or
Join Now!
|
|
Home/Government/Politics
|
| Forum |
Ask A Question |
Question Board |
FAQs |
Search |
Return to Question Board
| Question Details |
Asked By |
Asked On |
| Bush the environmentalist |
Itsdb |
06/19/06 |
BushCo wants you to know: Caring about the environment is for pinko terrorist idiots
Bush is the worst environmental president in the nation's history. Period. The proofs are irrefutable, and the list of his administration's sinister assaults on the pale blue dot we all call home is painful and tragic and punishable in the afterlife by seven billion years of listening to Lynne Cheney being scraped across a chalkboard.
No natural resource has been left unmolested: From forest management to air quality to water pollution to emissions standards to land management to industrial farming to reduced controls on heavy polluters to global warming to nuclear waste to our energy policy, BushCo has made atrociously efficient progress in decimating, in just three short years, 30 years of staunch environmental protections.
Dubya, by way of his industry cronies, has initiating more than 200 major rollbacks of America's most significant environmental laws. Hey, it's nothing new: As governor of Texas, Bush made his state No. 1 in thick smudgy black air and water pollution that makes babies gag and eyes water and cancer cells flourish. He had the ugliest enviro record of any governor in the state's history.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sound familiar? Last week tomder cited a NY Times op-ed praising Bush for designating the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands a national monument. I noted that I hadn't seen anything in our local paper on this. They finally reported on it today. More praise for Bush? Ha! From the title to the last paragraph, nothing but skepticism. Newest national monument is scenic, but few can visit read the headline in our paper.
New National Monument a Wonder Few Can See
By TARA GODVIN , 06.18.2006, 02:17 PM
The newest national monument boasts crystalline blue water, unspoiled islands with white sand beaches and vast reefs teeming with marine life, including 7,000 species found nowhere else on Earth.
But unlike Mount Rushmore or the Statue of Liberty, the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands will never be a place visitors can see by just packing the kids into the car for a week.
And Hawaiians themselves are unsure how much access they will have.
Remoteness is one factor, as the islands are scattered across 1,400 miles of the Pacific. No public flights have landed at the sole airport, on Midway Atoll, since 2002, and cruise ships make only occasional stops.
Federal authorities also have long put strict limits on who can set foot in the area to protect its endangered monk seals, nesting green sea turtles and other rare species, along with some 14 million nesting seabirds.
President Bush created the vast marine sanctuary last week.
"It is a place to maintain biodiversity and to maintain basically the nurseries of the Pacific," said Conrad C. Lautenbacher, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which will manage nearly all of the protected area.
The few people familiar with the riches held by the string of islands - Hawaiians who revere the area, researchers and a handful of fishermen - are waiting to find out how the area's new status will affect their access to the area.
William Aila, who has been fighting to protect the area since 1986, was pleased the president provided the maximum protection for the area.
"For Hawaiians, it's really a reconnection and taking responsibility for these islands to the north of us, what we consider our elder islands," he said.
Aila is a Hawaiian activist, fisherman and Democratic candidate for governor, as well as a member of the Coral Reef Ecosystem Reserve Council, which had been advising federal authorities in what had been a multiyear process to make the islands a marine sanctuary.
He said commercial fishing doesn't belong in the islands and the president was right to put a five-year phase-out on the eight or nine permits in effect for the area.
But Aila said he is concerned about what traditional Hawaiian fishermen will be allowed to do in the area. According to the president's proclamation: "Any monument resource harvested from the monument will be consumed in the monument."
Hawaiian oral histories tell of a long tradition of bringing fish back from the islands to share with family, he said, and feathers molted annually by the red-tailed tropicbird are needed to restore historic Hawaiian capes held in the Bishop Museum in Honolulu.
Kitty Simonds, executive director of the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council, said her organization is concerned about the commercial fishing phase-out.
"It looks good to the rest of the world. But as far as I'm concerned, it was an easy declaration because no one lives there," she said. "So all you have are the few fishermen who would like to continue their livelihoods there.
"What happened to the American dream?" Simonds said.
Scientists also want to know more about the declaration's effects.
"We don't know the details of what this designation will mean for the research. But we're hopeful that we'll be able to continue a robust research project up there," said Malia Rivera, just returned last weekend from a three-week research trip to the islands with the University of Hawaii's Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology.
So that's the best we can get out of the AP on a grand, historic environmental move by Bush? How might this have read had say, Al Gore made this move?
|
Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 06/19/06 7:27 pm:
$3699 per person based on groups of 2 or more.
think of the good time you could have in NYC for that ! (and even see the Statue of Liberty ) Clarification/Follow-up by Itsdb on 06/19/06 8:37 pm:
Absolutely. For $5,783 dollars the wife and I can fly to New York and stay 10 nights in a premiere suite at the Algonquin.
|
| |
|
Your Options |
Additional Options are only visible when you login! !
|
|
|
|
