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AmeriScan: May 3, 2002

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Bush Administration to Permit Mining Waste in Streams

WASHINGTON, DC, May 3, 2002 (ENS) - A definition of "fill material" that is changing under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers means tons of mining rubble from mountaintop coal mines will be permitted to fill American waterways.

The Corps is adopting the "effects-based approach" of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the Clean Water Act's definition of "fill material." Announcing the change today, the agencies said the regulation will remove ambiguity from Clean Water Act's regulations, and enhance environmental protection of our wetlands and streams by prohibiting the dumping of trash or garbage in them.

But Joan Mulhern, senior legislative counsel Earthjustice, the public interest environmental law firm, called the action a "Friday Night Massacre for our nation's waters."

"It's the biggest threat to our nation's waters in decades, perhaps since the Clean Water Act passed 30 years ago. Allowing masses of industrial wastes to be dumped in streams, lakes, rivers, and wetlands is contrary to the very purpose of the Clean Water Act and represents a major weakening of current clean water law," Mulhern said.

The new regulation will allow the Army Corps, for the first time in 25 years, to issue permits to place rubble from mountaintop coal mining in streams, based on the effects of this dumping.

EPA Administrator Christie Whitman said today, "We are committed to working with the affected states to reduce mining related environmental impacts, while providing the nation with the advantages of cleaner burning coal." The EPA stated today that the new regulation will "enhance environmental protections" for waters.

"Nothing could be further from the truth," said Mulhern. "Anyone who has ever seen what happens when a stream is buried under 900 feet of mining rubble would not conclude that this is a good thing for water quality. More than 1,000 miles of streams already have been destroyed in Appalachia by the coal companies that have been flouting the Clean Water Act for years while the EPA and the Corps looked the other way."

"Now that citizens have taken state and federal agencies to court to ensure our environmental laws are enforced, coal companies have sought - and been granted - legal relief from the Bush administration. Their lavish contributions to the Bush-Cheney campaign have just been paid back," Mulhern charged.

On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of 57 members of the House of Representatives, led by New Jersey Democrat Frank Pallone, sent a letter to Whitman expressing their "strong opposition" to the proposed rule. "This rule change is a clear attempt to legalize the destructive practice of mountaintop removal coal mining, where coal companies literally blow the tops off of mountains and dump the waste into nearby valleys and streams," stated the House letter.

v Senators James Jeffords, a Vermont Independent who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, and Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat who chairs the Clean Air, Wetlands, and Climate Change Subcommittee sent a letter on Wednesday to President Bush asking him to stop immediately his administration's efforts to overturn this important Clean Water Act rule.

v "The proposed rule would jeopardize the health of the nation's streams, wetlands, lakes, rivers and other waters," the Senators' letter states. "We ask that your administration not take any further action to finalize this rulemaking, including sending it to the Office and Management and Budget for review, until the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has had an opportunity to review the effects that this rulemaking will have on the health of our nation's waterways."

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Court Stops Makah Whale Hunt with Restraining Order

TACOMA, Washington, May 3, 2002 (ENS) - Today a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order halting an impending gray whale hunt by the Makah tribe. The temporary restraining order was requested on Wednesday by The Fund for Animals, The Humane Society of the United States, and others, after learning that the Makah Tribal Council was likely to issue a whaling permit this week and that whaling could begin immediately.

The temporary restraining order issued by Judge Franklin Burgess of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington will last at least ten days, and the court will hold a hearing on the plaintiffs’ pending motion for a preliminary injunction on May 15. If a preliminary injunction were granted, it would extend the injunction against whaling until the court has a chance to issue a final ruling on the merits of the case.

Judge Burgess said, “A delay of a few weeks in order to accomplish the review before the whaling proposal is implemented is reasonable and necessary. Plaintiffs have made a sufficient showing that serious questions are raised and that the balance of hardship tips in their favor. There is a public interest in determining that an EA adequately addresses all of the ways the whale hunting proposal could adversely affect the human environment."

Despite a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling that the previous environmental study authorizing the whale hunt violated federal law, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Marine Fisheries Service have expanded the hunt by now allowing hunting within the Strait of Juan de Fuca and any time during the year.

As a result, say the plaintiff groups, it is much more likely that a resident whale, rather than a migrating whale, would be killed and that threats to human safety will be increased.

The plaintiffs argue that the agencies have again violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to adequately study the ways in which the Makah whale hunt could adversely affect the environment, especially because "the expanded hunt poses an even greater risk to the area’s summer resident gray whales and human safety."

The plaintiffs say that the agencies’ authorization of the whale hunt violates the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which expressly prohibits whaling, while creating an exemption for Alaskan tribes but not for the Makah. The groups’ original lawsuit to stop the whale hunt was filed in January.

“We are elated that the court has halted this hunt at the eleventh hour and prevented irreparable harm, particularly to the small population of resident whales,” said Michael Markarian, executive vice president of The Fund for Animals. “Whaling may have been a tradition in the past, but there is nothing traditional about cruelly shooting these majestic creatures with high-powered rifles.”

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Nuclear Industry Funds Junket for Congressional Staffers

LAS VEGAS, Nevada, May 3, 2002 (ENS) - Luxurious Las Vegas accommodations and wining and dining at an exclusive members only nightclub await key staffers for several members of the U.S. House of Representatives this weekend, courtesy of the nuclear power industry, Public Citizen has learned.

The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) is bankrolling the junket for 22 congressional staffers as the House prepares to vote next week on whether to override Nevada Governor Kenny Guinn's veto of the Bush administration's Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump designation.

That designation was made despite 329 unresolved scientific and technical questions, concerns about the safety of transporting 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste across the country, and mounting evidence that Yucca Mountain, which sits on an aquifer and in an earthquake zone, is a dangerous place to store radioactive waste.

This weekend's Las Vegas excursion is one of several that the nuclear industry association NEI has provided to members of Congress and their staffs over the past several months. Each trip reportedly includes a short visit to Yucca Mountain.

But the obligatory tour of Yucca Mountain appears more as a footnote in the program of this weekend's junket that was circulated under the heading "Countdown to Vegas."

v Staffers will stay at the first rate Four Seasons Hotel and Sunday night will attend a dinner at the House of Blues Foundation Room on the top floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort. The exclusive club is accessible only to members and their guests.

The NEI has been providing the Las Vegas junkets to staffers and members of Congress on an ongoing basis for several months, during which staffers have reportedly enjoyed free drinks, free shows, golf and gambling.

"Unfortunately in our political system, money buys votes," said Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook. "The industry is clearly hoping that lavishing luxurious quarters and delectable meals on congressional staffers will buy influence with lawmakers and ultimately buy their votes on the Yucca Mountain project."

When concerned citizens asked the Department of Energy (DOE) to allow them to accompany the congressional staffers on their tour of Yucca Mountain to help answer any questions and to monitor the information presented by the DOE, the agency was unhelpful.

"I was told that DOE would have to ask NEI for permission and they never got back to me," said Peggy Maze Johnson, executive director of Citizen Alert. "It seems that the DOE is content to let NEI spoon feed to staffers the industry side of this issue only, and this decision is being influenced the old fashioned way - with lots of money."

Scheduled participants in this weekend's junket include staff from the offices of these Representatives:

  • Thomas Barrett, a Wisconsin Democrat
  • Charles Bass, a New Hampshire Republican
  • Robert Brady, a Pennsylvania Democrat
  • John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat
  • Jennifer Dunn, a Washington Republican
  • Philip English, a Pennsylvania Republican
  • George Gekas, a Pennsylvania Republican
  • Bart Gordon, a Tennessee Democrat
  • Felix Grucci, a New York Republican
  • Mark Kennedy, a Minnesota Republican
  • Ron Kind, a Wisconsin Democrat
  • Peter King, a New York Republican
  • Betty McCollum, a Minnesota Democrat
  • Scott McInnis, a Colorado Republican
  • William Pascrell, a New Jersey Democrat
  • Colin Peterson, a Minnesota Democrat
  • Thomas Petri, a Wisconsin Republican
  • Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican
  • Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican
  • Nick Smith, a Michigan Republican
  • Thomas Tancredo, a Colorado Republican

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    Polluted Stormwater Could be Pumped into Everglades

    MIAMI, Florida, May 3, 2002 (ENS) - A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plan, made public today, to build large new storage facilities for hundreds of millions of gallons of polluted stormwater on the borders of Everglades National Park is running into opposition from three national environmental groups.

    The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the National Parks Conservation Association and the Sierra Club warn that the storage facilities could flood and pollute the Park.

    Environmentalists fear that, during the upcoming wet season, millions of gallons of polluted stormwater will be pumped into Everglades National Park from the so-called S-332B reservoir. This was largely prohibited under an agreement reached last summer between the Corps, the water district, the park, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

    But under the new plan, the regional water district hopes to use this overflow at its discretion, and the Corps asserts only that it will allow such water pollution into the Park under "emergency" circumstances. The groups object that the Corps has not given a specific definition of what emergency circumstances are.

    The plan, developed at the recommendation of the South Florida Water Management District, is an improper use of the money Congress authorized for restoration of the Everglades, the groups charged today.

    The plan was published in today's Federal Register, but construction of the new facilities is already under way. Hydrologic modeling and other technical analyses are currently being conducted and will be released publicly no sooner than May 21, 2002.

    Brad Sewell, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, is calling the plan "a new twist" on the decades of harm to the Everglades from urban sprawl and agribusinesses.

    "Now, these interests want to pollute and flood the Everglades in the name of an endangered species and funded by restoration dollars, he said. An original version of the plan, released last fall, had been negotiated for purposes of saving the imperiled Cape Sable Seaside sparrow.

    Internal emails obtained by NRDC under the Freedom of Information Act revealed that the Corps, regional water district, and consultants for agribusinesses and development interests helped negotiate the use of the federal facilities in the Everglades for pumping and storing the stormwater.

    The plan was only published in the Federal Register today, and the public is supposed to have 30 days to comment on the plan, but construction of the new facilities is already under way. Hydrologic modeling and other technical analyses are currently being conducted and will be released publicly no sooner than May 21, the groups said.

    Operation of the new facilities is expected to start at the end of June.

    John Adornato of the National Parks Conservation Association said, "It is unprecedented to have the most significant federal construction in this part of the Everglades for the last quarter century already underway, and we are still waiting for the necessary environmental analyses to be released."

    The just released plan expedites construction of a pumping facility from the so-called Modified Water Deliveries Project, mandated by Congress in 1989 to restore water flows into the Park. In 2001, Congress authorized the start of an approximately $8 billion plan to restore the Everglades.

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    Fish Farm Opponents Make Strange Bedfellows

    ANCHORAGE, Alaska, May 3, 2002 (ENS) - An unusual coalition is calling on the Canadian government to safeguard wild fish stocks along the Pacific coast by restricting fish farms.

    The cause has generated an unprecedented show of solidarity from a diverse coalition of fishers, conservationists, government officials, tribes and scientists from Canada, Alaska and other U.S. states.

    More than 200 groups, scientists and political leaders sent a letter to Prime Minister Jean Chretien and President George W. Bush, calling on the British Columbia government to maintain its current moratorium on ocean net cages for fish farms.

    The B.C. Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries is moving forward with the managed expansion of the finfish aquaculture industry, lifting a five year moratorium. Officials are working to complete the final regulatory changes on aquaculture waste management. The government expects to accept new applications for aquaculture operations shortly.

    The coalition wants the government to improve existing aquaculture practices, and start a public process to evaluate the impact of industrial finfish farming on wild fish stocks, fish habitat, and fishing dependent communities prior to allowing further expansion at new or existing sites.

    Dale Kelley, executive director of the Alaska Trollers Association, said the coalition is attempting to persuade the Canadian government to leave its moratorium in place, because it considers the expansion of ocean net cage farming to be a significant threat to wild fish.

    "There is a tremendous energy at the heart of the coalition," she said. "People and interest groups from California to Alaska are signing on daily, galvanized by their long standing commitment to the health of wild fish and local economies that depend on them."

    Coalition member point to government, scientific and public reports, such as the provincially sponsored Salmon Aquaculture Review, and a report by Canada's Auditor General, which highlight the need for better research, monitoring, enforcement and public involvement. Just a handful of those recommendations have been implemented to date, and the British Columbia government is proceeding with its plans to lift the ban on new farms.

    v Farmed fish often escape from net pens, invade wild fish habitat, prey on juvenile salmon, and have the potential to transfer disease and parasites to wild fish.

    "Both Canada and Alaska are obligated to protect our shared fisheries resource under agreements like the Pacific Salmon Treaty," said Kelley. "Lifting the moratorium seems reckless when there are so many unanswered questions about the impact of fish farming on wild stocks."

    Non-native Atlantic salmon have reproduced in British Columbian rivers and are now being found in Alaska streams. For more than a decade, fishers in Alaska have caught Atlantic salmon in fisheries as far west as the Bering Sea.

    In February a widespread disease outbreak occurred at multiple British Columbian salmon farms, and an increased presence of sea lice has been documented in areas near fish farms. Coalition members fear that these problems may spread to wild fish in British Columbia and elsewhere.

    "We cannot afford to sit back and let the expansion of fish farming in British Columbia increase the existing economic and environmental threat to people and communities throughout Alaska," said Bob Weinstein, mayor of the city of Ketchikan and president of the Southeast Conference. "Canada should take immediate steps to safeguard wild salmon along the North Pacific Coast - beginning with keeping in place the moratorium on new fish farms."

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    Battlebots Go Underwater in Student Competition

    MONTEREY, California, May 3, 2002 (ENS) - High school and college teams from 10 states and Canada will compete in an underwater ROV (remotely operated vehicle) design competition held as part of the NOAA/NASA Link Symposium from May 20 to 22.

    The competition, taking place in Florida at both the Kennedy Space Center and Brevard Community College-Cocoa campus, will culminate in a dramatic underwater battle as teams compete to pick up treasure from the bottom of a pool using homebuilt ROVs. The underwater tethered vehicles are guided by the students on shore via cables that carry signals between the operator and the vehicle.

    The Link Project captures the spirit of its namesake, Edwin Link, by marrying the missions and capabilities of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Oceanography Program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

    The ROV competition is sponsored by the Marine Advanced Technology Education Center and the ROV Committee of the Marine Technology Society as part of a national effort to introduce students to the world of marine science and technology and to help them develop the skills necessary to become successful marine technicians.

    "The ROV design competition is an ideal educational component to the Link Symposium. It benefits both students and professionals by bringing them together," said Captain Craig McLean, director of the NOAA Office of Exploration.

    The Marine Technology Society's ROV Committee was created in 1978 in recognition of the growing use of ROVs in the marine industry. The Committee's mission is to promote interchange of technical information among industrial, academic, defense, and other organizations on an international basis in the areas of ROVs, undersea robotics, and artificial intelligence. For more information, visit: http://www.rov.org.

    The 2002 NOAA/NASA Link Symposium aims to facilitate technology exchange between the ocean and space science and engineering communities, highlight advancements that may benefit exploration in both realms, describe the role of technology in deep-sea and interplanetary exploration, and provide a forum for inspiration and vision for future cooperative sea-space efforts. For more information, visit: http://www.thelinkproject.org.

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    Kayak Expedition Investigates Gulf of Maine

    PROVINCETOWN, Massachusetts, May 3, 2002 (ENS) - Four kayakers will embark Saturday on a five month, 1,000 mile ecological and cultural exploration of the Gulf of Maine. The team, led by Maine Sea Grant Extension Agent Natalie Springuel, aims to help people understand what the Gulf of Maine is, its oceanography, its shoreline, its watersheds, its habitats, its natural history, its people and places.

    Using an ultra-lightweight laptop computer supplied by Maine Sea Grant, the team will keep Gulf of Maine communities and organizations abreast of the expedition's progress.

    The team will also use digital and video cameras, journals, art, a field microscope, a water quality kit, a GPS unit and other equipment to capture a snapshot of the Gulf of Maine.

    The paddlers will make 12 stops along the way to teach communities about the Gulf of Maine and recreational safety and stewardship.

    The team takes off from Provincetown, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod tomorrow and wraps up on September 28, 2002 at Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia.

    A map, journal entries and Gulf of Maine information will be updated from the water several times a week on the expedition website at: http://www.gomexpedition.org

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