IT IS NOT ABOUT FISH: It is Lying to Promote an Agenda

http://www.cgfi.org/materials/articles/2002/nov_20_02.htm ^

[nwconservative]

This article illustrates how just how far government bureaucrats will go to promote the environmental "anti people" agenda.

[nwconservative]

Celebrating the 30th Birthday of the Clean Water Act

Dennis T. Avery CHURCHVILLE, VA - We’ve just passed the 30th birthday of the Clean Water Act.

When the CWA was signed into law on Oct. 18, 1972, most of us still vividly remembered the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland catching fire (due to an oil spill) in 1969. The Potomac River flowing past the Capitol Building was too polluted for fishing, let alone swimming. For two hundred years, America used its rivers as sewers to carry away human and industrial wastes-while the number of humans and industries expanded and multiplied exponentially. In 1972, America called a halt.

Since then, we’ve spent billions of dollars to improve U.S. sewage treatment and separate our sanitary sewers from our storm sewers. Industries no longer routinely dump dangerous industrial pollutants into their drainpipes, and most have radically reduced their overall wastes through cleaner processes, recovery, and recycling. More of our livestock and poultry are housed in confinement so their wastes can be used as organic fertilizer, instead of being washed from the barnyards into the nearest stream with every storm.

Fishing and swimming are probably safer and more accessible to Americans now than they’ve been since independence in 1776.

Should we look at the 30th birthday of the Clean Water Act with pride in a job well done? Or should we launch another costly set of water regulations? Under the Clinton Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a new water regulation that would have dwarfed Hillary Clinton’s proposed government takeover of health care. The EPA proposal (called Total Maximum Daily Loads, or TMDLs) would have used impaired water quality as the excuse to manage American society—deciding how many houses could be built in which watershed, what businesses could be located where, and what crops and livestock could be grown on which farms. EPA might even have regulated highway driving because nitrous oxide from auto exhausts can wash into the streams.

In a rare Washington revolt against eco-regulation, Congress ordered the EPA to step back from its TMDL proposal. The agency and its activist supporters had overreached. The EPA’s position was made more awkward by the fact that the states had never collected the water quality data mandated in the Clean Water and by a report from Congress’ own Government Accounting Office that said the National Water Quality Inventory was essentially useless.

Critics charge that the EPA has never wanted good water quality data because the data gap left the bureaucrats free to keep claiming the need for still-more-stringent regulation. Where is water quality headed today, in the aftermath of the congressional rollback of TMDL's? The Greens continue to claim that a huge percentage of our streams and lakes are “impaired.” Never mind that there is virtually no monitoring to support the listings. Mostly, the activists are hoping for another marine scare like the Pfiesteria outbreak that killed thousands of small fish in Maryland rivers of the Eastern Shore in 1997. But Pfiesteria broke out only once, and scientists have been unable to show that it produces a deadly toxin—let alone that Pfiesteria is linked to pollution or nutrients in the water as eco-activists have charged.

A recent letter to EPA Administrator Christy Todd Whitman from 38 Democratic Congressmen demands that the TMDL regulation be put into effect, but 38 Congresspersons from one party don’t constitute much force in Washington. At the EPA, Mrs. Whitman wants to amend the TMDL proposal to allow basin-wide cooperation on consensus water quality goals, rather than relying on finger pointing and expensive lawsuits based on inadequate water monitoring. Whitman is also pushing the agency to fill the water quality information gap by setting standardized protocols for monitoring and modeling. States could then determine which water bodies are actually impaired, and why.

It’s too late ever to find out what our water quality was when Columbus landed in 1492, or how bad our water quality was in 1973, when we began the cleanup. But it’s past time to start comprehensive water quality monitoring-to pinpoint the real problems that remain in a much-improved water quality picture. Besides, it’s the law. The Clean Water Act requires it. After 30 years, it’s time for us to comply.

NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.

[Libertarianize the GOP]

http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/bump-list

[bigfootbob]

BUMP

[madfly]

Arizona's in a drought. We were lucky to get a good amount of snow recently. They just released a massive amount of that "clean water" north of Phoenix (Horseshoe Dam) to protect some birds, Flycatchers, that were passing through.

http://www.tucsonaudubon.org/conservation/spriver.htm

The San Pedro River and its watershed are located in southeastern Arizona and northern Sonora. It is a very diverse ecosystems and one of North America's most important wildlife havens. More than four hundred bird species use the watershed, either as residents or migrants. Congress recognized the river's value by establishing the nation's first Riparian National Conservation Area along a 45-mile stretch of the upper San Pedro. The American Bird Conservancy has chosen the San Pedro River as a "globally important bird area." The Nature Conservancy has rated this ecosystem as one of the eight "last great places" in the Northern Hemisphere. However, the river's viability is threatened by groundwater pumping at nearby Fort Huachuca and the city of Sierra Vista. For more information, read the articles below. Other sources of information: Center for Biological Diversity.Lori Faeth, president of the Arizona Nature Conservancy, is gov. Napolitano's environmental advisor.

[Carry_Okie]

LOL.

I would post the first three sections of Part V, Chapter 2, if it would do any good.

[Ebony-Patriot]

Seriously, the Ft Huachuca water usage is relativly low and what we use here on post is cleaned. This enviromentalist group has the closure of the post at the front of its agenda, which would drastically affect the economic situation in southern AZ.

[tubebender]

Thanks for the Ping....

[forester]

Critics charge that the EPA has never wanted good water quality data because the data gap left the bureaucrats free to keep claiming the need for still-more-stringent regulation.

Typical mission creep, expanding their jurisdiction at all cost....where is the data on background sediment levels in streams? Did ya hear that Cali's latest water guru agency NCWAP (North Coast Watershed Assessment Program) has been disbanded because their data showed that water quality is improving, not getting worse!!! By golly, that just can't be (howled the green bureau-nazis)...we need to hammer the eeeevilll capitalists with more regulation! Don't bother us with the truth...we are trying to save the planet !!! [/rant]

[nwconservative]

Here is some more AMMO, to spur us into action!

Do Government Wildlife Biologists Have An Anti-People Agenda?

http://www.cgfi.org/materials/articles/2002/feb_27_02.htm

Dennis T. Avery

CHURCHVILLE, VA Do government wildlife biologists know a fish from a file memo? Their official work doesn’t seem to show it.

The National Academy of Sciences just concluded that government biologists had no scientific basis for cutting off virtually all the irrigation water to farmers in the Klamath Basin of Oregon and Washington last year. The water shutdown coincided with the worst drought in the region’s recorded history, leaving most of the farmers with no crops—and no income—for a year.

Supposedly, the water cut-off was to protect the endangered sucker fish and the threatened Coho salmon in Upper Klamath Lake and the Klamath River. However, the National Academy points out that the government “has not shown a clear connection between water level in Upper Klamath Lake and conditions that are adverse to the welfare of suckers.”

In fact, the National Academy noted that the best year ever recorded for sucker survival was a low-water year. Nor have incidents of fish die-offs paralleled years of low water level. The NAS panel even warned that releasing extra water during a drought year might endanger the salmon because the reservoir water had warmed so much that it might “equal or exceed the lethal temperature for Coho salmon during hot summer months.”

A Fish and Wildlife Service official quickly noted that the Academy panel “didn’t say the science proves we were wrong; they just said there wasn’t enough science to prove us right.”

Why does that statement fill me with foreboding? Does this mean government biologists will now go out and try to justify themselves by “finding” new evidence? Good science generally comes from trying to find the larger truth among the oft-conflicting cycles and anomalies in the natural world. Good science rarely comes from bureaucratic self-justification.

Salmon catches have soared in the past two years throughout the Pacific Northwest, belatedly reminding the world that there is a natural 25-year cycle in the huge North Pacific salmon fishery—between the Pacific Northwest and the Gulf of Alaska. Oregon’s 2001 salmon catch was 272,000 tons, up from only 62,000 in 1999. In fact, I predicted the return of big salmon catches two years ago based on that 25-year cycle.

Did the biologists of the National Marine Fisheries Service remind us of this natural fish population cycle when the Sierra Club began predicting the extinction of Pacific Northwest salmon, supposedly due to logging, irrigated farming, dams, and the other things the Sierra Club hates?
They did not.

Are the Fisheries Service experts currently pointing out the recovery of California salmon as part of the same phenomenon? The San Francisco Chronicle noted last December 19, “A 14-fold increase in the numbers of endangered salmon the past five years has set off a ring of euphoria across California among the few who have learned of it.” The Chronicle credits the upturn in salmon numbers to California’s expensive fish-management efforts, but Oregon’s salmon manager says, “The [Pacific Ocean] is alive with bait fish” (thanks to the return of the currents).

So far, biologists haven’t helped us to see environmental reality very clearly:In the 1960s, biologist Garrett Hardin invented “lifeboat ethics,” which demanded we let millions of poor Third World people starve, instead of launching the Green Revolution to triple the crop yields on their existing farmland.

Dr. E. O. Wilson, a Harvard biologist who has won two Pulitzer Prizes for his writing skills, predicts the world will lose 50 percent of its wild species in the next 50 years. The United National Environmental Program, in sharp contrast, suggests the world will lose less than 1 percent of its wild species over the next five decades. Is Dr. Wilson an alarmist?

Paul Ehrlich, the biologist who wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, urges us to reduce the world’s human population from the current 6 billion to less than 2 billion “soon,” and says the policy implications of his recommendation are obvious.

Note also the recent “lynx hoax” in Washington State, in which a small group of federal and state wildlife biologists used hair from “tame” lynx to “document” the presence of rare Canada lynx in two U.S. national forests. Only a whistle-blower prevented further limits on public activity in those publicly owned forests.

Many wildlife biologists apparently prefer the world as it was 10,000 years ago, before so many people began to live so well. Many “wildlife experts” seem to have formed a dangerous relationship with eco-activists, who dislike people, and scare-hungry journalists to indict legitimate and sustainable human activities.

By promoting to the public unwarranted fears of forest loss, salmon or owl extinction and suckerfish reduction, the government wildlife biologist becomes even more dangerous. He or she can gain additional public approval (and budget) by shutting down small farmers, keeping small fishing boats in port, and putting healthy forests off-limits to sustainable tree harvest.

Today the Pacific Northwest, tomorrow the world?
This article was published by Knight Ridder Tribune
Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.

NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.

[SierraWasp]

"the green bureau-nazis"

NOW! I REALLY like that!!!

[Grampa Dave]

The card carrying Green Bureau Nazis worked hand in hand with their bed buddies, the Watermelon Green Jihadists.

[SierraWasp]

"their bed buddies"

Good shot!!! How 'bout "embedded buddies?"

[Grampa Dave]

The card carrying Green Bureau Nazis worked hand in hand with their embedden Butt buddies, the Watermelon Green Jihadists!

[SierraWasp]

"instead of being washed from the barnyards into the nearest stream with every storm."

HOG WASH!!!

[forester]

Do Government Wildlife Biologists Have An Anti-People Agenda?

IMHO, combining this attitude with the power of regulation has resulted in severe damage to our country's manufacturing base. I have started telling people that we are in a regulatory induced recession if not out right depression in the rural areas. Thanks for the link, I have never heard of this outfit before (Hudson Institute)....they seam to have a good grasp of the problem.

[forester]

QUESTION: What do you call Government Wildlife Biologists that have an anti-people agenda?

ANSWER: Green bureau-nazis.

Glad to help put a smile on yer mug Waspman!!!