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Sen. Ted Stevens: Can this hurt ever heal?

I wrote a little while back on the tantrum thrown by Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) when his fellow Senators refused to let him attach Arctic Refuge drilling to the defense appropriations bill.

Well, he's still whining:

As the Arctic drilling went down to defeat, Stevens said "goodbye" to the Senate, a remark interpreted by some as a farewell. At the press conference, Stevens said that interpretation was wrong.

"I'm here, I'm going to stay and get ANWR, there's no question about that. It's going to happen."

But Stevens said when he returns to Washington, he will no longer consider some Democrats his friends. The final refuge debate became too personal, he said.

"When I first went there, you would never hear a senator speak about another senator the way they were speaking about me that night," he said. "There are people I've considered to be personal friends without regards to politics, and they were turning into vipers as far as I was concerned. ... The extent of the venom there on the floor, that would never have happened in the days gone by."

Stevens said he has "written off" those friends.

"I'm not traveling with them anymore, and I'm not going to play tennis or swim or do various things with them."

Somebody give this guy a hug!

(via ThinkProgress)

The decline of hunters and anglers augers poorly for conservation

Over the weekend The Oregonian ran a good short series on the diminishing numbers of hunters and anglers in the state. While the state's population has doubled since 1950, the number of hunters and fishermen has declined. (Read the articles here, here, here, and here.) This is not just a Beaver State phenomenon -- it's true nationwide, and it may have some troubling implications for wildlife protection.

The Oregonian seems mostly concerned that without hunting and fishing, fewer people will want to protect wildlife and natural areas. I think that's wrong. Northwesterners are still getting out into nature in vast, teeming, trail-clogging hordes. In fact, wildlife watchers generate substantially more economic activity than hunters and anglers combined.

The more important question -- and the one that The Oregonian gives comparatively short shrift to -- is a basic policy question. As the paper has it:

... who will pay the costs of preserving habitat and managing fish and wildlife? Hunters and fishermen now foot most of the bill, not just through the steep license, tag and access fees they pay, but also through countless hours of volunteer labor, pulling out abandoned fences, cutting down water-sucking juniper trees, planting streamside willows and tending boxes of fish eggs.

In Oregon, as in many other states, hunting and fishing licenses, together with taxes on items like ammunition and fishing rods, pay for a huge variety of conservation benefits -- everything from fieldwork by professional biologists to refuges like Sauvie's Island on the Columbia River. Without those (declining) sources of revenue, the future of conservation may look even more bleak than it already does. So what to do?

Science!

Our science-minded readers may be interested to know that a whole gaggle of sharp science bloggers -- Chris Mooney, Tim Lambert, PZ Myers, and more -- are moving over to ScienceBlogs.com (sponsored by Seed). Their combined firepower is formidable. Bookmark it.

Alaska volcano erupts, ash plume will miss Anchorage

Early this morning, Mount Augustine, a volcano in Alaska's Cook Inlet, erupted, sending a plume of ash 30,000 feet into the sky. As of 10 a.m. this morning, winds were blowing the plume north, and it was expected to miss Anchorage and other nearby population centers.

Besides a few cancelled flights, human impacts have been negligible thus far, so further eco-drama sounds unlikely, and the webcam view is disappointing. The sensationalist in me is already bored. But c'mon, volcanoes are awesome, they have a huge potential to affect human populations and global climate, and in Mount Augustine's case, "further eruptions could take place at any time ..."

9/11 Forgotten Heroes

Just a reminder for you folks who have access to Link TV (DIRECTV channel 375 and DISH Network channel 9410) that 9/11 Forgotten Heroes, the first episode of the Sierra Club Chronicles, will be airing Thursday night (tomorrow!).

Here's a short summary:

The terrorist attack on 9/11 was one of our country's most horrific moments, and the damage continues. Told there were no health hazards in the aftermath, the truth shows there was and many first responders are now afflicted and ignored by our government.

For a full description and trailers, go here.

Update [2006-1-11 16:9:42 by Chris Schults]: If you don't get Link TV, you can download the entire episode from the Sierra Club's website. Go here and click on the "Full episode" link.

Sicken-Me Elmo

California may restrict two chemicals used in plastic baby goods In its continuing quest to make the rest of the country look environmentally retrograde, the California legislature is considering a […]

A Char, Char Better Thing That I Do

New study finds salvage logging bad for burned forests The timber industry and Bush administration officials contend that salvage logging post-wildfire is the quickest path to reforestation, but a new […]

So Fresh, So Clean

Whole Foods makes record-setting wind-power purchase Whole Foods Market, mega-purveyor of organic and free-range foodstuffs, plans to purchase a jaw-dropping 458 million kilowatt-hours of wind-energy credits. It will be the […]

The shrinking-population scare is mostly hype

Demographers are projecting that population in some parts of the globe -- Russia, the Ukraine, Japan, much of Western Europe -- are set to decline over the next 50 years or so. Of course, talk of a shrinking population seems to send some people into a panic, which is why you occasionally see stories decrying the new "population crisis" -- not too many people, but too few.

The Economist has this to say about the doomsayers:

People love to worry -- maybe it's a symptom of ageing populations -- but the gloom surrounding population declines misses the main point. The new demographics that are causing populations to age and to shrink are something to celebrate. Humanity was once caught in the trap of high fertility and high mortality. Now it has escaped into the freedom of low fertility and low mortality. Women's control over the number of children they have is an unqualified good -- as is the average person's enjoyment, in rich countries, of ten more years of life than they had in 1960. (Emphasis added.)

That seems just right to me. And the article makes some other worthwhile points too -- including that economic output per capita is a far better measure of the health of an economy than total output. Measured by total output, a place with a shrinking population might seem to be in economic decline, even if the average person is getting wealthier.

(Of course, even better than total output per capita would be a measure that looks at how the poor and middle class are faring. Still, policymakers should keep in mind that per-capita measures of economic health are more significant than total output.)

Kia ads: ‘Save the greenbacks’

The problem with these Kia ads is not that they mock environmentalists -- the world needs more mockery, not less -- the problem is that they're not funny.

(via desmogblog)