I might not be happy with all that the Obama Administration is doing (or not doing), but 80beats gives us a quick reminder that elections do matter: halting uranium mining claims and halting more logging in Oregon’s old-growth forests.
The Interior Department has called for a two-year hold on uranium mining claims near the Grand Canyon National Park.
The move reverses a decision by the George W. Bush administration to open the land flanking the park to hard-rock mining. That ruling, which opened the way for lucrative mining of uranium ore, was opposed by some in Congress and within the National Park Service over concerns about the toxic heavy metal’s potential effect on the park’s watershed, wildlife, and cultural and archaeological resources.
The halting of opening up large amounts of land in western Oregon to logging is good news as well.
The move scraps a Bush-era decision to rezone 2.6 million acres of Bureau of Land Management forests, which would have tripled current logging production and opened old-growth forests to clear-cutting. The attempt prompted a lawsuit by 13 environmental groups after the rule was finalized late last year.
Now before the 21%ers get all spotted-owl and shit, with the recent news that the American Conservative Union’s pay-for-play story, do they even have a leg to stand on when it comes to environmental issues anymore?
DaveJ at OpenLeft brings up this point regarding the spotted owl debate:
I started thinking about this back when the “conservative” position was pro-logging. Remember how they mocked the spotted owl? (The spotted owl is an “indicator species,” or a shorthand way to judge the health of an entire ecosystem.) I wondered why the logging industry was a cause for conservatives, but not the fishing industry, which was greatly harmed by the logging practices advocated by conservatives. The answer turned out to be that a guy who ran a corporation that had made a ton of money looting S&Ls (how come no one remembers the S&L Crisis?) had bought a lumber company and was destroying all the old-growth redwoods was hooked into (i.e. paying) the conservative movement. (Please read the links and follow the links there!) And so the “conservative” opinion became that logging old-growth forests was a good thing. Cash payment was the reason for this core pillar of conservative ideology. (The whole thing ended up paying off even more handsomely, probably thanks to more conservative movement backscratching.)
As the debate continues on climate warming, the environment and other scientific fronts, can we not trust the Radical Right position and organizations as time after time they have been proven to be fronts for corporate America?