Editor’s Note: This was a multi-party contribution involving Kim Komenich (photos) Kwan Booth (text) NewsDesk.org (editing) Spot.Us (financial support). This is part of a series that we’ll be posting over the next week.
While much of the debate on reducing emissions from the Port of Oakland has revolved around trucks, diesel pollution from the trucks is estimated to make up only 4 percent of West Oakland’s overall toxic burden.
A much larger percentage has been attributed to the international shipping companies that rent the ports — yet attempts to impose fees to pay for pollution controls have been sidetracked by global trade regulations and opposition by the state of California and even special interest groups in Oakland and the Bay Area.
The Obama administration’s Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, announced today that he won’t be changing George W. Bush’s rule that global factors, such as climate change, cannot be considered in analyzing the polar bear’s survival.
The rule, instituted in the last months of Bush’s presidency, prohibit the U.S. Fish and Wildlife and National Marine Fisheries services from considering whether practices outside the polar bear’s territory are affecting its chances for survival.
The Friant Dam on California’s San Joaquin River, built in the 1940’s, is slated for removal as part of today’s Congressional designation of wilderness status and federal protection to 2 million acres across nine states.
Included in Congress’ largest expansion of the wilderness system in 15 years is an ambitious river restoration effort on the San Joaquin River. The legislation authorizes the federal government to carry out an $88 million settlement won by environmentalists in 2006 after a court battle that spanned two decades.
In two vague bills introduced both in the House and Senate of the US Congress, a vast reorganization of America’s agriculture system aimed at tracking and regulating foods for public safety could endanger organic farms and gardens.
The bills, S.425 and H.R.875, attempt to modernize food safety and regulate and standardize agriculture by creating an agency called the Food Safety Administration, but in the process they could threaten organic farming.
Pending legislation would require that any group looking to issue a stay against a project to prevent environmental harm must first post a bond to cover any potential monetary losses that the company in question may incur during the trial. The bill is predicted to pass sometime in the next week.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d congratulate Utah republicans for at least being consistent in their ultra-conservative, anti-choice beliefs by spreading it to all species. But alas, that was not the intention of this new law.
They’ve preemptively passed a law to stop animal rights activists from distributing birth control to deer populations in order to bring their population down below the legal level for hunting to be allowed. While this has never happened before, it’s a common fear that activists will someday destroy hunters’ “way of life.”
A law against selling videos of animal cruelty was overturned last year in favor of Robert J. Stevens and his dog-fight video business. Steep increases in the number of available “crush videos” where small animals are crushed to appease a sexual fetish have prompted a request to the Supreme Court to make this unspeakable act illegal again.
The 1999 law signed by President Clinton made it unlawful to sell “crush videos” and nearly all depictions of animal cruelty. Stevens and his lawyers utilized the First Amendment to convince the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia to reverse his 37-month conviction and strike down the law altogether. The United States solicitor general has asked Supreme Court hear the case soon.
On Saturday Canada issued new regulations for its annual seal slaughter, banning the skinning of live seals and forbidding the use of the spiked weapon called a hakapik on seals over one-year-old. Unfortunately, most seals killed in the hunt are under a year old so the law will not alter the cruel deaths many seals face each year.
A new amended law in Switzerland protects the dignity of vegetation.
A law protecting the dignity of plants? Laugh if you will. I’m down on my knees in respect and awe. At last the Western World is realizing the dire importance of taking other species into account.
Recently, the Swiss Parliament asked a panel of philosophers, lawyers, geneticists and theologians to determine the meaning of dignity when it pertains to plants.
Lo and Behold, the team published a treatise on “the moral consideration of plants for their own sake.” The treatise established that vegetation has innate value and that it is morally wrong to partake in activities such as the “decapitation of wildflowers at the roadside without rational reason.”
Over a decade ago, an amendment was added to the Swiss constitution in order to defend the dignity of all creatures — including vegetation — against unwanted repercussions of genetic engineering. The amendment was turned into law and is known as the Gene Technology Act. However the law itself didn’t say anything specific about plants, until recently, when the law was amended to include them.
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