B and B

Drug cartels in our national parks

Our country's system of national parks is in a predicament, due to the funding shortages that have become a chronic condition in this era of GOP government-by-corruption. Unfortunately, while one may be able to survive on a starvation diet for a while, at some point the death slide begins. How long can this go on?

At a public hearing by a subcommittee of the House Government Reform Committee in California yesterday, there was this testimony:

Reduction in the number of rangers has put the public at risk by failing to stop drug cartels from planting booby-trapped marijuana farms in areas of Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks east of Visalia, [National Park Conservation Association chairman Gene] Sykes said.

Drug cartels? Booby-traps?

The NPCA has more about this stunning new problem:

Between January and September 2004, the Park Service and local and federal law enforcement agencies tracked down and removed $176 million worth of marijuana plants - exceeding the 2003 yearly total. The clandestine marijuana gardens and their guards - men armed with AK-47s - are polluting rivers and streams with fertilizer, trampling delicate soils and disrupting natural drainage, piling trash, laying miles of irrigation tubing, and poaching wildlife.

AK-47s?

From testimony at a similar congressional hearing a couple weeks ago:

"Park Service rangers have heard of hikers and fishermen being chased at gunpoint after inadvertently stumbling into a marijuana garden or meeting one of these guards on the trail," [Laura] Whitehouse [of NPCA] said. "The cartels also use booby traps to secure their marijuana gardens - shotguns with trip lines carefully hidden and positioned to shoot an unknowing victim in the face."

Hikers and fishermen chased at gunpoint? Shotguns with trip lines?

The appropriation of national parkland for the purpose of cultivating marijuana, according to Karen Taylor-Goodrich, associate director for visitor and resource protection for the National Park Service, is "a truly significant and extensive problem" that the agency is attempting to address despite a dearth of resources.

"While we are attempting to aggressively quantify the overall problem, how much marijuana is being cultivated and the extent to which these organizations operate on parks lands is not fully known," Taylor-Goodrich said. "Our intelligence indicates that most of these cultivation operations were conducted by a small number of Mexican national organizations."

Something has gotten out of hand. It should be a national embarrassment that international drug cartels have usurped the United States' public lands—not just any old public lands, but its most famous parks—for their criminal use, while endangering public safety and polluting the environment.

So what is the Republican congress' response?

[Subcommittee chairman Rep. Mark] Souder [R-Indiana] suggested the National Park Service needs develop creative ways to persuade the public and nonprofit "friends of parks" groups to raise more contributions for parks.

Souder suggested celebrities might be recruited to support fund-raising drives to help national parks in California.

If I didn't know better, I'd swear I was reading The Onion.

Cowbird analysis

In central Texas, we have at least two bird species that are officially endangered—the Golden-cheeked Warbler and the Black-capped Vireo. Both suffer from habitat loss of their preferred breeding grounds. But another factor that commonly believed to harm their populations is the prevalence of cowbirds.

From the Audubon Society:

The Brown-headed Cowbird, a species which lays its eggs in the nests of vireos and other birds so that they are "tricked" into raising the young cowbirds instead of their own young, has thrived on human activities such as bird feeding and agriculture and as a result can cause widespread reproductive failure in Black-capped Vireo populations.

So to help save the Golden-cheeked Warbler and Black-capped Vireo from extinction, conservation organizations use, in addition to habitat preservation and restoration, cowbird "control" programs (i.e., trapping and euthanizing), with significant apparent success.

A diverse coalition of agencies and organizations including Audubon Texas is working together on a cowbird trapping initiative aimed at decreasing parasitism rates on Black-capped Vireos and Golden-cheeked Warblers. A population of Black-capped Vireos at Fort Hood Military Reservation, Texas showed a dramatic increase in nest productivity after an intensive cowbird trapping program.

A National Geographic news item from 2003 provides a few more details:

Controlling the population of cowbirds is critical in this struggle [to save the Black-capped Vireo]. After a cowbird trapping program had been implemented at Fort Hood, Texas, and on nearby ranches, the vireos' low 5 percent reproductive success rate of 1987 leaped to 45.5 percent in 1996. Trapping is an expensive, short-term solution, though, that mostly helps local populations.

(For even more details on the Ford Hood program, see this link.)

Now, though, as I hear via the ecologist, Nuthatch, at her excellent blog, Boostrap Analysis, it appears as though the cowbird control programs may be getting a budget cut from the feds, and some members of the birding community are concerned about negative repercussions on endangered songbirds, such as the Kirtland's Warbler, which breeds in Michigan. (Since the cuts are federal, I guess that they would also impact anti-cowbird programs for the Black-capped Vireo and Golden-cheeked Warbler in Texas.)

Nuthatch is not so concerned, however, and is promising a "devil's advocate" argument, to be presented in a series of upcoming posts.

We tend to lose sight of the fact that nest parasitism is a natural process. Would any sensible conservationist endorse the slaughter of hawks, even though doing so would undoubtedly save the lives of any number of birds or small animals?

There is more than meets the eye here, and in a series of several posts, I’d like to briefly explore three main topics: the truth about cowbirds and their impacts on songbirds, problems with cowbird control as an endangered species management tool, and the specific issues surrounding Kirtland’s Warbler recovery efforts. Stay tuned, I'm sure my "devil's advocate" position may ruffle some feathers.

Judging from some of the comments to her post, she's already ruffled some feathers. But given all that I've learned about birds from Nuthatch in the past, I'll definitely be listening.

Bird Fest

Not Thanksgiving. Rather, it's the eleventh edition the birding blog bonanza, I and the Bird, hosted well north of the arctic circle by Clare Kines at The House & other Arctic musings.

I was particularly interested in a submission by a Chicago birder at the blog Birding is NOT a crime!!!! I have a hard time imagining the end of Chicago's Navy Pier, in November, with winds gusting to 50 mph and more, as being conditions conducive to bird watching. I would be wrong!

Read "From the Field: Midwest Cave Swallow Invasion Continues!!!!" for more. Yes, the anonymous birder behind this blog has an affection for exclamation points! Birding does inspire strong emotions at times, so I can understand completely.

One square inch of quiet

Silence. I know I could use more of it. I know I'm not alone.

Despite that, true quiet is getting harder and harder to find, as John Balzar writes in the Los Angeles Times:

Quiet is going extinct.

These thoughts turn over in the mind as you explore one of these few quiet places left in North America [Hoh River, Olympic National Park, Washington], perhaps the quietest of them all. Your guide is a man who has given his career to listening and recording the pure sounds of nature — and searching for meaning in what they convey.

He has become one of the few Americans to raise his voice on behalf of the vanishing quiet.

Naturally, your purpose here is to inquire about the value of this timeless thing that is slipping away without … well, without alarm, without a sense of loss, without broad public discussion. But something else occurs along the way. When you enter the realm of quiet to ponder it, the quiet awakens in you a missing bond with the natural world. The quieter the surroundings, the more — and the better — you hear. The world around you expands into a three-dimensional place.

Listen.

No need to strain. Just listen.

That is the autumn sound of yellowed maple leaves falling from the tree and settling on the forest floor 50 feet away. It is a sound you've never consciously heard. More to the point, it is a sound you didn't know you could hear.

...

At last, at a place marked by a red stone and a spruce with a hollowed-out trunk big enough to walk through, [acoustic ecologist Gordon] Hempton turns left off the trail. He picks his way over downed trees, through a squishy salamander bog and up a bank to a glen of mighty conifers. He sits.

A glass candy jar, resting on moss under a log, is the only sign that humans have ever been here.

"Welcome to One Square Inch," says a label on the jar.

Hempton chose this place to make a stand.

If he can stir up a ruckus, maybe the right people will listen and the National Park Service will officially designate just one square inch of this park as a place of absolute quiet. One square inch of quiet, of course, means miles and miles of buffer — essentially securing the natural soundscape of the entire park.

A simple idea. Turn off the generators in those RVs, reroute the airline traffic going into Seattle, forbid private planes overhead, and plaster the visitor center with posters reaffirming the mission of our national parks: to preserve nature as it was, quiet included.

Read on and you find out that, by Gordon Hempton's definition, he has found only seven or eight quiet places remaining in the United States. None in Europe. As recently as twenty years ago, when he started his work, he was able to find a lot more such places.

What is Hempton's definition? "[W]here the sounds of nature are unbroken for intervals of at least 15 minutes during daylight hours." 15 minutes is the length of the 'sounds of nature' recordings that he makes.

Qutoed in an August Seattle Times article, Hempton says, "Whenever someone tells me they know a quiet place, I figure they have an undiagnosed hearing impairment, or they weren't really listening. Most people believe they know what natural quiet is, but they have not had the experience; it is not the same thing as sitting in an empty theater, a church, a library. We spend our lives in containers. Cars. Buildings. Planes. Natural quiet is in open, living space. It's alive."

As I walked through the natural, open, living setting of Government Canyon State Natural Area last weekend, just outside of San Antonio, the silence seemed deafening. Surely there must be more than a handful of quiet places left in the U.S., even by that definition!

Yet just as the impression of profound quiet hit my brain, the drone of an aircraft miles away pierced my ears.

But Government Canyon is so close to a major urban area. It's hardly surprising that it's not truly quiet, right? Certainly there are places out in west Texas, in those wide open, empty spaces, just an afternoon's drive from here, where it is still quiet. Certainly!

Certainly?

A casual acquaintance from times gone by

This is last week's news, but it's not often that someone gets written up in the New York Times after getting passed over for a job. It's even less often when the person being written about was a classmate and casual acquaintance of mine from college. But this is the case for Kim Ng, who recently came in a "close second" for the job of general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Had she been hired, she would have been the first-ever female, and first ever Asian-American, general manager of a major league baseball team. But, given how highly regarded she appears to be in the baseball world, I suspect she will achieve both of these firsts before much longer.

From the November 17 Times article:

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 16 - As the Los Angeles Dodgers introduced their new general manager Tuesday, the most intriguing candidate sat in the audience.

Kim Ng pulled up a chair in the front row. She wore a tailored black suit. She clapped at all the right moments. This was the rare occasion in which the person who did not get the job received nearly as much attention as the person who did.

...

"Of course I'm disappointed," Ng said. "But I think it is groundbreaking that a woman even interviewed. The game is progressing. Next time, it may turn out different."

...

Although Ng's gender and ethnicity can make her seem like an untraditional candidate, her baseball roots are old-fashioned. Ng grew up in Queens playing stickball in her driveway. She rooted for the Yankees and once said that she made a scrapbook of Thurman Munson obituaries the day after he died.

A star softball player in high school and college, Ng was all set to become a consultant or an investment banker after college. But when one of her coaches at the University of Chicago told her about an internship with the Chicago White Sox, Ng saw a way to combine her passions. The White Sox, then as now, fashioned themselves a progressive organization and gave Ng her first job.

"I've never been around somebody who would ask so many intelligent questions," said Dan Evans, then an assistant general manager for the White Sox. "Kim always wanted to know why things were done a certain way."

While many of baseball's new-age general managers are portrayed as coddled Ivy Leaguers inextricably linked to their laptops, Ng nearly quit baseball after four years with the Yankees. She might have thought about leaving again in 2003, when Bill Singer, then a Mets scout, taunted her with an exaggerated Chinese accent at the general managers meetings.

The way Ng handled the incident, and the way she came back from it, only enhanced her profile.

Charles Kuffner at Off the Kuff has also written about Kim Ng recently, here and here. And here is an interview with her (undated, but obviously fairly recent, since she is with the Dodgers) from Women's Sport Foundation.

I did not know Kim well. In college, she was, literally, the friend of a friend. But it is still a trip to find someone you knew once-upon-a-time but had pretty much completely forgotten over the years, "suddenly" in the news (for positive reasons). I wish her the best of luck in blazing new paths for women in this particular male-dominated workplace.

New website for anyone with an avian interest

The Birding Gear Big Board—for bird enthusiasts like myself, this looks like a great new web site. The fact that it is run by Mike of 10,000 Birds, Nuthatch of Bootstrap Analysis, Charlie of Charlie's Bird Blog, and Pamela Martin of Thomasburg Walks only re-emphasizes its potential excellence.

They describe the site as "reviews of birding books, optics, cameras, and gear ... by bloggers you trust!"

So, if you have interest in birds, take a look!

GOP's public lands sell-off passes House

In Washington D.C. late last week, the House GOP continued their plundering ways. The spending bill they passed by a 2-vote margin--a bill that contains so many odorous features that they are virtually impossible to keep track of--also contains the provision that could lead to the indiscriminate sell-off of federal lands across the country to mining companies and real-estate developers.

The New York Times finally saw fit to write about this, but, alas, only after passage. From the November 20 online edition:

DENVER, Nov. 19 - Private companies and individuals would be able to buy large tracts of federal land, from sagebrush basins to high-peak hiking trails around the West, under the terms of the spending bill passed Friday by a two-vote margin in the House of Representatives.

On the surface, the bill reads like the mundane nip and tuck of federal mining law its authors say it is. But lawyers who have parsed its language say the real beneficiaries could be real estate developers, whose business has become a more potent economic engine in the West than mining.

Under the existing law, a mining claim is the vehicle that allows for the extraction of so-called hard-rock metals like gold or silver.

Under the House bill passed Friday, for the first time in the history of the 133-year-old mining law individuals or companies can file and expand claims even if the land at the heart of a claim has already been stripped of its minerals or could never support a profitable mine. The measure would also lift an 11 year moratorium on the passing of claims into full ownership.

The provisions have struck fear through the West, from the resort areas of the Rockies like Aspen and Vail here in Colorado, to Park City in Utah, which are all laced with old mining claims. Critics say it could open the door for developers to use the claims to assemble large land parcels for projects like houses, hotels, ski resorts, spas or retirement communities.

This bill has forced some Republicans, such as Dennis Rehbergof Montana, to choose between their D.C. lobbyist friends' monetary interests, and their constituents' less tangible interests in preserving public lands and wildlife for hunting and fishing, amongst other activites.

Rehberg, and most other Congressional Republicans, came down on the side of the lobbyists.

Mr. Rehberg's office then issued a letter from the sponsor of the provisions, Representative Richard W. Pombo, Republican of California, the chairman of the House Resources Committee. Mr. Pombo promised in writing that he would work in the conference committee to make sure that language protecting recreational access was added.

Sporting groups, nonetheless, remained unsatisfied.

"How are you going to protect hunting and fishing access opportunities and the diverse wildlife that exists on our public lands if it is no longer in public hands?" asked Craig Sharpe, the executive director of the Montana Wildlife Federation, a hunting and fishing group.

Will the GOP-controlled Senate go along with this attack on our nation's heritage?

Helotes Wal-Mart controversy now about "vested rights"

As you may recall, a few miles from here, in the small town of Helotes, just outside San Antonio, a controversy over a planned Super Wal-Mart has been brewing for approximately a year now. Last spring, 3 Wal-Mart opponents defeated 3 incumbent Wal-Mart supporters in elections for the Helotes city council. Two of the hard fought races were won by a mere seven votes (out of approximately 1300).

Since then, a month ago, the city council voted to place a 90-day moratorium on development while they study the issue further.

From the October 19 San Antonio Express-News:

Applause and shouts of joy filled council chambers Thursday after the City Council, in a 3-2 vote, approved stopping development near Scenic Loop Road and Texas 16 for 90 days.

Council members Bill Wheeler Jr., Linda Boyer-Owens and Stuart Birnbaum voted in favor of placing interim development controls on the area that a handful of landowners asked to be annexed Sept. 12.

Councilmen Jim Caruso and Charles James voted against the measure, warning that passing it could expose the city to litigation.

The vote came after more than an hour of appeals by residents and attorneys to the council.

By placing development controls on the area, the council prevents Wal-Mart store officials and anyone else looking to develop near the intersection from filing "an application for a license, certificate, permit, approval or other form of authorization for development" pending a zoning study and annexation impact analysis of the area.

Mayor Jon Allan, who placed the item on the agenda, told the council he made the move because residents who asked for annexation want to have some control over development in the area.

"At this point, it's very cut and dry," he said. "If we put these residents' rights as wanting to be annexed in the forefront, I think this interim development control allows this to happen.

"As people pointed out, there's no rush."

Last month, a group of property owners next to the 32-acre proposed Wal-Mart site filed a petition to annex the entire area. All newly annexed property is automatically zoned residential.

If the annexation is approved, that could force Wal-Mart officials to go through the rezoning process, which would add another step for the retailer looking to build a superstore on property now owned by Balous Miller.

Now, the Wal-Mart faction is pulling their trump card out of the Texas real estate developers' bag of tricks: "vested rights." That is the idea that governments cannot control how land is developed once a real estate developer even thinks about developing a piece of land. (Ok, it's not quite that extreme, but then again, it's not quite that far off the truth, either. At least in the way the developers want the law to work.).

From the November 16 Express-News:

Attorneys for landowner Balous Miller filed a lawsuit against the city of Helotes Nov. 10, alleging that Miller and Wal-Mart, who entered into a contract for Wal-Mart to purchase 31.6 acres from Miller in 2004, have vested rights that would allow the retailer to construct a supercenter at Scenic Loop and Texas 16.

"The land-use controls that were in effect at the time that Mr. Miller and Wal-Mart proposed this development are the land-use controls that we are subject to," said Barry A. McClenahan, attorney for Miller. "If the city — through this annexation which is, whatever else they say, is really for the sole purpose of stopping Wal-Mart, which the citizens realize — attempt to impose more restrictive land-use controls that would preclude this development, they can't do that."

Mayor Jon Allan said he couldn't comment specifically about the suit because city attorneys hadn't yet received it, but he said in general the issue of vested rights disturbs him.

"Developers are using vested rights to force developments onto communities," he said. "Our charge is to protect communities. This isn't about private landowners wanting to get a decent investment return on their property. This is more about greed than anything else."

...

"You have to consider the fact that the neighbors that live adjacent to this type of development, what about their rights?" Allan said. "These people have poured their lives, their sweat and their blood into their homes and then see it destroyed by these large developers that are going to create all kinds of traffic problems, light pollution, air pollution, noise pollution and significant degradation, not to mention water pollution because they have wells that almost certainly will be affected."

Miller purchased the 31.6 acres of land in 1982. Most of the land sits in the city's ETJ, with the exception of a small sliver within the Helotes city limits.

Because Miller and the retailer have applied for licenses and permits and entered into contracts for services, they have established vested rights, McClenahan said.

"I think that the law is pretty clear ... We have taken the steps to ensure that these rights are vested and that the law is there for a reason," McClenahan said.

But Allan said there's another reason.

"This whole vested rights thing is, they talk about the state laws, and let's face it: These vested rights laws have been fostered by developers and written by developers," Allan said.

"I think the voters should be outraged at the fact that communities are less and less able to determine how they would like their communities to be."

Quite a new mayor they have there in Helotes! We need more politicans like him, both in Texas and all over this country.

Republicans trying to sell off public land

Congressional Republicans are, yet again, up to no good.  This time, they are trying to sneak a provision into the budget bill that would allow them to sell off huge amounts of federal land--land that belongs to the citizens of this country--at bargain-basement rates to mining companies and other special interests.

From the Los Angeles Times today:

A budget bill that the House of Representatives is expected to vote on this week would force the federal government to put "For Sale" signs on public recreation lands in California and the West, including national forest holdings throughout the Sierra Nevada and remote parts of the Mojave Desert.

Backers of the bill insist that the amount of land affected would be small, but former Interior Department officials and some experts on natural resource law say the legislation could result in the sale of millions of acres.

Slipped into a massive budget-cutting bill late last month by the House Resources Committee, headed by Rep. Richard W. Pombo (R-Tracy), the provision has been eclipsed by higher-profile battles over two other controversial plans that would expand oil drilling offshore and allow it in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Those proposals have been dropped for now, but the land-sale provision remains.

The bill would lift an 11-year-old moratorium on the patenting — or sale — of federal lands to mining companies for a fraction of their mineral worth. While the patent fees would rise from $2.50 or $5 an acre to $1,000, the price would continue to exclude the mineral worth, which can amount to billions of dollars.

In a rewrite of an 1872 mining law that reverses long-standing federal policy that the government keep public lands, the proposal also orders the Interior Department to sell land adjacent to mining claims for "economic development."

Under the provision, legal experts say anyone would be able to stake a new claim on those neighboring parcels, do some survey work and, without having to prove a valuable mineral discovery, purchase the land for as little as $1,000 an acre.

Because the West — especially the Sierra Nevada, California desert and Colorado Rockies — is studded with millions of mining claims dating to the 1800s, former Interior officials say the measure would open the door to the widespread privatization of federal lands used by millions of people for hiking, hunting, and off-road driving.

"When I first saw it, it took my breath away. It's really quite stunning," said Mat Millenbach, who was deputy director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management during President Bush's first term. "This could have the impact of making public lands harder to get to and use. There will be huge issues of incompatible uses."

The desire to rape the assets of this country is nothing new for the GOP Congressional leadership of the last decade.  But will they get away with it this time? 

Let's make sure they don't.

ID on NPR

Late last week, I heard an atrocious report on NPR about a supposed "tiny" movement amongst biologists.  A movement towards support for "intelligent design".  A movement, despite its tinyness, apparently being suppressed by tyrannical tenure committees and by impolite peer reviewers.

I knew the subject matter combined with the shallowness of the content and the slant of the coverage would prompt a response from the estimable Dr. Myers at Pharyngula  Well, it took a few days, but he has at last published his thoughts on the report, and on the religion reporter who produced it. 

Yes, NPR has assigned its religion reporter to cover this supposedly scientific (or so the IDers would have us believe) issue.  I suppose that indicates something about what someone behind the scenes at NPR thinks of "intelligent design."