Our Border Parks and Wildlife Refuges Under Threat

By Scott Nicol

Last month, the Pew Hispanic Center reported that net migration from Mexico into the United States was had dropped to zero, with roughly the same number of Mexican citizens heading south across the border as north. 

Just a few days earlier, HR 1505, the misnamed National Security and Federal Lands Protection Act, was introduced onto the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.  Aimed at stopping the flood of immigrants that Pew found are, in fact, not pouring over our borders, this bill waives 36 laws on all federally owned lands within 100 miles of both the northern and southern U.S. borders for any Border Patrol activity.   

HR 1505 is a dramatic expansion of the Real ID Act, which gave the Secretary of Homeland Security the power to waive laws to build border walls and roads.  In 2008 former DHS Secretary Chertoff waived these same laws, which include the Endangered Species Act, Farmland Policy Protection Act, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to build walls that would otherwise have been illegal.   

The resulting damage has been tremendous.   Walls now tear through the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge, fragmenting habitat set aside for endangered ocelot and jaguarundi.  Up and down the Rio Grande, farmers and ranchers, some of whose families have held title to their land since the 1760’s, have had their property condemned.  And during border wall construction ancestral remains were unearthed and left exposed by bulldozers in the Tohono O’Odham reservation. 

Now Representative Rob Bishop, whose Utah district is hundreds of miles from either border, wants to see this brutalizing of our borderlands expanded to cover lands that are no where near the border. 

The Border Patrol has never asked for the power to ignore our nation’s laws, and they have told Congress that “land management laws have had no effect on Border Patrol’s overall measure of border security.”  The current Secretary of Homeland Security, former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano, recently called HR 1505 “unnecessary” and “bad policy.”   

So why would Representative Bishop keep pushing this bill, and why would any other member of the House vote for it?  One would assume that at the very least those who Represent border communities would stand up for the borderlands. 

Why on earth would Representative Francisco Canseco, whose district contains more miles of border wall than any other in Texas, be one of HR 1505’s cosponsors?  The city of Eagle Pass, whose residents are Rep. Conseco’s constituents, was on the receiving end of the very first border wall condemnation.  Big Bend National Park is also in his district, and HR 1505 would sweep aside all of the environmental laws that currently protect and maintain it. 

Some of Texas’ other border Representatives have taken the opposite position, asserting that all of our nation’s laws should be enforced on the border, not just those that pertain to immigration.  Representative Ruben Hinojosa, whose district includes the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge, criticized HR 1505, saying, “I think we can allow the Border Patrol to do its work and at the same time protect our environment and our rare animals such as the jaguarundi, the ocelot and our migrating birds in deep South Texas.” 

It may be that the difference between the two Representatives’ positions comes down to experience:  Hinojosa saw first-hand the harm inflicted upon the border by the waiving of laws, while Canseco did not come to office until the Tea Party’s surge in 2010.  Or perhaps it is a matter of party affiliation, as the GOP tries to use immigrant bashing and charges that President Obama has not done enough to secure the border as a wedge issue in the upcoming election, ignoring the Pew findings. 

Whether he comes to his decision out of ignorance or politics, Representative Canseco needs to think about the on-the-ground impacts of bills like the National Security and Federal Lands Protection Act on his constituents and the lands they cherish before he throws his support behind them.  And when the election comes around border residents need to think seriously about whether or not their Representatives in Washington are truly representing them.

To send an email to your US Senators urging them to oppose HR 1505 if it passes the House, use the Sierra Club Borderlands Team’s online action at www.SierraClub.org/nomorewalls

Scott Nicol co-chairs the Lower Rio Grande Valley Sierra Group’s Conservation Committee, as well as the Sierra Club’s national Borderlands Team.

The Political Roots of Earth Day

Children were given free t-shirts at a 2011 Earth Day event sponsored by Shell Oil at UTPA.

By Stefanie Herweck

Every year more Texas communities add an Earth Day festival to their calendar.  But among the presentations on household energy efficiency, the wildlife on display, the recycled fashion shows, homemade birdfeeders, and festival food, something critical has been lost: the political action of the original Earth Day.

Earth Day began as a serious bid to bring environmental issues to our politicians’ attention.  In 1970 Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson and Republican Representative Paul McCloskey helped create the day as a way to counter the fact that, “The state of our environment was simply a non-issue in the politics of the country.”  

The first Earth Day events were not festivals, but grassroots protests.  After years of fighting in isolation, and with little national attention, against polluting factories in their communities, against power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, oil spills, pesticides, the loss of wilderness, and the extinction of wildlife, 20 million Americans banded together on April 22, 1970 to make their voices heard. 

This movement didn’t stop when people left the streets.  Capitalizing on the networks created by the protests, student organizers released a “Dirty Dozen” list of U.S. House members whose voting records ran counter to the goals of protecting and preserving our nation’s natural resources.  When the next election cycle rolled around, thousands turned out to educate voters about the “Dirty Dozen.”  Two of the representatives lost their primaries.  Five more were defeated in their re-election bids. 

The environment quickly became an important national issue in the eyes of Congress.  As a result, in 1970 Congress amended and strengthened the Clean Air Act.  The Environmental Protection Agency was born in December of that year, and the National Environmental Policy Act was signed into law soon afterward.  The Marine Mammals Protection Act was passed in 1972, along with legislation which came to be known as the Clean Water Act.  In 1973 Congress passed the Endangered Species Act.

These were historic advances, but in the intervening years Earth Day has moved away from propelling legislation and holding politicians accountable, and has become a superficial celebration.  We nostalgically don our tie-dye t-shirts and visit festivals, complete with corporate sponsors and fast food vendors, while our country’s commitment to environmental protection erodes away.

The first Earth Day featured teach-ins to educate people, not just about interesting wildlife and how to be a “green” consumer, but about how industrial practices and the extraction and use of fossil fuels were destroying ecosystems and threatening human health. 

In the new millennium, Earth Day is failing to teach these things.  Even as Earth Day festivities have spread, public understanding about issues such as climate change has decreased.  A recent Gallup poll shows a decline in the percentage of people who are concerned about global warming, down to 55 percent this year from a high 72 percent in 2000.

Earth Day has also lost its original political edge.  Under the influence of industry lobbyists, and with campaign coffers filled with money from polluters, the environment has become once again a “non-issue” for our politicians.  They are working for polluters instead of for the people and the environment that we depend on. 

Our Texas Senators John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison are doing their part for the fossil fuel industry by consistently supporting legislation that goes against science and blocks the EPA from regulating pollution.  They also support extremist cuts proposed by the Ryan budget that would leave us without any funds whatsoever to protect our environment.   

At the state level, Governor Perry and his appointed commissioners at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) are waging a legal war on the EPA, insisting that Texas’ pro-polluter, anti-community regulatory process is better for business than a science-based process that protects human health.

Earth Day has been successful at getting people to stop and think about our environment.  But if we truly want to preserve our planet, its diversity of life, and ourselves, we need to educate ourselves about the environmental threats we’re facing and use concrete political actions to address those problems.

What can you do to recapture the political activism of the original Earth Day?  Hold policymakers accountable, by keeping up with the impacts their proposed policies will have on the environment and the health of our communities and natural areas.  Call or write Senators Cornyn and Hutchison and tell them to support the EPA in their mission to protect public health and the environment.  Contact your state elected officials and let them know that Texans deserve a voice when it comes to allowing polluters into our communities.  If your elected officials are consistently voting against the environment or champion destructive, pro-pollution policies, work to get them voted out of office.

Keep tabs on corporations and educate yourself about their practices.  When a corporation proposes a development in your community, find out everything you can about the plan.  If you have concerns take them to your elected officials and regulatory agencies. 

Your actions will have greater impact when you work with others who share your goals.  Joining a national environmental organization will allow you to be a part of a political force to turn the tide and make the environment a political issue once more.  Become active in a local group or simply come together with people in your community around local projects like protecting a park, cleaning up a body of water, preserving native habitat, or lobbying city officials to shift to renewable energy, establish bike lanes, and plant trees.

When the Earth Day festivals are over, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work to protect our environment.  Life literally depends on it.

An earlier version of this article appeared in the Rio Grande Guardian in April 2011. 

Protecting What We Love Photo Exhibit Comes to the Rio Grande Valley

From the Protecting What We Love Exhibit

Protecting What We Love is an exhibit of photo posters that tells the story of the environment in Texas in 2012.  The show includes the breathtaking work of some of Texas’ finest nature photographers — Charles Kruvand, Susan Heller, Adrian Van Dellen, and Deana Newcomb.

Alongside these gorgeous art pieces of the natural resources that we cherish are the documentary evidence of brave advocates exposing the dark side of the dream — the brave Don Young and Sharon Wilson with their photos of gas fracking and drilling in the Barnet Shale, the champion coal fighter Paul Rolke with his photos from Texas coal country; and the stalwart friend Hilton Kelley’s poignant images of children living and playing near the toxic fence lines of Port Arthur’s refineries and chemical plants.

Flyer for the exhibit

The solutions are here, too — enlightened and effective water conservation programs, solar panels flowering on rooftops across the state, green buildings for energy efficiency, an electric car and other smart transportation solutions to reduce pollution and clean up Texas.  There’s even a wonderful photo of our own cyclists out in force at UTPA to promote a clean, sustainable Rio Grande Valley. The Protecting What We Love exhibit opening is timed to coincide with the Edinburg Earth Day and Arbor Day on Saturday from 9 am to 1 pm.  The exhibit will be on display through this Friday, April 20.  Then the exhibit moves to the Brownsville Main Library April 23-April 29 and the Southmost Branch April 30-May 5.  Flyer for Brownsville here.

A Visit to Brownsville’s Secret Montezuma Cypress Grove

In March the Lower Rio Grande Valley Sierra Club visited the largest remaining grove of Montezuma cypress trees (Taxodium mucronatum) in South Texas.  These majestic trees are growing along the banks of a Brownsville, Texas resaca, an oxbow lake that was once a channel of the ancient Rio Grande.  Enormous Montezuma cypresses once lined the banks of the river and all of the resacas that snake throughout Brownsville, but the wood was highly prized for its water resistance, and the trees were cut and used to build the wharves for early Brownsville’s port.

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There are only a few large trees left along the Rio Grande watershed, and the Brownsville site is one of only 2 actual groves remaining.  The cypress’s seeds need to float in water for a time in order to germinate, so the end of ancient natural flood cycles in the highly engineered watershed, along with the mowing of stream and resacabanks, has kept them from making a natural comeback.

The Rio Grande Valley is the northernmost range of the Montezuma cypress, which is the national tree of Mexico.   The Aztecs called it ahuehuete, old man of the water, and once upon a time, when wetlands and resacas were plentiful around river systems, these “old men” grew to enormous sizes.  They are, after all, in the same family as giant sequoias and redwoods.  The “Tule Tree” in Oaxaca, Mexico is a Montezuma Cypress that has the stoutest trunk of any tree in the world.  (It takes 17 people with arms outstretched to span its circumference!)

The City of Brownsville owns about half of the resaca and, thanks to the efforts of community activists, has recently agreed to protect it.  Efforts are ongoing to secure the remaining portion of this amazing vestige of the ancient freeflowing Rio Grande.

The True Cost of Coal: From Appalachia to the Rio Grande Valley’s Dirty Secret

Power plant from the Beehive Collective graphic, The True Cost of Coal

The story begins with an intact ecosystem and lives that depend on the land, the work that is done there, and the shared culture that grows up around these activities.

But this scene of biodiverse landscapes and healthy, sustainable communities is torn apart with a blast.

The top of a mountain is scraped off and dumped into the valley stream below to expose a thin coal seam.  The few workers it takes to mine the coal are destroying mountains where they hunted and fished as children, but they have no economic alternative.

When they finish all that is left is an exposed, barren landscape and a local culture eroding away along with the mountain’s remains and the mine’s polluted runoff.  Looming over this regional destruction are the storm clouds of global climate change that gather strength from the greenhouse gases emitted by the power plants that the coal feeds.

This is the visual story of Appalachia and the effects of mountain top removal coal mining as told by the Beehive Design Collective in their graphic The True Cost of Coal, which will be touring the Rio Grande Valley March 28 through 30.

In 2008, members of the nation-wide artist-educator collective began gathering the stories of hundreds of people in Appalachia whose lives had been affected by mountain top removal coal mining.  An elaborate illustration evolved from these conversations.  The graphic exposes the economic, cultural and environmental impacts of coal mining and coal burning.   It reflects the complexity of the struggles for land, livelihood, and self-determination playing out in Appalachia.  It also analyzes the role of coal in globalization, mass consumption, climate change, and environmental injustice.

Mountain top removal mining and the costs of coal-fired electricity may seem far removed from the Rio Grande Valley, but we too burn  coal and support dirty coal mining operations through our electricity use.  Magic Valley Electric Cooperative, a prominent electric provider in the Rio Grande Valley, is a member of South Texas Electric Cooperative, which in turn gets some of its power from the San Miguel power plant, located off Highway 281 about 50 miles south of San Antonio.

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Even though San Miguel is the smallest power plant in Texas, it’s one of the dirtiest.  It burns a particularly polluting form of coal called lignite.  The lignite comes from the nearby San Miguel strip mine, operated by Kiewit, where each year 300 acres of the rural south Texas plains are torn apart and transformed into brown dirt piles.  (See the photos of San Miguel in the slideshow above.  More photos of the mine are found on the Kiewit site.)

Since the lignite has a low energy density compared to other coal, the San Miguel is extremely inefficient, requiring 3.3 million tons of lignite per year.  Lignite also has a higher ash content, meaning that San Miguel generates more waste.  In fact, nearly 2 million tons of ash have to be hauled away from the power plant each year and dumped in nearby pits.

Even more dangerous than the waste that is hauled away is the waste that San Miguel’s smokestack belches.  Although all coal-fired power plants emit huge amounts of carbon dioxide, the primary cause of global warming, lignite produces much higher concentrations of the greenhouse gas than most coal.

San Miguel also makes the Environmental Integrity Project’s list of top mercury polluters, with the fourth highest mercury emission rate in the entire United States.  Mercury is a highly toxic metal that rains down on streams and lakes, accumulating in the fish and seafood that we eat.  In our bodies it acts as a neurotoxin, interfering with the brain and nervous system.  Children and unborn babies are extremely vulnerable to even low levels of mercury exposure, which can cause mental retardation, cerebral palsy, deafness, blindness, and kidney disorders.  One seventieth of a teaspoon is enough to contaminate a 25-acre lake, and San Miguel emitted 3,247 pounds of it from 2000-2010.

The good news?  San Miguel is ripe for retirement.  Because it is so small and so dirty, it does not make economic sense to install the type of pollution control upgrades that will be required under new clean air protections.

The Electric Cooperatives that own San Miguel are guided by their customer-stakeholders.  They are not a distant transnational corporation, they are us.  South Texas Electric Co-op and Magic Valley should act as responsible members of the community by switching to forms of clean power generation and bring an end to San Miguel’s terrible pollution and environmental destruction.

Just like Appalachia, it’s time for South Texas to acknowledge the true cost of coal and move beyond the dirty fuel into a clean energy future.

See The True Cost of Coal and learn more about the Valley’s coal problem.  Complete listing the Beehive Collective Rio Grande Valley Tour times and locations is here.

The Plastic Bag Blight, Seen and Unseen

A plastic bag that made its way to a private yard in Edinburg

They drift in the breeze like white, yellow and blue parachutes and look almost lovely, until they are caught and shredded by a fence, tangled in a tree, or stretched wet and filthy over a drain grate.  They are plastic bags, and they have become a part of the scenery in the Rio Grande Valley, accumulating everywhere, even in rural and natural areas far away from the nearest stores.

Plastic bags have become such an everpresent eyesore that citizens are increasingly willing to trade their small convenience for bag-free streets, sidewalks, and parks.  Dozens of U.S. cities have banned single-use plastic bags or imposed fees for them.  Our own Valley communities of Brownsville and South Padre Island have been at the forefront of the effort to stop the plastic bag blight in Texas, with each passing an ordinance that charges consumers a fee for their use.

These ordinances are gaining traction in part because plastic bag litter is so visible and so unsightly.  Discarded bags blowing around set back efforts to keep our cities clean, and they trash our pristine natural areas.  But plastic bags also have negative impacts that we don’t see—impacts that are far more threatening to the environment and human health.

Every year countless animals die from encounters with plastic bags.  They become entangled in the bags, like the raptor that I witnessed trying desperately to disentangle its talons on a South Padre Island beach a few years ago.  Animals also ingest the bags.  One of the Valley’s premier species, the Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle, can mistake plastic bags floating on the tide for jellyfish and eat them, causing intestinal blockage and even death.

And millions upon millions of bags are floating out there.   They drift on the currents, where exposure to sunlight makes them brittle, causing them to crumble into smaller and smaller pieces.  The plastic does not break down into its component elements; it just fragments into more and more pieces of plastic that are smaller and smaller.  These plastic bits float just below the surface of the water and collect in high concentrations in the mid-ocean gyres, where currents spiral together and the world’s plastic waste accumulates.

This plastic soup is made more poisonous because plastic is oliophilic, meaning that it attracts oil.  Thus it absorbs other oily pollutants that it encounters such as PCBs, pesticides like DDT, and motor oil.  When the now highly toxic plastic bag fragments reach a small enough size, they are consumed by zooplankton and filter feeders, and the bag enters the food chain along with the deadly toxins that it absorbed.  Fish eat the plankton, bigger fish in turn eat them, and the plastic and chemicals climb the food chain.  Trace amounts of these chemicals are found in humans, suggesting that we are ultimately consuming the toxin-laden plastics that we so carelessly threw away.

The landfill and the recycling bin are not much more appealing options.   It is costly to get the bags to the landfill.  A study in Austin found that the taxpayers of that city pay $850,000 a year to put plastic bags in landfills and clean them up as litter.  Plastic bags are more likely than other trash to escape from landfills on the wind.  Since the bags do not biodegrade, they remain intact for 500 to 1,000 years, ever threatening to contaminate surrounding lands and streams.

The cost to recycle plastic bags outweighs their value, so often they are not recycled, even when placed in bins set aside for this purpose.  It is estimated that only 1 to 3 percent of plastic bags are recycled, and few new bags have recycled content.

Single-use bags, like all plastic, are made from petroleum, a non-renewable resource.  Fourteen plastic bags contain enough petroleum to drive a car a mile.  We throw away 380 million of them each year—equivalent to dumping 12 million barrels of oil.  Plastic bags give us the pollution of petrochemicals, but none of the energy.

Plastic bags in a field across from Bicentennial Park in Edinburg

Recognizing the harm that single-use bags bring with them, McAllen is the latest city to propose a bag ban.  The Texas Retailers Association and its members oppose the ban.  This week McAllen City Commissioner Scott Crane announced that McAllen’s ban would be put on hold for 90 days while retailers like HEB and Wal-Mart create a voluntary education program.  Just such an outreach effort took place in Austin in 2008 and 2009, but it fell short of its goals.  So, in March Austin is expected to pass an ordinance to first impose fees for, and then ban outright, single-use plastic bags.

As in Austin, McAllen’s voluntary effort is unlikely to succeed.  In the meantime a delay in banning single-use bags will mean that their pollution continues to pile up.

It’s time to stop thinking of single-use bags, as “disposable.”  The fact is that the plastic bag you carry groceries home in today will outlive you.  Your great-grandchildren won’t be able to see it, but its pollutants will still be in the soil that they walk on and the water that they swim in.  Along with their great-grandmother’s eyes or their great grandfather’s smile, they will inherit the plastics and toxins that we bequeathed them, just so that we wouldn’t have to remember to bring along a reusable bag.

Revisiting the Forest of McAllen: Photos from the McAllen Botanical Garden

The McAllen City Commission will decide Monday whether to provide matching funds so the Valley Land Fund can begin restoring the McAllen Botanical Garden and eventually reopen the park and permanently protect the old growth forest within it.  Here’s what you’ve been missing while it’s been closed. 

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