Earthbytes

LA recycles waste but waste industry wastes people

I got a link from Cuéntame today with a disturbing video on American Reclamation's deadly business practices:

 

Now check out this blurb from American Reclamation, Inc's home page:

American Reclamation, Inc. (AMR) is a family owned corporation with over 50 years of experience in the recycling and sold waste industry and a Waste Haulers & Recycling business in the Los Angeles area.

American Reclamation, Inc. is an independently owned company which prides itself in Safety,Customer Satisfaction, Quality Service, Clean Equipment, and a good work place for their employees.

This would seem to be yet one more example of a company putting a pretty face forward but hiding its dark side under...well...the garbage.

Check out the website for Don't Waste LA for some good info and other articles.

 

Back to the Start: a move we need to make in lots of human endeavors

I totally love this ad from Chipotle that aired during the Grammy's. It speaks most directly to the tragedies of factory farming and our unsustainable food systems, but the idea of getting back to the start -- relating to Earth and each other from heart space, and co-creating our world from there -- is one we need to bring into everything we do on this planet. Enjoy this reflection from Willy and Chipotle...

 

Jeff Biggers: Powerful New Music Video Captures Appalachia's Grief Over Mountaintop Removal

Great article from Jeff Biggers and awesome video from Magnolia Mountain:

As millions of pounds of explosives from mountaintop removal strip mining operations continue to devastate historic mountain communities in central Appalachia, a powerful new music video released this week by the beloved American Roots band Magnolia Mountain captures the haunting grief and stories of stricken families in America's cradle of roots and country music.

Driven by Mark Utley's banjo licks and Magnolia Mountain's effortlessly haunting and plaintive harmonies, "The Hand of Man" joins the pantheon of classic mountain ballads and mining tunes, including Kentucky legend Jean Ritchie's "Black Waters" and John Prine's timeless paean to his family's demise in western Kentucky to Peabody coal, "Paradise," and 2/3 Goat's recent metrobilly hit, "Stream of Conscience."

via www.huffingtonpost.com

 

The Human Cost of Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining

Makayla Urias, 8, from Pike County, Kentucky holds contaminated water samples taken from her home which is surrounded by mountaintop removal coal mining.

 

If you haven't played with the new interactive map at iLoveMountains.org, please go check it out.

Over the past few years, several health studies on the interrelationship of human health and mountaintop removal coal mining have added to the urgency -- an urgency understood by citizens of Appalachia for many years -- to keep the mountains intact. Scientific evidence that this destructive mining practice hurts people and nature is piling up just about as fast now as surface mine operators can blow up the mountains and pile mining waste into Appalachian waters!

The interactive map will allow you to explore the relationship of mountaintop removal coal mining to poverty, changes in life expectancy, birth defect rates, or deaths from cancer, heart or respiratory diseases. The map allows you to view the data at various scales, from regional to state to county-level correlations.

You can also view summaries of the studies that correlate mountaintop removal coal mining with human health consequences.

After you play with the map, please visit the iLoveMountains action page. It lists several things anyone can do to make sure Makayla Urias and every other child in Appalachia has a fair chance for a long, happy and healthy life.

Tell Obama: No fastracking for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline permit!

Wow, NRDC couldn't have found a better celebrity to help stop the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. The Closer herself! Take a look:

 

Now -- if you haven't already done so -- please ask President Obama to close the valve for good on some of the dirtiest oil on planet Earth!

For a few precious moments, it seemed the Keystone XL pipeline permit would get a second look after Obama stood up to the oil industry and delayed a decision pending further environmental review. But Big Oil's Congressional lapdogs have now forced a 60-day review that is way too short for adequate analysis, let alone an informed decision from the President.

In the past few days, industry claims that the pipeline would be safe has been challenged by whistleblower Mike Klink, an engineer who says he was fired by Bechtel after he called them out for shoddy materials and poor craftsmanship during construction of the original Keystone pipeline.

Klink himself wrote an awesome article in December 2011 that called safety of Keystone XL into question.

 

Action Alert: Virginia Rising to Keep Ison Rock Ridge Standing

Please stand with me and thousands of others today to stop destruction of Ison Rock Ridge in southwestern Virginia. If a mountaintop removing mining permit is approved there, the mountain communities of Inman, Andover, Derby, and Callahan Avenue and Ridge Street in the town of Appalachia would be at risk for more damage to the health of people and nature.

The permit area is huge: over 1200 acres of this awesome mountain ecosystem would be deforested and blown apart, disrupting the natural processes that must be kept intact to support human beings and other species who know this place as home.

Google Earth image of the permit area. See this image and more information at Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards website.

I Love Mountains has a page that will help you ask President Obama, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, Nancy Sutley of the White House Council on Environmental Quality and EPA Regional Administrator Shawn Garvin to deny the permit.  If another mine is permitted here, it will only compound the destruction by mountaintop removal coal mining that Wise County's land, air, water, wildlife and people have already suffered.

Here's a great video that will let you hear from folks in Wise County, in their own words:

 

Please take action now to help all of our relations in Wise County, Virginia to keep Ison Rock Ridge standing.

Coalition Files Three Lawsuits to Demand National Coal LLC Treat Pollution from Coal Mines

Here's the joint press release filed today, November 8, 2011 by Sierra Club, Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment (SOCM) and the Tennessee Clean Water Network (TCWN):

Company’s Own Records Show Violations Of Legal Limits of Iron, Selenium, Other Heavy Metals in Local Waterways

Knoxville, TN – Earlier this week, the Sierra Club and its partners, the Tennessee Clean Water Network and Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment, filed three suits in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee to enforce pollution limits on two coal mines and one coal mine waste disposal area owned and operated by National Coal, LLC. According to the company’s own monitoring, National Coal continues to violate legal limits on its selenium discharge into local waterways. The coalition filed suit in order to protect the residents and wildlife of Tennessee that depend on the state’s waterways for clean water.

The Clean Water Act governs the legal limits of various forms of pollution allowed in mining and waste disposal. The Clean Water Act also requires mining companies to test and disclose the results of water sampling at mining and disposal sites. National Coal’s records show consistent violations for selenium, iron, and manganese at these sites. As a result of these egregious violations, the coalition has now filed suit in federal court under the citizen suit provisions of both the Clean Water Act to enforce the permit limits. 

“The kinds of pollutants National Coal is releasing into Tennessee’s waters can cause health problems as well as serious environmental damage,” said Axel Ringe, Vice Conservation Chair for the Tennessee Chapter Sierra Club. “Repeat violators like National Coal need to know that wanton polluting of Tennessee’s waterways has serious consequences for local residents and won’t be allowed to continue unchecked.” 

Today’s lawsuits follow several other recent Clean Water Act enforcement actions brought by the Sierra Club and other partner organizations that have resulted in significant protections for Appalachian streams and the communities that rely on them, including the installation and operation of treatment technology that will reduce selenium pollution from mines owned by Arch Coal and Patriot Coal.

“Citizens must continue to hold a zero-tolerance attitude toward companies that pollute our watersheds,” said Cathie Bird, chair of the E3 Committee of Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment.  “Without clean water, communities can’t thrive. That’s why we have laws to protect our water, and we’ll work hard to hold companies accountable when they pollute our streams.” 

Selenium, a toxic element that causes reproductive failure and deformities in fish and other forms of aquatic life, is discharged from many surface coal-mining operations across Appalachia.  At very high levels, selenium can pose a risk to human health, causing hair and fingernail loss, kidney and liver damage, and damage to the nervous and circulatory systems. Further, in clinically toxic doses, manganese can lead to motor imbalance and psychiatric disorders and over consumption of iron can lead to cirrhosis of the liver and heart conditions.

"Tennesseans rely on our rivers, lakes and streams for clean water," said Renée Victoria Hoyos, Executive Director, of the Tennessee Clean Water Network. "National Coal regularly and knowingly pollutes the waterways around these three locations. It is simply unacceptable and these suits are critical to ensuring that polluters like National Coal take our health and the impacts their actions have on the environment seriously."

The coalition is represented by Joe Lovett and Mike Becher with the Appalachian Mountain Advocates, and Gena Lewis and Michael Bernard. For more information on selenium visit http://www.sierraclub.org/coal/downloads/Seleniumfactsheet.pdf

###

Contact:

Sean Sarah, Sierra Club, 202 548-4589, [email protected]

Casey Self, Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment (SOCM), 865-249-7488 x105, [email protected]

Renée Victoria Hoyos, Tennessee Clean Water Network, 865-522-7007 x100, [email protected]

 

Is Blinky a Nuke Mutant?

See the story with this photo at gizmodo.com

One of the articles making rounds in the No Nukes community today is this story about a wolf fish with three eyes caught near a nuclear power plant in the Cordoba province of Argentina.

The nuclear power station (Central Nuclear Embalse) on the southern shore of Embalse Rio Tercero near Embalse, Cordoba, Argentina [Source: Google Earth, image date 3/13/11, eye altitude 9,461 feet]

Central Nuclear Embalse is one of two nuclear power stations in operation in Argentina. Embalse is a Pressurized Heavy Water Reactor fueled by natural uranium and using heavy water for cooling. Embalse also produces cobalt-60, a radioisotope used in medicine and industry.

Embalse made news in August of 2011 when contracts were signed between the Argentine government, state-run utility Nucleoelectrica Argentina and Candu Energy to overhaul and expand the plant.

And the fish? Hoplias marabaricus -- the wolf fish -- ranges from Central America down through Argentina and usually lives near the edges of black and white water streams or pools, or on flooded forest floors. Young wolf fish sometimes become stranded in these flood pools and have to wait for the next floods to move back into stream channels.

In Brazil, researchers have studied this species as a potential stock fish for artisanal fishermen who have been dislocated from traditional river fishing areas by construction of dams for hydroelectric power generation. The wolf fish is also a species known to aquarists and sport fishermen.

Wolf Fish (Hoplias malabaricus) [Photo credit: Cláudio D. Timm]

Impacts to fish and wildlife living near nuclear plants or exposed to radionuclides is not a new area of concern. The Fukushima disaster last spring inspired a new round of articles on exposure of marine life, and consequences of  legacy nuclear waste disposal on salmon near the Hanford facility in Washington have been studied. The damage to wildlife from water intake systems at nuclear plants led the Environmental Protection Agency to propose new rules this year to reduce the number of fish killed by these cooling systems.

Finding scientific information on "fish mutations near nuclear plants" was a bad search parameter on Google today, unless you wanted to read more about Blinky and the 3-eyed fish of of Embalse.

I found the original article about this catch to be interesting, in case you want to read about it in Spanish: El pez de tres ojos de los Simpson era argentino.

Murkowski: Interior’s mining overhaul needs Capitol Hill sign-off - E2-Wire

Interesting article yesterday at The Hill's E2-Wire:

Sen. Lisa Muirkowski (R-Alaska), the top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, believes the Interior Department is barreling ahead with a major coal mining regulation overhaul without the needed congressional approval.

Interior announced plans Wednesday to merge its Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSM) into the larger Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Murkowski questioned the move Wednesday evening, noting that she’s “deeply concerned about this proposed unilateral action.”

Read more of the story at thehill.com

 

EcoWatch launches nationwide news service website today

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Joins EcoWatch to Announce Launch of Nationwide News Service Website

Live Webcast at www.ecowatch.org begins at 3 p.m. EST

WHAT: Launch of Nationwide News Service Website with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Keynote

WHY: Celebrate EcoWatch and Waterkeeper Alliance’s Nationwide News Service

WHEN:   Thursday, Oct. 27 at 2:30 p.m. EST

WHERE: Rivergate Park, 1785 Merwin Ave., Cleveland, Ohio 44113

Cleveland, OH—EcoWatch, in partnership with Waterkeeper Alliance, is hosting a public event today along the Cuyahoga River to celebrate the launch of their nationwide news service website with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., founder and president of Waterkeeper Alliance, as keynote speaker.  The website—www.ecowatch.org—went live this morning and will work to unite the voice of the grassroots environmental movement and mobilize millions of Americans to engage in democracy to protect human health and the environment.  

The website expands EcoWatch’s coverage nationwide and becomes the first media source to focus exclusively on environmental news culled from more than 700 environmental organizations across the country.  The site showcases original content in its Insights column from leading national voices in the environmental movement, including EcoWatch’s advisory board members. 

The news service provides timely access to relevant information that seeks to motivate individuals to become engaged in their community, adopt sustainable practices and support strong environmental policy.  The site focuses on five critical issue areas—water, air, food, energy and biodiversity—and covers topics including, renewable energy, water and air quality, sustainable agriculture, fossil fuel depletion, solution-based sustainability projects, species protection, global warming, climate change and pending legislation.

“The current assault on America’s environmental laws, like the Clean Water Act, creates a pressing need to educate and engage people to protect our infrastructure, the air we breathe, the water we drink, to provide our children with the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment as our parents gave us,” said Kennedy. “This website encourages people to be part of the solution and engage in democracy.”

EcoWatch, publisher of EcoWatch Journal with a distribution of more than 80,000 copies across Ohio, will launch the nationwide news service out of Cleveland’s Tremont neighborhood and become part of the growing online news media market.

“Northeast Ohio is a national leader in sustainability and EcoWatch is proud to call Cleveland its home,” said Stefanie Penn Spear, founder and executive director of EcoWatch. “This news service website follows the model we developed in Ohio over the last five years and expands on my more than 20 years of publishing environmental news.”

The public event will feature brief remarks from Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson; Cleveland City Councilman Joe Cimperman; the George Gund Foundation’s Senior Program Officer for the Environment, John Mitterholzer; the Cleveland Foundation’s Program Officer, Nelson Beckford; and Kennedy, a member of EcoWatch’s advisory board, who will serve as keynote speaker. 

Other advisory board members are Wendy Abrams, an eco-advocate and philanthropist; Ed Begley, Jr., an actor and environmentalist; Lester Brown, a  prize-winning author and critical thinker; Laurie David, a bestselling author and activist; Paul Hawken, an environmentalist, entrepreneur and author; Randy Hayes, founder of Rainforest Action Network; Phil Radford, executive director of Greenpeace, and Harvey Wasserman, an anti-nuclear activist.

In addition to commemorating the launch of the national website, EcoWatch and Waterkeeper Alliance will acknowledge the significance of the celebration’s location, near the historic site where the then oily Cuyahoga River caught on fire in June 1969.  This event played a major role in the growth of the modern-day environmental movement and passage of the Clean Water Act. The event will also highlight the need for water advocacy and stewardship, public access to our waterways, human-powered recreation on the water and collaboration on solution-based projects like Rivergate Park. Immediately following the event, participants are encouraged to enjoy Rivergate Park, home to the Cleveland Rowing Foundation, by touring the grounds and watching rowing, kayaking and paddleboarding on the river.

Kennedy will also keynote a fundraising event at Windows on the River at 2000 Sycamore St. at 6 p.m. that evening. The event includes a VIP reception, dinner and keynote speech.  Tickets can be purchased at www.ecowatchohio.org.

To view the website, visit http://www.ecowatch.org/.

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EcoWatch is a Cleveland-based nonprofit dedicated to uniting the voice of the grassroots environmental movement and mobilizing millions of Americans to engage in democracy to protect human health and the environment. EcoWatch, founded in 2006, publishes the bimonthly newspaper EcoWatch Journal, distributed for free throughout Ohio printing 80,000 copies per issue. For more information, visit www.ecowatchohio.org

Waterkeeper Alliance is a global environmental organization uniting more than 190 Waterkeeper organizations around

the world and focusing citizen advocacy on the issues that affect our waterways, from pollution to climate change.

Waterkeepers patrol more than 1.5 million square miles of rivers, streams and coastlines in the Americas, Europe,

Australia, Asia and Africa.  For more information, visit www.waterkeeper.org.