Monday, 17 Jun 2002

Mush, Mush

In Alaska, some 4,000 miles from Capitol Hill, global warming is neither an abstraction nor up for debate. It's simply a reality -- and not, generally speaking, a pleasant one. High water is eating away houses and buildings, mosquitoes are invading where once they were unheard of, hunters are getting trapped on breakaway ice, permafrost is no longer permanent (meaning building foundations are slouching and buckling), and on the Kenai Peninsula, a 4 million acre spruce forest has been killed by hot-weather-happy beetles in the largest forest loss ever recorded in North America. Sen. Ted Stevens, a Republican, can hardly take the party line on climate change when he's witnessed the sagging roads, crumbling towns, dead forests, and catastrophic fires that are devastating his home state. Mean temperatures in Alaska have risen by 5 degrees in summer and 10 degrees in winter since the 1970's, federal officials say, and climate models predict that temperatures will continue to increase over this century, by up to 18 degrees.

Goal Standard

Who knows what goes on at all those bureaucrat-level United Nations climate change meetings? Jason Anderson, for one, energy specialist at Climate Network Europe and Grist correspondent extraordinaire. In his latest dispatch, Anderson reports on the unofficial agenda of the latest Conference of the Parties: the World Cup. Inspired by the mania of the fans, conference participants decided soccer could be the key to finally getting something done about climate change. Unfortunately, the whole concept hit an old, familiar adversary: the United States. The rest of the world could go ahead with the soccer plan, but the Bush administration had its own idea -- baseball. Sound wacky? Well, somebody's tongue might have been in the vicinity of his cheek during the last conference. Help yourself to a little dose of satire, only on the Grist Magazine website.

Wrecklamation

One hundred years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Reclamation Act, creating a new government agency charged with making the desert bloom. The goal of the act, which gave birth to the Bureau of Reclamation, was to bring water to family farms in the West and lift the region out of the depression of the 1890s. But a century later, family farms have all but disappeared, and the West is home to a complicated web of large-scale industry, agriculture, booming cities, Native American tribes -- and, of course, a wide range of plants and animals, some of them endangered. The Bureau of Reclamation is preparing for its centennial by planning a big party near the Hoover Dam (its signature achievement), but not everyone's in the mood to celebrate. Some say the agency can't meet the needs of the 21st century because it hasn't altered its 19th century policies (best expressed by Franklin Lane, interior secretary from 1913 to 1920, who said it was a crime to let one drop of water flow unused to the sea). And they blame the agency with, essentially, designing and planning the environmental destruction of the West.

We've Got Mail

Looking for a little lively interchange during your coffee break? Check out our latest batch of letters to the editor. Who or what is really killing the killer whales? How do you maintain hope in the face of despair? What's the best way to ensure fair access to water for impoverished people? Is nuclear energy really anything to worry about? And is that new Grist columnist Umbra Fisk a goddess or what? We don't have the answers, but some of you do. Check out the yackety-yak, only on the Grist Magazine website.

Mayor May Not

Weighing in on the debate over storing nuclear waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain, mayors from across the country stated over the weekend that they do not want high-level radioactive waste shipped through cities until the safety of communities along the transport routes can be assured. The resolution was drafted by the energy committee of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and urges adequate funding, training, and equipment for communities along the nuclear path for at least three years before shipping begins. The roughly 300 mayors attending the annual meeting are expected to formally approve the resolution today. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson said the Bush administration had deemed the shipments safe, and that there might be a greater danger in leaving nuclear waste at power plants across the country.