Environmental Disasters Loom Large But Remain Unnoticed

These are hard and exhausting times. Impeachment issues and the president’s continual bombardment of lies and insults that call for correction are wearing us out, remaining front and center both in the media and our minds. As a result of our fatigue and alarm, and because media is abrogating its duty to report essential news outside of Trump’s tantrums, it’s not surprising that disastrous decisions by the president, and their consequences, have gone unnoticed. None of the actions and policy changes of the current administration is more urgently in need of increased awareness, and resistance, than those that relate to environmental degradation and destruction posing serious threats to our health and safety.

Among the most egregious decisions of the Trump administration is the recent “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” proposal promulgated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This terribly dangerous idea would require scientists to disclose all their raw data, including confidential medical records, before the EPA would consider academic studies as valid. Scientific and medical research would be severely limited leading to Draconian public health regulations as well as environmental crises. EPA officials call the plan a step toward transparency, but it is clearly designed to limit important scientific information that should drive policy related to clean air and water, among other health-related environmental impacts.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump pledged to roll back government regulations as part of his pro-business “America First Energy Plan.” Once in the White House he immediately signed executive orders approving two controversial oil pipelines and a federal review of the Clean Water Rule and Clean Power Plan. Shortly thereafter, the Clean Water Rule was repealed.

The administration is allowing drilling in national parks and other treasured venues and opening up more federal land for energy development while the Department of the Interior plans to allow drilling in nearly all U.S. waters, opening up the largest expansion of offshore oil and gas leasing ever proposed. This year the administration completed plans for allowing the entire coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to be made available for oil and gas drilling as well.

You have only to look at who Mr. Trump turned to or appointed to head key agencies that deal with energy and environmental policy. For example, three of four members of a transition team mandated to come up with proposals guiding Native American policies had links to the oil industry and his first head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, challenged EPA regulations in court more than a dozen times. Pruitt also hired a disgraced banker with no experience with environmental issues to head the Superfund program, responsible for cleaning up the nation’s most contaminated land.

Other departmental gems include Andrew Wheeler, who replaced Pruitt. He was a coal industry lobbyist and a critic of limits on greenhouse gas emissions. Then there’s Rick Perry who was tasked with developing more efficient energy sources and improving energy education. At Interior, Ryan Zinke who didn’t last long. He was followed by an attorney and oil industry lobbyist who put his personal energy into deregulation and increased fossil fuel sales on public lands. At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a scientific agency that warns of dangerous weather, monitors atmospheric changes, oceans, and more, Trump’s guy was a lawyer and businessman who had advocated against NOAA.

In August, Mr. Trump instructed Sonny Perdue, Agricultural Secretary, to exempt Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, the world’s largest intact temperate rain forest, from logging restrictions and mining projects. The president had already told the Department of the Interior to review more than two dozen monuments with a view to reducing the size of Bears Ears National Monument and other sacred land.

National Geographic has been tracking how the administration’s decisions influence air, water, and wildlife. Here are just some of the ways environmental policies have changed since Trump became president. The U.S. has pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, loosened regulations on toxic air pollution, rolled back the Clean Power Act, revoked flood standards accounting for sea-level rise, green-lighted seismic air guns for oil and gas drilling that disorient marine mammals and kill plankton, and altered the Endangered Species Act.

A recent New York Times analysis counts more than 80 environmental rules and regulations “on the way out under Mr. Trump.” So far 53 rollbacks have been completed and 32 are in progress. The Trump strategy, the Times points out, relies on a “one-two punch” in which rules are first delayed, then overridden by final substantive rules. It packs a big punch any way you look at it.

Not long ago I visited Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts where the philosopher, writer and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau lived for two years in a solitary cabin in the mid-19th century. Often credited with starting the environmental movement, he articulated a philosophy based on environmental and social responsibility, resource efficiency, and living simply. He believed fervently that we must keep the wild intact. “What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” he asked.

It’s a question we should all contemplate in the runup to November 2020.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, health, politics and social issues from Saxtons River, Vt. www.elayne-clift.com

"Water, Water Everywhere, Nor Any Drop to Drink!"

Those are the words of “the Ancient Mariner,” in a 19th century poem written by Samuel Coleridge. They seem eerily, and creepily, relevant today. While we aren’t floating on a sea of undrinkable salt water, we are facing the threat of not having water to drink.

Flint, Michigan became the canary in the coalmine regarding the crisis in clean drinking water in this country when the nation learned that the drinking water there was full of lead. Looking to cut water costs, the governor had hired an outside firm that came up with the idea of getting Flint’s drinking water from the Flint River, known to be heavily polluted, instead of the Detroit River system. Contamination from the Flint River interacted with the aging lead pipes in Flint’s water delivery system causing dangerous levels of lead contamination for people without water filters.

But the issue of water standards is not just taking place in cities like Flint. It’s also occurring in rural places like Kentucky, Texas, Kansas and elsewhere. And then there’s the very real problem of water shortages occurring in many corners of the world due to climate change and other factors.

Many water problems in this country come from mining, waste from burning coal, and large-scale agriculture, along with aging pipes. In Marin County, Kentucky, for example, people often get their water from wells sunk into flooded, abandoned mines with water loaded with heavy metals. Other communities from West Virginia to North Carolina trace their water problems to waste produced from burning coal stored in liquid ponds that can leak or spill, according to a recent article in the New Republic. Further, in large-scale rural farming areas, nitrogen-based fertilizer slides off farmlands and makes its way into freshwater systems.

In 2016, Reuters released a report about America’s drinking water. It concluded that nearly 3,000 locations in the U.S. have drinking water where the lead contamination is at least double of that found in Flint’s drinking water.  And according to the Centers for Disease Control, at least 2.5 percent of children in this country have elevated levels of lead in their blood, the effects of which may not show up until adolescence.

According to a Michigan State University report referenced on www.desmogblog.com,  the U.S. could see large portions of the population unable to afford water in the near future. This is due to “a variety of pressures ranging from climate change, to sanitation and water quality, to infrastructure upgrades, placing increasing strain on water prices.” It would take an estimated $1 trillion dollars to replace aging water infrastructure in the U.S. alone in the next 25 years. That could triple the cost of water bills to households.

The water crisis is global. Cape Town, South Africa has been in the news recently because it could be the first major city in the world to run out of water. June 4th is designated as Day Zero. That’s when the city’s taps will be turned off, causing residents to have to line up at collection points to get 25 litres of water per day, per person. Climate change-induced drought and a growing population are said to have caused the current crisis.

So far, most of the people facing water shortages live in so-called “developing countries.” In many places women and girls walk miles to find water, sometimes several times a day. But even China regularly sees moderate to severe water shortages, and every year the vast country uses more water than rain replaces. An estimated 25 – 33 percent of Chinese people lack access to safe drinking water.

There is something even more frightening to contemplate about the world’s future, and that is the real possibility of water wars. Conflicts over water could easily break out in the Middle East, especially in Israel, Jordan and Syria. But water conflicts are also possible here. Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California all share water from the Colorado River. Those states have already begun negotiating how to manage the river’s limited water supply.

Statistics about water are telling. According to www.seametrics.com, by 2025 an estimated 1.8 billion people will live in areas plagues by water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world’s population will live in water-stressed regions.  780 million people in the world now live without clean drinking water. Extreme drought is expected to render vast expanses of land useless by 2050 while over the past forty years, as the world’s population has doubled, use of agricultural water has quadrupled.

According to the U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment of Global Water Security, by 2030 “humanities ‘annual global water requirements’ will exceed ‘current sustainable water supplies’ by 40 percent. By the year 2040 there will not be enough water in the world to quench the thirst of the world population and keep the current energy and power solutions going if we continue doing what we are doing today.”

The unquenchable thirst described in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is enough to make any mouth dry.  The thought that we may experience such thirst in our lifetimes is unfathomable, but it is real.

America's Assault on Its Antiquities

Anyone who has seen pictures of the Taliban-battered giant Buddhas in Afghanistan, or the destruction of the ancient city of Palmyra by Isis, will understand why environmentalists and naturalists are devastated by Donald Trump’s Executive Order calling for the identification of American national monuments that could be rescinded or resized.  The destructive nature of that Executive Order is on a scale no less traumatic than the travesties committed by the world’s two most uncivilized bodies, and the fact that the present administration doesn’t get that is extraordinarily troubling.

With the stroke of his pen, the president opened the way to drilling, mining and other development on federal lands, lands like Utah’s Bear Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, which together comprise more than three million acres that Trump’s Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke claims to be of no concern to “people in D.C. who have never been to the area” and who have “zero accountability to the impacted communities.”

Mr. Zinke plans to advise President Trump to shrink Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument to a scatter of isolated sites. The Utah monument is sacred to Native Americans seeking protection for Bears Ears because of its deep cultural and ecological significance. Tribal leaders have worked for nearly a decade to document the significance of this national monument.

These and other national treasures have been protected since 1906 when the Antiquities Act was passed. The Act gives U.S. presidents the power to keep vulnerable lands and waters safe. Virtually every president since Teddy Roosevelt has used it to protect archaeological, historic and natural sites from commercial exploitation.

Adam Markham, Deputy Director of Climate and Energy at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), is one of the people speaking out about the president’s action. He points out that many sites originally designated as national monuments were later upgraded by Congress to become national parks, including Bryce Canyon and Death Valley. Designating such places as monuments kept them safe when congressional leaders with ties to special interest groups and industries involving coal, oil, timber and mining threatened their future.

Donald Trump’s April Executive Order “puts this important regulatory protection for conservation and historic preservation at risk,” Markham noted in a UCS blog. “The clear intention of the Order is to lay the groundwork for shrinking national monuments or rescinding their designation entirely, in order to open currently protected public lands for growth in coal, oil and minerals extraction.”

Mr. Trump has ordered a review of all presidentially-designated national monuments since 1996 if they are over 100,000 acres in size. And incredibly, the Department of Interior signaled in a press release that it has no intention of undertaking a fair, independent review by describing Bear Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante as “bookends of modern Antiquities overreach.”

The administration appears to be woefully out of touch with the impact of its threat to federally protected land and water. The National Park Service(NPS) oversees 59 national parks and many other natural and historic sites.  They host millions of visitors every year, generating millions of dollars in tourism-related revenue. The NPS also employs over 315,000 people. Research shows that local economies expanded with monument designation. They will surely collapse when their beloved monuments are gone.

That’s in part why five sovereign Native American Tribes with ancestral ties to Bears Ears, including the Hopi and the Navajo Nation, have formed the Bears Ear Inter-Tribal Coalition, as if they didn’t have enough work to do trying to protect their sacred lands. Bears Ears is home to thousands of sacred and culturally important sites. Ceremonies are performed there and medicinal plants are gathered. Among its archaeological treasures are the Lime Ridge Clovis site which was inhabited over 11,000 years ago.

Amazingly, at the same time the president was signing the Executive Order and budgeting for a 12 percent decrease in the Interior Department’s funding, he declared that one of his administration’s priorities was “to protect these magnificent lands, and to ensure all Americans have access to our national parks, as well as to other National Park Service sites, throughout the next century.”

Thankfully Sen. Dick Durban (D-IL) has introduced the America’s Red Rock Wilderness Act to protect over 9 million acres of land in Utah threatened by oil and gas development.

Seventeen other senators support the legislation. 

But much more will need to be done to protect America’s beloved and diverse landscape, as well as magnificent sites like Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, and numerous other venues rich with Native American history, cliff houses, pictographs, ancestral remains and vistas of extraordinary range and beauty.

Preserving these vistas and their historical significance is a gift to future generations. They tell us who we are as a people and a country. To attack or abuse them is to bring down our Buddhas and our Palmyras. It cannot be allowed to happen.