A View From The Brink ... the beach is backwards

Canada Geese goslings now at Golden Gate Park

 

Happy Mother's Day!

 

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It's that time of year again. Canada Geese are raising new families at Stow Lake in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Here momma goose is guarding her goslings while the family takes at walk.

Considering that all fowl or birds are the direct descendants of those dinosaurs who survived that big asteroid when it hit our planet 65 million years ago, then this is the newest generation of that ancient bloodline. Without their feathers and with their little wings still undeveloped, it's easy to see them as tiny baby raptors wobbling around as they try out their legs on land.

 

Photograph by Thomas K. Pendergast

 

Happy 4/20!

 

 

Photographs by Thomas K. Pendergast

 

April 20, 2012 @ 4:20 p.m., Pacific Time, on "Hippy Hill" in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. Every year there is a gathering of a certain tribe, to celebrate a certain plant. There are many rumors as to why they do this. Nobody really knows for sure. Who can remember? They apparently don't much care either.

 

Go here for the full photo essay   --->>>

 

 

Fish Off Corona del Mar May Have Ingested Radioactive Kelp After Fukushima, Study Finds

 

"It's not a good thing," says researcher after discovery that a radioactive isotope of iodine was absorbed by kelp off Laguna Beach and Corona del Mar a month after the disaster in Japan.

 

Nisha Gutierrez-Jaime of CoronaDelMarPatch.com reported that fish along the Orange County coast may have been affected by radioactivity that fell on California in the days after Japan's 2011 nuclear disaster, as small levels of radioactive isotopes accumulated in local seaweed.

A study poses the possibility that small amounts of Fukushima radioactivity entered the California coast's food web, but the Long Beach State marine sciences professor who co-wrote a new study said he does not know if there is a measurable detrimental effect.

The radioactive forms of cesium and iodine "get dispersed over a variety of organisms" including fish, said marine biology professor Steven L. Manley. "I would assume it's there" in the biomass of plants and animals off California's coast.

"It's not a good thing, but whether it actually has a measurable detrimental effect is beyond my expertise," he said in a news statement issued by the Long Beach State public affairs office.

Writing in the scientific journal "Environmental Science & Technology," Manley and co-author Christopher G. Lowe said researchers measured a radioactive isotope of iodine in kelp within a month after massive radiation leaks were caused by the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.

 

Go here for the full story at CoronaDelMarPatch.com   --->>>

 

Raven Orders Take Out Dinner

 

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February 20, 2012, Cowell Ranch Beach, California. Photograph by Thomas K. Pendergast

San Francisco man tangles tenaciously over HVAC site with city, state and corporation

 

By Thomas K. Pendergast

 

When Robert Smith first decided to do something about what he considers to be an ugly eyesore - the air conditioning and ventilation system on the roof of the Lawton Health Center (LHC) - he thought it would be a simple matter to get something done.

So, a few months ago, the Sunset District resident contacted the company that runs the San Francisco health and rehabilitation business, located in a building at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Lawton Street, or at least he tried.

"I asked Kindred Corporation, which is headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, to simply address the problem and screen these monstrous, freestanding, unscreened HVAC units and the tunneling between them, all of which are in clear view of the street," Smith said. "I called, thinking this was a simple matter. 'We'll be cordial, congenial, and they'll screen the units and that will be that,' I thought."

Smith called and said: "Here's the problem. Can you help out?"

Smith, who lives across the street from the health center, said he was told to call a different office and contact a particular person, which he did twice but never received a return call.

So, he contacted someone in the corporation's legal department. Eventually, a woman got back to him, although not with a message he expected to hear.

 

Go here for the full story on the website of the Sunset Beacon newspaper   --->>>

 

On NPR the BLM defends its work with 'legacy wells'

 

REMEDIATION: Plugging just one carries price tag in the millions of dollars.

 

Wesley Loy of the Petroleum News reported that officials with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management say the agency is monitoring environmental risk from old wells on federal land on Alaska's North Slope, as well as updating plans for remediating the sites.

The comments come in response to an Alaska state legislator's charge that the BLM has neglected the dozens of so-called legacy wells.

Rep. Charisse Millett, R-Anchorage, is sponsoring House Joint Resolution 29, which urges the BLM "to plug legacy wells properly and to reclaim the legacy well sites as soon as possible." Artealia Gilliard, spokeswoman for BLM Alaska, said the agency's priority is monitoring the wells posing the most risk.

Extreme coastal erosion has threatened a few legacy well sites, and the BLM has spent large sums to deal with those.

BLM manages the Indiana-sized National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, located to the west of Alpine, Kuparuk, Prudhoe Bay and other central North Slope oil fields.

Between 1943 and 1982, the Navy and the U.S. Geological Survey drilled 136 wells and "test holes."

"It would be great if we could go out and remediate them all at once, but it's just not realistic," Gilliard said.

 

Go here for the full story on the Anchorage Daily News website   --->>>

 

Read Go more here: http://www.adn.com/2012/02/04/2300910/blm-defends-its-work-on-npr-a.html#storylink=

Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2012/02/04/2300910/blm-defends-its-work-on-npr-a.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2012/02/04/2300910/blm-defends-its-work-on-npr-a.html#storylink=cpy

Parasites turning California honeybees into ‘Zombie-like slaves’

 

Photo of a honeybee pollinating a blackberry flower in Golden Gate Park, June of 2011, by Thomas K. Pendergast 

 

KTVU Channel 2 News reported today that a San Francisco State University researcher has come up with an explanation for a stunning decline in Northern California honeybee colonies that sounds more like a plot for a science fiction movie.

According to John Hafernik, a biology professor at San Francisco State University, the die off has been triggered by parasites that inflect and transform honeybees into “zombie-like slaves.”

Hafernik had collected some dead honey bees that were found on campus, but then forgot about them.

“Being an absent-minded professor,” he said in a prepared statement, “I left them in a vial on my desk and forgot about them...The next time I looked at the vial, there were all these fly pupae surrounding the bees.”

Further examination found that the fly pupae were those of the Apocephalus borealis – a parasitic fly.

 

Go here for the full story on the KTVU Channel 2 news website   --->>>

Medical Journal Article: 14,000 U.S. Deaths Tied to Fukushima Reactor Disaster Fallout

 

Impact Seen As Roughly Comparable to Radiation-Related Deaths After Chernobyl; Infants Are Hardest Hit, With Continuing Research Showing Even Higher Possible Death Count.

 

In the Sacramento Bee newspaper, Joseph Mangano and Janette Sherman of the International Journal of Health Services reported that an estimated 14,000 excess deaths in the United States are linked to the radioactive fallout from the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear reactors in Japan, according to a major new article in the December 2011 edition of the International Journal of Health Services.  

This is the first peer-reviewed study published in a medical journal documenting the health hazards of Fukushima.

Authors Joseph Mangano and Janette Sherman note that their estimate of 14,000 excess U.S. deaths in the 14 weeks after the Fukushima meltdowns is comparable to the 16,500 excess deaths in the 17 weeks after the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986. 

The rise in reported deaths after Fukushima was largest among U.S. infants under age one.  The 2010-2011 increase for infant deaths in the spring was 1.8 percent, compared to a decrease of 8.37 percent in the preceding 14 weeks.

The IJHS article will be published Tuesday and will be available online as of 11 a.m. EST at http://www.radiation.org.

Just six days after the disastrous meltdowns struck four reactors at Fukushima on March 11, scientists detected the plume of toxic fallout had arrived over American shores.  Subsequent measurements by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) found levels of radiation in air, water, and milk hundreds of times above normal across the U.S.

 

Go here for the full story on the Sacramento Bee website   --->>>

Alaska Governor Parnell wants more oil drilling and cuts in state taxes

 

Governor also slams feds for regulatory delays

 

Sean Cockerham of the Anchorage Daily News reported that Alaska's Governor Sean Parnell continued to bash the federal government Tuesday and said he's lobbying legislators to pass his proposal for a major reduction in how much the state taxes oil companies. Parnell on Tuesday morning gave the opening address at the Alaska Oil and Gas Congress, an annual petroleum trade gathering being held at the Marriott Hotel in Anchorage.

Parnell, as he commonly does, criticized the federal government for its regulation of oil drilling. He complained that companies are being prohibited from drilling in the offshore Arctic Ocean, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and within the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

"A little delay here, a little moratorium there, a little slowdown of permitting, tax increases on an industry that can pull us out of the economic doldrums. This is something that we must change. Our economy and our people cannot afford these political games," Parnell said.

President Barack Obama and Congressional Democrats have been calling for an end to lucrative tax breaks for oil companies. Representatives of the oil and gas industry say that's a tax increase that will make it harder for the companies to invest in new domestic drilling projects.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar came to Alaska in August and said Obama was an advocate for increased drilling in Alaska, including the National Petroleum-Reserve Alaska, and that his attitude about Arctic offshore drilling was "let's take a look at what's up there and see what it is we can develop." But he said any Arctic offshore drilling would need to be done carefully and that there were painful lessons from the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Obama opposes oil drilling within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Salazar emphasized that Obama in July signed an executive order to create a new federal working group tasked with having agencies better coordinate Alaska oil and gas permitting and other regulatory oversight. The White House said the working group is designed to simplify oil and gas decision-making in Alaska by bringing together federal agencies to collaborate as they evaluate permits and environmental reviews on Alaska projects.

 

Go here for the full story on the Anchorage Daily News website   --->>>