Blog Archive

Thursday, January 30, 2025

Public Lands in Wrong Hands Enviro Show

 Greetings Earthlings. Has it occurred to you lately that the present managers of our Public Lands are not protecting or preserving them? Longtime listeners to this show know we have. Zack Porter, Executive Director of Standing Trees returns to the show to explain why and offer solutions. As always, we will also introduce you to this week's Fool-on-the-Hill and Those Whose Brains Were Small as well as the latest outrages from His Malignancy The Mad King and more but first it's time for......Revenge of the Critters! Surfer's Deja vu.
 

This week's Fool-on-the Hill is Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) who proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would allow His Malignancy to serve a third term in the White House so that the country “can sustain the bold leadership our nation so desperately needs.” Bold?  Seems like reckless fascism from here, Andy, you old fool. 

 

Speaking of, it's time to hold our collective nose and dive into The Swamp as His Malignancy and assorted MAGA Swamp dwellers pour in the sewage.  As one of his first acts as president, His Malignancy signed an executive order pulling the United States out from the Paris Climate Agreement. Of course, he did that last time around but this time "After declaring a national energy emergency on his first day in office, [the] President said that coal could be a fuel source for new electric generating plants." The Mad King as Old King Coal? Nah! A "merry old soul" wouldn't pull the rug out from under victims of the worst climate related firestorm in LA history by eliminating FEMA. Getting back to energy, Sunrise notes: "A recent report revealed that fossil fuel interests poured nearly $450 million into the 2024 election cycle in support of [His Malignancy] Additionally, [his] cabinet picks have deep ties to the fossil fuel industry. Doug Burgum and Lee Zeldin have both received hundreds of thousands of contributions from the oil and gas industry while fracking CEO Chris Wright donated $450,000 to [his] campaign." And from the malicious to the ridiculous The Mad King actually signed an executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America”. Swamp Queen Marjorie Taylor Greene is drafting legislation to rename it in all federal documents. Then His Malignancy was flooding The Swamp with an illegal funding freeze last week but, thankfully the pushback was so intense that The Mad King balked and started back stepping. It was a welcomed defeat. Pushback in the courts also: 22 state attorneys general sued Trump over birthright order or ACLU suing fast-track deportation policy or Quakers suing to stop ICE out of worship services. Stay tuned. We can't move on here without giving you this link to Bill McKibben's recent think piece on MAGA madness and give you an Action Link to let Congress know what you think.

 

Our Doublespeak of the Week is, appropriately, the Fix Our Forests bill pushed out of the U.S. House and now in the Senate. Earth Justice noted this from a recent protest letter: "This legislation purports to be about sound forest management and fire, but it could actually make fires worse, and is really about stifling citizen voices, removing science from land management decisions, and legislating a large-scale rollback of the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act on millions of acres of federal lands. Its sweeping provisions remove scientific review and accountability to benefit the short-term interests of extractive industries." In other words it's doublespeak bullshit.
 
 
Pull out of the World’s Main Climate Pact, bring back coal, "Drill baby, drill", trash Public Lands, WTF, "It's the Climate Crisis, Stupid!" Do you think the far-right Climate Deniers at Prager U got the memo? "PragerU, the prominent right-wing advocacy group that promotes climate change denialism, was forced to evacuate its West Coast headquarters by the Los Angeles wildfires, which experts and scientists have said were exacerbated by climate change, the Daily Beast revealed." 😏 And this from the real world: "The Climate Backtracker, a project of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, is keeping tabs on all the things the new U.S. administration is doing to “scale back or wholly eliminate federal climate mitigation and adaptation measures.” Things like this perhaps? "As climate change supercharges disease, Trump pulls US from World Health Organization". Getting back to the LA firestorms and all the other climate related disasters on Earth some people are finally starting to realize "There's no place that's safe." Let's take a break here. 

 
Our Critter of the Week this time is the Winter Wren. "Once lumped with a group of similar-looking wrens, the Winter Wren was part of a three-species split in 2010 based on updated genetic evidence. The other two species created from that split were the Pacific Wren of western North America and the Eurasian Wren, the only wren species found in the Eastern Hemisphere" according to the American Bird Conservancy and yet the Carolina Wren is listed on ABC's same page? Go figure. "One of the smallest wrens in North America, the inconspicuous Winter Wren is easy to mistake for a mouse as it creeps about its favored forest and riparian habitats. Patient observers will eventually catch sight of a tiny brown ball of a bird with barred flanks, a pale “eyebrow,” and a stubby, erect tail. This wren always seems to be in motion, flicking its wings and bouncing up down even while standing still. Its short, rounded wings make it a weak flyer, and it prefers to scamper about on foot."  Of course the Wren is always in motion out there in the cold, it so small it has to keep from freezing to death! 


We think you might agree that Elon Musk qualifies for "Their Brains Were Small and They Died" segment. His recent nazi salute during His Malignancy's inauguration nonsense obviously replays mid-20th century fascism. Elon is a dinosaur in so many ways we can hardly wait until he goes extinct. As it turns out, many billionaires are stuck with the curse of ‘affluenza’. They should probably seek help or, better yet, go the way of the dinosaurs. 
 
 
In the Enviro Show Echo Chamber we are replaying Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting's (FAIR) take on the mainstream media's coverage of MAGA. Needless to say "you might want to look to a media outlet not owned by a toadying oligarch." We've always had issues with the New York Times, the Washington Post, the big three Networks and the like with their both-sides status quo news coverage but since the recent election those so-called legacy media operations have decided to normalize the rise of fascism here in the U.S.A.  That is very disturbing and does not bode well for our nation.  You may have noticed we don't normalize here on The Enviro Show. And this from our friends at the Center for Biological Diversity: "

The country should also do more to protect marine mammals off its own coasts. Tell NOAA Fisheries to promote whale-safe fishing gear."

 

 
OK, how about our Quote of the Week?
 
What an extraordinary gift trees are and how many things we can learn from them, if only we know how to watch, to see, to give them the love and attention that we give to friends! 
 
               - Susanna Tamaro
 
After our interview with Zack it's on to the bus stop billboard:
 
 





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