The Appalachia Restoration Act, a bill in the U.S. Senate, would prohibit dumping "excess spoil" resulting from mountaintop removal into streams and headwaters. A similar bill in the House of Representatives—the Clean Water Protection Act—would put even tighter restrictions on dumping this pollution into Appalachian streams.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) introduced the Appalachia Restoration Act earlier this year, and according to a statement from Cardin, are planning to hold a hearing on mountaintop removal next week. This is the first Congressional hearing on mountaintop removal since 2002. Earthjustice senior counsel Joan Mulhern testified at that hearing, along with former Backstreet Boy Kevin Richardson (BTW, if the last time Congress held a hearing on something a Backstreet Boy testified, you know it’s been a long time!!)

Unfortunately, while Congress is moving to act, mountaintops are still being blown up all over Appalachia. In a bit of disheartening news, the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers announced plans last week that would, "[secure] access to clean streams and safe drinking water, and [honor] our clean water laws."

But, as we expressed in a statement about this news, "Until the White House announces that it will stop the blowing up of mountains and burying of streams, we cannot support their policies, regardless of what process is used to review the mines on a case by case basis."

Earthjustice was thrilled this month when a strong new set of rules was issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service to protect California’s endangered salmon species. We've working to protect California salmon since the 1980s and the new biological opinion is a huge step in the right direction.

But some people just hate good news about the environment.

The conservative, anti-environmental operation known as the Pacific Legal Foundation is pushing Governor Schwarzenegger to ask Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to remove protections of California’s native fish species by calling out the "God Squad." The God Squad (officially the Endangered Species Committee) is a rarely used provision of the Endangered Species Act that allows species protections to be overridden by a government panel that would essentially play God and exterminate a species in the name of economic necessity.

PLF’s clients, big agricultural interests in California’s San Joaquin Valley, have always enjoyed taxpayer-subsidized water to grow thirsty, government subsidized crops in this dry region, including cotton, alfalfa, and most recently almonds. The goal is to end all restrictions on water exports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta regardless of environmental harm..

But if PLF really wants to go down this road, the federal government might be required to call not one, but a half dozen separate God Squads.

Why so many?

Thanks to the hard work of groups like Earthjustice and NRDC, representing fishing communities and conservation groups trying to restore the Delta, excessive water exports are now understood to impact not only the delta smelt, but also three imperiled Central Valley salmon and steelhead species, green sturgeon, and, most recently, killer whales in the Pacific, which depend on salmon as food.

When the fight becomes subsidized water and crops for Westlands Water District vs. Free Willy, guess who the American people are going to back?

The Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973 with overwhelming bipartisan support from Congress and signed into law by Richard Nixon — hardly a radical environmentalist. The mission of the law remains very popular among the American people. The recent delisting of the bald eagle proves this law works when fully enforced.

The American public does not support wiping out species because commercial enterprises demand more government handouts. This much is clear.

But this is not simply Big Ag versus some species. Due the unprecedented closure of the commercial salmon fishing season, the wasteful water practices of Westlands and others have put hundreds of fishermen out of work for two years now. This has taken regional jobs and a healthy food source from people all across this country.

What has also been made clear through recent court decisions and scientific studies is that the West Coast’s largest estuary and the species and communities that depend on a healthy Delta are seriously imperiled by overpumping.

William K. Reilly, a member of the Governor's Delta Vision Blue Ribbon Task Force and EPA administrator under the first President Bush, recently wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle that, "The delta water's average annual flow is overcommitted to users by more than eight times." Yet California’s water agency, under Schwarzenegger, has continued to dish out more and more water that doesn’t exist in an effort to meet a demand that takes this precious resource for granted.

Big Ag must now learn to do more with less. The days of copious taxpayer-subsidized water exports from the Delta are coming to an end. And the idea of killing off numerous native fish species, decimating Northern California fishing communities, and turning the Delta into a fetid swamp is simply not allowed under federal law.

Calling six God Squads will not fix the problems that are facing California agriculture, and PLF knows that such efforts would be quixotic at best.

Only living within the ecological limits of what the Delta can stand will we be able to restore the Delta to health. A study done nearly 25 years ago found that 30 percent is the maximum amount of water that can be taken from an estuary that remains healthy. Today, in some years, we are exporting at levels closer to 50 percent. Getting water exports down below this ecological limit through water conservation, and planting appropriate crops is where our leaders should be focusing their efforts.

Stamping feet in anger and playing God will not fix the problem.

The case goes back to 2002, when we sued, on behalf of the Florida Wildlife Federation, to get the South Florida Water Management District to stop pumping contaminated drainage canal water into Lake Okeechobee, one of the biggest drinking water sources in Florida, and the second biggest lake in the United States. For years, the district has been disposing of contaminated runoff from urban areas and industrial-scale sugar and vegetable farms by "backpumping" its untreated waters from drainage canals into Lake Okeechobee.

Since the Clean Water Act doesn't allow anyone to add pollutants to lakes and rivers without a permit that limits pollutants to safe levels, we argued that the Water District needed a federal permit to pump filthy water into the public lake.

The enormity of the problem was evident: When the pump stations switch on, they flow at the rate of a medium-sized river and inject a plume of dark polluted water that reaches almost 10 miles into the lake. Toxic algae outbreaks in the lake in recent years have been transferred into rivers along with lake water, causing massive fish kills, covering the water with toxic green slime, and making it unsafe even to submerge an unprotected hand.

We had a major win in our case in 2007, when a federal court in Miami found that pumping canal water into the lake created a public health threat because it contaminated drinking water and triggered toxic algae outbreaks in the lake that kill wildlife and sicken people.

Instead of cleaning up the water, the water district appealed. U.S. Sugar Corp., the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency joined the case on the side of the polluters.

While the case was on appeal, the outgoing administration of President George Bush adopted a new rule squarely aimed at this case. It exempted from permitting all transfers of contaminated water from canals to lakes and between all other water bodies — regardless of whether the pumping contaminates drinking water and threatens public health.

On June 4, the appeals court in Atlanta ruled that the Water District did NOT need a permit under the Clean Water Act to pump dirty water into Lake Okeechobee. The judges said they had no choice but to accept the EPA's Bush-era rule. Tellingly, one of the judges, Circuit Judge Ed Carnes, called the water pumped into Lake Okeechobee "a loathsome concoction of chemical contaminants," including nitrogen, phosphorous and ammonia.

The Bush administration rule doesn't just affect Florida. It endangers drinking water reservoirs around the United States:

The U.S. sends tens of millions of dollars a year to Africa and developing countries to help them prevent drinking water contamination. It is ironic that, at the same time, the U.S. EPA is legalizing contamination of drinking water supplies here at home.

It’s as close as our own backyards, as far away as the Arctic. It’s affecting birds, boys, butterflies and bugs. Creeks are feeling it, and the oceans, too. It’s here, it’s now, and mostly it’s caused by humans.

It’s global warming and we have to take immediate, powerful counter measures to prevent massive planet-wide consequences, warns the federal government in a chilling report just released today.

Thirteen federal agencies and the White House collaborated in the study, which was put together by the United States Global Change Research Program with oversight from White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

As reported by The New York Times, the study concludes that: 

The impact of a changing climate is already being felt across the United States, like shifting migration patterns of butterflies in the West and heavier downpours in the Midwest and East.

Even if the nation takes significant steps to slow emissions of heat-trapping gases, the impact of global warming is expected to become more severe in coming years, the report says, affecting farms and forests, coastlines and floodplains, water and energy supplies, transportation and human health.

Such a report must be issued every 10 years, under a 1990 law. This study was begun in 2000. See the complete report at http://www.globalchange.gov/usimpacts.

Remember "Healthy Forests"? This was one of the euphonious program names hatched by Karl Rove or another of the Bush wordsmiths to mask a real purpose. There was also the Clear Skies Initiative, which actually aimed to weaken the Clean Air Act.

Healthy Forests argued that the best way to control wildlfire and protect rural communities was to thin the forests of dead brush and sick trees, such growth having accumulated to dangerous levels owing to decades of fire suppression.

Fair enough, but many scientists and environmental advocates argued that Healthy Forests was really a smoke screen (forgive me) aimed at obscuring the fact that much of the planned "thinning" would be far from human settlements and would in fact involve logging big, living, valuable trees.

Well, comes now a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by a Colorado fire ecologist named Tonia Schoennagel that corroborates the fears of the critics:

A tiny fraction of the thinning projects (she looked at more than 44,000 fuel reduction projects) took place at what's called the WUI—wildland-urban interface. The abstract of her study is here; the full study is available at a price. A fine summary from the Missoula Independent is here. George Ochenski, who wrote the Independent piece, throws in fascinating (and depressing) information about the effects of global warming on the northern Rockies woods as well.

Don’t you guys get it? It’s not the planet that lacks smarts, it’s the human race. We should learn from natural systems, pattern human society on systems that work, are sustainable and don’t foul their own nests. (Semirelevant aside: Paul Hawken just gave a lovely commencement speech  to a group of graduates in Portland. Among many interesting things he said was, Do you realize that humans are the only species on the planet that do not have full employment? Worth pondering. The whole speech is quite wonderful and uplifting in fact.)

So I went to the IBM site for the smarter planet and it’s not as bad as I feared.

In fact, it’s about making various human endeavors—health care, transportation, and so on smarter, and who can argue with that? Chock full of graphs and charts, very slick. One thing caught my eye. It says that it costs eight times as much to have a person renew her driver’s license in person as it does for her to do it on-line. And that reminded me of another snippet  from this morning’s deluge of news: Governor Arnold, desperate to keep California from going broke, says we can save $300-some million by doing away with textbooks in the public schools and moving the books on-line. Something deeply disturbing about that.

“We saw dolphins, whales, sharks and turtles everywhere. Out of ignorance, the fishing boats would catch and kill upwards of 300 dolphins per day, and the children would play with turtle eggs on the beaches.”

Now, less than three decades later, Don Federico explained that there is none of that.

Even in isolated areas, it’s a huge event when tourists spot a whale or a dolphin. Turtles no longer come to nest on our beaches, and shark finning is decimating local populations. The fish you could previously catch in a couple of hours, now take weeks of time for a fishing boat to collect.

In February of this year, and partially in response to the serious threats facing marine biodiversity, the United Nations resolved to make June 8 of every year “World Ocean Day.” On this day we are asked to think about what the oceans mean to humankind. We are challenged to learn about the many beautiful and complex marine creatures and habitats that bless our oceans, to remember the diverse ecological services and foods the seas provide, and to consider what we can do to help conserve these important ecosystems.

Thus, in honor of today, I want to reflect on overfishing – likely the greatest threat the oceans face in our time – and what we can do about it.

Perhaps because we cannot see below the surface, most people do not understand the very serious impacts of many kinds of commercial fishing. Some fishing methods destroy highly productive ecosystems as fish are gathered, and with too many boats fishing for too few fish, we are simply taking too much.

Most of the fish caught and killed are just thrown back into the sea because it won’t bring a premium price in the market.

Scientists have shown that commercial fishing has wiped out 90 percent of large fish, including swordfish, cod, marlin, and sharks. The most recent global assessment of wild marine fish stocks found that 52 percent are fully exploited, while 25 percent are either overexploited, depleted or recovering from depletion.

Not surprisingly given the above, a few years ago scientists estimated that nearly half of the fish consumed by humans globally are farmed. Unfortunately, fish-farming likely won’t solve the problem, because these fish, too, need to eat.

Every year, roughly 30 million mega tons of marine catch is used for the production of animal feeds to grow salmon, chicken and even beef, for human consumption.

So, what can and should we do, both as a society and as individuals?

We need clear and effective policies to address the threats to the oceans; including appropriate mechanisms for ensuring quality monitoring and enforcement of laws.

We need individual governments and the international community to take a lead and start managing our ocean resources with a view to sustainability and from the perspective of precaution.

Fishing limits need to be set considering what is needed for marine populations to recover, so that the children of Don Federico and those in innumerable other fishing communities around the globe can continue living from the sea in the proud tradition of their parents.

You can help, by speaking out on issues related to ocean protection, and by making changes in your own life to protect the oceans.

In honor of World Ocean Day, please consider the following possibilities:

• Don’t eat swordfish or other threatened fish species. Use the Seafood Watch guide to determine what fish to buy for dinner.
• Don’t throw toxic substances (solvents, paints, oil, medicines, etc.) down the drain or the sewer. Keeping our water clean helps protect coastal environments.

• Choose goods with less packaging. A lot of plastics end up floating in the ocean and are mistaken by marine animals for food.

• Volunteer or contribute to environmental organizations working on marine protection.

• Make more of your meals vegetarian.

• Teach your children about the oceans and what they do for us.

Visit our websites to learn more about what Earthjustice and our partners in Latin America are doing to protect the marine environment!

They led with the head of Chevron, possibly because he was outnumbered, out-argued, and out flanked by what followed. His piece (read it for yourselves) was empty, vapid, and one wonders who in the PR department pulls down six figures to write this pap. "We must work together," "we're all on the same side," and like that.

Next came Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, and one very smart dude. His piece was a little heavy on numbers but did a good job of outlining how the green energy future will be an economic boon.

Then they trotted out George Will, who used to be a solid and interesting conservative voice but has been getting crankier and less compelling over the years. He leaned heavily on a piece by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger in The New Republic. They're "The Death of Environmentalism guys," and they're still hammering away on the conservation movement for not melting away into the larger progressive movement. At least I guess that's what they're ranting away about.

Lastly, our own Trip Van Noppen, who explained succinctly why Pope is right and Chevron is wrong—the answer being that the oil companies deserve much of the credit for getting us into this mess and are now trying to sound all reasonable and cuddly.

All taken together, I expect the package probably left most readers rather baffled, though our side came out ahead. Way ahead. Check it out.

If you breathe, be happy. Cement kilns are some of the dirtiest air polluters in the country. In some states like Oregon, New York and California, they’re the biggest mercury polluters as well. What the EPA proposed makes cuts of up to 93% in mercury, a potent neurotoxin that can cause memory loss and neurological damage to newborns and young children. But EPA also made cuts in pollution that causes asthma and leads to smog. And the fight isn’t over yet.

The EPA needs to hear from us!

 For over a decade, the cement industry has gotten a free pass to pollute, and it’s time we take aggressive steps to crack down on corporations that pollute our rivers and streams, the water we drink and the air we breathe. On June 16 in Los Angeles, June 17 in Dallas, and June 18 in Washington D.C., EPA staff will be on hand to listen to your comments on their proposal to cut toxic air pollution from cement kilns. Here is more information about the hearings.

If you can attend one of the hearings, let us know. If you can’t but still want your voice heard, write a 500-word essay about why clean air is important to you. We’ll have representatives at every hearing and we’ll read your essay to the EPA.