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Vista Planning Commission Meeting a Case of Déjà Vu

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A couple of days ago I came across an article in the Vista Press about the September 6 meeting of the city’s Planning Commission, during which a developer’s site plan to build a 41-unit apartment complex along Creek Walk in downtown Vista was approved (A Two Water Bottle Night at the City Planning Commission Meeting, Sept. 9).

Writer Pat Murphy’s description of the meeting was eerily reminiscent of the August 25, 2015, Carlsbad City Council meeting, where a developer’s plan to build a shopping mall on the banks of the Hedionda Lagoon was unanimously approved — despite an overflow audience of residents voicing their opposition to the project.

Murphy called Vista’s meeting a “two water bottle night” to describe the lengthy session, with standing room only attendance for opponents of the project. The first to speak was an individual introducing herself as a representative of a group calling themselves, “Vistans for a Livable Community.” That sounded to me a lot like the group that dubbed themselves “Citizens for North County,” who spearheaded the defeat of the developer’s plan for Carlsbad.   [Read more…]

Obama’s Most Impressive Legacy? Preserving Wilderness

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By Jim Miller

President Obama’s recent stops in Lake Tahoe and Hawaii highlighted his conservation efforts, and while these activities have not received as much coverage as they deserve, one might reasonably argue that conservation and the preservation of endangered wilderness is the President’s most impressive legacy.

As the New York Times reported, “Obama has visited more than 30 national parks and emerged as a 21st-century Theodore Roosevelt for his protection of public lands and marine reserves. His use of the Antiquities Act of 1906, which gives a president unilateral authority to protect federal lands as national monuments, has enabled him to establish 23 new monuments, more than any other president, and greatly expand a few others.”   [Read more…]

Nuclear Shutdown News – August 2016

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By Michael Steinberg / Black Rain Press

US nuclear industry reaches a new low with resale of decrepit nuke plant already scheduled to permanently shut down next year.

On July 12, Syracuse.com in upstate New York announced, “Entergy to sell FitzPatrick to Exelon in mid-August.”

The FitzPatrick nuclear plant is located in Lake Ontario near the Canadian border. It started up in late 1974, not long after Richard Nixon’s reign over the White House permanently shut down. This means the nuke plant’s one reactor has been cranking away for almost 42 years, releasing radiation into the air and water in the Great Lakes region all the while.

US nuclear reactors were designed to operate only 40 years.   [Read more…]

Local Native Community Rallies Against Dakota Access Pipeline

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Water is Life, You Can’t Drink Oil

On Sunday, August 28 Native people and their allies from throughout San Diego County came together in Horton Plaza Park to rally against the Dakota Access Pipeline. The Standing Rock Sioux reservation, lead by Chairman Dave Archambault, has made a call to all Native Americans and supporters to nonviolently protest the creation of the pipeline which would cross the Missouri River potentially harming this great, natural source of water.   [Read more…]

The Battle Against Plastic Bags in California; A Brief History

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By Mitch Silverstein

Of the 17 measures on this November’s ballot, two in particular deal specifically with California’s statewide plastic bag ban.

Prop 67 presents a fairly straightforward referendum; Prop 65, on the other hand, is a deceitful measure designed specifically to trick us. As the outcome of these measures will determine if California enacts the nation’s first statewide single-use plastic bag ban, let’s take a brief look at how we got here.

San Francisco passed the first single-use plastic bag ban in 2007; other bay area and coastal cities quickly followed suit. With these bans came wide media exposure, and several studies showed significant reductions in plastic waste in cities that adopted them.   [Read more…]

SB 32: California’s Big Bet on the Environment

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Senate Bill 32 was approved by the California legislature last week along with a companion bill (AB 197), putting the Golden State on a path to further reducing greenhouse gas emissions past the end of the decade.

Gov. Jerry Brown fought long and hard for the legislation mandating an additional 40 percent cut in emissions by 2030. The state is already on track to meeting the goal, set by AB 32 in 2006, to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions back down to 1990 levels by the year 2020.

Not included in the new legislation was extending the state’s cap-and-trade program, arguably a more flexible, lower-cost policy tool to cut emissions. As things stand now, the future of the program is uncertain, as the California’s Chamber of Commerce is in court seeking to overturn the program on the basis that it needed two-thirds approval.   [Read more…]

A Long Hot Summer: Where’s the Love in the Anthropocene?

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One of the more thought-provoking books I read this summer was Love in the Anthropocene, a collection of stories by Dale Jamieson and Bonnie Nadzam. As the title suggests, the tales in this volume are about what the world is becoming and will be as a result of climate change.

Interestingly the world Jamieson and Nadzam depicts is not a Hollywood-style apocalyptic landscape, but an earth largely bereft of natural environments, where zoos house the last animals, natural food is rare, cities have adjusted to catastrophic weather, and those fortunate enough to live inside the bubble of “civilization” are surrounded by vast discarded populations who are left to tough it out on the outskirts of “normal life.”

What is striking about this scenario is that it is not necessarily dystopian for the characters who inhabit it because they have simply come to accept a world we might be horrified by as “the way it is.” Put another way, for these future humans the demise of nature has been naturalized as a simple fact of life, just like the brutal inequality and the blithe replacement of the real with the simulation that defines their social landscape.   [Read more…]

Geo-Poetic Spaces: Backfire

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Ashes on car windows
Big Sur is burning

Roads closed
evacuation imminent

Trapped
in the apocalyptic
centrifuge of helicopter blades
slashing
fire retardant sun   [Read more…]

San Diego Unified Calls on Pension Funds to Divest from Fossil Fuels

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By Anne Marie Tipton / San Diego 350.org

The San Diego Unified School District’s (SDUSD) Board of Education unanimously passed a resolution on July 26th calling on the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (STRS) and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (PERS) to divest their investment portfolios of stocks in fossil fuel companies. Recognizing the threat of global warming, the resolution also supports last year’s state legislation, SB 185, which requires PERS and STRS to divest from coal stocks. Most of SDUSD’s employees belong to these huge retirement systems.
  [Read more…]

SeaWorld is Guilty of Disturbing the Peace

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For years the residents of the Point Loma and Ocean Beach areas have been complaining of the noise and air pollution spewed forth nightly by SeaWorld. Some people that own dogs have complained that the dogs are scared nightly by the horrendous percussion sounds while trying to hide from the shaking windows and doors. Some people that have children and babies complain that it wakes them up, usually crying, and has affected their everyday life.

Sunday night, August 15th, was one of the worst incidents of noise that I have heard in a long time. The noise reverberated for over two minutes; and as soon as one could relax another wave hit. And it wasn’t just here on the Point. Looking over the comments made on Facebook, Laura stated that she heard it in La Mesa. She said it wasn’t real loud; more like thunder but it was from Sea World.   [Read more…]

An $8.8 Trillion Tab for Millennials to Pay

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By Lauren McCauley / Common Dreams

“We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children,” is an oft-quoted proverb, frequently used to explain the importance of environmental preservation. Unsaid, however, is how much it will impact the next generation if the Earth is bequeathed in a lesser state.

Environmental campaigners NextGen Climate and public policy group Demos published a new study that attempts to quantify the true cost of not addressing climate change to the millennial generation and their children.

The Price Tag of Being Young: Climate Change and Millennials’ Economic Future (pdf) compares some of the high costs millennials will face in the “new inequality economy”—such as student debt, child care costs, stagnant wages, as well as financial and job insecurity—against the fiscal impacts of unmitigated global warming.   [Read more…]

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