Glynn Wilson

A view of Village Creek in Roebuck Springs, Alabama, Sept. 13, 2010

by Glynn Wilson

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has still not concluded its negotiations with the city of Birmingham for a killing 11,760 watercress darters, an endangered species protected by the Endangered Species Act, and also for some 8,900 additional darters injured when a city park manager ordered a beaver dam removed on Village Creek in Roebuck Springs two years ago.

The federal agency, which could not be reached for comment today, is seeking a civil penalty totaling $2,975,000, but apparently some of the money will go toward planting trees and enhancing the habitat running through Roebuck Golf Course, which is showing progress, according to a recent visit to the area.

Part of the agreement calls for no mowing or use of pesticides or herbicides along the creek bank, and as you can see from the video above, the banks are now grown up with sea myrtle bushes, which will provide ground cover for nesting birds such as the native yellow-crowned night herons, and food for all manner of butterflies, including the migrating monarchs which travel through Birmingham on their way to Mexico every year in October.

The Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources also has a claim against the city for $1,062,786.21 for the death of watercress darters, plus the deaths of more than two million individuals of a protected species of snail, and is contemplating a lawsuit against the city to collect that claim. No word on where that stands either, and no one with the city will comment due to the ongoing litigation.

The agency’s action stems from an incident on September 19, 2008, when a City maintenance crew removed a beaver dam from the Roebuck Springs pool in Hawkins Park. The crew also breached an underlying earthen dam that formed the spring pool where more than 20,000 of the small endangered fish lived. Breaching the dam quickly drained the spring pool and stranded and killed thousands of watercress darters among a mass of drying aquatic plants.

“The massive fish kill resulted in the loss of more than half of the largest known population of this species,” Cynthia K. Dohner, the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Southeast regional director, said at the time.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Untold Story of Human Health Effects From BP’s Oil Disaster

Editor’s Note: The Washington Post was given an opportunity for first, exclusive rights to publish this story Tuesday, but took a pass “because of the complicated nature of this story and our concerns that it’s too early to judge the real health effects.” Due to the time sensitive nature of this story, and because of tonight’s community health meeting in Orange Beach, we cannot hold it any longer for traditional news outlets. A special thanks to Spot.us for partial funding to cover travel expenses for reporting on this story.

Glynn Wilson

Robin Young of Orange Beach talks about the health problems she suffered from BP’s Gulf oil disaster (see video below).

by Glynn Wilson

ORANGE BEACH, Ala. — Wherever disaster strikes, there’s always an associated crud.

There was the Exxon Valdez Crud. The Nine Eleven Crud. The Katrina Cough, and then the TVA coal ash cough.

Now, along the entire coast of the Gulf of Mexico, there is the BP Crud, afflicting workers and the general population from Louisiana to Florida.

When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, Robin Young, a 47-year-old director of guest services for a property management company in Orange Beach, Alabama, was gearing up for what promised to be the best tourist season on the coast in years. From the city of New Orleans to the Florida panhandle, communities were finally starting to feel like they were recovering from the devastation left in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Ivan.

Since suffering a debilitating bout of what locals are calling the “BP Crud,” however, like thousands of other people along the coast due to their exposure to the oil and chemical dispersants, she is now part of a growing community of activists along the coast who are worried about their health.

Just a few days after BP’s oil made landfall along the Alabama Gulf Coast in June, Ms. Young’s symptoms started with “a fiery, burning sore throat,” she said. Then came the horrible, constant cough, followed by an achy feeling much like a severe flu virus — and a lethargy that kept her in bed for two weeks solid. Her memory started playing tricks on her, and her motor skills and even hand-to-eye coordination went south.

Read the rest of this entry »

As we move forward in the Internet Age, Spot.Us, along with the help of its generous sponsors, has been trying to understand the changing world of journalism.

After the last survey, we learned what the community thought about objectivity in journalism.

Now, we’ve got another hot-button issue to tackle: Private or Public? In exchange for your contributions on this topic we will let you fund the reporting project of your choice. It’s our budget, but your decision — thanks to our sponsor Free Press.

While a large chunk of the mainstream media is privately owned (Rupert Murdoch of Fox News), public forms of media have existed for quite some time and enjoy a healthy, albeit cult-like following of users.

In this time of transition, questions have come up about the role that public media should play in journalism’s future. Should it expand to cover the gaps left in the shrinking private news business? Can it expand without government support and would this be compromising?

Read the rest of this entry »

The Federal Government or the State Court System?

David Underhill of the Mobile Alabama Sierra Club protests BP in Panama City, Florida

Legal Analysis
by Glynn Wilson

David Underhill of the Mobile Alabama Sierra Club, who recently protested a public forum sponsored by the U.S. Department of the Interior by wearing duct tape over his mouth since citizens were not allowed to speak like they should have been in a real democratic town hall public hearing, was also party to a stakeholders meeting August 17 with officials from national and local government agencies and environmental groups as well as the British Petroleum corporation.

There were already so many public complaints about the lethargic nature of BP’s response to paying claims to individuals and businesses along the Gulf Coast that the Obama administration stepped in June 15 and seized $20 billion of the oil company’s money, to make sure people receive compensation for losses suffered due to the largest and worst environmental disaster in American history.

By June 16, less than two months after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico April 20, killing 11 workers and spreading it’s crude all over the Gulf from the Louisiana marshes to the beaches of Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, President Barack Obama appointed Washington attorney Kenneth Feinberg to act as the arbitrator to lead an independent team to oversee paying out claims from the new $20 billion escrow fund.

But the question on Underhill’s mind at the August 17 meeting was whether Feinberg could truly be independent and fair if he is being paid by BP. So he tried to get an answer from one of the BP representatives at the meeting, Gary Willis. Clearly there is not much trust of BP on the Gulf Coast, since the company has lied time and time again about the amount of oil leaking into the Gulf, about the use of chemical dispersants, even about who has the power to control access to oiled beaches.

The answer Underhill got from the BP official was “fuzzy,” he said, so he and Casi Callaway of the Mobile Baykeeper did a followup interview with BP public relations representative Sam J. Sacco.

In an e-mail exchange obtained exclusively by The Locust Fork News-Journal, Sacco said: “A question was asked by one of your members at the Aug. 17 COAST meeting as to whether BP was paying the appointed claims administrator, Mr. Feinberg,” Sacco said. “The answer to that question is yes.”

Read the rest of this entry »

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
- English proverb

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.
- Mark Twain

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

For the record, I’ve never owned a horse.

I’ve ridden a few, but I still don’t know for sure if this proverb is true.

Although I suspect when John Heywood used the phrase in 1546 he was talking more about people than horses.

You think?

As for Mark Twain’s quote, I agree 100 percent.

My humble sympathies go out to the citizens of the world, the country and the Gulf Coast today, however. I’ve lived on the coast of Alabama and loved it, and in New Orleans, and I feel you. I do.

But I know how hard it is sometimes to actually spend time reading up on a subject before bloviating about it.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

On Sunday, June 13, 1971, the day the New York Times published its first installment of the Pentagon Papers story on the Vietnam war, I was going on 13, living in the suburbs east of Birmingham, Alabama. About the only news I recall keeping up with in those days had to do with Alabama football and Atlanta Braves baseball.

Summer was fun then (before global warming had started to set in) and you could play outside without dying of heat exhaustion, although the air in Birmingham was pretty bad in those days. On CB radios truckers called it “Smoky City.”

On April 27, 1971, Hank Aaron had hit his 600th career home run, the third player ever to do so. On July 31 that year, Aaron hit a home run in the All-Star Game at Detroit’s Tiger Stadium. He would not break Babe Ruth’s all time home run record with number 715 until April 8, 1974, at a time when the end of the war in Vietnam was about a foregone conclusion.

Two big changes came to Alabama football in 1971. Wilbur Jackson was the first ever black player given a football scholarship to Alabama and John Mitchell, who made the team as a junior in 1971, was the first to actually play, eight years after the Alabama student body had been integrated. The Crimson Tide went undefeated that year, but lost to Nebraska in the Orange Bowl. I met Paul “Bear” Bryant in person around that time at an Alabama-USC basketball game.

I mention my personal history to try to inject a little reality into the garbling of Vietnam-era history that has accompanied the WikiLeaks release of the Afghanistan war logs last week, to make sure readers check in with Frank Rich at the New York Times today, and to make a related point but a different argument about recent criticism of President Barack Obama.

Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: This article was originally funded by and published at Truthout.org, but for unknown reasons, it does not appear to be in the searchable archives anymore. When this was discovered on Monday, October 24, 2011, we re-published it here.

by Glynn Wilson

Northeast Jefferson County east of Birmingham, Alabama, has long been known as a white flight suburb and home to a crowd of racist rednecks, mostly good old boys and gals who work for the power company, the gas company, the phone company and in construction. Bordered by rural and mostly white Blount and St. Clair counties to the north and east, it has become the poor side of town. The money went south. The black migration from the city has in recent years about taken over what was at one time the largest, mostly white suburb in the country called Center Point, which was the half-way point between the industrial city of Birmingham and the countryside in the 1950s and ’60s.

Now that the citizens of the United States have elected the first African-American president in U.S. history, however, there are racist, conservative activist groups popping up all over the place — and not just the Tea Party. One man has put the area on the map like no other.

Michael B. Vanderboegh of Pinson hit the national spotlight last week and is now under serious federal law enforcement scrutiny since calling for right-wing militia-style activists to toss bricks through the windows of Democrats on his SipseyStreetIrregulars blog, designed to appeal to the so-called Three Percenters, or three percent of American gun owners with the most radical view of the Second Amendment.

Read the rest of this entry »

Five Years Ago Today, this Web Press was Born to Counter the Fourth Estate

Brooks Boliek

The Boliek house in Takoma Park, Maryland, where this site was started five years ago today…

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

THE BUNKER – Five years ago today, I huddled in front of a little apple red iMac computer in a friend’s kitchen in Tacoma Park, Maryland, near Silver Spring. It was there I wrote the very first Sunday column for this alternative, independent news Web site, there in the pouring rain with the jazz down low on the radio.

By that time, George W. Bush had been sworn in for a second term, so we knew he would be with us for another three and a half years. There was not much hope for stopping all the damage he would surely cause in that time, but somebody had to try to warn the public.

There was always the hope of impeachment.

That story never did grow legs, or at least not long enough to ever be considered a real threat to the corporate state pulling Bush’s strings.

As the rain poured with the jazz in the background, I read about the suicide of Hunter S. Thompson, and thought of my good friend Spider Martin, who had given up the ghost two years before, also by self-inflicted gunshot wound.

You’ve just about got to be a big picture kind of writer to make sense of moments like that — in an hour or two of reading, thinking and writing. That’s about how long it takes to produce an average newspaper-style column of about a thousand words.

The problem was, everywhere you looked over the Internets on the World Wide Web at that time, there were these things called “blogs” popping up all over the place like mushrooms in a cow pasture after a summer rain.

In the face of that kind of fast-paced change, what was an experienced, real journalist to do in these times, five years after the heralded advent of the new millennium?

There was all this anonymous defamation on some sites; on others, it was mostly self-congratulatory navel-gazing, like reality TV. Ugh!

Could the Free Press and American Democracy survive both Bush — and blogs?

Gawd only knew.

Read the rest of this entry »

Locust Fork News-Journal editor and publisher Glynn Wilson was interviewed Thursday by the OpEd News on the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency and the subject of change.

Here’s the blurb and link.

It’s only been a year since we got rid of Bush. Y’all remember W, the worst president in history, right? So yeah, we got change. We got rid of the corporate Republican cabal running the country into the ground. Is Obama moving fast enough on all fronts to satisfy every liberal groups’ demands and all the promises of the campaign? No, of course not. Remember, it took 8 years for Clinton-Gore to balance the budget and get our economy back on track. Remember the “peace dividend?”

OpEdNews Interviews Glynn Wilson on Obama and Change