An early autumn view of Devil’s Den looking downstream from the waterfalls in the Talladega National Forest (click on the image for more photos)

There will be a public meeting at the Heflin Park and Recreation Department near the Georgia line in Heflin, Alabama Monday night at 6 p.m to to discuss a possible sale of oil and gas leases on 43,000 acres in the Talladega National Forest and the Conecuh National Forest in South Alabama.

According to several non-profit environmental groups, including WildSouth.Org and the Southern Environmental Law Center, the state Bureau of Land Management is “putting thousands of acres of publicly owned national forest land in Alabama at risk by allowing potential oil and gas drilling in the Talladega and Conecuh National Forests,” and the groups fear the plan could open the area to up to the controversial practice of “fracking,” where water, sand and chemicals are pumped under pressure into the ground.

In a letter of protest, the Southern Environmental Law Center, representing Wild South and the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the agency is relying on outdated environmental analyses done by the U.S. Forest Service in 2004 as part of the revised management plan for Alabama’s national forests. Among other deficiencies, these stale analyses fail to assess the environmental impacts of drilling using high-volume hydraulic fracturing, known as “fracking.”

This form of gas drilling, in which millions of gallons of water and chemicals are injected underground to fracture shale and release natural gas, has caused significant and widespread environmental problems in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and elsewhere.

Exempt from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act, fracking has been linked to environmental and public health risks, such as contamination of streams and drinking water wells. This type of gas drilling has a large footprint, so drilling operations could significantly fragment wildlife habitat in the national forest and contribute to the industrialization of nearby rural land.

The groups are asking the BLM to remove the Alabama national forests from its proposed lease sale.

“The Bureau of Land Management is proposing a massive intrusion into Alabama’s national forests without properly analyzing the potential impacts and without providing sufficient information to the public. Some of the areas they propose leasing for oil and gas development are near some of the most popular destinations in the forests,” said Keith Johnston, managing attorney for the Birmingham office of the Southern Environmental Law Center.

“We have a strong sense of place in the South, and our public forests should not be sold to the highest bidder to be destroyed for short-term profit,” said Tracy Davids, director of Wild South. “These are the places that families hunt, fish, hike and recreate. Oil and gas drilling will ruin these lands and force us off of our national forests. This is an assault on our heritage and we won’t stand for it.”

“This is an illegal giveaway to the oil and gas industry, and it must be stopped. The BLM is turning a blind eye to the very real risks of damaging our forests and harming the health of everyone who lives nearby,” said Matthew McFeeley, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “More than ten percent of the Talladega National Forest is being put on the auction block without giving the public any chance to weigh in.”

The Talladega National Forest is a source of clean drinking water for numerous communities, including Anniston and Jacksonville, Alabama.

In 2009, the Forest Service estimated about 600,000 visits a year to the forest by hikers, hunters, anglers, horseback riders and others who seek out the forest’s exceptional recreational opportunities. Some areas proposed for leasing contain or are near important environmental resources such as the popular Pinhoti National Recreation Trail, the Chinnabee Silent Trail, Talladega Scenic Drive, Cheaha Mountain and Rebecca Mountain, and waterways including Choccolocco, Cheaha and Shoal creeks, as well as other tributaries to the Coosa, Tallapoosa, and Cahaba rivers.

Also, based on the little environmental information available on the proposed lease areas, many are habitat for endangered, threatened or at-risk fish and wildlife, such as the Red-cockaded woodpecker and several fish and mussel species, which the agency and Forest Service are responsible for protecting under the law.

He explains where we came from and who we are, two of the big three questions, the other being where are we going. And he talks about the need for a decline in organized religion with their creation story myths, written long before modern science was even invented. It’s a must see for anyone who wants to call themselves an educated person.

Edward Wilson, an Alabama native, is the Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. He is the author of several books, including “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis,” “On Human Nature,” the winner of the 1979 Pulitzer Prize, and “The Ants,” the winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize.

Add: The video is now available here.

The Social Conquest of Earth is available online.

by David Underhill

MOBILE, Ala. — Control of the legislature and the governorship by a newly empowered Republican party with an ambitious agenda has startled the nation — and some sectors of Alabama.

This state with a tiny immigrant population now has the nation’s most stringent law aimed at undocumented aliens. Women’s rights seemingly secured are under challenge again. The judge evicted from office for installing a monument to his religion inside the supreme court building is returning to that office. And the legislature currently in session is performing radical surgery on the state’s budget, hacking away at education, health care and other essentials with a grim abandon never before seen in Montgomery.

So it came as no surprise when a source inside the Capitol passed along a bill radical beyond anything done to date by the ideologically inflamed Republicans dominant in state government. Not yet formally introduced, it is circulating among sympathetic legislators.

Its chief proponents are Senator Scott Beason, primary advocate of the law crafted to harass Mexicans, documented or not, out of the state, and Senator Shadrack McGill, who appears to have fervent biblical motives for crimping the choices available to women.

They didn’t draft the bill circulating now. It comes from a national campaign pushing for passage of similar bills in other states, from a company partially owned and run by former Bush aide Karl Rove. But these two senators lead the effort in Alabama.

They are evidently waiting for an opportune moment in the waning tumultuous days of the legislative session to suddenly push the bill forward and drive it toward passage. If they succeed in enacting this bill into law, it will abruptly transform the working lives of nearly all residents in ways not contemplated for centuries.

The full text of the bill follows. Readers can form their own opinions.

SYNOPSIS: Under existing law some companies receive tax preferences and other benefits from the state, while other companies do not. And some companies receive workers provided by the prison system, while other companies do not. This bill would end the advantages enjoyed by these favored companies and instead provide an equal competitive setting for all companies to thrive.

A BILL TO BE ENTITLED AN ACT

To devise a system to stabilize Alabama’s workforce so that employers and employees can have reliable expectations about the terms, conditions, and duration of employment, and can thereby become more successful participants in the free market system.

BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF ALABAMA:

Section 1. This act shall be known and may be cited as the Revive Employment, Training and Retention Opportunity Act of 2012.

Section 2. The Legislature makes the following findings:

(a) The economic well-being of the citizens will be enhanced by the increase of industry and commerce within the state, and it is in the best interests of the state to promote such development.

(b) Public-private partnerships are not a novelty; they have a long, distinguished history.

i. For many decades local industrial development boards have attracted businesses by exempting them from taxes. This is accomplished by making the boards the formal owners of the property where these companies operate, and the companies lease the land and structures from the boards. Ownership by the boards, which are public agencies, is a convenient legal fiction. It eliminates property taxes because public property is not subject to such taxes.

ii. Various state policies also offer tax incentives and other inducements to attract businesses. Most recently the Legislature passed a bill making private companies, in effect, agencies that levy, collect and spend taxes. To stimulate new or expanded facilities, companies may keep the income taxes they withhold from workers’ paychecks, rather than passing this money along to the state Department of Revenue. The companies use these retained funds to pay down the debts incurred to build new or expanded facilities.

iii. Many employees in the state’s industries are the output of training programs operated by community colleges and other education agencies with a mandate to create workers with the skills needed by businesses. Some of these state government programs are on the grounds of the plants for which they are training workers.

iv. Under newly passed legislation the Department of Corrections will provide workers for private businesses. The designers of this partnership are aware of the abuses in the prisoner leasing system a century ago, which allowed some companies to enjoy the competitive advantage of having nearly free labor. The new system is carefully constructed to avoid such abuse.

(c) These public-private partnerships have been piecemeal and somewhat haphazard. This act extends the partnership concept into a comprehensive, coordinated statewide system that will promote stability and security for employers and employees.

(d) In keeping with Alabama traditions this system will be attentive to and protective of family values, property and contracts.

(e) The powers to be granted and the purposes to be accomplished by this act are proper governmental and public purposes, and the commercial activities fostered by this act are of paramount importance.

Section 3. Employment contract

(a) All non-executive employees of all public and private entities within the state shall sign a contract specifying that the employee has been the recipient of numerous goods and services by the state, including education, health, highways, etc., without which the employee would be incapable of performing his/her job, and that during employment he/she acquires further skills and knowledge provided by the employer which he/she otherwise would not possess.

(b) The contract shall specify that the employee acknowledges the receipt of these benefits and accepts the resulting obligation to faithfully perform the work provided by the employer, unless rendered unable to do so by illness or death, or unless terminated by the employer.

(c) The contract shall include a buyout clause allowing the employee to void the agreement and quit the job upon payment of adequate compensation to the state and to the employer for the benefits received by the employee. Besides the value of education in the state’s schools, the amount of compensation shall take account of knowledge acquired on the job about industrial processes, trade secrets, copyrighted materials and other intellectual property of the employer, which would be extremely valuable to any competitor hiring the worker released from his/her original contract. The amount of compensation due from the departing worker shall be determined by a arbitrator selected by the Alabama Development Office, with the understanding that this amount shall be sufficient to discourage such departures and to assure employers of a stable workforce with very low turnover.

(d) The term of the contract shall be perpetual. To maintain a reliable and predictable pool of variously skilled workers for the state’s enterprises, the contract fosters the traditional role of the family as the most formative social unit. Parents instill their experience and skills in children, and this instruction includes the parents’ role in the workforce. Therefore, children are heirs to the benefits their parents enjoyed from the joint investment by the state and the employer to develop them into productive workers. As such heirs, children assume upon maturity the duties and obligations of their parents’ employment contracts, which accords with human nature and history, throughout most of which children have replicated the work and status of their parents.

(e) The Attorney General shall draft the standard employment contract, in consultation with appropriate state agencies and private companies, and the text shall be incorporated in subsequent enabling legislation to carry out the purposes of this act.

Section 4. Enforcement of Employment Contract

(a) Anyone who fails to honor his/her employment contract, either by malingering on the job or absconding from the job, is subject to detention by any sworn officer of the law within the state.

(b) Any absconded employee who crosses into another state shall be subject to return under a fugitive worker law. Several states are in the process of enacting employment measures similar to this act. The Attorney General shall seek compacts with those states for the reciprocal detention and return of fugitive workers. When such agreements have been reached, the Attorney General shall incorporate the text in subsequent enabling legislation to carry out the purposes of this act.

(c) A detained worker shall be promptly brought before the Judge of any Circuit Court, who shall issue a contempt citation for the worker’s willful refusal to honor his/her employment contract. This brings the detainee fully under the jurisdiction of the Court, which shall immediately transfer the detainee to the Department of Corrections for induction into that department’s prison labor program (see Section 2 (b) iv above). Then the detainee shall be returned to his/her job, with the original employment contract still in force, but supplemented now by the strictures of the Department of Corrections.

Section 5. Legal Justification and Defense of Enactment

(a) All measures specified in this act serve valid public purposes and are in the best interests of the citizens of the state. These measures fall well within the state’s broad constitutional latitude to choose policies that reasonably promote common values, in this instance employment in productive enterprises and continuity of the family as the basic institution of society.

(b) These measures are not a break with past practice. Rather, they extend and improve the established concept of public-private partnerships by making the state and employers joint originators of enforceable employment contracts for all non-executive workers. This will assure a supply of trained personnel and will exert a moderating influence on wages. Reduced labor costs will be highly attractive to companies and will benefit all employers, which is more equitable than current policies that grant tax preferences and other incentives to some companies but not others.

(c) Detention and contempt citations for those who breach their employment contracts is not a departure from accepted practice. The term “alimony jail” is a familiar phrase because confinement for failure to pay alimony and child support, among other derelictions, is a routine legal remedy.

(d) Nor is transfer of employment contracts from parents to children a departure from accepted practice. By ancient custom inheritance transfers real estate and other items from one generation to the next, and unless wills specify otherwise, the law favors transfers within family bloodlines. The same applies to employment contracts derived from this act.

(e) Nothing in this act shall be construed as giving the state any control over private companies. This act in no way impairs the right of owners to use their property and of managers to oversee that property in any lawful manner they desire. The state’s sole role under this act is to assist the companies in acquiring and keeping a capable, affordable workforce.

Section 6. All laws or parts of laws which conflict with this act are repealed.

Section 7. This act shall become effective immediately following its passage and approval by the Governor, or its otherwise becoming law.

Like Republican presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney, Republican Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker finds himself at the center of a big story he claims he can’t remember his part in. Where, as Amy Sullivan puts it, “Romney knows for sure he didn’t think the guy was gay in the incident he doesn’t remember,” Scott Walker “[doesn't] remember all of the particulars” of the incident we have on video, in which he told a billionaire donor that taking collective bargaining rights from public workers was “the first step” in a bigger plan, “because you use divide and conquer.”

So if you are a union member, do you really want to vote Republican? Think about it.

Jennifer Granholm calls out Mitt Romney for his bullying past and present, wondering aloud whether Romney thinks about the people he has hurt while pursuing his personal ambitions and suggesting he has never faced consequences for his actions. Romney, she says, “is focused like a laser on the problem at hand: How to get elected president. Nothing else matters.”