LA Weekly

Serve an organic turkey and compost the dishes.

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I've been thinking about biology and how it relates to the Bush administration's new "harmonius" roster. It looks to me like Bush is turning the government into a monoculture, planting only one set of ideas the way farmers are warned against planting only one set of crops and Gary Chapman, who used to write great technology columns for the Los Angeles Times warned against promoting only one operating system, because it will breed viruses like a stagnant pond. (And wasn't he right?)

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I've been thinking about biology and how it relates to the Bush administration's new "harmonius" roster. It looks to me like Bush is turning the government into a monoculture, planting only one set of ideas the way farmers are warned against planting only one set of crops and Gary Chapman, who used to write great technology columns for the Los Angeles Times warned against promoting only one operating system, because it will breed viruses like a stagnant pond. (And wasn't he right?)

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This week, the National Parks Conservation Association was telling us to write to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, asking him to resolve a minor discrepancy in the Petrified Forest National Park Expansion Bill (there was a "June" were a "July" should have been) and jump-start its passage in the House.

The Wilderness Society is now asking us to contact members of congress urging them to stop drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Last April, the Natural Resources Defense Council recommended writing letters to Gov. Schwarzenegger, insisting that he preserve the roadless wilderness areas designated by the Clinton administration.

DeLay has gone on record saying the best reason to drill in ANWR is to "crack the backs" of environmentalists.

Newly re-elected (or just elected, depending on how you look at it) Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska has defined increased oil and gas exploration in her state's environmentally sensitive areas as the primary goal of her next term in the Senate.

And now Schwarzenegger has come out in favor of rolling back he roadless rule. Watch for new oil rigs in the Los Padres National Forest.

I understand there's a value to writing our legislators that goes beyond neat cause-and-effect results. But is anyone else sick and tired of writing letters to nutcases like DeLay and Murkowski?

No wonder Grist magazine readers are so pissed off.

Then again: California Attorney General Bill Lockyer is suing the feds over a plan to "manage" 11.5 million acres of the Sierra National Forest. I wrote him a letter to thank him.

And that letter I wrote to DeLay at the NPCA's urging actually worked. Now let's hope Bush signs the bill into law. And why wouldn't he? Creationists think the fossil record is on their side these days.

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"[Princeton University] graduate student Somnath Roy . . . reported that simulations of a wind farm in Oklahoma with 10,000 windmills could increase temperatures by upward of 2C for several hours in the early morning. These findings mirror an actual but previously ignored temperature rise that U.S. government meteorologist Neil Kelley observed at an actual wind farm in California in 1990."

A team of Canadian and U.S. scientists have published a report stating that, in some strange way, wind-generated power may alter the climate.

Can it be true?

Some smart guys on Slashdot say no.

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From 1951 to 1992, the U.S. government tested nuclear weapons on the Nellis Air Force Range 70 miles northwest of Mercury, Calif. In the late '90s, several wells were drilled to monitor radioactive contamination in ground water destined for Beatty and Amargosa Valley.

Earle Dixon, then a hydrogeologist consulting with the region's Community Advisory Board, worried that those testing wells wouldn't be enough. In 2002, while at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, he repeated his concerns in a report he co-authored with physicist Dennis Weber. The report has been used to bolster the argument against siting a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.

Later, he became the BLM's project manager for a cleanup operation at the Anaconda Copper Mine near Yerington, Nev.

Then, Dixon was fired.

On Wednesday, he filed a $1 million "federal whistleblower complaint" claiming his supervisors retaliated against him because he "refused to downplay the health and safety risks" at the site, according to the Associated Press. "The complaint says cleanup costs at the abandoned mine owned by Atlantic Richfield Co. have risen dramatically," the AP reports, "from an estimated $10 million or $20 million to potentially more than $200 million – as a result of research Dixon conducted or directed on dangers from uranium and other toxins."

In an interview, Dixon told the AP that "The site is an environmental compliance mess. There is nothing in compliance – not groundwater, not air, not soil. It needs to be addressed. I was trying to move forward and get it addressed and that's not what the BLM or NDEP wanted."

Here is a story about the backlog of whistleblower complaints piling up at the Office of Special Counsel, which had a bad record of keeping up with whistleblower complaints until Elaine Kaplan took it over under President Clinton.

The OSC is now headed by Scott Bloch, a Kansas lawyer Bush appointed last year who joined the OSC January for a five-year term. He was previously the Deputy Director for the Task Force on Faith-Based Community initiatives. Bloch has since become somewhat famous for removing from the OSC Web site anti-discrimination language protecting gays and lesbians. That didn't last, but there's some evidence that, while the controversy brewed, Bloch imposed a gag order on his own employees, in violation of the 1989 Whistleblower Protection Act and its subsequent amendments.

Hmmm. Why do I think Dixon doesn't have a chance?

Ask Jack Spadaro.

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I'm sort of sick of writing about, talking about and even thinking about election results. I think it's high time we celebrated something, like, say, the 10th anniversary of the Desert Protection Act, which set aside 7.7 million acres for protection, raised the status of Joshua Tree and Death Valley from monuments to parks and struck a careful compromise between recreation, habitat preservation and commercial use of the sensitive desert land. Sen. Dianne Feinstein authored it, inspiring other preservation-minded bills and land buys in the years that followed.

I didn't celebrate it on the day it happened because I was out in the streets of Scottsdale, Ariz. on Halloween dressed as a psychedelic bunny rabbit scavenging for those few rich Democrats who might be persuaded to get out to vote. Which I'm not talking about anymore for a while.

Jennifer Bowles of the Riverside Press-Enterprise has written well about the Desert Protection Act here (registration required, but if you want to, you can use judith_lewis_la@yahoo.com/password: everybody). And a couple of cool events are happening this weekend. On Friday at 7:30 p.m., Donna Charpied will give an update on the fight against the Eagle Mountain garbage dump, the Andromeda Society will get out their hi-powered telescopes (it's a new moon -- maybe you'll see the Andromeda Spiral Galaxy) and Ritmo Loco and others will play until midnight; the next day at 3 p.m. there'll be an anniversary commemoration at the visitor center in Twentynine Palms, and a 6 p.m. Anniversary Gala dinner at the Twentynine Palms Community Services Center with Huell Howser on hand for fun. Check out the Web site.

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Star Swirls

The polar ice-caps are melting, the mountain glaciers
Drip into rivers; all feed the ocean ;
Tides ebb and flow, but every year a little bit higher.
They will drown New York, they will drown London.
And this place, where I have planted trees and built a stone house,
Will be under sea. The poor trees will perish,
And little fish will flicker in and out the windows. I built it well,
Thick walls and Portland cement and gray granite,
The tower at least will hold against the sea's buffeting ; it will become
Geological, fossil and permanent.
What a pleasure it is to mix one's mind with geological
Time, or with astronomical relax it.
There is nothing like astronomy to pull the stuff out of man.
His stupid dreams and red-rooster importance : let him count the star-swirls.

-- Robinson Jeffers

The planets are putting on a great show this week.

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1. Amendment 37 passed in Colorado, requiring the state's major utilities to obtain three percent of its power from renewable energy sources by 2007, and 10 percent by 2010.

2. Measure O "seems on track to pass," says the Daily Breeze.

3. Barack Obama won his senate race in Illinois. Of course, but still.

4. Iowa Rep. Jim Leach defended his seat in the House: Republicans can be green, too.

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