Big cedars. Karen Sykes/P-I
Moran, who entered a guilty plea in November, will have three years of supervised probation after his sentence is served. The trees were taken to mills in Western Washington.
Forest Service Special Agent in Charge Tom Lyons tried to capture what has been lost:
"These trees simply cannot be replaced in our lifetime. Mr. Moran took a portion of the last remaining stand of old growth cedar trees in the lower White River drainage."
The Sierra Club is teaming up with Clorox.
Yep, the same company derided by generations of environmental activists for producing chlorine and other not-so-environmentally-friendly cleaning products. Now, though, Clorox has come out with a new line of cleansers made of natural ingredients such as coconuts and lemon oil. Phosphorus and bleach have been eliminated. Clorox (and now the Sierra Club) says the products are biodegradable and not tested on animals.
Tip o' the hat to the AP's Traverse City, Mich., bureau for jumping on this story. (The only publication to carry the full story so far appears to be the International Herald Tribune.) There, six members of the executive committee of the club's Traverse group resigned, including Moncia Evans, who told the AP:
They sold their soul to the highest bidder.
The deal has also come under fire from Sierra Club chapters in a number of states, including, according to the AP, New York, Florida, New Jersey and Tennessee.
The Sierra Club is an interesting organization in that they try to have grassroots advocacy and democracy right down into all the local chapters. I personally got to know a bit about how the group works in the late 1990s when I broke a story about the massive controversy that erupted when some Sierra Club members, citing population and consumption numbers, tried to have the group come out against immigration to the United States. That spat has continued on into this decade.
A U.S. District Court judge in Tacoma has ruled against a handful of environmentalists challenging the rebuilding and expansion of a sockeye salmon hatchery on the Cedar River.
Those opposed to the hatchery argued that the artificially boosted sockeye population could hinder the recovery of declining chinook, which are federally protected by the Endangered Species Act (see this 2005 story on the case).
The court ruled that Roz Glasser, the lead plaintiff in the case, did not have "standing" in challenging the hatchery, meaning she wasn't able to prove that the project would actually harm her personally.
The National Marine Fisheries Service, the federal agency responsible for protecting salmon, was named as defendant, and the city of Seattle and Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife were intervenor-defendants. No word yet on whether Glasser will appeal.
Hard on the heels of the news that wolves apparently have set up housekeeping in north-central Washington comes news today that a creature found dead near Spokane last month was a gray wolf.
We couldn't get a picture of *the* dead wolf, but here's what a dead wolf looks like.
Photo/Yellowstone National Park
Genetic tests confirmed that the creature was a purebred wolf. A second carcass found about two weeks later was a wolf-dog hybrid, though. Dogs' and wolves' DNA differs only by 0.2 percent. Right -- two-tenths of one percent.
The wolf was killed on State Route 291 near Tum Tum, in Stevens County, about 25 miles northwest of Spokane, and appears from its DNA to be similar to wolves from western Montana and southern British Columbia.
More wolves are on their way, according to Harriet Allen, manager of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife's endangered species program:
You like the idea of hydrogen-powered cars? Then you better get ready to pony up -- or to get taxpayers to do so. A new congressionally-mandated report from the National Research Council tried to figure out the potential for hydrogen vehicles, concluding that while the technology is zipping along, the costs are still sky high.
Here are their projections:
The Northwest is poised to play a significant role in this technology, though it's not clear that a lot has happened in this arena since 2003 when President Bush announced big investments in hydrogen tech and locals responded with enthusiasm (see this P-I story). All I could find in recent news was reference to Pacific Northwest National Labs working fuel "pellets" and a website for the American Hydrogen Association NW.
The council came up with these numbers assuming that the technology continues to improve, people want to buy the cars, and that government policies will help drive the transition from oil to hydrogen fuel -- making their findings "potential best-case scenarios rather than predictions."
Now let's talk costs.
A recent visit to Canada and my general Canada-ophilia drew my attention to these enviro tidbits from north of the 49th Parallel*:
Tussock moth
Photo/U.S. Department of Agriculture
The t-shirts in question
Andy Rogers/P-I
* A sharp-eyed Dateline Earth reader points out that Toronto isn't north of the 49th Parallel. And of course the reader is right. All we need do is look at a map to confirm that. How Left Coast of us!
When the news first broke that oil spilled in the Duwamish River last night, a natural question arose: Why wasn't oil containment "boom" already pre-deployed to catch it?
This is the kinda thing we're trying to avoid
Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle
Well, it turns out the pre-booming -- a legacy of the Point Wells oil spill, which had a Keystone Kops aura about it -- was done. The boom was laid out when the fuel was actually being transferred from a barge to a container ship. (More here on what led to the pre-booming requirement.)
The spill seems to have occurred after the refueling was completed. The boom had been pulled in, the container ship and barge had parted ways, and the spill came from the tug that was tending the barge, the James T. Quigg, owned and operated by Olympic Tug and Barge.
Yep, somehow, there was some kinda fuel transfer going on internal to the tug. Huh? An intertank fuel transfer on the tug? The state Ecology Department says it is asking those same questions.
Paddling on Diablo Lake. Paul Brown/P-I
The City Light spill poses "minimal" risk, according to officials, and is being cleaned up. No word on how much of the oily chemical made it into the lake. It came from a leak at the Ross hydroelectric dam on June 18. A City Light press release warns that:
"(V)isitors to the area are advised to avoid contact with any oil sheen and the containment booms that are in place. If a person or boat does come into contact with the oil, they are advised to wash themselves and their equipment with soap and water."
UPDATE:
The total volume of oil spilled was about 150 gallons, and of that 10 parts per million were PCBs. A little quick math reveals that the total volume of PCBs was about 1:100th of a teaspoon.
BACK TO ORIGINAL POST:
It sounds like the potential for exposure is much less than the levels that triggered fewer male births, as described in this study out this week in Environmental Health. The women in this report were in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1950s and '60s and those "most exposed to PCBs were 33 percent less likely to give birth to male children." A similar exposure occurred in Wales near Cardiff from a toxic dump used from 1965 to 1972.
How does exposure in a mom lead to fewer boys, seeing as it's the sperm that determines gender?
That's right -- not only does Canada have a desert. It has a desert where salmon, quite apart from the downturns elsewhere, are doing pretty well.
Sockeye are the ones that turn that purdy shade of orange when they return to their native lakes.
Gilbert Arias/P-I
So reports Mark Hume of the The Globe and Mail's West coast bureau. Where a run of sockeye was falling off the charts, a tribal organization called the Okanagan Nation Alliance worked with a variety of organizations on both sides of the border to return the run.
These sockeye are coming up the Columbia, and it's starting to look like they will return this year in big enough numbers for Native Americans -- First Nations, as they're known north of the 49th Parallel -- will actually be able to catch fish again for the first time in a long, long time, Hume reports. And it looks to be a record return. Where 14,000 sockeye spawned at Osoyoos Lake just five years ago, the biologists are expecting something like 10 times that this year -- maybe more.
In an e-mail alert, Peter McHugh of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife recently wrote:
This run has exceeded everyone's expectations by leaps and bounds.
A report out today by the National Academy of Sciences says that there's a surprising amount we don't know about how doing things like cutting down vast swaths of a forested watershed affects the water supply downstream.
This stream near Greenwater illustrates what they're talkin' about
P-I/Gilbert Arias
Requested by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Reclamation -- which have to make decisions all the time about forests and the water supply they provide -- offers:
Recent increases in fire, insects, and disease in forests have spurred adoption of forest management practices, such as thinning and salvage logging, whose effects on hydrology have received little study. The hydrologic effects of many of the new management practices and (best management practices) have not been studied, and dynamic forest conditions make it important to understand how contemporary practices influence water resources.
I didn't realize until I read the report that there's a notion that cutting down the forest increases the water supply downstream. The panel, which included input from enviros and scientists and the timber industry (did I forget anybody? let's just say all the sides are represented) addresses this idea:
