Alan Gregory’s Conservation News

I wrote this letter to the editor of the Hazleton-Pa., newsppaper yesterday. The proposed cargo airport would destroy at least 5,000 acres of Pennsylvania forest while enriching the pockets of a few select bidness leaders.

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Letter to the editor                                      27 June 2008

The Standard-Speaker

Hazleton PA 18201

Editor:

This proposed cargo airport would not have made much sense 30 years ago, and today it amounts to little else —  a millions-of-dollars boondoggle to be paid for by taxpayers. The nation is running out of petroleum and its byproducts, including automobile gasoline, and here’s the Hazleton area daydreaming of yet another mindless tool to use up gasoline while also wrecking thousands of acres of Pennsylvania forest. (The powers-that-be would win a lot more public opinion poll votes if they simply transferred ownership of the land to the Pennsylvania Game Commission, or at very least, put a conservation easement on the property. Now that would create a real community asset).

The New York Times a few days ago featured a lengthy article noting how Americans are fleeing suburbia and their trophy homes of three- and four-car garages for urban homes in order to cut back on their automobile and living expenses. But this notion seems to have flown by some folks around here.

Construction of the airport would not only cost us taxpayers a heck of a lot of money, but would also involve enormous transformations in the very landscape that God bequeathed us, including the filling of a huge gorge. Some contractor would make a big bundle, in the many gazillions of dollars range, just to move millions of cubic yards of earth around and get the remaining bare dirt ready for paving into a runway. And the Catawissa Creek would be transformed from a scenic waterway into a storm water runoff zoo.

And while spending money for this make-work project, we taxpayers would get a mere pittance to help our communities and neighborhoods become friendlier to walkers, bicyclists and others who don’t relish the idea of spending more to keep their family cars fueled up.
So, here we are at another crossroads. Do we turn left and destroy another landscape, or turn right and do the best thing?

A repot earlier this decade focused on the white-tailed deer populations in Kentucky and Ohio, but the basic underlying issue in those two states is the same as that faced by Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia and at least the southern tier of New York State: There are too many of these ungulates.

Compounding the question of what to do with herds that are eating their own home while wrecking those of countless other species, especially forest-interior songbirds, is the declining numbers of hunters. In Pennsylvania, license sales in the fall of 2006 kaggeed about 4 percent behind 2005, even as the firearms season approached. The high-water mark for hunting license sales in the Keystone State was 1981 when one million-plus licenses were sold through the Pennsylvania Game Commission and its vendors. In the fall of 2006 – the sale, spread across 15 resident and nonresident license categories, was about 750,000.

Meanwhile, some 1.7 million deer were moving across the landscape in that year. And not just in forested areas. Deer are at extremely high densities in some suburban locales, so much so, in fact, that boroughs and townships are hiring sharpshooters to thin these local herds.

But the decline in license sales is particularly troublesome for the wildlife agency that gets all of its operating dollars from those sales.

Pennsylvania, and other states, would do well to acknowledge that hunting is no longer the rich tradition it once was and find alternative ways to augment the funding of their wildlife agencies.

One outstanding case study is Missouri, where the Department of Conservation gets around $80 million annually through a conservation sales tax (one-eighth of one percent of the state’s sales tax). In easy English, this means for every $1,000 spent on taxable items, $1.25 is earmarked for conservation of Missouri’s fish, forests and wildlife.

On Monday morning, June 23, the U.S. Conference of Mayors passed and adopted a resolution urging that bicycling should be integrated into the United States’ transportation, climate, energy and health policy initiatives. The resolution got widespread support from the mayors, including more than 25 mayors who signed on as co-sponsors. Chris Koos, the mayor of Normal, Ill., originated the popular resolution. Meanwhile, I continue to hear only the usual blather from pols in Washington, D.C.

George and John McCain want us to believe that we can just drill our way out of the present oil-and-gasoline crisis. Bush even appeared in the Rose Garden on Wednesday to urge Congress to open up offshore and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.

A congressman Last week disputed the notion that the oil companies lack access to federal lands for oil exploration and extraction. And he’s right. Oil companies already have leases on more than 90 million acres of federal land, offshore and on land. About three-quarters of that acreage — or about 68 million acres — is lying unexplored for petroleum resources.

Further, the federal Mineral Management Service tells us that four-fifths of the 89 billion barrels of oil estimated to lie offshore is already open to industry.

Congress enacted moratoriums on drilling in some areas to protect water and coastlines in certain sensitive regions, and the George’s dad augmented those moratoriums with his own executive ordersfollowing the Exxon Valdez oil disaster in 1990. Even with those moratoriums in place, it turns out the oil companies have ample land on which to drill and extract oil. So why are they pressing for even more land? Damn god question. Perhaps John McCain knows the answer.

“The real philanthropists in our society are the people who work for less than they can actually live on . . . So that people like you can be dressed well and fed cheaply.”

Barbarah Ehrenreich quoted in The American Ruling Class (film, 2006)

The longer gasoline prices stay in the stratosphere, friends, the more pressure we’ll feel to roll over and let Big Oil companies drill in the last wild places we look after, like the Rocky Mountain Front and the Wyoming Range–and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, of course, which our lame duck leader George W. has been touting again of late.

Or maybe those in control, like GW, have finally pushed us past our tipping point on purpose to get the green light to drill everywhere? If so I bet they’ve bitten off a bad strategy. I seriously doubt $5 gas will make us open our last precious places to fossil fuel drilling and is, in fact, more likely to foreshadow the demise of the internal combustion engine.

What should we really be doing?

Making our towns, cities and neighborhoods more friendly to walking and bicycling.  Making public transportation happen in timely, accommodating fashion. And beefing up the mileage ratings of every darn new car to leave Detroit or any other auto-making place.

For an excellent guide to wildlife conservation activism, go here (http://bigwildlife.weebly.com/guide-to-taking-action.html

I’ve hiked in quite a few places. Living in Boise in the late 70s gave me quick access to the Fohills, Bogus Basin and Idaho City and some wonderful Ponderosa pines, stellers jays and western warblers. Living in South Korea gave me easy access to a beach along the eastern shore and when I go to Plattsburgh, N.Y., home was on the upward shore of Lake Champlain and a wonderful trail. I love upstate New York and the Adirondack Park and its many, many trails, some cross-country routes, some routes to the tops of wonderful peaks like Giant Mountain, Hurricane Mountain, Mount Marcy, Whiteface Mountain and the Sawteeth. Great and wide-open expanses of Eastern deciduous forest with spruce, white pines and other conifers providing diversity. I lived for a time in Keesville, N.Y., which meant a 30-minute commute to the Air Force base and the workplace (the public affairs office of the 380rh Bombardment Wing. The base has been shuttered now for quite a few years, and the duplex in which we lived – on the base – is probably now gone. But the New York-Vermont ferries are alive and well and the Adirondack trail system remains. Hiking in the Adirondacks gives one a chance to be a part of, and enjoy, the forest which we have largely destroyed elsewhere.

Like the product of Eastern makers, Northeastern plant lovers have their own specialty labels. In Vermont, the sugar maple is a favorite of both local syrup lovers and tourists. At orktown, Va., the paw paw trees grow a wonderful banana-tasting fruit znc tulip trees go big and tall, easily exceeding 100 fweet in height. Some smart folks have figured out that promoting species native to their regions and surrounding states is both a conservation tool and a way of selling a region’s natural areas to the visitor from afar.

It is a crying shame that native plants are not stocked more by Pennsylvania.

With gas pricesoline soaring daily to new heights, many myths and fables are floating around regarding what are responsible and wishful solutions. One myth (from the Big Bidness group) that keeps moving around among people who should know better is that oil is experiencing a speculative bubble and will someday burst. This is misplaced optimism, friends and fellow countrymen.

While speculation exists, the main problem is that oil, or more specifically “sweet” crude, is peaking and in decline. There is just plainly not enough sweet crude out there, whether in the Arctic or Middle East, to keep up with the growing demand. Make-believe solutions such as tar sands and shale deposits cannot feasibly meet a world demand of 121 million barrels per day by 2025.

And now we’re hearing the “attempting to drill at home” calls from stupid politicians. This will not change anything either, as quantities are slim and the market is global. Growing alternatives such as corn for ethanol competes with food needs, although cutting meat consumption would stretch cropland supplies to the breaking point (as growers struggle to keep up with rising gasoline costs). Cellulosic-based fuels are smarter, but care must be paid to input requirements.

The number one solution tools to start using, right now, are efficiency and consumption control. Bicycling and walking are key, along with public transportation. Of course, local, county and state governments must invest in public infrastructure needs, like crosswalks and bicycle lanes, while skipping phony “big” projects like new airports that would serve, at best, a mere handful of customers while decimating the human and wildlife communities.