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EIA's Powerful "Hunt for the Whalers"

2012-01-18T22:59:07Z

Joel Reynolds, Director of NRDC's Urban Program, the Marine Mammal Protection and So. California Ecosystem projects, Santa Monica, CA

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the Environmental Investigation Agency’s (EIA) video “Hunt for the Whalers” is worth millions .

It’s one thing to talk about the brutality of hunting fin whales in the North Atlantic. It is another thing to see the reality of these magnificent animals being dragged from the water into the Icelandic whaling station and butchered right before your eyes. And at the center of this barbarism – caught on camera -- is Kristjian Loftsson, owner of the Icelandic whaling company Hvalur.

Whatever reason for slaughtering these massive whales there may once have been, there is none today. No market for the meat. No legal right to trade. And no legal or moral basis for the senseless destruction of these endangered animals – among the largest on the planet, the so-called greyhound of the sea for their speed, larger than two school busses lined up end to end.

EIA’s film is understated and compelling, with an investigative story-line – tracking the illegally hunted meat from Iceland to the markets of Japan. But nowhere is its impact greater than in the video documenting the modern, 21st century whaling station and the activities of its employees, overseen by Loftsson, as they unload their cargo and wield their knives.

President Obama did the right thing in certifying Iceland for its activities in derogation of the IWC Convention and CITES. That was a necessary first step. But Loftsson has already stated his intention to resume the fin whale hunt next season. As EIA has so graphically documented, none of us can rest until the killing is stopped.

Take action now.

Pebble Mine: The Region Says No -- Again

2011-11-23T00:09:54Z

Joel Reynolds, Director of NRDC's Urban Program, the Marine Mammal Protection and So. California Ecosystem projects, Santa Monica, CA

The opposition continues to grow.

According to a poll released today of over 2,000 shareholders of the Bristol Bay Native Corporation – the regional Native corporation and largest private landholder in southwest Alaska – 81 percent of the company’s shareholders now oppose the proposed Pebble Mine, a massive gold and copper mine that would be built at the headwaters of the watershed that feeds the greatest remaining wild salmon fishery on Earth.

According to Jason Metrokin, CEO of BBNC, the problem isn’t development, since BBNC and its shareholders support responsible development of the region. The problem is that the Pebble Mine will unavoidably put at risk the “fisheries and our Native way of life.”

The BBNC poll is the latest confirmation of the overwhelming opposition within the Bristol Bay region to the foreign mining consortium’s proposal to open a vast pit and a deep underground mine in the remote water-laden tundra between Lake Clark National Park and Lake Iliamna, the largest fresh water body in Alaska and source of the salmon-rich Kvichak River. According to latest estimates, over 10 billion tons of mining waste laced with toxics – about 3,000 pounds for every person on the planet -- would be generated and, in theory, contained forever in a tailings pond bordered by dams larger than the Three Gorges Dam in China.

According to the Pebble Partnership, formed by the foreign mining consortium of Anglo American, Northern Dynasty Minerals, and Rio Tinto, the long, documented history of contamination from mines like the one proposed at Pebble is irrelevant given the consortium’s commitment to environmental stewardship and compliance and its guarantee that the fishery will be protected. Moreover, says Anglo’s CEO Cynthia Carroll, the mine will not be built without the support of the region’s residents.

So far, the people who live there aren’t buying it.

In fact, year after year, as the results of poll after poll have shown, the wall of opposition only grows stronger, not only around Bristol Bay but state-wide, where a poll released just weeks ago by Strategies 360 Polling and Market Research revealed majority opposition to the mine. In a state where mining has been welcomed for generations, the Pebble Mine is proving itself to be a “different kind of mine” – but not in the sense that the Pebble Partnership has hoped.

All of these poll results – together with last month’s approval in the Lake and Peninsula Borough of the “Save Our Salmon” initiative – are the latest evidence that the Pebble Mine is a failure in the making, whether you’re an American, an Alaskan, a Bristol Bay resident, a BBNC shareholder, a fisherman, a hunter, a developer, a conservationist -- or an investor.

Take action now to stop the Pebble Mine.

Southwest Alaska Residents Approve Initiative Barring Large-Scale Mining that Threatens Salmon

2011-10-18T06:44:04Z

Joel Reynolds, Director of NRDC's Urban Program, the Marine Mammal Protection and So. California Ecosystem projects, Santa Monica, CA

Today – October 17, 2011 – the votes were counted in Bristol Bay, and, in a historic result against enormous odds, the Save Our Salmon initiative has prevailed.

In the Lake and Peninsula Borough of southwest Alaska, where the massive Pebble Mine is proposed to be sited by a consortium of foreign mining companies, the residents have approved a prohibition against large-scale resource extraction – like the Pebble Mine -- that would destroy or degrade salmon habitat in their region.

And, most remarkably, they did so despite an intense campaign of fear funded by the Pebble Partnership falsely charging that the initiative “will drive Lake and Pen families away to find work, force schools to close and drive up the cost of food and fuel as the local economy shrinks even more.”

It’s no surprise that the residents of the Bristol Bay region support salmon protection over the Pebble Mine. Public opinion poll after public opinion poll has confirmed for years that opposition to the mine is overwhelming throughout the Bristol Bay region as a whole, from native communities and village corporations to commercial and recreational fishermen and hunters to development leaders like the Bristol Bay Native Corporation.

But this initiative is the first that, by its terms and because it carries the force of law, will prevent destructive large-scale mining from moving forward against the will of the people who live there.

The Pebble Partnership has long committed that they won’t proceed if the people of the region oppose the mine, and today’s approval of the Save Our Salmon initiative is the latest indication of the region’s continuing resistance. The Pebble Mine can’t be built without degrading or destroying significant salmon habitat, since the proposed site sits at the headwaters of the salmon stream system that feeds Bristol Bay’s incomparable wild salmon fishery.

Unfortunately, the Pebble Partnership isn’t expected to walk away just yet. Despite their assurances of respect for local views, despite their avowed commitment to proceed only with strong local support, they have already made clear their intention to challenge the initiative in court. In fact, even before the vote was taken, they went to court to block it and were told, first by the trial court and ultimately by the Alaska Supreme Court, that the people must be allowed to vote.

Now that the verdict is in, expect the Pebble Partnership to head back to court, urging that the initiative be invalidated, asserting their right, as foreign corporations, to fill Alaskan salmon streams with contaminated mining waste and inevitably put at risk the way of life that has sustained the Bristol Bay region for thousands of years.

But this fact remains: Today the people of the Lake and Pen Borough have resisted the Pebble Partnership’s intensive campaign of disinformation and fear and approved an initiative to save their salmon. The only question now is whether the Pebble Partnership is listening.

Governor's Inexplicable Midnight Veto of Bipartisan SB 833 Threatens Water Quality and Tribal Sacred Sites

2011-10-10T16:46:55Z

Joel Reynolds, Director of NRDC's Urban Program, the Marine Mammal Protection and So. California Ecosystem projects, Santa Monica, CA

Governor Jerry Brown’s veto of SB 833, just minutes before the midnight deadline last night, is inexplicable in rational terms.

The bill, sponsored by Senator Juan Vargas from San Diego, would have prohibited siting of a garbage dump on the banks of the San Luis Rey River in northern San Diego County adjacent to sacred sites of the Pala Band of Mission Indians. It had overwhelming bipartisan support in an age of unparalleled political division, passing both houses of the state legislature almost unanimously.

Most immediately, it would have prohibited the proposed 300-acre Gregory Canyon dump, a garbage scheme by largely out-of-state investors who bought a piece of property decades ago unfit for a landfill and then circumvented local landfill siting standards by initiative. It’s a project opposed by 19 tribes and an unusually broad cross-section of interests, from the Farm Bureau to local water agencies to conservationists, because putting a garbage dump next to a river is a recipe for disaster, and putting a garbage dump adjacent to sacred sites is a cultural insult and a desecration.

In his veto message, the Governor expressed “pain” over the “unspeakable injustices that native peoples have endured and the profound importance of their spirituality and connection to the land.” But he did nothing to stop this latest injustice and proceeded to veto the state legislature’s virtually unanimous action to prevent it.

On the risk to the San Luis Rey River and the drinking water supply of northern San Diego County cities, he cited the duty of the water boards – regional and state – to protect water quality, concluding that a “fully sufficient process” exists for environmental decision-making. Never mind that those boards – like so many administrative agencies -- frequently fail to fulfill their responsibilities. Never mind that the legislature, which created those very agencies, has concluded overwhelmingly that this is the wrong place for a garbage dump.

Perhaps most important in his view, the Governor alluded to local initiatives by which the people of San Diego have twice approved the site for the dump. Although ostensibly a nod to “local control,” this reference is to misleading ballot measures that pitted south San Diego County against less populous north County and overrode the existing zoning and the county’s established siting criteria. This cynical process is the antithesis of legitimate local control, and it’s bad public policy: the local regulatory structure was overridden by a self-interested group of investors from someplace else who managed to rezone their land through misuse of the initiative process.

And the result is exactly the wrong location for 30 million tons of garbage.

The good news is that the coalition of interests fighting this uniquely untenable project remains committed to doing whatever it takes – for however long it takes -- to stop it. Because, in the 21st Century, putting a garbage dump on a river is irrational and unacceptable. Because desecrating sacred sites is culturally – and categorically -- unconscionable.

The bad news is that Governor Brown had a chance last night, simply by letting SB 833 take effect, to end this wasteful, decades-long battle. By intervening instead to sustain the life of this inherently unsustainable project, he has promoted an outdated and unnecessary approach to solid waste management, perpetuated the cultural and racial injustice that his veto message decries, and inevitably endangered the health, welfare, and quality of life of generations to come in southern California.

The people weep.

Out of Ideas, the Orange County Transportation Corridor Agencies Propose the Same Illegal Toll Road Again -- In Pieces

2011-10-06T16:28:34Z

Joel Reynolds, Director of NRDC's Urban Program, the Marine Mammal Protection and So. California Ecosystem projects, Santa Monica, CA

Remember the Foothill South toll road? The one proposed by the Orange County Transportation Corridor Agencies (“TCA”) that would eviscerate the California State Park at San Onofre State Beach, one of the most popular state parks in California? The illegal one rejected three years ago by the California Coastal Commission, which found that “it would be difficult to imagine a more damaging alternative location for the proposed toll road”? The one again rejected later that same year by the Commerce Department of the George W. Bush Administration?

If you thought it was dead, think again.

Yesterday, the TCA’s Finance and Operations Committee approved a “new” TCA staff proposal. And that new proposal is . . . exactly the same as the old proposed toll road – except now the TCA wants to permit and build it in pieces!

After three years promising to find an alternative with a realistic chance of approval and, ultimately, of addressing traffic congestion in southern Orange County, the TCA is proposing instead to build four miles of the same rejected alignment – from Oso Parkway south to just north of Ortega Highway while continuing to defer any decision on how that segment will ultimately reach its intended terminus at the I-5.

Unfortunately, rather than cure the violations of law originally identified by state and federal regulatory agencies, the latest proposal compounds them by “segmenting” the project in order to avoid consideration of the devastating environmental impacts that doomed the full alignment project three years ago. Instead of eliminating or mitigating those impacts, the TCA yesterday proposed that regulatory agencies ignore them and focus instead only on four miles of the 16 mile right-of-way, leaving for a later day – after the four miles have been built – any regulatory review of the full project alignment.

Under a long line of state and federal legal precedent, this approach constitutes an illegal segmentation of the project. It is illegal precisely because this kind of segmentation has the inevitable effect of prejudicing any later consideration of additional segments.

And this violation is in no way mitigated by the TCA’s claim that it hasn’t yet decided on where the alignment will run from Ortega Highway to the I-5. If you believe that, I have a blow-out preventer from the Gulf of Mexico that I’d like to sell you.

To make matters worse, the TCA intends to fund this latest scheme through tolls based on an astonishing prediction of 41,000 average daily trips along the four-mile segment in the year 2035. What the factual basis may be for this estimate along this single section is uncertain – the TCA hasn’t said – but it may have more to do with the amount the TCA’s bankers estimate would be required to green light construction than the amount reasonably expected in actual ridership.

One immediate consequence of this latest illegal TCA proposal will be renewed opposition from the broad coalition of interests that defeated the toll road in 2008. As far as the TCA is concerned, the last three years back at the drawing board have generated no discernable progress in its conception of the project. Now hotly contested and costly administrative proceedings and, ultimately, litigation against the project will begin again and continue for as long as it takes to defeat the TCA’s latest run at this failed project – a project that should have been retired years ago in favor of 21st Century traffic management solutions whose purpose is moving people and relieving congestion rather than building a needlessly destructive toll road to perpetuate the TCA’s own survival.

Without any real expectation that the full TCA board will listen to reason when it votes on October 13, we nevertheless strongly urge them to reject this latest act of desperation by its staff to salvage an illegal project definitively put to rest three years ago.

Handle CEQA With Care

2011-10-04T23:18:25Z

Joel Reynolds, Director of NRDC's Urban Program, the Marine Mammal Protection and So. California Ecosystem projects, Santa Monica, CA

In Vernon, the state’s first large-scale commercial toxic waste incinerator spews deadly dioxins and furans near schools, churches, and the residential communities of East Los Angeles. In Richmond, a commercial center is constructed on the Breuner Marsh, filling wetlands and severing the San Francisco Bay Trail. In Santa Monica, Occidental Petroleum drills for oil just yards from Will Rogers State Beach and Santa Monica Bay.

East of Riverside, the rich natural habitat of Potrero Valley is bulldozed and converted into an 18,000 unit golf resort. Along the Los Angeles River, in the city’s historic center, millions of square feet of industrial warehouses, serviced around the clock by thousands of diesel trucks, open for business on land identified by community residents for parkland.

Welcome to California without the California Environmental Quality Act.

Known as CEQA, this landmark environmental protection law requires an environmental impact report and effective measures to mitigate environmental harm for any project that may have a significant effect on the environment. CEQA derailed the incinerator in Vernon, the commercial center in Richmond, the oil drilling on Santa Monica Bay, the massive golf resort in Potrero Valley, and the warehouses along the LA River, where the sites were then acquired for state parkland. The oasis in Potrero Valley was acquired by wildlife agencies and is being operated as a nature preserve.

In addressing these and countless projects like them up and down the state, Californians have relied on CEQA for over 40 years to protect their communities and our natural resources from environmentally uninformed government decisions – decisions that needlessly pollute our air, contaminate our water, endanger our children’s health, despoil our wild lands, and undermine the quality of our lives. CEQA has been called “a bill of rights for an environmental democracy,” and development is better, smarter, and greener because of it.

But environmental democracy takes time, costs money, and has regulatory teeth, so CEQA has also become the law that developers love to hate.

Last week, in the wake of double-digit unemployment, that sentiment carried the day as Governor Jerry Brown signed into law two bills – SB 292 and AB 900 – hastily approved by wide margins on the final day of the Legislative session. The bills amend CEQA to expedite court review of legal challenges to “environmental leadership projects” that commit to meet certain loosely-defined environmental standards and create a significant number of jobs. Under SB 292, one of the expedited projects is the proposed Farmers Field stadium in downtown Los Angeles.

The understandable purpose is to put people to work. Fair enough. But once amended, the threat to CEQA and the purposes it serves becomes dangerously difficult to contain. Indeed, development lobbyists are already talking about extending this latest “CEQA reform” to a range of polluting projects, from port expansion to warehouse development to highways.

While job creation is a goal everyone supports, the well-worn juxtaposition of jobs versus the environment is a hollow refrain. Just two years ago, for example, Majestic Realty Company promised thousands of new jobs if its stadium project in the City of Industry were exempted from CEQA challenge. The Legislature complied, but the jobs are nowhere to be seen.

In fact, no compelling case has ever been made that California’s environmental standards cost more jobs than they attract. And there is no factual basis to conclude that lowering those standards will benefit anyone but the polluters who demand it.

Nor is there solace in corporate promises of environmental stewardship. The world of public policy is littered with failed good intentions, and it is the public that suffers the consequences. Indeed, CEQA was enacted to make enforceable the good intentions of developers and government officials -- intentions often discarded, prior to the act's passage, in the rush to issue permits and break ground. Through CEQA, the Legislature wisely obligated decision-makers to be skeptical of lofty promises – and then granted to citizens the right of enforcement if CEQA’s obligations weren’t met.

CEQA isn't perfect, but it has served Californians well by providing communities a line of self-defense when elected officials become cheerleaders for, not regulators of, significant projects. Highways, incinerators, refineries, sewage treatment plants, power stations, prisons, stadiums, and commercial or residential developments are all subject to environmental and judicial scrutiny before they can be built.

And while important to all of us, this protection is particularly valuable to low-income communities, disproportionately the recipients of projects that “have to go somewhere . . . .” These are the communities without financial or political resources available to affluent citizens, and these are the communities most at risk if the protections are weakened.

California is a richer, more livable place because of its environmental standards. Reform of our most important environmental law must be handled with care, even as we strive to create jobs and promote green energy technology. Each of us has a personal stake in CEQA’s integrity, because none of us, especially our children, can afford to lose its protection.

This blog post appeared first as an Op Ed in the Sacramento Bee on October 3, 2011.

Election Day in Bristol Bay: Lake and Pen Borough Residents Vote on Salmon Protection Initiative

2011-10-04T20:34:35Z

Joel Reynolds, Director of NRDC's Urban Program, the Marine Mammal Protection and So. California Ecosystem projects, Santa Monica, CA

Today – Tuesday October 4, 2011 – is a big day in southwest Alaska. It marks the conclusion of voting on the Save Our Salmon (“SOS”) initiative being considered by the residents of the Lake and Peninsula Borough, where the massive Pebble Mine is proposed to be built. If approved, the initiative would ban large-scale resource extraction – like the Pebble Mine – that would destroy or degrade salmon habitat. Because voting is conducted by mail, the outcome won’t be known for a couple of weeks.

Whatever the outcome, the campaign has been a microcosm of the broader battle over the Pebble Mine – an embodiment of the tension between the world’s most productive wild salmon fishery and irresponsible large-scale mining. It has reflected the struggle between the economic needs of the people of the region and the reckless pursuit of corporate profits, between democratic self-determination by Bristol Bay residents and autocratic imperialism by a consortium of foreign mining companies. (Photo by Robert Glenn Ketchum)

But at its most basic the SOS campaign has reflected a conflict between telling the truth and telling lies – a familiar conflict in the controversy over Pebble Mine.

Several examples:

First, the initiative qualified overwhelmingly for the ballot based on a number of signatures that exceeded the entire number of votes in the last municipal election. Although Anglo American CEO Cynthia Carroll has given repeated assurances that they will not pursue the mine without broad local support, the Pebble Partnership’s immediate reaction to the initiative was to challenge it in court, seeking to remove it from the ballot. When the trial court rejected their demand, the Pebble Partners appealed all the way to the Alaska Supreme Court – only to be told once again that the people of the region are entitled to vote.

Second, since it couldn’t prevent the people from voting, the Pebble Partners funded a front group called Defend Your Rights (“DYR”) that only distorted the initiative’s contents. Instead of trying to explain why protecting salmon streams is a bad idea – admittedly a tough sell in a region dependent on salmon – DYR distributed a mailing whose focus is fear and propaganda, charging that the initiative “will drive Lake and Pen families away to find work, force schools to close and drive up the cost of food and fuel as the local economy shrinks even more.”

Never mind that the initiative would do none of that.

Never mind that the initiative is explicitly limited to large-scale resource extraction activities greater than 640 acres.

Never mind that, even then, the initiative prohibits only those extractions that threaten salmon habitat.

Third, ignoring the Pebble Partners' singular role in financing opposition to the initiative, that same DYR mailer personally attacked the initiative’s funder, Lake and Pen Borough resident Bob Gillam, claiming that Gillam “cares about one thing: his sport fishing,” that his sole purpose is “to protect his own private fishing playgrounds,” and that “he wants you to think he’s one of us.”

Never mind that the Pebble Partnership is made up of foreign corporations – hardly “one of us.”

Never mind that Gillam’s opposition to their mega-mine at Pebble is shared by over 80 percent of Bristol Bay residents.

Never mind that, through his heroic efforts, one thing has become unmistakably clear: that the more facts people learn about the Pebble Mine the more its opposition grows. To know Pebble is to oppose it.

If the SOS initiative passes, it will attest once again to the fact that the people of the Lake and Pen Borough support protecting wild salmon and their habitat. If the initiative fails, it will attest only to the undeniable power of lying – something that demagogues have understood all too well since the invention of propaganda centuries ago.

Take action now. Stop the Pebble Mine.

More freeways won't end L.A.'s traffic woes

2011-08-10T17:10:47Z

Joel Reynolds, Director of NRDC's Urban Program, the Marine Mammal Protection and So. California Ecosystem projects, Santa Monica, CA

There are two things on which most Southern Californians enthusiastically agree: Vin Scully should announce Dodger baseball forever, and something needs to be done about the traffic.

Sadly, there's nothing we can do to make Scully immortal. But we can definitely do something about the traffic.

First, we can stop spending time and scarce transportation funding on planning, designing and permitting obsolete highway projects that will only perpetuate our paralysis. Traffic studies have long established that we can't just pave our way out of congestion. We've tried that approach for 50 years, and gridlock is where it's gotten us.

Second, we need to promote rapid transit, congestion pricing, carpooling, bus-only lanes, transit-oriented development and other 21st century solutions. Our quality of life and our economic future — and those of our children — depend on it.

Consider, for example, two particularly glaring examples of proposed highway projects in Southern California that we can no longer afford to entertain: the extension of the 710 Freeway from its terminus in Alhambra north of Interstate 10 to Interstate 210 in Pasadena; and the Foothill South toll road, in southern Orange and northern San Diego counties. Both epitomize yesterday's approach to traffic management, and both need to be abandoned — definitively.

The 710 extension has been going nowhere for more than five decades, stopped in its tracks by unyielding opposition from municipalities, civic leaders, community groups and environmentalists determined to protect the residential neighborhoods and historic communities in its path. The latest bad idea devised to breathe new life into this white elephant project is to tunnel it, at a projected cost of up to $14 billion. This is an extravagance that would get us essentially nowhere, since transportation experts predict that the road would be congested virtually from the day it opens.

A better alternative for the region is a multipronged approach focusing on transit and other congestion management improvements on existing roads — an effective course of action that could have been implemented years ago with strong community support, creating real jobs and delivering real traffic relief now.

Along the south coast, the Foothill South toll road is a 16-mile, six-lane highway to be funded by tolls that, for the project to pencil out financially, are expected to be so expensive that only wealthy drivers would choose to pay them. Already rejected by the California Coastal Commission and the Bush administration for its destructive effects on coastal resources, this proposed road for the rich would run through the heart of the California state park at San Onofre — a recreational resource that serves 2.5 million visitors each year. According to state parks staff, 60% of the park would be closed. Although the toll road's ostensible purpose is to reduce congestion on Interstate 5, transportation models already predict that the "substantial congestion" condition expected on the I-5 for decades to come would remain, whether or not the toll road is built.

Meanwhile, the myopic Orange County Transportation Corridor Agencies — the consolidated local agencies created to build the toll road — refuse even to consider addressing I-5 congestion by widening the existing freeway, a seemingly obvious measure that most stakeholders (except the TCA) believe is a better alternative for the region.

Instead of wasting limited transportation dollars on projects like these that inevitably sabotage mobility by perpetuating traffic congestion, we need to demand strategies that will actually address the problem. There is no better example anywhere in the country than the 30/10 initiative advanced by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa — who last week became MTA board chairman — and the Move LA coalition of community organizations to leverage federal loans to accelerate funding for 12 key public transit projects in Los Angeles.

The 30/10 plan — now called America Fast Forward — is a groundbreaking initiative that deserves our strong support. If successful, it will create an estimated 160,000 construction jobs, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, decrease harmful air pollution by more than half a million pounds of emissions each year and provide desperately needed transit alternatives for commuters. It includes the so-called Subway to the Sea, Phase 2 of the Exposition light-rail line and the Crenshaw/LAX Transit Corridor.

If there is an immutable truth today it is that, as a society, we no longer have the luxury of wasting public funds on costly projects that won't address the problems we face — projects that persist more for reasons of politics or bureaucratic momentum than effectiveness. We need, as quickly as possible, to devise, design, permit and construct the elements of a transportation system that will create jobs and allow us to get out of our cars, get off the freeways and get wherever it is we have to go. "I can't get there from here" is not an acceptable future for Southern California's residents.

When Vin Scully decides someday to leave the microphone behind, there will be nothing we can do to stop him. But we can move forward to renewed mobility and away from a future of gridlock by rejecting highway projects that will take us nowhere.

This piece originally ran as an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times.

Critically Endangered Western Gray Whales Found at Laguna San Ignacio

2011-08-01T22:39:28Z

Joel Reynolds, Director of NRDC's Urban Program, the Marine Mammal Protection and So. California Ecosystem projects, Santa Monica, CA

Laguna San Ignacio, along the Pacific coast of Baja California, is renowned as the last undisturbed breeding and calving lagoon of the Eastern North Pacific gray whale. Over a decade ago, this World Heritage Site was the focus of a successful international campaign by NRDC and others to prevent construction on its shores of the largest industrial salt works in the world. Today it remains the focus of an international conservation alliance seeking to give the lagoon permanent protection. (Photo: Robert Glenn Ketchum)

Recent scientific research has made these efforts even more critical than previously had been understood..

At the 63rd annual meeting of the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission, held in in Tromsø, Norway this past June, researchers presented results from a photo-identification study establishing that four critically endangered western gray whales from Sakhalin Island, Russia have found their way from the western Pacific Ocean all the way to Laguna San Ignacio.

These results, reported by NOAA scientists David Weller, Amanda Bradford, and colleagues, are both remarkable as a matter of science and significant from the perspective of conservation.

First, though the populations are distinct based on genetic as well as geographic differences, the recent results contradict the longstanding understanding that the tiny population of an estimated 130 individual Western North Pacific gray whales is confined geographically to the eastern seaboard of Asia, isolated from the much larger population of Eastern North Pacific gray whales whose migration route parallels the Pacific Coast of North America each winter and spring. (Range map: Jones and Swartz 1982)

Second, they buttress the importance of Laguna San Ignacio and the efforts to preserve it by establishing it as a critical destination not just for hundreds of individual eastern grays but for still unknown numbers of western grays as well – one of the most endangered whale populations in the world today -- who travel extraordinary distances to get there. Further photo-identification studies are now being undertaken to determine the numbers of western grays whose presence can be established at Laguna San Ignacio.

More generally, this research demonstrates once again how little we understand the ways of the great whales and, therefore, how important is our work to protect them. Laguna San Ignacio is a rare gem of undisturbed gray whale habitat – an invaluable remnant among countless coastal gray whale lagoons that for eons provided protection and sustenance but, in recent times, have been forfeited to human activities, from whaling to development to commercial shipping. (Photo: Richard Sobol)

It is a place that must be saved. For the eastern gray whale, for the western gray whale, and for our children.

To learn how you can help, go to http://www.savebiogems.org/baja/graywhalenursery/.

Robert Glenn Ketchum, Our Generation's Ansel Adams

2011-07-26T22:35:11Z

Joel Reynolds, Director of NRDC's Urban Program, the Marine Mammal Protection and So. California Ecosystem projects, Santa Monica, CA

While Robert Glenn Ketchum's name recognition can be debated, his impact on the world cannot. According to American Photo Magazine, he is “the most influential photographer you’ve never heard of.”

In fact, among conservationists, he is renowned for his 35-year history of photographic activism on behalf of some of the most threatened landscapes in the world. From the Hudson River Valley to California’s Big Sur coast to Alaska’s Tongass rainforest to Ohio’s Cuyahoga River Valley to Laguna San Ignacio in Baja California and, most recently, to Bristol Bay in southwest Alaska. For his work, he has earned a long list of significant accolades, awards, and recognition, leading to his selection last year by American Photo for a Master Series profile previously reserved for the photographic firmament of Avedon, Leibovitz, Cartier-Bresson, and Helmut Newton.

What William Henry Jackson, Ansel Adams, and Eliot Porter were to their generations of photographers, Robert Glenn Ketchum is to ours. He is an artist whose passion for conservation has led him to become one of the world’s most effective defenders of our natural heritage, using his extraordinary photographic talents to convey the beauty and the peril of places that we, as a society, cannot afford to lose. The photos featured here are only a few examples of his work.

Fifteen years ago I had the privilege of working with Robert Glenn Ketchum to protect the last undisturbeed breeding and birthing lagoon of the Pacific gray whale at Laguna San Ignacio -- a UNESCO World Heritage Site targeted by Mitsubishi Corporation and the Mexican government for construction of the world's largest industrial; salt factory. The project was defeated in March 2000, and the lagoon remains today one of the natural wonders of the planet.

Most recently, we have joined with Ketchum to fight the proposed Pebble Mine in the wild lands of southwest Alaska -- an outrageous scheme by a consortium of foreign mining companies to build one of the world’s largest gold and copper mines at the headwaters of the incomparable wild salmon fishery of Bristol Bay. For thousands of years the salmon have sustained the people and wildlife of Bristol Bay, and today they are the heart of a fishery that generates an estimated $450 million annually and thousands of jobs. Whatever your perspective on mining, it is difficult to imagine a worse location anywhere for a project of this kind.

In support of a unique coalition of Alaskan Native communities, commercial and recreational fishermen, hunters, businesses, and environmentalists, Ketchum has thrown himself into the fight against the mine, photographing the region, publishing photo books, giving lectures, speaking to reporters, lobbying federal officials, and generally doing everything he can to raise awareness of the region and the threat posed by the Pebble Mine. Visit his website at www.robertglennketchum.com and see for yourself.

NRDC has a long history of association with Robert Glenn Ketchum, and we are proud once again to be working closely with him. The Pebble Mine is one of the most glaring examples in the world today of a project whose fate will spell the future of our planet, for better or worse. NRDC and its members are determined to do all that we can to stop it.

Join Robert Glenn Ketchum, NRDC, and the people of Alaska. Take action now to stop the Pebble Mine.

Pebble Mine: "Self-Destruction" -- Watch This

2011-07-06T16:41:55Z

Joel Reynolds, Director of NRDC's Urban Program, the Marine Mammal Protection and So. California Ecosystem projects, Santa Monica, CA

Bristol Bay is synonymous with wild salmon. Each year tens of millions of salmon return to the pristine rivers and streams of southwest Alaska, fueling one of the most productive commercial, recreational, and subsistence fisheries in the world -- sustaining the people, communities, and wildlife of Bristol Bay for thousands of years.

Since large mines inevitably contaminate their surroundings, and since copper in amounts of only a few parts per billion over background levels is toxic to salmon, the Pebble Mine is a disaster in the making – a toxic time-bomb if ever there was one.

The risks of Pebble Mine are staggering, unavoidable, and unacceptable.

I’ve seen no one express this more eloquently, in fewer words, than Bristol Bay native Holly Wysocki.

I met her recently in Dillingham, where, like so many people in the region at this time of year, she was feverishly in the midst of last minute preparations for this year’s salmon season.

Holly is in her mid-twenties and was raised in subsistence and commercial fishing, which she’s continued all her life. Born and still living in the town of Dillingham on the shores of Bristol Bay, Holly’s life and that of her family revolve around the wild salmon fishery and depend on its protection -- literally.

Holly’s view of the Pebble Mine? “Self-destruction.”

See for yourself what she has to say about Pebble in a television ad from the Renewable Resources Coalition in Anchorage. It only takes 30 seconds, and you won’t regret it. Maybe you’ll never forget it.

The Pebble Mine isn’t an abstraction or a mere cause for Holly Wysocki and the people of Bristol Bay. It’s a matter of life and death. This may be why, according to recent surveys, over 80 percent of Bristol Bay residents oppose the mine.

We have to stop the Pebble Mine.

Take action now. And please send this blog post to everyone you know.

Pebble Mine: Road to Disaster

2011-06-21T19:52:44Z

Joel Reynolds, Director of NRDC's Urban Program, the Marine Mammal Protection and So. California Ecosystem projects, Santa Monica, CA

Most people who've heard of the massive Pebble Mine — proposed for construction in the wild lands above Bristol Bay in southwest Alaska — know about the gigantic open pit, the estimated 10 billion tons of mining waste laced with toxics, the unavoidable risk of contamination to the wild salmon fisheries of region, and the overwhelming opposition of the people who live there.

But few people understand that it gets even worse.

The foreign mining companies that make up the Pebble Partnership have said very little about impacts from the road, power plants, slurry pipelines, relentless heavy-duty diesel truck traffic, and even a deep water port that would accompany the mine – infrastructure essential to its operation, destructive in its own right, and staggering in its geographic scale.

This week my colleagues and I flew over the proposed right-of-way of what is currently estimated to be a 104-mile road from the mine site to Cook Inlet. From the pristine wild lands at the headwaters of the Bristol Bay watershed, the road would wind south, crossing innumerable streams and other water bodies, large and small, where salmon spawn. It would skirt the east end of Lake Iliamna -- the largest fresh water body in Alaska – eviscerate the community of Pedro Bay, bridge the Iliamna River (among others), and traverse steeper and steeper slopes as it winds its way through icy mountain peaks that drop precipitously into the deep blue waters of Iniskin Bay in Cook Inlet.

There, an industrial marine terminal and a deep water port would be constructed at the receiving end of a new slurry pipeline, where ore from the mine would be loaded onto large, ocean-going container ships. These industrial facilities – and the increased ship traffic that it is intended to attract -- wouldn’t be good news for the critically endangered population of Beluga whales that reside in Cook Inlet, already home to the Port of Anchorage to the North. The population has already been federally listed as endangered and its Cook Inlet habitat designated as critical.

Although no one yet knows how the power for the massive mine and associated infrastructure would be generated – power needed, for example, to continuously and permanently dewater the site, power the mine construction and operations, slurry the ore, treat the run-off, and run the port – estimates are that the demand would equal or surpass that required by the entire city of Anchorage. The costs of such facilities – economic, environmental, and social --- would be staggering.

It’s no secret that the technological and engineering challenges of large-scale mining in a region as wild, wet, and vast as is contemplated for the Pebble Mine are unprecedented, from the mine itself to the facilities essential to service it. But it is equally clear that, even if the world’s best engineers could be enlisted to build it, there is no way they could engineer away the inevitable and innumerable risks of failure, accident, fuel and chemical spills, contamination, and ultimately economic, environmental, and social devastation that such a project, in such a location, would pose to the communities, to the fishermen, and to the wildlife of Bristol Bay.

The Pebble Mine is a road to disaster. And when the ore has left the country, the people of Alaska will be left with the wreckage.

Say no to Pebble Mine.

Bristol Bay Rivers Endangered by the Pebble Mine

2011-05-17T17:44:29Z

Joel Reynolds, Director of NRDC's Urban Program, the Marine Mammal Protection and So. California Ecosystem projects, Santa Monica, CA

Thanks to American Rivers (“AR”) for its latest recognition that the survival of the Kvichak and Nushagak Rivers lies squarely in the cross-hairs of the Pebble Partnership and its proposal to build a mega-mine at the headwaters of the Bristol Bay watershed in southwest Alaska. In its report issued today on America’s Most Endangered Rivers, AR summarizes what’s at stake for Bristol Bay and its incomparable wild salmon fishery, for the people, communities, and wildlife that depend on it, and for all of us who recognize the value of clean water and wilderness.

There is no better example anywhere of a project that poses too great a risk to resources we cannot afford to lose. No amount of environmental review, no structure of permitting, and no confident assurances from the Pebble Partnership that wild salmon and large-scale mining can "co-exist" at the headwaters of the Kvichak and Nushagak Rivers will eliminate that unavoidable risk. For that reason, over 80 percent of the region’s residents oppose the Pebble Mine, and their opposition must be respected.

As is so often the case with proposals of this kind, there is a lot of money to be made by the consortium of foreign mining companies that propose to extract Alaska’s minerals and leave its people with the toxic legacy of polluted streams and contaminated fisheries. It’s no surprise that Anglo American, Rio Tinto, and Northern Dynasty Minerals are willing to enrich themselves at the risk of impoverishing everyone else. Resource extraction on such a scale – with so much money at stake -- is, after all, a “dangerous business,” as one Anglo American executive told me last year.

But it would be very surprising if the people of Alaska allowed those foreign companies to get away with such a crazy scheme, knowing what’s at stake, understanding the certainty of disaster, and depending, as they do, on the purity of the streams that sustain the Bristol Bay fishery. The Kvichak and the Nushagak Rivers richly deserve their place on the list of America’s most endangered rivers, and they must be protected.

Support the people of Bristol Bay. Take action now to stop the Pebble Mine.

Rio Tinto Shareholders Face Pressure on Pebble Mine

2011-04-15T19:23:14Z

Joel Reynolds, Director of NRDC's Urban Program, the Marine Mammal Protection and So. California Ecosystem projects, Santa Monica, CA

The international campaign against the proposal to build the massive Pebble Mine above Bristol Bay in southwest Alaska moved to London this week.

Rio Tinto, one of the backers of the proposed mega-mine, held its annual general meeting of shareholders at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Center near Westminster Abbey, and environmental and human rights groups from around the world gathered to question the company’s board about a long list of mining ventures gone bad for the communities around them. Groups from Indonesia, Australia, Mongolia, Utah, the Upper Michigan Peninsula, Alaska, and elsewhere were represented, and, as in years past, a significant part of the three-hour meeting was devoted to hearing about these projects.

NRDC is there too, along with Kimberly Williams, Executive Director of Nunamta Aulukestai (“Keepers of the Land” in Yupik), an association of nine village corporations in southwest Alaska and one of the leaders of the coalition in the Bristol Bay region of Alaska opposed to the mine. Our purpose is to urge Rio Tinto’s management and board to end the company’s participation in the Pebble Mine project – just as Mitsubishi Corporation ended its participation in February – because we consider it to be, from an environmental and an economic perspective, one of the worst development proposals anywhere in the world today.

On Tuesday afternoon, Kimberly and I, along with Jason Metrokin (the CEO of the Bristol Bay Native Corporation, the largest private landowner in the Bristol Bay region), former Alaska State Senate President Rick Halford, and former President of the Igiugig Village Tribal Council Lydia Olympic, met with Rio Tinto CEO Tom Albanese and his team in Rio Tinto’s offices to make the same pitch. That hour-long meeting, arranged by the company in response to NRDC’s request, gave us a rare opportunity to present our views directly to the top management of the company in a private setting. Our intent was to initiate a dialogue that we hope, over time, will persuade Rio Tinto to abandon its interest in the Pebble Mine.

This high-powered delegation of leaders from the region most under threat from the Pebble Mine made three main points: (1) that the proposed mega-mine poses an unacceptable risk to the $400 million-per-year wild salmon fishery that has sustained the communities of Bristol Bay for generations; (2) that the project is overwhelmingly opposed by over 80 percent of the region’s residents; and (3) that the project can’t be reconciled with Rio Tinto’s own standards of respect for sustainability, environment, cultural heritage, and community relations.

On Thursday, at the shareholder meeting, Kimberly and I reiterated these points and urged the members of the board to reconsider the company’s support of the project. Both Rio Tinto’s Albanese and the Board Chairman Jan du Plessis reported that, in their view, the private meeting two days before had been a positive and productive exchange of serious concerns, and Albanese indicated that he, too, had questions about the feasibility of a giant open pit mine at the proposed location, but he believed a smaller, underground mine in the same area could be more viable.

We responded categorically that any significant mine, open pit or underground, at the headwaters of the Bristol Bay watershed was inalterably unacceptable and, in our judgment, flatly inconsistent with Rio Tinto’s publicly stated environmental, cultural, and social policies. We supported the conviction of our position by providing to Chairman du Plessis over 57,000 petitions of opposition generated by NRDC members and activists, bringing the total number of such petitions provided to the Pebble corporate partners to over 300,000 in just the past 12 months.

A focus on Rio Tinto’s string of public statements on community relations and respect for the environment was also the theme of a full-page ad in Thursday’s London Financial Times, funded by NRDC and co-signed by NRDC and seven other coalition members, including Nunumta. “Rio Tinto: Talk is cheap,” the headline read, and the text cautioned Rio Tinto’s shareholders to “watch what Rio Tinto does, not what it says.” The ad urged the company to follow Mitsubishi Corporation’s example and withdraw from the Pebble project.

Next week, NRDC will be running another full-page ad, this time in the New York Times and headlined by actor/director and long-time conservationist Robert Redford, demanding in a bold headline that Rio Tinto and Anglo American not do to Bristol Bay what, through the massive Bingham Canyon mine in Utah, Rio Tinto has done in his backyard. The visual comparison provided by the ad between Bristol Bay’s pristine wilderness today and the massive open pit scarring the landscape at Bingham Canyon captures in a compelling and graphic way exactly what is at stake for the people, the communities, and the wildlife – especially the wild salmon – of Bristol Bay.

Update: Photos from the Rio Tinto shareholder meeting in London yesterday (first photo showing NRDC's Joel Reynolds and Nunamta Aulukestai's Kimberly Williams with Rio Tinto CEO Tom Albanese and Board Chairman Jan du Plessis; second photo showing Kimberly Williams holding over 57,000 petitions opposing the Pebble Mine), courtesy Joel Reynolds.

U.S. Nuclear Industry: Not Safe Enough

2011-03-18T16:44:46Z

Joel Reynolds, Director of NRDC's Urban Program, the Marine Mammal Protection and So. California Ecosystem projects, Santa Monica, CA

The specter of nuclear disaster in Japan has prompted nuclear industry representatives in the United States to offer reassurances that no such thing could happen here. Our plants are better designed, they say, our system of government oversight is stricter, and a quake of that magnitude is highly unlikely.

If you believe that, I have a fail-safe blowout preventer from the Gulf of Mexico I want to sell you.

Some 25 years ago, on behalf of a group of San Luis Obispo residents called Mothers for Peace, I urged the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and then the federal courts to block the operating license for the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant. The facility, located on the Central Coast of California, sits just a couple of miles from the Hosgri earthquake fault, which is believed to be capable of generating a magnitude 7.5 temblor.

We argued that the plant should not be granted an operating license because, among other concerns, emergency plans for the facility were inadequate and failed to consider the possibility that an earthquake might trigger events leading to a release of radiation — the very circumstances that have now occurred in Japan.

The commission rejected our concerns and even prohibited its staff and the public from considering them. Their view was that the plant had been designed to withstand the "maximum credible earthquake" for the site and that therefore an earthquake couldn't lead to a nuclear accident.

After initially granting a temporary stay of the license, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, by a 5-4 vote, agreed with the commission. In a decision written by then-Judge Robert Bork (and joined by, among others, now-Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and former special prosecutor Kenneth Starr), it concluded that the probability of a simultaneous earthquake and radiological accident at Diablo Canyon was "so small as to be rated zero" and, on that basis, that the commission was right to ignore it.

Judge Patricia Wald, joined by now-Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and others, dissented vehemently, calling the NRC's decision "inexplicable in legal, logical or common-sense terms." Wald excoriated the majority for "pretending that earthquakes are not material to emergency planning" for a nuclear accident at Diablo Canyon, and she concluded that if the majority was wrong, "history will allow no rehearing."

That prediction haunts us today as we watch the nuclear crisis unfolding in Japan. If Japanese regulators had been asked a day before the quake whether the Fukushima Daiichi plant was at risk, they would certainly have answered with an emphatic "no." Yet in the wake of the massive earthquake and resulting tsunami, three reactors have experienced partial meltdowns and a fourth, containing spent fuel rods, has lost coolant and caught fire. Hydrogen explosions have occurred at three reactors, and in at least two cases the roofs of the buildings that contain them have been destroyed. One or two of the reactors have apparently breached their primary containment, and widespread offsite contamination is feared.

Whether we are witnessing a chain of events more like the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 or the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 is not yet clear, but we ignore at our peril the serious implications of what is happening in Japan for our own nuclear plants. The crisis demands that we review and, if necessary, upgrade crucial reactor safety systems and emergency response plans — particularly for nuclear facilities located along our coasts.

The basic assumption that an earthquake can't cause a radiological accident — an assumption relied on in licensing not just Diablo Canyon but San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in northern San Diego County and every other U.S. reactor in a seismically active area — is simply wrong. Earthquakes are unpredictable, and geologists are consistently surprised by the discovery of unknown faults. Moreover, a quake can lead to other problems such as tsunamis, power outages and coolant system failures, which, when combined with human error, can spell disaster.

Although it is true that serious accidents at nuclear plants are few and far between, it is also true that the consequences of such accidents are potentially catastrophic. Even for strong advocates of the nuclear industry, therefore, it is foolish to ignore avoidable risks — such as locating a reactor in a seismically active region or, as in the case of Diablo Canyon, assuming that engineering can eliminate any possibility of a seismically induced accident.

Once again, the debate has begun about the role of this uniquely dangerous technology in our global fight against climate change — whether this latest failure in "fail-safe" nuclear reactor safety systems disqualifies nuclear energy from a growing role in cleaning up fossil-fuel pollution as we transition to a clean energy future, a future based on energy efficiency, renewable energy and green jobs. Neither the nuclear industry nor the commission has done enough over the years to inspire public confidence. Nuclear energy isn't cheap or clean or accident-free, and, for the relentless claims to the contrary, the credibility of nuclear utilities and the NRC has taken a beating.

Now, as Japan struggles to contain four out-of-control reactors, all of us — whatever our views of nuclear energy — must focus not on assurances that it can't happen here but rather on ensuring it never does.

Note: This piece originally ran as an op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times.