A Crappy New New Year Enviro Show!

Greetings Earthlings on the eve of another New Year. We'll have plenty of 2020 Hindsight © to go around and Kyla Bennett of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility joins us to give you some indication of what may make the next 365 days a Crappy New Year! As in past years, we'll still take you to meet our Fool-on-the-Hill and, as in these past months, to throw barbs at His Malignancy The Mad King, as well as an end of the year Enviro Show Quote of the Year, but first it' time for...........Revenge of the Critters! A Roo with a bad attitude terrorizes town Down Under.

This final week of 2019 has us recalling one of Congresses biggest fools and not just because he carries The Mad King's water or spouts Putin's party line during the impeachment hearings. No, Rep. Devin Nunes, Repugnican of California wrote: "I mean no offense to the global warming prophets of doom, but I welcome more offshore energy exploration and want to see it move ahead quickly," in his blog in 2017. Fool on! 

We have Breaking News! Our friend and sometimes Enviro Show guest, Michael Kellett has penned an excellent op-ed in The Greenfield Recorder titled "My Turn: Forest Protection Bill H.897: Setting the record straight" which cleanly debunks the junk science coming from both the Warwick & Wendell Selectboards who apparently missed the memo on the Climate Crisis while buying into DCR's bogus approach to so-called "forest management". 

On to His Malignancy The Mad King! Let's begin with this headline which fits nicely with this show's focus: "Trump EPA Sued for Putting Millions of Lives at Risk With Rollback of Chemical Safety Rules". Read all about it HERE. Now, in keeping with the moment, how about a look into His Malignancy's record on the Climate Crisis over the past year? Not to mention other rollbacks  you may have missed. And, The Mad King's approach to managing our public forests is no better. More than 400,000 people and dozens of local tribal, government, business, and national recreation groups have flooded His Malignancy's U.S. Forest Service with comments opposing its plan to undo safeguards that prevent clearcutting of old-growth trees and road building in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. The comment period has ended. Now it's time to......send in the lawyers! Also, reversing a past victory in federal court for wild plains bison, The Mad King's U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will not be affording any Endangered Species Act  protections to the two genetically distinct bison herds living in and around Yellowstone National Park. That would be the very same agency that is now threatening one of the largest Barn Swallow nesting sites in the state, right here in Hadley, MA. We wish Roy Cohen would return from the dead and haunt His Malignancy with the special Holidaze message "It's the Climate Crisis, Stupid!" but no such miracle seems available so "The 2020 Election must be  a time of reckoning on climate change"

Time for The Enviro Show Quote of the Year:

"Nature is not, of course, always benign and beautiful. It can be frightening and terrifying also. Not too many generations ago, raw nature and wilderness tended to inspire fear and dread in "civilized" people.They represented Otherness and the Unknown. That which is "wild" is also "bewildering".

Today, wilderness is usually considered to be something good and in need of preservation. The beauty and awesomeness of it dominate our attention.

We are attracted by wilderness, the Otherness of it, the sense it is something inevitably outside of us. Always beyond us, it is what is ultimately real.

We cannot adequately appreciate this aspect of nature if we approach it with any taint of human pretense. It will elude us if we allow artifacts like clothing to intervene between ourselves and this Other. To apprehend it, we cannot be naked enough.

In Wildness is the preservation of the world."

                                                                                     -  Henry David Thoreau

After our conversation with Kyla we move on to our Bus Stop Billboard:


Monday January 27, 7 to 9pm. Climate Action Now Monthly Gathering. All Welcome! The Unitarian Universalist Society of Amherst, 121 North Pleasant Street, Amherst, MA. Go to: http://climateactionnowma.org/ 

Tuesday January 28, William Moomaw, Emeritus Professor of International Environmental Policy at the Fletcher School – Tufts University, will give a talk titled, “Battling Climate Change One Forest at a Time.” Moomaw will discuss how, over the past 100 years, forests have been actively managed for the production of wood and paper, and more recently for industrial scale wood fuel for heat and electricity. As a result, our forests are purposely kept in a relatively young stage and harvested well before the trees have reached maturity and a large stock of stored carbon and the forest has achieved its full ecological potential. Forests of the world have the potential to store twice what they now store, but this will require a change in management practices. Moomaw will explain how having a higher percentage of older forests will also slow and potentially reverse the decline in both the total population of species and their diversity. The presentation will take place in room 218 of Murdock Hall on the MCLA campus. They are free and open to the public.

For more information, contact Elena Traister at (413) 662-5303.

Goodbye Enviro Show fans, we'll be back next year. Meanwhile, remember to listen to your Mother!