No more national parks?

Denali NP. (c) Lyanna 2005

Scenes like this may only be found from an archive in the National Museum of Natural History, if land developers and oil companies get their ways. The House Resources Committee has drafted a legislation that could put an end to national parks, giving the private landowners, e.g. land developers and oil companies the "freedom" to destroy and exploit what once public lands every which way they wish.

Imagine your summer plan would include a trip to the bank to take a loan out for your national park visit. That may not be so far from reality if national parks are privatized.


Here's an excerpt of the proposed legislation:

Section 6303 requires the Park Service to solicit and sell commercial sponsorship of park visitor centers, education centers, information centers, museums, trails, auditoriums, amphitheaters, and theatres throughout the National Park System, collecting $10 million annually. If the Park Service fails to sell at least $10 million in sponsorships, all authority provided under the Park Service Concessions Management Improvement Act of 1998 would be in moratorium.

More info at: http://www.npca.org/parks4sale/fact_sheet.pdf

This seems to be consistent with the current adminstration's policy on enriching the rich at the expense of everyone else and the future of the nation.

The legislation would impact the state of Alaska the most. It's a red state and it's the same state that has been targeted by ExxonMobil and alike to juice out the oil beneath the home of many endangered wildlife and fragile living species.

Check out http://www.npca.org/parks4sale/ and take action against greed and ecoterrorism.

Self-destruction?

It looks like humans are doing a good job of pushing themselves to extinction. With the deadly combination of ignorance, greed, and arrogance, the polluting industrialists, whose logics and rational thinking are blinded by their passion for money, are working hard to destroy the sustaining environment and everything that lives in it.

Scientists have warned "warmer,wetter weather brought on by global warming could increase outbreaks of the plague, which has killed millions down the ages and wiped out one third of Europe's population in the 14th century".

We've been hit with news on avian flu believed to be spread by migratory birds carrying deadly viruses that could cause a pandemic.

Yet, aggressive efforts to downplay the importance of global warming have been pursued by the polluting industry, organized to lobby the Bush administration to resist and deny the truth about global warming, as we've seen in the recent US reaction towards Kyoto protocol.

You're invited to read more on how climate change could kill us all.

The question is how much money is enough to satisfy the greed of those who insist on making more money on the dead bodies of their own children?

Taking the heat...

An encouraging news today from Australia: The Aussies are making progress in finding ways to generate electricity from hot rocks of the outback. These rocks' temperatures can be as high 570 deg. F! This provides plenty of energy for the coversion from steam power to electric power.

So how deep do we have to drill to reach to these hot rocks? 400 feet? 600 feet? Try more than 3 miles! That's how deep they'd have to get to for this source of "free" energy.

This energy source should not be confused with geothermal energy source used in many parts of the world. Geothermal electricity is generated from steam extracted from underground reservoirs and springs - not dry hot rocks. In the case for hot rocks, electricity is harnessed from the channeled super-heated steam generated from high-pressure water pumped down to the hot rocks.

The idea of mining heat from hot dry rocks (HDR) isn't new. It was conceived and developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory as early as the 70s. While the concept is quite simple, in practice, it's difficult to control the key element in this type of heat mining: the reservoir. And this is what has been the major challenge to geothermal engineers in Australia as well.

So far the Australian government has chipped in about $370 million to develop the technology for commercial HDR energy conversion.

I guess this is one step towards being free from the grip of the petroleum cartels - not to mention the benefit from the reduction in CO2 emission, which is the major contributor to global warming.

Take Action!

National Forest Protection and Restoration Act (NFPRA) needs your help to reverse the abusive trend set by the timber industry and the US Forest Service. For several decades USFS has spent billions of taxpayer dollars subsidizing the timber industry through building timber roads - all 440,000 miles of them! This led to serious damages to the environment by clearcutting causing destruction of natural beauty, wildlife, and other environmental damages such as soil erosion.

Fortunately,a bill has been introduced by Representatives Jim Leach (R-IA) and Louise Slaughter (D-NY) to reverse this trend. Please take a moment to take action and write to your representatives in the congress asking them to support the bill. Clearcutting is the practice of stripping a forest bare by cutting down every single tree. This practice causes severe and irreversible damages to the land and the communities surrounding the clearcut areas. Floods and other mud slides are among the consequences of clearcutting. To the timber industry, clearcutting is perhaps the most profitable approach. Other people who loves clearcutting is land developers. The impacts of clearcutting is far reaching. Many wildlife habitats are upset and so is the ecosystem, given the large-scale clearcutting. There have been growing concerns about the personnel management manuvers at the Department of Interior: many forest ranger positions have been cut or transferred to "desk jobs", leaving the forests unprotected from one of the most dangerous beasts: the timber industry. Illegal logging is on the rise as a result. It looks as if the DOI is "assisting" the timber industry in exploiting natural resources on public lands, according to many environmentalists. And this problem isn't unique to the US alone. Illegal logging in Central America and the Philippines have also attracted international attention.

The time is now to save what is left of the world's natural resources from the voracious greeds of the timber industry and land developers.