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Tar-sands extraction isn’t just turning swaths of Canadian land into postapocalyptic film sets. New research shows it’s also contaminating the wild animals that members of the Mikisew Cree and Athabasca Chipewyan First Nations have traditionally relied on for food.
We already knew that the tar-sands operations have been dousing northern Alberta with mercury and other forms of pollution. Now university scientists have collaborated with the First Nations to test the pollution levels in hunted animals found downstream from the tar-sands sites. Here are some lowlights from their findings, which were included in a report published on Monday:
Arsenic levels were high enough in in muskrat and moose muscle; duck, moose, and muskrat livers; and moose and duck kidneys to be of concern for young children. Cadmium levels were again elevated in moose kidney and liver samples but also those of beaver and ducks … Mercury levels were also high for duck muscle, kidneys, and livers as well as moose and muskrat kidneys, especially for children. …
Total levels of PAHs [polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons] and levels of carcinogenic and alkylated PAHs were very high relative to other food studies conducted around the world.
The First Nations members aren’t shocked to hear this. Some have already started avoiding their traditional foods because of worries about contamination, they told researchers. More from the report:
Participants were concerned about declines in the quality of [traditional] foods, in the greatest part because of environmental pollutants originating from the Oil Sands. It was notable how many participants no longer consumed locally caught fish, because of government-issued consumption advisories and associated human health concerns. Muskrat consumption had also declined precipitously, along with muskrat populations, a decline that was attributed to changes in hydrology and contaminant levels associated with the WAC Bennett Dam and the Oil Sands. The only effective alternatives to traditional foods are store-bought foods. …
All participants were worried about ongoing declines in the health and wellbeing of their community. They generally viewed themselves as less healthy than their parents, who rarely got sick. Neurological illnesses (e.g. sleeping disorders, migraines, and stress) were most common followed, in descending order of frequency, by respiratory illnesses (e.g. allergies, asthma) as well as circulatory (e.g. hypertension, coronary) and gastrointestinal (e.g. gallbladder, ulcers) illnesses. Yet, everyone was most concerned about the current and escalating cancer crisis.
A documentary about the research — One River, Many Relations — will be released in October. Here’s a trailer:
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy
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Mother Jones
Less than a day after the United States Supreme Court issued its divisive ruling on Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, it has already begun to toss aside the supposedly narrow interpretation of the decision. On Tuesday, the Supremes ordered lower courts to rehear any cases where companies had sought to deny coverage for any type of contraception, not just the specific types Hobby Lobby was opposed to.
The Affordable Care Act had listed 20 forms of contraception that had to be covered as preventive services. But Hobby Lobby, a craft supply chain, claimed that Plan B, Ella, and two types of IUD were abortifacients that violated the owners’ religious principles. The science was against Hobby Lobby—these contraceptives do not prevent implantation of a fertilized egg and are not considered abortifacients in the medical world—but the conservative majority bought Hobby Lobby’s argument that it should be exempted from the law.
Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the the 5-4 opinion, used numerous qualifiers in an attempt to limit its scope, but a series of orders released by the court Tuesday contradict any narrow interpretation of the ruling.
The court vacated two decisions by the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit—Autocam Corp. v. Burwell and Eden Foods v. Burwell—and commanded the appeals court to rehear the cases in light of the Hobby Lobby decision. In both instances the Sixth Circuit had rejected requests from Catholic-owned businesses that sought to exempt the companies from offering insurance that covered any of the 20 mandated forms of birth control. The Supreme Court also compelled the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to reopen a similar case, Gilardi v. Department of Health & Human Services. “With Tuesday’s orders,” wrote The Nation‘s Zoë Carpenter, “the conservative majority has effectively endorsed the idea that religious objections to insurance that covers any form of preventative healthcare for women have merit.”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg predicted this outcome in her dissent, noting that the logic of Alito’s decision went far beyond the limited scope he initially claimed. “The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield,” Ginsburg wrote.
No matter what Alito and other justices may claim, court decisions set precedent and offer opportunities for lower courts to expand the logic of the initial case. (See Bush v. Gore.) The immediate turnaround to broaden the scope of Hobby Lobby won’t do anything to dispel fears that the case has opened the way for a broad swath of businesses to object to any government regulation they dislike based on the religious whims of corporate owners.
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Supreme Court Broadens Hobby Lobby Ruling to All Forms of Birth Control
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I’ve had a friendly argument with Greg Sargent for some months about whether immigration reform was dead, or was merely on life support and still stood a chance of resuscitation. But in a way, it may turn out we disagreed a little less than we thought. He points me today to this Politico story:
Last summer, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) privately told the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference that if reformers won the August recess, then Republicans would move a bill in the fall. But the Syria crisis, the government shutdown and the botched rollout of HealthCare.gov consumed attention through the end of 2013.
….As recently as this month, however, there was more movement in the House than previously known….But then Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) lost his Republican primary election. And young children from Central America crossed illegally over the southwestern border in record numbers. Those two unforeseen events killed any remaining chance for action this year.
….For their part, reformers underestimated how impervious most House Republicans would be to persuasion from evangelicals, law enforcement and big business, and how the GOP’s animus toward Obama over health care and executive actions would bleed into immigration reform.
Before last summer I didn’t think immigration reform was irretrievably dead. I thought it was damn close, but it wasn’t until fall that I was pretty sure it was, indeed, completely dead. And that’s pretty much my read of what Politico says. (Though, as it happens, I wouldn’t actually put much stock in John Boehner’s promise to the NHCLC, since it sounds mostly like something he said merely to avoid gratuitously pissing off a constituency, even though he knew perfectly well the reformers weren’t going to win the August recess.)
I’d say the last paragraph of the excerpt is key. The reformers may have kept up their hopes, but for some reason they simply didn’t understand just how hellbent the tea partiers were against any kind of serious immigration reform. I, on the other hand, being a cynical liberal, understood this perfectly. They were never going to bend—not no how, not no way—and Boehner was never going to move a bill without them.
The canary in the coal mine was always Marco Rubio. He genuinely wanted reform; he genuinely worked hard to persuade his fellow conservatives; and he genuinely had credibility with the tea party wing of the GOP. But by the end of summer, he understood the truth: it wasn’t gonna happen. At that point, he backed away from his own bill, and that was the death knell. No base, no bill. And by the end of summer, it was finally and definitively clear that the base just wasn’t persuadable.
In any case, Republicans have now abandoned even the pretense of working on immigration reform, and Sargent says they’ll come to regret this:
The current crisis is actually an argument for comprehensive immigration reform. But Rep. Bob Goodlatte — who once cried about the breakup of families — is now reduced to arguing that the crisis is the fault of Obama’s failure to enforce the law. Goodlatte’s demand (which is being echoed by other, dumber Republicans) that Obama stop de-prioritizing the deportation of the DREAMers really means: Deport more children. When journalist Jorge Ramos confronted Goodlatte directly on whether this is really what he wants, the Republican refused to answer directly.
….This is the course Republicans have chosen — they’ve opted to be the party of maximum deportations. Now Democrats and advocates will increase the pressure on Obama to do something ambitious to ease deportations in any way he can. Whatever he does end up doing will almost certainly fall well short of what they want. But determining the true limits on what can be done to mitigate this crisis is now on him.
I don’t know what Obama is going to do. For years, he followed a strategy of beefing up enforcement in hopes of gaining goodwill among conservatives. In the end, all that accomplished was to anger his own Hispanic supporters without producing anything of substance. At this point, there’s no downside to taking maximal executive action, so he might very well do that. But will he do it before or after the midterms? Or just give up and move on to other things? Hard to say.
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