Mendocino Environmental Center

From: www.mendocinocountry.com

Under three separate programs hatched in Washington DC, the federal government intends to militarize and industrialize the entire Pacific coast of America, from Seattle to San Diego. While these programs began during the era of Bush, they continue undiminished in the Obama administration. .
Each of these projects has its own government agency sponsor and environmental approval process. Unless president Obama modifies, postpones or cancels them, they will routinely go into effect on their particular pre-ordained timeline.
The Green Party of Mendocino County has published a petition to oppose all three of these projects and calls upon individuals, environmental groups and local Green bodies up and down the Pacific Coast to endorse, download and circulate our Pacific Coast Ocean Sanctuary Petition,
As Greens, we need to lead a mighty chorus of popular outrage against the Triple Federal Assault on our coast.

Expansion of Naval Warfare Training:
First, the Navy is set to declare most of the Pacific Northwest from Cape Mendocino to the Puget Sound in Washington and east to Idaho a free fire zone for naval air, sea and undersea warfare training operations.
Much of the US Navy Department’s naval and air fleet homeported in Washington is deployed in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea, on duty in the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Northwest Training Range Expansion would pre-emp the entire coasts of the states of Washington and Oregon and Northern California to the Humboldt-Mendocino county line along with most of Puget Sound and a series of “special use” air spaces off the coast and over land near the US Canada boundary east to Idaho.
Bullets, bombs, shells, rockets, missiles and depth charges will be fired into the air and waters of our coast for decades to come with deadly, permanent consequences to wildlife and ecosystem values.
Along with naval artillery, guided missile drones, and phosphorus munitions, midrange sonar will be employed, causing marine mammals to become disoriented and beach.
An Environmental Impact Statement on this project is available  at www.nwtcomplexeis.com.
The deadline for public comment has been extended to April 13, 2009.

Offshore Oil and Gas Leasing
‘    For the last three decades, the Mendocino and California Coast, Washington, Oregon and the Atlantic seaboard have been spared new offshore oil drilling by a simple paragraph in the House Interior Appropriations bill denying the Minerals Management Service funding for any lease sale planning in those areas.
But as a result of decisions taken by the national Demoocrat party leadership, the Omnibus spending bill covering the period until October 1 passed the House with no Outer Continental Shelf moratorium.
There are three oil and gas Lease Sales off California, one off Mendocino, and two in the Los Angeles area: one off Santa Barbara and another off Oceanside.
The Interior secretary has extended public comment on a Minerals Management Service Five Year offshore oil and gas leasing plan begun in the last days of the Bush administration until September 21. He will hold a meeting on the California Lease Sales on April 16 in San Francisco. See www.mms.gov/5-year
Oil drilling offshore the US has had long term chronic and occasionaly disastrous impacts on fishing, tourism and the environment. In terms of domestic consumption, the estimated petroleum off Mendocino for example would provide only 17 weeks, but the damage to marine ecosystems is virtually permanent.

Wave Buoy Electricity
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has granted wave energy preliminary pilot project permits off Fort Bragg, Mendocino, and Eureka as well as Ventura County.
Recently, FERC has asserted jurisdiction over all waters including nearshore areas up to 3 miles out which are in state jurisdiction for OCS activities.
This agency, which reports directly to the president, has adapted the process for licensing dams to licensing hydrokinetic arrays. The final license can last from 30 to 50 years, and then be renewed.
In order to encourage rapid development of hydrokinetic technology, FERC has come up with a hydrokinetic pilot project preliminary permit process that can take as little as six months to be completed, lasts for 5 years and allows deployment and testing of experimental devices and their environmental impacts. Numerous conditions apply. This is a completely untested technology with unknown environmental risks.
See www.ferc.gov/industries/hydropower/indus-act/hydrokinetics.asp
The applicant must apply for a license within 2 years in the case of a pilot project preliminary permit or surrender its permit.
. The pilot project permit may be near to shore as in the case in the PG&E pilot project off Fort Bragg, but it is intended to lead to arrays of hundreds tethered to the ocean floor by a complex system of cables and pulleys in deep water further out, with power cables strung along the bottom to shore.
A large scale deployment would deny the area to fishing.
A typical wave buoy is as big as a railroad car. Onshore facilities similar to shipyards will be required to build and maintain them, as well as tie the output to the utility power grid.

WHEREAS THE WEST COAST OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA finds itself the target of a US Navy training range expansion, offshore oil and gas lease sales by the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission hydrokinetic energy pilot projects;

WHEREAS the Northwest Training Range expansion would transform our peaceful coast into a warfighting asset, bringing the conflict in South Central Asia into our front yard and cause significant and permanent disruption of fisheries and marine life, decimate our tourism economy and ruin our quiet enjoyment of the ocean;

WHEREAS oil and gas drilling on our outer continental shelf would create decades of acute environmental risk and permanent deterioration of the quality and integrity of the marine environment for only a few weeks of national petroleum consumption;

WHEREAS FERC has rushed into the business of granting hydrokinetic permits on a case by case basis with no regard for due process and objective rulemaking, and the environmental impacts of wave buoy array deployment are unknown, and would require significant industrial development onshore which is being ignored in its permitting process;

WHEREAS: The cumulative impact of these projects are not considered by any of these agencies and would militarize and industrialize our coast to a vast extent in undesirable ways with which we profoundly disagree;

WHEREAS: We the people, our needs our feelings, our unique culture, economy and ecology are being ignored by the federal government in pursuing these projects;

WE, THE UNDERSIGNED WEST COAST VOTERS URGENTLY INSIST YOU POSTPONE ALL THESE PROJECTS indefinitely for further study as Bush 41 postponed OCS lease sales off California in 1989.
FURTHER we ask you to work with Congress to promulgate OCEAN SANCTUARY legislation to permanently protect coastal areas off California, Oregon and Washington in order to preserve for posterity significant natural characteristics such as deep ocean upwellings which provide a large portion of the nutrients on which our fisheries and planet depend.

This great article by Judith Vidaver of the Ocean Protection Coalition, published in the coalition’s June newsletter, strongly opposes Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s corrupt fast-track Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Process. There is nothing “green” about this process that aims to kick sustainable seaweed harvesters, fishermen and abalone divers off Point Arena to pave the way for offshore oil rigs, wave energy projects and corporate aquaculture.

Photo: If Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Resources Secretary Mike Chrisman have their way, sustainable harvesting of sea palms like these will be prohibited in Sea Lion Cove off Point Arena. A powerful coalition of environmentalists, seaweed harvesters, American Indians, recreational anglers, commercial fishermen and abalone divers are opposing the corrupt MLPA Process.

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Ocean Protection Coalition Opposes Corrupted MLPA

By Judith Vidaver

In 1999 the California State Legislature passed the Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA). This Act seeks to protect diversity of marine life and “help sustain, conserve and protect” marine populations.

To do this, Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) would be established with varying levels of restrictions on allowable activities. The Act further requires monitoring and adaptive management of MPAs. While well-intended, the implementation has been fraught with controversy.

On June 13, OPC attended the Sustainable Fisheries Reality Tour held in Point Arena and heard the concerns of credible fisheries experts. Speakers included Craig Bell (Mendocino County Fish and Game Advisory Commissioner), Jim Martin (Recreational Fishing Alliance and Fish and Game Advisory Commissioner), Allan Jacobs (science instructor), John and Barbara Stephens-Lewallen and Larry Knowles (Mendocino Seaweed Stewardship Alliance) and many other community members who will be impacted by the proposed “Marine Protected Areas.

“Welcome to the Point Arena upwelling,” said Craig Bell, as he opened the meeting part of the Point Arena Sustainable Fisheries Reality Tour. “Point Arena is one of the most environmentally active cities on the North Coast and we don’t support the MLPA’s Integrated preferred alternative (IPA), he
said.

“Don’t underestimate us,” Bell added. “We’ve been giant killers before in Point Arena.”

Bell emphasized that the MLPA process has been expanded from a $250,000 process (as originally intended when the law passed in 1999) to an out of control $25 to $40 million financial boondoggle. Fisheries experts agreed that the current MLPA plan proposed for the North-Central Coast region
(extending from Point Arena to Pigeon Point in San Mateo County) is fatally flawed and shouldn’t be approved by the State Fish and Game Commission in August.

We learned that the process (which was supposed to be stakeholder- driven and democratic) of developing the “recommended alternative” was corrupted. Local stakeholders’ concerns were repeatedly ignored and their recommendations over-ridden by the Packard Foundation and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a national environmental organization based in San Francisco.

The major weaknesses of the proposed plan include:
• It will not do as it was intended to do and will unduly harm fishers and other users of the ocean and seriously impact the local economy.
• The program will be prohibitively expensive to enforce.
• Senate Majority Leader Dean Florez (D-Shafter) has called for a hearing looking into claims of possible conflicts of interest by Fish and Game Commissioner Michael Sutton and others in the MLPA Process.

For these reasons OPC will not support the NRDC alternative for the North-Central Coast region.

Downtown is deserted. Foggy and wet. So we busted out some markers and paper. This is what happened.

The Mendocino Environmental Center has recently joined the Mendo Time Bank, an up-and-coming local exchange network that uses time for currency. In pursuit of our common goals of environmental stewardship, community building, and social justice, Mendo Time Bank is partnering with the MEC and will eventually be part of MEC’s new Transition Town Ukiah project <to be explained in a future post>. The MEC is the new “house”, so to speak, of the Time Bank, providing it with meeting space, a place to have regular orientations, office hours, and social events, as well as providing volunteers to help with administration, promotion, and networking.  The Mendo Time bank has already had orientations at the Center, and is now producing a regular radio program on the MEC’s Low Power FM radio station, KMEC Radio.  The show is airing every other Tuesday from 6 to 7pm.  The show will feature Time Bank news, stories from users, new services offered, music, and more.

The MEC is also accepting Time Dollars for payment of membership dues.  Memberships usually cost $35 dollars per year, or 5 hours of community service per year for trade.  Therefore, the MEC will charge 5 Time Dollars per year for membership.  What membership provides is access to the Center for meetings and so forth, the chance to have a show on KMEC, connection to our email list which provides local action alerts and issue updates, as well as a place for the activist, social advocate, etc to work on projects out of a home base with a phone number, address, and wireless internet that the member can use.  There are many more ways people can benefit as members, check out our “Members” page for more information.

Members and Administrators who put in many hours of work keeping the MEC alive, will now have the opportunity to be compensated for their work with Time Dollars.  It is exiting to offer something to them as a thanks for all they do.  Policy will soon be developed that details who and how members can earn Time Dollars.

To join the Mendo Time Bank, go to www.mendotimebank.com and submit an application.  If you are a member of the MEC <or wish to be> and are interested in helping us to develop this relationship, earn Time Dollars, and meet new people, please contact the MEC by calling our office at7074681660 or emailing us: mendocinoenvironmentalcenter<at>gmail.com

The more we use Time Dollars in diverse ways, the more valuable they become, creating momentum toward a sustainable future.  As we transition our area into a fully inclusive local economy, become more conscious about our consumptive life style, and decide to do things differently, we actually make real change.  Hoping all in Mendo Land will become members of the MEC and the Time Bank, so the services they offered can be fully utilized.  Both organizations are community resources that are waiting community involvement. Start using it, create the habit, and create change!

In 1999, The Mendocino Environmental Center sent two busloads of advocates to Seattle to protest the economic globalization that was the focus of the World Trade Organization conference. In spite of a cold rain, thousands of protesters showed up and managed to block traffic so well that the conference was unable to accomplish any of its objectives. Although there were some independent media that reported from the ground (thanks KZYX!), the mainstream coverage tended to highlight the perspective of the conferences delegates, who typically said, “We know what they’re against. We just can’t figure out what they’re for.”
This complaint was not new. A generation earlier, when the environmental movement really took off, there were many who suggested that it was just another issue to rally revolutionaries as the Vietnam War was winding down. The post World War II enthusiasm for technology and “progress” had little patience for tree-hugging NIMBY contrarians who were viewed, at best, to be well-intentioned dupes of communist propaganda.

In a way, they were right. Many of us were so angry with the excesses of the military-industrial complex, international corporations, and the governments that supported them that we did not pay enough attention to the moral underpinnings of our own efforts. And now, as we advocate against a regional mall in the Ukiah Valley, we are once again being painted as obstacles to “progress”. It is time to state what we are for.
A precious world There have been many celebrations this year marking the fortieth anniversary of humanity’s first landing on the moon. But our first encounter with Luna, and her perspective of the Earth, had come
eight months earlier. On December 24, 1968, as many of Earth’s inhabitants were celebrating the return of the light, three astronauts reached the moon for the first time. They could not land, as the landing craft was not yet ready. But as they finished circling around the far side of the moon, they were nearly overwhelmed by a sight never before seen by humans – Earthrise. One of the astronauts turned his camera, designed to take pictures of craters, to the Earth, which he later described as “a big blue marble, looking so frail and alone in the vast blackness of space.” It was that image, seen from the moon, that provided the impetus for the modern environmental movement.

Sustainability: our gift to the future

There is a saying attributed to the tribal chieftains of the indigenous peoples of this continent: “I am the leader of all my people. Many are alive. Many more have come before. But most are yet to be born.” Nearly every philosophy, religion, tradition, way of life, etc., tries to instruct us how to live day-to-day in order to bring about a better future. Some call this fulfillment, some salvation, some destiny. And it seems to apply not only to each individual but also to humanity as a whole. To paraphrase an environmental mantra, we must think eternally, act in the here-and-now.
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Think eternally,
act here-and-now
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Sustainability is essential. It’s what makes us more than NIMBY’s. If an activity is not sustainable, it is stealing from future generations. Being stewards of the Earth requires us to oppose any such activity. We are for progress, but only if it is sustainable. Nonviolence, toleration, and diversity. For centuries leaders have often argued that the end justifies the means. The result is a world full of hunger, suffering, war, and tyranny.

We believe that the means create the new reality. If we commit to nonviolence, toleration, and diversity, then each decision will embolden humanity, and the paradise we seek will blossom in the present. Have you ever shared such a moment with another, when you start to feel tingles from being so in tune with the magnificence of the human potential? Whenever two or more people gather in the name of compassion,
they make it so. Moments like that happen all the time at the MEC.