WINTER 2016
’ NATURE SVOICE
For the 2.4 million Members and online activists of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
IN THIS ISSUE
Morning in Desolation Canyon, Utah
Saving Public Lands and Our Climate Arctic Wildlife Gets a Reprieve Environmental Justice for All Rhinos Face New Threat
NRDC works to safeguard the earth — its people, its plants and animals, and the natural systems on which all life depends.
Victory
END OF THE ROAD FOR LOGGING Great news for America’s last great rainforest: NRDC has won a federal appeals court fight to reinstate the landmark Roadless Rule in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, protecting 9.5 million pristine acres from logging roads and old-growth clearcuts. The Tongass covers most of southeastern Alaska and is home to grizzlies, wolves, goshawks and some of the best salmon runs in the world. The court’s ruling, secured by NRDC and Earthjustice on behalf of a coalition of environmentalists, Alaska Natives and tourism interests, should ensure this venerable forest is safeguarded for generations to come.
Victory
ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST Just one week after President Obama rejected Keystone XL (see back page), Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a ban on oil tanker traffic off the north coast of British Columbia — a move that left the proposed Northern Gateway tar sands pipeline dead in the water. It’s a huge victory for more than 130 First Nations — and NRDC Members — who long fought the project, which would have pumped 500,000 barrels of tar sands crude each day over mountains, across salmon-filled rivers and through the Great Bear Rainforest to waiting supertankers, raising the prospect of catastrophic spills.
DIVESTING JUST GOT EASIER Last month, State Street Global Advisors launched the very first exchange traded fund (ETF) based on the S&P 500 index that omits companies owning fossil-fuel reserves: SPDR S&P 500 Fossil Fuel Free ETF, (Ticker: SPYX). The new vehicle, which State Street developed with the support of NRDC, allows individuals and institutions to responsibly divest from passive investments that indirectly expose them to fossil fuels that pollute our planet and threaten our climate. NRDC will be investing in the new fund but otherwise receives no financial benefit from it.
C OV E R A RT I C L E
Climate Fight Moves to Public Lands I n the wake of the Paris climate summit, it is clearer than ever that the world must adopt multiple strategies for moving beyond fossil fuels and toward a clean energy future. Here in the United States, almost 25 percent of our nation’s global warming pollution comes from fossil fuels extracted from our public lands and offshore waters. “Drilling and burning our natural heritage is bad enough,” says NRDC Trustee Robert Redford. “But that policy becomes catastrophically bad when the world’s leading climate experts are telling us we must leave the vast majority of fossil fuel reserves in the ground if we are going to avoid runaway global warming.” TAKE ACTION
nrdc.org/fossilfuels
While President Obama has led globally on climate by rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline, championing a bold Clean Power Plan and scaling up renewables, his Interior Department continues to let fossil fuel giants run roughshod over our public estate. In addition to potential leasing of the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans for oil development (see article below), Interior has approved an onslaught of fracking amidst the pristine beauty and soul-stirring vistas of Utah’s renowned Desolation Canyon. It has given the go-ahead to an invasion of fracking rigs around New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon National Historic Park. And it is proposing to approve a massive,
3,500-acre coal mine just 10 miles from Bryce Canyon National Park, potentially transforming the gateway of this natural treasure into an industrial sacrifice zone. NRDC has joined forces in court with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and the Western Environmental Law Center to stave off these assaults. We are also calling on President Obama to end all new leasing for oil, gas and coal on America’s public lands and in its offshore waters. “By acting now,” says Redford, “the president can take billions of tons of potential climate pollution off the table and spare millions of acres of our natural heritage from destruction.”
S P E C I A L R E P O RT
Arctic Wildlife Gets a Reprieve — But for How Long? The environmental campaigns and victories featured in Nature’s Voice are all made possible through your generous support. You can help NRDC defend the environment by making a special contribution. NRDC.ORG/JOINGIVE
Just weeks after Royal Dutch Shell beat a retreat from the Arctic, saying it was putting drilling operations there on hold “for the foreseeable future,” the Obama Administration announced it was canceling all auctions for drilling rights in the Arctic Ocean through 2017. It also denied requests by oil and gas companies to extend their current leases in the region. “This is another big step forward in our campaign to save the home of the polar bear — and our planet’s climate — from the catastrophic risks of drilling and burning Arctic
oil,” said Niel Lawrence, director of NRDC’s Alaska program. “But it’s just a temporary reprieve.” That’s because the Obama Administration will soon release an offshore drilling plan for 2017–2022, which it signaled last year will likely put the Arctic Ocean back on the auction block alongside Atlantic coastal waters from Virginia to Georgia, where an oil spill could prove devastating to beaches, fisheries and whale populations. NRDC is already preparing to fight back on numerous fronts, including the
courtroom if necessary. And we’re mobilizing our Members to ratchet up the pressure on President Obama to permanently protect us from the ravages of offshore drilling by putting the Arctic and the Atlantic off-limits to Big Oil for good.
DESOLATION CANYON © DREW RUSH/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE; EAGLE © SEKAR B/SHUTTERSTOCK; POLAR BEARS © FLINSTER007/ISTOCK
G O O D N EWS
CA M PA I G N U P DAT E
can be devastating. But they are standing up for justice as never before — and when they call on NRDC to provide legal firepower, we’re ready to partner with them. We never lose sight of who has the most at stake. In Flint, as everywhere else we work, it’s local communities, living on the front lines of pollution, who not only have the courage to organize but the vision, resolve and tenacity to see justice done.”
nyone who doubts the urgent need for environmental justice in the United States need look no further than the public health crisis that is unfolding in Flint, Michigan. In 2014, city and state officials decided to start supplying residents with water pumped from the Flint River instead of continuing to buy municipal water from nearby Detroit, and it wasn’t long before people began to express alarm. The water didn’t taste right, and it smelled funny. Soon more ominous complaints began to mount — of rashes, hair loss, vomiting and other health problems. Through it all, residents were told by officials not to worry; the drinking water was fine.
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I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy, what we’ve been through. It wasn’t. Medical studies conducted more than a year after Flint switched its water supply found the number of children living with dangerous levels of lead in their bloodstream had skyrocketed. Why? The water from the Flint River was corrosive, and this had been causing lead from the city’s old pipes to leach into the tap water. As if that weren’t bad enough, both city and state officials had been aware for months of test results that showed Flint’s drinking water was contaminated with shockingly high levels of lead, yet they’d neglected to take any meaningful action to address the crisis. The people of Flint had good reason to fear they were especially vulnerable to lead exposure. The city’s population is predominantly AfricanAmerican, and average blood lead levels are higher nationally in African-American children. Nearly 90 percent of the housing stock in Flint was built
Clockwise from top left: Sheila Holt-Orsted at the gravesite of her father, who died in 2007; a boy plays in the shadow of the Port of Los Angeles; Nalleli Cobo and her mother, community organizers against oil development in Los Angeles; a pile of petcoke looms over homes in Southeast Chicago; Pala Indian children protest the Gregory Canyon dump.
before high-lead paint was banned by federal law. On October 1, 2015, less than a week after doctors reported a doubling in the proportion of children under the age of five in Flint with elevated blood lead levels, NRDC joined with local, faith-based organizations and other advocacy groups to demand that the federal Environmental Protection Agency step in and take emergency action to secure safe drinking water for Flint residents. In November, working in concert with the American Civil Liberties
Union of Michigan and local advocates, NRDC notified the city and state of its intent to file suit on behalf of residents whose escalating concerns about the safety of their drinking water had been dismissed or ignored. “All too often, it’s places like Flint — communities of color or low-income neighborhoods struggling economically — that suffer first and suffer most from the pollution that poisons our air, water and food,” says NRDC President Rhea Suh. “For families on the front lines, the consequences
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Perhaps no case epitomizes the struggle for environmental justice like the one launched by Sheila Holt-Orsted in Dickson, Tennessee, about 40 miles outside of Nashville. “I came home for Christmas in 2002,” she remembers, “and my father had cancer, my aunt who was my dad’s sister-in-law had cancer, I had an uncle who had died of cancer, neighbors with cancer — and I kept saying, ‘This is strange. Why does everyone here have cancer?’ ” It was a question that would continue to haunt Holt-Orsted, who was herself diagnosed with stage-two breast cancer only three months later. As she fought to recover, she also began searching for answers. What she found was shocking: two letters from county officials, one for white families living near the county landfill, warning them their well water was contaminated with trichloroethylene (TCE), a toxic industrial chemical, and one for AfricanAmerican families like hers, telling them their water was safe. For years the landfill had accepted industrial waste by the truckload, including solvents, degreasers and paint thinners, which soon leached into the groundwater. Holt-Orsted’s family had been drinking, cooking with and bathing in that dangerously contaminated water. She reached out to NRDC, which brought suit in 2008 against the city and county governments and private companies [Continued on next page.]
SHEILA HOLT-ORSTED © STEVE JONES; BOY © DANIEL HINERFELD; MOTHER/DAUGHTER © LISA WHITEMAN/NRDC; PETCOKE SITE © TERRY EVANS/CHICAGO MAGAZINE; CHILDREN © DAMON NAGAMI/NRDC
And Environmental Justice for All: NRDC on the Front Lines A
[Continued from previous page.]
Maribel Baez with her son, Anthony, in her New York apartment infested with mold, 2012.
sick, triggering a host of problems from heart palpitations and stomach pains to frequent nosebleeds and asthma. Nalleli, who herself has spoken out at government meetings and made a personal appeal to Pope Francis about the dangers of oil development in her neighborhood, has emerged as a new face of the next generation of environmental justice activists. “We’re fighting for a community,” she says. *
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That’s a refrain heard all across the country, including from working-class neighborhoods of Chicago’s Southeast Side, where enormous piles of harmful black petroleum coke, a waste product of oil refining, began appearing three years ago, some mounds eventually growing five stories tall. Looming over homes, schools and parks, these open-air piles are part of petcoke handling operations that have sent plumes of oily, coal-like dust through the neighborhood. Local residents, who have long organized against an array of other environmental burdens, chose to fight back. Partnering with NRDC, they raised an outcry in the media and public hearing rooms and threatened legal action. The resulting political pressure led first to more stringent regulations for the dust and then to announcements by the
corporate owner —KCBX, which belongs to the Koch brothers — that it would permanently close one petcoke storage site and remove piles from another — a critical win as residents continue fighting for a community that is entirely petcoke-free. For residents living in New York City’s public housing, however, the health threat has all too often come from inside their homes. The problem: persistent mold and excessive moisture from leaking pipes, which exacerbate asthma and other respiratory problems. “Home should be a place where you are safe, not a place that hurts you,” says Maribel Baez, who lives in the South Bronx, echoing the frustration of many of the city’s 400,000 public housing residents, a population disproportionately affected by asthma. In the past, the New York City Housing Authority would often take months to respond to residents’ complaints, but today the agency is required to respond within 7 to 15 days, thanks to a 2013 settlement in a class action lawsuit brought by NRDC on behalf of affected residents. The suit itself broke new ground: by using the Americans with Disabilities Act, which classifies asthma as a disability, NRDC’s legal team argued that when the housing authority allowed mold to go unchecked, it violated the rights of asthma victims to breathe clean air.
Home should be a place where you are safe, not a place that hurts you. “It’s a legal approach we’re now exporting to help residents battling similar neglect in public housing across the country,” says Rhea Suh. “We’re not afraid to get creative, to be innovative and to use whatever legal tools we can to hold polluters and government agencies accountable. We believe in justice for all — that all people have the right to live, work and play in a healthy environment. It’s at the heart of what we do.”
MOTHER/SON © ALLISON JOYCE/NY DAILY NEWS; ACTIVISTS WITH SUH © ANGELA GUYADEEN/NRDC
that had contributed to the pollution at the landfill. NRDC attorneys spent 8,000 hours preparing for HoltOrsted’s day in court. But on the night before trial in 2011, the authorities capitulated, agreeing in a settlement to spend $5 million to identify areas at risk of TCE pollution, connect every home and business in that area to public water and close all the wells in endangered zones. Nearly a decade after her Rhea Suh (right) and other NRDC staff meet with local activists in Chicago. crusade began, and four years after her father passed away, — creating a model for greening ports nationally Holt-Orsted and her family finally found justice, and globally. But recent revelations that the port both for themselves and for their neighbors. has failed to implement several key pollution“I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy, what cutting measures, coupled with its approval of we’ve been through,” says Beatrice Holt, Sheila’s a new, $500 million rail yard development — mother. “And now, because of what NRDC has which NRDC is battling in court — prove that done, maybe no one else will have to.” Al Huang, “we can’t let our guard down,” according to the director of NRDC’s Environmental Justice Melissa Lin Perrella, an NRDC senior attorney. Program, puts the win in perspective: “Those are “Just like the communities we represent, the moments we fight for, and we savor them,” we’re in this for the long haul.” he says. “But we also know this isn’t a Hollywood That same commitment to staying the course movie — the big courtroom win, then the credits has been the hallmark of the Pala Band of roll. Environmental justice victories often Mission Indians. For 20 years they have been require years of vigilance to make sure polluters waging a campaign to stop developers from follow through on their commitments.” building a 300-acre garbage dump in Gregory Canyon, an ecologically sensitive gem north of * * * San Diego that is home to endangered species, critical drinking water sources and sacred Case in point: the Port of Los Angeles, sites used by the Pala for hundreds of years. among the busiest shipping ports in the world. NRDC attorneys have been working hand in hand The staggering amount of goods transported with the tribe since 2009 to block this reckless by huge, diesel-powered container ships, trains plan, taking on the San Diego Regional Water and trucks is matched by a staggering amount of Board and the Army Corps of Engineers. diesel exhaust — creating a “diesel death zone” Fourteen-year-old Nalleli Cobo wasn’t even for nearby residents who have suffered elevated born when the Palas’ battle began, but she and rates of asthma, respiratory disease and cancer. her family have found themselves caught up in When officials brushed off their concerns, these an entirely different fight in South Los Angeles, citizens turned to NRDC. The resulting lawsuit, where an oil well sits literally across the street filed in 2001, got the attention of port officials, from their apartment building. According to who ultimately agreed to dramatically cut diesel residents, the oil operation has made them emissions and switch to cleaner-burning fuels
Shanghai bars serving trendy cocktails and Beijing shops crammed with traditional medicines may seem a world away from the South African grasslands. But they are connected by the illegal trade in black and white rhino horn, which is used in Chinese folk medicine, mixed into drinks and given as luxury gifts. Demand is skyrocketing across Asia,
The insatiable appetite for rhino horn is driving a frenzy of poaching. More than 1,200 South African rhinos were killed in 2014, compared with 13 in 2007. Only 4,000 black rhinos remain, and conservationists now estimate they could be extinct within 10 years. Some 20,000 white rhinos could meet the same fate if current trends continue. Rhinos desperately need stronger protections, but they may soon be facing a new threat instead. The South African government, backed by rhino farmers who stand to make millions of dollars, may
RHINOS © W. PERRY CONWAY/CORBIS
White rhinoceros and calf
raising the market value for one kilogram of powdered rhino horn to $60,000 — more than cocaine, heroin and gold combined.
propose legalizing the rhino horn trade. Officials claim that rhino farms — where horns can be removed without killing the animals — will help increase TAKE ACTION
supply to meet demand and thereby reduce poaching. But a pioneering NRDC study says it will do exactly the opposite. “When you legalize something, you signal that it’s OK to use it,” says Andrew Wetzler, who heads NRDC’s Land & Wildlife Program. “That winds up expanding both the market and the incentive to poach.” The NRDC study, designed by researchers at Oxford, Beijing Normal and Duke Universities, found that many people who don’t buy rhino horn now would purchase it if it were legal. Demand from this mushrooming customer base would quickly exceed the supply of farmed white rhino horns, and poachers would fill the gap by killing more wild black rhinos. “We don’t have time to experiment with high-risk policies that could actually lead to more killing of rhinos rather than less,” says Wetzler. South Africa is expected to present its plan to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) this fall. In response, NRDC has launched a campaign calling on South African President Jacob Zuma to help save rhinos instead of moving ahead with his government’s dangerous proposal.
nrdc.org/rhinos
Climate Leadership After Keystone XL By Susan CaseyLefkowitz, NRDC Director of Programs
President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline ushered in a new model of climate leadership: one that says no to costly projects that would lock us into decades of additional fossil fuel use. When NRDC first opposed the Keystone XL pipeline, in 2008, many people thought we were crazy to cast it as a climate fight. But we knew this was the right course, and we stuck to it. When the industry claimed tar sands oil wasn’t that dirty, we presented data showing it generated 17 percent more carbon pollution than did conventional fuels. When politicians said tar
sands would get to the market with or without Keystone XL, we exposed the industry’s own internal assessments that tar sands expansion hinged on the pipeline. And when the Obama Administration dragged its heels, we galvanized NRDC’s two million Members and activists to raise their voices against the pipeline — and partnered with those on the front lines, including Nebraska ranchers, Native Americans and citizens up and down the proposed pipeline route. We kept the heat on, and over time, things shifted. Today, more than two-thirds of Americans favor limits on carbon pollution. Oil and coal companies have lost their social license to operate as they once did — unfettered and without competition from clean energy resources. And new political will
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has emerged. When President Obama rejected Keystone XL, he said, “If we’re going to prevent large parts of this earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we’re going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground.” With those words, he expanded the definition of climate action — and leadership — beyond ramping up clean energy and limiting pollution from cars, trucks and power plants; it now also means stopping new dirty fossil fuel projects. That’s a vital addition, because if we’re going to fend off catastrophic warming, we will need every tool we have. And once our leaders start opposing dirty fuel infrastructure, every decision that follows becomes that much easier.
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Mountain lion
PINE TREE © KIM STEELE/GETTY IMAGES; MOUNTAIN LION © FRANK LUKASSECK/GETTY IMAGES
Legalized Trade Could Push Rhinos Over the Edge
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