The article makes it seem that the only reason the Bay Program Strategy mentions climate change is because public comment was strong. Not too encouraging, coming as it does from the same people who failed the first 25 years.

from WYPR — public radio in Baltimore <http://news.wypr.org/post/latest-strategies-bay-clean?utm_source=Chesapeake+Bay+News&utm_campaign=eca3288ed6-Chesapeake_Bay_News4_23_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_71ced15df1-eca3288ed6-61676821>

The Latest Strategies For Bay Clean-up

By JOEL MCCORD • 23 HOURS AGO
SHARETwitter Facebook Google+ Email

CREDIT UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND CENTER FOR ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE VIA FLICKR

The Chesapeake Bay Program, that multi-state, multi-federal agency partnership working on bay restoration, released Monday the latest set of draft strategies to guide the next steps in restoring America’s largest estuary to the health it once enjoyed.

As expected, it includes calls for more effective management of blue crab harvests, protecting restored oyster reefs and getting better control of storm water run-off. But it also has some new wrinkles.

For the first time since the first Chesapeake Bay Agreement was inked in 1983, the document mentions climate change and the need to prepare low lying areas for the inevitable sea level rise that will come with it. Nick DiPasquale, head of the Chesapeake Bay Program, said the section was included because the topic came up repeatedly during public meetings with scientists and others.

The strategies also take into account existing healthy waters within the bay region.

“It’s the first time we’ve ever acknowledged that there are a lot of really great, clean places from New York to West Virginia to Pennsylvania and everywhere else in between,” said Mark Bryer, head of the Nature Conservancy’s Chesapeake Bay Program. “And we, collectively as a partnership, want to protect these places.”

The 25 management strategies are the next step under the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement and will be open for public comment for the next 45 days. They should become final in July.

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from The Guardian . . .<http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/mar/03/mapping-environmental-protest-justice-defending-land?CMP=share_btn_tw>

Mapping the global battle to protect our planet

A new project maps environmental protest across the world, powerfully visualising a growing movement

The Atlas of Environmental Justice project tracks protests over natural resources. Photograph: EJAtlasLeah Temper in Barcelona
Leah Temper is the coordinator and co-editor at EJAtlas. Follow @EnvJustice on Twitter.
Tuesday 3 March 2015 10.08 EST

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In 2012 protests erupted in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina over the demolition of a much beloved local park to build a business complex. A movement under the slogan “This Park is Ours” aimed originally at protecting the green space soon broadened into a collective movement aimed against corruption, lack of transparency, economic inequality and dwindling social services. Hundreds of protesters from all social classes and religions gathered daily in the endangered park, becoming part of a Bosnian spring that came to represent a struggle for human dignity and accountability under most articulated civic movement since the 1992-1995 war.

From Banja Luka to Gezi Park, Turkey to Rosia Montana, Romania to the land wars across India, social conflicts are increasingly playing out through battles around environmental resources and in defence of common land.

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These struggles have sometimes toppled governments, such as the coup in Madagascar in 2008 that brought “land-grabbing” to global attention when Daewoo was given a lease to grow food and biofuels for export on half the country’s land. But most of the time, the evictions, forced relocations and the violent repression of those impacted by contamination from gold mines, oil extraction, plantations and agribusinessoperations are rarely covered in the press. Ecological violence inflicted upon the poor is often not news but simply considered to be part of the costs of “business as usual”.

While statistics on strike action have been collected since the late 19th century for many countries and now globally by the International Labour Organisation, there is no one body that tracks the occurrence and frequency of mobilisations and protests related to the environment. It was this need to better understand and to track such contentious activity that motivated the Atlas of Environmental Justice project, an online interactive map that catalogues localised stories of resistance against damaging projects: from toxic waste sites to oil refining operations to areas of deforestation.

EJatlas aims to make ecological conflicts more visible and to highlight the structural impacts of economic activities on the most vulnerable populations. It serves as a reference for scientists, journalists, teachers and a virtual space for information, networking and knowledge sharing among activists, communities and concerned citizens.

The EJatlas was inspired by the work of participating Environmental Justice Organisations, such as Grain, the World Rainforest Movement and Oilwatch International, OCMAL, the Latin American Observatory of Mining Conflicts, whose work fighting and supporting impacted communities for 20-30 years now has helped articulate a global movement for environmental justice. The global atlas of environmental justice is an initiative of Ejolt, a European supported research project that brings together 23 organisations to catalogue and analyse ecological conflicts. The conflicts are entered by collaborating activists and researchers and moderated by a team at the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

At the moment the atlas documents 1,400 conflicts, with the ability to filter across over 100 fields describing the actors, the forms of mobilisation from blockades to referendums, impacts and outcomes. It resembles in many ways a medieval world map – while some regions have been mapped, others remain “blank spots” still to be filled. While much work remains to be done, the work so far offers several insights into the nature and shape of environmental resistance today.

Brazil drought: water rationing alone won’t save Sao Paulo

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Firstly, it highlights how those on the frontlines of these struggles are often not environmentalists – they are communities defending their livelihoods, the right to participate in decision-making and recognition of their life projects. Nor it this, as governments and companies try to paint it, about a balance between development and conservation. It is rather about the meaning of development itself, who is sacrificed in the name of development and who decides. Pollution is not democratic, nor is it colour blind.

Secondly, it shows how the globalisation of the economy and material and financial flows is being followed by the globalisation of resistance. Mobilisations are increasingly interlinked across locations: anti-incineration activists make alliances with waste-picker movements to argue how through recycling they “cool down the earth”. Foil Vedanta, a group of activists fighting a bauxite mine on a sacred mountain in India, follow the company’s supply chain to Zambia, where they reveal Vedanta is evading tax and spark street protests there. Trans-nationally, new points of convergence unite movements working on issues from food sovereignty to land-grabbing, biofuels and climate justice.

From land grabs to anti union behaviour, businesses are increasingly being held accountable

Rolf Nieuwenkamp

Read more

This globalising of concerns has led to more civil society participation in multi-lateral governance, but the outcomes are often based on voluntary guidelines. While investor-state dispute settlement mechanisms such as those embedded in trade agreements such as the proposed TTIP EU-US trade agreement can allow corporations to sue states, there is no way to hold corporate abusers to account.The Chevron case, where the company has managed to evade a 9.5 billion euro fine imposed by the top Ecuadorean courts for devastating the Amazon is only one example of this challenge.

The evidence shows that “corporate social responsibility” is not a panacea and that until corporate accountability can be enforced, successful “cost-shifting” will remain a defining feature of doing business.

Shedding light on human rights: do businesses stand up to scrutiny?

Read more

Thirdly, the diversity of conflicts demonstrate that technical innovations and the greening of capitalism through “pricing nature” will not solve the environmental crisis. Biofuels, off-setting projects and even geo-engineering of the climate are leading to new conflicts as northern consumers occupy even more environmental space in the south – this time to absorb their atmospheric emissions. Naomi Klein has powerfully pointed out how looming climate chaos can only be addressed through a restructuring of the global economy, calling attention to inter-generational justice and the world we are leaving behind us. But the thousands of actually existing and localised struggles of environmental dispossession in the EJatlas are an even more potent call for the need for systemic change that addresses the unequal distribution of power and lack of democratic participation that are at the root of both social injustice and environmental degradation.

The danger such movements represent to powerful vested interests is attested to by the intensity of the violence and backlash wielded to repress them, with over 30% of cases shown on the map entailing arrests, killings, abuses and other forms of repression against activists. It is not an exaggeration in many countries to speak of a veritable “war against environmental defenders”.

Furthermore the number of violent conflicts is set to increase because the world’s remaining natural capital currently lies on or beneath lands occupied by indigenous and subsistence peoples. Communities who have nothing left to lose are willing to use increasingly contentious tactics to defend their way of life.

Beyond stories of disaster and degradation, the struggles documented in the atlas highlight how impacted communities are not helpless victims. These are not only defensive and reactionary battles but proactive struggles for common land, for energy and food sovereignty, for Buen Vivir, indigenous ways of life and for justice. The environment is increasingly a conduit for frustrations over the shape of capitalist development. Tracking these spaces of ecological resistance through the Environmental Justice Atlas highlights both the urgency and the potential of these movements to trigger broader transcendental movements that can confront asymmetrical power relations and move towards truly sustainable economic systems.

The up-to-date version of the atlas will be presented at the closing meeting of the Ejolt project in Brussels today where the project brings attention to the increasing persecution of environmental defenders and calls on European Unionpolicymakers and parliamentarians to integrate environmental justice concerns into their policy agenda and move towards reducing the current atmosphere of impunity for environmental crimes.

Leah Temper is the coordinator and co-editor at EJAtlas. Follow @EnvJustice on Twitter.

Join our community of development professionals and humanitarians. Follow@GuardianGDP on Twitter.

from Grist <http://grist.org/politics/dr-evil-is-defending-big-oil-is-anyone-defending-climate-the-same-way/&gt;

Dr. Evil is defending Big Oil — is anyone defending climate the same way?

By David Roberts on 2 Mar 2015 10:21 am

There was a story in The New York Times last October that didn’t get the attention it deserved. It was about a speech given last June in Colorado Springs to a bunch of energy executives by “Dr. Evil,” i.e., Richard Berman, the guy who does PR for pretty much every nasty industry you can name.

Berman is notorious. This Boston Globe investigation is probably the best single-serving account of his history and tactics, but you can find similarly damning stories in The New York Times, Mother Jones, 60 Minutes, and many other outlets. And you can peruse Berman Exposed, a project of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Berman’s genius lies in exploiting what is legal. If a business or industry wants to fight off a public-interest campaign — against corn syrup, say, or against fracking — it can hire PR firms itself. But that leaves it open to negative public opinion. No business wants to be the face of a controversial campaign.

What Berman does is start nonprofit “educational” groups as a thin front for his business. The Center for Consumer Freedom works to discredit anti-obesity campaigns. The Employment Policies Institute battles campaigns to raise the minimum wage. And so on. (He’s got dozens). These groups often have no address but that of Berman and Company, no employees but Berman, and no one on their boards but industry reps and current and former Berman and Company employees.

The nonprofits then hire Berman and Company to run PR campaigns. The beauty of this arrangement, from industry’s perspective, is that nonprofits don’t have to disclose their donors. So industries can funnel money to Berman without being identified with it. And he can say and do things they would never, ever be publicly associated with. The nonprofit groups serve, effectively, as money laundering/anonymizing operations.

What’s more, the media is very often too lazy to check into legit-sounding nonprofits, so these front groups get op-eds placed, representatives on news shows, and “studies” reported to the public, all without being identified as agents of industry. It’s quite the racket.

Bill McKibben, pondering how best to strangle your puppies.Berman’s latest target is greens. He’s got front groups going after EPA power plant rules, the fossil-fuel divestment movement, and anti-fracking activists. For a taste, you can check out his BigGreenRadicals.com, which is worth your time if only to appreciate the hilariously evil-looking picture of Bill McKibben they dug up.

—

This is all quite lamentable and has been lamented at length, many times. I mean, Berman is so scummy his own son has publicly and vociferously denounced him. But he doesn’t care.

And that’s why it’s worth listening to him, and worth reading the transcript of that speech he gave energy execs. It’s a fascinating discourse on how to shape public opinion by someone who is a) very good at it and b) utterly unburdened by scruples. This is how to win when you don’t care about decency or honesty or the opinion of your peers. This is how to win when you only care about winning.

My impression, when I hear liberals discussing public opinion and communications, is that they often conflate what will work with what is good or righteous or honest. Their goal is to change public opinion, yes, but they are also keenly interested in being viewed a certain way, in being perceived as honest or objective or nonpartisan. They confuse strategies that appeal to them, their own values and worldview, with strategies that produce desired outcomes.

Berman doesn’t have that problem. Everyone sees him as an evil turd and he doesn’t care, at all. He really only cares about moving the needle, defending his corporate clients, and fighting off the “nanny state.” He only cares about winning. It lends a certain clarity to his thinking.

With that in mind, let’s look briefly at what he says in that speech, along with some illustrative videos of his work.

1. Always be on the offensive.

The key is to shape public judgment. “If you want public judgment on your side, you have to start the conversation,” Berman says. “You’re on defense if you’re responding to somebody else.”

You always attack, frame the issue, establish the battlefield. If you are responding to someone else’s accusations, even if your defense is accurate, you are losing.

2. The best offense is ad hominem.

Berman is explicit and unapologetic that going on the offensive means “shooting the messenger,” i.e., discrediting opponents, depriving them of moral authority. “The logic of the offense campaign,” Berman says, “is diminishing the other side’s ability to capture people’s imagination and to become credible.”

He goes after the people and groups running public-interest campaigns and tries to “reposition” them in the public’s mind as unelected, greedy, meddlesome nanny-staters. He’s done it to the Humane Society, unions, and now green activists.

The value of this strategy is that trust undergirds all factual disputes. If you stop trusting, say, the Humane Society, if you start viewing it as a money-making bureaucracy, then it doesn’t matter what the Humane Society says about any specific issue, or the facts it marshals. You’ve made a judgment about them.

3. Being first, establishing common knowledge, is half the game.

“You know the guy that gets to make the first opinion, the first impression, has a huge advantage,” Berman notes, “because people don’t want to admit they were wrong the first time.” Getting out first and broadly helps create what he calls “common knowledge,” i.e., the kinds of things that “everybody knows,” even though most people can’t tell you where they heard it.

His example: Everybody knows that driving is more dangerous than flying. In most cases people can’t tell you exactly where they heard that, or cite any statistics, but they just … know it. It’s out there.

Once something becomes common knowledge, it is extremely difficult to dislodge it. This is part of the brilliance of the right-wing media machine. It surrounds conservatives with dozens of voices, all saying the same thing, which leads to the strong impression that, hey, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. This is how all conservatives “know” Obamacare is failing, even though it is succeeding beyond expectations.

4. A tie is a win for the status quo.

When you are defending the status quo, you don’t necessarily need to convince the public that your side is right. You just need to confuse the issue. If you make people doubt the other side’s messengers and fill the air with a bunch of contradictory statistics and facts, most people won’t have the wherewithal to dig through it all. They will simply tune out:

You get in people’s mind a tie. They don’t know who is right. … People are not prepared to get aggressive in moving one way or another. I’ll take a tie any day if I’m trying to preserve the status quo.

This is one reason why preventing change is easier than generating it.

5. Humor works. (And so does scorn.)

Berman:

We like to use humor because humor doesn’t offend people and at the same time they get the message. … Wherever possible I like to use humor to minimize or marginalize the people on the other side.

6. Emotion works better than facts; negative emotions linger longer.

Berman doesn’t get into this in the energy speech, but he has touched on it elsewhere. Here’s a bit from the Globe story:

Berman gave one of his most revealing talks about his strategy in a locale far from his Washington office. Meeting with a group of Nebraska farmers in 2010, he told them it was more effective to “hit people in their heart rather than their head,” according to a report on the talk by Nebraska Farm Bureau News. “Emotional understanding is very different — it stays with you. Intellectual understanding is a fact and facts trump other facts. When I understand something in my gut, you’ve got me in a very different way.”

Berman then explained why he believes such attacks work. “People remember negative stuff,” Berman said. “They don’t like hearing it, but they remember it … We can use fear and anger — it stays with people longer than love and sympathy.”

7. “If you want a video to go viral, have kids or animals.”

—

I’ll leave you with a series of questions.

A) Could you, or would you, behave like Dr. Evil on behalf of clean energy or climate mitigation?

B) If there were a Dr. Evil of clean energy or climate mitigation, would you hire him?

C) Would you give money to a nonprofit front group that funneled money to him, if you knew the donation would never be disclosed?

D) Would you publicly denounce him if his tactics came to light?

My strong suspicion is that if a Dr. Evil did pop up fighting for progressive causes, liberals would line up to disown him, thus demonstrating their precious independence and moral superiority. My further suspicion is that, of the vast amount of money being spent by left-leaning foundations, green NGOs, and clean energy industry groups to shape public opinion about climate change, approximately zero of it is being deployed with the same ruthless, unscrupulous ferocity that Berman brings to defending the status quo. Is that a good thing?

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Bruce
bpotter

— well, one reason, anyway . . . .

Guard Delivers Provisions to Ice-Bound Chesapeake Bay Island

February 20, 2015 1:11 PM

Fishing boats sit frozen in ice in the harbor of Tangier Island, Virginia as residents wait for a Coast Guard ice breaker to clear the harbor. (Photo by Glenn Beil/Getty Images)

UPDATED: Feb. 20, 2015 1:34 p.m.

TANGIER ISLAND, Va. (WNEW/AP) — The Virginia National Guard flew in food, medicine and mail to ice-bound Tangier Island, and the mayor said a Coast Guard cutter was on its way Friday to open a passage to this tiny fishing and tourism outpost in the middle of Chesapeake Bay.
Like many longtime islanders, Mayor James “Ooker” Eskridge played down Tangier’s plight but said medicines were essential for those who could not get off the island. Tangier has no drugstore.
“But you know, we’re not starving out here,” he said in an interview. “This happens when you live in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay.”
The guard’s 224th Aviation Regiment used a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter Thursday to deliver milk, eggs, bread and prescription medicines to the 1.2-square-mile island of 460 people.

While the island has a grocery, many islanders hop on a ferry to Crisfield, Md. — 14 miles away — for larger purchases. Ice has made that route impassable. The only way off the island now is by air; the island has a small airport.
Like most of the Mid-Atlantic, Tangier has shivered through an unseasonable cold stretch, dipping to 9 degrees Friday. It received about 8 inches of snow this week.
Islanders who are accustomed to the isolation said many newcomers hadn’t planned ahead for the long winter months.
“We plan for it. We stock up our cabinets,” said Judith Eskridge, the mayor’s wife. “Some of the new people who come, they don’t know.
“It’s inconvenient, but it’s not life-threatening.”
Another longtime islander, the mayor’s nephew Tommy Eskridge, agreed. “We’re used to it. Like it’s not our first rodeo.”
The island’s frozen place in the bay has brought hardship. Some are unable to pay bills or visit relatives who are hospitalized on the mainland. Many on the island pilot or crew tugboats, often in two-week shifts. They’ve been stranded on the mainland.
Because of its isolation, many Tangier residents still retain the linguistic echoes of the island’s settlers, primarily from Cornwall along England’s southwest coast. John Smith, the intrepid Jamestown settler, is believed to be the first European to step foot on the island four centuries ago.
Many islanders fish or haul in the bay’s beloved blue crabs.
The island is a popular destination for tourists, who explore it by foot. Most islanders get around on golf carts.
Mayor Eskridge said the ice is “the worst it’s been in a long time” and has kept oystermen from Tangier Sound and a bountiful season. The season ends in two weeks.
“It puts the guys out of work,” he said. “We just can’t get the boats out to them.
“You look out there and it looks like the Arctic.”
In late January of 2003, the island was locked in ice and isolated for more than a week due to the extreme winter weather. Food stocks on the island had been dwindling, and following the deaths of several residents whose bodies were unable to be evacuated because the bay was sealed in ice, the U.S. Coast Guard intervened to break free a route to the island.
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