Few environmental agencies are in more distress right now than the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. One sign of the depth of disarray at DEP is this link to its webpage on accountability:

http://www.nj.gov/dep/srp/accountability/

Visitors get the following message:

“The Office of Accountability page is no longer in use. The policy linked from this page is now out-dated. New information related to enforcement will be posted later this year…”

Those familiar with New Jersey DEP know that its accountability actually has been inoperable for some time now. Now, we are just waiting to discover that its Toxic Site Remediation program has been condemned.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is circulating environmental tips to all of its employees (See http://greening.usda.gov/simple_things.htm), including such common step things as turning off unnecessary lights, reducing printing and avoiding travel for in-person meetings when other forms of communication will do. Even those tips are recycled from another agency.

This message is part of a program, called Greening USDA. Its purpose is laudable but – in a department that funds clear-cuts of forests and industrial agricultural practices leading to growing desertification, not to mention promoting pesticide use, genetically-modified crops and mega-factory farms – the focus on the “small stuff” like re-using your lunch bag obscures employee involvement in the department’s big issues.

Truly Greening USDA requires both its leaders and specialists to rethink how this behemoth agency is fulfilling its mission – and then turn out the lights when they are done.

When Bush took his oath of office in January 2001, he inherited a budget surplus of $127 billion from President Clinton. The Outstanding Public Debt as of 10 Feb 2008 at 04:15:41 AM GMT was $9,245,477,585,004.46 … and growing at $1.48 billion per day.

Our national debt exceeds 9 trillion dollars!

Understanding numbers this large is difficult. Here’s an analogy:

If someone living in the year 1719 (50 years before America declared its independence from England) could foresee the Bush debacle of the early 21st century, they could pay off the $9.2 trillion national debt if they and their heirs saved $1,000 per second (without interest) until today.
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Black-Footed Ferret Recovery Leader Retires in Frustration

After 32 years with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, Mike Lockhart is calling it quits – in disgust. For the past eight years, he has headed the Black-Footed Ferret Recovery Team, which is charged with bringing one of the rarest mammals in North America back from the brink of extinction.

In a farewell letter to colleagues, Lockhart details how official indifference, crappy leadership and a profound lack of support on the ground have made recovery of the black-footed ferret an even more uphill struggle than it needed to be.

One notable aspect of Mike’s story is how rapidly the conditions for federal wildlife scientists have deteriorated inside the Fish & Wildlife Service — particularly the growing penetration of political pressures into what had formerly been scientific decisions.  Read about how Mike Lockhart is far from being an isolated case and what PEER is doing to protect public agency scientists and science: http://www.peer.org/campaigns/whistleblower/scientific/index.php

Check out Noah Schactman’s coverage of PEER questioning the Forest Service purchase of tasers over at Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog: http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/01/forest-rangers.html

The Nez Perce Forest has proposed to widen the “Divide” Trail that runs along the western side of Meadow Creek Roadless Area! These trails, #505 and #835 run nearly the length of the roadless area and were designed for foot traffic. Over the years these trails like many other succumbed to increasing motorized use without any analysis of the effects on this sensitive and ecologically important drainage and roadless area.

Please contact all 4 Nez Perce employees listed above to express your outrage. Your message might include:

1) Trails #505 and #835 should never be opened to motorized use.

2) Proposing this damaging project outside of the Travel Planning process currently occuring is conscious public deception.

3) “Trail improvement” projects like this one turn traditional foot and horse traffic trails into motorized highways, harming sensitive wildlife like elk and dramatically increasing erosion and damage to native plant life.

Obviously, the Forest Service is not interested in hearing from the public with such a short comment period. The deadline is this Friday, December 14 … today !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Please Email:

1) Gary Loomis the Trail Foreman at Red River Ranger District at gloomis@fs.fed.us or contact him by phone at 208-842-2139.

2) Terry Nevius the District Ranger at Red River Ranger District at tnevius@fs.fed.us or contact him by phone at 208-842-2140.

3) Jane Cottrell the Nez Perce NF supervisor at jcottrell@fs.fed.us or contact him by phone at 208-983-7000, and

4) Alexandra Botello the Nez Perce NF Natural Resource Planner at abotello@fs.fed.us or contact the front desk by phone at 208-983-1950 and ask to be switched to her.

Thanks for your strong support!

-via Dick Artley

The Forest Service ignored criticisms submitted by NM and AZ state wildlife biologists and did not make the public aware that they significantly weakened a 1996 court-ordered rule to protect the endangered northern goshawks in southwest national forests. Why? … to increase the amount of large trees and mature forest that the USFS could log on publicly owned land.

Clearly, this Forest Service action taken in secret is illegal. Now the Forest Service has taken two illegal actions 1) violating a court order, and 2) violating the NEPA by changing the rule in such a way that no member of the public would know.

The entire tragic story can be read here.

-Dick Artley

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered a decision (Rapanos v. U.S,., 126 S. Ct. 2208) on the extent of federal protection of wetlands that was so confusing it has become the stuff of legends. Not one Supreme Court justice agreed with the opinion of another, leaving a baffling mess for the lower courts, agencies and everyone else to figure out.

One federal judge, Robert Propst, the Senior Judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, found himself unequal to the task of deciphering Rapanos and asked to have a wetlands case before him reassigned because “I am so perplexed by the way the law applicable to this case has developed it would be inappropriate for me to try it again.” Read the rest of his opinion here.

The experience inspired Judge Propst to coin the term “justsurdity” to “describe those areas of the law which help to attain justice, but appear to be absurd when considered in the light of common sense.”

I’m a retired Navy pilot, Engineering Test Pilot and current Captain with a major international air carrier.

It came as a surprise to me to learn that while newer models of commercial aircraft are more quiet, newer models of military aircraft are often MUCH noisier.

The folks who are most unfairly and adversely affected by this are those people who purchased homes outside of the published noise zones and now find themselves effectively within the noise zones because the newest airplanes are much louder than their predecessors.

According to Navy documents, the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet is 18 dB noisier than the F-14 Tomcat that it replaced, in the 600-foot Field Carrier Landing Practice pattern.

Ten decibels is twice as loud. Eighteen decibels is nearly four times as loud. Unfortunately, the Navy is denying the magnitude of the problem.

I wrote this report, which details the dimension of this problem.

If anyone has additional information on this issue, I would appreciate your posting comment on this entry.

John Hammerstrom

The U.S. Forest Service has just purchased 700 taser weapons (“electronic control devices�). According to a September 19, 2007 press release from Taser International the devices have already been shipped.

Inquiring minds want to know why the cash-strapped Forest Service is buying tasers–especially in the middle of fire season. We have submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the agency asking to see–

• The amount that the Forest Service paid for these tasers;
• The decision documents used to justify their purchase; and
• Information describing the training provided to agency personnel issued tasers.

If you know why the Forest Service thinks it needs tasers, please let us know.

Soon, in addition to the howl of the coyote and the hoot of the owl, one may be able to hear the cry of “Don’t tase me bro” echo through the forest night.