LA Weekly

If the Bush administration gets its way with the wilderness again, there'll be no more public-comment period before the U.S. Forest Service decides to lease your local national forest to a ski resort, golf course or oil company. By executive order on December 22 (nice timing!), Bush decided to dismantle the National Environmental Policy Act, which since Nixon (goddamn enviro!) signed it into law in 1970, guarantees the public a voice in the management of public lands. Write now or forever hold your peace.

(Then again, think of all the trees we'll save by eliminating those pesky environmental impact statements!)

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The Wall Street Journal, for which you need a pricey subscription, is running excellent coverage of the tsunami aftermath. Today there's an article detailing, without speculation, exactly how urgent the clean water problem is in India and Sri Lanka:

"In his makeshift clinic on the west coast of Sri Lanka, Dr. Thusitha Ranasinghe has seen a disturbing change in the sort of patients seeking his help. In the days immediately following Sunday's tsunami, which knocked over most of the seaside huts in the town of Modara, people came in mostly with cuts and scratches. Now, he says, many are seeking treatment for intestinal problems.

'Two days ago there were no diarrhea cases," but now about one in five have the disorder, he says. The reason: "There is no clean water here.'

The gist of the story is that because the tsunami either displaced fresh water with undrinkable salt water or swept sewage into wells, perhaps many as a million people have no supplies of drinking water, making them vulnerable to a raft of water-borne diseases.

"Evidence of how critical the issue has become was abundant yesterday. In Indonesia's remote Aceh region, witnesses reported cases of diarrhea among refugees whose thirst compelled them to drink from roadside ditches. In southern India, security forces and aid workers fanned out to drop chlorine tablets in water tanks. And in the Maldives, people celebrated a sudden rain storm that delivered a temporary supply of potable water as the islands' stranded tsunami survivors await international aid.

David Nabarro, director of the crisis operations at the World Health Organization in Geneva, said cases of diarrhea and dehydration typically shoot upward about one week after catastrophes.

'I don't think anybody knows how many lives are at risk,' Dr. Nabarro said. 'My feeling is that there may be as many as five million people whose lives are very badly affected by this catastrophe. It wouldn't be an unreasonable thing to consider 50,000 people succumbing if we don't take very fast and focused action.'"

Steve Lopez' column in this morning's LA Times gives good advice on how to help.

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Cheese and Crackers has an extensive list of links to photographs and videos of the tsunami tragedy.

CheinsSansFrontiers is an extremely informative blog from Sri Lanka. Many stories and links to useful information.

Bangkok's The Nation daily has a story on why Thailand's beach resorts weren't warned.

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"A tsunami, when it approaches, is silent. A brown mass of water billowing towards the bedroom where I and my partner, Robert, were sitting on the bed in Khao Lak, in Phang Nga province just north of Phuket in Thailand."

Alexa Moses' first-person account of surviving the tsunami, in the Sydney Morning Herald. It's written in particularly unadorned prose, which makes it all the more affecting.

I note that this is a tourist's account, but those are the only reports I've found so far in English.

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Michael Crichton has a new book out called State of Fear, in which the nefarious villains are environmentalists who provoke a deadly tsunami as a marketing stunt. I ordered the book from Amazon, and it arrived the same day the death toll from the most deadly tsunami in history rose to 22,000. Crichton has always had a prescient streak -- Disclosure, remember, preceded the Clinton-Lewisnky affair -- but this is just too weird.

I haven't read much of the book yet, but I've read some interview and speeches Crichton has given recently. And I find it interesting that Crichton has traveled so much, written so much, accomplished so much and learned so much and yet evidently had so little contact with the people who call themselves environmentalists -- the people he describes are loony idealogues, fundamentalist powermongers. I don't recognize them. I also find it fascinating that he believes in the things he believes in so dogmatically, when that's what he says he's trying to combat in the environmental movement.

Life is too short to bicker with everything Crichton has been dragging out to defend his book (which is starting to seem like the point of his writing it), but I want to address this one issue he put forward at the Commonwealth Club in September, because I know it's a popular one with the libertarians Crichton hangs with. To wit:

"I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn't carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world."

The real fantasy is the one that somehow persists among the Reason magazine set that DDT, a long-lingering pesticide (it can still be detected in some mother's milk, over three decades after it was banned) known to cause thinning in the eggshells of raptors (including the bald eagle), would eliminate all mosquito-borne illness, including malaria. But it just isn't true.

For one thing, DDT is still being used in certain developing nations where the public health threat from mosquito-borne illness is greater than the health risks from DDT.

For another, both the malaria parasite and the insects that transmit it mutate rapidly. The mosquitos quickly adapt to resist widely used insecticides (including DDT); the drugs developed to treat the malarial parasite, including chloroquine -- the cheapest, and therefore the only, drug used to treat malaria patients in sub-Saharan Africa, where the vast majority malaria deaths occur -- stop working. The World Health Organization recognized in 1969, well before the ban of DDT, that malaira would be impossible to eradicate.

Malaria and other mosquito-borne illnesses pose a huge public health threat for the regions recently devastated by the tsunami. But DDT won't save them. A rigorous, complex, multi-pronged public health program might help.

In the evolutionary battle to survive toxins in the environment, the insects, as a species, will always win. They just adapt faster. What kills us slowly strengthens them significantly in only a generation -- and a generation for them is a day.

Write a thriller about that, Mr. Crichton.

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Some weird bug hit me on the way back from Costa Rica, which I've since given to all my friends and family back here in L.A. Happy holidays. It was the kind of illness that makes you think a lot about air quality (in Costa Rica: poor, at least in the neighborhood I lived in).

Anyway: While I was down with this thing, I listened to the L.A. mayoral candidate debate on the environment, broadcast on KPFK, and found it to be a predictable bore; mostly because everyone's an environmentalist in Los Angeles. Even Bob Hertzberg wants to "electrify those trains" running through the Alameda Corridor. Much more fascinating was the post-debate discussion with Lila Garrett and Tom Hayden, with callers demanding to know why the debate hadn't touched on "black-on-black violence" and the inadequate training of local security guards, who "couldn't tell a terrorist from Pollyanna," according to one caller. Hayden and Garrett patiently reminded the callers the event was sponsored by the League of Conservation Voters so the candidates would talk about the environment.

Blogger Mack Reed has documented the whole thing here. I recommend skimming for the Richard Alarcon parts. I know everybody liked the Parks quote about answers and no solutions, but I preferred the state senator from the San Fernando Valley's "We can stand up to President Bush and his environmental policies." No, it doesn't sing, but it was bold.

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I've been following with interest San Diego developer Irving Okovita's lawsuit against environmental activist Sandy Steers, along with Gene Zimmerman, Robin Eliason and her husband Scott of the U.S. Forest Service. Last week's LA Times story on the suit, which invokes RICO against environmental watchdogging, is here, and the Daily Kos has a worthwhile thread on the issue going, too.

Basically, the suit alleges that the Eliasons, Zimmerman and Sandy Steers, a local environmental activist, engaged in a criminal conspiracy to a luxury condominium project Okovita has planned for Fawnskin, the little town on north shore of Big Bear Lake, nearly a critical bald eagle wintering habitat already ravaged by drought and bark beetle infestation. The Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics (What do you mean? Aren't they all?) is trying to scare up defense funds as the Justice Department has so far refused to step up.

I can't imagine the won't be dismissed as frivolous when it goes to court next month, but Okovita's approach brings to light some challenges facing environmentalists trying to preserve the Endangered Species Act -- that he can even consider such action indicates something's gone terribly wrong in our collective thinking about habitat preservation, which has been ridiculed by the "Wise Use" people as a showdown between man and beast. Really the whole idea should have been, and always was, to preserve the earth for humans by first paying attention to the well-being of the creatures we share the planet with. We protect endangered snail darters because it ultimately stops us well short of endangering ourselves. We banned DDT because it was weakening the eggshells of bald eagles, only imagining what effect the long-lingering residue of this pesticide would have on us.

A reasonably good article on the history of the ESA is online at Open Spaces magazine.

Speaking of: I was hacking and sneezing over the holidays, I read the entire October 2001 "Oil and Gas Leasing Study" for the Los Padres National Forest. These things amaze me: Pages and pages of impending disasters, vividly detailed and casually dismissed. More on that to come.

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Friday night I treated myself to a night at Si Como No, a "green hotel" that heats its water with solar energy and recycles all its water into the landscape. It's part of an association of "sustainable tourism" hotels across Costa Rica. The rooms are full of signs reminding you to turn off the lights and limit your water use.

I'm sure it's an improvement over other developments in the region, but it still seemed to me like an awful lot of concrete and asphalt had been spread over a perenially wet landscape, which can't be good. Why not dirt paths and bioswales? Even the balustrades are concrete sculpted to look like bamboo. It's odd, because there's bamboo everywhere here -- it's a renewable resource, and non-indigenous to this lanscape. Why not use it?

A lot of wildlife hangs out there, though. I nearly tripped over an iguana. And it sure is beautiful. I watched a wild thunderstorm from the bar. And I the morning, from my concrete balcony jutting out into the jungle, I watched the capuchin (cara blanca here, for their white faces) monkeys play for an hour. You can tell they're there by the way the trees are bouncing.

The hotel's owner is from Hollywood; I'm hoping to get a chance to talk to him before I go home.

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Four or five days ago at the Costa Verde Hotel, the monkeys arrived at 5 p.m. I watched them hop on the bar and try to steal bananas off the counter. I took pictures of them lounging in the chair next to me.

I have since found this to be a reliable place to see the endangered squirrel monkeys (monos titis) in the evening -- at 5 p.m. on the dot, actually. When I wondered why that was, I learned from a woman in another nature reserve that there was a time when they used to feed the monkeys at that hotel. They stopped a long time ago, but the monkeys have never forgotten it, and still come back for food.

All over Quepos and Manuel Antonio, you can find signs listing "seven reasons not to feed the monkeys." They become dependent on human food, which makes them aggressive; white bread and french fries aren't good for them (and neither, as it turns out, are too many bananas); it pulls the monkeys into human territory where they're more likely to get hit by cars and electrocuted. They do a better job here of raising public awareness about animal feeding than most national parks do in the U.S. -- I've seen more people feed coyotes in Joshua Tree than I've seen tourists here feeding monkeys. In fact, I haven't seen any.

Last night, however, I was considering staying for the night at Hotel Villabosque, a little place right on the boundary of the national park, where I'd seen sloths and iguanas. I climbed up to their balcony in the evening, and the monkeys were plentiful and wild. I expected them to be scared of me, but instead it was the other way around -- there were so many of them I couldn't get back down the stairs, and only narrowly escaped one that was aiming to jump on my head.

When I finally got downstairs, I asked the bartender whether there was ever a problem with the monkeys. Do they bite? Do they land on humans? "There's no problem," he told me. "They land on you sometimes, but it doesn't hurt and they never bite. When you feed them, they will sit on your arm."

A few minutes later, I went back upstairs to watch them, and saw this bartender with a bag of bread in his hand, surrounded by a flock of monkeys.

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The monkeys that live in Manuel Antonio National Park, just south of Quepos, Costa Rica, are declining in numbers not just because of their genetic isolation, but because they can't deal with civilization. As the town builds up around them, they get electrocuted on the wires, flattened in the road, even hit by bicycles (that's according to David D'Amore, the director of the school I'm attending, Escuela De Idiomas D'Amore).

Last night I stayed in a hotel that sponsors a group called "Kids Saving the Rainforest"; so far, they've built seven monkey bridges that span the road that runs from Quepos to the park. Evidently that's one of the better places to see the titis and capuchins that live around here -- sometimes they even frequent the hotels. But I stared at a bridge today for a half hour. No tengo suerte.

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The Smog Blog is reporting this morning that, after several days of deteriorating air quality, Fresno is under code red. Most of the "haze" is particulate matter -- dust and smoke from farms and their trucks.

Big agriculture and industry been fighting efforts to clean up the San Joquin Valley's air quality for years (with some help, it seems, from the San Joquin Valley Air Pollution Control District), on the grounds that it's bad for the region's business climate.

I like the American Lung Association's slogan: "When you can't breathe, nothing else matters."

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I'm leaving Saturday to study Spanish for two weeks in Costa Rica. When I'm not in school, I'm planning to spend a lot of time in Manuel Antonio National Park counting monkeys and sloths. I've heard the monkey population is dwindling because, just like so habitat sanctuaries here, the park has become genetically sealed as hotels have popped up around its borders, blocking off migration corridors.

The squirrel and capuchin monkeys will also steal your lunch while you swim; as a result of their thievery and humans' desire to feed them (even though it's illegal), they've been suffering heart problems and high cholesterol.

Still, it oughta be fun. I'm going to see if I can set up an interview or two with Grace Wong, one of the park's wildlife managers, or Jose Salazar, the park's director, about the corridor problem. It's an issue here, and a metaphor everywhere: Healthy wildlands are all about connectivity.

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Santa Barbara drinks its water. Condors recover in its forests. Astronomers gather on its highest peak to watch meteor showers.

But for a while now, the Bush administration and its energy-company allies have been angling to tear up the Los Padres National Forest for its oil and gas.

I first found out about it three years ago, when I walked into the Patagonia store in Santa Monica and was asked to sign a petition banning energy exploration in the Los Padres. I couldn't quite believe it could happen then, and I can't quite believe it now.

But last summer, soon-to-be-ex-Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman proposed rolling back the roadless rule put in place by Clinton just before he left office in January 2001. That law set aside 58.5 million acres of roadless wilderness in the nation's forests. It wasn't just an aesthetic thing -- not buildling roads meant not cutting down trees, not exploring for oil and gas, not tearing up landscapes and habitats for commercial interests. 4.4 million acres of that land is in California.

Timber, mining and energy companies, naturally, hated that rule. As does the pro-development, pro-industry, tear-off-the-top-of-a-mountain-to-get-at-the-coal-friendly Bush administration. Now it wants to open up 34 million acres to road-building and development.

Schwarenegger says that's fine with him. Other lawmakers aren't so sure.

The Los Padres contains 140,000 acres identifed as "high oil and gas potential areas" or HOGPA (it's almost onomatopoetic). Known environmental impacts, according to the 2001 environmental impact study, include increased air pollution and deteriorating views (so much for that "good seeing!") , pollution-causing erosion dumping into steep mountain watersheds and disrupting of endangered and threatened species habitats. None of the areas are actually in the forest's condor preserve, but as condors are huge birds with an extensive range, the development can't help but encroach on their territory, according to Dan Smutz of the Wilderness Society.

Another concern, Smutz told me, "is that this is also an area of high geological instability, high potential for earthquakes. Typically when you develop and oil and gas project you’ll transport it one of two ways -- you'll have a holding tank for waste or oil running from the actual pumping area to the storage unit, or you'll bring out the transport trucks and have them transport the oil at a regular interval from the site to the storage unit. And all it takes is one truck carrying this low-grade, high viscosity oil getting in an accident to destroy hundreds of acres of habitat and poison the watershed people rely upon for their drinking water."

Right now, the fate of the HOGPA rests in the hands of the new Los Padres Forest Supervisor, Gloria Brown, who came from the Siuslaw National Forest up in Oregan and has a solid reputation for balancing industry and envrionmental issues. The public comment period for the issue is over, but it still doesn't hurt to write to her at 6755 Hollister Ave., Suite 150, Goleta, CA 93117.

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