Los Padres Forest Says Yes To Oil Drilling

Last week, Los Padres National Forest officials announced they will allow oil companies to drill for an estimated 17 million barrels of crude oil or natural gas within its borders.

Forest Supervisor Gloria Brown said that the plan will preserve inaccessible wilderness areas and important habitat for the endangered California condor while allowing oil and gas leasing on 52,000 of the national forest’s 767,000 acres.

In her written statement, Brown wrote, “I feel that it provides for the protection of ecological values that are so important to the American public, while still offering a portion of our oil and gas potential to the nation.”

A “no surface occupancy” stipulation forbids wells, roads or power lines on 47,723 of the 52,000 acres made available to leasing. Instead, companies will have to access the oil by “slant drilling” from adjacent national forest or private lands.

Yet Andrew Christie, Chapter Coordinator of Santa Lucia Chapter of Sierra Club, says his organization is “not impressed” with this no surface occupancy stipulation.

“Oil drilling is oil drilling,” Christie says.

Plus, he says, the agreement does allow for surface drilling on the remaining 4,277 acres, which is “unacceptable.”

“This reflects the same mentality that is determined in the Arctic Refuge [ANWAR] and makes about as much sense,” says Christie. “It’s a drop in the bucket of annual oil consumption in exchange for a lot of damage to habitat and endangered and threatened species.”

“It’s just like [ANWAR]. They know there’s not that much oil there. Only a couple days’ worth. All they’re really after is the precedent,” he says. “’We will go anywhere and do anything to pull this stuff out of the ground.’ This is what happens when we put oil people in charge of the country.”

The announcement is the result of a 10-year study of Los Padres, a nearly 2 million-acre forest that spans 220 miles from Big Sur in Monterey County in the north to near western Los Angeles County in the south. [RM]

BRAC Hearing Comes to Monterey

The next Base Realignment and Closure Commission [BRAC] hearing of local interest will be held at the Monterey Convention Center on Monday, August 8, at 1pm.

Originally scheduled to be held in San Francisco, the public hearing was relocated to Monterey last week. It will address the merits of closing or consolidating the Naval Postgraduate School [NPS] and the Defense Language Institute [DLI], and offers local representatives a chance to voice their opinions about the commission’s July 19 decision to put the Monterey schools on the potential closure list.

The hearing will be facilitated by Sen. Dianne Feinstein [D-CA] and will be attended by Commission Chairman Anthony Principi and commissioners Philip Coyle and James Bilbray. Although the hearings are open, the public will not be given the chance to speak.

On July 20, the 2005 BRAC Commission voted to add several military installations, including NPS and DLI, to a list for closure or realignment consideration. Under the 2005 BRAC Act, the principal criteria for keeping bases open, or closing or realigning them, is military value.

The nine-member BRAC commission panel is obligated to send its recommendations to the president by Sept. 8. The president has until Sept. 23 to accept all recommendations or reject all of them. Congress will have 45 days to accept the president’s recommendations or reject them whole. The Defense Department will be obligated to act on all congressionally approved recommendations. [RM]

Remembering Hiroshima

The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) will sponsor a ceremony to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at 8pm August 9 on Lovers Point beach.

In addition to a memorial of floating lanterns, the ceremony will include messages from the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and local peace activists.

“We’ll be making luminaria out of paper bags, sand and candles which will be set on homemade rafts and pulled behind kayaks,” explains Peggy Olsen, a member of the WILPF.

Olsen says that the ceremony will be similar to a traditional Japanese memorial, in which floating lanterns are lit to honor both ancestors and the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

August 6 and 9 mark the 60th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that killed more than a quarter million people. The ceremony in Pacific Grove will be held in conjunction with commemorative events at major nuclear weapons labs and in communities across the country.

In addition, on August 6, local activists will carpool to a large demonstration at the Bay Area’s Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab—one of the world’s primary sites for the creation and development of nuclear weapons.

“The horror that the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered is there to remind us that we have to prevent this from ever happening again,” Olsen says. “We want to make the first time the last time nuclear weapons are used.”

For more information, visit www.peacemonterey.org or call 647-0152. [RM]