Friday, 21 Mar 2003

Ready, Aim...

At least three and as many as nine oil wells were burning yesterday in Iraq's Rumaila oil field, just north of the Kuwait border. News of the fires caused an abrupt spike in global oil prices, but the market settled down after Bush administration officials said the damage appeared to be limited. The Rumaila field is capable of producing more than 700,000 barrels per day, and the Bush administration has explicitly warned Iraq against destroying that field and others, saying the oil represents the nation's best chance of rebuilding its economy after the war. It is unclear whether fires are also burning in other fields north of Baghdad, whether more fires will be set, and how extensive the environmental harm will be. "The concern about long-term damage is pure speculation until we see something definitive," said Anthony Cordesman, a former Defense Department official and current senior research fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Trout Fishing in America

Environmental groups sued the Washington State Fish and Wildlife Department this week to prevent the springtime release of more than 5 million hatchery-born salmon in the Puget Sound area. The groups, Washington Trout and the Native Fish Society, pointed to recent studies showing that hatchery fish are harming their wild-born brethren by out-competing them for space and food, and sometimes even eating them. Conservationists fear that by out-competing wild salmon, which are protected under the federal Endangered Species Act, the hatchery fish will also significantly shrink the genetic diversity of salmon species. Washington Trout's Ramon Vanden Brulle dubbed the hatchery fish "a very significant impediment to salmon recovery."

Wish Granite

Communities across New Hampshire are invoking the state's Land and Community Heritage Investment Act to preserve open spaces, even though state funding for land conservation and historic preservation faces extreme pressure from a ballooning budget crisis. Under the terms of the act, New Hampshire matches local conservation funding efforts with state money -- an offer more than 100 communities have whole-heartedly supported at town meetings during this month alone. This surge of support for local conservation measures has given rise to hopes that the state will maintain its current funding level of $6 million per year for land-protection efforts. "We're hoping that the voice of New Hampshire citizens expressed at town meeting will be heard by the governor and the legislature as they work on what is admittedly a very tough budget," said Chris Wells of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.

Wolfowitz at the Door

As part of the Defense Department's ongoing effort to exempt the U.S. military from environmental regulations, the Pentagon's Paul Wolfowitz has called on military service heads to provide examples of situations in which President Bush should invoke national security to trump eco-protections by fiat. In a memo to the chiefs of the Armed Forces, Wolfowitz, who is deputy defense secretary, wrote, "it is time for us to give greater consideration to requesting such exemptions" from the president, who has the authority to issue them but has never done so in U.S. history. Pentagon spokesperson Glenn Flood acknowledged the memo but said the exemptions could only be called for in a "dire, critical situation." Critics of the exemptions note that, because they are granted by the president, they are not subject to any kind of challenge or review.

Fish and Cheeps

Never mind doctors and drug dealers -- there's a new clientele for beepers: dolphins. If some lawmakers in the U.K. get their way, British fishing fleets will soon be required to use high-tech equipment resembling beepers to keep dolphins, porpoises, and other cetaceans out of fishing nets. Known as "pingers," the devices emit random ultrasonic noises designed to keep marine mammals away from potentially deadly nets. The pingers "emit less noise than most mobile phones -- but presumably for the cetaceans they're just as annoying," said Andy Smerdon of Aquatec, the company that makes the devices. At present, an unsustainable number of cetaceans die in fishing nets, according to the British lawmakers backing the proposal. Other proposals to protect the species include new nets with panels to allow larger marine animals to escape, better monitoring, and a standardized labeling system for cetacean-friendly fisheries.