Tom's Turn: Notes from our Senior Editor

Odds and Ends

June 22, 2007

If anyone ever thought that Save-the-Whales went the way of the twentieth century, he or she was not paying very close attention a few weeks ago when two humpback whales -- mother and child -- came into San Francisco Bay and swam up the river all the way to Sacramento, maybe 90 miles inland and well into fresh water. Throngs of people lined the riverbanks hoping to catch a glance. Television helicopters swarmed overhead. Learned experts worried that fresh water wasn't good for the pair, and that there was nothing for them to eat. Officials tried turning the leviathans with noises, they tried herding them with an armada of small boats. It was the number one story on the evening news for most of two weeks. Finally, the whales turned around and headed for the ocean. They made their final dash through the bay and the Golden Gate under cover of night.

I attended a long-awaited and very moving event not long ago: groundbreaking for the David Brower Center in Berkeley. Dave was the first executive director of the Sierra Club and the leading environmentalist of the second half of the last century. I worked for him at the club and later at Friends of the Earth. (Dave was also, incidentally, a big fan of Earthjustice.) The center, adjacent to the Cal campus and built with all kinds of nifty green features, will house small nonprofits and environmentally aware for-profits and have meeting rooms, a restaurant (Alice Waters of Chez Panisse is advising), a gallery, and a theater. It is planned as an enviro center to carry Dave's ideas and passion indefinitely into the future. They're hoping to have the buildings (there's a block of 97 affordable housing units with street-level retail shops attached) done by the end of 2008. It's all very exciting.

Finally, a new wrinkle on nuclear power as a solution to climate change. According to scientists cited in an article in the International Herald Tribune, water may be the ultimate Achilles heel for the nuclear enterprise. Reactors need huge volumes of cold water to keep them from overheating. As the climate warms, cooling requirements intensify and rivers and streams become depleted and warmer themselves. In 2003, during the heat wave that killed approximately 20,000 people in France alone, the government had to reduce power from (or completely turn off) 17 reactors owing to lack of water. Buying replacement power cost the utility that runs the electricity system 300 million euros, close to a half a billion dollars. The situation is only going to get worse in the immediate future.

Tom Turner, Senior Editor
yourturn@earthjustice.org