A devastating year (so far) for Oregon and the environment…

April 9th, 2008

This year is bad. Very bad. Things are bleak, bleak. Here are the things on the top of my mind that have, are, or likely will happen in terms of the environment and Oregon… I don’t have time to link back, so search Google for specifics on any of them…

• Palomar LNG pipeline ripping up farmland and forest.
• LNG terminal at Astoria received county approval and will almost certainly get FERC approval.
• Western Oregon Plan Revisions approval to massively increase logging on BLM lands (that even its own scientists say is badly flawed).
• Hush money paid to Indian tribes to back-off and repudiate their formal demands that Snake/Columbia river dams be removed.
• Destination resorts in Central Oregon, including at the headwaters of the Metolius River, are marching forward.
• Casino in the Gorge increasingly likely.
• Approval for mega-resort in the Gorge, with hundreds of houses, approved.
• Salmon stocks declining to the point that all commercial fisheries are closing (even the fisherman want them closed which tells you something).

It’s on and on with this crap. And, as you know, once a destination resort is built, it is there for the long haul. It ain’t moving. To defend the environment, you need to win each and every battle. When developers “lose” a battle, they simply can try again and again. And if they ever win, there’s no turning things back.

The solution to these issues? Well, in the short term, for many of them, the courts.

In the long term, here are a few late night thoughts:

1. Increasing outreach and education of citizens as to the value and necessity of strong environmental safeguards, including land use planning and regulations. The concept of “community rights” needs to have as much play as the recently hyped and faulty notion of “(individual) property rights”.

2. In regards to education, the twin issues of the value of biodiversity and the value of habitat needs increasing play. Too much of the attention is on “energy” issues and global warming. And while these issues are indeed important, we’re seeing death by a thousand cuts with loss of critical habitat and biodiversity. To this end, these issues should somehow be tied to the increasingly popular issues of global warming, etc… you know, habitat as a heat sink, etc. I dunno… but the message needs to shift to facts on the ground, rather than lofty somewhat vague “scare” issues like energy and warming.

3. More Democratic judges and legislators. And I am not taking about rubes like Barack Obama and other compromisers who give with one hand and take away with the other (Obama went along with the Energy plan which has landed us with all these LNG terminals). We need Democratic fighters who won’t back down when faced with ugly pressure groups. And we need more Democratic judges (because there is no such thing as a disinterested judge… all judges are partisan one way or another) to help assert State’s rights to regulate and control what happens with our state.

4. Stronger land use laws on both the federal and local levels. As we’ve seen with some of these mega-projects, when approval by the state happens, they still need approval by the federal government under some different law. Or vice versa. As such, the best bulwark against the anti-environment forces at work are overlapping laws, allowing for multi-jurisdictional defenses.

5. More advocacy groups and more money to them. These groups are increasingly important in terms of the above points. But it would be nice to see some of them divested from their commercial or corporate benefactors, and the ability to be a bit more scrappy and flexible. Philanthropy, generally, needs to shift some of its efforts to conservation and the environment; such issues currently receive a fraction of overall giving.