An aerial shot of the new tunnel bypass near Devil's Slide. (© 2010 California Department of Transportation)

The first responsibility of a physician is to do no harm. The first responsibility of an environmentalist is never to accept a dumb solution to a problem when a better solution is available.

Case in point: Devil’s Slide south of San Francisco, a stretch of Highway 1 that would crumble into the Pacific every 10 years or so during a big storm. Rebuilding was time-consuming and expensive. The state of California sought a more permanent solution—and seized on one that ignited two decades of opposition resolved only when a doughty Earthjustice attorney finally stepped in.

An almond farmer watches oil wells that have sprouted near almond orchards in the Central Valley town of Shafter, CA. (Chris Jordan-Bloch / Earthjustice)
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As reported in the current issue of Earthjustice Quarterly Magazine, oil fracking has become big news in California, where the practice is conducted in the shadows and is essentially unregulated—the Wild Wild West, if you will. (See: Extreme Energy: Out of Control Out West)

That may be about to change.

At least 10 bills have been introduced in the state legislature since the Magazine came out; three would impose moratoriums to halt fracking until regulations can be put in effect. Others would require disclosure of the chemicals being used, mandate groundwater monitoring before and after fracking operations, and classify wastewater from the fracking process as hazardous waste. A state-court lawsuit by Earthjustice is working its way through the system, and a federal court just ruled that failure by the Bureau of Land Management to study the environmental impact of fracking is illegal—but the judge declined to rescind the permits, so the practice continues.

A stunning, inspiring new documentary film, A Fierce Green Fire, The Battle for a Living Planet, had its theatrical premiere in New York on March 1, and was scheduled for screenings across the country in following weeks. (View the full schedule.)

The film is in five acts, each narrated by a different person. Robert Redford starts with the beginnings of the modern movement, highlighting David Brower and the Sierra Club’s successful campaign to block construction of power dams in the Grand Canyon. Ashley Judd tells the story of Love Canal in New York and a neighborhood that had to be abandoned when residents—children in particular—began to become ill, even die, from toxic wastes buried beneath their homes and yards years before. Van Jones recounts the struggles by Greenpeace and the Sea Shepherd Society to end commercial whaling. Isabel Allende tells the tale of the Brazilian rubber tappers’ crusade to save their forest home, led by the martyred Chico Mendez. Meryl Streep ends with a hopeful recounting of the effort to stem global climate change.

Dave Brower was a legendary leader in the environmental movement. (Photo courtesy of Tom Turner)

David Brower was the most prominent, influential and controversial environmental leader of the second half of the 20th century. He was a visionary, a brilliant publicist, and also prickly and demanding. This and much more comes through clearly in a new book published by Heyday of Berkeley to celebrate Brower’s 100th birthday.

Alas, he isn’t here to celebrate it, having passed away in November 2000, two days before the election that gave us George W. Bush. Perhaps it’s a blessing that he didn’t have to live through that nightmare.

Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben,  who first alerted the non-scientific world to global climate change two decades ago with The End of Nature  has a new piece in Rolling Stone that he says is the most important thing he’s written in the past 20 years, and he’s written hundreds of articles and books during that period.

It’s titled “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” and it’s long but worth reading. More than worth reading.
 

The Shell drillship Kulluk, off the Seattle, WA, waterfront. (Dave Nakayama)

As I write this, ships are being prepared to steam northward from several ports to begin poking holes in the floor of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas in search of oil.

Thanks to legal action by Earthjustice over the last few years, and thanks also to a one-year time-out called in the wake of the catastrophic blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, the drilling has been forestalled, but it could finally begin this July. Legal challenges are still pending, but the odds seem long against them.

That said, this is closer to the beginning of this struggle than to its end.

I'm going to stand back and just give you a taste of a report from the Earth Policy Institute. Scary. I recommend you read the whole thing and send it around. There are still people who should know better denying climate change. They are welcome to believe whatever they like, but they shouldn't be playing any role in setting policy. Here are the excerpts:

Pipes for Keystone. Courtesy ecowatch.org

The New York Times describes Joe Nocera as a business columnist, but a quick scan of recent columns is very heavy on pieces about the woes of the NCAA, the National Collegiate Athletic Association. If today’s column is any indication, we’d all be better off if he stuck with sports.

His thesis is that rejecting the Keystone pipeline, which would transport crude oil extracted from Canadian tar sands to refineries on the Gulf shoreline, was foolish, short-sighted, and so on.

Ross Douthat

Last Sunday, Dec. 4, the weekly review/opinion section of The New York Times carried a sober and sobering piece by Robert Semple, a Times editorial writer who seldom gets to sign his pieces. He wrote of the climate meetings taking place this week in Durban, South Africa, where no one seems to think much progress will be made.

Semple produced a couple of depressing charts showing how carbon emissions overall have soared, and found little reason to hope that Durban will produce any breakthroughs. There are some bright spots, however, principally Western Europe, whose carbon emissions have declined by about 5 percent in the past two decades through phasing out of coal, increasing use of solar, and adopting a cap-and-trade system. Much more needs to be done, especially by the U.S., China, India, and others.

Meanwhile a few pages along in the paper, we’re treated to a column by one Ross Douthat, who compared the Occupy protestors to the admirable group that is opposing the Keystone XL pipeline that would bring filthy tar sands crude oil from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the gulf coast.

Bill Moyers

“Wall Street owns the country…. Money rules…. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.” So sayeth the pupulist firebrand Mary Elizabeth Lease in 1890. "She should see us now," comments Bill Moyers in a ringing speech reprinted inThe Nation.

What caught my interest particularly in this typically brilliant Moyers peroration was that he can put a date on when the more recent takeover of government by Big Money began (Aug. 23, 1971) and what triggered the revolution. According to this analysis, our troubles began on that date with the circulation of a secret memo by Lewis Powell, a board member of Philip Morris and a big wheel in the national Chamber of Commerce.