LA Weekly

Long believed to be extinct, a magnificent bird--the Ivory-billed Woodpecker--has been rediscovered in the Big Woods of eastern Arkansas. More than 60 years after the last confirmed sighting of the species in the United States, a research team announced that at least one male ivory-bill still survives in vast areas of bottomland swamp forest.

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker has reportedly been found. Lots of cool video on the second link (to Cornell's Web site). The journal Science broke the news.

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Decontaminating water tainted by the gasoline additive methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) requires installing expensive systems, dliuting the water with other sources or abandoning toxic wells and looking for new ones. Thirty-two million people in California depend on water from sources that are known to contain MTBE, including the San Diego city water utility, which serves 1.2 million people. That's eight times as many people as the next most affected state, New Jersey, with just over 4 million people affected.

Nonetheless, 11 California representatives, including Christopher Cox of Orange County and Buck McKeon of Santa Clarita, voted last week for an energy bill containing a Tom DeLay-engineered provision protecting oil and chemical companies from lawsuits over MTBE. Lois Capps tried to stop the madness -- she put foward an amendment to the energy bill removing the MTBE lines -- but she fell short just a few votes. The bill itself ultimate passed with a margin of over 60 votes.

Yikes. It's hard to understand the other side of this one, and it's even harder when you look at how necessary legal action against big oil has been in the past: In 2003, Santa Monica settled its suit against Shell, Chevron and Exxon after MTBE seeped into wells that once supplied half of the city's water. The wells were shutdown in 1996, and the oil companies pay $3 million a year for replacement water, in addition to building systems to restore the water quality in the well. (In February, the oil companies also agreed to pay $1.5 million to the EPA for costs incurred in investigating the contamination.) Both Orange County and Santa Clarita have water suppliers in litigation against oil companies.

MTBE has been banned in California for a year, but its concetration in drinking water is still on the rise. Whose supposed to pay to clean it up if the Senate's energy bill passes with the same language intact?

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San Francisco, CA - Sierra Club members turned out in historic numbers this year to elect five of their peers to the 112-year-old environmental organization's Board of Directors and to reject a ballot initiative that would have forced the group to support restrictions on immigration. Over fifteen percent of the Club's membership returned 122,308 ballots – the second highest in the Club's recent history – and defeated the anti-immigration measure by more than a 5 to 1 margin.

If I was supposed to be unbiased about this, I failed.

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Americans have been alerted to the dangers of global warming so many times that volumes have been written just on the history of efforts to draw attention to the problem.

Big news from Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker. We knew all this, of course, but she lays it out in such sober, well-structured prose that it would seem impossible for anyone to go on denying it. Even Reason magazine's obdurate science correspondent, Ronald Bailey, shows signs of melting. (Where climate change once was "hype," there are now "two sides." That's progress!)

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Funny, the weather in Great Smoky Mountains National Park doesn't look that bad to me. Even the air is relatively clean. (The official briefing says the event was canceled out of concern for the safety of the crowd.)

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If you're already tired today of hearing from Michael and Ted and Adam and their mentor, George (you may not be, but I sure am), you need these words from Grist founder Chip Giller:

Sustainability is the new bling. In rural America, residents are recognizing the potential of wind power, solar energy, biodiesel, and other green industries to revitalize their communities. Farmers are discovering the advantages of precision agriculture. Communities are fighting the stench, pollution, and economic ravages of factory farms.

Sustainability is the new self-reliance. In churches, mosques, and temples, religious leaders are taking seriously their responsibility as stewards of God's creation. They are retrofitting their places of worship for energy efficiency, spreading the word to their congregations, banding together to pressure politicians, and asking, ''What would Jesus drive?"

Sustainability is the new grace. In minority and low-income communities all over the country, civil rights activists are linking disparate struggles -- poverty, criminal justice, transportation, climate change, health -- to continue the path-breaking work of the environmental-justice movement. Sustainability is the new dream.

Read the whole thing. Read it again. It'll make you feel better about everything good you've done all year -- even if it's just buying food at the farmer's market or taking the bus to work.

Here's the link again: Click. Like that. It's so right on it almost makes me weep.

Hey, I just realized "Death of Environmentalism" forms the same acronym as Department of Energy. Conspiracy?

Other Earth Day News:

My list of local events in Los Angeles is here. (I'll be at the Eco-MayFestival by day.)
It's a full moon at 2 a.m. Sunday morning, and one of my favorite local DJs will be spinning at a boat party benefit for NextAid.
My blog buddy Kit Stolz, who gave me all his climate change sources, has now has his own eloquent forum.
The long-simmering energy bill not even libertarians like (it hasn't changed much since last year) passed in the House yesterday. This is the best article I've read about it so far.

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Today, on the eve of the 35th anniversary of the first Earth Day, the House of Representatives is voting on, and widely expected to pass, a grossly porkified energy bill that would dole out billions in subsidies to fossil-fuel industries, shortchange alternative-energy and efficiency initiatives, and indemnify makers of the gasoline additive MTBE against liability for groundwater contamination. And this time the bill may actually have a chance of passing in the Senate, perhaps as early as next month, after years of stalemate.

This and other dismal news rolling off Capitol Hill of late would seem good reason to make Earth Day 2005 a revolt, not a celebration.

Read Amanda Griscom Little in Grist. (I know, you were going to anyway, but still . . . ). It's everything I wanted to say only better.

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In support of SB1, the California state effort to install one million solar roofs in the next 13 years, Americans for Solar Power has produced this graphic cost-benefit "waterfall." I think it's a cool idea. I just wish it were easier to read.

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The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Board of Commissioners voted to approve the final environmental impact report for the Pine Tree Wind Farm Tuesday, which means they'll go ahead with this major wind energy project in the Mojave Desert. That's great news for the clean-air people, bad news for the Audubon people, who had been complaining that the EIR inadequately addressed the turbines' threat to songbirds. Aside from a funny exchange among the commissioners about the exact definition of a passerine, the standoff between the wind-power advocates vs. the bird lovers was mostly sad, just because no one wants birds to die, but no one wants a new coal plant in Utah or Nevada, either.

The public comments pro and con concluded with Charles Bragg of the Santa Monica Audubon chapter threatening to sue. "We are in it for the long haul," he said. "We don't go to court very often, but when we do we hang around. The last time it took 15 years, and we won.
"I don't want to lay awake at night thinking of wings hitting propellers so I can turn on my lights."
And then Board of Commisioners President Dominick W. Rubalcava introduced "our city attorney" as if to say his lawyer was scarier than their lawyer.
At the end of all that, the truly relentless Doug Korthof, who had turned nearly every agenda item back to solar power all afternoon, got up one last time:

Korthof: I'm one of the EV1 drivers who did the vigil in Bubank. Rubalcava: We're talking about brids. Korthof: I'm zeroing in on it! You know, almost every electric car driver has solar on the roof . . . Rubalcava: On the roof of your car? Korthof: No, of my house. Now, you have been presented with a dilemma. I want to remind you of Alexander the Great, when presented with a Gordian knot, he solved that dilemma by just cutting the knot. Solar doesn't have any opponents. The people who produce solar energy are coming to you with money. Rubalcava: So you're speaking against the wind project. Korthof: I'm speaking against it. You could take this money and put it into solar.

Then he started talking about the Dark Sky Society, and how you used to be able to see stars and meteors at night in Los Angeles in the '30s and '40s. Rubalcava said he knew all about that: "The observatory," he said, "was in my supervision when I was at Parks and Rec."

I'm not sure how it all connects. But it was funny at the time.

Unlike so many things I report on with little or no objectively at all, and all the bias I want, I sincerely don't know how I feel about this one. An enviro in the lobby who'd spoken up on the wind farm's behalf said she felt the same way. "All those birds," this person said, "it just breaks my heart. But at the same time, do we want more kids in Utah with asthma?"

And do we want another coal-fired power plant smoking up Gerlach, Nevada?

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Bush is spending Earth Day in the Great Smoky Mountains -- one of the national parks regularly cited by the National Parks Conservation Association as blighted with dirty air, chronically underfunded (they're in the red $11.5 million this year) and clogged with traffic. Even the EPA has rated the nation's most visited park as "unhealthy." I hope he finds time to fire up the iPod and go for a long jog.

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My friend Cinnamon Twist has the posted both the greenest, funnest list of L.A. events on tribe.net: It's called "e[co]-blips." I don't know the reason for the brackets around the "co."

It sucks that we have to choose this year between the Bioneers Conference and the International Medicinal Mushroom Conference, but there you have it. They're both around the same days in October. As much as I love Bioneers, I may have to do the latter. It's in Port Townsend, Washington, where they make some mean electric cars.

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It's been so long since I've blogged I forgot the password. This is my excuse. (I'm always embarrassed when long features I've written get published, but if I don't blog them, who will?)

Anyway, a pair of peregrine falcons has chosen the 33rd floor of PG&E's San Francisco headquarters as their nesting spot, and the Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group has set up a Webcam so you can watch them. I haven't seen much, yet, but I've read reports from other people of falcons shredding rodents on screen. Three eggs hatched yesterday,

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It's been so long since I've blogged I forgot the password. This is my excuse. (I'm always embarrassed when long features I've written get published, but if I don't blog them, who will?)

Anyway, a pair of peregrine falcons has chosen the 33rd floor of PG&E's San Francisco headquarters as their nesting spot, and the Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group has set up a Webcam so you can watch them. I haven't seen much, yet, but I've read reports from other people of falcons shredding rodents on screen. Three eggs hatched yesterday,

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