9/26 Squirrelly, BC big trees, renaming WA locations, Whatcom extremist candidate, EPA enviro office, salmon crisis roots, Mamalilikulla, seaweed farms, eDNA

 

Squirrelly [Laurie MacBride]

September with Squirrelly
Laurie MacBride in Eye on Environment writes: "Squirrelly and I had a nice visit the other afternoon – a welcome break during a very busy season. We’re really quite alike, the two of us. Sure, he/she’s a North American Red squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus), and I’m a human (Homo sapiens), so at first you might not spot the resemblance – until September. That’s when you’ll find us both scurrying about, hard at work to bring in the harvest and store it away for the winter." Read more. (Eye on Environment)

BC’s Big Trees Protection Is Toothless. Government Knew It
Officials in British Columbia’s Forests Ministry understood that a regulation introduced in 2020 to protect big trees on public lands would have little impact. They designed it that way. Internal records released to The Tyee in response to a Freedom of Information request confirm critics’ suspicions that the Special Tree Protection Regulation was meant to sound good to the public while continuing to protect the interests of the logging industry. Andrew MacLeod reports. (The Tyee)

Derogatory term for Native women removed from WA creek, lake names
The U.S. Department of the Interior announced in September the new names for 19 geographic locations that previously included racist and sexist terms used to describe Indigenous women.  Alexandra Yoon-Hendricks reports. (Seattle Times)

Extremist and sexist memes, video scrubbed from Whatcom candidate’s social media
A Republican candidate for the state Legislature in Whatcom County has shared sexist and antisemitic memes online, promoted misinformation about COVID-19 and offered apparent support for anti-government militants. Dan Johnson of Laurel, a former towing company owner who’s running for the 42nd Legislative District’s position 2 House seat, also has apparently removed his vlog “The Hook News and Information” from the video streaming site YouTube and recently restricted access to his public Facebook page. Robert Mittendorf reports. (Bellingham Herald)

Biden administration launches environmental justice office
Forty years after a predominantly Black community in Warren County, North Carolina, rallied against hosting a hazardous waste landfill, President Biden’s top environment official visited what is widely considered the birthplace of the environmental justice movement Saturday to unveil a national office that will distribute $3 billion in block grants to underserved communities burdened by pollution...The Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights — comprised of more than 200 current staff members in 10 U.S. regions — will merge three existing EPA programs to oversee a portion of Democrats’ $60 billion investment in environmental justice initiatives created by the Inflation Reduction Act. Hannah Schoenbaum report. (Associated Press/Report for America)

The racism, and resilience, behind today’s Pacific Northwest salmon crisis
There’s no one in this region whose life isn’t touched by the fish, whether they think about it or not. We populated towns to fish for salmon and can them. We sacrificed them for cheap electricity. Even the region’s iconic farming and timber industries wouldn’t be possible without salmon, whose dying bodies have enriched the Northwest soil with ocean nutrients. But for decades the injustice at the heart of that story has been systematically hidden. Tony Schick writes. (OPB)

The Mamalilikulla’s long journey home
A coastal B.C. First Nation dispossessed from its land for decades by colonialism is part of a groundswell of Indigenous nations declaring protected areas based on their own sovereignty — and they’re not waiting around for colonial governments. Stephanie Wood reports. (The Narwhal)

Rising tide: Pacific Northwest could soon double or triple its small number of seaweed farms
There's a rising tide of interest in opening seaweed farms in the Pacific Northwest. If even half of the current applicants succeed, it would more than double the small number of commercial seaweed growing operations in Oregon and Washington state. According to the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, there are now five prospective seaweed farmers with pending aquatic lease applications before the agency and another four more in the wings, for a total of nine in various stages of permitting. All of those proposals are located in the sheltered waters of Puget Sound. Tom Banse reports. (NW News Network)

With a few cups of water, scientists use eDNA to study reclusive, rare creatures off West Coast
Some critters in the ocean are reclusive, hiding from human probes and trawls. Other critters are rare, driven close to extinction from warming and increasingly acidic waters. Studying rare and reclusive creatures has posed problems for scientists in the past. In recent years, environmental DNA, or eDNA, has helped. To isolate eDNA, scientists scoop water from the ocean. Courtney Flatt reports.(OPB)

Now, your tug weather--
West Entrance U.S. Waters Strait Of Juan De Fuca-  209 AM PDT Mon Sep 26 2022   
TODAY  Light wind becoming E to 10 kt in the afternoon. Wind  waves 1 ft or less. W swell 3 ft at 10 seconds. 
TONIGHT  W wind 5 to 15 kt becoming to 10 kt after midnight.  Wind waves 2 ft or less. W swell 3 ft at 9 seconds.

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