Steve Roady speaks about Earthjustice's oceans litigation.

Intro: This is the first in a series of Q and As on Earthjustice’s oceans work, which works to prevent habitat loss and overfishing, as well as reduce the impacts of climate change on the ocean. Earthjustice’s Oceans Program Director Steve Roady has been litigating cases that help protect our oceans for more than a decade. Check out earthjustice.org/oceans for more information.

Jessica Knoblauch: What first drew you to oceans management work?
 
Steve Roady: I was first exposed to the oceans while growing up on Florida’s Gulf coast. I spent a lot of time on the beaches as a child and was always fascinated by the shrimpers. But I really first became aware of the key problems in the environment in middle school where we were all forced to read Rachel Carson’s classic book, Silent Spring. The idea that birds were dying because of DDT was just amazing to me and it really got me thinking about environmental issues.
 
JK: How does Earthjustice use the law to protect oceans?
 
SR: Earthjustice is one of the leading groups to begin looking at oceans’ problems through the lens of potential federal litigation. Basically, we work with three or four of your standard environmental laws. There’s the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the main federal fisheries act, which directs the federal government to prevent overfishing and to minimize bycatch, to protect habitat and to rebuild overfished fish populations. There’s also the National Environmental Policy Act, which mandates the federal government to carefully study the environmental effects of their actions before they take them. And we also invoke the Endangered Species Act to protect species like sea turtles, which are protected under the ESA but often killed as so-called bycatch in trawl fisheries around the country.
 
We invoke all of these statutes in an effort to try to curb the unrestrained fishing practices going on in federal fisheries and do our best to make sure the federal government is complying with the basic thrust of the laws that protect the ocean resource. Since we started the Ocean Law Project back in 1998, we’ve had a number of significant wins in the courts that set some significant precedents with respect to how the federal government manages ocean resources in a sustainable way. And typically we’ll have a case that we’ll bring on behalf of other groups, so if a case is won the precedent goes to everybody’s benefit.

Photo courtesy of quinn.anya

Republican dust up over phantom environmental regulation
Conservative Republicans are so intent on eliminating “unnecessary” environmental regulations that they recently set their sights on eliminating a rule that doesn’t even exist, reports the Washington Post. The so-called “dust rule” regulates farm dust, which is mixed with things like dirt and dried cornstalk bits and is technically considered pollution by the U.S. EPA. The agency does limit how much of this particle pollution can be in the air, but just two states—Arizona and California—require farmers to take some dust control measures. Though EPA administrator Lisa Jackson has said that she’s unlikely bring on stricter dust rules, regulation-wary Republicans aren’t taking any chances and have already proposed three new bills to prevent a rule that does not (and probably will never) exist. Unfortunately, the zealousness with which Republicans have attacked this rule is just the latest in a spate of attempts to cut the EPA off at its knees for trying to regulate environmental health hazards like coal ash, power plant pollution, and mountaintop removal mining.
 
Exxon punts financial responsibility on Valdez spill
While the oil continues to linger on the shore of Alaska’s Prince William Sound—twenty some years since the Exxon Valdez oil spill—the company who caused this mess is quietly trying to get out of paying to clean it up, reports Mother Jones. To date, Exxon has paid about $900 million over 10 years for cleanup costs, but when the government asked for an additional $92 million in 2006 to address existing problems, Exxon said no way, arguing that it is only responsible for “restoration projects” and not costs associated with cleanup. Of course, none of this matters to the people affected by the spill, who are too busy trying to move on with their lives to argue over semantics.
 

Rep. Eric Cantor (VA-7)

This week, President Obama has conducted a bus tour through my home state of Virginia and North Carolina. The tour focused on job creation and the state of our economy.

Unfortunately, Republican leadership in Congress thinks weakening our clean air and water protections is the foundation of economic renewal.

Since returning from August recess, the House of Representatives has passed some of the most anti-environmental and anti-public health legislation in its history. These bills—which indefinitely delay air pollution standards for power plants, industrial boilers/incinerators and cement plants—passed as key provisions in Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s “Jobs Agenda.”

Slime-choked waterway

<Editor's Note: this op-ed by David Guest, managing attorney of Earthjustice in Florida, recently appeared in newspapers throughout Florida. Also, view multimedia interview with David Guest.>

At the end of August, a large, disgusting algae outbreak slimed Old Tampa Bay. Two months earlier, an algae outbreak in the Caloosahatchee River near Fort Myers turned the river bright green, smelled like raw sewage, and made thousands of fish go belly up. Water with algae outbreaks like this is so toxic that health authorities say you shouldn’t touch it, much less drink it or swim in it. It can give you rashes, respiratory problems, and even kill you.

U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, found that out the hard way. He swam in the same type of toxic algae outbreak in Grand Lake, Oklahoma in June and said he became “deathly sick” that night with an upper respiratory illness. “There is no question,” Ihhofe told the Tulsa World, that his illness came from the toxic algae in the lake. Oklahoma health officials had warned people not to touch the water, swim in the popular lake, or eat fish from it. Like Florida’s outbreaks, the one in Grand Lake was fueled by the so- called “nutrients,” nitrogen and phosphorus, which come from inadequately treated sewage, fertilizer, and manure.