Last month I was fortunate enough to be able to join a small group of Earthjustice supporters and staff for ten days in Costa Rica.
The trip was outstanding. We explored the Caribbean coast, spending time in Cahuita and Tortuguero national parks, before flying inland to the very different cloud forest region. All along we were accompanied by a superb naturalist and local guides with a wealth of knowledge of plants and ecosystems. They helped us spot wildlife -- especially birds -- that I, at least, would never have seen on my own.
As you might suspect, the trip had a larger purpose than seeing an extremely interesting part of the world, worthwhile though that is. Martin Wagner, director of Earthjustice's international program, set up a series of informal meetings with Costa Rican environmental lawyers and activists so we could learn more about environmental issues and the role of Costa Rican and international law in addressing them. Martin himself did a great job of tying many of these issues -- sea turtle protection, for instance -- to the decisions of international bodies like the World Trade Organization and Earthjustice's own efforts to shed public light on their secretive deliberations.
For several years Earthjustice has been very active in an association of environmental law groups in North, Central and South America that pools special skills, information, and knowledge of domestic and international law so each group can handle challenges that no one organization could take on alone. For instance, a few years ago the American company Boise Cascade entered into a joint venture with the Chilean company Maderas Cóndor to build a wood panel and chip plant, to be fed by logging over 12,000 acres a year of already overcut natural forest.
Working with the Chilean law group Fiscalio del Media Ambiente and the Canadian environmental law group Sierra Legal Defence Fund, Earthjustice brought its experience in international law to bear and challenged the permits for the project under the Agreement on Environmental Cooperation between Chile and Canada. When the Joint Submission Authority ordered Chile to respond to our argument that it had performed no environmental assessment, Boise Cascade withdrew from the project. The case marked the first time that a South American government had ever been subjected to citizen enforcement of an international environmental agreement.
In Costa Rica we met with other Earthjustice partners, CEDARENA (the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Center) and Justicia para la Naturaleza. Earthjustice has worked with these groups in the past in preventing the exploitation of gold in Miramar, a fragile watershed on the Pacific side of Costa Rica; while in Costa Rica we heard of other efforts to prevent oil development in sea turtle habitat and to seek reparations and improved working conditions for banana plantation workers whose health and reproductive abilities have been destroyed by the widespread mishandling of pesticides.
An Earthjustice excursion is not quite like any other. It is always a mix of exploring the natural world and also the complex human institutions, economics, and law that affect that world. I encourage you to join us on one of these outings, whether it be a trip to Costa Rica, river rafting in Alaska, or one of the occasional three-day conferences we hold in Utah and Montana. They provide outstanding opportunities to learn not only about places but about what it will take to protect them.
I cannot talk about Earthjustice's international work without mentioning one of its recent successes much closer to home.
U.S. companies, Sempra Energy Resources Corp. and Baja California Power, Inc., are building two electrical generating plants three miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border near Mexicali, Baja California. The plants would be fueled by natural gas piped from the U.S. side of the border, and the electricity would be sold back across the border into the U.S. The plants themselves, however, would be on Mexican soil and thus avoid compliance with the U.S. Clean Air Act, even though the prevailing winds would blow the plants' emissions into the Salton Sea air basin, which is already too polluted to meet the Clean Air Act's minimum health standards. Waste discharges from the plant would flow into the New River, which crosses from Mexico into the U.S. and empties into the Salton Sea; they would further pollute both water bodies, both of which already fail to meet minimum water quality standards set by the U.S. Clean Water Act.
Fortunately, the companies need federal permits from the Department of Energy and the Bureau of Land Management to build the transmission lines necessary to get the power back to U.S. markets. Lawyers with Earthjustice's international program challenged the issuance of such permits without a full environmental assessment of both plants' environmental impact. Last week Judge Irma Gonzales of the federal district court for the Southern District of California agreed. She concluded that the evidence showed that discharges from the plants would have a significant adverse impact on the Salton Sea by increasing its salinity and that the agencies did not appropriately take into consideration impacts on air and water quality that might justify writing environmental performance standards into the transmission line permits.
This is a sweet victory for those who oppose using international commerce as a cover for environmental degradation. The case also illustrates very clearly why Americans need to be concerned about environmental developments in other countries.
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