Tipi Workshop, Saturday
September 22, 2007

Learn by Doing!
We will follow expert guide Eustace Conway in setting up several tipis from the ground up. This workshop is a one-day event all about learning how to set up and take down an Indian tipi in a smooth, safe, easy manner, and to really understand the process while building great personal confidence in this empowerment.

Eustace lived in a tipi for seventeen years and has taught countless thousands of people how to “dance up a tipi” – so very easy when properly done! He produced a wonderful video show called “The Tipi” on how this articulate process can be a fun, flowing dance of ease. The video is for sale on the Turtle Island website at www.turtleislandpreserve.com or by calling the Turtle Island office at
(828) 265-2267.

Location: Centered in the beautiful wilderness valley, an
awe-inspiring base camp at Turtle Island Preserve .

Time: Our workshop starts at 10:00am and stops at 3:30pm.

Cost: $95.00 per person
A wonderful lunch is $10.00 extra if you
would like to add that to your day’s experience.

Register: Available on our website or by calling (828) 265-2267
Leave a message with the workshop name and date,
your name & phone number, and the number of people attending.
Mail your payment to: Turtle Island Preserve
1443 Lonnie Carlton Road
Triplett, NC 28618

Horse and Mule Driving Workshop with Eustace Conway

December 1, 2007
Join us for an introduction to working horses from a moving vehicle and from the ground. Together we will experience logging, sled work, using a farm wagon, a two-wheel cart, a four-wheel buggy, and a mowing machine; and go over many fundamentals of training a horse from the ground for general farm use and horse power other than riding. This workshop will be held at the renowned horse drawn farm Turtle Island Preserve. Our large collection of antique horse drawn vehicles is an inspiration in and of itself.
This is a hands-on workshop. We will get you as involved as you want to be. We will drive single horses and pairs; we will cover harnesses- different types and applications, choosing a harness, adjusting them for your horse, and where to get harnesses and other equipment. This workshop is as comprehensive as you can get in a one day activity; from pleasure driving to heavy farm work, light horse and mule to heavy draft. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to receive such a broad introduction.
One of the most valuable aspects of this workshop is the unique ability extended by the lead teacher, master horseman Eustace Conway. He not only has a gift with horses but has the ability to interpret that knowledge into a digestible form for the human student. He will sensitively match each participant’s needs on an individual coaching basis to make sure that you “get it” and can grow tremendously during this one day event. Eustace has taught horse lore for over 10 years at Turtle Island and holds two long distance horse-powered world records.
This workshop is available to anyone 16 years or older. The date is Saturday December 1 arrival time 9AM; departure time 4:30PM. Located at Turtle Island Preserve, near Boone, NC. Cost is $95 (make checks payable to Eustace Conway). Bring your own lunch or for $10 a fine home cooked meal is available; everything else is provided. To register and reserve your space mail a deposit ($50), or the full tuition, in check form to the following address:

1443 Lonnie Carlton Road
Deep Gap, NC 28618
(828) 265-2267
www.turtleislandpreserve.com
mail@ turtleislandpreserve.com

Barack Obama recently spoke on mountaintop removal during a speech in Lexington, Kentucky.

He said the country also needs a forward-thinking energy policy, and he alluded to his disapproval of the coal mining process of mountaintop removal.

“We’re tearing up the Appalachian Mountains because of our dependence on fossil fuels,” he said, sparking loud applause.

Senator Christopher Dodd has spoken directly to the proposed Buffer Zone rule change:

I oppose Bush’s proposal to relax environmental rules on mountaintop removal. This rule change is an example of special interests, in this case coal companies, running the government. When big coal companies make the rules, worker safety and the environment suffer.
Instead of expanding coal companies’ right to destroy the environment while mining for coal, the government should be working to develop truly clean and safe coal technologies. This means protecting our climate with new technologies, protecting mine workers by enforcing safety rules and standing up to the big companies, and protecting communities and our natural landscapes by using only safe and clean extraction methods. This can only be accomplished by opposing mountaintop removal.

Bill Richardson also provided a strong statement on the issue:

The Administration’s decision to streamline mountaintop mining isn’t good for anyone. Instead it’s a gift to the industry that has been most loyal to the GOP at the expense of mine workers and the environment. What this nation needs is a 21st century energy policy that will reduce the pressure to dig up and burn every last ounce of coal, no matter how dangerous or how destructive. Coal can fit into this picture with new technologies, but the Administration is hanging onto the last scraps of a failed energy policy as long as it can.

In the West, and in Appalachia, people are fighting to protect their communities, their jobs, and the environment in the face of this rapacious policy. Jim Webb said it best before he was elected senator to the coal state of Virginia: ‘The ever-hungry industrialists (realized) that (Appalachia) sat arop one huge vein of coal. And so the rape began. The people from the outside showed up with complicated contracts… Soon the (local folks) were treated to a sundering of their own land… The Man got his coal, and the profits it brought when he shipped it out. (The local people) got their wages, black lung, and the desecration of their land.’” (From Born Fighting, Jim Webb, 2004).

Richardson also throws us a bonus quote from Senator Jim Webb, who himself needs to start leading on this issue.

(h/t DevilsTower at DKos)

Two New Books on Mountaintop Removal
Want to learn more about mountaintop removal? Check out these two new books:

Now available: Moving Mountains by Penny Loeb.

“Loeb compassionately chronicles 10 years of grassroots efforts by citizens of southern West Virginia to protect their homes from coalmining damage.”–Publishers Weekly

In late 1994, wells in Pie, West Virginia, began to go dry, leaving many residents of the small coal-mining town without potable water. When local housewife Trish Bragg made a few phone calls in an effort to solve this problem, she had no idea that her inquiries would eventually lead to her becoming the named plaintiff in a major lawsuit, a summa cum laude college graduate, and a hero of her community.

Moving Mountains recounts the struggle of Trish Bragg and other ordinary West Virginians for fair treatment by the coal companies that dominate the local economies of southern West Virginia. The collateral effects of mountaintop removal, deep mining, and other mining practices are felt most profoundly in the communities that supply much of the labor for these mining operations, which results in divided loyalties among families that have made their living from coal mining for generations. Author Penny Loeb spent nine years chronicling the triumphs and setbacks of people in the West Virginia coalfields–people caught between the economic opportunities provided by coal and the detriments to health and to quality of life that are so often the by-products of the coal industry. The result of her work is an account of the human and environmental costs of coal extraction, and the inspirational grassroots crusade to mitigate those costs.

Available Sept. 30: Bringing Down The Mountains by Shirley Stewart Burns, Ph.D

Bringing Down the Mountains provides insight into how mountaintop removal has affected the people and the land of southern West Virginia. It examines the mechanization of the mining industry and the power relationships between coal interests, politicians, and the average citizen. Bringing Down the Mountains reveals how a political system married to natural-resource extraction turns a blind eye to the irrevocable disfigurement of the earth while thousands of West Virginians suffer the consequences…The individuals whose lives have been ruined by mountaintop removal want change.

SC Forestry Commission: More wildfires than usual this month

COLUMBIA, SC (WIS) – August has been an unusually fiery month, according to experts at the South Carolina Forestry Commission. The state agency is charged with fighting wildfires throughout the state.

Agency Fire Chief Paul Watts says wildfire behavior has been more aggressive in recent weeks, due in part to the drought conditions that persist across the Palmetto State.

Watts says, “Our fire numbers are up, we’re having more than usual, they’re behaving more aggressively and are larger in acreage. We usually don’t see flame heights extending beyond tree tops in August.”

In the first half of the month, 215 fires were reported to the SCFC. A look at the last ten years of Augusts shows an average of 160.

South Carolina’s wildfire season is fire season is normally in late winter/early spring, but the drought has extended the season this year. Today, Watts said, “Our relative humidity and winds don’t take us to Red Flag Alert status yet, but we’re getting close.”

Agency officials urge South Carolinians to take precautions outdoors with regards to burning. The drought index is about 700 and the scale only goes to 800. The index is one of the tools we use to estimate wildfire risk with regards to fuel moisture. These extreme conditions have left ground fuels dry and ripe for fire.

This unusual pattern takes its toll on the Commission personnel who battle these fires too. Hot weather makes fighting abnormally large and numerous fires that much more dangerous.

This article found on:
http://www.wistv.com/Global/story.asp?S=6956724&nav=menu36_3

News notes are courtesy of Southern Forests Network News Notes
www.southernsustainableforests.org

Steady loss of hemlock trees could devastate ecosystem

OTTO — Chelcy Ford looked up into the early afternoon sunshine and pointed to the naked, brown branches of the hemlock trees surrounding her. The bare-limbed evergreens are a familiar sight here in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, where nearly all of the hemlocks are dying after being infested by the woolly adelgid.

Unlike many other scientists trying to figure out how to save the trees, Ford and a small group of researchers at the Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory here are letting them die.

Their hope is that by studying the dying hemlocks they can begin to answer the question that seems to puzzle everyone: What will happen when they’re gone?

The woolly adelgid and its distinctive white, snow-like egg sacs have moved through the region faster than anyone had predicted, and scientists say all of the hemlocks in Western North Carolina’s forests could be gone in the next five years.

As more research continues, scientists are finding that the hemlock plays a critical role in its ecosystem, and without another species to replace it, the hemlock’s loss could mean major changes for the area’s forests.

“We lost the American chestnut,” Rusty Rhea, an entomologist with the U.S. Forest Service, said of the tree species that was essentially wiped out by a fungus in the middle of the 20th century. “It went away and the oak trees slid in there and took its place. It was a pseudo-substitute.

“When the hemlock goes away, there’s not going to be a pseudo-substitute. That habitat is going to be lost.”
The threat to the hemlocks

The woolly adelgids were thought to have come into the United States on ornamental plants imported from Japan in the 1920s, appearing first in Virginia in the 1950s and then making their way up to the Northeast in the 1990s.

The bugs made their way into the Southern Appalachians around 2002, and now many hemlocks in neighborhoods all over Western North Carolina display the distinctive white, cottony balls on their branches. Without any natural predators, the adelgids have flourished, feeding on Eastern and Carolina hemlocks, which are only found in the Southern Appalachians. The adelgids inject toxic saliva into the trees that effectively kills them over a period of years.

“It caught us off-guard,” said Chris Ulrey, a plant ecologist with the Blue Ridge Parkway. “All of a sudden it popped up all over Western North Carolina, and it just spread.”

Ulrey and others who spend a lot of time in the area’s forests said the loss of the hemlock in the Southern Appalachians has progressed much faster than anyone had predicted. Ulrey said nearly all of the trees on the Blue Ridge Parkway are infested. About one-quarter of the hemlocks in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park are already dead, and forester Tom Remaley estimates that all the untreated hemlocks in the park will be dead in two to five years.

“Really cold winters will really slow it down,” Jim Vose, a researcher at Coweeta, said of the adelgids. “We don’t have those conditions. We have ideal conditions for adelgids to reproduce.”

In the Southern Appalachians, hemlocks are typically found in riparian zones, areas of vegetation near streams, and are a keystone species, meaning they play a unique role in the ecosystem.

“There’s only a few that are keystone species that if you lose them, it can disproportionate effects on the ecosystem,” Vose said.

The streams and areas surrounding them are home to a large number of fish, including trout, along with insects, salamanders and hundreds of invertebrates. The hemlocks themselves are home to a few different species of migratory birds.

“We have the highest diversity in riparian zones of anywhere in the country,” Vose said. “Those environmental conditions are going to change.”

Scientists at Coweeta, a research arm of the forest service, started examining the effects of the loss of the hemlocks in 2004 by setting up plots in riparian zones in their laboratory in Otto.
Studying the effects

The first study published by Ford and Vose this July determined that the hemlocks are taking up much less water as they die – about 10 percent less annually and 30 percent less in the winter and spring.

This increase in water in the areas where hemlocks grow means that stream flow could increase and the riparian zones could become wetter, which could have consequences for all of the animals and plants in the area.

The hemlocks, with their dense canopy, also provide shade that helps to regulate stream temperatures and keep the ground moist. The loss of the hemlock’s canopy could change the temperatures in streams and riparian zones that are critical to the survival of everything from the trout to the worms in the soil.

The loss of the tree may mean that many birds will lose their homes. And there are other considerations — the hemlock’s needles play a role in the acidity of the soil and the tree’s tannins are already washing into streams in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

“Just from the basic water balance to the sunlight hitting the forest floor, it will really have a cascading effect to species in the area,” said Mark Cantrell, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “I think because of the widespread and catastrophic level of impact, we can expect there to be significant changes.”

The biggest changes might be when the hemlocks, which can weigh up to 2,000 pounds, fall down. This will send huge amounts of wood onto the forest floor, causing danger to campers and increasing the risk of forest fires. The large trees can also alter the region’s streams, changing the water’s acidity and causing blockages, which could lead to flooding, said Will Blozan, president of the Eastern Native Tree Society and an arborist who lives in Asheville.

Without another evergreen species to take the place of the hemlocks, hardwood trees may move into the area. But these trees cannot provide the same functions as an evergreen, and the thick rhododendron that often thrives in hemlock stands will make it difficult for other large tree species to move in.

As more research comes out of the laboratory, scientists are beginning to discover just how devastating the loss the species will be. Vose said understanding these effects will help researchers determine how to minimize the impact of the loss of the hemlock in the Southern Appalachians.

“Everyone’s just saying it’s going to be bad,” Ulrey said, “But we’re not going to know until it starts happening.”
Trying to save some hemlocks

While the Forest Service, the National Forest Service and the Blue Ridge Parkway all use both chemical and biological controls to stop the adelgid, their cost and sheer number of hemlocks make it impossible to save large portions of the trees.

The Forest Service is able to treat less than 5 percent of the hemlock population on its land in WNC. Great Smoky Mountains National Park has treated about 1,000 acres of trees in conservation areas and another 1,000 near the roadside. The Blue Ridge Parkway has treated about 2,000 trees in its forests.

The agencies have also released beetles that are natural predators of the adelgid into the forests, although there are too many adelgids and not enough beetles. They are also working on getting more species of beetles, which Rhea said is necessary to control the adelgids.

The goal is to try to save some portion of the hemlock population with the chemical treatments. Scientists hope that they can use these stands to repopulate areas that are being lost and that the beetles will keep the future adelgid population in check.

In the future, however, the loss of the hemlocks is going to be coupled with the loss of other tree species as more non-native pests enter the forests in WNC, Rhea said.

“It’s just one thing after another,” he said. “The additive effect of all of these things is going to be catastrophic.”

News notes are courtesy of Southern Forests Network News Notes
www.southernsustainableforests.org

Larry Gibson, who has worked tirelessly to show the damage of Mountaintop Removal coal mining to the world was featured on CNN’s Heroes: Larry Gibson- Defending the Planet. The segment was aired on August 14, August 16 and August 19. Larry Gibson is an OVEC board member and Mountain Keeper who has tried to protect his families land and graveyard on Kayford Mountain, West Virginia. To see the segment, use this link: http://edition.cnn.com/video/#/video/living/2007/08/14/cnn.heroes.larry.gibson.cnn

Ravaging Appalachia

Give the Bush administration credit for persistence. It just won’t let a bad idea die. On Friday, the Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining proposed new regulations that it hopes will permanently legalize mountaintop mining — a cheap, ruthlessly efficient, environmentally destructive means of mining coal from the mountains of Appalachia.

By our count, this is the third attempt in the last six years to enshrine the practice by insulating it from legal challenge. But since the net result is likely to be more confusion and more courtroom wrestling, the situation cries out for Congressional intervention to define once and for all what mining companies can and cannot do.

for the rest of this editorial, please visit the New York Times here

August 22, 2007

Contact:
Cindy Rank, West Virginia Highlands Conservancy (304) 924-5802
Dianne Bady, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (740) 886-5796
Vernon Haltom, Coal River Mountain Watch (304) 854-2182
Jared Saylor, Earthjustice (202) 667-4500
Jim Hecker, Public Justice (202) 797-8600
Ed Hopkins, Sierra Club (202) 675-7908

Bush Administration Proposes Repeal of Stream Protection Rule to Ease Legal Limits on Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining
Protective “buffer zone” for streams ignored under new OSM plan

Washington, D.C. – Continuing a dangerous and irresponsible trend, the federal Office of Surface Mining (OSM) this week will announce plans to try again to make stream annihilation legal by exempting coal mining wastes from a 1983 regulation.

For years, the agency has ignored the law and allowed thousands of miles of headwater and perennial streams in Appalachia to be permanently buried by coal companies under millions of tons of waste generated by mountaintop removal coal mining. Known as the “stream buffer zone rule,” this decades-old regulation has prohibited surface coal-mining activities from disturbing areas within 100 feet of streams. A copy of the proposed changes to the buffer zone rule is available at: http://www.earthjustice.org/library/legal_docs/draft-environmental-impact-statement-on-the-stream-buffer-zone-rule.pdf

“The Bush administration just doesn’t give up in its quest to give away more and more legal protections to the mountaintop removal polluters,” said Joan Mulhern, Senior Legislative Counsel for Earthjustice. “Despite the federal government’s own studies showing widespread, harmful, and irreversible stream loss in the region, the OSM proposes exempting the most harmful mountaintop removal mining activities from the buffer zone rule. Once again, OSM is demonstrating that it is not an effective regulator for the public, but the ‘Office for Slicing Mountains’ and ‘Office of Stream Mangling’ for coal companies.”

The new exemption is the latest chapter in a long-running effort by the Bush administration to allow coal companies to avoid compliance with both the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (administered by OSM) and the Clean Water Act. According to OSM’s own figures, 1,208 miles of streams in Appalachia were destroyed from 1992 to 2002, and regulators approved 1,603 more valley fills between 2001 and 2005 that will destroy 535 more miles of streams. Those actions were taken in defiance of the plain language of the existing rule. Under the plan announced this week, OSM proposes to change the rule to conform with its deviant behavior. It would exempt from the stream buffer zone rule those very mountaintop removal activities that are most destructive to streams, including “permanent excess spoil fills, and coal waste disposal facilities” – in other words, giant valley fills and sludge-filled lagoons.

“OSM has chosen to turn its back on irreplaceable water resources of the Appalachian region,” said Cindy Rank with West Virginia Highlands Conservancy. “Headwater streams are the lifeblood of the mountains and those of us privileged enough to live in those mountains. This new interpretation of the buffer zone rule is an unholy reversal of the original intent of the Surface Mine Act, which was to protect communities and streams, not bury them.”

The effort to repeal the buffer zone rule dates back to 2004, when OSM proposed repealing the Reagan-era rule to allow coal companies to accelerate mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia. In response to protests from coalfield residents and conservation groups, OSM agreed it would do an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) before changing the longstanding rule. But in its new draft EIS, OSM rejected and failed to analyze all alternatives that would have restricted stream filling. In its own words, “OSM would not anticipate a major shift in on-the-ground consequences from any of the alternatives.” Most egregious is that the agency did not even consider the effect of enforcing the stream buffer zone rule as written.

“OSM summarily rejected all alternatives that would reduce harm and only considered those that would allow stream burials to continue at the same rate as in the past,” said Jim Hecker, Environmental Enforcement Director at Public Justice. “OSM’s own report shows that valley fills harm downstream water quality but this proposal does nothing to address it.”

The agency also assumes all stream loss will be fully mitigated, even though it freely admits that stream mitigation has generally failed. “While proven methods exist for larger stream channel restoration and creation, the state of the art in creating smaller headwater streams onsite has not reached the level of reproducible success,” the OSM wrote. “Attempts to reestablish the functions of headwater streams…have achieved little success to date.”

“The coal companies have yet to show that they can successfully recreate streams after they completely destroy these mountains and bury these waters, yet OSM still gives them this major exemption from the law,” said Dianne Bady, with the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition. “These headwater streams are the sources of our drinking water and our heritage, and this administration is knowingly allowing them to be buried and poisoned.”

This wholesale exemption for mountaintop removal mining will have significant impact to downstream water quality, permanently filling and destroying important headwaters that feed larger waters that function as drinking water sources and fishing and recreational waters for thousands of Americans. Already, mountaintop removal mining has flattened more than 500,000 acres and permanently buried 2,000 miles of streams.

“The OSM essentially wants to destroy our most valuable, life-giving resource to extract a filthy, polluting resource,” said Vernon Haltom of Coal River Mountain Watch. “We who live near mountaintop removal sites are having our future sustainability destroyed for someone else’s short-term profits.”

“This proposal amounts to a stamp of approval for the nation’s most destructive form of coal mining,” said Ed Hopkins, Director of Sierra Club’s Environmental Quality program. “Instead of loosening protections for our waters, we should be strengthening our commitment to cleaner, renewable sources of energy that can protect our communities, boost the economy and help fight global warming.”

WASHINGTON, Aug. 22 — The Bush administration is set to issue a regulation on Friday that would enshrine the coal mining practice of mountaintop removal. The technique involves blasting off the tops of mountains and dumping the rubble into valleys and streams.

It has been used in Appalachian coal country for 20 years under a cloud of legal and regulatory confusion.

The new rule would allow the practice to continue and expand, providing only that mine operators minimize the debris and cause the least environmental harm, although those terms are not clearly defined and to some extent merely restate existing law.

The Office of Surface Mining in the Interior Department drafted the rule, which will be subject to a 60-day comment period and could be revised, although officials indicated that it was not likely to be changed substantially.

The regulation is the culmination of six and a half years of work by the administration to make it easier for mining companies to dig more coal to meet growing energy demands and reduce dependence on foreign oil.

Government and industry officials say the rules are needed to clarify existing laws, which have been challenged in court and applied unevenly.

A spokesman for the National Mining Association, Luke Popovich, said that unless mine owners were allowed to dump mine waste in streams and valleys it would be impossible to operate in mountainous regions like West Virginia that hold some of the richest low-sulfur coal seams.

All mining generates huge volumes of waste, known as excess spoil or overburden, and it has to go somewhere. For years, it has been trucked away and dumped in remote hollows of Appalachia.

Environmental activists say the rule change will lead to accelerated pillage of vast tracts and the obliteration of hundreds of miles of streams in central Appalachia.

“This is a parting gift to the coal industry from this administration,” said Joe Lovett, executive director of the Appalachian Center for the Economy and the Environment in Lewisburg, W.Va. “What is at stake is the future of Appalachia. This is an attempt to make legal what has long been illegal.”

Mr. Lovett said his group and allied environmental and community organizations would consider suing to block the new rule.

Mountaintop mining is the most common strip mining in central Appalachia, and the most destructive. Ridge tops are flattened with bulldozers and dynamite, clearing all vegetation and, at times, forcing residents to move.

The coal seams are scraped with gigantic machines called draglines. The law requires mining companies to reclaim and replant the land, but the process always produces excess debris.

Roughly half the coal in West Virginia is from mountaintop mining, which is generally cheaper, safer and more efficient than extraction from underground mines like the Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah, which may have claimed the lives of nine miners and rescuers, and the Sago Mine in West Virginia, where 12 miners were killed last year.

The rule, which would apply to waste from both types of mines, is known as the stream buffer zone rule. First adopted in 1983, it forbids virtually all mining within 100 feet of a river or stream.

The Interior Department drafted the proposal to try to clear up a 10-year legal and regulatory dispute over how the 1983 rule should be applied. The change is to be published on Friday in The Federal Register, officials said.

The Army Corps of Engineers, state mining authorities and local courts have read the rule liberally, allowing extensive mountaintop mining and dumping of debris in coal-rich regions of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia.

From 1985 to 2001, 724 miles of streams were buried under mining waste, according to the environmental impact statement accompanying the new rule.

If current practices continue, another 724 river miles will be buried by 2018, the report says.

Environmental groups have gone to court many times, with limited success, to slow or stop the practice. They won an important ruling in federal court in 1999, but it was overturned in 2001 on procedural and jurisdictional grounds.

This article was obtained from The New York Times, please click here to read the rest of the article

Last week, the North Carolina General Assembly overwhelmingly approved an underwhelming, potentially disastrous Renewables and Efficiency Portfolio Standard (REPS). REPS legislation requires utilities to provide a certain percentage of its power from “renewable” sources. The North Carolina REPS calls for an unambitious 12.5% by 2021. Worse, the bill forces ratepayers to assume the costs of constructing new coal and nuclear facilities even if such facilities never begin operation.

Avram Friedman, Executive Director of the Canary Coalition, places the blame for passage of this bill squarely on the shoulders of those who made this bill a reality:

“It’s not accurate to place all fault with the energy corporations . . . Nor is it fair to point at legislators as the primary target for blame . . . The environmental community needs to look inward in sorting out what went wrong as the process it began quickly broke in an unintended direction. There were the two organizations who went over the deep end as partners in the “concensus”, becoming so invested in the process there was no safe way out, defending S3 to the end on the basis of the token Renewable and Efficiency Portfolio Standard, despite the overwhelming consequences of the Construction Work In Progress provisions that would ease the way for more polluting power plant construction and render any advances toward renewables and efficiency meaningless. But, with a few notable exceptions, the entire environmental community was willing to go along with this scheme from the beginning and bears the responsibility for the predictable S3 debacle. The same failed strategies continue to repeat themselves, yielding similar results every time, year after year. Groups allow themselves to be co-opted, moving allegiance from their principles to the process, becoming a part of the system that is perpetuating the problem. Social peer pressure restricts the ability to speak openly and truthfully, in this case about the nature and scope of change that is needed to confront poor air quality and global warming. Legislative proposals coming out of the environmental community are timid and unnecessarily compromising, tailored to what is believed to be the prevailing political wisdom, what would be acceptable in the political and social circles in which one travels. There is no attempt to change the political atmosphere to conform with scientific reality. There is only compromise after compromise until the diluted product is meaningless, or in this case worse than nothing at all, because it strengthens the hand of the coal and nuclear industries. The prevailing sentiment within the environmental community seems to be one of resignation that we live in a serfdom, so lets only try to accomplish what a group of serfs can do. Those who believe they are powerless are powerless, because . . .” Click here to read Avram’s thoughtful critique of S. 3 and his hopeful solution for fixing it.