Nightline Daily E-Mail

July 19, 2004

TONIGHT'S FOCUS: A battle is brewing in the West. At stake is land that is stunningly beautiful and ecologically sensitive, land that has been compared to the Serengeti for its spectacular array of wildlife, but also to Saudi Arabia because of the enormous amount of natural gas beneath it. Stepped up leasing of land for oil and gas development by the Bush Administration has brought a bonanza of profits to Rocky Mountain states like Wyoming. But the energy boom has also brought together some unusual alliances who vehemently oppose development.

The Bush Administration has expedited permits for leasing land to oil and gas developers along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains -- in Wyoming, Montana, eastern Utah, western Colorado and northern New Mexico. This area -- most of which is owned by the federal government -- is rich in natural gas, and new technology has made harvesting that gas possible. Growing demand for a clean, domesticallly produced energy source has pushed up prices, setting off a drilling bonanza.

That's been good for some, but as Nightline discovered, it's also intensely angered ranchers, sportsmen and environmentalists who worry about the effects on the wildlife and their way of life. Nightline looks at the intensive natural gas development surrounding the tiny town of Pinedale, Wyoming, nestled in the Upper Green
River Valley. The Valley is also a major migration corridor for mule deer and pronghorn antelope, who pass through on their long migration from the Grand Tetons to the high desert. The region is famous for its hunting and fishing bounty, and is home to a growing
recreational and tourist industry as well as traditional livestock ranching.

The Bureau of Land Management, part of the Department of Interior, is responsible for mediating the multiple uses of this public land. Critics charge that under the Bush Administration, energy development, in the form of thousands of new wells, has been expedited at the expense of environmental considerations. Drilling brings commerce, but with it networks of roads and truck traffic to serve the gasfields. Ranchers, hunters and fishermen have joined with environmentalists to try to slow down the pace of drilling.

Judy Muller will examine the controversy tonight and Chris Bury will talk with Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton.

We hope you'll join us.

Jay LaMonica and the Nightline Staff
Nightline Offices
ABC News Washington Bureau


Informant: Earth First!

British Columbia's oil and gas commissioner said this week that the Canadian province will sell parcels of coal-rich land north of Glacier National Park, despite U.S. concerns about the effect on water quality...

http://www.enn.com/news/2004-07-16/s_25926.asp

by BRUCE BABBITT

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/08/opinion/08BABB.html

BARROW, Alaska -- Thwarted by the public in its efforts to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, the Bush administration and the oil companies are now quietly turning their attention to the balance of the Arctic region of Alaska, all the way west to the Chukchi Sea, within sight of Siberia. In advance of its efforts, the administration has jettisoned environmental safeguards and is now threatening the traditional-use rights of the Alaska Natives who have hunted caribou and waterfowl along the Arctic slope for thousands of years.

This plan was announced in Anchorage just as Congress recessed for the Reagan funeral. Outside Alaska it has received little notice, not even for its centerpiece -- a proposal to lease rights for oil and gas development in Teshekpuk Lake, a body of water that is vital to the region. This shallow lake, which is about 30 miles across, is the biological heart of the western Arctic, the summer nesting and breeding ground for hundreds of thousands of black brant, spectacled eider, yellow-billed loons, white-fronted geese and other migratory birds that arrive here each year from 32 of the lower 48 states as well as countries as far south as Argentina.

The lake, however, isn't just for the birds. It is also a critically important subsistence area for the indigenous Inupiat communities on the Arctic slope. They go there to hunt and fish for food to sustain them through the long, dark winters.

Teshekpuk Lake lies within the western region of what is known as the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. In 1976 Congress transferred the management of the petroleum reserve to the Bureau of Land Management. But Congress also mandated protections for the wildlife and native peoples, making it clear that America's Arctic should not be transformed into another West Texas oilfield.

In 1998 the Clinton administration took the first steps to open the reserve with a two-year study involving hundreds of scientists and representatives of the Inupiat communities. Two years later the scientific teams returned with a recommendation to begin oil leasing, with stipulations for setting aside approximately 13 percent of the study area, mostly rivers and lakes, including Teshekpuk, as protected areas. They also recommended a ban on permanent roads across the fragile tundra, based upon assurances from the oil companies that they could operate with temporary winter "ice roads" that would simply melt away as summer approached and waterfowl and migratory caribou began congregating at the lake.

The Bush administration now proposes to eliminate these safeguards intended to protect the lake, the wildlife and the Inupiat who depend on it. The decision is not yet final. During the summer there will be
hearings in Anchorage and Washington. Then, Interior Secretary Gale Norton is expected to make a decision. In this land of endless summer days, there are bound to be a lot of sleepless nights.

Bruce Babbitt was secretary of the interior from 1993 to 2001.


Informant: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/08/opinion/08BABB.html

June 29, 2004

OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY by Glen Barry, Ph.D., Forests.org

Australia is experiencing ecological collapse on a continental scale. The same environmental catastrophes are playing themselves out around the world. But in Australia we see the western culture's cavalier attitude towards the environment juxtaposed upon an arid region with relatively few lush, fertile areas. In Australia's land one can seen the future, and it is not pretty. Ancient forests continue to be felled to make paper, soils are made barren by salt deposition, the Great Barrier reef is silted, and water and energy are wasted despite their scarcity. In Australia we are witnessing the effects of deforestation, climate change and water mismanagement earlier and more clearly. Horrendously wasteful over-use of land, water and the atmosphere's waste holding capacity are laying waste to a continent.

As the magnitude of the crisis unfolds, slowly the country's politicians are realizing the seriousness of the situation. But tinkering around the edges of environmental policy will not sustain Australia. Radical plans to conserve Australia (and the world's) water, forests and atmosphere are our only hope. This will include an end to industrial logging in most natural forests, abandoning marginal farmland, and making water and air use more efficient, or barring this, stopping activities that impact them.

More fundamentally, the lies of perpetual economic growth and petroleum dependent societies must be shattered. Less ambitious programs of environmental conservation are window-dressing.

Below you will find a startling overview of Australia's ecological condition, and two modest efforts to address the situation - barring development adjacent to the Daintree rainforest and a new water management system. Perhaps the Australian public and body politic are waking up?
g.b.


ITEM #1
Nothing to show but a wasteland
http://www.smh.com.au/handheld/articles/2004/06/27/1088274624705.html

ITEM #2
Drought-Hit Australia Plans to Save Ailing Rivers
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/SYD273959.htm

Australia has increased tax concessions to encourage oil exploration in the far reaches of the Great Barrier Reef, angering environmentalists who warn an oil spill could destroy the world's largest living reef system...

http://www.enn.com/news/2004-06-24/s_25185.asp

AsiaNews/SCMP

June 21, 2004

http://www.asianews.it/view.php?l=en&art=1013

BEIJING ­ Two red tides of algae have engulfed more than 5,000 sq km of the northeast sea, forming the largest toxic slick in history of Bohai sea, the area closest to Pechino, and threatening to contaminate important fishing waters.

One tide started on Friday near the mouth of the Yellow River, the mainland's second longest, affecting an area of 1,850 sq km. The other tide started on Saturday in the middle, east and north of the Bohai Sea, affecting 3,200 sq km, the State Oceanic Administration said on Tuesday.

"These red tides are a sort of biological cancer because they threaten environmental quality, aquatic life forms and even human life," said Zhao Zhangyuan, of the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences.

The toxic slicks consist of a densely populated algae bloom that breeds in abundance, and consumes urban pollution, industrial discharge, farm waste and fertiliser run-off that flows into coastal waters from rivers and streams.

Their large presence in the sea saps the water of oxygen while producing toxins that can paralyse fish and contaminate seafood. The administration urged authorities in Liaoning, Hebei, Tianjin and Shandong, which all lie along the Bohai coast, to monitor the algae and ensure all seafood was free of toxins before being sent to market.

"Red tides are just one of the environmental problems the mainland is facing. It will lead to an unimaginable disaster if no clever action is taken quickly ... and the government has been slow to act," said Mr Zhao.

Another urgent problem to solve is desertification. According to Xinhua, more than 1.7 million sq km -- 18.2 per cent of the mainland's land area -- is now classified as desert and the area is expanding at an alarming pace -- 3,464 sq km a year, compared with 2,460 sq km in 1994.

More than 730 hectares of farmland has been converted back into forest in four years as part of a project to bring the dust and sand that often whips through the city under control, Beijing forestry officials said. In order to protect population of the worst-affected areas, the government has relocated families in safer areas, as it has done for people in six districts and counties on the outskirts of Beijing, who would be relocated by 2010. Compared with last year, the number of relocated people is increased, from 480 to 2,000 of this year.

Forestry officials added 56 billion yuan had been spent since 2000 on sand-control projects in more than 70 counties and districts, like Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei and Shanxi.

Informant: NHNE

Soy testimonies---health effects of soy---(and I can vouch for this---my own daughter was diagnosed with abnormal thyroid after being on a soy heavy diet for several years.)
http://www.soyonlineservice.co.nz/soytest.htm



Soy Farmers' Dream Road May Hasten Amazon Ruin

BRAZIL: September 23, 2003

SAO PAULO, Brazil - Plans to pave a muddy road in the lower Amazon Basin should create a new soy boom in Brazil, but at a potentially high ecological price - exposing the world's richest tropical forest to destruction.

A roughly 625-mile stretch of dirt road links Brazil's soy-rich center-west, where most of its future agricultural growth will occur, to the lower Amazon River port of Santarem, the Atlantic and important export markets.

Torrential rains, however, make BR-163 and a few smaller roads virtually impassable from March through June, barring access for the soy belt to Europe and Asia via Santarem.

Conservationists fear that work to improve the road will hasten the ruin of the lower Amazon without government action to contain illegal logging and land invasions.

But President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is under pressure to fulfill campaign promises to create jobs and boost an economy that slipped into recession in the second quarter of 2003, while keeping a lid on fiscal spending.

The government has written the paving of BR-163 into its development plan as part of a program to stimulate exports.

A consortium of companies, including oil giant Petrobras and multinational grain broker Cargill, are so convinced the road would generate growth and profit that they are discussing funding the development of BR-163 out of their own pockets.

Jose Luiz Glaser, Cargill's director of soy in Brazil, pointed out that BR-163 had been in the government's development plans for many years but no improvement of the road has been carried out.

SOY EXPORT TERMINAL

"It is a project that will happen - but I think it will take three to six years," said Glaser, who added that the company is conducting a viability study on improving the road.

In April, Cargill opened a $20 million soy export terminal in Santarem with a capacity to move 800,000 tonnes of soy a year, most of which the company expects to come from the center-west - via BR-163.

Soy is the country's top farm export and should account for 10 percent of trade revenues in 2003. Brazil accounts for 25 percent of the world's soy after the United States, but should overtake its northern counterpart as the top soy producer in the next five to seven years at current growth rates.

Agriculture is one of the main engines of the Brazilian economy and, in future, most of the growth in the sector will come from the underdeveloped center-west savanna and other equatorial regions in the north and northeast.

Despite advantages such as seemingly endless, cheap, arable land and abundant water, Brazil's fertile center-west savanna has neither developed sufficient highways, integrated railways nor river barge systems like the United States and Europe.

"This road will be the spine of agricultural and economic development from the center-west to the Free Trade Zone in Manaus (upriver on the Amazon)," said Dilceu Dal'Basco, state representative in Mato Grosso, Brazil's top soy state.

The port is three days closer to Brazil's main soy markets in Europe and Asia than ports in the industrialized south. Freight costs from central Mato Grosso to Rotterdam would fall 20 percent, according to Transportation Ministry data.

"Agriculture would not be the only area to benefit," said Jony Lopes, coordinator of planning at the Transportation Ministry's infrastructure department.

He said goods coming from the Free Trade Zone in Manaus would halve travel time to the main markets in the south of Brazil and cut freight costs by 30 percent.

AMAZON EXPOSED

Deforestation of the Amazon, home to up to 30 percent of the planet's animal and plant species, jumped an alarming 40 percent last year, the Environmental Ministry said recently.

Even talk of paving the road, which often has potholes big enough to swallow cars, undermines the forest's survival.

"Just the possibility of the work spurs many of the poor to move on to the land along the road with the dream of being a soy farmer," said Roberto Smeraldi, who heads a group of international experts charged with advising Brazil and rich countries that fund Amazon conservation efforts.

Historically, when Brazil has faced the complex problem of creating economic growth to alleviate poverty while respecting the environment, the Amazon has remained an afterthought to the national agenda, said Violeta Loureiro, professor of sociology at the Federal University of Para.

"Soy is just another bulk commodity export," she said. "This is our history - exporting primary products like rubber, coffee and sugar that offer unreliable returns. Why not explore the medium term potential in the region's rich biodiversity?"

"The problem, which is not going away soon, is Brazil lacks the resources - the fiscal budget - to develop and protect these assets," Loureiro said.


Story by Reese Ewing

REUTERS NEWS SERVICE

http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/22323/story.htm


Informant: Bea Bernhausen

Quelle: http://ecolog.twoday.net/stories/246455/