Friday, 11 May 2007

Excuse Us While We Pick Our Jaws Up Off the Floor

Canadian bureaucrat fights charges over leaked climate document

This week's hottest eco-scandal comes from Canada. For real! Where else would Mounties descend on a federal office to arrest an anarchist-leaning, punk-drumming bureaucrat for allegedly leaking a climate document to activists and the press? We swear on our stack of Celine CDs: this happened Wednesday at the Environment Canada office in Ottawa. Jeff Monaghan, 27, who's worked at the agency for four years, was released but still may face charges; yesterday, he described the arrest as a "witch hunt" and an attempt to "bully public servants whom [the agency], in a paranoid fit, believe are partisan and embittered." Monaghan did not admit to leaking the draft, which confirmed Canada's plan to abandon the Kyoto Protocol, but he didn't so much deny it, and spoke about the need for "real action" on climate change. He called the charges against him "an extension of a government-wide communications strategy pinned on secrecy, intimidation, and centralization." And our little Canada-loving hearts broke.

Friday Never Felt So Right

Interior officials messed with science, say witnesses at House hearing

Think you've had a rough week? Imagine how the U.S. Interior Department feels. This week saw a heated House hearing in which activists and former officials testified about Interior's nasty habit of meddling with science. "This is an agency that seems focused on one goal: weakening the law by administrative fiat, and it is doing much of the work shrouded from public view," said Natural Resources Committee Chair Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.). Witnesses including former Fish and Wildlife head Jamie Rappaport Clark said politics had led to manipulation of research relating to the Endangered Species Act, but Interior Deputy Secretary Lynn Scarlett insisted the agency was establishing an accountability board and was shocked, shocked to find politics in its establishment. Amidst the hubbub, the official who inherited Interior's messed-up-beyond-belief oil and gas leases, Johnnie Burton, announced plans to resign. And agency head Dirk Kempthorne was found huddled in a corner, muttering, "TGIF, TGIF."


Dan Peplow and Sarah Augustine are wary of implicating big aid organizations in complicity with mining practices that affect indigenous health in their area of focus, Suriname; after all, it was criticism along those lines that once nearly threatened their safe exit from the country. But an inquiring reader wants to know, so the co-directors of the Suriname Indigenous Health Fund speak out. And they're not done there: this week's InterActivists also ponder the effects of resource extraction on sea turtles, why they could benefit from talking to a psychologist, and how there's no such thing as safe mining. Dig in.

Oxy Frontin

Indigenous tribe sues oil company over pollution in Peru

A group of indigenous tribe members from Peru has filed suit against Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum in a U.S. court, claiming that the company's operations in the Amazon from 1975 to 1999 contaminated their food and water supplies, hurt their health, and led to the death of a child. The company -- known as Oxy to friends and foes alike -- "engaged in irresponsible, reckless, immoral, and illegal practices in and around the ancestral and current territory of the Achuar indigenous people," reads the complaint. Oxy handed its operations in the area to Argentina-based Pluspetrol in 2000, and says Pluspetrol assumed all obligations; an Oxy spokesperson said the suit contains "inflammatory statements, unfounded allegations, and unsupported conclusions." But residents and human-rights groups disagree. "My people are sick and dying because of Oxy," says one tribe member. "The water in our streams is not fit to drink and we can no longer eat the fish in our rivers or the animals in our forests."

Sheddy Mercury

Wal-Mart to cut mercury content in compact fluorescent bulbs

As energy-saving compact fluorescent light bulbs move their way into the mainstream, concerns about their mercury content are spiraling up too. Soon, however, consumers will be able to find less-toxic CFLs for always low prices. Yes, Wal-Mart announced yesterday that its bulb suppliers will reduce mercury content by about one-third, eliminating 360 pounds of the metal if the store meets its goal of selling 100 million CFLs this year. Noah Horowitz of the Natural Resources Defense Council notes that "the energy savings delivered through the use of CFLs will actually reduce more mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants than is added through manufacture of the bulbs." But whether you buy 'em at Wal-Mart or not, recycle your old CFLs instead of tossing them in the trash. Even though the U.S. as yet has no federal bulb-recycling program, tossing fluorescents is against the law in some states. And that's a pretty lame reason to be thrown in the slammer.