Friday, 02 May 2003

Dry Idea Rolls on

The U.S. Interior Department has identified areas around the county that are likely to face conflicts over water shortages in the next 25 years, including the usual suspects (Los Angeles, Calif., Denver, Colo., and Phoenix, Ariz.) as well as some new hotspots: the Gulf Coast of Texas, North Dakota's Red River Valley, and Western cities from Bend, Ore. to Albuquerque, N.M. Next week, the federal government will unveil a plan for averting the conflicts and ensuring that agriculture, urban areas, and wildlife get enough water. The plan is expected to call for such measures as water banks, improved irrigation systems, and more emphasis on desalination. Environmentalists were relieved to see the Interior Department championing conservation and creative problem-solving rather than more dam-building, the traditional federal solution to water scarcity. However, no new funds will be made available for the plan, which will be financed out of the current Bureau of Reclamation budget.

Spokes Woman

For the past 14 years, the California-based Greenbelt Alliance has sponsored a seven-day cycling tour to raise money to protect the San Francisco Bay area's open spaces and its quality of life. And for the last nine of those years, Karen Salinger, this week's Grist diarist, has participated in the ride. From the San Francisco peninsula to the summit of Mt. Hamilton, from the urban sprawl of Brentwood to the scenic Rio Vista, Salinger rides for the environment -- and for the joy of it. Along the way, she battles wind, rain, and even a little snow, promotes her own organic-produce distribution company, and helps celebrate local leaders who are advocating for the environment. Read about her journey, only on the Grist Magazine website.

No Art-ic Refuge

Sometimes art gets political -- and sometimes it's the artist who suffers. Just ask Subhankar Banerjee, who spent his life savings to photograph Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. For a while, things were going swimmingly for Banerjee; he found a publisher for his photo collection and earned an exhibit at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. Then, in March, a senator urged her colleagues to look at the collection before voting for oil drilling in the refuge -- and that's when the trouble started. Banerjee and his publishers say some members of the Smithsonian told them the museum had been called on to cancel or revise the exhibit, charges the institution denies. The show, which opens today, was moved from the main floor to a lower-level room and the text was deleted or truncated. For example, one caption, written by Banerjee, originally read, "The refuge has the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen and is so remote and untamed that many peaks, valleys and lakes are still without names." It was changed to read, "Unnamed Peak, Romanzof Mountains." Quotations from President Carter and environmental writers Peter Matthiessen and Terry Tempest Williams were also deleted.

Bighorn Blown

The U.S. Forest Service has settled a lawsuit with eight former and current workers from Bighorn National Forest who suffered on-the-job retaliation after complaining about hostile working conditions and questionable forest-management practices. The $200,000 settlement will be divided among the whistleblowers, but the USFS will not discipline the managers who were responsible for the retaliatory acts. Nine years ago, the workers raised alarms about Forest Supervisor Larry Keown and other managers, saying they allowed ranchers to overgraze public land, failed to meet the goals of reforestation plans, and green-lighted timber harvests in the absence of environmental impact studies. In the end, just two of the whistleblowers remained on the job, after reorganizations they say were clearly designed to oust them.

Texa-cojones

In 1992, Texaco called an end to almost three decades of oil drilling in Ecuador -- and left behind a legacy of miles of pipelines and 20 billion gallons of toxic waste that destroyed the rainforest, fouled waterways, and exposed residents to cancer-causing pollutants. Now, 30,000 jungle residents of Ecuador and Peru whose environment was permanently despoiled are suing ChevronTexaco for $1 billion. The road to court was a long one, with the parties spending a decade arguing over venue alone. The case will be heard in Ecuador, but last year, a New York federal judge reached a landmark conclusion that any financial penalty imposed in Ecuador would be upheld in the U.S., making it the first time a foreign judgment on an environmental case will be enforceable in the U.S. Last year, ChevronTexaco, the world's second-largest oil company, took in $99 billion in revenues.