Dig deep, fellow taxpayers: On
Oct. 1, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund
— a fund, fed by corporate polluters, which cleans up some of
the nation’s most contaminated places — officially ran
out of money (HCN, 12/9/02: Life in the wasteland). Now, taxpayers
will foot the cleanup bill for everything from toxic dumps to
defunct factories, lead mines to leather tanneries.
Talk is cheap, especially when the discussion is
about oil and gas drilling. In August, Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M.,
promised he would leave drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge out of the Energy Bill (HCN, 8/18/03: Energy bill
will likely boost drilling in the Rockies). But in September, the
Senate Energy Committee, chaired by Domenici, added language to the
bill that would allow drilling on 200,000 acres of the
refuge.
At least one Canadian tribe is saying
“no” to sea lice — and to big business
(HCN, 3/17/03: Bracing against the tide). The Kwicksutaineuk tribe
in British Columbia is suing two multinational corporations,
alleging that corporate fish farms — and the algae and sea
lice associated with them — are killing not only wild salmon,
but also crabs, clams and shrimp.
In his
investigation of the Indian Trust accounts, Alan Balaran
found that oil and gas companies paid Navajos 20 times less than
they paid non-Indians (HCN, 9/15/03: Follow-up). The
court-appointed investigator gleaned much of his information from
Kevin Gambrell, head of the Farmington, N.M., Indian Minerals
Office. In May, the Interior Department placed Gambrell on
administrative leave for “insubordination.” But on
Sept. 15, just weeks after Balaran’s report was published,
Interior officially fired Gambrell.
Tribes and
environmentalists cheered when the Salt River Project, an
Arizona utility company, backed out of its proposal to build a
strip mine near the Zuni reservation in New Mexico (HCN, 10/8/01).
But last month, the Bureau of Land Management put a damper on that
celebration by announcing it has received a request from an unnamed
energy company to drill for oil and gas on 117,000 acres in the
area.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Follow-up.
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