Republicans in Washington, D.C., aren’t giving up trying to ram through the Keystone XL pipeline. On Monday, less than two weeks after President Obama rejected the controversial Canada-to-Texas project, Republicans in the Senate introduced a bill that would let Congress make it a reality. They’re also scrambling to attach Keystone XL to other pieces of legislation floating around the Capitol.

We’re not surprised: Big Oil and its congressional cronies were angered by Obama’s rejection of Keystone XL. We can’t let up on the counterpressure. If it’s built, Keystone XL would, as climatologist Dr. James Hansen says, be “game over” for climate change. It would also be a disaster for Canada’s boreal forests (where the tar sands the pipeline would carry are extracted) and put hundreds of waterways and some 20 imperiled plants and animals, from the whooping crane to the piping plover, at risk of a spill — which government scientists say would be inevitable.

The Center for Biological Diversity has been at the forefront of the fight against Keystone XL, and we’ll keep you up to date on how to stop this dangerous project.

Check out our press release, read our Oregonian op-ed on the issue and learn more about our Keystone XL campaign.

Hi Alan: I’m writing to personally urge you join the Environmental Water Caucus’ detailed comments to the fifth draft of their Delta Plan.  This Plan, mandated by the State Legislature, will affect virtually every citizen and largely shape the water landscape in California for decades to come.  It will guide the path to restoring one of the world’s great estuaries or write its obituary.  It will determine the future abundance of our fisheries and the quality of our waters from the Sierra to the Sea and from the North to the South.  Unfortunately, the Plan is seriously deficient.

Below is a brief descriptive request that we’re circulating to the larger environmental and fishing community.  Attached is our comment letter.  Beyond asking Coast Action Group to join, we’re also requesting that you circulate this request to all organizations you believe might be willing to sign on and then follow up with them.  Let me know if you have any questions.  EWC’s website is http://www.ewccalifornia.org/home/index.php.  Thanks!!!  Cheers!

Please copy Nick Di Croce (Nick De Croce <troutnk@aol.com>) and myself the authorizing individual, organization and logo by September 27.  Thanks!  Cheers!

We are contacting you because the Delta Stewardship Council is developing a plan that will affect almost every major water body and every water user in the state.  Unfortunately, the plan memorializes the status quo and pays homage to the brotherhood of major water districts whose objectives for the state’s waters are far different from yours.

We are the California Environmental Water Caucus. For 25 years we have been fighting the battles of the Bay Delta and its tributary rivers. Our 31 member organizations range from conservation groups such as the Planning & Conservation League and the Sierra Club, to commercial and sportfishing interests such as the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations and the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, to river organizations such as Friends of the River and Sacramento River Preservation Trust, to tribes such as the Winnemen Wintu and Karuk, as well as water quality organizations such as the California Coastkeeper Alliance and Clean Water Action.

The Caucus has created a detailed response letter to the Council in which we identify the Plan’s legal and substantive deficiencies and recommend reasonable and achievable alternatives. Over the coming year, we will either begin the path to restoring one of the great estuaries of the world or write its obituary.  It is critical that the voices and interests of the broad environmental community be represented as the Delta Plan nears completion.

We request that you review the attached copy of our response letter and sign on in support of our expressed concerns and recommendations.  The following summarizes our main findings and recommendations:

• All of the following recommendations require the application of the Public Trust doctrine and the economic analyses that accompany a balancing of the Public Trust with other traditional alternatives.
• The Delta is over appropriated and unless exports are reduced to a scientifically permissible level, the Delta cannot be recovered in any scientifically acceptable sense.
• The over appropriation stems primarily from CVP and SWP contract levels which cannot be met in most years.  The contracts need to be reduced by the State Water Board to a more sustainable yield level.
• Delta outflow must be increased in keeping with the State Water Board’s Delta Flows Criteria, which will favorably impact Delta ecosystems and migrating fish species.
• An aggressive water efficiency program – more aggressive and of longer duration than the current state’s 20/20 program – is a necessary component for reducing reliance on the Delta and must include both urban and agricultural users.
• The water use reductions and savings shown in EWC report alternatives make major structural alternatives such as a canal or tunnel through the Delta and further surface storage unnecessary for water supply reliability.
• The Delta Stewardship Council should accept and support the Delta Protection Commission’s recommendation in their Economic Sustainability Plan to:  “Improve many [core] Delta Levees beyond the PL 84-99 [standard] that addresses earthquake and sea-level rise risks, improve flood fighting and emergency response, and allow for vegetation on the water side of levees to improve habitat.  Improvement of most core Delta levees to this higher standard would cost $1 to $2 billion. While this is a longer-term program, planning should be initiated immediately.”
• Irrigation water should no longer be provided to impaired farmlands in the San Joaquin Valley, in accordance with the state water code requirements for reasonable and beneficial use of water.
• The Delta ecosystems and wildlife cannot be restored without significant reductions of pollutants that are currently being poured into the Delta or without significant improvements in the habitats of the Delta.
• The Kern Water Bank, originally established as a statewide resource but now in private ownership, should be returned to public ownership.
• As recommended in recent federal biological opinions, evaluations of fish passage around major Central Valley dams connected to the Delta should be conducted in order to determine the possible benefits to endangered salmonid species.
• The state needs to ensure that low-income California communities are provided safe and affordable water for basic human needs.

The first five pages of our 46-page letter, as well as the above points, contain the essence of our concerns and alternative recommendations.  If you concur with our directions, we urge you to join us. We need your acknowledgment, your authorizing individual’s name and title, and a copy of your organization’s logo (via email) by September 27.

Bill Jennings, Chairman
Executive Director
California Sportfishing Protection Alliance
3536 Rainier Avenue
Stockton, CA 95204
p: 209-464-5067
c: 209-938-9053
f: 209-464-1028
e: deltakeep@me.com
www.calsport.org

Mendocino County’s wineries have been among the most aggressive in branding themselves, and the rest of the haute alcohol industry, as ecologically sustainable. They’ve been successful enough so far that the ubiquitous vineyards dotting hillsides and carpeting valley floors, and the enormous stocks of fine vino lining store shelves receive little to no scrutiny from many who otherwise consider themselves environmentally conscious.

The Anderson Valley’s vineyards and wine shops are among the most prominent in obtaining and advertising their environmental bona fides. For example, Goldeneye winery is certified “LEED Gold” by the US Green Building Council. Or take Cakebread Cellar’s Anderson Creek vineyard north of Boonville. Like other grape plantations in the valley, Cakebread’s vines have been certified a “Fish Friendly Farm” by the private California Land Stewardship Institute. It’s a “voluntary, self-directed compliance program,” according to that organization’s website, for whatever that’s worth. The entirety of Mendocino County has even been deemed “America’s greenest wine region” by Visit Mendocino County, Inc., a private tourism lobby run by the Mendocino Winegrape & Wine Commission and various local chambers of commerce (with $300,000 generously contributed by Mendocino County). They apparently even trademarked the phrase.

Yet for all the attempts to project an image of stewardship, there is no escaping the fact that so much vineyard acreage, no matter how golden or fish friendly it may seem, is exacting a harsh toll on the region’s rivers and forestlands, causing soil erosion, loss of habitat, and sucking watersheds and aquifers dry. Will Parrish’s recent series, and other coverage in this newspaper, has revealed the scale of the industry, its resource requirements, geographic footprint, and detailed the various agricultural techniques used to grow grapes, all of which are simply bad for the environment.

As if this weren’t enough, there’s an even more systemic environmental problem that won’t be overcome, no matter how many vineyards convert to organic, bio-intensive, or some other regime of “sustainable” practices: carbon emissions. Premium wine, it turns out, is a very carbon intensive commodity to produce, and even more so to market.

Greenhouse gas emissions are produced at various stages of planting and tending grapevine acreage. First of all, there’s the tradeoff of using land that could otherwise grow trees — which are tremendous carbon sinks — to grow vines that store virtually no significant CO2 themselves. This is especially true in Mendocino County where the largest trees on earth grow across much of the land area and need only to be left alone to flourish. Then there are the petroleum inputs associated with farming. This includes tractors and other heavy equipment, transport of materials and crops, transport of field workers, etc. On top of these field sources of carbon emissions, which are shared by pretty much any other crop, from soybeans to garlic, there is another that is unique to wine. Wine grapes are, after all, not a finished agricultural product. After being plucked from the vine, they must undergo one extra biological process before making it to market.

When grapes are crushed and yeast begins fermenting the sugars to produce alcohol, these microorganisms also produce CO2 as a byproduct. Much of this CO2 escapes the wine into the atmosphere. In fact some of this escaping CO2, heavier than the air around it, blankets the tops of fermentation tanks, preventing wine from oxidizing. Winemakers have known about and relied on this process for thousands of years to keep their product fresh. Even this blanket eventually dissipates into the air though, adding to the global atmospheric stock of the single most important and dangerous cause of planetary climate change. Furthermore, being the industrial processors they are, wineries today purchase CO2 by the tank-load for use as a anti-oxidant in later stages of the manufacturing process, when the wine batch produces too little of the gas on its own.

If the irony or weirdness of all of this is lost on you, then allow me to spell it out: the primary byproduct of the favorite drink of so many self-proclaimed environmentalists and conservationists is carbon dioxide, or “yeast farts” — the primary cause of climate change. All the wealth, energy, and prestige endowed in wine, winemaking, and wine connoisseurship is rather bizarre given that it literally involves nothing more sophisticated than humans initiating a feeding frenzy of trillions of Saccharomyces cerevisiae so that these same humans might then imbibe one of the two waste streams to get high.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy an alcoholic beverage every now and then myself, or that I don’t appreciate the wonder of what’s happening biologically in fermentation. Rather, it’s the contrived image of the elegant, cosmopolitan wine aficionado, especially the sort dominant in the greenwashed Napa, Sonoma, and Mendocino scenes, that strikes me as absurd. What is so absolutely elegant and sophisticated about catalyzing huge emission cycles of CO2, and drinking the leftover ethanol, and furthermore being so obsessed with this ritual as to dedicate the majority of arable land and huge flows of water in places like Mendocino to it?

Just how much CO2 does wine fermentation emit? It depends if it’s red or white grapes because each has a different sugar content, or degrees brix, the dissolved sucrose in the grape juice. It depends still again on the specifics of the fermentation process of different wineries. Whatever these details, the basics are as follows: each single molecule of sugar, when broken down by the yeast, turns into two molecules of ethanol, and two molecules of CO2. On way to think about this is that a wine’s carbon emissions are roughly equivalent to its alcohol content (roughly because a tiny amount of ethanol is lost through evaporation).

Various calculations have been done to put exact figures on the global wine industry’s CO2 emissions. Tyler Coleman and Pablo Päster, two economists who have tried to calculate wine’s total carbon footprint, have estimated that 1 liter of grape juice at 22 brix (about average for wine grapes) undergoing fermentation will release 107 grams of CO2. A typical wine bottle is .75 liters, thus a bottle of wine is responsible for about 80 grams of CO2 released into the atmosphere through fermentation.

Multiply that by the number of wine bottles sold and you get some idea of wine’s CO2 emissions from fermentation. According to the Wine Institute, California produced 199.6 million cases of vino last year. That’s equivalent to 2.3 billion bottles, which is equivalent to 211,000 tons of CO2 emissions from fermentation alone.

To put this in perspective, let’s look at an analysis of Fort Bragg’s carbon emissions calculated in 2006 by Cities for Climate Protection. That year the roughly 7,000 residents of Fort Bragg, in driving their cars and trucks, lighting and heating their homes, and powering their workplaces, generated about 152,000 tons of CO2 emissions. CO2 emissions from wine fermentation are obviously not trivial then.

Aware of wine fermentation’s status as a greenhouse gas pollution source, an advisory group to the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors on energy issues recommended several years ago that the county’s general plan should be amended to “encourage wineries to develop methods to capture the CO2 emitted from fermentation and to sequester that which is captured.” The Board and its planning staff chose to pass the buck instead to the Air Quality Management District, and nothing has been done by local government. Wineries, however, have been keen to talk about CO2 emissions when it can be incorporated into their advertising and PR. Parducci Winery, for example, sells all of its wines under a “sustainable” moniker and claims to be the “1st carbon neutral winery in the US.” Much of the company’s website is dedicated entirely to advertising the Parducci brand and operations as eco-friendly, and no aspect of the company’s public image lacks for green gloss. One of the more absurd examples of Parducci’s climate PR is a short video entitled “Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Top Turn-Ons.” Yes, that’s turn-ons, as in sexually arousing fetishes, which for the former Governor are women and wine, we are told. The video depicts Schwarzenegger presenting a Parducci executive, who just so happens to be a woman, with the Governor’s Environmental and Economic Leadership Award. It concludes with triumphal music and a subtitle announcing: “Parducci — sexy green.” (google Schwarzenegger’s Top Turn Ons)

A “Wine Industry Greenhouse Gas Calculator” created by the Australian consulting firm Provisor for the Wine Institute of California and its industry counterparts in New Zealand, South Africa and Australia, has been developed and can be used to comprehensively determine greenhouse gas emissions from specific vineyards and wineries. Interestingly CO2 emissions from fermentation are calculated in the Provisor application, but not reported through this tool because, according to its creators, “fermentation is part of the ‘short-term carbon cycle,’ and is not considered to contribute to global warming.”

In other words, grape plantations sequester carbon from the atmosphere when they leaf out and fruit. That carbon is quickly released again via fermentation and fall pruning, and then recaptured in next year’s growth. This can be taken to mean that grape growing and fermentation is essentially a carbon neutral cycle, or can be made into such through the kinds of fancy organic methods Mendocino’s wineries are keenly promoting. What’s implied here is that if wineries install solar panels, and use sheep to keep the weeds down and fertilize the rows, then all will be well since fermentation balances out. The industry has already convinced itself and its technical consultants, and mostly sold government regulators on this logic.

The problem with trying to claim that vineyards and winemaking are carbon neutral, or can be made carbon neutral, is that the vast majority of California’s grape alcohol plantations were established after 1970. According to data gathered by Sonoma County’s Agricultural Commissioner, plantings of Pinot Noir in Sonoma County exploded from just several hundred acres in 1970 to upwards of 10,000 acres by 2005. In the same period plantings of Cabernet Sauvignon shot up from 1000 acres to more than 12,000. Most other varietals followed similar trajectories in the overall rush to fill former orchards and forestlands with grapes. While not at the level of its southern neighbor to convert forests and pastures into grape plantations, Mendocino County’s rush to stick grapes in every nook and cranny has been remarkably aggressive also. Winegrape plantations now sprawl across about 60,000 acres in Sonoma County. Mendocino County is planted with 16,600 acres, according to its 2010 crop report.

Conversion of forestlands to vineyards, such as that which is being proposed by Premier Pacific Vineyards at its 20,000 acre “Preservation Ranch” site, releases huge amounts of stored greenhouse gases. One of the worst aspects of the recent boom in winegrape planting is that many of the newest vineyards are being established on hillsides and mountaintops, in search of the perfect marginal soils and climatic exposures for trendy varietals, but requiring removal of much existing biomass. Forest ecosystems which can lock away huge and increasing amounts of carbon each year are thereby being destroyed, causing a one-time release of massive CO2 stores. These sinks are then replaced with mono-crop plantings that have no comparable capacity to sequester carbon, merely cycling smaller quantities through the chain of premium vintage which begins with grapes on the vine and ends in the tipsy urine streams of affluent, image conscious consumers. In a paper written for the American Association of Wine Economists in 2007, Coleman and Päster explain:

“While many French vineyards have been established for hundreds of years [and it should be added were planted without the benefit of the industrial timber cutting and earth moving machinery being used today in Mendocino], vineyards in other countries, such as in the Napa Valley of California, are being established on recently forested land. An increase in demand for California wines has meant that some crop fields are also converted for grape cultivation. Due to the increase in global demand for wine, new crop is being planted on land that was previously used otherwise in a natural state. Much of this land is being converted from prime agricultural land or from forest. Such a land-use change can decrease that parcel’s ability to sequester CO2 and the burning or decay of the removed biomass contributes CO2 and CH4 [methane] to the atmosphere.”

When all things are taken into account, CO2 emissions from fermentation actually comprise a minuscule portion of wine’s overall carbon footprint. Coleman and Päster again pointed out that “the CO2 emitted during fermentation represents less than 3% (around 100 g) of the overall CO2 emissions resulting from the production and delivery of one bottle of wine.” Even deforestation and changes in land use account for only a small fraction of the wine industry’s carbon emissions.

The most intensive CO2 emissions source in the wine industry is actually the transportation and marketing of wine. It’s the wine tasters arriving in their BMWs and Volvos to sip Gewürztraminer and Chardonnay in cozy tasting rooms. And it’s the marketing of premium and discount wines in a globalized marketplace that burns the most fuel, emits by far the majority of greenhouse gases, and is on balance the most wasteful part of the whole.

Paradoxically the image of North Coast wine as a special, premium product crafted in an earth-friendly fashion, and having a special value, a value based in part on the provinciality of the winery and vineyard’s supposed environmental credentials, is part of a marketing strategy used by Mendocino’s wineries to cleave a larger market share in distant US and foreign cities. Wine buyers in Tokyo, New York, London, and Shanghai, seeking that self-congratulatory sense of sophisticated élan, often grab a California estate bottle from their local shop’s shelves, in large part because it comes from a supposedly environmentally sustainable winery. This profound contradiction is at the very heart of the North Coast wine industry today. Positioning itself as a green or sustainable enterprise may very well be an actual goal pursued by some honest vineyard owners and vintners, but mostly it is a marketing strategy to create a global demand for California’s finest.

The Wine Institute is unambiguous when presenting export figures and describing the bigger profits to be fetched by marketing California’s “green” wines on a global scale: “In 2010, US wine exports, 90% from California, jumped 25.6% in value to an estimated $1.14 billion in winery revenues,” explains the Institute in a press release earlier this year. According to Gomberg, Fredrikson & Associates, a wine consulting group that works with the Wine Institute, California’s biggest markets include the EU, Hong Kong, Japan, and China.

It takes a lot of fuel to ship $116 million worth of wine to Hong Kong, and half a billion dollars worth to Europe. Carbon emissions from this trade dwarf anything caused by winegrape cultivation or winemaking, and make wine, regardless of whether it’s produced by “fish friendly” or “LEED certified” operations, an enormously polluting luxury.

Global warming will likely have a negative effect to salmon habitats in the northwest United States. The report has suggested that snow will melt sooner, causing floods that will hurt fisheries. Rain will replace snow altogether in some places. As temperatures rise, surface and groundwater will be harder to find. Salmon habitats will shrink as a result of these floods and invasive species could take hold in our rivers more easily.

“These changes pose a significant challenge and risk to adequate water supplies,” stated Mike Connor, head of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

This study is unique because unlike others it covers all the Western water basins that the Bureau of Reclamation serves, operating dams, canals, and power plants in 17 Western states. Through the 21st century the study expects a 5 to 6 degree Fahrenheit temperature rise. The federal scientists, however, wish not to point the finger at anyone for the cause of global warming.

“There’s already a lot of data out there,” Mike Connor shared in an interview. “This reaffirms a lot of what we already know.”

In the California Central Valley there was an average 3 degree F. temperature increase through the course of the 20th century. In Washington State’s Columbia River Basin there was a 2 degree F. temperature increase.

Scientists state that their studies “raise questions … (about) potentially greater flood risk during the 21st century,” including “more winter runoff” and “more extreme runoff events.”

In areas like the California Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a rise in temperature and water flow could hurt the dying Delta Smelt fish, jeopardize key salmon runs, and cause invasive species like the quagga mussel to become more plentiful.

Click here to read more about the issue see the McClatchy Newspapers 25 April article.

Click here for DOI Report

As partners in a statewide effort to secure protections for polluted waterways, we ask for your help in letting U.S. EPA know that Californians support strong federal leadership on reducing storm water pollution and restoring the health of polluted lakes, rivers, streams, estuaries and coastal waters. In November 2010, EPA issued a memo (attached) that provided good guidance on establishing numeric effluent limits in permits, and other ways to improve storm water and TMDL programs.  But now EPA is backing away from the memo in response to pressure from industry, and is seeking comments on whether to withdraw or weaken the memo.  EPA’s call for comments is also an attempt to gauge support for a federal storm water rule, which is currently in progress.  You and your organization can help in three ways before the comment deadline this Monday, May 16:

1) Fill out and submit our action alert. Circulate it far and wide to your colleagues and link to it on your Facebook page:http://www.cacoastkeeper.org/take-action/speak-out/9.

2) Sign-on to the attached group letter to EPA, asking them not to weaken or withdraw the November 2010 Memo. Please send logos, name, title, and organization name to sara@cacoastkeeper.org by Friday, May 16 at 10am.

3) Adapt our action alert or letter and send an individual letter to EPA on your organizational letterhead. The more letters the better!

Feel free to email me with any questions.

Thank you!

Sara

John Vidal in La Paz
guardian.co.uk, April 10, 2011

Bolivia is set to pass the world’s first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country’s rich mineral deposits as “blessings” and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry.

The country, which has been pilloried by the US and Britain in the UN climate talks for demanding steep carbon emission cuts, will establish 11 new rights for nature. They include: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered.

Controversially, it will also enshrine the right of nature “to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities”.

“It makes world history. Earth is the mother of all”, said Vice-President Alvaro García Linera. “It establishes a new relationship between man and nature, the harmony of which must be preserved as a guarantee of its regeneration.”

The law, which is part of a complete restructuring of the Bolivian legal system following a change of constitution in 2009, has been heavily influenced by a resurgent indigenous Andean spiritual world view which places the environment and the earth deity known as the Pachamama at the centre of all life. Humans are considered equal to all other entities.

But the abstract new laws are not expected to stop industry in its tracks. While it is not clear yet what actual protection the new rights will give in court to bugs, insects and ecosystems, the government is expected to establish a ministry of mother earth and to appoint an ombudsman. It is also committed to giving communities new legal powers to monitor and control polluting industries.

Bolivia has long suffered from serious environmental problems from themining of tin, silver, gold and other raw materials. “Existing laws are not strong enough,” said Undarico Pinto, leader of the 3.5m-strong Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia, the biggest social movement, who helped draft the law. “It will make industry more transparent. It will allow people to regulate industry at national, regional and local levels.”

Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca said Bolivia’s traditional indigenous respect for the Pachamama was vital to prevent climate change. “Our grandparents taught us that we belong to a big family of plants and animals. We believe that everything in the planet forms part of a big family. We indigenous people can contribute to solving the energy, climate, food and financial crises with our values,” he said.

Little opposition is expected to the law being passed because President Evo Morales’s ruling party, the Movement Towards Socialism, enjoys a comfortable majority in both houses of parliament.

However, the government must tread a fine line between increased regulation of companies and giving way to the powerful social movements who have pressed for the law. Bolivia earns $500m (£305m) a year from mining companies which provides nearly one third of the country’s foreign currency.

In the indigenous philosophy, the Pachamama is a living being.

The draft of the new law states: “She is sacred, fertile and the source of life that feeds and cares for all living beings in her womb. She is in permanent balance, harmony and communication with the cosmos. She is comprised of all ecosystems and living beings, and their self-organisation.”

Ecuador, which also has powerful indigenous groups, has changed its constitution to give nature “the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution”. However, the abstract rights have not led to new laws or stopped oil companies from destroying some of the most biologically rich areas of the Amazon.

Coping with climate change

Bolivia is struggling to cope with rising temperatures, melting glaciers and more extreme weather events including more frequent floods, droughts, frosts and mudslides.

Research by glaciologist Edson Ramirez of San Andres University in the capital city, La Paz, suggests temperatures have been rising steadily for 60 years and started to accelerate in 1979. They are now on course to rise a further 3.5-4C over the next 100 years. This would turn much of Bolivia into a desert.

Most glaciers below 5,000m are expected to disappear completely within 20 years, leaving Bolivia with a much smaller ice cap. Scientists say this will lead to a crisis in farming and water shortages in cities such as La Paz and El Alto.

Evo Morales, Latin America’s first indigenous president, has become an outspoken critic in the UN of industrialised countries which are not prepared to hold temperatures to a 1C rise.

Saturday’s Globe and Mail
Feb. 18, 2011

Our bucktoothed icon is hard-working and monogamous, steadfast and stable in the Canuck way. But beloved? Not when one drops a tree on your cottage or floods your land with its dam. These days, however, the beaver has a new brand: eco-saviour. An increasingly vocal group of scientists and conservationists believes the dam-building rodent is an overlooked tool to mitigate climate change – a natural remedy for our sick rivers and ravaged wildlife. Fly away with that, bald eagle.

Engineers with tails

It’s the beaver’s avid dam-building that makes it a star with conservationists. In 2002, when University of Alberta biologist Glynnis Hood was in the middle of getting her PhD, the Prairies experienced the worst drought on record. She watched the wetland dry up “right before her eyes.” But where beaver dams existed, the pond water remained. Poring through 54 years of historic aerial photos, records of beaver populations and climate data, she discovered that the ponds with active beaver lodges had nine times more water during droughts than ponds without dams. In dry summers, the beavers kept water from trickling out and built channels to guide the water in; they had more impact than any rainfall or drought. Dr. Hood says this wasn’t a surprise to some of the older farmers, who often kept well-placed beavers on their land. Yet she would go to conferences where engineers would give presentations on river flow (with beaver dams in their photos) and never mention the animal. In wetland and river restoration, which in the U.S. has cost billions of dollars, the very creature responsible for shaping the landscape was largely absent from the discussion.

Natural pollution-busters

As an environmental engineer, the beaver is a full-service deal: raising the water table, increasing biodiversity, even cleaning up pollutants. In Washington State, where hot summers dry up forests and have caused severe water shortages, a pilot project found that beaver dams stored five to 10 times more groundwater reserves than rivers without dams, and slowed the spring runoff. And rather than casting the shadow of a concrete dam, they improve the view. Recent studies show that when beaver dams were added to wetland-restoration efforts, the population of frogs, toads and songbirds rebounded. Native foliage returned. The dams created waterholes for moose and other animals in times of low rainfall. They slowed down water flow in rivers and shored up banks, while preventing sediment and pollutants from being carried downstream. One study of a Russian river examined the impact of pollutants from a cheese factory: By the time, the water had passed through the dams, it was nearly as clean as before the factory. The 25 beaver ponds along the way appeared to be capturing the pollutants and breaking them down with bacteria.

Friends of the fish

There is growing evidence that the presence of beavers improves endangered fish stocks. Beaver ponds are deeper, which means that they thaw earlier and freeze later, giving juvenile salmon more time to grow. The bark and branches that beavers drag into the water add nutrients and draw insects, which the young salmon eat. Deforestation and agriculture loosen the topsoil around many rivers and streams, which can suffocate life in a pond, but beaver dams prevent this from happening. In the past, beaver dams have been removed to create a single flowing river, or out of fears that the dams stopped the passage of adult salmon upstream. But the healthiest rivers are constantly changing and shifting – the very impact of beaver dams, which come and go. As Duncan Halley, a beaver researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, points out, beavers populate six of the 10 largest salmon rivers in the country, without issue. Even in cases where beaver dams have been found to impede adult salmon, Dr. Halley says, no research has suggested that it was enough to affect river-wide populations.

Will work for free

The beaver, in certain places, is better than a bulldozer, and far less expensive. “It’s about $10,000 a hectare to replace wetlands, and you’ve got something to do it for free,” Dr. Hood says. “The problem is that you also have something you can’t control as easily as a backhoe.” But this hasn’t stopped several countries from trying to bring back the beaver. In Denmark, the European beaver was introduced in an area of planted pine forest where they got busy building dams and restoring the streams and rivers. (And making “beaver land” a popular tourist attraction.) In Scotland, the return of the beavers after 400 years has been more controversial, with salmon anglers, who fret over their stocks, pitted against conservationists, who believe in the rodents’ environmental benefits. (In August, the first baby beavers were born.) In the United States, Wyoming offered beavers to landowners as a restoration strategy, and a similar plan is in the works in Oregon. “We humans like to engineer solutions to our environmental problems,” says Steve Zack, a biologist with Wildlife Conservation Society in Oregon. “But meanwhile we have these beavers who do a spectacular job.”

Our sacred cow

Canada may have been built largely on the (skinned) backs of beavers, hunted nearly to extinction for their fur, but messing with them today will inevitably lead to trouble. Oshawa city council discovered this the hard way last year when it tried to dispatch a beaver colony from a man-made pond built to stop stormwater flooding. Protests ensued (“Give a dam! Save our beavers!”). Taking the contrarian position, a city council candidate in the fall election posted signs that read: “Vote Dave Spackman. Kill the Beavers”; he came a distant second last, and the council is now considering a $60,000 solution so that the beavers can stay. A similar debate rages in Squamish, B.C. Prince Edward Island was forced last year to cull 150 highway-flooding beavers – with regrets. And in Saskatchewan, despite repeated calls for a beaver bounty (at $20 a head), the province chose instead to compensate farmers for property damage. “They’re not your average beavers,” local reeve Wes Black laments. In his municipality, two men work every day, including weekends, all summer long to break up the problem dams – only to find many rebuilt the next morning.

Man v. nature

The challenge, the researcher says, is to find a balance with the beaver – to put them where they happily improve the environment, in healthy numbers, without clashing against urban sprawl. “It’s as though two control freaks are competing for the same environment, and there’s been this ongoing battle ever since,” says Dr. Hood, who has just completed the manuscript for a new book, The Beaver Manifesto: In Defence of Tenacity. She spent 19 years on the front lines as a warden for Parks Canada while humans and beavers tussled over land – when the phone rang, she says, you could usually count on a beaver being involved somehow. “We like nature as long as it’s well behaved,” Dr. Hood says, “and once it starts getting the crayons and running loose, then we get worked up about it.” Except that now may be time for one control freak to step aside – and let a few well-placed beavers run loose with the crayons.

Erin Anderssen is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.

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Extreme rainstorms and snowfalls have grown substantially stronger, two studies suggest, with scientists for the first time finding the telltale fingerprints of man-made global warming on downpours that often cause deadly flooding.

Two studies in Wednesday’s issue of the journal Nature link heavy rains to increases in greenhouse gases more than ever before. One group of researchers looked at the strongest rain and snow events of each year from 1951 to 1999 in the Northern Hemisphere and found that the more recent storms were 7 percent wetter. That may not sound like much, but it adds up to be a substantial increase, said the report from a team of researchers from Canada and Scotland.

The study didn’t single out specific storms but examined worst-of-each-year events all over the Northern Hemisphere. While the study ended in 1999, the close of the decade when scientists say climate change kicked into a higher gear, the events examined were similar to more recent disasters: deluges that triggered last year’s deadly floods in Pakistan and in Nashville, Tenn., and this winter’s paralyzing blizzards in parts of the United States.

The change in severity was most apparent in North America, but that could be because that’s where the most rain gauges are, scientists said.

Both studies should weaken the argument that climate change is a “victimless crime,” said Myles Allen of the University of Oxford. He co-authored the second study, which connected flooding and climate change in the United Kingdom. “Extreme weather is what actually hurts people.”

Jonathan Overpeck, a University of Arizona climate scientist, who didn’t take part in either study, praised them as sensible and “particularly relevant given the array of extreme weather that we’ve seen this winter and stretching back over the last few years.” Not all the extreme rain and snow events the scientists studied cause flooding. But since 1950, flooding has killed more than 2.3 million people, according to the World Health Organization’s disaster database.

The British study focused on flooding in England and Wales in the fall of 2000. The disaster cost more than $1.7 billion in insured damages and was the wettest autumn for the region in more than 230 years of record-keeping.

Researchers found that global warming more than doubled the likelihood of that flood occurring. Similar studies are now under way to examine whether last year’s deadly Russian heat wave and Pakistan floods — which were part of the same weather event — can be scientifically attributed to global warming.

For years scientists, relying on basic physics and climate knowledge, have said global warming would likely cause extremes in temperatures and rainfall. But this is the first time researchers have been able to point to a demonstrable cause-and-effect by using the rigorous and scientifically accepted method of looking for the “fingerprints” of human-caused climate change.

The scientists took all the information that shows an increase in extreme rain and snow events from the 1950s through the 1990s and ran dozens of computer models numerous times. They put in the effects of greenhouse gases — which come from the burning of fossil fuels — and then ran numerous models without those factors. Only when the greenhouse gases are factored in do the models show a similar increase to what actually happened. All other natural effects alone don’t produce the jump in extreme rainfall. Essentially, the computer runs show climate change is the only way to explain what’s happening.

In fact, the computer models underestimated the increase in extreme rain and snow. That is puzzling and could be even more troubling for our future, said Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University, who wasn’t part of the study.

Similar fingerprinting studies have found human-caused greenhouse gas emissions triggered changes in more than a dozen other ecological ways: temperatures on land, the ocean’s surface, heat content in the depths of the oceans, temperature extremes, sea level pressure, humidity at ground level and higher in the air, general rainfall amounts, the extent of Arctic sea ice, snowpack levels and timing of runoff in the western United States, Atlantic Ocean salinity, wildfire damage, and the height of the lower atmosphere. All those signs say global warming is here, said Xuebin Zhang, a research scientist for the Canadian government and co-author of the Northern Hemisphere study. “It is affecting us in multiple directions.”

Most of the 10 outside climate experts who reviewed the papers for The Associated Press called the research sound and strong. However, climate scientist Jerry North of Texas A&M University, while praising the work, said he worried that the studies were making too firm a connection based on weather data that could be poor in some locations. But Francis Zwiers of the University of Victoria, a lead author of the study with Zhang, said the data was from National Weather Service gauges and is reliable.

“Put the two papers together and we start to see an emerging pattern,” said Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria, who wasn’t part of either study. “We should continue to expect increased flooding associated with increased extreme precipitation because of increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas. And we have no one to blame but ourselves.”

Worldwide overpumping of groundwater, particularly in northern India, Iran, Mexico, northeastern China and the American West, more than doubled from 1960 to 2000 and is responsible for about 25 percent of the rise in sea level, according to estimates in a new study by a team of Dutch researchers published in Geophysical Review Letters.

The general idea that groundwater used for irrigation is running off into ocean-bound rivers or evaporating into the clouds, only to end up raining into the ocean, has been around for two decades or so; it was a focus of a 2005 paper in The Journal of Hydrogeology. But Peter H. Gleick, a leading expert on water issues, said the new paper offers a fresh way of quantifying the phenomenon.

Mr. Gleick, president of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute, said that experts on groundwater issues “have known for a long time that that water ultimately ends up in the oceans and contributes to sea level rise. What we haven’t known is the magnitude and severity of the problem.”

This study, by a team of researchers based at the University of Utrecht and the International Groundwater Resources Assessment Center in Utrecht in the Netherlands, suggests that, in Dr. Gleick’s words, “both the magnitude and the severity of the phenomenon are severe”: it estimates that groundwater depletion worldwide went from 99.7 million acre-feet (29.5 cubic miles) in 1960 to 229.4 million acre-feet (55 cubic miles) in 2000.

That volume is almost as much as the combined annual flows of the Ohio and Susquehanna Rivers, as measured by the United States Geological Survey. Put another way, it is 15 times the amount of water used annually by all the users of the Colorado River in the United States, from the cities of Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas to the farms of the California and Arizona deserts, which produce most of this country’s winter fruit and vegetables.

Barton H. Thompson Jr., a Stanford law professor who is co-director of the university’s Woods Institute for the Environment, said the Dutch study could help broaden the lens through which groundwater problems are examined.

“There has been growing recognition that it is not simply a local issue but at least a regional issue,” he said. “If you are living in an area where maybe you’re not depleting your groundwater but other people nearby are depleting theirs, eventually they are going to have to find other water. They may have to find it nearby, and that may be your water.”

What the new study suggests, he added, “is that groundwater depletion is a global problem. Now we have to worry that it’s also contributing to sea level rise. It changes the scale of the problem in a way that perhaps we haven’t thought about before.”

Both Dr. Gleick and Dr. Thompson emphasized the extent to which large agricultural regions in arid or semi-arid areas, from California’s San Joaquin Valley to the Ogallala Aquifer under the Great Plains the Yuncheng Basin in northern China, have become dependent on groundwater to grow the crops that sustain both livestock and people.

This dependence may make it hard to change current practices that lead to depletion, Dr. Gleick suggests.

“I do think there’s growing awareness of the seriousness of the groundwater over-pumping problem, but I think it’s going to take more than this wake-up call to change policy, because we’re hugely dependent on this unsustainable source of water,” he said, adding, “Forty percent of our groundwater withdrawals are coming from unsustainable sources of water.”

“By definition, unsustainable means it can’t continue forever. This water provides a lot of our food. And we’re basically drawing down the bank account.”

Groundwater’s contribution to sea-level rise will probably diminish, he added, because as groundwater basins are depleted, there won’t be as much water left to send through rain clouds to the oceans.

I am writing on behalf of Salmonid Restoration Federation to inform you that the 29th Annual Salmonid Restoration Conference will be held March 23-26, 2011 in San Luis Obispo, CA.

This is the premier salmon and steelhead restoration conference on th eWest Coast and features exciting all-day habitat restoration tours, educational workshops, a Plenary session with prominent fisheries scientists, legislators, and conservation advocates as well as nine concurrent sessions focusing on biological, physical, and environmental issues that affect salmon recovery.

Attached (and pasted below) is a 70-word blurb that we welcome you to post in your newsletters or online event calendars. I have also pasted in a longer full page article that includes more detailed information about the Conference.

SRF welcomes your participation at the conference and invites you to share this information with your co-workers, constituents and clients, or in any online calendar or newsletter.

Please let us know if you would like to receive any newsletters, which include the conference agenda and registration packet, or posters.

You can see the full agenda of the conference at http://www.calsalmon.org/pdf/SRF_ConfAgenda_120210_web.pdf

or view a description of the workshops and field tours at:
http://www.calsalmon.org/index.php/registration/wednesday-workshops-a-tours.html
and
http://www.calsalmon.org/index.php/registration/thursday-workshops-and-tours.html

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29th Annual Salmonid Restoration Conference March 23-26, 2011 in San Luis Obispo, CA

Salmonid Restoration Federation proudly presents the 29th Annual Salmonid Restoration Conference,March 23-26, 2011 in lovely San Luis Obispo, CA. This year’s  conference includes two full days of workshops and field tours on fisheries restoration topics, a plenary session featuring prominent keynote speakers and concurrent sessions focusing on environmental, biological, and policy issues that affect salmonid recovery. For more detailed information, please see www.calsalmon.org or contact SRF at 707 923-7501.

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29th Annual Salmonid Restoration Conference March 23-26, 2011 in San Luis Obispo, CA

Salmonid Restoration Federation will host the 29th Annual Salmonid Restoration Conference March 23-26, 2011 in San Luis Obispo, California. The theme of the conference this year is “Restoring Salmonids – Holding the Line on Species Decline.”

The Plenary Session will feature Michael Pollock from the Northwest Fisheries Science Center of NOAA Fisheries, Thomas Williams from the Southwest Fisheries Science Center of NOAA Fisheries, Congresswoman Lois Capps, and Paul Jenkin from Surfrider Foundation and the Matilija Coalition.

This year the conference will feature workshops on topics including Fish Passage Design & Implementation, Stormwater Pollution Runoff & Water Quality, Invasive Species Management for Salmonids, and Sustainable Water Conservation. Field Tours will include tours of the Morro Bay Watershed from Headwaters to Mouth; a San Luis Obispo and Arroyo Grande Creek Tour; a Sustainable Vineyards and Agricultural Practices Tour; an Instream Structures Tour, and a tour that focuses on reducing sediment delivery and  & road-related erosion control.

Concurrent sessions include:

• On-the-Ground Salmonid Restoration: Obstacles and Opportunities
• Barrier Identification, Design Criteria, Implementation, and Project Monitoring to Recover Steelhead
• Coho Salmon Recovery Efforts
• Enhancing Instream Flows: Springs, Seeps, and Groundwater Recharge for Salmonids
• Salmonid Strongholds: The Key to our Future
• Climate Change and Salmonids
• Population Status and Trend Monitoring
• The Future for California Chinook Salmon – Fisheries, Restoration, Recovery
• The Role of Lagoons and Estuaries for Steelhead and Salmon

Other conference events will include a film social and dinner on Thursday evening which will show the STRAW documentaryhttp://www.asimplequestion.org/,  short film clips by Thomas Dunklin http://www.thomasbdunklin.com/ and Damolition footage by Matt Stoecker. SRF will host a poster session and reception on Friday night, and a cabaret and banquet with a Wild Copper River salmon dinner and fantastic Latin dance band Sambada http://www.sambada.com/

For more information about the conference, please visit www.calsalmon.org.