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8/17/11

As executive director of the Coastal Commission, Douglas championed public access to the rocky bluffs and sandy beaches. With the muscle afforded by the state's landmark Coastal Act, he preserved natural habitat and battled developers, moguls and celebrities with visions of private beaches. And, despite making powerful enemies, he survived in a political arena as rugged as Big Sur.

Douglas, 68, is moving on to a different kind of fight. He's suffering from lung cancer and went on medical leave Monday with plans to retire in November. Few state officials have left a bigger mark than Douglas, a World War II refugee from Germany, made on his adopted home. And his departure ushers in a period of uncertainty for an agency that has roots in Sonoma County.

Douglas may have said it best when he informed the commission of his plans at a meeting last week in Watsonville: “The irony of our work is that our greatest achievements are the things you don't see. It's the wetlands that haven't been filled. It's the access that hasn't been lost. It's the agricultural lands that haven't been converted. It's the highly scenic and environmentally sensitive habitat areas that haven't been spoiled or destroyed.”

The Coastal Commission grew out of public frustration with restrictions on beach access in Southern California and growing interest in closing off swaths of the North Coast with exclusive developments such as The Sea Ranch.

Douglas has been there from the start. A longtime resident of Marin County, he co-authored Proposition 20, the 1972 ballot initiative that created the commission. As a legislative staffer, he worked on the Coastal Act, the 1976 law that made the commission permanent and empowered it to regulate development in coastal zones. He joined the agency and became its executive director in 1986.

Some of his biggest battles have been in Southern California, where the commission prevented a freeway from splitting San Onofre State Beach, and along the Central Coast, where it secured public access at Pebble Beach and San Simeon. Closer to home, it helped establish Tomales Bay State Park.

Douglas hopes that Charles Lester, his senior deputy, will succeed him. Given the political battles that have been fought over pricey coastal property, there's likely to be pressure to pick someone from the outside.

Whichever avenue the commission chooses, former Sonoma County Supervisor Mike Reilly said Douglas' influence will be felt for years to come through the policies crafted and legal precedents established during his tenure.

“Peter always said the coast is never protected, it's always being protected,” said Reilly, who served on the Coastal Commission for 12 years. “And that's going to continue to happen in large part because of the groundwork he's laid.”

That's a fitting legacy for a champion of California's coast.

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8/17/11

Ashley Donnell and her fellow students stood on the banks of Klamath River silently watching their professor and Yurok tribal officials inspect the body of the gray whale -- known as “MaMa” -- who died Tuesday after spending months swimming under the U.S. Highway 101 bridge to the delight of visitors and locals.

For 56 days, the undergraduate in Humboldt State University's Marine Mammal Education Research Program watched the 45-foot-long giant and her calf. Donnell was there three weeks ago when the calf separated from its mother and headed downstream. She was there when the whale took its last breath at 4:19 a.m.

”It's hard for everybody,” Donnell said. “Especially the community. They were all enamored by her.”

The whale had stationed herself near the bridge since late June, delighting throngs of motorists and tourists. Until Monday, biologists said her condition was typical of a female gray whale that had just weaned a calf. Then, the whale took a turn for the worse.

The whale was swimming in tight circles and drifting downstream when Donnell and her peers arrived at the bridge about 10 a.m. Monday. At 6:30 p.m., the whale beached herself on a sandbar about 200 yards south of the bridge. Later that evening, the whale was able to right herself and swim back up to the bridge, but she later stranded herself on the same sandbar.

HSU marine biology professor Dawn Goley was with the whale when it died, Donnell said.

On Tuesday, Goley and members of the Yurok Tribe used an excavator and other large pieces of equipment to move the whale to a shallower part of the river. Goley and biologists with the National Marine Fisheries Service, the North Coast Marine Mammal Center and the Yurok Tribe will conduct a necropsy to determine the cause of death, she said.

After weeks of monitoring the whale's behavior and condition, Goley said, scientists could see no outward signs of trauma. The necropsy will show if the whale suffered from internal trauma.

”This was one of the few opportunities we've had to see gray whales up close,” she said. “We learned more about this gray whale, and we learned a lot about the Klamath River.”

Goley said the barnacles gray whales typically have on their skin when they're in the ocean were gone from the Klamath River gray whale on Monday, and her skin was showing signs of wear.

According to Sarah Wilkin, stranding coordinator with the marine fisheries service, the Klamath River gray whale was first observed by scientists in 2001. She was included in a catalog of gray whales photographed in Baja California, Wilkin said.

”We all wanted a happy ending,” she said. “We wanted the whale to return to the sea, but she didn't. In my mind, it means there probably was something wrong with her physically or medically and this -- in some ways -- was the best ending that could happen.”

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8/5/11

The Oregonian's editorial "Timber country and you" (July 24) places the interest of the timber industry above the public's interest in clean water, wild salmon and healthy watersheds. The editorial ignored what science tells us about the impact of logging roads on the survival of wild salmon.

Those roads and stream crossings discharge large amounts of sediment pollution into salmon streams, degrading habitat and creating an impediment to the recovery of salmon across the West. A 2008 study prepared for the EPA confirmed that poorly maintained logging roads increase mortality of adult and juvenile salmon by increasing the amount of fine sediment in streams.

The recent decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, NEDC v. Brown, is a major step forward in addressing this long-standing problem. That decision will require the timber industry to get permits where they are discharging polluted stormwater from active logging roads directly to a river through a ditch or culvert. The permit program will apply to a small subset of logging roads that have the worst impacts on salmon habitat.

The court's decision in no way threatens the 25,100 jobs directly related to the timber industry (numbers from the Oregon Employment Department that conflict with the number of 125,000 claimed in the editorial). In response to the court's decision, a state-led permitting program would let local agencies such as Oregon's Department of Environmental Quality design permits for logging roads that take into account local conditions and proximity to salmon streams. The permitting process could recognize that the public has an interest in this issue and build in adequate accountability and transparency. Similar permit programs have been implemented all over the country for numerous industries, none of which have suffered dramatic job losses as a result.

Every Oregonian has a personal stake in clean water and salmon. We are investing billions of dollars in salmon recovery while at the same time we are being told to ignore one of the impediments to that goal. But it is more than just salmon recovery that is at stake; salmon-dependent communities and economies are also at risk.

The decision by the 9th Circuit Court will bring a long overdue measure of balance between two resource-extracting industries: timber harvesting and salmon fisheries. But there are those who oppose a balance and want to tilt the advantage back to the timber industry and let the salmon fisheries continue to bear the cost. Sen. Ron Wyden's proposed Clean Water Act exemption for the timber industry is clearly an attempt to circumvent the 9th Circuit's ruling and prevent any semblance of balance. It is an attempt to maintain the status quo, which has a century-long history of salmon impoverishment. It's the wrong policy and unfair to salmon-dependent communities and unfair to Oregon citizens who are spending so much of their time and money to recover local runs of native salmon.

Through its long history, The Oregonian's editorials have generally supported salmon, their wise management and their recovery. But in this case, it appears politics trumped science to the detriment of healthy rivers and salmon, both of which are important to the citizens of Oregon.

Chris Winter is an environmental attorney with the Crag Law Center who worked on the NEDC v. Brown case before the 9th Circuit. Bill Bakke is the executive director of the Native Fish Society. Jim Lichatowich is a fisheries biologist and author of the book "Salmon Without Rivers -- A History of the Pacific Salmon Crisis." 

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7/25/11

The world consumes 1 million plastic shopping bags every minute - and the industry is fighting hard to keep it that way

American shoppers use an estimated 102 billion plastic shopping bags each year — more than 500 per consumer. Named by Guinness World Records as "the most ubiquitous consumer item in the world," the ultrathin bags have become a leading source of pollution worldwide. They litter the world's beaches, clog city sewers, contribute to floods in developing countries and fuel a massive flow of plastic waste that is killing wildlife from sea turtles to camels. "The plastic bag has come to represent the collective sins of the age of plastic," says Susan Freinkel, author of Plastic: A Toxic Love Story.

Many countries have instituted tough new rules to curb the use of plastic bags. Some, like China, have issued outright bans. Others, including many European nations, have imposed stiff fees to pay for the mess created by all the plastic trash. "There is simply zero justification for manufacturing them anymore, anywhere," the United Nations Environment Programme recently declared. But in the United States, the plastics industry has launched a concerted campaign to derail and defeat anti-bag measures nationwide. The effort includes well-placed political donations, intensive lobbying at both the state and national levels, and a pervasive PR campaign designed to shift the focus away from plastic bags to the supposed threat of canvas and paper bags — including misleading claims that reusable bags "could" contain bacteria and unsafe levels of lead.

"It's just like Big Tobacco," says Amy Westervelt, founding editor of Plastic Free Times, a website sponsored by the nonprofit Plastic Pollution Coalition. "They're using the same underhanded tactics — and even using the same lobbying firm that Philip Morris started and bankrolled in the Nineties. Their sole aim is to maintain the status quo and protect their profits. They will stop at nothing to suppress or discredit science that clearly links chemicals in plastic to negative impacts on human, animal and environmental health."

Made from high-density polyethylene — a byproduct of oil and natural gas — the single-use shopping bag was invented by a Swedish company in the mid-Sixties and brought to the U.S. by ExxonMobil. Introduced to grocery-store checkout lines in 1976, the "T-shirt bag," as it is known in the industry, can now be found literally every­where on the planet, from the bottom of the ocean to the peaks of Mount Everest. The bags are durable, waterproof, cheaper to produce than paper bags and able to carry 1,000 times their own weight. They are also a nightmare to recycle: The flimsy bags, many thinner than a strand of human hair, gum up the sorting equipment used by most recycling facilities. "Plastic bags and other thin-film plastic is the number-one enemy of the equipment we use," says Jeff Murray, vice president of Far West Fibers, the largest recycler in Oregon. "More than 300,000 plastic bags are removed from our machines every day — and since most of the removal has to be done by hand, that means more than 25 percent of our labor costs involves plastic-bag removal."

The initial resistance to plastic bags came from manufacturers of paper bags, who saw them as a major threat. Environmentalists took up the cause of eliminating single-use bags in the 1990s, but they made little headway until a sailor and researcher named Charles Moore passed through the North Pacific Gyre in 1997 and drew international attention to the vast flood of plastic trash polluting the world's oceans.

The first nationwide ban was enacted a decade ago in Bangladesh, after plastic bags clogged storm drains and caused massive floods. China issued a top-down order banning plastic bags in June 2008 — just two months before it hosted the Olympics — in an effort to reduce the amount of "white pollution." Even though the ban is openly flouted by street vendors, it has still made a tremendous impact: In the first year alone, China decreased its use of plastic bags by two-thirds, eliminating some 40 billion bags — a move that saved the energy equivalent of 11.7 million barrels of oil.

The Indian city of Delhi boasts some of the world's most aggressive legislation on plastic bags, not only fining individual users and businesses that hand out the bags but also threatening jail time for offenders and plastic-bag manufacturers. This year, Italy became the first European country to issue a nationwide ban on plastic bags, while Ireland places a 15-cent fee on every bag — a move that reduced usage by 90 percent in the first three months. All told, 25 percent of the world's population now lives in areas with bans or fees on plastic bags.

While other nations have effectively cracked down on plastic bags, the U.S. government has left local communities to fend for themselves. In 2007, San Francisco became the first American city to ban plastic bags, and Washington, D.C., has imposed a five-cent fee per bag, cutting monthly use from 22.5 million bags to barely 3 million. Unlike attacks on plastic products such as Styrofoam, which were orchestrated by well-known environmental groups, the fight against plastic bags has been led for the most part by community organizers and concerned citizens who put pressure on their local businesses and governments. In recent years, a growing number of U.S. communities — from 30 townships in Alaska to the Outer Banks of North Carolina — have introduced some 200 anti-bag measures.

The widespread mobilization against plastic bags has sparked a counterattack by the plastics industry, which was slow to react to the rising tide of negative sentiment among consumers. Leading the charge to protect the plastic bag is the American Chemistry Council, an industry group whose members include petro-chemical giants like ExxonMobil and Dow Chemical. With 125 employees and more than $120 million in annual revenues, the ACC and its members are using their deep pockets and extensive political connections to overturn bans on plastic bags, cast doubt on legitimate scientific studies and even file lawsuits against anti-bag activists. The council, which spent $8 million on lobbying alone last year, has also put together a front group called the Progressive Bag Affiliates, made up of top bag manufacturers like Hilex Poly, Superbag and Unistar Plastics.

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