• Bush and Kerry Make Final Appeals to the Voters
  
• Trust for Public Land Tracks Conservation Ballot Results
  
• Sustainable Forestry Trade Enhanced in Latin America
  
• Environmentalists Give DC Transport Plan a Failing Grade
  
• Colorado River States Get $19.5 Million for Salinity Control
  
• Handling Stormwater in Arid Eastern Washington
  
• Sources of Arsenic in Virginia Water Explored
  
• Gene Defends Lungs Against Environmental Pollutants
  

Bush and Kerry Make Final Appeals to the Voters

Kerry promised once again to bring renewable energy back to the forefront of America's energy policy, and pledged that by 2020 he would ensure that 20 percent of U.S. energy is supplied from renewable sources.

On the final day, Kerry campaigned in Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio. Kerry traveled to Orlando, Florida, before joking his way through a Milwaukee rally in a pouring rainstorm. Later Monday, Kerry visited Detroit before ending the night in Ohio. Kerry was joined at his Cleveland rally by his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, and by rock music legend Bruce Springsteen.

President George W. Bush ended his campaign in Des Moines, Iowa after final day events in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The President repeated his now familiar themes, "five clear choices for America's families," and he promised to "promote renewables like ethanol and biodiesel" to keep the farm economy strong.

He promised a stronger economy, better education, more tax cuts, more affordable health care, and a continuation of the war on terrorism. "There will be no draft; we'll keep the all-volunteer army," the President pledged.

Trust for Public Land Tracks Conservation Ballot Results

It can be difficult to keep track of all the ballot measures across the country that will be decided today, but with its new database, Trust of Public Land will monitor and release results as soon as they are available on Wednesday, November 3.

Among the presidential battleground states lands measures are Michigan where 16 local measures worth over $100 million are at stake including $35 million in Washtenaw County.

In Florida, 12 local measures worth over $2 billion are at stake, including three Miami-Dade County questions totaling over $1.4 billion.

In New Jersey, 44 local measures totaling $355 million will be decided tomorrow, including $105 million for Hunterdon County.

Since 1998, 824 conservation ballot measures have passed in 44 states, raising $22 billion in funding for land conservation – a rate of passage of approximately 77 percent.

In 2000, the last presidential election year, 174 ballot measures passed, an 83 percent passage rate, creating $7.5 billion in funding for land conservation.

“In recent years, voters across the political spectrum have voiced strong support for protection of natural lands, clean water, and safe communities,” said Ernest Cook, Trust for Public Land's director of Conservation Finance. “This is a reaction to the continuing problems of sprawl that threaten the quality of life in so many areas.”

A complete list of results from local and state balloting on conservation and parks will be available online at www.landvote.org.

The results of today's votes, along with results of all 2004 conservation measures, will be published as a report in early 2005. Results and ballot specifics from past and current ballot measures since are available on the LandVote database also available at www.landvote.org.

Introduced in June, the database includes information on all conservation related ballot measures since 1999.

Sustainable Forestry Trade Enhanced in Latin America

Environmentalists Give DC Transport Plan a Failing Grade

In formal comments to the Transportation Planning Board of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, Earthjustice, on behalf of Environmental Defense, Sierra Club, and Audubon Naturalist Society, pointed out that hardly a day goes by without breakdowns somewhere in the Metrorail or Metrobus systems, but the new programs would spend billions on roads, ignoring the needs of mass transit.

Earthjustice attorney David Baron said that regional officials are failing to provide the funding needed to maintain even the current degraded level of service, much less what would be required to improve or expand the system. "Instead," he said, "the latest proposals include massive new spending for new and bigger roads.”

According to Metro officials, the Washington area’s transit system is on “life support,” and requires a major infusion of funds to maintain current service levels.

Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority rail cars are breaking down nearly twice as often as they did three years ago, creating increasing delays across all lines when ridership is surging.

At its October 15 meeting Metro's Board of Directors Budget Committee listed some of the system's short-term needs - investment in basic infrastructure such as fixing leaking tunnels, and upgrading power and communications systems; purchasing 120 new rail cars so that eight car trains can run on one-third of the system, and buying 185 more buses to meet continuing demand and reduce crowding.

Baron told the Transportation Planning Board of Metro's prediction that, without a major infusion of new funding, overcrowding will become “unmanageable” on the Orange line by 2008, on the Blue line by 2009, on the Red and Yellow lines by 2010, and on the Green line by 2011.

More than $140 million in additional funding is also needed for security and emergency response.

Metro predicts that failure to correct delays, overcrowding, and other problems will drive people away from transit, thereby worsening the region’s traffic congestion.

Yet the latest long-range plans for the region’s transportation needs assume that transit ridership will not drop, even though the same plans fail to provide adequate transit funding. This faulty assumption will lead to increased air pollution in a region already overburdened by unhealthy levels of smog and other air pollutants, the environmental groups maintain.

The Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation must reject these draft plans, the environmental groups state in their comments, and send regional planners back to the drawing board to develop plans that will fix the regional transit system and protect public health.

Colorado River States Get $19.5 Million for Salinity Control

The Natural Resources Conservation Service will provide $9.7 million to both Colorado and Utah and $90,000 to Wyoming. Only these three states have USDA approved salinity control projects in the basin.

The Colorado River Basin is the primary domestic water supply source for 27 million residents in seven states - Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming - and a source of irrigation water for more than 3.5 million acres of farmland.

"These funds will help farmers and ranchers control salinity on their lands and improve water quality in the basin so that millions of people can have a cleaner, safer domestic water supply," Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman said.

Application of irrigation water to the land results in the addition of soluble salts such as sodium, calcium, magnesium, potassium, sulfate, and chloride dissolved from geologic materials with which the waters have been in contact.

Salts dissolved in Colorado River water cause over $300 million in damages each year, the USDA estimates.

Through EQIP, the Natural Resources Conservation Service works with eligible agricultural producers in the basin who implement land management and irrigation improvement practices that reduce salinity by preventing salts from dissolving and mixing with the river's flow.

Improved irrigation systems reduce leaching in the soil which, in turn, reduces the amount of salt that moves through the soil into the water table. The end result is that less salt ends up in the Colorado River, flowing more than 1,400 miles from its headwaters in Wyoming and Colorado to the Gulf of California in Mexico.

USDA partners with the U.S. Department of Interior's Bureau of Reclamation and Bureau of Land Management to carry out Colorado River Basin salinity control activities. The Colorado River Basin Salinity Control Forum, established in 1973 by the basin states, provides interstate and interagency coordination and guidance for the combined state and federal salinity control efforts.

For every dollar of EQIP funds allocated to salinity control in the authorized project areas, 43 cents is made available from accounts in BR's basin states for on-farm financial and technical assistance.

USDA aims to reduce the salt loading by 705,000 tons by the year 2020. So far, agricultural producers have reduced over 404,000 tons of salt or nearly 57 percent of the USDA goal. The overall goal for the federal partners is to reduce 1.8 million tons of salt annually by the year 2020.

Additional information on EQIP is at: http://www.nrcs.usda.gov/programs/eqip.

Handling Stormwater in Arid Eastern Washington

The manual was prepared cooperatively by Eastern Washington cities and counties, the state departments of Ecology and Transportation, private engineering consultants and representatives of the building industry.

"This group of dedicated professionals prepared two drafts for public review, then worked together to come up with this final product," explained Karen Dinicola, a water quality specialist for the Department of Ecology.

The "Stormwater Management Manual for Eastern Washington" is a companion document to the "Model Municipal Stormwater Program" document published just over a year ago. The two documents provide tools for managing stormwater discharges to protect water quality.

Core elements of stormwater management and an overview of the document will be outlined during workshops scheduled for November 9 in Spokane, November 16 in Kennewick, and December 7 in Ellensburg. More workshops will be scheduled next year.

"The manual recognizes there are fundamental differences, such as soils and climate, between the east and west sides of the state," said Nancy Aldrich, with the city of Richland, who co-chaired the Eastern Washington Stormwater Project committee. "We thank the Department of Ecology for recognizing those differences and funding this process. We hope the manual will be well received by its users."

The Stormwater Management Manual for Eastern Washington is available online at http://www.ecy.wa.gov/biblio/0410076.asp

Free CDs will be available for workshop participants and at Ecology's regional offices in Spokane and Yakima.

For more information on the manual, model program or the upcoming workshops, contact Karen Dinicola at 360-407-6550 or kdin461@ecy.wa.gov.

Sources of Arsenic in Virginia Water Explored

Discovering the pathways from the mine to the stream and the conditions of discharge from groundwater into the stream are first steps to possible remediation and control, said Madeline Schreiber, assistant professor of geosciences at Virginia Tech.

"Arsenic was used in pesticide. The extraction process involved heating the ore so that the arsenic would oxidize as a white powder," Schreiber said.

Schreiber's goal is to figure out how to prevent arsenic from getting into drinking water sources. "We are trying to determine the biogeochemical controls on arsenic release. In this case, release was accelerated through human activity - mining. But we are also looking at how the mineral weathers; then, once it is in the water, how it interacts with the sediment and with bacteria."

Schreiber and associate professor of biology Maurice Valett are lead investigators on a National Science Foundation funded project that began in 2002 on the transport, transformation, and retention of arsenic in a headwater stream and possible hydrologic, biological, and geochemical controls.

"The change that occurs as anaerobic [oxygen-free] groundwater discharges to aerobic surface water impacts the transport of arsenic. Arsenic is more mobile under anaerobic conditions, while under aerobic conditions, it is bound to iron minerals," she said.

"So we are asking, "What happens to arsenic as it is transported from groundwater to surface water? Is it retained at the interface between the two zones?

Since research has demonstrated that arsenic is a carcinogen, the U.S. standard for arsenic in drinking water has been lowered from 50 to 10 parts per billion, which is the same as the European Union standard.

Since much of the arsenic contamination is natural, rather than as a result of industry, "and a little bit goes a long way," Schreiber said, "the taxpayers will have to pay for prevention. But prevention is less expensive than remediation."

Schreiber and Valett will present their findings at the 116th national meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver, Colorado, November 7-10.

Gene Defends Lungs Against Environmental Pollutants

The scientists say their research could lead to the identification of what factors make some people more susceptible to lung diseases than others.

The so-called master gene - nuclear factor erythroid-derived 2-related factor 2 (Nrf2) - is activated in response to environmental pollutants such as cigarette smoke.

Then it turns on other genes that act as antioxidants and pollutant detoxifers to protect the lungs from developing the disease of emphysema.

Shyam Biswal, PhD, senior author of the study and an assistant professor in the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences, said, “The important thing to remember is that the degree of lung damage depends on the ability to defend against environmental factors. We now know that Nrf2 is the key player in protection even in the case of chronic exposure to pollutants.”

In 2002, Dr. Biswal and colleagues were the first to show that activation of Nrf2 in response to an anticancer agent, sulforaphane, can turn on antioxidant genes, but little was known about Nrf2 regulated genes and their role in lung inflammatory diseases caused by chronic exposure to environmental agents.

By exposing mice to cigarette smoke, the researchers were able to learn which gene controlled this natural defense mechanism.

The researchers found that disruption of the Nrf2 gene caused earlier onset and more severe emphysema in a strain of mice that is resistant to cigarette smoke-related emphysema.

Through gene chip analysis, the researchers were able to identify 50 Nrf2-dependent antioxidant and cytoprotective pulmonary genes that work together to protect the lungs from cigarette-smoke-induced emphysema. A gene chip allows researchers to monitor the complex interactions of thousands of genes on a whole genome rather than one at time.

Pulmonary emphysema is a major manifestation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which affects more than 16 million Americans and is the fourth highest cause of death in United States. COPD, the only disease among the top 10 causes of death with a rising incidence rate in the United States, is predicted to reach worldwide epidemic proportions.

Tirumalai Rangasamy, PhD, first coauthor of the study and a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Biswal’s lab, explained that whereas cigarette smokers make up 85 percent of COPD patients, other environmental risk factors include air pollution and chronic occupational exposure to various dusts.

Dr. Biswal said, “With this new gene and environmental interaction discovery, in the future we may be able to identify people who are genetically predisposed to developing lung diseases, not just COPD, that are caused by environmental factors."

Published in the current issue of "The Journal of Clinical Investigation," the study was supported by grants from the Maryland Cigarette Restitution Fund, the Young Scientist Clinical Award from the Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute, National Institutes of Health National Cancer Institute and National Institute of Environmental Health Science to the Johns Hopkins Center in Urban Environmental Health.