Category: RT Newswire

The ball is in LURC’s (Land Use Reg Commission) court…can’t wait to see
what they do w/ this now.

ASW

—————————- Original Message —————————-
Subject: Plum Creek Offers Up No Changes In Post-Hearing Brief
From:    “Jym St. Pierre” <jym@restore.org>
Date:    Tue, March 18, 2008 12:44 pm
To:      undisclosed-recipients: Undisclosed recipients;
————————————————————————–

For Release Tuesday, March 18, 2008 – 10:30 a.m.
Contacts:
Judy Berk, NRCM (207) 622-3101 X 203 (o)
Elyse Tipton, Maine Audubon (207) 781-2330, ext. 229 or (207) 632-8389

Despite Overwhelming Public Criticism of Moosehead Plan
Plum Creek Offers Up No Changes In Post-Hearing Brief

AUGUSTA, March 18, 2008 —Maine’s two leading environmental
organizations said today that Plum Creek, the nation’s largest
commercial landowner, has submitted a post-hearing brief that
dismissed long lists of concerns raised during hundreds of hours of
public testimony by Maine residents and technical experts about Plum
Creek’s plan to develop the Moosehead Lake region.

The executive directors of Maine Audubon and the Natural Resources
Council of Maine (NRCM) provided their analysis of the hearing record
and public comments on Plum Creek’s proposal at a news conference in
Augusta.

Continue reading

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” … an accelerating trend with no apparent end in sight,…”
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Edmonton Journal (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada)
Monday » March 17 » 2008

Glacier melt hits record rate, UN says
Huge losses in Europe spark renewed climate change fears

Reuters Sunday, March 16, 2008

OSLO – A thaw of the world’s glaciers has
accelerated to a new record with some of the
biggest losses within Europe, in a worrying sign
of climate change, the UN Environment Programme
said Sunday.

“Meltdown in the mountains,” UNEP said in a
statement, saying that a retreat of glaciers from
the Andes to the Arctic should add urgency to UN
negotiations on working out a new treaty by the
end of 2009 to combat global warming.

“Data from close to 30 reference glaciers in nine
mountain ranges indicate that between the years
2004-2005 and 2005-2006 the average rate of
melting and thinning more than doubled,” it said.

Some of the biggest losses were in Europe — in
the Alps, the Pyrenees and the Nordic region —
according to the UNEP-backed World Glacier
Monitoring Service at the University of Zurich in
Switzerland.

“The latest figures are part of what appears to
be an accelerating trend with no apparent end in
sight,” WGMS director Wilfried Haeberli said in a
statement.

The estimates, based on measuring the thickness
of glacier ice, indicated an average loss of
about 1.5 metres in 2006, up from just over half
a metre in 2005. UNEP said the thinning was the
fastest since monitoring began. Since 1980,
glaciers have thinned by about 11.5 metres in a
retreat blamed by the U.N. Climate Panel mainly
on human use of fossil fuels.

The thaw could disrupt everything from farming —
millions of people in Asia depend on seasonal
melt water from the Himalayas — and power
generation to winter sports. The thaw could also
raise world sea levels.

UNEP said glaciers were among the clearest
indicators of global warming. “There are many
canaries emerging in the climate change coal
mine. The glaciers are perhaps among those making
the most noise,” said Achim Steiner, head of UNEP.

Among big losers, Norway’s Breidalblikkbrea
glacier thinned by almost 3.1 metres during 2006
compared with 0.3 metres in 2005 and France’s
Ossoue glacier in the Pyrenees thinned by nearly
three metres versus around 2.7 metres in 2005.

© The Edmonton Journal 2008

Copyright © 2008 CanWest Interactive, a division
of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All
rights reserved.

The Longest Walk 2 is wending its way across the country, bringing attention to the
preservation of sacred sites. As the northern route of the walk enters Colorado,
local activists, spiritual leaders and archeologists have welcomed them.
Although unable to attend numerous equinox ceremonies in the area of Crestone
(and the sacred eastern mountain massif, Sisnajini) the walkers offered to take
a message of local concern with them to DC: The Baca National Wildlife Refuge on
the border of Great Sand Dunes National Park is being threatened by gas
exploration by the Canadian company, Lexam. Prayers have been rendered with the
building of a huge Medicine Wheel and regular ceremonies near the proposed drill
sites (along with a court case and a demand for an Environmental Impact
Statement, of course!)
The Longest Walk 2 representatives will be carrying with them to Washington DC,
an article entitled “Resistance to Oil and Gas in Colorado’s Sacred San Luis
Valley” which appeared in the Brigid, 2008 (Jan.-Feb.) issue of Earth First! Journal.

For more info:

www.slvec.org

Since there seems to be an environmental crisis in everyone’s back yard, Longest
Walkers will be carrying many petitions to the Capitol on their sacred journey. Please
welcome and support them if they come to your area. Check the itinerary at:

www.longestwalk.org.)

They walk for the Mother and for us all!

from the San Francisco Chronicle

RICHMOND — More than 300 people marched from downtown Point Richmond to the Chevron refinery Saturday to protest the company they say is profiting from the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Twenty-four demonstrators were arrested for trespassing late in the afternoon after removing a police barricade, entering refinery property and linking arms, said Lt. Mark Gagan, a Richmond police spokesman. He said they cooperated with the arresting officers. Continue reading