I recently watched this video on the Union of Concerned Scientists Website linked to from this post on Fox Attacks. It seems to be pretty easy to understand and has some pretty damning reasons, if they are true, why bunker busters would be ineffective at destroying underground targets and would cause massive damage to the environment and kill millions of people.

Bush added funding for the nuclear form of the bunker buster to his recent budget proposal. There is a Washington Post article here but you need to register. Why would he add this kind of thing to his budget proposal when even the Pentagon realizes how much damage it could do? I sincerely hope it's just a bluff.

I read conservative pundit Michelle Malkin's blog which mentions the 9th circuit's decision to allow the military to conduct sonar exercises without previous measures to ensure that they weren't hurting whales. While I understand the need to protect the country and that sonar exercises have a degree of necessity (though I'd be lying if I said I didn't think it was largely of our own making), I wonder what was wrong with some of the measures the military was taking to protect wildlife and why it wouldn't be a good compromise between military and the environment.

Michelle Malkin didn't really provide much commentary besides just mentioning it in a blog article and putting it in the category of "Animal Rights Wackos". But the (largely conservative) commentators filled in the blanks. Given the unlimited lengths that some people would give the military to protect the country, it should be no wonder that liberals like myself get nervous. I imagine they would let animals become extinct without blinking in the name of protecting the country.

One commentator called "ajmontana" even mentioned that he was of the opinion that the U.S. Navy owns the ocean and can do whatever it wants to protect the country.

On August 31st, 2007 at 7:07 pm, ajmontana said:

Without sounding crass imho the US Navy owns the ocean and can do whatever they need to do to protect the USA. But that’s just me.

Another, DesertLover, was also of the impression that if sonar endangered animals in the many years it was in operation we would have heard about it somehow.

On August 31st, 2007 at 4:39 pm, DesertLover said:

I guess he doesn’t know that sonar equipment has been around since 1913 … first called “hydrophones” by the British Navy for detecting submarines in 1915 … in the form we know it today since 1931 … so after nearly 100 years they don’t know anything aobut its effects … so that tells me there aren’t any … if there were we would have heard about it by now … end of story …

<snip>

As if the animals would have sent us an e-mail about it or something. Perhaps he/she thinks that ecological research happens on it's own (In actuality, I'm pretty sure it relies largely on government grants. Of which there are few, let alone for ecological research that would lend evidence to environmentalists and get in the way of military/government policy).

Of the commentors I only saw one that seems to have thought before posting. It seems generally that liberals (only two that I saw) and conservatives alike don't think much before posting.　The one I saw that thought about his post, Alphonse, is likely a liberal, though he didn't make a particularly liberal statement per se, it was given a bit of spin. He mentioned that sonar has increased in power over the years it's been in use causing it to cause more damage to wildlife and at least attempted to provide some evidence (Wikipedia). It wasn't without responses, one saying that submarines don't use the sonar at full power, which may be true but I would doubt that the nominal power hasn't risen significantly. He also mentioned that they use active sonar in favor of passive sonar. However, passive sonar being the act of just listening in the ocean for other vessels, it is hard, and requires a human to do it (at least for final verification). So, It seems as submarines become quieter active sonar will be used more and more for detection and location of submarines.

At any rate, I thought it was pretty scary that many would disregard wildlife with such ease. I think that military and military backers should understand that that's how activism works. Environmentalists are not acting to inhibit military for no reason. Environmental damage by military is a big issue which would continue unabated if they didn't exist. On the other hand military folks are not conducting military actions to harm wildlife, it's because they want to make better sonar and inhibit others from gaining the upper hand in a conflict which is also a valid pursuit.

I am of the opinion that there are two extremes. One is no sonar exercises at all, the other is sonar exercises with no strings attached. Wouldn't conducting exercises with restrictions be a proper compromise?

This past weekend I went to my friend Matt's house in Cambridge, MD on the Eastern Shore. It was good to see him again since I don't go to see him very often. Though we haven't been able to get together very much since I left school, we still have managed to keep in touch regularly on IM and I feel like he'll be one of my lifelong friends.

We went Kayaking on the Blackwater Wildlife Reserve (map) (which, as I've mentioned earlier in my blog, has a plan to develop new homes on it, see here to learn more). It was really fun and it was nice to do a good easy going, low-tech activity, since most of the time I feel like I'm bombarded with the fast pace of life in the digital age. It also, helped me to realize just how important wildlife reserves are to the local animal populations. We didn't have to work very hard to see Egrets, Cranes, Ducks, and fish. Not to mention the impact that developing on watershed like that would have on the Bay.

Anyway, I had a good weekend hanging out with my friend and kayaking. We made tentative plans to do it again in August and I'm looking forward to it.

My good buddy Matt let me know about a plan to put in a resort on a nature preserve near his home on the eastern shore. From the site: "The developer has requested growth allocation or special permission to build in protected areas". In order to do that they would need to drastically change the ecosystem (currently a wetland) of the area by adding soil to it to make it stable. Also from the site, "The site’s hydric soils and high water table, which prevents the ground from absorbing stormwater, means that if the land is developed, large volumes of polluted runoff containing fertilizers, pesticides, and other pollutants from roads, lawns, and the golf course could flow into Little Blackwater River, only hundreds of feet away, and then into Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, and, ultimately, the Bay."


In any case this is an example of development that is not smart. Please sign the petition to stop this development.

I just learned today via the Sierra Club Insider that President Bush's proposed budget is proposing to sell off 800,000 acres of National Forest and Bureau of Land Management lands to raise money for the federal treasury. I think this is a bad idea.

My firm belief is that if the federal government sells that land then the land is gone forever. I think it's the government's duty to do whatever it can to hold on to and protect lands like these. Even if they aren't necessary now the government would never be able to get them back when they do become necessary. I think if we sold the land now we would wish we didn't 100 years from now (If even that long). Selling it also creates bad precident that selling land owned by the National Forest Service is ok and it's not.

One might come up with reasons in your head why this might be a good idea but this page does a good job of explaining why this is important. For example, you might think that these lands aren't important or ecologically significant but you can see that's not the case from the Sierra Club page as it lists example of land that would be up for sale:

• 160-acre parcel in the Big Creek drainage south of Emigrant, MT. A popular recreation area, which abuts the upscale guest ranch, Mountain Sky Ranch, it includes three recreational homesite leases and a fishing access site.
• Nearly 730 acres of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area in Oregon and Washington
• 1300 acres in Washington along Sultan's Canyon, a remote and rugged river gorge with rare low elevation old growth forest. (Old growth forest has been proven by ecologists to be extremely environmentally significant)

Obviously the #1 issue today is global warming and renewable energy (almost the same issue). Selling these lands opens the door to development and will hurt the envornment in ways unimaginable. Probably in ways we won't know until we've done it. Just as how global warming affects the environment in ways unimaginable (Carbon emissions in the air are absorbed by the ocean causing them to be more acidic for example. Did you know that?! :o Many ocean creatures can't survive in more acidic water.).

Anyway, sign the Sierra Club's petition and help them lobby to remove this part of the budget.

I've decided that I want to get more involved in Ecology at a local level. I'm facinated by using the internet to organize people at a local level. Websites like Meetup.com, while I don't like how and how much they charge for the service, do well for organizing people with similar interests. Today I'm reading about Ecology and looking at a number of ways of helping out within the local area. The Sierra club has a local Virginia Chapter which looks interesting.


I think I'd like to start by really seriously changing my lifestyle to incorporate as much reuse/recycling/conservation as possible. This means making organizing recycled materials and making regular trips to the nearby waste drop off point for stuff they don't pick up on the curb. It also means recycling every piece of recyclable material. I think by doing this I'll learn a lot more about how to make it easier for people to do this. I think it would go a long way towards helping the environment if recycling was easier to do. Maybe I can help somehow in this regard.


Another issue I'd like to learn more about are using locally grown (reduces transportation waste/pollution) and organic food. While I am able to buy organic food easily in Fairfax, it's quite expensive and inconvenient. I think I'd like to figure out better ways for me to store food, and how to make food using ingredients that keep for a long time so that I make less trips to the supermarket.


I really believe that if people were more inclined to reduce/reuse/recycle, due to social pressure, and it was easier to do so, that people would do it and society would be a much more sustainable place for it. I suppose that improving conservation would be the most difficult change to enact since it requires social change that doesn't benefit people in terms of time/money. I suppose the only way to get people to conserve more would be to make it harder for them to buy things (by driving up the prices through stiffer government regulation perhaps). I don't know. I suppose if these were easy questions to answer or solve then they may have been solved already.

My gas milage for my 2003 Honda Civic. It's supposed to get 29 city, 38 Highway and I average somewhere in the middle. Makes sense right?

I recently read this article at BCC news. This brings my attention to another of our so called president's failings. The environment.

People have been saying for years that global warming is a problem and have on numerous instances have shown that since humans have entered the industrial age around 1900, the average temperature of the atmosphere has gone up dramatically. It's just too much of a conincidence, for me at least, that the global temperature started rising almost exactly in tandem with industrialization.

However as this article, and many like it recently, show Republicans/Conservatives and Democrats/Liberals alike have gravely underestimated the problem (though liberals to a lesser extent perhaps). It's one thing to be given circumstantial evidence of man's affects on the environment 20 years ago. But it's another thing to ignore the evidence that has been building for the case of human induced global warming and is in our collective posession now. While I think that Democrats probably don't do enough for the environment, they still are WORLDS better at creating ecologically friendly policies than the conservative counterparts and their leader, George W Bush.

All signs point to disaster. If you think about just the obvious impacts of greenhouse gasses you can miss all the other problems that unnatural amounts of greenhouse gasses pose. And this is not even speaking to all of the other problems humans cause that are mentioned in the article.

It doesn't take a genius to see that we need to change our ways. Even if (big IF) the theories and evidence are wrong and it's natural, there is still a considerable amount more risk associated with doing nothing than with doing something (and some people are spending time promoting space tourism, but that's another rant I don't have time for, try this one).