First, you need to try to picture it: thousands of tuna, salmon, cod, and other species being bred in steel cages up to 200 miles offshore, across 3.4 million acres of ocean (about the land area of the lower 48 states). That’s the legislation recently put forward by the Bush Administration, a fish-farming “panacea” aimed […]
Month: October 2005
Bush and ‘Bycatch’
I wish we had a more ignominious term than “bycatch” to describe one of the greatest threats to our marine environment. Maybe fishing vessels could be found guilty of “fish-kill in the second degree.” According to the United Nations, fully one-quarter of the fish taken in nets, seines, and longlines are discarded as unwanted or […]
Pombo failed to pay taxes for two foreign trips, group says
Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Tracy, on Wednesday downplayed his involvement with a group that sent him to New Zealand and Japan in recent years, possibly in violation of U.S. tax law. The International Foundation for the Conservation of Natural Resources paid more than $23,000 for the trips in 2000 and 2002, but apparently didn’t pay taxes […]
Of Karl Rove, Nixon’s Gray Ghost, Pinball Proto-Fascism, Muscle Car Imperialism, And The Gong Show Of The American Political System
“We were primed for proto-fascism by our habitual consumerism and willful ignorance. As the years trundled on, our customized vans would become Mini Vans that would morph into SUVs and Humvees. It was all about comfort, the illusion of control, and insularity, even then. All about our right to the pursuit of numbness. We were […]
Caring For Creation
I don’t fit neatly into the job description of an environmental journalist, although I have kept returning to the beat ever since my first documentary on the subject some 30 years ago. That was a story about how the new Republican governor of Oregon, Tom McCall, had set out to prove that the economy and […]