Review shows affected streams and springs are drying up. State enforcers say it will take at least six months to finish their probe.
Excerpt from this Desert Sun story:
Nestlé, the world’s largest bottled water company, continues to take millions of gallons of free water from the San Bernardino National Forest two hours east of Los Angeles, 17 months after California regulators told them they had no right to much of what they'd taken in the past. And federal officials are helping them do it, despite concluding Nestlé is drying up springs and streams and damaging a watershed.
The company says it is legally entitled to every drop, and is "sustainably collecting water at volumes believed to be in compliance with all laws and permits at this time," according to emailed responses to questions from The Desert Sun.
The company reported piping 139 acre-feet — or 45 million gallons — of water from the springs and slopes of the popular national forest last year as part of its Arrowhead brand operations. They were required to pay about $2,000 for a new federal permit, but no fees for the water, which is theirs to use for retail sale. Some conditions were imposed in a management plan that they originally drafted, which was signed in March by the forest's district ranger.
The state’s top water rights enforcer said in a recent interview that while he and his staff had advised the multinational company in December 2017 not to continue taking unauthorized water, it will take at least another six months for his team to finalize their investigation, and, if necessary, issue penalties.
"We hope by next December" the report will be complete, said Victor Vasquez, the senior engineer who heads water rights enforcement for the California Water Resources Control Board. He noted the draft report had taken two years to complete, and said his staff is working hard on the final version after receiving additional input from Nestlé and the public. "The issues we're examining are very complex, very technically complicated... this has a lot of geology involved in it, and a lot of legal aspects."
Vasquez and Nestlé also noted that state regulators had found that the company is entitled to up to 26 acre-feet of surface water and 126 acre-feet of groundwater piped from horizontal wells, for a total of 152 acre-feet.
Vasquez' team concluded that in past years the multinational had taken as much as 356 acre-feet of unauthorized water, and advised them to "immediately cease any unauthorized diversions." So far, according to required state records, Nestlé is staying within the 152 acre-feet limit, though they submitted a response to the state saying they actually have rights to at least 271 acre-feet.
ASHEVILLE, N.C. — A new lawsuit alleges the U.S. Forest Service’s practice of setting ‘timber targets’ puts the climate at risk, undermines
Excerpt from this press release from the Southern Environmental Law Center:
A new lawsuit alleges the U.S. Forest Service’s practice of setting ‘timber targets’ puts the climate at risk, undermines the Biden administration’s important climate goals, and violates federal law.
The Southern Environmental Law Center filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on behalf of two conservation groups, the Chattooga Conservancy and MountainTrue, and an individual in Missouri.
The case centers around the Forest Service’s failure to properly study the massive environmental and climate impacts of its timber targets and the logging projects it designs to fulfill them. Each year, the Forest Service and Department of Agriculture set timber targets, which the Forest Service is required to meet through logging on public lands. In recent years, the national target has been set as high as 4 billion board feet – or enough lumber to circle the globe more than 30 times. The already high target is expected to increase in the coming years.
These mandated targets create backwards incentives for the Forest Service. Forests on public lands provide a key climate solution by capturing and storing billions of tons of carbon. But rising timber targets push the agency to clearcut forests and log carbon-dense mature and old-growth forests. Logging these forests releases most of their carbon back to the atmosphere, worsening the climate crisis and undermining the Biden administration’s important efforts to protect old growth and fight climate change.
Despite their significant and long-lasting impacts on our climate and forests, the Forest Service has never assessed or disclosed the climate consequences of its timber target decisions.
“Our national forests offer a simple, straightforward, and cost-effective climate solution,” Patrick Hunter, Managing Attorney for SELC’s Asheville Office, said. “But these incredible areas are routinely logged to achieve crude, destructive timber targets. The agency’s single-minded pursuit of these targets threatens almost every value that people cherish about our national forests, puts the climate at risk, and violates federal law.”
“Each year, the Forest Service’s pursuit of fulfilling its timber targets results in carbon emissions equivalent to burning billions of pounds of coal,” said Nicole Hayler, Executive Director of the Chattooga Conservancy. “Federal agencies like the Forest Service should be leading the way in the fight against climate change, not releasing tens of millions of tons of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere while degrading some of our most immediate and effective climate solutions—our national forests.”
NJ DEP and Audobon are greenwashing clear cuts as beneficial to forests and wildlife. Don't fall for it.
Laura Oltman, a member of Team SRRP and the New Jersey Highlands Coalition Natural Heritage Committee, wrote an opinion editorial article that was published in New Jersey Spotlight News. The op-ed responded to an article published in the same journal from Colleen O’Dea regarding Sparta Mountain. O'Dea quoted Sharon Petzinger of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, where Petzinger described a forest management project for Sparta Mountain Wildlife Management Area. Ostensibly, this project was initiated by New Jersey Audubon and the state DEP to create a habitat for a particular bird species, the golden winged warbler, by felling large areas of mature forest.
Oltman calls out the blatant greenwashing campaign by NJ DEP and Audubon, where they describe removing large areas of mature forest as beneficial to protecting endangered species. The science around these methods, and the benefits being concluded, are FAR from settled.
In addition to the dubious science and benefits being put forth, NJ DEP executes the forest management plan under few environmental regulations and exploits loopholes that exist in the current permitting process. Far little oversight is carried out by NJ DEP to ensure the project results align with the plan's stated goals.
On February 22, 2022, Oltman submitted a written response (LINK) to the New Jersey Legislature in response to the state's Forest Task Force's final report submission. In that response, she outlines in detail the current logging practices at Sparta Mountain and the lack of oversight and environmental regulation of logging activities in New Jersey's public forests. By retaining these mature forests, the survival chances of the wildlife species that depend on that habitat for their protection and reproduction will also improve.
Team SRRP encourages the public to
read Oltman's op-ed, and response to NJFTF,
Question the NJDEP and NJ Audubon positions,
Write their New Jersey state representatives to voice opposition to this current practice, and
Call for increased regulation and oversight of logging activities on New Jersey's public lands.
Living Carbon, a biotechnology company, hopes its seedlings can help manage climate change. But wider use of its trees may be elusive.
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
On Monday, in a low-lying tract of southern Georgia’s pine belt, a half-dozen workers planted row upon row of twig-like poplar trees.
These weren’t just any trees, though: Some of the seedlings being nestled into the soggy soil had been genetically engineered to grow wood at turbocharged rates while slurping up carbon dioxide from the air.
The poplars may be the first genetically modified trees planted in the United States outside of a research trial or a commercial fruit orchard. Just as the introduction of the Flavr Savr tomato in 1994 introduced a new industry of genetically modified food crops, the tree planters on Monday hope to transform forestry.
Living Carbon, a San Francisco-based biotechnology company that produced the poplars, intends for its trees to be a large-scale solution to climate change.
“We’ve had people tell us it’s impossible,” Maddie Hall, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, said of her dream to deploy genetic engineering on behalf of the climate. But she and her colleagues have also found believers — enough to invest $36 million in the four-year-old company.
The company has also attracted critics. The Global Justice Ecology Project, an environmental group, has called the company’s trees “growing threats” to forests and expressed alarm that the federal government allowed them to evade regulation, opening the door to commercial plantings much sooner than is typical for engineered plants.
Living Carbon has yet to publish peer-reviewed papers; its only publicly reported results come from a greenhouse trial that lasted just a few months. These data have some experts intrigued but stopping well short of a full endorsement.
