|
Voices of the Northwest
The BLM's Spray Plan from Hell
They propose to "treat" 932,000 acres with herbicides annually, using 14 currently "approved" herbicides and 4 new ones.
By Barbara Kelley
Posted on Aug 17, 2007 |
Email this article
Printer friendly page
|
Dear People Who Care,
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) (or Bad Land Management) has issued a Final EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) that is the worst possible news you can imagine. The BLM is the manager of the largest acreage of public land in our country. And, although we the public are the actual owners, they have been calling the shots. We stopped them in 1983-84 by going to federal court, but they are back again with the biggest spray program I have ever heard of. They manage 251 million surface acres, and 750 million sub-surface acres or what they call the "mineral estate." They treat all this as if they own it, and hope to turn it into an empire yielding big bucks for big timber and the Bush Empire--unless we can beat them in court again.
They propose to "treat" 932,000 acres with herbicides annually, using 14 currently "approved" herbicides and 4 new ones. Approval means the chemical got past the EPA which very rarely tests them, the manufacturer does. Cheating, subterfuge, and deception are rampant in the chemical corporation reports.
I am sure the BLM, in tandem with the Bush Administration, wants the Secretary of the Interior to sign the Record of Decision, before Bush is replaced and/or impeached.
The BLM lands are "lower" than the Forest Service lands, and they are interspersed with private holdings such as homes, farms, and businesses. They are connected to all of us by water. Unless some very fundamental things have changed, water still runs together, does not recognize boundaries, makes life on earth possible for all creatures and plants, becomes groundwater, rivers, streams, runs into oceans... All water is connected and, by water, all life is connected. There is no way out of this basic truth, so their argument of "remote" does not wash. Their plan would poison us all.
Well, I said all this to them in my Comments, which are available to you. It's easy now, I can just push a button. I hate to serve up bad news: we are perishing from too much bad news. Sometimes fighting back is a remedy for the bad news blues.
Justice is never granted, it must be wrenched.
For the earth,
Barbara Kelley
You may reach Barbara and SOS care of this zine.
To: Brian Amme
Nevada State Office
1340 Financial Boulevard PO Box 12000
Reno Nevada 89520-0006
From: Save Our ecoSystems inc (SOS), Barbara Kelley, Oregon
Dear Brian Amme,
These are my Comments on the Final EIS and PER, BLM 2007.
I appreciate the help you have given me in trying to navigate my way through this huge document on the Internet.
And I commend all the many people involved in laying out this terrible news with clarity and thoroughness. But you are all living in the midst of a terrible moral dilemma, and those are the last kind words I can bring myself to write. I will address the following comments to "you" and "your," though I have no idea who the people are behind the outrageous statements in the document. The BLM is a faceless giant.
I sent in my comments on the Draft EIS over a year ago, and would like to incorporate them by reference into this final EIS. In my cover letter, I reminded all of you that you are the employees of the American public, and that you are desecrating our public lands against our will. I especially want to re-emphasize that fact at this time.
Fury and Outrage. I refuse to muffle or disguise the fury I feel in looking over your "plan from hell" to ruin our forests. Most people have been persuaded to take a cool, scientific approach in their critiques, and to avoid emotion. I think this is a misplaced value. Your document is an outrage. My emotions are valid. (Martin Luther King did not quiet down his oratory to calm the white conscience. And it is the validity of his righteous moral indignation, as well as his eloquence, that captured our attention and left its everlasting truth in our very souls.)
I am a victim of your faceless policies. I have lifelong diabetes since trying to do an organic farm below forests that were sprayed with Agent Orange in the mid-seventies. Many of our animals and wildlife died, and we all became very ill. The farm had to be abandoned. We finally won a lawsuit in federal court, along with other organizations, after working for years to stop the spraying by other methods (which don't work).
A recent article in the Sunday Oregonian, 6/17/A4, titled "Agent Orange Stash Holds Data," points out that a study of thousands of samples of blood, semen, and urine, from veterans who had been exposed to Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, revealed that "the most notable finding in the initial study was that veterans who absorbed large amounts of the main toxin in Agent Orange (dioxin--ed), may have a higher risk of developing diabetes." This is a high level study of 86,000 samples over 20 years, involving the Air Force, Congress, and the National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine.
Incidentally, diabetes is not in my family and, when I became so ill after repeated spraying above our farm, I was eating healthy; I was 5''7", 130 pounds, did not smoke, drink, or take drugs. And I was working very hard, until I became ill, after repeated sprayings of Agent Orange in the spring of 1975.
Cancer keeps rising, even though treatments are more successful than formerly. It is in every family now. And it kills more children between one and 12 than any other disease, according to the American Cancer Society. (Don't tell me that's from smoking!) Please note: I have addressed cancer in detail in my former comments on the draft. All of your chemicals are toxic and I am convinced that the poisons (sic) you are proposing, all of them, are deadly to human and animal health, wildlife, water, air, and of course the integrity of the forest. The diseases connected with the use of these chemicals are legion, the suffering boundless. I know. "Diuron," for example, is a "known, likely" carcinogen, according to the EPA. You will be held accountable if you use it. The argument that the lands you plan to decimate are "remote," is not valid. Water starts in the headwaters of the forest, and carries your pollution to our rivers, streams, groundwaters, oceans, and all marine and animal life. All water is connected. And, by water, all life is connected.
Any discussion of herbicides should include not only the active ingredients, but also the inerts, especially those known to be harmful to human and animal life, and the environment generally. Many of us have extensive and alarming information on the so-called "inerts" --a deceptive term if ever there was one. Also of concern are the additives you use as solvents, surfactants, or God only knows what else. All these together with the "active ingredients" make up a witches' brew with mostly unknown synergystic impact. Look around you, everywhere: cancer, diabetes, neurological defects, malformations, mental defects, autism, wildlife decline. To what do you attribute all this illness? I don't think it is just the germs! Please! Think what you are doing!
Wildfire. You have, in this document, latched onto the Bush Administration directives on wildfire. Wildfires used to keep the forests healthy before the interference of forest managers. Certain seeds, such as those of the ponderosa pine, for instance, will not germinate without fire.
Do you still use diesel and other such flammable solvents to start your controlled fires, or do you spread them in the forest as part of your herbicide formulations? You probably do, and in so doing, you are greatly increasing the extent and the ferocity of both controlled and wild fires.
Further, by stripping the forest floor of its natural undergowth, and by dessicating the forest with killing toxics, you make the forest more prone to fire. They rage, unimpeded by moisture, through the canopy. And the heavy resistant bark of the old trees does not readily go up in flames like your little saplings. Your tree farms are more flammable than the old diverse stands you poison or cut down.
Also, the missing undergrowth is starving the wildlife. You force them to eat the young trees or strip the bark for nourishment. Then you poison them. Between the clearcutting, the toxic sprays, and the use of repellents, you are guilty of destroying the wildlife that really does have a right to live in the forest.
Long story short, you the managers are exacerbating forest fires. A better approach to this ageless, natural phenomenon (forest fires) would be to disallow the building of permanent homes in or near the forests. Tents, yurts, and the like, could be allowed as temporary shelters, providing ready evacuation plans are filed by their residents so that humans, like the animals, could make a quick getaway.
Global Climate Change is in part due to deforestation as well as other well-known human activites. Your plan is to thin and deplete the forests. This will decrease the total biomass of vegetation. The forest, like the ocean, is one of nature's largest "sinks" for carbon absorbtion and oxygen generation. As usual you are trying to play God, and you are manipulating basic natural metabolisms. Here is what you are doing: the less vegetation---;less rainfall---;more drought---;more fire---;even less vegetation---;less carbon absorbtion and oxygen generation---;less wildlife and their fertilization. And so on, in endless ecosystem feedback loops. Your role as God is a failure. The results of your misguided policies are disastrous. Oceans are rising, biodiversity is falling, extinctions are rising alarmingly, pollution is at an all time high, people are ill . . . . Your activities and you yourselves are complicit in all this. Sorry, that is the unadorned truth.
Invasive Weeds. Most of the public comments on your Draft EIS were on this subject. What they were all saying was that the BLM and other forest managers were causing weed invasion by clearcutting. In a natural forest, where killing plants and animals is not practiced, the checks and balances of prey and predator keeps the forest healthy.
There are other considerations, when you are presented with what you call noxious weeds: are they possibly a natural pioneer step toward forest regeneration? Maybe they are not noxious if you are not in a hurry to plant rows and rows of Douglas Fir for profit? If they are indeed actually preventing trees from resprouting, which I doubt, then you might investigate whether they have culinary or medicinal value. Or possibly could be made into a biofuel.
You need to cancel your plans to destroy our public lands, and seek environmental guidance from some of the deep and wise environmentalists of our day.
Your "No Action" Alternative is deceptively named. You are not proposing "no action" in this plan, but rather a continuation of your present destructive policies. I hope nobody writes in that they support this alternative, having been deceived by its name.
Your Executive Summary is an unabashed piece of hypocrisy, a stunning compendium of unsubstantiated generalities.
I will, for the sake of brevity, quote just a few of them. You claim that "treatments" (and this is of course a euphemism) will:
"achieve habitat enhancement"
"improve ecosystem health"
"benefit fish and wildlife habitat" (a repeat of the first one)
"improve riparian and wetland areas"
"improve water quality in priority watersheds"
And so forth! I didn't believe the Wizard of Oz even before his curtain was pulled aside, and I do not believe any of these false claims.
Ethics. It is hard on us to keep informing and imploring you people, you paid scientists and foresters. Are you aware of the moral abyss into which your careers have fallen? In the education you pursued, probably as a lover of nature and the land in the first place, were there any courses in ethics? Would you take such a job again if you knew what you were getting into? You have turned our public lands into a battleground between those who fight for profit and those of us who fight for the preservation of the Earth.
I suggested previously that you use the expertise of the many fine environmental thinkers and writers on the scene today. Allow me to introduce, and exhort you to read, two very brilliant thinkers whose piece I will attach as Exhibit A. Their names are Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim of Yale University. They have joint appointments at Yale in the Divinity School, the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and the Department of Religious Studies. The piece I attach, titled "Daring to Dream, Religion and the Future of the Earth," is published in Reflections, Spring 2007, a Yale publication. Their opening words:
"There is a deepening realization from many quarters that the changes that humans are making on the planet are comparable to the changes of a major geological era. The scientific evidence says that we are damaging life systems on Earth and causing species extinction (20,000 species lost annually) at such a rate as to bring about the end of our current period, the Cenozoic era. No such mass extinctions have occurred since the dinosaurs were eliminated 6.5 million years ago."
The Earth Charter, Values and Principles for a Sustanable Future. Were you represented at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992? Are you in possession of a copy of the Earth Charter which grew from that international meeting of concern? If not, copies can be obtained fromhttp://www.earthcharter.org or (506) 205-1600. The Earth Charter is a work of genius, a phenomenon of international cooperation, an inspiration and guide to good earth care.
If your agency were to be guided by its principles, you would not be having this adversarial relationship with the American public. Your work might once again become interesting, protective, useful; you were meant to be stewards of the lands and waters, not to prepare timberlands for sale to the highest bidder.
Please read the last few paragraphs of "Daring to Dream" in Exhibit A, wherein the eminent Tucker and Grim summarize and advocate for using the guidance of the Earth Charter to help save our earth. In their words: "... (The Earth Charter) reflects the aspirations of the thousands of groups and individuals who helped to shape this people's document. It embodies the idea that the physical, chemical, and biological conditions for life are in delicate interaction over time to bring forth and sustain life."
We look to you to assume a sense of responsibility for the BLM lands--the peoples, the plants and animals, the air and the waters, whose health and well being depend upon your integrity, honesty, and vision.
Barbara Kelley, July 2007
Editor's note:
A few minor typos were corrected August 25. 2007.
You may find Barbara Kelley's work at WxNW.org.
© Copyright 2000-2006 by West By Northwest.org
Top of Page
untitled
|
