2008.10.12
Discuss Sunday's commentary by environmental journalists
Sunday's Horizon section featured several columns on environmental issues. Look below for excerpts and links to all of the pieces.
Killing the Endangered Species Act
Sharon Guynup
Guynup lives in New Jersey, writes on science and the environment for national magazines and Web sites, and is the author of "State of the Wild 2006: A Global Portrait of Wildlife, Wildlands, and Oceans." Blue Ridge Press
No more bald eagles? Sea turtles? Peregrine falcons? Manatees?
That could be the legacy our children inherit if an aggressive, back-door overhaul of America's wildlife protections is rammed through by the Bush administration. While Congress was on August recess, the administration sneaked a fast-track proposal into the Federal Register that will gut the 35-year-old Endangered Species Act -- changes it has been unable to push through Congress. Three years ago, a Republican-led House bill reforming the act died in the Senate.
Water is the public's business
Erica Gies
Gies is a freelance reporter whose work has been published by the International Herald Tribune, Wired News, Grist, E/The Environmental Magazine and The San Francisco Bay Guardian. Blue Ridge Press
We turn on the tap and clean water flows. Most of us take this service for granted because we consider water, necessary for life, a basic right. In fact, this notion stems back to an ancient Roman legal precedent called the public trust doctrine. This fundamental tenet says that crucial natural resources, especially water, belong to everyone.
Great value in going green
John S. Edwards
Edwards, of Roanoke, is the senator for the 21st Senatorial District of Virginia.
The world is consuming 1,000 barrels of oil per second.
The United States accounts for 25 percent of that frantic consumption, though we have only 3 percent of the world's oil supply. It should be no surprise therefore that we import 70 percent of our oil from other countries, exporting our dollars to Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and others. In fact, we currently are sending $700 billion a year overseas, just to purchase oil.
Heaven needs a catcher
Tom Henry
Henry created the environment beat at The (Toledo) Blade in 1993 and writes extensively about the Great Lakes, nuclear power, air pollution and North America's biggest tree pest, the emerald ash borer. He is a graduate of the Knight Center's 1996 Great Lakes Environmental Journalism Training Institute.
I cover the Great Lakes and other Midwestern environmental issues. But when I examine my deepest motivation for doing environmental journalism, my mind wanders off to Seattle -- a city I've never visited.
Let me explain.
Conservation: a dying cause
Michael Lawler Smith
Smith is a freelance outdoor writer residing in Lexington and a retired federal employee who served as deputy assistant director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
There's an election issue so subtle and inconspicuous almost no one recognizes it.
The issue, succinctly, is what has become of our 650 million acres of federal public lands -- and as they slip further toward ruin, what becomes of conservation itself in this country?
The next president's most urgent task
Philip and Alice Shabecoff
The Shabecoffs are authors of "Poisoned Profits: The Toxic Assault on Our Children," published by Random House in August.
The next president will face a Herculean task cleaning up the multifaceted mess he will inherit -- not unlike, in fact, the scouring of the Augean stables. Among other things, he will have to extricate us from the Iraq war, repair our overburdened military, lift us from our fallen international standing, begin to free us from our addiction to fossil fuels, deal with the housing crisis and shore up our shambling economy, rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, solve the immigration dilemma, create a rational health care system, stem the rise of food prices, and guard the nation from terrorism without eroding our civil liberties.
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