Both of thiese articles from small local newspapers, which our major newspaper didnot mention. Why is that?
One-Way TripStephen LaRose
Published Thursday June 17, 09:38 am
Saskatchewan migratory birds face a deadly winter in Gulf Of MexicoSpewing from 40,000 to 100,000 barrels of unrefined crude oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico, the wellhead has resisted several efforts by the wellsite owner, British Petroleum, to cap its flow. As of June 14 (press time), 39 million gallons of oil have spewed unchecked into the Gulf of Mexico.
Some in the oil drilling industry now say that the wellhead could still be discharging into the open sea by Christmas.
The blowout has been partly contained by a steel cap and riser pipe that’s diverting some of the oil to an oil tanker ship on the surface. From June 10 to 14, the amount of oil captured this way has gone from about 6,000 barrels a day up to almost 15,000 barrels a day.
The oil slick stretches nearly 3,500 kilometers, and has or will wash ashore in four states — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Many shoreline areas contain nesting areas for migratory birds which spend their summers in Saskatchewan.
What kind of winter home will they find when they return?
Disgust and sadness permeates the conversation, even through the telephone lines. It’s understandable. Trevor Herriot has made a career and a life’s work examining the delicate balance between nature and man in the Saskatchewan grasslands, and now someone wants to talk to him about one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in history.
Oil and wildlife mixes about as well as oil and water. Birds are birds, not experts in determining oil-contaminated areas. From hundreds of feet in the air, birds can’t tell the difference between the normal ocean and the area contaminated by the spill. So, when they dive into the water for their food, they come up coated in oil.
They can’t fly. Their feathers lose the ability to regulate their body heat. And if they try to peck or lick the oil from their bodies, they ingest the stuff, get sick and die.
The oil will also kill plants and animals that are part of their food chain.
This isn’t a local problem for American states bordering the Gulf of Mexico. The oil spill’s effect will reach throughout North America.
…includingSaskatchewan. The Gulf Coast is the winter home for many migratory birds that spend their summers in Saskatchewan — some of whom are on the endangered species list.
The biggest name to stand out — though it’s far from the biggest bird on the list — is the piping plover, a shorebird. Climate change and human development may already be doing a number on the plover, says Bird Studies Canada, because its natural habitat in western Canada — riverbanks and lakeshore marshes — are either drying up or being made unsuitable for the birds by conversion into public beaches or watering holes for cattle. Damming and draining doesn’t help, either.
Other birds who spend their summers in Saskatchewan and their winters in the Gulf of Mexico coast include the common loon, the Western Grebe, Horned Grebe, the American White Pelican, the Double-crested Cormorant, some gulls and terns and the Long-billed Curlew.
There’s also the Short-billed Dowitcher, the greater and lesser Yellowlegs, the Red-breasted Merganser and the Blue-winged Teal.
This fall, these birds will find their habitats destroyed when they return on the annual pilgrimage Mother Nature has programmed into them.
Tens of thousands will die, entire species will face extinction, and in Herriot’s words, “a biological ecosystem that took hundreds of millions of years to create will be destroyed in a month.”
Even worse, hurricane season starts in late August. Storm surges and tidal waves created by hurricanes and tropical storms that pass through the Gulf of Mexico could push the oil further inland, destroying the habitats of species that live inland.
One of the few pieces of good news in the oil spill disaster, Herriot notes, is that the leaking oil will probably not affect the nesting areas of the whooping crane. Placed on the endangered species list in 1967, the whooping cranes’ winter nesting areas are along the Gulf of Mexico coast in Texas — west of the Deepwater Horizon blowout. The Gulf of Mexico’s current will send the oil east, away from their nesting areas.
The whooping crane’s survival is remarkable not for how many are left — estimates put the number of such birds alive at about 250 — but from how far back the bird has come. At one time there were fewer than 60.
So, good for whooping cranes. Nice that one bird population won’t be devastated. Harriet is still concerned for Saskatchewan’s migratory birds.
I don’t need to tell Planet S readers that birds such as the piping plover can’t vote. They have to rely on environmentalists, naturalists, and people like Herriot to speak for them.
Good thing that someone does. Too bad they’re not listened to.
When the Saskatchewan government overhauled the Wildlife Habitat Protection Act two months ago, environmental concerns took a back seat to “getting government out of the marketplace.” In right-wing political parlance, this is called “business as usual.”
For Herriot — author of three books (River in a Dry Land,Jacob’s Wound: A Search for the Spirit of Wildness and Grass Song Sky) about the relationship between man and nature — it’s just another step in exactly the wrong direction.
“In Saskatchewan, as well as federally, there’s an increasing demand by government to streamline the environmental review process,” he says. “We should be going in the other direction. We should be taking steps to preserve what wildlife and wild lands that we have left.
“What they call ‘paperwork,’ we call stewardship,” he says.
Apparently, there wasn’t much ’stewardship’ on board Deepwater Horizonbefore the April 20thexplosion. In a May 20 report to the White House, University of California, Berkeley environmental engineering professor Robert Bea said “this disaster was preventable, had existing progressive guidelines and practices been followed.
“Other existing U.S. guidelines that were simply waived by the responsible regulatory authority could have prevented this incident,” said Bea, who heads the Centre for Catastrophic Risk Management at UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering.
“You know, I think that many people still believe, despite all the evidence about pollution, global warming, and the interconnectedness between man and nature, that the world ecosystem can take all the kinds of abuse modern industry can throw at it,” says Herriot.
“I hope we can learn from this that nature has only a finite capability to handle such abuse — certainly less than our capabilities to abuse nature.”
WGST department becomes programWomen’s and gender studies folded into new interdisciplinary initiative
VICTORIA MARTINEZ
Associate News Editor
After 18 years as a department, women’s and gender studies is transforming into a program this year.
Students will still be able to take honours, four and three year degrees in WGST, but the courses offered have changed. The focus of the program will be separated into gender, sexuality and cultural studies and transnational feminisms.
To reduce overlap with courses offered by other programs, eight courses were replaced with more current topics. Popular courses will still be offered as humanities and social science electives to arts and science students.
“The new women’s and gender studies program will continue to explore topics that span a full spectrum of issues from the intimate to the international,” department head Joan Borsa explains. The traditional focus on examining human behaviour and culture will not be affected by the change to program status.
Otherwise, undergraduate programming will not see too many changes.
“A gender-based lens is relevant to all disciplines,” said Borsa.
The WGST department has existed since 1992, and has offered a major since 1996.
The program will be the first program offered by the newly formed Interdisciplinary Centre for Culture and Creativity, which will be devoted to cross disciplinary study.
The transition will expand the pool of resources WGST can draw from in terms of faculty and research collaborations by sharing information across all the disciplines included in the ICCC. The centre will work with outside groups with more leverage than one department might be able to.
A large portion of WGST students already take minors in other fields, so the new designation will simplify that process. The program now contains seven specializations including English, economics and philosophy.
The ICCC move will also enable the program to offer a master’s degree taking advantage of other disciplines, which is scheduled to be offered by 2011. Research should benefit immediately, since the program will work more closely with other programs than the department could.
The main role of the ICCC is to encourage cooperation between fields of study, and will recruit on behalf of all the programs it contains. The defining quality of projects in the centre is social responsibility combined with cultural and creative work.
The next program to be added to the ICCC will be an MFA in writing, with reading French and courses specifically for first year Greystone scholars already included.
