Thursday, 27 Mar 2003

Slang Shot

Attention readers: It's time for the First Annual and Perhaps Only "Cheer Us Up the Weather Is Godawful and We're at War" Grist Magazine Slang Invention Contest. Umbra Fisk, advice columnist extraordinaire, is on the lookout for something a bit catchier than "anti-environmentalist" to describe anyone who intentionally harms the natural world. Get the details of the contest, plus the answers to two of the world's most persistent environmental conundrums (paper towels vs. hand dryers? garbage disposals vs. trash?) in the latest Ask Umbra, only on the Grist Magazine website. The contest winner will be announced on Earth Day (that's April 22), so put your thinking caps on and forward this message to everyone you know who has some choice words for anti-enviros.

The Ides of Marsh

Verdant marshes and wetlands were much of what helped put the "fertile" in the Fertile Crescent, that swath of land between the Tigris and Euphrates that is considered the birthplace of Western civilization. But in the last few decades, those marshes have been all but destroyed by dam-building and civil strife in Iraq. Those marshes that do remain could disappear in as few as three years -- but don't give up all hope yet, as the marshes have become something of a cause celebre for wetlands-protections advocates. The U.N. Environment Programme lists the collapse of Iraq's marshes as a catastrophe on the scale of the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, and is determined to do something about it. UNEP's post-conflict assessment team hopes to begin work on restoring the marshes as soon as the war ends, and a different team of international environmentalists plans to launch a restoration project dubbed Eden Again.

Virgin Rebirth

Meanwhile, wetlands are also a matter of concern in a place that could scarcely be more different from Iraq: the island of St. Croix in the Virgin Islands. The Virgin Islands Indigenous and Endangered Species Act of 1990 specifies that the policy of the territory is to "prevent a net loss of wetlands to the maximum extent possible," but about half of the mangrove wetlands on St. Croix have been damaged or destroyed. The remaining wetlands are threatened by human disturbance, pollution, dredging, population growth, sedimentation, non-native species, and other causes. In response, the Virgin Islands Department of Natural Resources' Fish and Wildlife Division plans to spend the next year and a half developing a conservation plan for the wetlands.

Cleaner Smoke Stacki Thanks to Pataki

New York state now boasts the nation's strictest pollution controls on power plants, thanks to measures approved yesterday by Gov. George Pataki (R). The announcement was met with joy by environmentalists, who had been pushing for the tougher rules for upwards of three years, but the electricity industry said the move would cost custumers while doing little to reduce smog and acid rain. Under the new rules, New York power plants have until 2008 to cut their sulfur-dioxide smokestack emissions by an additional 50 percent below those reductions already required by the federal Clean Air Act. Beginning in the fall of 2004, the rules will also extend controls on nitrogen oxide emissions from the summer season to the entire year. Enviros said the rules would improve air quality and mitigate health problems such as asthma. They also expressed the hope that other states would follow suit, because much of the power-plant pollution that plagues New York drifts in from beyond the state's borders.