Since 1977, CLF has led efforts to block offshore drilling in the North Atlantic, particularly in the area of Georges Bank. CLF’s efforts were instrumental in winning drilling moratoria in Georges Bank through 2012.

This morning, President Obama announced new plans for offshore drilling. Here’s what Priscilla Brooks, Ph.D., CLF’s Ocean Conservation Program director, had to say.

“The Gulf of Maine is a national treasure and Georges Bank an economic engine for many of New England’s coastal communities.  While we are pleased that the Administration chose to spare those and other important national marine resources in the Pacific and Alaska from this new wave of offshore prospecting, we are dismayed that the Obama administration feels it politically expedient to continue the prior administration’s pursuit of the destructive and risky business of oil and gas drilling off our shores,” Brooks said. ”Not only does that pursuit threaten unique underwater habitats, fisheries and marine wildlife, but it is the wrong solution to the twin challenges of achieving energy independence and addressing climate change.  We can’t drill our way to a solution for either challenge. If we are to break our country’s addiction to fossil fuels, we need to go boldly down the path of clean energy like greater efficiency and renewable power from wind, waves and sun and not be diverted by these distractions. We reject the notion that continuing to pursue extraction and burning of fossil fuels over a long time horizon is a necessary component of a comprehensive energy and climate solution.”

If you would like to speak with Priscilla or CLF vice president Peter Shelley, please contact CLF communications director Karen Wood at (617) 850-1722, or you may contact them directly at the numbers below:

Priscilla Brooks, CLF, (617) 850-1737
Peter Shelley, CLF, (617) 850-1754

I hope the band-aids used to fix leaks at Vermont Yankee hold.  I wish I had faith in the statement “they’ve stopped a leak.”  Perhaps this is one statement from Entergy’s out-of-state corporate executives that acutally is true and reliable.  Unfortunately, the public’s confidence in Vermont Yankee is badly torn, and not easily mended. 

Even if the broken pipes are repaired, all the problems are not fixed.  Vermont Yankee and regulators allowed leaks to pollute the enviornment for over two months. 

Uncontrolled and unmonitored releases of radioactiviely contaminated water are illegal.  The pollution from these leaks is still in the ground and in our water.  This is unacceptable.

There are still old, underground pipes at Vermont Yankee.  The fact that there were leaks in these old pipes that Energy denied even existed, indicates there are bigger problems.  Lax oversight, sloppy management, and poor performance allowed problems to sit and fester.  These old pipes and this old plant are not safe or reliable.

The next time you enjoy the serene beauty of Cape Cod’s National Seashore or the untrammelled mountain Wilderness areas of the Green and White Mountain National Forests, pause at a particularly pristine spot and utter a quiet thank you to Stewart Udall.  Obviously the former Secretary of the Interior under presidents Kennedy and Johnson didn’t make these places so intrinsically beautiful and ecologically significant.  Instead, he dedicated his life in public service to ensuring that they, along with so many other of America’s natural treasures, remained that way for future generations to enjoy.

The wildlife-rich 40 miles of sandy beaches, marshes, and wildlife cranberry bogs along the Cape Cod National Seashore were forever protected thanks to the tireless leadership of former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall

Udall, who passed away on Saturday, was a great champion of protecting wild places through common ownership and management by our national government.  He was a leading proponent of the Wilderness Act of 1964–one of our nation’s wisest and most successful conservation laws.  And his  legacy lives on in the numerous national parks–like the Cape Cod National Seashore–national monuments, and wildlife refuges across the country that were added to the government’s public land holdings on his watch and through his efforts.

Among the many wonderful tributes written since his passing, the Associated Press obituary includes a passage from one Udall’s 1963 book “A Quiet Crisis”:

“If in our haste to ‘progress,’ the economics of ecology are disregarded by citizens and poliymakers alike, the result will be an ugly America…We cannot afford an America where expeidience tramples upon esthetics and development decisions are made with an eye toward the present only.”

Over the years, CLF has worked hard to expand and defend the legacy of Udall and other courageous government officials who understood that the economics of ecology are central to our nation’s continued prosperity.  In the 1980s, CLF’s efforts led to a significant reduction in the use of dune buggies and other off-road vehicles that were degrading habitat and disturbing the Cape Cod National Seashore’s natural tranquility (echoes of that effort are evident in CLF’s ongoing campaign to protect Vermont state lands from being chewed up by ATVs).  More recently, CLF was a leading member of the coalition that drove passage of the New England Wilderness Act of 2006, which protected more than 80,000 acres of wild forests in the Green and White Mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire. 

A great man has died.  But in his memory the work of protecting  America’s wild places continues on.

The Massachusetts’ Water Resource Authority’s decision to release 15 million gallons of untreated sewage into Boston Harbor’s Quincy Bay during last weekend’s storm felt to many like a giant step backward in the decades-long fight to clean up Boston Harbor. The good news is that there are actions that can be taken today that could have kept MWRA officials from having to make that decision in the future—implementing green stormwater infrastructure to reduce the burden on our sewer pipes, reduce flooding and make communities more resilient to climate change.

Many of our state’s aging sewer systems become overwhelmed with a mix of rainwater and sewage during large storms. That’s why MWRA officials were stuck between a rock and a hard place, forced to choose between quietly releasing 15 million gallons of untreated sewage into Quincy Bay or letting the water flood the station and release that sewage into basements, but sparing the Harbor. The problem runs deeper than this one incident—during last week’s storm, there were equally damaging releases of raw sewage into neighborhoods and into the Mystic and Charles Rivers as well. (See video footage here).

Massachusetts can stop these incidents by investing in green stormwater management techniques to enable communities to better prevent sewer overflows and save money over the long term. Some of these techniques include the use of permeable pavement, green roofs, rain barrels, even gravel—anything that will absorb stormwater and diminish runoff from hard surfaces. These actions can be taken by homeowners in and around their homes, at the city scale by greening streets, parking lots, and alleys, and at the state level, by greening state highways and universities.  Massachusetts residents can urge their towns to adopt bylaws requiring green stormwater and green building techniques to be used in all new construction or infrastructure projects. Cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York are already rolling out these techniques and finding that they are both cost-effective and environmentally sustainable.

Fortunately, we have a chance RIGHT NOW to tell the state of Massachusetts how important it is to us to keep stormwater in check. The U.S. EPA is currently working on a stormwater permit that will govern the stormwater management of communities across Massachusetts for the next five years.

Help Massachusetts prepare for the next storm before it happens. Tell our government that we need a stronger stormwater permit to govern Massachusetts waterways and keep our communities pollution-free.

How can law and policy influence design to make the metropolitan Boston area more livable and eco-friendly?

• How many cars can the Green Line Extension to Medford take off the roads?  Would pay per-mile auto insurance help?  Would better bike maps and paths?  How about green zoning ordinances?

• Can greenspace and access to riverfronts make our communities healthier?

• What if Wal-Mart and Lowe’s new stores don’t just use renewable energy, but also design their parking lots to stop runoff from polluting our rivers and streams?

• Can Mayor Menino make the city’s public housing as environmentally sustainable as the Apple store on Boylston St the Macallen Building Condos in South Boston?

Meet, greet and exchange ideas…or just kick back…with environmentalists and urbanists working on these issues and more!  Co-hosted by Boston Urban Exchange and CLF.

Boston-area Urban Development Meet & Greet
Location: Mantra (downstairs), 52 Temple Place, Boston, MA.
Date: Wednesday, March 24, 6-8 pm
Free admission, cash bar.
More info at http://buxmarch2010.eventbrite.com/

Our co-sponsors:  Boston Urban Exchange (BUX) is a gathering of planners, architects, urban designers, developers, ethnologists, technologists, entrepreneurs, policy-makers, artists and others who care about urban development in the Boston/Cambridge region.

Vermont Yankee will be allowed to continue to leak and pollute.  On March 10, 2010, the Vermont Public Service Board held an initial hearing on CLF’s request to close the plant until the leaks are repaired.  

Unfortunately, Yankee will continue to operate at least until it shuts down for refueling in late April.  I have little doubt that when it does shut down for refueling, the leaks will be found and repaired.  The sad part is that since early January, Vermont Yankee has been allowed to continue to operate with ongoing leaks of radioactive waste from pipes Yankee told regulators never even existed.  The leaks and the lies should stop.  Entergy should not get a free pass to pollute.

If my car is leaking oil, I stop the car and fix the leak.  We should expect the same from an operator of a nuclear power plant.

Entergy — the owner of Vermont Yankee — claimed yesterday it should not be required to give regulators accurate information on the leaks, the impacts of the leaks and its efforts to stop them.  They are busy trying to fix the leaks and the requested reporting apparently would be some sort of distraction.  CLF responded that a company as large as Entergy should be able to “walk and chew gum at the same time.”  If Entergy has time to make daily public announcements about what is going on, why can’t they make those statements under oath?  And if they can’t, what are they hiding?

Join CLF in asking the VT Public Service Board, the NRC and the VT health Department to shut Vermont Yankee down until the leaks are repaired.

Learn more about CLF VT Yankee Advocacy

President Obama took a very positive step when he nominated Cheryl LaFleur to be a Commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Ms. LaFleur played a key role in developing the energy efficiency programs that have become a model for the nation during her time at National Grid USA (formerly the New England Electric System).  She was also instrumental in the critical decision by her company to support the landmark Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and to champion an auction of the pollution “allowances” instead of giving them to polluters for free and re-invest the proceeds in customer friendly efforts like energy efficiency.

As a career utility executive Ms. LaFleur knows the companies that FERC regulates and the people who run them but as a tough, smart and fair-minded independent thinker with solid values about protecting the environment and the people she is well positioned to be the right person to regulate those companies.

And maintaining a little geographic and gender diversity on a body like FERC that has been traditionally Western and male is not such  a bad thing . . .

Hopefully, the partisan gridlock in Washington will not hold up her confirmation by the Senate.

America is waking up to the fact that the unfathomable amounts of animal dung generated by our industrial agricultural system is poisoning our water and our air.  Those who live by waters polluted by the excesses of industrial agriculturae have long understood the grim connection between our cheap-food system and the slow death of rivers, lakes, streams, estuaries, and other coastal waters.  Now the mainstream media is bringing wider attention to this looming environmental disaster.

Exhibit A:  The Washington Post recently ran a prominent environmental expose under the headline “Manure becomes pollutant as volume grows” This excerpt explains the problem well:

Animal manure, a byproduct as old as agriculture, has become an unlikely modern pollution problem,….The country simply has more dung than it can handle: Crowded together at a new breed of megafarms, livestock produce three times as much waste as people, more than can be recycled as fertilizer for nearby fields.   That excess manure gives off air pollutants, and it is the country’s fastest-growing large source of methane, a greenhouse gas. And it washes down with the rain, helping to cause the 230 oxygen-deprived “dead zones”

"Dead zones" are areas within waterbodies where oxygen becomes severely depleted when massive algae colonies--fed by nutrient-rich manure and other agricultural waste--die off. The oxygen-depleting algae decomposition process has disastrous results for fish and other aquatic life. This fishkill occured on the Neuse River in North Carolina an area of intensive factory farming.

Exhibit B: Popular talk radio host and TV personality Don Imus featured an unusually-sobering interview with investigative author David Kirby about his new book “Animal Factory.”  In vivid detail, the author explained the inhumane conditions in which thousands of hogs, cows, and chickens are often confined at these industrial meat and dairy operations that are much more akin to factories than “farms.”  Citing many gasp-inducing horror stories from the book, Kirby underscored the public health and environmental risks created by the oceans of excrement these operations release into the environment when they saturate spray fields with levels of liquid manure that runs off into nearby rivers, streams, and lakes.

Exhibit C: Through the international success of documentary film “Food, Inc.,” which is nominated for a “Best Documentary Feature” Academy Award millions of moviegoers were exposed to moving pictures of the environmental and social repercussions of industrial agriculture. 

Defenders of industrial agriculture will tell you that spraying liquid manure on to pastures and cropland helps to fertilize that land to grow crops to feed the animals.  In reality, spraying massive amounts of liquid manure on the land is a cheap way for these industrial farms to dump their wastes.  The rest of us bear the true costs in the form of water that is unsafe for drinking, swimming, and fishing among other public health risks and other pollution problems.

Liquid manure is spread to saturation levels on a farm on the shores of Lake Champlain's St. Albans Bay, a part of the lake that has long suffered from algae blooms. Though blooms have yet to cause fishkills on the scale pictured above, scientists have documented a growing "dead zone" in the Lake's Northeast Arm--an area where manure from thousands of dairy cows is spread on riverside and lakeside cropland during much of the year.

 This problem is coming to a head in Vermont, where lax regulation and poor management of industrial-scale dairy operations contributes pollution that feeds annual outbreaks of blue-green algae and nuisance weeds in Lake Champlain and is also responsible for bacteria contamination in the Lake and many other rivers and streams.  We would never allow unchecked pollution like this from any other industry, but the powerful agribusiness lobby has largely prevented the type of legislative and law-enforcement responses that this problem demands.  To learn more about CLF’s actions to document and force clean up and prevent a worsening of this dung disaster, read our report ”Failing Our Waters, Failing our Farms,” and the legal petition sent to EPA seeking stronger action under the Clean Water Act.   And check back here for a future post on other ways to get our society out of this dung dilemma.

Yesterday’s Boston Globe editorial in response to Monday’s New York Times article on the Clean Water Act makes the point that Massachusetts is in a unique position because the state’s waterways are regulated under a more flexible state water act enforced by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). However, that’s not a panacea. Massachusetts must still support and enforce the terms of the federal Clean Water Act to keep pollution at bay.

While the DEP may enforce discharge permits in Massachusetts, it’s the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that has primary responsibility for issuing them. Two US Supreme Court decisions in 2001 and 2006 have undermined the authority of the EPA by calling into question what defines a waterway eligible for protection under the Clean Water Act.  The confusion over which of these waterways are legally protected has left 52% of Massachusetts’ waterways at risk for increased pollution, because EPA is no longer asserting its jurisdiction to regulate pollution flowing into them.

Congress needs to act quickly convey that the Clean Water Act applies to all waterways and must be enforced broadly and effectively.

The Clean Water Restoration Act, first introduced in Congress in April 2009, would amend the Clean Water Act to clarify that the Act applies to all US waterways as it did prior to the Supreme Court decisions. Passing the CWRA will send a message to polluters that all waterways merit equal protection under the law, and that the EPA will continue to enforce the terms of the CWA to prevent further environmental damage.

If we want clean waterways, not just for Massachusetts but throughout New England, here’s our chance to make sure that the EPA has full authority to do its job right, by passing the Clean Water Restoration Act.

Support the Clean Water Restoration Act