Alan Gregory’s Conservation News

I typed this newspaper column a few years ago and post it here for 2008 reading.

Lots of fish and wildlife habitat has been hammered across northeastern Pennsylvania. And even the most casual of visitors to the region might wonder why more hasn’t been done to save the scrappy leftovers. It’s a great question, well deserving of an answer from the top bananas that pull the region’s economic strings.

After all, there’s more to life than a shopping sortie to the Arena Hub in Wilkes-Barre. Or a trek to motorboat haven at Lake Wallenpaupack (an artificial lake in the Poconos). Or a pilgrimage to Cabela’s, the destination “attraction” near Reading.

Some folks (quite a few, actually, given the elbow-to-elbow crowd I saw out at Lake (impoundment) Frances in Nescopeck State Park on the hatchery trout opener) actually value a more quiet, sun-in-the-face outdoors experience. Like those who founded the new organization Backcountry Hunters and Anglers.

Backcountry in the Hazleton area?

No, but we do have lots of attractions like the one that just popped up southwest of the city. It joins the list of the region’s other attractions, like “destination” Big Box stores, the ones conveniently located within shouting distance of the I-81 exit taxpayers picked up the tab for in the 1990s.

Yes neighbors, Humboldt Industrial Park is our newest attraction.

And the state Department of Transportation folks have made it official, posting a sign alongside I-81 just north of the Route 924 interchange that identifies the park of concrete, steel, plastic and asphalt as a place worthy of the ordinary tourist’s attention. How times change.

As recently as a decade ago, only theme parks in the Disney mold qualified for such billing. I don’t know what might attract sportsmen to Humboldt, though. Cartoon mascots notwithstanding, I’ve yet to see a giant oversized mouse with big black ears out there.

Besides, nearly all of the fine wild turkey, grouse and songbird habitat that once blanketed the high, rocky ground on the Humboldt ridge is gone. Developers and tax breaks took care of it. Now, as just about everyone, including the county commissioners, knows by now, ADM (Archer Daniels Midland) is coming to our newest attraction west of I-81.You may remember this big, struggling outfit. It’s the one whose revenues for fiscal year 2005 barely squeezed past the $1 billion mark, reaching only a paltry $1.04B by year’s end.

Let me repeat that. $1.04 billion.

Once upon a time, taxpayers were getting ripped off by the poverty-stricken owners of pro sports franchises – the ones who vowed to leave town at midnight unless local folks forked over gazillions to build them new stadiums with revenue-producing luxury skyboxes.

But the taxpayers caught on to the scam, telling the big shots to go ahead and skip town – and take their locker rooms with them.\But when it comes to wildlife-wrecking industrial development, no tax break seems too big.

ADM’s “net earnings for the quarter ended Dec. 31, 2005 increased 17 percent to $368 million [or] $0.56 per share from $314 million [or] $0.48 per share [in 2004].”

That’s from the company’s Web site. There are, of course, lots of other interesting and important financial data worth perusing at www.admworld.com.
The alleged “improvements” in the tax-break packages our leaders worked out for ADM are basically smoke and mirrors.

The size of the new cocoa processing plant: 500,000 square feet, or big enough to shelter a couple of B-52s and their ground maintenance crews with plenty of room left for the squadron commander.

Its footprint will include a fleet of trucks coming and going at all hours, lurching onto taxpayer-built roadways patrolled by taxpayer-paid police and maintained by taxpayer-funded highway maintenance people.

In the weeks following the much-ballyhooed announcement in 2006 that ADM was “considering” coming to Hazleton, I heard from a few people who know the real value of a forest.

But most area sportsmen kept quiet.

Most, apparently, are fine and dandy with massive habitat fragmentation and massive habitat destruction, as well as roads, power lines, fertilizer, road salt, all-terrain vehicles, sewage, dogs, cats, traffic, and all suburban blights that eliminate fish and wildlife and ruin wild country.

ADM has given lots of big-time cash over the years to politicians of all stripes. ADM was surely just being nice. They didn’t expect anything in return.Hazle Township, in welcoming ADM to town, agreed not to seek property taxes from the corporation for a decade, attaching a few minor strings to the tax-break package. The county commissioners offered a similar deal.

And the beat goes on. As one historical figure noted, “[The] best thing that ever happened to government is that people don’t think.”

The big push has been launched to drill for natural gas in a bunch of Pennsylvania counties, including Wayne and Sulivan, some of which, by the way, is among the least disturbed land in the state. Many people in Wayne, according to some of those who attended a gathering the other night, have already signed on without, I add, a good understanding of the consequences of drilling thousands of feet deep. Water is just one of the issues.e county where I live has signed on early without understanding the consequences of drilling up to 10,000 feet for natural gas.  Water is an issue.  And with water is the just of chemicals to get the gas to the surface. Federal guidelines, you see, do not require public notification of what chemicals are used.

Addionionally, the operation will run weeklong and around the lock. Access roads will be cut and/or widened for equipment; and there’ll be a 4-acre minimum of clear cutting at each site; and lagoons for the water they use.  There are no conservation guidelines for any of this.

Mmany landowners have signed on early for as little as $25 an acre.  Those who have not signed the dotted line are now being offered $2,250 an acre.  Many Wayne residents are not wealthy folks. And the industry is using this fact as leverage.

Drilling? Only so long as state conservation laws are enforced to limit environmental damage. I’ve seen what hapened to the landscape in the northcentral PA counties of Potter and Tioga once well pads were in place and churning away. And it wasn’t pretty. Not at all.

I’ve never seen any “clean” coal. And believe me, I’ve looked at a lot of stripping pits, coal banks and sediment-laden streams to know that “clean coal” does not exist. Yet, today’s edition of the New York Times contains yet another tale on the re-upped discussion about the so-called virtues of “clean coal.” Hah, hah, this article can be found at  (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/business/30coal.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1212149067-8F81DABnAReVqc86MaHX1g) and it’s right when it states : the tehnology “… may come too late to make coal compatible with limiting global warming.” Remember how execs and those with money and power (like George W. Bush) like to talk about “jobs vs. environment”? Here in northeastern Pennsylvania, I can see quite easily how mining (i.e. jobs) have ruined the landscape. The Georgia license plate I saw this morning reads “Give Wildlife a Chance.” Yet, there is less wildlife with each passing day, and all the talk of “jobs vs. all else” just keeps moving on.

The Rutland, Vermont Herald has a fine climate chnage-related editorial in today’s edition. Click here http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080529/OPINION/805290302/1038/OPINION01 to read.

Veteran conservation activist Dave Foreman now ramrods the Rewilding Institute in New Mexico (my old home state and home of the town (Albuquerque) where my dad got his PhD and taught Peace Corps volunteers things like backpacking and rappelling.  You can read Dave’s suggested conservation reading list (Books of the Big Outside) at http://rewilding.org/BoBO.pdf. The Wildlands Project, by the way, continues, its headquarters having moved to Florida from Vermont. You can look at the Rewilding Institute’s honme page at http://rewilding.org/  Take a look at the Wildlands Project’s site at http://www.wildlandsproject.org/cms/index.cfm?group_id=1000

Wyoming’s Star Tribune carried the story and Ted Williams picked it up on his Fly Rod & Rel mag blog. Here’s the gist: The so-calleed Phase III inventory, part of the 2005 Energy Policy Act, was released recently by the federal Bureau of Lnd Management. It lists the potentials  as well as the downfalls of carbon-based development. The newspaper article lists several of what it calls”obstacles” to the extraction of oil and gas resources, including environmental protection law, municipal zoning codes, private property concerns and National Park designations. It’s a five-paragraph article and the final para is devoted to a paraphrased thought from Wilderness Society attorney Nada Culver: The report is a misleading misuse of science to support Big Oil, the natural gas industry, etc. at a time when the focus should  be on investing in energy efficience, rnewables and conservation. Many members of Congress, of course, don’t care about things like that. Their focus is on pleasing campaign contributors.

The Idaho Sish and Game Department (as a young teenager I was a member of an Explorer post sponsored by the department)has decided to institute a hunting season on gray wolves, ostensibly to protect “big game” herds in the state, like elk. Read the whole sordid tale at this Web site: http://www.idahostatesman.com/newsupdates/story/389530.html

The local world of “consumption at all costs” started right on time today. First up were the beefed-up pickup trucks roaring don what used to be a simple residential street. Then the borough’s “road” crew zipped past in its light dump truck with borough decals on the side. Next up, school buses hauling kids to Valley Elementary School, Hazleton Area High School and a junior high somewhere. This is the daily transportation grind in Conyngham. Of course, hardly a soul around here walks to the post office to collec the day’s mail. I am the ex caption, I guess. Just as no one “walks”or bicycles to the Catholic Church that’s just up the street a piece. And all this happens despite gasoline now knocking on 4 bucks a gallon (for the cheapest stuff) and well over $4 for a gallon of premium.

The Jeddo Mine Tunnel is NOT a modern engineering marvel. Far from it. It’s more than a mile of underground shafts and drains much of the old anthracite mine workings underlying the city of Hazleton in southern Luzerne County, Pa. And the Jeddo releases an average of 45,000 gallons a minute of aquatic-life killing coal-tainted water into the Little Nescopeck Creek. The Little Nescopeck to the east and south of the Jeddo is a fine and small  brook trout stream. After a more than two-mile run to the west and north the Litle joins Nescopeck Creek and kills its aquatic life, including whatever trout were released into its water by the Fish and Boat Commission and still swim more than four miles downstream of Nescopeck State Park and the best remaining habitat in the watershed.

The whole things eventually flows into into the Susquehanna River at Berwick, Columbia County, Pa. In recent years, state officials and the Hazleton City Authority have considered using water from the tunnel for drinking purposes. In early 1989, however, the authority ruled out the possibility, saying that filtering the highly acidic sulfur-laden water would be too expensive.

In the early 1970s, the state considered a plan to seal the tunnel and create three lakes in the Milnesville area as part of a showcase mine reclamation project. The proposed recrational development fell through. In 1984, a Montoursville sought federal approval of a plan to study the possibility of constructing a hydroelectric power plant at the mouth of the tunnel. That project also never materialized.