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Tribe Prevails In Washington State Legal Battle for Water for Salmon

Swinomish Tribal Chairman Brian Cladoosby

SWINOMISH INDIAN RESERVATION – The Swinomish Indian Tribal Community learned Thursday that the Washington State Supreme Court ruled in the Tribe’s favor in a challenge to the Skagit River Instream Flow Rule amendments adopted in 2006 by the Washington Department of Ecology.

The Court’s October 3 decision concludes that Ecology department’s 2006 Skagit Rule amendments are invalid because they are inconsistent with Washington State’s laws to protect minimum instream flows for fish and other environmental values.

“This decision is a huge victory for Swinomish, for salmon, and for the water that salmon need to survive. Ecology had a choice to do the right thing or the wrong thing in 2006, and unfortunately, it chose to do the wrong thing. The Court’s decision vindicates the Tribe’s position and confirms that Ecology cannot make an ‘end run’ around laws that protect instream flows for fish,”

said Swinomish Tribal Chairman Brian Cladoosby.

The 2006 Rule amendments radically changed Ecology department’s original rule, which was adopted in 2001. The 2001 Skagit Instream Flow Rule established minimum instream flow levels for the Skagit River and several important tributaries.

“We spent years collaborating on what became the 2001 Rule with the City of Anacortes, the Public Utility District, Skagit County, Upper Skagit and Sauk-Suiattle Tribes and the State of Washington. The result of those efforts was a good rule based on sound science. Our collective agreement provided certainty for agriculture, for the Cities, for the County and for the Tribes for decades to come,”

Cladoosby continued.

In 2004, Skagit County sued Ecology department challenging the 2001 Rule. Multiparty discussions ensued as the Swinomish and other tribes, water purveyors, and the State tried to resolve the County’s complaints. Eventually, Ecology and the County settled the County’s lawsuit without consulting any of the other parties to the negotiation. In return for Skagit County agreeing to drop its lawsuit, Ecology department agreed to adopt the 2006 Rule Amendments.

The 2006 Rule amendments created 27 “reservations” of water for future out-of-stream use for a wide variety of purposes despite the fact that the senior minimum instream flow right established in 2001 is frequently unmet.

In 2008, the Tribe and the City of Anacortes (the “City”) filed a lawsuit challenging the 2006 Rule amendments. The Tribe and City contended that Ecology’s decision to create the reservations exceeded Ecology department’s authority.

Today, the Washington State Supreme Court agreed that:

“Ecology’s Amended Rule, which made 27 reservations of water for out-of-stream year-round non-interruptible beneficial uses in the Skagit River basin and which would impair minimum flows set by administrative rule, exceeded Ecology’s authority because it is inconsistent with the plain language of the statute and is inconsistent with the entire statutory scheme. The Amended Rule is invalid.”

“We would have preferred to work together to find a solution to everyone’s water needs as we did prior to the original 2001 Rule,”

observed Cladoosby,

“but, Ecology chose to go it alone with the County and we were left without any option other than calling the problems with the 2006 Rule amendments to the attention of a court. If we had not acted, the stream flows needed to support our diminishing salmon stocks would have been further impacted.”

The Swinomish Indian Tribal Community is a federally recognized Indian Tribe with approximately 900 members. Swinomish is a signatory to the 1855 Treaty of Point Elliott, which guarantees the Tribe’s treaty fishing rights. Its 10,000 acre reservation is located 65 miles North of Seattle, Washington on Fidalgo Island and includes approximately 3,000 acres of tidelands.

Obama Announces Fifth White House Tribal Nations Conference

Source: ICTMN

President Barack Obama recently announced the fifth White House Tribal Nations Conference this year will be held November 13 at the Department of Interior.

President Obama will host the conference that will give leaders from 566 federally recognized tribes the opportunity to interact directly with the president and members of the White House Council on Native American Affairs.

A representative from each of the 566 tribes will be invited to share their concerns and help improve the government-to-government relationship.

More details will be released at a later date.

Obama Says Redskins Should Think Seriously About Changing Name

Source: Indian Country Today Media Network

In an interview with the Associated Press, President Obama said that if he were Dan Snyder, owner of the Washington D.C. NFL franchise, he would consider changing the football team’s name.

“If I were the owner of a team and I knew that there was a name of my team–even if it had a storied history–that was offending a sizeable group of people, I’d think about changing it,” Obama said to the AP.

Snyder, the Redskins owner, has said that he would never change the team’s name, but has been urged by Native American leaders, media outlets and U.S. lawmakers to change it. This is the first time that the president has publicly weighed in on the name-change debate.

Last month, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, who previously agreed with Snyder, shifted his stance on the issue slightly, saying that those who are offended by the name should be considered. “All these mascots and team names related to Native Americans, Native Americans feel pretty strongly about it,” Obama told the AP. “And I don’t know whether our attachment to a particular name should override the real legitimate concerns that people have about these things.”

U.S. colleges and universities have changed mascot names that were offensive to Native Americans. According to the AP, St. John University changed its name from the Redmen to the Red Storm, Marquette is the Golden Eagles instead of the Warriors and Stanford University was the Indians, now they’re the Cardinals.

Obama also said he understands that fans have a long-standing attachment to their team and they don’t “mean offense” by supporting them. “I don’t want to detract from the wonderful Redskins fans that are here. They love their team and rightly so.”

NFL owners are meeting in Washington on Monday for their fall meetings and a protest against the team name is planned.

“The President has heard and given voice to the major national Native organizations, parents, educators and students who have long called for an end to race-based stereotypes in sports,”said Suzan Shown Harjo, a Native American policy advocate who is the lead plaintiff in the trademark challenge to the Washington Redskins name.”These public slurs — even when used by enthusiastic fans who have no ill intent — cause harm and injury to our young people and can no longer be tolerated in polite society.”

Obama said he doesn’t have a direct stake in the Redskins name debate because he is not a team owner, according to USAToday.com. But he hinted that it was an interest of his.

“Maybe after I leave the presidency,” Obama said. “I think it would be a lot of fun.”

Standing Rock Sioux Move to Rescue Children, Accuse South Dakota of Genocide

Stephanie WoodardA view of Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's reservation outside the capital in Fort Yates, North Dakota. — Stephanie Woodard
A view of Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s reservation outside the capital in Fort Yates, North Dakota.

Stephanie Woodard on

Indian Country Today Media Network

10/3/13

Citing the 1987 Proxmire Act, which enables the United States to prosecute acts of genocide, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe has asked the federal government to file suit against the state of South Dakota for crimes against tribal children. The tribe’s homeland is in the prairies and badlands of North and South Dakota; one of its most revered leaders was Sitting Bull, who is said to have prayed Native forces to victory at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Standing Rock’s tribal council urged the United States to take action in a September 17 resolution claiming that South Dakota has been taking its children into care and adopting them out of the tribe illegally, in violation of the Indian Child Welfare Act. The resolution was passed the day after a child-welfare advocate informed the council that a young tribal member whom the state’s Department of Social Services (DSS) had placed with a white adoptive couple was homeless on the streets of Aberdeen, South Dakota.

The advocate, Shirley Schwab, recalled tracking down the 18-year-old. “When she came into the Burger King where we’d agreed to meet, I saw that her life had been reduced to what she could fit into a small blue duffel bag. No driver’s license, no money, no cell phone, little more than the clothes on her back.”

“When she turned 18, she exercised her right to live on her own,” said the teen’s adoptive mother, Wendy Larson Mette. “As far as I knew, she was living with friends, going to school.”

Schwab said a fellow Aberdeen resident had contacted her about the teen’s plight because of Schwab’s prior knowledge of the girl. Public court records show that in 2010, the teen and her siblings reported that their adoptive father, Richard Mette, had sexually and physically abused them for more than a decade. A deputy state’s attorney initiated a law-enforcement investigation. Police visited Richard and Wendy Larson Mette’s house and found sex toys and stacks of pornographic magazines and videotapes in bedrooms and common areas. The children were moved to another home. Schwab became their court-appointed special advocate.

DSS appears to have been long aware that this was a problem household. As early as 2001, Richard and Wendy signed an agreement, now a court document, with DSS. In the agreement, the couple, who are divorced, promised DSS officials to lock up their pornography and stop “swatting, spanking, kicking and tickling” the foster children placed with them. DSS later allowed the couple to adopt most of the children.

When asked if she believed her children had been sexually abused, Larson Mette said, “I fully believe and support my children in this accusation.” She said she found her ex-husband’s treatment of the children “horrifying,” but said that over the years, she had never noticed any indications of the sexual abuse, including related injuries or behavioral changes: “What are perceived to be the obvious signs were not there. They had great attendance in school.”

Larson Mette called the 2010 police report accurate in terms of “room location or quantity” of pornography, but claimed that over the years she had personally seen only some of the material.

Court records and local media reports show that South Dakota cut a deal with the father, who is now serving the relatively light sentence of 15 years for child rape. The state dropped cruelty charges against Larson Mette, and despite allegations that she had tolerated the sexual abuse, returned the children to her.

The state then undertook to discredit publicly the children and their advocates. This included a retaliatory prosecution of Schwab and the deputy state’s attorney, who were fully acquitted at trial. Court documents and sworn testimony show state criminal investigators took the teen and her younger siblings to a basement interrogation room in order to get them to recant the abuse claims. The children were interrogated individually, without an adult present on their behalf. They wept and said they were frightened, but none recanted.

“When I met the 18-year-old and saw what her life had become after such trauma, I was devastated,” said Schwab. “I could hardly breathe.”

Within a few days of Schwab contacting Standing Rock, the tribe had flown the teen to safety with tribal kin out of state. “Our chairman said, ‘She’s our relative, get the plane ticket now,’” recalled tribal councilwoman Phyllis Young, who added that adoptive and foster parents have been known to turn children away after they turn 18 and government subsidies end.

Young said that three Standing Rock children remain in the Larson Mette home, and the tribe is very concerned about their safety; as a result, it will sue for custody. The councilwoman noted that in recent years Standing Rock children have been victims in notorious and widely reported South Dakota cases involving sexual abuse by white adoptive fathers, all of whom are serving time.

“If they file, I will do whatever is necessary,” said Larson Mette. “My children are happy. I love them, they love me. We are trying desperately to put our lives back together and move forward.” She called that a “fair” representation of their situation.

In addition to moving to protect young tribal members, Standing Rock has requested that the South and North Dakota Congressional delegations hold hearings on Indian child welfare. The tribe has also contacted the United Nations about submitting material for the United States’ upcoming human-rights review.

Importantly, the tribe is working with the federal government to develop its own child-welfare infrastructure. This will help solve a problem that tribes and Indian-child-welfare advocates have long decried—South Dakota’s habit of taking Native children into custody and placing them in white households and white-run group homes, thereby undermining tribal culture and sovereignty. The Oglala and Rosebud Sioux tribes and the American Civil Liberties Union recently sued the state in a related matter.

“This all epitomizes the state of South Dakota’s total disregard for Native children,” said Schwab.

Neither South Dakota’s attorney general nor DSS director replied to requests for comments on any of these matters.

“The language of the Standing Rock tribal council resolution is both specific and global,” said Young. “We act on behalf of this teen and her siblings, and for all Native children who have been taken from their tribal communities.” The Proxmire Act includes reparations, she said, and the tribe wants the children’s reparations to include lifelong therapy for the abuse they have suffered.

“What is happening to our children is like war crimes,” Young continued. “We heard terrible things at hearings we just held at Standing Rock. Over the years, many Indian women have asked me to help get their children back. Some of our children the state has in its custody right now are Sitting Bull descendents. This has historic dimensions. We at Standing Rock are taking this to the limit.”

Fukushima Nuclear Plant Reports Another Radioactive Water Leak

By MARI YAMAGUCHI

Oct 3, 2013

TOKYO — TOKYO (AP) — Another day, another radioactive-water spill. The operator of the meltdown-plagued Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant says at least 430 liters (110 gallons) spilled when workers overfilled a storage tank that lacked a gauge that could have warned them of the danger.

The amount is tiny compared to the untold thousands of tons of radioactive water that have leaked, much of it into the Pacific Ocean, since a massive earthquake and tsunami wrecked the plant in 2011. But the error is one of many the operator has committed as it struggles to manage a seemingly endless, tainted flow.

Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Thursday workers detected the water spilling from the top of one large tank when they were patrolling the site the night before. The tank is one of about 1,000 erected on the grounds around the plant to hold water used to cool the melted nuclear fuel in the broken reactors.

TEPCO said the water spilled out of a concrete barrier surrounding the tank and believed that most of it reached the sea via a ditch next to the river.

The new leak is sure to add to public concern and criticism of TEPCO and the government for their handling of the nuclear crisis. In August, the utility reported a 300-ton leak from another storage tank, one of a string of leaks in recent months.

That came after the utility acknowledged that contaminated groundwater was seeping into ocean at a rate of 300 tons a day.

TEPCO spokesman Masayuki Ono told an urgent news conference Thursday that the overflow occurred at a tank without a water gauge and standing on an unlevel ground, slightly tilting toward the sea. The tank was already nearly full, but workers pumped in more contaminated water into it to maximize capacity as the plant was facing storage crunch.

Experts have faulted TEPCO for sloppiness in its handling of the water management, including insufficient tank inspection records, lack of water gauges, as well as connecting hoses lying directly on the grass-covered ground. Until recently, only one worker was assigned to 500 tanks in a two-hour patrol.

In recent meetings, regulators criticized TEPCO for even lacking basic skills to properly measure radioactivity in contaminated areas, and taking too long to find causes in case of problems. They also have criticized the one-foot (30-centimeter) high protective barriers around the tanks as being too low.

The government has said it will spend $470 billion to build an underground “ice wall” around the reactor and turbine buildings to block groundwater inflows and prevent potential leaks from spreading. It is also funding more advanced water treatment equipment to make the contaminated water clean enough to be eventually released into the sea.

Oneida Indian Nation plans symposium on ‘Washington Redskins’ name at NFL meeting hotel

In its latest effort to get the Washington Redskins to change their name, the Oneida Indian Nation of upstate New York will hold a symposium at the same hotel where NFL will meet Monday.

NEWS WIRE SERVICES

October 4, 2013

The Oneida Indian Nation says the Washington Redskins’s name is a racial epithet.

The Oneida Indian Nation of upstate New York said Thursday it will take an in-your-face approach in its ongoing battle to get the Washington Redskins to change the team’s name.

The tribe, which says the name is a racial epithet, will host a symposium on the topic Monday at the same Washington hotel where the National Football League is holding its fall meeting, beginning the next day.

Native History: Construction of Mount Rushmore Begins

gizmodo.comThe carving into the mountain the Sioux call Six Grandfathers began October 4, 1927. — gizmodo.com
The carving into the mountain the Sioux call Six Grandfathers began October 4, 1927.

This Date in Native History: On October 4, 1927, sculptor Gutzon Borglum began carving the faces of four presidents into the granite of the sacred Black Hills.

Christina Rose

Oct. 4, 2013

Indian Country Today Media Network

For the Lakota, the slashing of the stone exemplified disrespect in itself, but beyond that, there was something almost mocking about having four American presidents, all of whom had supported genocidal Indian policies, looking down at the Lakota people.

The heads of each of the four presidents measure 60 feet high and the monument took six and a half years to complete.

The presidents represented on the face of the mountain the Sioux called Six Grandfathers had some terrible Indian policies, here are some highlights:

Lincoln was responsible for hanging the Dakota 38, the largest mass hanging in U.S. history.

George Washington declared an all-out extermination against the Iroquois people in 1779.

Thomas Jefferson supported a policy of assimilation, and failing that, extermination of the Cherokee and the Creek. He said all Natives should be driven beyond the Mississippi or, “take up the hatchet” and “never lay it down until they are all exterminated.”

Theodore Roosevelt, who, shortly after being elected governor of New York, announced, “This continent had to be won. We need not waste our time in dealing with any sentimentalist who believes that, on account of any abstract principle, it would have been right to leave this continent to the domain, the hunting ground of squalid savages. It had to be taken by the white race.”

Six Grandfathers before it was desecrated.

Mount Rushmore was carved into the land that was promised in perpetuity through the Treaty of 1868. The Black Hills are central to the creation stories of the Lakota, where they have always lived and prayed. However, the 1860s were a time when promises were made, but soon broken. In 1877, gold was found in the Black Hills and the land was confiscated by the U.S. government. To this day, the Lakota have refused payment for the land of their origins.

One well-intentioned, if unpopular, result was that in 1939, Henry Standing Bear, Lakota graduate of Carlisle Indian School, wrote a letter requesting Connecticut sculptor Korczak Ziolowski come to South Dakota and carve the likeness of Standing Bear’s ancestor, Crazy Horse, into another mountain. Standing Bear wrote, “My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know the red man has great heroes, too.” The Crazy Horse Memorial, which is substantially bigger than Mount Rushmore, is a result of their relationship.

The Crazy Horse Memorial is seen here during a school field trip in September called Autumn Volksmarch.

While the majority of local Native Americans agree that Mount Rushmore could not have been a more offensive undertaking, in 2003, things began to change with the arrival of the monument’s new superintendent, Gerard Baker, Mandan-Hidatsa. From the beginning, Baker set about turning over what the Rapid City Journal called “misconceptions about travel and tourism on the reservations,” addressing the questions of tourists, such as, “Do Indians still live in tipis?”

Baker, described as having long braids and standing close to 6’6”, hired two members of Pine Ridge’s Akicita (Warrior) Society and set up a Native American village. He recommended that his employees read Black Elk Speaks, and that they bone up on the Ft. Laramie Treaty of 1868. Baker took visitors to Pine Ridge’s Red Shirt Table and Wounded Knee. According to historian Donovin Sprague, Lakota, Baker truly rang in a new era.

Gerard Baker (right) with a fellow park ranger during his time as superintendent at Mount Rushmore. (PBS)

“I think Gerard Baker did wonders up there, he got a little village going, and he faced some heat on that. I knew him from the Battle of the Little Big Horn site, and he was part of the big change up there. It had been Custer’s battlefield, and he had it renamed to reflect both cultures,” Sprague said. “Then there was, of course, the Two Cents Column of racist comments in the newspaper. He’s an outstanding person who worked for the National Parks Service since he was a young man.”

When Sprague was asked his opinion of Mount Rushmore, he sighed. “Putting the presidents faces on treaty land, I have always known all my life these things are here and not going away, so I was raised to think about it educationally. What can we do to use it to bring people together?”

Having worked with the former education director at Rushmore, Sprague said, “They [the staff at Rushmore under Baker] were very into integrated culture. We had a graduate studies credit program through Black Hills State University, where I was an instructor. They had staff for the Lakota side of history and culture, and Gerard was there to speak. There was a balancing. We had a really good working relationship during Gerard’s era.”

Baker is reportedly now working in Pine Ridge to establish a new park in the Badlands. Quoted in Esquire Magazine, Baker said, “When I got offered the job [at Rushmore], I called the elders up and asked their advice. I was expecting to hear, ‘Don’t work there. You’ll be a turncoat!’ But instead what I heard was just the opposite, ‘What a place to begin the healing process!’”

Since the monument has been closed due to the government shutdown, there is no information about whether or not the programs instituted under Baker have continued.

Ocean acidification due to carbon emissions is at highest for 300m years

Coral is particularly at risk from acidification and rising sea temperatures. Photo: Paul Jarrett/PA

By Fiona Harvey, The Guardian

The oceans are more acidic now than they have been for at least 300m years, due to carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, and a mass extinction of key species may already be almost inevitable as a result, leading marine scientists warned on Thursday.

An international audit of the health of the oceans has found that overfishing and pollution are also contributing to the crisis, in a deadly combination of destructive forces that are imperilling marine life, on which billions of people depend for their nutrition and livelihood.

In the starkest warning yet of the threat to ocean health, theInternational Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) said: “This [acidification] is unprecedented in the Earth’s known history. We are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change, and exposing organisms to intolerable evolutionary pressure. The next mass extinction may have already begun.” It published its findings in the State of the Oceans report, collated every two years from global monitoring and other research studies.

Alex Rogers, professor of biology at Oxford University, said: “The health of the ocean is spiralling downwards far more rapidly than we had thought. We are seeing greater change, happening faster, and the effects are more imminent than previously anticipated. The situation should be of the gravest concern to everyone since everyone will be affected by changes in the ability of the ocean to support life on Earth.”

Coral is particularly at risk. Increased acidity dissolves the calcium carbonate skeletons that form the structure of reefs, and increasing temperatures lead to bleaching where the corals lose symbiotic algae they rely on. The report says that world governments’ current pledges to curb carbon emissions would not go far enough or fast enough to save many of the world’s reefs. There is a time lag of several decades between the carbon being emitted and the effects on seas, meaning that further acidification and further warming of the oceans are inevitable, even if we drastically reduce emissions very quickly. There is as yet little sign of that, with global greenhouse gas output still rising.

Corals are vital to the health of fisheries, because they act as nurseries to young fish and smaller species that provide food for bigger ones.

Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed by the seas – at least a third of the carbon that humans have released has been dissolved in this way, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – and makes them more acidic. But IPSO found the situation was even more dire than that laid out by the world’s top climate scientists in theirlandmark report last week.

In absorbing carbon and heat from the atmosphere, the world’s oceans have shielded humans from the worst effects of global warming, the marine scientists said. This has slowed the rate of climate change on land, but its profound effects on marine life are only now being understood.

Acidification harms marine creatures that rely on calcium carbonate to build coral reefs and shells, as well as plankton, and the fish that rely on them. Jane Lubchenco, former director of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a marine biologist, said the effects were already being felt in some oyster fisheries, where young larvae were failing to develop properly in areas where the acid rates are higher, such as on the west coast of the US. “You can actually see this happening,” she said. “It’s not something a long way into the future. It is a very big problem.”

But the chemical changes in the ocean go further, said Rogers. Marine animals use chemical signals to perceive their environment and locate prey and predators, and there is evidence that their ability to do so is being impaired in some species.

Trevor Manuel, a South African government minister and co-chair of the Global Ocean Commission, called the report “a deafening alarm bell on humanity’s wider impacts on the global oceans”.

“Unless we restore the ocean’s health, we will experience the consequences on prosperity, wellbeing and development. Governments must respond as urgently as they do to national security threats – in the long run, the impacts are just as important,” he said.

Current rates of carbon release into the oceans are 10 times faster than those before the last major species extinction, which was the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum extinction, about 55m years ago. The IPSO scientists can tell that the current ocean acidification is the highest for 300m years from geological records.

They called for strong action by governments to limit carbon concentrations in the atmosphere to no more than 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide equivalent. That would require urgent and deep reductions in fossil fuel use.

No country in the world is properly tackling overfishing, the report found, and almost two thirds are failing badly. At least 70 per cent of the world’s fish populations are over-exploited. Giving local communities more control over their fisheries, and favouring small-scale operators over large commercial vessels would help this, the report found. Subsidies that drive overcapacity in fishing fleets should also be eliminated, marine conservation zones set up and destructive fishing equipment should be banned. There should also be better governance of the areas of ocean beyond countries’ national limits.

The IPSO report also found the oceans were being “deoxygenated” – their average oxygen content is likely to fall by as much as 7 per cent by 2100, partly because of the run-off of fertilisers and sewage into the seas, and also as a side-effect of global warming. The reduction of oxygen is a concern as areas of severe depletion become effectively dead.

Rogers said: “People are just not aware of the massive roles that the oceans play in the Earth’s systems. Phytoplankton produce 40 per cent of the oxygen in the atmosphere, for example, and 90 per cent of all life is in the oceans. Because the oceans are so vast, there are still areas we have never really seen. We have a very poor grasp of some of the biochemical processes in the world’s biggest ecosystem.”

The five chapters of which the State of the Oceans report is a summary have been published in the Marine Pollution Bulletin, a peer-reviewed journal.

Ingenious 19-year-old Develops Plan to Clean up Oceans in 5 Years

By: Amanda Froelich,

September 13, 2013 True Activistcom

Watch video here

With millions of tons of garbage dumped into the oceans annually and repeat incidence of oil spills like the Deepwater Horizon Disaster, it’s the Ocean which has taken the brunt of unsustainable methods from man. In effect, it’s estimated almost 100,000 marine animals are killed due to debris entanglement and continually rising pollution.

To a degree, individual lessening of consumerism and utilizing sustainable methods to re-use and eliminate waste is very beneficial. However, reducing the already-toxic state of the Earth is the biggest concern of environmentalists and engineers, seeking to utilize the technological advances already available. To this avail, it was 19-year-young Boyan Slat that ingeniously created the Ocean Array Plan, a project that could remove 7,250,000 tons of plastic from the world’s oceans in just five years.

Slat’s idea consists of an anchored network of floating booms and processing platforms that could be dispatched to garbage patches around the world. Working with the flow of nature, his solution to the problematic shifting of trash is to have the array span the radius of a garbage patch, acting as a giant funnel as the ocean moves through it. The angle of the booms would force plastic in the direction of the platforms, where it would be separated from smaller forms, such as plankton, and be filtered and stored for recycling. The issue of by-catches, killing life forms in the procedure of cleaning trash, can be virtually eliminated by using booms instead of nets and it will result in a larger areas covered. Because of trash’s density compared to larger sea animals, the use of booms will allow creatures to swim under the booms unaffected, reducing wildlife death substantially.

Economically, the Ocean Array Project also rises to the top due to its sustainable construct; it’s completely self-supportive, by receiving energy from the sun, currents, and waves. By also letting the platforms’ wings sway like an actual manta ray, contact with inlets in the roughest weather can be ensured. It’s a plan that merges environmental safety with thoroughly thought out processes.

Inspired to tackle global issues of sustainability, Boyan began by launching a project at school that analyzed the size and amount of plastic particles in the ocean’s garbage patches; his final paper went on to win several prizes, including Best Technical Design 2012 at the Delft University of Technology. Continuing the development of his concept during the summer of 2012, he revealed it several months later at TEDxDelft2012.

Slat took his well-planned project further by then founding The Ocean Cleanup Foundation, a non-profit organization responsible for the development of proposed technologies. Aside from saving thousands of animals and reducing chemicals (like PCB and DDT) from building up in the food chain, it could also save millions of dollars a year due to clean-up costs, lost tourism, and damage to marine vessels. His undeterred passion to create healthier oceans has possibility to beneficially impact the lives of the entire world.

Although extensive feasibility studies are currently being conducted, it has been estimated that through the selling of plastic retrieved over the five years, the money would surpass the initial cost to execute the project. In other words, it may even be potentially profitable. Because the main deterrent to implement large scale cleanup projects is due to the financial cost, this solution could perhaps pave ways for future innovations of global cleanup to also be invented.

While the project process would take five years, it’s a span that could continue to increase the world’s awareness of garbage patches, as well as the importance of recycling and reducing consumption of plastic packaging.

To find out more about the project and to contribute, click here.

Monsanto just dropped $1 billion on better weather forecasts

John Upton, Grist

Congressional paralysis is freezing or slashing national spending on weather forecasting and monitoring. Plans to deploy a next-generation array of satellites known as COSMIC-2 could be cut by lawmakers as part of the sequester spending cuts — if only they would pass a budget. And workers at NASA, which provide data used by climate researchers the world over, are being furloughed.

But Monsanto — that profitable agro-corporation that wields ever-increasing power over the world’s food supply — is taking a smarter approach. As the effects of climate change devastate crops the world over, Monsanto has announced it is buying the Climate Corporation for $930 million. From the press release:

“Farmers around the world are challenged to make key decisions for their farms in the face of increasingly volatile weather, as well as a proliferation of information sources,” said David Friedberg, chief executive officer for The Climate Corporation. “Our team understands that the ability to turn data into actionable insight and farm management recommendations is vitally important for agriculture around the world and can greatly benefit farmers, regardless of farm size or their preferred farming methods. Monsanto shares this important vision for our business and we look forward to creating even greater experiences for our farmer customers.”

Modern Farmer explains the acquisition:

Climate Corporation underwrites weather insurance for farmers, basically in real time, using some of the most sophisticated data tools available to determine the risks posed by future weather conditions and events.

And the company doesn’t limit itself to weather data. As politicians, pundits, and people on the Internet continue to argue over whether climate change is real, the insurance industry has for years been operating under the assumption that it is. So Climate Corporation uses data from major climate-change models — the very ones that are under constant assault by doubters — in its calculations.

Climate Corporation manages an eye-popping 50 terabytes of live data, all at once. Besides climate-change models, data is collected from regular old weather forecasts and histories, soil observations, and other sources. The company collects data from 2.5 million separate locations. Given these numbers, it shouldn’t be surprising that Climate Corporation is basically alone in this market.

If Congress continues down the road of spending cuts and government shutdowns, private industry will soon know more about what’s going on with the weather than the government does.