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them, which is an obvious concern. I’ve always been comfortable with the statement that hunters don’t use assault rifles. We’ve always been proud of our ’sporting firearms.’”

“Outdoor Life” consistently points out its steadfast support for the Second Amendment. But guess what? It just trashed the First Amendment.

No one inside the District of Columbia Beltway thought to ask, much less think about, what a 700-mile-long 15-foot-high fence on the U.S.-Mexico border might do to wildlife before voting on the Secure Fence Act of 2006.

That’s the anti-illegal immigration law ordering the building of the fence along the border. Of course the border region is home to a whole ark of rare, fleeting and uncommon wildlife species: desert bighorn sheep, ocelot, jaguarundi among them. Close off the cross-border migration corridor, though, and you have just physically stopped cross-border wildlife migration.

Ted Kerasote, in this New York Times op-ed published Saturday, gives the fence — 83 miles of which have already been constructed — its long-overdue scrutiny.

As usual, a bunch of politicians have voted to enhance their re-election prospects rather than voting to do the right thing.

Global warming will worsen drought and reduce flows on the Colorado River, a key water source for Southern California and six other Western states, according to a report released Wednesday and reported on by the Los Angeles Times.

An excerpt from Betina Boxall’s report:

“The basin is going to face increasingly costly, controversial and unavoidable trade-off choices,” said Ernest Smerdon, who chaired the panel of academicians and scientists who wrote the report. “Increasing demands are impeding the region’s ability to cope with droughts and water shortages.”