FALL 2021
’ NATURE SVOICE For the 3 million Members and online activists of the Natural Resources Defense Council
IN THIS ISSUE
We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to overcome the climate crisis and build a healthier, more equitable, and more vibrant world.
Manish Bapna Named NRDC President Momentum Builds to End Fossil Fuel Leasing on Federal Lands NRDC Sues (Again) to Save Endangered Bees Court Deals Blow to Utah Mine Expansion
NRDC works to safeguard the earth—its people, its plants and animals, and the natural systems on which all life depends.
Victory
R.I.P. KXL (GOOD RIDDANCE!) An epic, decade-long battle that helped ignite a new era of climate activism has ended: The Keystone XL pipeline is dead. News that pipeline builder TC Energy was canceling the project was greeted with jubilation by the pipeline’s legion of opponents, from local communities along the pipeline’s proposed 1,200-mile route to the legal team at NRDC, who filed no fewer than three separate lawsuits to halt the project. NRDC continues to fight against other climate-busting fossil fuel projects, like the Line 3 tar-sands pipeline.
BAN OF TOXIC PESTICIDE CLOSE Our 14-year fight to get the neurotoxic pesticide chlorpyrifos off the market and out of our food supply is that much closer to victory, thanks to a recent federal appeals court decision. The court, siding with NRDC and our allies, ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to ban the pesticide unless the agency can identify uses that won’t pose health risks. The science shows that exposure to even low levels of chlorpyrifos in early life can lead to neurological damage and developmental delays.
GENEROUS + SMART = DAFS You’ve probably used tax-advantaged accounts to save for retirement or for your kids’ college education. Why not consider using one to power your charitable giving? Members are increasingly turning to donor-advised funds (DAFs) as a smart way to support NRDC and other organizations close to their hearts. DAFs allow you to contribute not only cash but noncash assets as well, like long-term appreciated securities, and they have other benefits that can make your generosity go even further. For more information, contact Zara Mahmood at (212) 727-4537 or NRDCMembership@nrdc.org.
C OV E R A RT I C L E
MANISH BAPNA NAMED NRDC PRESIDENT
W
e at NRDC are excited to welcome Manish Bapna as our new presi dent and chief executive officer. Bapna previously served as in terim president and CEO of the World Resources Institute (WRI), which he joined in 2007. He re places Gina McCarthy, who left to join the Biden– Harris administration as the country’s first national climate advisor. “I am deeply honored to be taking the helm at NRDC at this time,” Bapna says. “We have a oncein-a-generation opportunity to overcome the cli mate crisis and build a healthier, more equitable, and more vibrant world, and NRDC is uniquely suited for this challenge.” Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, Bapna spent summers with relatives in the western Indian state of Rajasthan, where his deep com mitment to environmental activism and equity took root. “Rajasthan is very arid,” he says, “and I
witnessed firsthand how deforestation, water scar city, and industrial pollution affected the rich and poor differently.” Early in his career, Bapna made the “life-changing decision” to devote himself to activism, walking away from a comfortable job at the World Bank to head up a fledgling nonprofit, the Bank Information Center, which fought to pro tect the environment and local communities from the negative impacts of lending by international financial institutions. At WRI, Bapna helped lead the organization’s dramatic global expansion while overseeing its core program work on climate, forests, cities, energy, water, and other key areas. He was the architect of several influential global commissions and partnerships focused on the climate crisis, poverty, and inequality. He also led efforts to embed equity into WRI’s mission, cul ture, and programs, heading up a diverse task force to ensure implementation. For his part, Bapna calls NRDC “the most
effective organization in the environmental move ment” and counts himself a longtime admirer. “NRDC’s reach and impact are unrivaled, and its set of capabilities—its toolbox—is unmatched,” he says. “Law, science, and policy chops, coupled with aggressive advocacy, make NRDC truly unique— and uniquely effective, especially at this critical moment in our collective fight for a more just, liv able, and sustainable future.”
We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to overcome the climate crisis and build a healthier, more equitable, and more vibrant world.
S P E C I A L R E P O RT
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Report Exposes Canada’s Hidden Forest Crisis Canada has long touted itself as a responsible steward of its boreal forest, which ranks as the largest remaining intact forest on the planet and stores nearly twice as much carbon per acre as the Amazon rain forest. Yet the country permits the clearcutting of more than a million acres of the forest each year—and much of that logging is anything but sustainable. That’s the conclusion of a recent NRDC report that analyzed the sourcing practices of three key wood-pulp suppliers in the forests of Ontario and Quebec. The pulp is purchased by manufacturers and transformed into a variety of products, including
by such big-name corporations as Procter & Gamble for such throwaway items as Charmin and Puffs. Yet an alarming amount of this wood is sourced from forests that are vulnerable to unsustainable logging practices and contain vital habitat for imperiled wildlife like the boreal caribou. And none of these pulp companies require wood to have been obtained with the free, prior, and informed consent of First Nations potentially impacted by forestry oper ations. “Canada often brags about its world-class forestry practices,” says report coauthor Courtenay Lewis of NRDC’s Canada Project. “The truth is Boreal caribou a different story.”
MANISH BAPNA © WORLD RESOURCES INSTITUTE; BOREAL CARIBOU © ALAIN CARON/VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS CC BY-SA 4.0
G O O D N EWS
CA M PA I G N U P DAT E
MOMENTUM BUILDS TO END FOSSIL FUEL LEASING ON FEDERAL LANDS
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“The fossil fuel leasing program has been a bonanza for industry and a disaster for pretty much everyone else.”
Clockwise from top left: Long targeted by the oil industry, Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is vital habitat for threatened polar bears; the industry is also pressing to drill in Big Cypress National Preserve in the Florida Everglades; from the deafening blasts of seismic air guns to the risk of oil spills, offshore drilling poses numerous threats to marine mammals like sea lions; Alaska’s Indigenous Gwich’in are on the frontlines fighting to defend the Arctic refuge.
Wildlife Refuge. Hundreds of thousands of Members and online activists have rallied to join NRDC in urging Haaland to overhaul the leasing program, calling on her to permanently ban all new federal fossil fuel leases and to set a course toward ending all fossil fuel extraction from our public lands and waters as swiftly and equitably as possible. (You can too—see Take Action, on the next page.) Upending the status quo can’t come soon enough. A bombshell report recently issued by the International Energy Agency calls for “no
investment in new fossil fuel supply projects,” a stunning about-face for an agency that has long been one of the world’s most dependable champi ons of the fossil fuel industry. “Even the IEA finds it can no longer ignore the fact that we can’t keep green-lighting new fossil fuel expansion if we’re going to have any hope of avoiding the worst im pacts of climate change,” says Axelrod. Yet as Bobby McEnaney points out: “I think a lot of folks would be shocked that almost 25 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States comes from fossil fuel production taking
place on our public lands and in our coastal waters.” As director of our Dirty Energy Program, McEnaney has been at the forefront of NRDC’s fight to get our government out of the fossil fuel business. After four years in the trenches combat ing the barrage of attacks from the Trump admin istration, McEnaney has welcomed the “night to day” shift in administrations. He’s cheered the Biden–Harris pledge to put the country on track toward a clean energy future and to safeguard 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030, while expressing frank disappointment in certain admin istration decisions that “take us in the wrong direction,” such as defending in court a Trump-era push to expand oil and gas operations in the Western Arctic. Nevertheless, he sees the current Haaland-led review of the Interior Department’s oil-and-gas leasing program as the best chance yet to break up the fossil fuel industry’s cozy relationship with the agency and to stop the shortsighted giveaways of our irreplaceable natural treasures. “Interior’s mandate is to steward our resources for the benefit of all of us and for future generations,” McEnaney says. “How do you square that with handing over millions of acres on the cheap to one of the most destructive industries on the planet? You can’t.” [Continued on next page.]
POLAR BEARS © STEVEN KAZLOWSKI; BIG CYPRESS NATIONAL PRESERVE © NPS; SEA LIONS © DOUGLAS KLUG/GETTY IMAGES; GWICH’IN ACTIVISTS © SAUL LOEB/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
wo bucks! What else can you buy these days for two bucks? Most places, you can’t even get a cup of coffee.” Despite having spent the better part of the past decade charting the dysfunctions and outrages of the U.S. Interior Department’s program for leasing our federal lands and coastal waters to the fossil fuel industry, somehow NRDC Senior Advocate Josh Axelrod hasn’t lost the “can-you-believe-it!?” indignation of someone just learning, for example, that $2 per acre is often all that oil and gas companies pay to lease our public wildlands. Axelrod’s prolific blog posts have chronicled it all: the insufficient bonding requirements that have allowed industry to saddle taxpayers with the enormous tab to clean up thousands of leaking abandoned wells; the abysmally low royalty rates companies pay in return for the oil and gas they extract; the missing pollution control require ments that are leading to massive leaks of climatebusting methane; the fact that, over the past two decades, an area of federal land nearly the size of New York—more than 34 million acres—has been handed over to industry with no bidding at all through a practice known as “noncompetitive lease sales.” “Almost any way you look at it,” Axelrod says, “the fossil fuel leasing program has been a bonanza for industry and a disaster for pretty much every one else.” Now the fossil fuel industry’s century-long dom ination of our public lands and coastal waters is facing its biggest challenge yet. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland is leading a long-overdue, top-tobottom review of the agency’s fossil fuel leasing and permitting program. The review comes amid promising signs that Haaland is working to fulfill the Biden–Harris pledge to reverse the Trump administration’s fossil fuel–driven assault on our natural treasures, including her decision to sus pend oil and gas leases in the Arctic National
[Continued from previous page.]
Indigenous Groups Battle Zombie Pebble Mine
Indeed, fossil fuels exact a devastating toll at every stage, from the wildlands and wildlife that are sacrificed in the search for new deposits of oil, gas, or coal to the witches’ brew of toxic pollutants that are released when they are burned for fuel. Recent peer-reviewed science finds that, world wide, fossil fuel air pollution is responsible for one in every five deaths, including an estimated 350,000 Americans every year. Marginalized com munities have been forced to bear an outsize share of that toxic burden, with polluting infrastructure such as wells, refineries, and pipelines all too often
plunked almost literally in their backyards. Nowhere, perhaps, is the Interior Department’s privileging of industry interests more appalling than in the context of its shameful legacy carrying out the federal government’s racist policies against Indigenous People. Time and again the department has perpetuated that legacy by downplaying or ignoring Indigenous voices and giving over histori cally Indigenous lands for industry exploitation. From the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, where the Gwich’in are fighting to defend the sacred birthing ground of caribou, to Florida’s Big Cypress National Preserve or the Greater Chaco region of New Mexico, where frontline Indigenous commu nities are battling to stop new oil drilling and fracking, a tectonic shift in the Interior Department’s priorities away from coddling the fossil fuel industry is vital to redressing a history of gross inequity. Says McEnaney, “We need the Interior Department to finally embrace the fact that the future doesn’t belong to fossil fuels.” TAKE ACTION
nrdc.org/stopfossilfuels
Rusty patched bumblebee
NRDC Sues (Again) to Save Endangered Bees For the fourth time, NRDC and our partners are in court to save a pint-size pollinator—the rusty patched bumblebee—from extinction. Last year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service refused to designate critical habitat for the species, despite the fact that the bee’s vital habitat continues to disappear. “NRDC has had to force the service’s hand every step of the way,” says Lucas Rhoads, attorney with NRDC’s Pollinator Initiative. “We had to sue to get the agency to list the bumblebee in the first place—and now again to uphold its legal duty to protect the bee’s critical habitat under the Endangered Species Act.” Wild bees like the
rusty patched bumblebee—which has disappeared from a startling 87 percent of its native range—are some of nature’s most effective pollinators and are essential both to healthy ecosystems and to an abundant food supply. The bees once thrived in the flower-rich grasslands and tallgrass prairies that blanketed the Midwest and Northeast. Saving the bee could also save what remains of these precious ecosystems while bolstering restoration efforts. “Having to drag the service to court is getting old,” says Rhoads. “They should just do right by the bee in the first place.”
Court Deals Blow to Utah Mine Expansion Siding with NRDC and our allies, a federal district court has ruled that the Trump administration broke the law when it approved a sprawling open-pit coal mine on the doorstep of Bryce Canyon National Park. Speci fically, the court agreed that Trump’s Bureau of Land Management failed to assess the economic costs associated with climate change before green-lighting the expansion of the Alton mine. “The court brought down the hammer over what should have been obvious to the bureau from the getgo: You can’t trumpet this mine’s supposed economic benefits without also talking about its colossal climate
costs,” says NRDC Senior Attorney Ann Alexander. NRDC and our coalition partners have been fighting for a decade to stop the mine, which is expected to produce more than two million tons of coal a year. In addition to the climate-wrecking pollution from burning all that coal, the mine would imperil vulnerable wildlife such as the endangered greater sage grouse and damage the experience of visitors to Bryce Canyon, whether through increased pollution or the degradation of the park’s clear night skies. Says Alexander: “Now the Biden–Harris administration has the opportunity to halt this truly awful project.”
Bristol Bay, Alaska
protection from large-scale mining for Alaska’s magnificent Bristol Bay watershed, home to the world’s most prolific wild salmonrun and a $2.2 billion sustainable fishery. The broader coalition to save Bristol Bay—a diverse group of allies including conservation groups like NRDC—launched a media blitz in support, running full-page ads in The Hill, the Washington Post, Politico, and the New York Times calling on the agency to put Indigenous sovereignty and the long-term future of Bristol Bay ahead of the shortsighted profit motives of the mining industry. “For far too long, the people of Bristol Bay have been demanding no less than what they deserve: permanent protection from a reckless mine that would destroy their way of life and one of the earth’s greatest natural places,” says NRDC Western Director Joel Reynolds. “It’s time for EPA to act.”
RUSTY PATCHED BUMBLEBEE © TONY ERNST VIA FLICKR CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; BRISTOL BAY © ROBERT GLENN KETCHUM
$2 per acre is often all that oil and gas companies pay to lease our public wildlands.
Pebble Mine refuses to die. Despite being denied a key permit by the Army Corps of Engineers last fall, the sole corporate backer of the monster open-pit copper and gold mine, Canadian mining company Northern Dynasty Minerals, has dug in its heels and appealed the decision. Now, United Tribes of Bristol Bay—representing 15 Indigenous groups and 80 percent of the region’s residents—has formally petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to veto the project using its autho rity under the Clean Water Act. Unlike the Army Corps’ permit denial, an EPA veto would provide lasting
The United States has pledged to slash greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 percent by the end of the decade, marking a stunning—and urgent—reversal of the reckless climate denial of the Trump administration. NRDC was at the forefront of the campaign to persuade President Biden to make such a bold commitment. A month before he did, we released an expert analysis demonstrating not only that a 50 percent cut in climate pollution is technologically feasible, but that it will create millions of high-quality jobs, spur economic growth, and make peo ple healthier and our society more equitable. Biden’s move “sets the stage for the transformative change the global climate crisis de mands,” says Shelley Poticha, NRDC’s chief climate strategist. “Now we’ve got to make sure
the president’s commitment is backed by bold, decisive action.” To that end, NRDC has launched a sweeping campaign aimed at prevailing on the Biden–Harris administration to deliver on the president’s pledge. At its center is our Climate Action Plan, a detailed blueprint that offers achievable, real-world solutions to slash U.S. climate emissions in half. “We know these solutions will work because NRDC has spent years getting innovative policies and programs like these implemented in cities and states across the country,” Poticha says. “Our plan builds on that success.” Among the plan’s break through provisions: transitioning to a power sector that is 85 percent clean by harnessing the momentum of the renewableenergy revolution, as well as following through on Biden’s promise to conserve 30 percent
of our lands and waters by 2030, which would preserve vital carbon sinks. Maximizing climate solutions on U.S. farmland will be equivalent to shutting down 64 coal-fired power plants every year, and dramatically boosting the energy efficiency of our buildings and appliances will save consumers money while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the pollution that causes respiratory illnesses. Millions of Members and online activists have rallied in support of the plan, and NRDC continues to build a groundswell of public support to counter the opposition of the fossil fuel industry and its allies to meaningful, equitable climate action. “Twothirds of the country wants our government to stand up to the climate crisis,” says Poticha. “We’re determined to make that happen.”
Two Major Retailers Drop Toxic Flea Collars By Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, Senior Scientist, and Tom Hucker, Safer Chemicals Advocate
Nearly two-thirds of households in the United States own pets, and 95 percent of pet owners consider their pets to be members of the family. So it’s no surprise that consumers were shocked in March when they learned that nearly 1,700 pets had died from exposure to pesticides in Seresto flea collars, which are sold nationwide. The EPA received 75,000 incident reports documenting pet harms associated with the collars, according to an alarming USA Today report, yet did nothing to protect pets. And unfortunately, Seresto collars aren’t the only dangerous flea collars on the market. But here’s some good news: Some retailers are protecting pets and their families. PetSmart, the nation’s largest pet retailer, under pressure from NRDC, has stopped selling products containing another
dangerous pesticide, tetrachlorvinphos (TCVP). The nation’s second-largest pet retailer, Petco, has followed suit. Many other major retailers continue to sell flea collars containing TCVP, however, under brand names Hartz, Zodiac, and Adams. When used as intended, these products are designed to leave pesticide residue on a pet’s fur to kill fleas and ticks. However, that residue can rub off on anyone who touches the animal, as well as on any objects the pet comes into contact with, such as furniture and bedding. And young children, whose developing brains are most at risk from TCVP, can absorb the pesticide not only through their skin but also by ingesting it (they put their hands in their mouths—a lot). A 2009 NRDC report, and the EPA’s own assessment in 2016, found that normal use of TCVP collars left enough residue on pets’ fur to pose neurological risks to toddlers’ developing brains. It is time for the EPA to ban the use of a toxic pesticide on our beloved pets that threatens the health of kids. And while NRDC continues to hold the EPA accountableto the science through the courts, respon sible retailers need to follow the lead of PetSmart and Petco and stop selling these dangerous products.
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Long-eared owl
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