Editor’s note: This is a guest posting by Bruce Barcott, a book author and former Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism. Bruce kindly let us cross-post this item, which he published this morning on his own blog.
Environmental reporters who’ve dealt with the Bush Administration are always on alert around Christmas and New Year’s, the White House’s favorite time to issue new environmental regulations. It’s not a dumb strategy—drop a bomb when most reporters are stuck on the bad-weather beat or scrambling to get to LaGuardia. This year was no exception.
On late Wednesday afternoon — New Year’s Eve — the Interior Department announced that it would double the rate of logging on 2.6 million acres of public forests in southwestern Oregon. Felicity Barringer, working late, slipped notice of the move into the national edition of the next day’s New York Times, noting that it would inevitably be settled in court years from now:
Environmental groups condemned the decision and gave notice that they would challenge the plan in federal court. The group Earthjustice called the decision a “massive giveaway at the expense of salmon spawning streams, healthy old-growth forests and habitat for rare birds such as the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet.”
Meanwhile Scott Learn, at the Portland Oregonian, pitched in a lengthier piece that gave a little more context. Seems Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski wanted to delay the plan until the Obama administration could weigh in — not expecting a complete halt to the logging ramp-up, but at least a revised plan that enviros could tolerate and not tie up in court. Noted Learn:
The BLM’s plan marks the biggest long-term change in logging practices since the Clinton administration’s 1994 Northwest Forest Plan. Any litigation could delay increased logging in the near future.So this isn’t a realistic move forward for timber communities so much as it is a final stick-in-the-eye from the Bush Admin to environmentalists out West. (Link to the BLM press release here.)
Happy New Year, Take Two: The second piece of business coming out on New Year’s Eve (well, technically it came out on Tuesday afternoon, so New Year’s Eve Eve) was the EPA Inspector General’s report on perchlorate, which said, basically, that the Bush Administration’s desperate moves to block the regulation of the chemical were, well, wrong.
Perchlorate for dummies: A chemical used in rocket fuel and fireworks that’s been linked to thyroid problems in pregnant women and young children. Has a tendency to percolate into the water table and contaminate drinking supplies.
Barringer, again (the Watchdog of the Week certificate is in the mail, Felicity), cranks out a little something for the Times national edition:
The Environmental Protection Agency failed to follow its own guidelines and made a basic error in evaluating how a toxic contaminant in rocket fuel harms human health, according to a report by the agency’s inspector general.Background: Perchlorate has been seeping into the drinking water supplies at various spots around the nation, thanks to military contractors and fireworks manufacturers. Various studies have shown it to be a real concern, especially for pregnant woman.(Here is a 2006 report from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences,which the Bush Administration has been trying to ignore.)
The best perchlorate reporting in the country has been done by David Danelski and his colleagues at the Riverside Press-Enterprise. Danelski and Co. have been hound dogging the story for years, driven by the perchlorate contaminating several drinking water sources in Southern California’s Inland Empire. (Check out Danelski’s report from last July on California’s reconsideration of acceptable perchlorate levels.)
Happy New Year!
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