Rat Seeks Carp

You’d think the most exotic and controversial animal trap in the entire country would be more exciting to look at. It wasn’t. As a connoisseur of traps, this Rat was most curious about an electric fish trap. And from this Rat’s perspective, this fish (trap) story is a dandy tale -- about human beings, the illusions you harbor about controlling nature, and the immutable law of unintended consequences.

The aforementioned animal trap is actually not a trap but an electric fish barrier, wired to the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. It is the last line of defense keeping the marauding Asian carp from wreaking havoc in Lake Michigan, and no doubt beyond. (But as a fellow low-life, bottom-feeding critter, Rat does harbor some sympathy for the much disparaged Asian carp.)

The site of the electric fish barrier, on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal.

You’ll see pictured here some interested souls getting a tour of this fish barrier, found near Lockport, Illinois and operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Essentially the barrier is a bunch of thick wires in the water just above the bottom of the canal that emit electric waves that repel the fish. Even though you weren’t supposed to actually see fish fleeing , very few of the people on this tour shared the Corps’ sanguine view of the effectiveness of this device.

The weird plumbing Chicago area rivers can be seen at this site (called Bubbly Creek at one time because of the decaying refuse gassing off in the stream, located about a mile from the Loop).

So far, only one Asian carp has found upstream from the barrier that we know about, but plenty of Asian carp DNA has been detected. Experts believe if the carp gets past the barriers, they have a free shot to Lake Michigan, and eventually Wisconsin’s rivers. (Asian carp can get to Wisconsin via the Mississippi River too, of course.)

Equally fascinating on this tour was getting to see firsthand the elaborate and massive plumbing job that is the river and surface waterway system for Chicago. The whole thing has been engineered to look nothing like it looked before settlement, and its dual purpose is to move cargo and send polluted water down to the Mississippi River (150 miles away) instead of to Lake Michigan (which is right there). Trying to manipulate this system to keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes, as some are proposing, will be enormous engineering, hydrologic and – especially – political undertaking.

Time is totally on the carp’s side on this one.

Festivities, Fireworks and Flying Fish

No matter how many times I see it, it still sends chills up my spine. Check out this stunning video taken last week of salmon running Dagger Falls, on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River, Idaho, 700 miles from the sea.:




Save Our Wild Salmon are asking people to take action and let the Obama Administration know that protecting these incredible animals and this awesome journey is something we all care about. Take a minute to send a letter to the Administration here (actually, it takes less than a minute).

Then go be awestruck by this beautiful country.

Now THAT's patriotic!

posted by the River Rat

If you're Nestle, money DOES buy happiness.

Sometimes, you just can't make this stuff up.

The Wall St. Journal last week ran an article about the resistance Nestle is encountering to a proposed bottling plant in the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon. Commenting on the trend that people are getting smart and turning on their taps instead of peelingthe cap off expensive little plastic bottles, Nestle Chief Executive Paul Bulke had this to whine say:

"Water is a category that gave us so many years of joy...and all of a sudden, it changes. That is what hurts."

Joy? Is that what we're calling pure profit these days?

posted by the River Rat

The Lingering Limburger Smell of Scared-Rat Politics

Rat has been sniffing around the halls of the Capitol and found more than a little Limburger. And in these days of tea parties and heightened rhetoric, there’s also the smell of fear in the air. This fall, the governor’s seat, all 99 Assembly seats and more than half the Senate seats are up for grabs. You can bet that played a big role in our elected representatives' lily-livered inaction this spring.

There’s nothing new to election-year politics, is there? Don’t the guys in office always try to rig the system to hang onto power? Sure.

But the question draws a rat’s nose to those currently in power, the Democrats. Rat would love to surface some conservation group newsletters (including that from my beloved River Alliance) from November 2008, no doubt expressing glee (in very careful non-partisan tones, of course) that the Dems were total lords of the Capitol, and we could expect big breakthroughs on conservation policy.

Conservation went a dismal 0 for 4 on its top priorities. (There were some things to cheer about: two new Wild Rivers named, phosphorus bans in the form of lawn fertilizer and dishwasher soap, e-waste legislation.)

What’s at the bottom of the Dems dropping the conservation ball? The messy knot of money and power, Rat thinks, and not just on conservation.

First, there’s the obvious currying favor with interests with money to burn on campaigns. That can be the only explanation for the Democrats’ shameful dithering on regulating payday loan operations. This should have been a no-brainer for a party supposedly committed to struggling people. But they milked the industry for tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donations, not to mention throwing out any shred of integrity about the policy when Assembly Speaker Mike Sheridan (in effect, the Assembly Dems’ majority leader) was found with a payday industry lobbyist on his arm.

Then there’s the hideous process of letting AT&T write their own bill to deregulate land lines. Dems’ fingerprints are on that too. (Luckily the bill died.)

Sheridan’s Democratic counterpart in the state Senate, Russ Decker, deserves a few brickbats for holding up good legislation, out of fear of making his colleagues have to vote on it, for fear that it might lose the Dems a senate seat. His pettiness ended up holding up said good legislation for another reason: he was punishing some senators for voting for someone else for majority leader. (Turns out those senators were on to something.)

But why cling to power when you won’t use it for a good purpose? Power ought to me a means to an end, and in the current Capitol climate, where both majority and minority leaders get picked as much for their fund raising ability as for their diplomacy, the means is the means is the means – raise money from wherever you can to hold a seat, so you can get re-elected so you can hold a seat, so you can…..

Part of the blame for such dismal performance by the Legislature (Dems in charge, so more shame on them) has to go to Jim Doyle. He’s never been a back-slapping, glad-handing, hustle-the-Legislature kind of politician. He never served in the other wings of the Capitol, and seemed to avoid them like a vegetarian steers away from a butcher. Rat overheard the complaints of many Democratic legislators that they felt dissed by the Gov because he simply paid them no mind. It’s very hard to advance an agenda if legislators and the governor don’t talk to one another. Note to Dems: See Tommy Thompson.

Total majority is a privilege that the Dems may have squandered, leaving them in this paradox: by having been so cautious and so beholden to cash constituents, they may lose the very power their caution and special-interest pleasing was supposed to help them keep.

Hydro Hijinks

Rat has watched with interest the unfolding, and what now may be the unraveling, of “Clean Energy Jobs Act” (CEJA), a coal pile of policy proposals to get us away from burning hydrocarbons and move us to “renewable” energy. It has been in circulation for months in the Wisconsin Legislature, and was a product of a task force convened by Governor Jim Doyle to look at global warming.

It was always questionable how much the bill had to do with jobs, and now it’s even questionable how much it has to do with clean energy.

Unless, that is, you call hydropower – power generated by dams – clean. It certainly is renewable because the rivers always run, but river rats have always been suspect of hydro because of the damage it does to rivers. (And, in developing countries, the damage it does to people who get displaced by the flooding for the reservoirs.)

It’s very unlikely we’ll see any new hydro dams in Wisconsin (all the good spots are already taken), so if you want hydropower in this state, you get it from Manitoba, where they still build big dams on pristine rivers.

Hydropower was deemed “renewable” by the Global Warming Task Force and therefore deemed so in the legislation. That put it on par with wind and solar and biofuels and other things – all energy that can be produced in Wisconsin. But a little rat informed us about how power companies operating in Wisconsin were trying to wire the legislation to have all the power they could buy from Manitoba Hydro (a Canadian “crown” corporation) get counted as “renewable.” One analysis showed that the 5 biggest utilities in Wisconsin could get all their required renewable energy (the bill called for 25% from renewable sources by the year 2025) simply by connecting their wires to Manitoba hydro.

That would have undercut a fundamental premise of the CEJA legislation – encouraging the development of renewable energy generated in Wisconsin. Not to mention the new dam construction it might have triggered in Manitoba.

The bill was amended last week, and things appear to have gotten worse. The only tiny barrier to Manitoba Hydro providing ALL “renewable” energy in Wisconsin is some paperwork shuffled between Manitoba and Wisconsin “regarding the final licensure of two existing hydroelectric projects in Manitoba” (emphasis ours). (The quote is from the Wisconsin Legislative Council’s overview of changes to the bill.) That’s a pretty low threshold: native Canadians have fought with the utility over the decades, but there’s little history of Manitoba Hydro not getting its way, especially for dams already built.

CEJA has been compromised in other ways, and conservation groups are acting like it’s the drunk uncle at the party – entertaining at first, embarrassing as time went on. We’ll know its fate in a few days’ time.

Who Needs A Scenic River When There’s A Bridge To Build?

There’s a bridge to somewhere that nobody wants on the Minnesota-Wisconsin border, but there’s congresswoman who won’t let a mere federally protected river get in the way of a new bridge.

This story reminds Rat of the “bridge to nowhere” made infamous during the 2008 presidential campaign. A multi-million dollar bridge from the mainland to a barely inhabited island in Alaska, it became a symbol of government waste and pork. There was no small irony in that pork chop, in that Republican presidential candidate John McCain railed against such projects, and the Alaska porkchop/bridge was built with the blessing of his running-mate, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Rep. Michele Bachman of Minnesota is angry that a judge ruled against the construction of a new bridge over the St. Croix River at Stillwater. The St. Croix was among the first rivers to get a federal designation as wild and scenic in 1968. No matter, says Bachmann: the bridge must be built, and if the federal Wild and Scenic River designation is in the way, damn the designation: simply un-designate the river and build the bridge.

This is not Bachmann’s first toe-dip into controversy. She accused candidate Obama of being anti-American and recently claimed that the current health care reform proposal would allow a 13-year old to go to school, get an abortion at Planned Parenthood, and be home on the bus the same day.

Bachman’s bridge over the River Croix – opposed for over 20 years now, mostly because people fear it would metastasize exurban sprawl – is not likely to get built. There’s worse news for the scenic Lower St. Croix: after another dragged-out legal battle, a Twin Cities media tycoon got a green light from the Minnesota Supreme Court to build a small castle on a bluff of the river. River rats fond of the St. Croix fear the ruling will grease the skids for building more castles and change the scenery of the scenic Lower St. Croix forever.

Who needs a bridge when you can sue your way to the Supreme Court to get permission to build a house in a federal scenic riverway?

Sorting out the S*** from the Shinola....

There’s a buzz among river rats and other water watchdogs this week, as the Wisconsin State Journal’s three-part series on how the dairy industry is spreading its way, so to speak, across the Wisconsin landscape, to the dismay and anger of people who end up with 5,000 or 8,000 cows as neighbors, and feel like they had little say in the matter.

Rats who have infiltrated the alleyways of state government have known for a long time what the State Journal’s intrepid reporter Ron Seely quantified by ferreting out email records from the state Dept. of Natural Resources – that the dairy industry gets its way with regulators. This despite whining that they are overburdened with regulations. (They oughta compare notes with a city sewage treatment plant or a paper factory if they really want to know what scrutiny is.)

Rat has experienced first-hand the ways of the dairy industry’s biggest organizational cow, the Dairy Business Association (DBA). Getting its way has meant DBA spreading not just manure but outright falsehoods and near-slander of people who call them out. Several of us met with DBA representatives about a year ago to discuss legislation to limit manure contamination of drinking water. But the organization’s staff sent a “warning” to its members that thoroughly mischaracterized the intent of the policy.

When that brush fire was quelled, DBA’s executive director turned to attacking a well-respected and knowledgeable conservation professional no doubt seen by DBA as dangerous because he knows, intimately, the practices and shortcomings of the industry, and knows how those practices could be changed to minimize damage to resources.

Soon there will be legislation introduced in an attempt to limit, if not eliminate, contamination of people’s wells by manure and other wastes. Yes, it could be yet more regulation that the dairy industry loathes, and it will no doubt throw itself at it in opposition.

And none of it would be necessary if the actually acted proactively and responsibly and fixed the problem where it clearly could be fixed.

There’s not an industry in Wisconsin with poorer public relations right now than the dairy industry, despite all that wholesome family farm stuff they invoke. It wouldn’t take much to turn it around, but for now they’re going in the wrong direction.