NEWSCONSERVATION

"This'll only cost you $9 billion," reads a billboard put up over the weekend on the side of I-70 near Grand Junction, Colorado.

Pictured is the desolate scene—the parched dry bed of the Colorado River's largest tributary— that would become reality if a proposed water project called the Flaming Gorge Pipeline ever gets built.

The pipeline would spell disaster on a number of levels, according to experts, editorial boards and activists in the region. With the astronomical cost of piping water from Southwest Wyoming's Green River to Colorado, 560 miles up and over the continental divide, the piped water would be the most expensive in the state's history, delivered to fuel even more unsustainable population growth along Colorado's booming Front Range.

The Flaming Gorge Pipeline would would also devastate the Green River ecosystem and Dinosaur National Monument. This can't be a good sign for thousands of recreational river users and the significant local tourism businesses they support. Lastly, given that the Flaming Gorge would withdraw 81 billion gallons a year from the Colorado's largest tributary, this pipeline is only going to exacerbate existing intractable conflicts among the seven Basin states that share this increasingly scare resource.

So what's a concerned citizen to do?

Below is a guest blog post by New Orleans jazz artist Katja Toivola-Jones, who started a petition to re-open Louis Armstrong Park.

Jazz culture is the heart and soul of New Orleans, and Louis Armstrong, more than anyone, is the famous son who's made it so. The proud jazz spirit Armstrong's legend nurtured here helped keep the city afloat during our difficult rebuilding years since Hurricane Katrina.

So why is the city park named in Louis Armstrong's honor a year after his death still not fully re-opened—almost 6 years since the levees failed?

There are answers, but because they are more like excuses, they are not so satisfying.

Shark fin soup, a delicacy consumed mostly by wealthy Chinese, is leading to the decimation of tens of millions of sharks every year.

But now Toronto, the largest city in Canada and 5th largest in North America, is poised to add some...er, teeth, to a growing movement to ban shark fins from menus around the world.

Today,  any high-end Chinese restaurant or traditional wedding banquet is likely serving shark fin soup. It's an old tradition that has come to be quite the status symbol. But the lofty price tag (up to $100 per bowl) is only part of the high cost—the destruction of shark populations around the globe is the larger cost to society.

Shark finning is an extremely cruel and wasteful practice: Fins are cut from sharks while they are still alive, and the bodies tossed back overboard where the shark sinks and either drowns or bleeds to death. The practice of shark finning has been banned in U.S. waters since 2002, and some international agreements have ended the practice in regions of the high seas. Yet, finning continues in many places, driven by the lucrative trade of fins to supply the soup (a meal that contains hardly any nutritional value, by the way).

Given the increasingly threatened status of shark worldwide, some leaders, such as in Hawaii and the town of Brandtford, Ontario, a city only a short drive from Toronto, have decided to take things a step further and ban the sale, consumption and possession of shark fins—the only real way to decrease the number of sharks slaughtered for fins each year.

Last week, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar traveled to the Grand Canyon to make an important announcement—that he favored a 20-year uranium mining ban around the Grand Canyon, the most environmentally-protective option on a spectrum of otherwise poor choices.

The announcement was a huge victory for many local and national coalitions across the country, who have advocated fiercely to protect one of the world's greatest natural treasures from despoilment by mining and nuclear industry interests. It was also big news for Change.org member Suzanne Sparling, an Arizona resident who started a petition on Change.org to protect the landscape and rivers she loves. Her petition allowed more than 50,000 Change.org members to tell the Interior Department to support the 20-year ban of uranium mining that Secretary Salazar set in motion last week. "This is a monumental step in showing how much we can all do when joining our voices and working together!" said Suzanne in a recent email I exchanged with her.

With over 80 percent of all fish stocks declared fully exploited or overexploited, it is harder and harder for fishermen to find and catch the last fish. But enormous government subsidies make it not only possible, but profitable, for fishermen to do just that.  The oceans are running out of fish but rather than scaling back, the fishing fleet is larger than ever—like the global nuclear weapons arsenal capable of blowing up the planet several times over, today's fishing fleet can catch 2.5 times as many fish as is sustainable.

A decade ago, the World Trade Organization members agreed that something had to be done to reign in the unsustainable use of government funds to construct more and bigger boats in a sea of shrinking fish populations. But so far, negotiations have run dry, as trillions of dollars continue to poor into an ever-emptier sea. In a series of reports released last year in the Journal of Bioeconomics, researchers noted that U.S. taxpayers foot the bill for an average $713 million in direct subsidies to fisheries every year.

And nearly 60% of global fisheries subsidies go towards increasing the capacity of the fishing fleet.

A federal regulation that will shape the future of the U.S. National Forest system, which includes 155 national forests spread over 193-million acres of across the country, will close for public comment this Friday, May 16th. Without major revisions to the draft of the rule, some environmental groups such as Earthjustice say that the regulations will leave our forests in peril.

This is not just an issue for your typical treehugger. National forest lands are the single largest source of drinking water in the nation, providing fresh water to about 124 million people. In addition, millions of people visit national forests every year to enjoy hunting, fishing, camping, hiking and wildlife watching. More than 5,000 species of fish and wildlife also happen to make the national forest system their homes.

California's San Jose Sharks are on a tear through the NHL playoffs this month, and so their mascot 'Sharkie' must be keeping seriously busy. Win or lose, when the season is done, we hope that the team can sink its teeth into an important statewide issue that could determine the continued survival of their real-life mascot.

Around the world, shark populations are plummeting due to the continued consumption of shark fin soup, which is viewed as a luxury and status symbol in traditional Chinese culture. The soup is made from fins sheared from live sharks; the sharks are then left to die. Worldwide, every single day, shark fin soup is to blame for 260,000 shark deaths. Every year? Seventy million. Because sharks are top ocean predators, their mass die-off is a dangerous experiment with our larger marine ecosystems.

California is the largest importer of shark fins outside of Asia, so it shoulders major responsibility for the sharks' plight. Luckily, right now the state is considering an important piece of legislation, AB 376, that would change this situation by banning the sale and import of shark fins.  And while the Chinese restaurant lobby and some politicians like to paint this bill as an attack on traditional Chinese culture, the reality is far different. A co-sponsor of the bill is Chinese American, and a new poll just released found that 70 percent of Chinese American California voters support the shark fin ban (compared to 76 percent of total California voters).

If you're a regular reader, you know that I've been covering a controversial story regarding the Ott Biological Preserve in Calhoun County, Michigan as it's developed over the past several months.  It's not your typical environmental controversy. A small, local organization and local officials wanted to use state money to put a biking and walking trail through the biological preserve.

While in most cases, a biking and walking trail is widely embraced by nature lovers, a few local Ott lovers brought attention to the threat a paved (or even unpaved, but dramatically graded) trail would have posed to the preserve. They started a petition here on Change, which garnered more than 1,000 signatures, and helped to educate people in Calhoun County and around the country about the difference between a preserve and a park, and about the threat this unique biological preserve was facing.

While opponents to the trail explained on numerous occasions in op-ed articles, at public meetings, and on Facebook that other trail options existed that went around the preserve, proponents were quite adamant that they thought a trail was a good idea. Those wanting to protect the preserve, though, even went to the relevant state officials to confirm that the grant money for the trail did not stipulate that the trail needed to go through the preserve.

Last Friday, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) told Brazil that it should stop construction of the Belo Monte dam until human rights and environmental concerns had been resolved. In response, Brazil told the IACHR to mind its own business.

The IACHR’s ruling was in response to a complaint filed by several groups of Indigenous peoples opposed to the project, and is the latest salvo in a growing international movement against the dam. Construction on the dam has already started, but the fight isn't over yet.

As I’ve written before, the Belo Monte mega-dam project is slated to destroy an area of rainforest the size of Chicago, right in the heart of Brazil’s largest indigenous reserve: the Xingu River basin. According to groups opposed to the project, the completed dam would also threaten the survival of several indigenous groups and could make up to 50,000 people homeless. All this for an only minimal amount of energy. For these reasons, it’s been controversial since its inception, spurring conflicting legal rulings, several government officials’ resignations and a large international opposition that’s attracted celebrities on the order of James Cameron and Sting.

Legendary conservationist Edgar Wayburn once observed, “Nature doesn't divide herself into measured plots. A watershed encompasses the chain of life; if any part is developed, the integrity of the whole ecosystem is threatened.”

There may not be much water in southeastern Utah, but Dr. Wayburn’s point still stands – neither wildlife nor wildlands are helped by setting aside just a few acres here and there. Habitat fragmentation, air pollution, and sprawl ensure that environmental damage spreads across entire ecosystems. From national parks to national forests, when it comes to Mother Nature’s whims, human-drawn lines on a map are generally meaningless.

That’s exactly what’s happening to the remarkable landscapes and archaeology of Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. The Park itself may have the highest federal protection, but much of its surrounding ecosystem is in trouble. The area’s wildlife, iconic buttes and mesas, and solace have all come under threat from oil and gas leases east of the park and tar sands oil plans to the west and the south.

As a first step in this larger battle to protect Canyonlands, the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) has launched a Change.org petition targeting off-road vehicle (ORV) use. The petition asks Ken Salazar, the Secretary of the Interior, to ban ORVs on over 1,000 miles of trails through sensitive habitat, streams, and archaeological sites outside the Park.