The Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Task Force released its final strategy for long term ecosystem restoration for the Gulf Coast Monday following extensive feedback from citizens throughout the region. The Task Force delivered its final strategy recommendations on Friday to President Barack Obama, who established the Task Force by executive order.
The strategy is the first restoration blueprint ever developed for the Gulf to include input from states, tribes, federal agencies, local governments and thousands of involved citizens and organizations across the region, according to the release. The plan represents a commitment by all parties to continue to work together in an unprecedented collaboration to prepare the Gulf region to transition from response to recovery and address the decades-long decline that the Gulf’s ecosystem has endured.
EPA Administrator and Task Force Chair Lisa P. Jackson, partnering with Task Force Co-Chair Garret Graves, made the announcement during keynote remarks at the 2011 State of the Gulf of Mexico Summit in Houston. Ms. Jackson was joined by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Administrator Jane Lubchenco, Council on Environmental Quality Chair Nancy Sutley, USDA Under Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment Harris Sherman, according to a press release announcing the plan.
“After the Deepwater Horizon disaster, this Task Force brought together people from across the Gulf Coast in unparalleled ways to talk about how we tackle both the immediate environmental devastation, as well as the long-term deterioration that has for decades threatened the health, the environment and the economy of the people who call this place home,” Jackson said. “It has all come to this moment – when we move from planning and researching to supporting real, homegrown actions aimed at restoring this vital ecosystem.”
The birds are singing. The bees are buzzing, and the dogwood blooms are popping out here on the official first day of spring, known in science as the vernal equinox, the day each year when the day and night are almost exactly 12 hours long as the Sun crosses the celestial equator going northward, rising exactly due east and setting directly in the west.
Sitting here contemplating the surroundings in this little human-engineered slice of suburban heaven, if one can call it that, it is temping to sip the good coffee and imagine that all is right with the world, as the saying goes.
But of course, as much as we would like to put the problems of the world out of our minds and escape, we know all is not right with the world, our country or our state.
If it wasn’t already obvious, it is now as clear as a crystal ball that no matter how sophisticated humans become at engineering electrical power systems, they are all bound to fail at some point, to kill a bunch of people — and cost way more than the economists can ever predict. That goes for coal as well as oil and nuclear power. It’s just that we haven’t suffered from a major coal mine collapse — this week.
Bikini Bear and David Underhill of the Mobile Sierra Club
Guest Column
by David Underhill
Bikini Bear entered the lion’s den the other day. She is a polar bear.
The compulsively literal might say she is a person dressed in a polar bear costume. But all would agree that she was wearing a yellow polka dot bikini.
The lion’s den was a meeting room in the state’s handsome Five Rivers facility on the causeway across Mobile Bay. Presiding were officials from the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement — formerly the Minerals Management Service until the exploding BP oil well prompted a reorganization and name change. They called this meeting, and two others along the Gulf Coast, to solicit comments about their plans to expand the offshore areas leased for oil and gas drilling.
No More ‘Drill Baby Drill’ in the Atlantic, or the Eastern Gulf
Obama administration officials announced Wednesday that offshore oil drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico or off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts will not be allowed as part of the next five-year drilling plan.
Oil and gas companies are still allowed to pursue drilling off Alaska’s shores, in the Arctic’s Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. But Wednesday’s decision reverses the administration’s previous policy set less than a month before the disastrous BP Deepwater Horizon blowout, approving new offshore drilling off Virginia, North Carolina’s Outer Banks and both coasts of Florida.
According to the Defenders of Wildlife, the drilling ban should be extended to include Arctic waters.
“The administration’s decisive move to restore protection of much of America’s coasts from the dangers of offshore drilling for the next five years demonstrates that it took the hard lessons of the BP Gulf oil disaster to heart,” said Richard Charter, offshore drilling expert and senior policy advisor for Defenders of Wildlife. “We continue to witness the devastation that drilling operations can have on our economy, coastal communities and wildlife. Prohibiting oil and gas exploration in these fragile areas is the only way to prevent such a catastrophe from happening again.”
I honestly wish there was some good news to report. Sorry to say, there’s not any.
Well, the Crimson Tide did manage to pull out a victory over Ole Miss in Tuscaloosa on Saturday, football being about the only thing worth mentioning on the good side of the ledger in Alabama. But the Atlanta Braves were knocked out of post-season play last week, so baseball season is over. So much for sports.
I traveled to the Gulf Coast again last week for Shrimp Fest, hoping upon hope to see some signs of things getting better along the formerly beautiful Gulf of Mexico. I’ve spent a fair portion of my life visiting the Gulf, and lived in Gulf Shores and New Orleans for some very interesting runs over the years.
Alas, I came away with empirical data indicating that the air and water are still dangerous and may not get well anytime soon.
Nixon said he was “not a crook,” but he was certainly a creep. No historical rehabilitation will ever exonerate him for that.
The record of all that illegal Republican campaign cash was stored in the president’s secretary’s desk, and is now in the National Archives and referred to as “Rose Mary’s baby.” Unfortunately, the Washington Post‘s investigation of the Watergate break in did not pick up enough steam to stop Nixon’s reelection, even though it did culminate in his impeachment and resignation after the election — and jail time for some of his cronies.
Is it possible that a similar scenario is developing this time around?
Here’s another strange, terrible twist in the BP Gulf oil disaster. Nah, there’s no problem with going to the beach and swimming in the water on the coast.
Oil induced changes to phytoplankton and their associated bacterial communities are related to a rise in vibrios vulnificus, a bacteria that has claimed the lives of at least 6 people on the coast.
The exposure of this 12-year-old boy named Jon came with just a short walk barefoot in the water.
This is no joke. The National Science Foundation has awarded a rapid response grant to research this issue to scientists Crystal Johnson, Gary King and Ed Laws of Louisiana State University to find out. The researchers will look at how the abundance and virulence of naturally-occurring bacteria called Vibrio parahaemolyticus and Vibrio vulnificus, often found in oyster beds, may change in response to the spill.
The findings will provide insights into vibrios’ ability to “consume” oil, and will allow the biologists to uncover antibiotic compounds in certain species of phytoplankton that live in association with vibrios.
“Adaptation to the spilled oil may result in an increase in some types of vibrios,” Johnson says. “We believe that vibrios will change in response to the stress of direct exposure to oil and/or to indirect effects of interactions with other species affected by oil.”
“What did the scientists see? They saw birds and they saw oil. And too often, they saw them together.” That’s the bottom line from a new report, “The Risk Remains: A Bird’s Eye View Six Months After BP’s Disaster,” released Wednesday by the National Audubon Society.
The report details the findings of Audubon scientists who visited the oil-plagued Gulf Coast six months after the Deepwater Horizon spill.
During their weeklong journey, the scientists made some interesting discoveries. Like the fact that oil’s still around—and visible. They saw oil in nine of out 10 transects along Barataria-Terrebonne Bay and the Isles Dernieres-Timbalier—both globally significant IBAs.
The oil didn’t always look the same; sometimes it sat beneath the sand, oozing to the surface when prodded. In other places, it lay dormant under the water’s surface, becoming visible only as it crashed into the shore or during high tide. Either way, it was still there.
Also, the Audubon scientists saw oiled birds, but only three total out of 10,000 birds counted.
Audubon’s had a presence on the Gulf Coast for more than a century. And the organization will continue its work there post-spill, aiming to turn tragedy into something positive by rebuilding and restorating the land, and trying to reverse coastal erosion and stabilize populations of area birds, according to a press release announcing the report.
“Through long-term commitment,” the report reads, “we can go beyond recovering from this assault on a precious landscape to improving its bounty for birds and people.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reopened 2,927 square miles of Gulf waters off eastern Louisiana, directly south and southwest of East Bay, to commercial and recreational fishing today, the eighth reopening in federal waters since July 22. Somehow we doubt this will satisfy the fishermen who are not catching anything in these dead waters, or a wary public who have stopped eating Gulf seafood.
This reopening was announced after consultation with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and under a reopening protocol agreed to by NOAA, the FDA and the Gulf states, according to a press release.
“Today’s reopening is great news for fishermen and the seafood industry in Louisiana,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said. “We look forward to reopening more federal waters, as this provides greater access to commercial and recreational activities, and continues to build consumer confidence in Gulf seafood.”
The total area reopened today is about 1 percent of federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico and 11 percent of the current closed area, as last modified on October 1. No oil or sheen has been documented in the area since July 31.
He was in charge of the 9/11 victims’ compensation fund, and adjudicated claims of Virginia Tech Massacre victims and those of Agent Orange. Now Ken Feinberg is tasked with sorting out the thousands of claims stemming from the BP oil spill. Morley Safer reports for Sixty Minutes.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
