GE’s “Smart Clean-up Coalition” hoax exposed

The group seemed more than a little suspect when I first came across it a while ago, a now I know why, thanks to an article in today’s Boston Globe.

They call themselves the Smart Clean-up Coalition, and their “mission” is purportedly to support a reasonable approach to the problem of cleaning up the Housatonic River. They back something called  “monitored natural recovery.” For non-native speakers of obsfuscation, this means they want to sit by and watch the river clean itself.

A little background to this might help.

For more than half a century, General Electric operated a major plant complex in Pittsfield, Mass., along the Housatonic River, merrily pumping carcinogenic PCBs into the river with no serious interference from regulators. It followed the usual pattern. First they denied there was any harm in PCBs, then denied they were doing anything wrong, then threatened to pull out of town if they were forced to clean up their act.

In the end, the town’s biggest employer did just that, leaving behind a complex of big empty buildings, lots of people out of work, and one of the most polluted rivers in the country. That was about 40 years ago, and GE has been dragging its feet on the river cleanup ever since.

Now, as the Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to determine how best to clean up the next critical part of the river, this new group has popped up, with a Facebook Page, a blog, and press releases all pushing for this “less aggressive” approach. It is, coincidentally, the least expensive approach for GE. In a tortured bit of logic, they claim this will do the least ecological damage!

On paper, the “coalition” is made up of banking and Chamber of Commerce types, and when asked, they at first denied they had any connection to GE. Then a local paper discovered that GE had given them $300,000 to help them along with their “mission.”

Hopefully, as the EPA considers how best to proceed, they will realize that this so-called coalition and their bogus, benign sounding “monitored natural recovery” has been completely discredited.

http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2011/02/27/ge_donations_to_river_group_stir_controversy/

http://www.facebook.com/smartrivercleanup

Northern Pass or Northern Gash?

Once again we’re finding out just how expendable our national forests are. This time it’s about cutting a high-power transmission line through the White Mountain National Forest.

So here’s the deal. Northeast Utilities wants to buy electricity for HydroQuebec, mostly for its customers in southern New Hampshire, though other parts of New England will get some, too. Maybe not entirely free of controversy, it does provide a reasonably clean, renewable source of energy. It’s important for the region as well, especially the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, the Titanic of the nuclear power industry, may be out of business by next March.

But here’s the catch. They say they need to build a new transmission line to carry all that power, and it has to cut through about 10 miles of the White Mountain National Forest. According to the Appalachian Mountain Club, this new line will create a 450-wide corridor, with steel pylons 135 feet high. Maybe it should be called the Northern Gash, instead.

It will cross the Appalachian Trail, come with a half-mile of the Eliza Brook shelter and 4 miles of the Lonesome Lake Hut.

Compared to other parts of the country, New England is a small region, with precious little in the way of wilderness areas, and even those are constantly under threat from once kind of development or another. We must protect what’s left.

There is already a transmission line from Canada that runs down through Vermont. Is it impossible to use that?

Residents along the proposed route are already mobilizing to block this plan. They deserve everyone’s support.

Writing about what matters

I’ve been writing all my life, pretty much, but I’m fairly new to blogging. I started a blog a couple of years ago, mostly to find out what this was all about. I wanted to write about nature, the environment – things that I care about, that I think about, that I draw strength from.

Sometimes I would write about interesting places I’d been to, things I’d seen. That was the naturalist in me. Just as often I’d write about something I came across in the news. That would be the reporter in me.

So now I’ve decided to separate those two selves. Here, under The Ecocryptic, youll find newsy things about environmental issues that have caught my eye, and sometimes raised my ire. It’ll be my way of spreading the word, provoking thought, maybe even action.

There’s so much going on, so much that’s important, but I’m afraid it’s getting lost in all the noise. All we can do is try. Stay tuned.

My nature-writing will be at the other site, along with my archived posts, perambulations.wordpress.com and some of my current reporting can be found at Digital Journal.

I hope people will read both. As I go along I’ll try to figure out ways to everything linked up.