Another Green Monday, and another Dear Science:
It was a good weekend for recreating in Spokane, enough sunshine to coax us outdoors, yet still a lingering chill that so perfectly accommodates a trip to the mountains. From running, hiking, biking and playing disc golf, to snowshoeing, Nordic skiing and shredding powder – this weekend had the potential for a little bit of everything. But we’re always reminded that more can be done to protect and conserve our recreational and scenic areas. If you haven’t yet, pick up the latest copy of Out There Monthly and be sure to read Steve Faust’s “Last Page” article about creating a Spokane River Greenway - an envisioned river corridor running from the Idaho state west through Riverside State Park where the planning, development and maintenance is managed by one body, perhaps a metropolitan parks district, as opposed to the four or five entities that manage different section of the river now. As Steve says, “it’s time to consider a new approach.”
Oil spill in the Clark Fork River. On Friday, a helicopter flew over a 20-mile stretch of the Lower Clark Fork River between the Noxon Rapids Dam in northwest Montana and the Cabinet Gorge Dam in the Idaho panhandle to get a better look at floating oil sheens caused by a pipe breaking at the Avista-operated Noxon Rapids Dam, 
spilling some 1,250-gallons of transformer oil into the Clark Fork River. But fear not, Avista’s environmental affairs director said to The Spokesman-Review that, “the oil is “not the goopy, heavy stuff.” Something tells us that with the month Avista is having that their PR staff is going to need a raise. Read more of The Spokesman’s story HERE.
Is it possible that the Goracle was using Rovian fear tactics? It’s likely that few PowerPoint presentations have ever garnered the kind of critical analysis then the one Al Gore has crisscrossed the globe with. Gore’s ever-evolving global warming presentation will be a slide shorter now that Roger A. Pielke, Jr., a political scientist, has called out the former Vice President for comparing a spike in natural disasters to global warming – as Gore says, “a manifestation of human-driven climate change.” Upon hearing from Pielke, Gore removed the slide as of mid last week. Andrew Revkin of The New York Time’s Dot Earth brilliantly investigates Pielke’s point, summed up here by Pielke himself, ”Indeed, justifying the upward trend in hydro-meteorological disaster occurrence and impacts essentially through climate change would be misleading. Climate change is probably an actor in this increase but not the major one — even if its impact on the figures will likely become more evident in the future.” Read more from Revkin HERE.
Dear Science: A recap. The above story about Al Gore’s misstep of overstating a connection between global warming and disaster trends in his climate presentation plays as a sequel to conservative columnist George Will’s recent attempt to argue that climate change doesn’t exist by using bogus facts. We launched our Dear Science: category with Will and we continued it with our above post on Gore. And we’re not the only one’s playing watchdog, Andrew Revkin was particularly annoyed by these recent blunders – read more HERE.
In another edition of 10th Anniversary Center For Justice news, journalist extraordinaire Tim Connor sits down for a chat with founder Jim Sheehan in a long “freestyle interview.” Most of the conversation revolves around community, Center’s evolution, and the question for the ages, “why Spokane?” Here’s a keeper about the Spokane River:
Q. Are there two or three things that just delight you, that you didn’t anticipate but that you look back at and say, ‘that was a great insight, I’m so glad we took that on?’
Jim: Yeah, there’s a couple of things. I think what we’ve done on the river has been really positive. I was just talking to Bonne (CFJ attorney Bonne Beavers) this morning and she was saying, ‘well we haven’t really done anything and everything is still out there,’ and I’m saying yeah except that if it wasn’t for us it would have been business as usual, and all the permitting would have already happened and all the licenses would have been given. And all the pollution would have been pouring in. The river isn’t going to get changed with a lawsuit. It’s going to get changed politically when the people demand it. It will be like field burning. That was a great example of a practice that was archaic and just beyond it’s time. Maybe at some point it was a positive thing. But we didn’t need to do that any more. And so ultimately that was solved politically. And that’s what will happen with the river too. We may not see it in our lifetime (laughs) but that’s will will happen. And it will happen because it’s insane to put stuff into the river. But it just takes time. You don’t change a mindset overnight. So, the river work is great.
Full interview HERE.
Climate change gets whacked. Let's conclude our AGM with a funny story. Part of the narrative arch to the Godfather films is the resistance to change; nostalgia for a fallen world of respect and loyalty. So it’s comforting to know that in 2009, the Mafia is alive and well in Sicily, only these days the crime is slightly more advanced than Fredo's gambling: Members of Cosa Nostra were arrested for bribing city officials to build wind farms. Ironically enough, they gave luxury cars to politicians. (They also illegally accessed the municipality's safe to copy the proposal of a rival company.) Looks like Mafia wind power is the new greenwashing. MORE.
