2 Years Later, Grim Photos From the BP Disaster 7MAI12

A picture is worth a thousand words, and these pictures should be enough to show bp and the government lied to us about the severity of bp's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the short and long term damage done to the environment. There are links to several related articles following this. KEEP IN MIND, BIG OIL WANTS TO BRING THIS SAME TECHNOLOGY AND THREAT TO THE ENVIRONMENT TO THE ARCTIC. Greenpeace, the NRDC and other environmental organizations are fighting them every step of the way, go to their websites for more information on their campaigns. This from Mother Jones / MOJO......

—By Kate Sheppard

|

Photo courtesy of Greenpeace

It's been two years since the Deepwater Horizon disaster unleashed 4.9 million barrels of oil on the Gulf of Mexico. In the midst of the disaster, BP and its contractors did everything they could to keep people from seeing the scale of the disaster. But new photos released Monday offer some new insight to just how grim the Gulf became for sea life.
The images were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request that Greenpeace filed back in August 2010, asking for any communication related to endangered and threatened Gulf species. Now, many months later, Greenpeace received a response from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that included more than 100 photos from the spill, including many of critically endangered Kemp's Ridley sea turtles dead and covered in oil.
Most photos are missing dates and descriptions, though the FOIA request covered the period of April 20, 2010, to July 30, 2010. But they're pretty shocking—which is probably why they weren't made public at the height of the spill. "It just makes me furious," said John Hocevar, a marine biologist who works for Greenpeace. "I had so many conversations with people in various government agencies working on the Gulf spill, and I feel like they were hiding things from all of us."
"The White House was sitting on this stuff for over two years, at the same time they were saying everything was fine, that the oil was gone, and while they were rushing ahead with plans for new drilling in the Gulf, the Arctic, elsewhere," Hocevar continued. "It's just not okay. This is not an acceptable type of collateral damage."
Mother Jones has requested comment from NOAA but had not received a response at press time.
Jump below the fold to see some of the photos that have been kept under wraps for the past two years:

Kate Sheppard

Reporter

Kate Sheppard is a staff reporter Mother Jones' Washington bureau. For more of her stories, click here. She Tweets here. RSS | Twitter

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  http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2012/05/greenpeace-bp-photos 

Why Is the Government Killing Bald Eagles? 11MAI12

THIS is sad and disgusting, and it isn't only creatures as glorious as Bald Eagles being killed....consider the slaughter of Gray Wolves in the Northern Rockies. From Mother Jones / MOJO....

—By Tim McDonnell

Sighthound/Flickr

It's a sad fact of life in wildlife management: Every now and then, wild animals have to be killed for the sake of ecological or agricultural protection. "Culling," as it's known, is often a last resort and is usually carried out with a grim sense of necessary duty. After all, most wildlife professionals aren't big on the idea of killing wildlife.
Right?
An unsettling new investigation by the Sacramento Bee found that the federal Wildlife Services agency, an obscure bureau within the USDA tasked with "resolving wildlife conflicts," has in the last decade accidentally killed over 50,000 animals that posed no threat to people or the environment (in addition to nearly a million coyotes killed intentionally). The execution roster would make John Muir roll over in his grave: wolverines, river otters, migratory shorebirds, bald and golden eagles, and more than a thousand dogs (averaging eight a month!), including family pets. According to the Bee:

In most cases, [employees of the agency] have officially revealed little or no detail about where the creatures were killed, or why. But a Bee investigation has found the agency's practices to be indiscriminate, at odds with science, inhumane and sometimes illegal…because lethal control stirs strong emotions, Wildlife Services prefers to operate in the shadows.
"We pride ourselves on our ability to go in and get the job done quietly without many people knowing about it," said Dennis Orthmeyer, acting state director of Wildlife Services in California.

Officially, Wildlife Services exists to take care of things like aggressive bears, coyotes that eat a rancher's sheep, geese that won't get off the tarmac, etc. But the Bee reports that the methods the agency uses, like traps with spring-loaded poison cartridges, leave a grisly wake of bycatch, sometimes of federally protected species, that has been deliberately hushed up by top officials. Even people are at risk: 18 employees and "several members of the public" have been exposed to cyanide from the traps.

Carol Bannerman, a Wildlife Services spokesperson, said that 80 percent of the animals the agency goes after are "dispersed," meaning chased away, rather than "lethally removed," meaning (you guessed it) killed. But she admitted that the agency's methods were sometimes sloppy. She described a recent incident where a team was dispatched to remove arctic foxes from an area where there were nesting endangered shorebirds. Traps were set, but instead of foxes, they caught snowy owls. There was nothing to do but return to the drawing board and try again.
Bannerman insisted such mishaps were accidental and regrettable.
"No one goes into this profession because they want to kill animals," she said.
That may be true, but it doesn't explain the behavior of one agency official who, according to a former employee interviewed by the Bee, instructed that employee to cover up an accidentally killed golden eagle:

"I called my supervisor and said, 'I just caught a golden eagle and it's dead,' " said Strader. "He said, 'Did anybody see it?' I said, 'Geez, I don't think so.'
"He said, 'If you think nobody saw it, go get a shovel and bury it and don't say nothing to anybody.' "
"That bothered me," said Strader, whose job was terminated in 2009. "It wasn't right."

Bannerman declined to confirm or deny this report, saying it was "a complex personnel situation" that she couldn't comment on. Still, she defended the basic premise of the agency, saying, "It benefits the species as a whole by providing a response and giving people help with problems they're having."

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/04/28/4450678/the-killing-agency-wildlife-services.html#storylink=cpy

Okay. But if you see a USDA pickup rolling up the road, consider locking Fido in the house.

Tim McDonnell

Climate Desk Fellow

Tim McDonnell is a Climate Desk fellow. For more of his stories, click here. Follow him on Twitter or send him an email at tmcdonnell [at] motherjones [dot] com. RSS | Twitter

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  http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2012/05/wildlife-services-sacramento-bee