Articles by Glenn Hurowitz

Baltimore baker takes on great quacking menace

Last week, The New York Times' David Streitfeld told the story of one J.R. Paterakis, a Baltimore "baker" who opposes the Conservation Reserve Program, which provides incentives to farmers to set aside their land for wildlife, clean water, and (incidentally) massive carbon sequestration. Seemed like an opportunity to deploy my rye wit.

The program has been a huge success -- protecting 35 million acres of land and partially restoring the "duck factory" of the upper Midwest that fills the skies of North America with quacks and hunting opportunities -- so why has Mr. Paterakis put this great environmental success story in his sights?

Bush administration ignoring environmental laws, building border wall anyway

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced yesterday that he will use authority Congress gave him to waive all environmental laws that will impede construction of 670 miles of border wall between the United States and Mexico.

The wall threatens the rare wildlife of the Southwest like ocelots, jaguars, jaguarundis, and others with extinction because it will prevent animals from reaching breeding populations in Mexico.

Rodger Schlickeisen, president of Defenders of Wildlife, released a statement saying,

Thanks to this action by the Bush administration, the border is in a sense more lawless now than when Americans first started moving west. Laws ensuring clean water and clean air for us and our children -- dismissed. Laws protecting wildlife, land, rivers, streams, and places of cultural significance -- just a bother to the Bush administration. Laws giving American citizens a voice in the process -- gone. Clearly this is out of control. It is this kind of absolute disregard for the well-being and concerns of border communities and the welfare of our wildlife and untamed borderlands that has forced Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club to take a stand and say "No more!"

The Bush administration is aiming to complete the wall before it leaves office, likely because all three presidential candidates have expressed some degree of opposition to it.

The only hopes for stopping the wall at this point are a Supreme Court case by the Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife challenging the Bush administration's authority to waive environmental laws, a so-far anemic effort sponsored by Congressman Raul Grijalva to get Congress to change the law, or civil disobedience in the border region aimed at stopping or slowing the wall.

Do humans deserve to find life on other planets?

An explosion in our ability to detect planets in other solar systems has made astronomers increasingly confident that it's only a matter of time until we discover life on other planets. Astronomers just discovered methane on a planet 63 light-years from Earth -- a sign that life just might exist. Here's what Carl B. Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, said following the discovery in this fascinating Washington Post article by Marc Kaufman.

There are a hundred billion stars in our galaxy and probably a hundred billion other galaxies with as many stars as ours, so it seems highly unlikely that there are not Earth-like planets orbiting some of them out there, waiting to be discovered.

I find the idea of life on other planets enormously uplifting: life is a miracle. But the idea of our civilization finding life on other planets fills me with apprehension. After all, civilization "discovering" new worlds teeming with life is nothing new to us: we've been doing it since agricultural civilization started expanding from Mesopotamia millennia ago.

But for as long as we've been discovering these new worlds, we've been destroying them, whether it was the Clovis people slaughtering the woolly mammoths, mastodons, and giant beavers that used to make North America home, the Sumerians turning wetlands and forests into wheat fields, or our own civilization slaughtering everything from the dodo to the bison to (just last year) the Baiji dolphin formerly of China's Yangtze River. And now we're turning our attention to the world's remaining tropical forests.

Enviros file supreme suit to stop border wall

Sierra Club and Defenders of Wildlife have filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court challenging elements of the REAL ID act, which gives Secretary of Homeland Security the power to waive any environmental laws that would get in the way of the 700-mile-long double-layered concrete wall Congress authorized for the U.S.-Mexico border.

From the press release announcing the lawsuit:

By granting one government official the absolute power to pick and choose which laws apply to border wall construction, the REAL ID Act proves itself to be both inherently dangerous and profoundly un-American. The issue here is not security vs. wildlife, but whether wildlife, sensitive environmental values, and communities along the border will be given fair consideration in the decisions the government makes," said Rodger Schlickeisen, president of Defenders of Wildlife. "We are hopeful that the Supreme Court will take up this case in order to protect the fundamental separation of powers principles enshrined in the United States Constitution."

The lawsuit seems to have some legs; a government official familiar with it said it had some chance of success.