Ken Salazar, considering next move, still committed to Interior

E Ken Salazar, right, is interviewed outside the Ritchie Center at the first 2012 presidential debate at the University of Denver. (Kathryn Scott Osler, Denver Post file)RelatedDec 23:Jockeying already underway for John Kerry's Senate seatDec 22:Obama nominates John Kerry as next secretary of stateDec 21:Obama nominates Kerry for secretary of stateDec 17:Biographical information for Sen. John KerryOn foreign policy, John Kerry is Obama's good soldierDec 16:Obama to nominate John Kerry for secretary of state, source saysDec 14:Susan Rice withdraws her name for secretary of stateDec 13:Embattled Rice bows out; Kerry new front-runner

WASHINGTON — Interior Secretary Ken Salazar says he is still mulling whether to stay on another four years with a second Obama term — a job that sources say he can keep if he wants it.

Heading Interior means Salazar is the custodian of managing the more than 500 million acres of the nation's public lands and another 1.7 billion acres offshore — a job rife with politics from environmentalists, energy companies and members of Congress in districts rich with natural resources.

Salazar is said to be weighing the job — it's work he very much enjoys — against the tug of his extended family in Colorado. Heading a federal agency means long hours, a life in Washington and days upon days of travel.

He is expected to make an announcement in the coming months. According to sources close to the department, his schedule has plans inked on the calendar through February.

"It is perhaps the most wonderful job of any Cabinet position in the United States," he said to the Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas last week. "I would not say that about Agriculture or Housing and Urban Development or Transportation. ... This is the best job."

That said, the past four years haven't been exactly easy for Salazar.

He was at the helm during the biggest environmental disaster in U.S. history.

Eleven men died when the BP-operated Deepwater Horizon well exploded April 20, 2010. After it sank two days later, about 53,000 gallons of crude oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico every day for nearly three months.

Salazar received criticism from both sides after the disaster.

Environmentalists — and the White House — said he moved lethargically in figuring out what went wrong. House Republicans on Capitol Hill lambasted him for his moratorium on new offshore drilling leases, which they say crippled domestic energy production.

The rebukes from the Hill didn't stop with Deepwater. House Republicans have continued to hammer him on his agency's handling of oil and gas leasing on federal lands — including in Colorado.

"I continue to be surprised that as secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar has pushed regulations that destroy Colorado jobs and imperil Colorado water law," said Rep. Cory Gardner, R-Yuma, who is on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. "If Ken Salazar ever decides to come back to Colorado, he'll have a lot of questions to answer about some of the decisions he's made in Washington."

But Salazar has earned friends in the West on both sides of the aisle in the past year after signing a historic water-sharing treaty with Mexico. The agreement sets in place a set of

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Colorado-based group helping Nepal produce more crops with human urine

Himalayan villagers plant marigolds in their noses to mask the odor of urine in collection tanks. (Photos courtesy of the dZi Foundation)

For 14 years, a foundation based in the one-stoplight town of Ridgway, on the Western Slope, has been helping rural villagers in eastern Nepal with education, building and employment projects. Now, the dZi Foundation has drawn widespread attention for what it has Himalayan villagers doing with urine.

Human urine has turned out to be the key to more diverse and more abundant vegetable crops in a remote area where subsistence farming has been the norm for generations. More conventional fertilizers have not been an option in communities that are five-day walks from the nearest roads.

So the dZi Foundation teamed up with a Himalayan development organization and started a project that is moving villagers beyond the crude outhouses that long have served the remote farming areas. The foundation persuaded more than 1,000 households in the communities of Sotang and Gudel to replace their "pig toilets." The name comes from the fact that outhouses were built over pig pens so that waste could drop directly to the waiting, hungry pigs. The waste was a big part of the swines' diet — and also a health hazard.

"We can laugh about this, but the sanitation issues were pretty bad," said dZi board chairman Darvin Ayre of Boulder. "Getting rid of the pig toilets was a first step, then we realized we could use urine on crops."

DZi, named after an etched stone bead believed to bestow health on its wearer, switched many villagers to dual-hole toilets that separate solid waste and urine. The urine collects in a tank, and the nitrogen-rich liquid is left to off-gas for a month. It's diluted and dispersed to fields using a drip system.

It is delivered directly to the soil, not put on edible parts of plants that grow on elaborately terraced fields and in new greenhouses that dZi also helped to build.

This new form of fertilizer has allowed farmers to grow new crops such as tomatoes, cauliflower and cabbage that traditionally did not do well or had not been tried there.

"This is a matter of maximizing what they have," said dZi co-founder and president Jim Nowak of the use of urine as well as the many other ways the foundation has been working to revitalize villages from the ground up.

DZi's urine project recently was featured in Scientific American in an article that found use of human urine on farm crops has been spreading slowly worldwide in the past decade. In addition to the Nepalese use of it, urine is

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Denver anti-gang-violence plan successful, challenging in other cities

Font ResizeLocal NewsBy Sadie Gurman
The Denver Postdenverpost.comPosted: 12/23/2012 12:01:00 AM MST

An ambitious anti-gang-violence strategy unfolding in Denver is credited for drastically decreasing killings in other cities that have tried it. But it has also proved difficult to sustain, raising questions about how long Denver's budding program can survive.

Denver's Ceasefire is based on an approach cited for slashing Boston's homicides by nearly 70 percent in the mid-1990s. Community leaders, clergy and law enforcement officials gather known gang members in closed-door meetings, where they demand that the violence end and promise steep and swift punishment if it doesn't. Social-service providers then offer a path toward reform through job-placement programs, rehab and other counseling.

The nontraditional approach worked for a while in Boston. By 1999, four years after police started their program, the city saw just 31 homicides, down from a record 152 in 1990.

But by 2000, Boston's program began to unravel as police focused their attention elsewhere, key brass transferred to other departments and a group of black clergy members proved "surprisingly ill-prepared to deal with a new cycle of gang violence," according to a 2008 study by the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. And by 2005, gang slayings in the city had reached a 10-year high.

"The sustainability is a challenge," said S. Gregory Baker, project director of the same initiative in Cincinnati that began in 2007, after the city recorded a record number of killings. That program, too, faced early skepticism from police officials and saw setbacks largely because of budget cuts. But Baker said the effort, credited for a 41 percent drop in gang-related homicides since it began, is back on track with renewed funding and a revamped organizational structure.

"You're bringing together naturally diverse teams of people who don't traditionally work together. Keeping them together as a unified team, focused on the same mission, that's a challenge in and of itself," he said.

The leaders of Denver's effort, including Police Chief Robert White, say they are committed to making the approach work in a city that has seen at least nine gang-related killings this year.

Gang violence has fallen slightly since 2010, according to Police Department data. There had been 208 gang-related or -motivated aggravated assaults as of the start of December, compared with 230 between January and November 2011.

Still, several troubling cases last summer, including the June 24 shooting of Denver police Officer Celena Hollis, allegedly by a member of the Park Hill Bloods, put a spotlight on the need for a holistic, Ceasefire effort, police officials said.

With the help of probation and parole officers, officials have already begun summoning certain gang members to "call-in sessions," where myriad law enforcement personnel, including federal and state prosecutors, tell them to stop shooting and warn them of the steep consequences their entire crew could face.

"A powerful message"

They also hear from grieving relatives of violence victims, ex-gangsters and an array of social-service providers who offer to help them with everything from handling child support to finding proper eyeglasses, as in one case.

"It's a powerful message,"said Chief Deputy District Attorney Tim Twining, head of the office's gang unit, which handles 200 to 300 cases annually. "We're not just here to make idle, empty threats. In fact, we don't want to see you anymore."

There are scores of street gangs large and small in Denver, but police wanted to target those behind some of the most recent activity. Call-ins so far have aimed to draw members of the Crips, Bloods and Gallant Knights Insane, a homegrown gang, with mixed results. Only a handful of offenders showed up for the first meeting. At least 15 came to a second.

A third meeting, closed to reporters, seemed more productive, drawing as many as 30 people, those who were present said. Those who were asked to attend have already been in the court system and were considered by police to be influential players who would be more likely to pass the message on to their associates.

Whether it sank in was up for debate.

One attendee told The Denver Post he thought the meetings were "a bunch of bull" meant to scare people into compliance and doubted police would be successful. Another, though, said he would impart the message to anyone he thought would be open to hearing it.

"If I see somebody I know, if I have some consideration for them, I tell them I don't gang-bang anymore," he said. "I would tell you to be careful. If they don't want to listen, that is their business."

The goal is for entire gangs to feel the increased heat and change, said Paul Callanan, project manager for the Gang Reduction Initiative of Denver, which provides logistical support for Ceasefire. The cost — in manpower and dollars — hasn't been tallied but will likely come out of a $2.2 million Department of Justice grant that funds GRID's strategies, which include targeted police responses. That grant runs out in 2014, but Callanan said he hopes Ceasefire can continue with existing resources.

Similar programs exist in many cities with varying levels of success. White said he patterned Denver's strategy off of one he implemented as police chief in Greensboro, N.C., where officials credit it for a 51 percent drop in violent crime since 2000.

But police officials in Oakland, Calif., struggled to maintain their Ceasefire, which fell apart after three or four years. The program lacked support of the community leaders who give it legitimacy and wasn't a true collaboration, Oakland police Lt. LeRonne Armstrong said. Realizing their mistakes, Oakland police jump-started the program again last summer.

"We just weren't doing it correctly," he said. "We tried to do it without a true investment in it."

Sadie Gurman: 303-954-1661, sgurman

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NORAD trademarks its Tracks Santa name

Font ResizeLocal NewsBy The Associated PressAssociated PressPosted: 12/23/2012 12:01:00 AM MST

The military command that protects the skies over the U.S. and Canada is also protecting the name of its famous Santa-tracking operation.

The North American Aerospace Defense Command has trademarked NORAD Tracks Santa and licensed a private company to sell official T-shirts and other gear. NORAD says the goal isn't to make money but to keep profiteers from cashing in.

NORAD began tracking Santa in 1955 when a newspaper ad listed the wrong phone number for kids to call Santa. They wound up calling the Continental Air Defense Command, NORAD's predecessor.

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Bald eagle hunts near downtown Denver in City Park

Font ResizeEnvironmentBy Bruce Finley
The Denver Postdenverpost.comPosted: 12/23/2012 12:01:00 AM MSTDecember 23, 2012 7:9 AM GMTUpdated: 12/23/2012 12:09:45 AM MST


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Your Questions About Us Oil Production

Are the GOP plans to increase domestic oil production really about energy security? Or making money?

Those on the Right seem rather cool to the idea of nationalizing the US oil industry; even if they admit that private industry has no interest or obligation in doing right by its host society.
So is it about enegy security? Or making tons of dough while oil is high and can only go higher?

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Tweet Posted on Dec 22, 2012 Zack Kopplin

By Alexander Reed Kelly

Eons ago, something crept out of the world’s oceans and made its home on land. All of us living today are descendants of that organism; we owe our existence to its victory in the struggle to adapt to its new, terrestrial surroundings.

Today, slimier creatures are dragging themselves up from the depths of nearby swamps, and they’re attempting to reshape the legislative and educational environments to suit themselves. A mix of religious zealots and political opportunists are waging a campaign to roll back the findings of biology and indoctrinate American students with unsubstantiated dogma. Their lobbies at the state level are powerful, especially in the heartlands of American conservatism, and their efforts have moved some who would otherwise passively oppose them to action.

Zack Kopplin was a sophomore in high school when his state passed the Louisiana Science Education Act in 2008. Masquerading behind the language of “academic freedom,” the law made Louisiana the first state to allow taxpayer-funded public schools to teach creationism and the more insidiously labeled “intelligent design.” Being so obviously inconsistent with the federal policy of separation of church and state, and posing a threat to science students whose education in religious ideology may hinder their access to college and jobs, Kopplin assumed someone from the scientific community would take action. He was “baffled” as the months passed and no one did, and in 2010, he dedicated his senior-year project to building a campaign to repeal the rule.

Kopplin began by contacting Dr. Barbara Forrest, a Southeastern Louisiana University philosopher and a key expert witness in the 2005 case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. The trial resulted in a federal court ruling that found teaching intelligent design in public biology classes to be inconsistent with the First Amendment because the subject is not scientific and “cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.” Forrest and Kopplin enlisted the help of 78 Nobel laureate scientists who publicly endorsed the repeal of the law. The New Orleans City Council, an association of clergy members and various educational and scientific organizations also lent their weight.

Kopplin’s campaign persuaded state Sen. Karen Carter Peterson, a Democrat from New Orleans, to sponsor a repeal bill, and in April 2011, she introduced SB 70.

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Within a month, the state Senate heard a debate over the bill. A 5-1 vote to defer action on the legislation effectively killed the group’s effort. Disappointed but not undaunted, the members revived the push the following spring, but lost again. This time, however, defeat came via a much narrower vote of 2-1, as some of the group’s previous opponents abstained. The campaign has promised to continue pressing the legislature until the teaching of creationism in public classrooms is illegal in the state.

The shift in results is encouraging, but state politicians are not yet rushing to Kopplin’s cause in sufficient numbers. The religious lobby, which is aligned with such national groups as Focus on the Family, has the power to elect and defeat political candidates. “Republican politicians are under pressure to vote with the religious right,” Kopplin said in a telephone interview with Truthdig on Friday. “If one of these politicians supports legislation that opposes creationism, they’ll be faced with someone who is further to the right than them in the next primary.”

Louisiana lawmakers and other state officials don’t just have the voting public to fear. Gov. Bobby Jindal has developed a reputation for punishing those who oppose him. According to New Orleans-based nonprofit news provider The Lens, this year Jindal removed Martha Manuel, the executive director of the Governor’s Office of Elderly Affairs, less than 24 hours after she publicly questioned one of his decisions. He appears to have pressed the resignation of Cynthia Bridges, a longtime secretary at the Department of Revenue, after she produced a tax report that contradicted his plans. And Jindal engineered the removal of several top officials at Louisiana State University who were “all seen as obstacles to privatizing the university’s hospital system.”

But Louisiana is not without officials willing to endure the pressure of well-funded interest groups and a vindictive governor. On Tuesday, the Orleans Parish School Board voted unanimously to ban the teaching of creationism and intelligent design in its schools. “No history textbook shall be approved which has been adjusted in accordance with the State of Texas revisionist guidelines,” the parish board wrote in its decision, “nor shall any science textbook be approved which presents creationism or intelligent design as science or scientific theories.”

The outcome affects six schools that operate within the parish. Along with the New Orleans City Council’s decision to reject the Louisiana Science Education Act, the city has now fully banned creationism from public classrooms.

Kopplin, now a history student in his second year at Rice University in Houston, has already received two honors for his efforts. He won a National Center for Science Education 2012 Friend of Darwin Award and was granted the 2012 Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award in Education. “This is a big victory for reason,” wrote Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer—who was on the jury for the Hefner award—of Tuesday’s result in New Orleans.

When asked why he believed that he, a mere high school student, could bring about such major change at the state and local level, Kopplin said: “I just thought it was right. I didn’t think about the opposition. I’m used to my attempts at things not working. I may lose nine out of 10 times, but eventually we will win this.”

Kopplin has been praised and reviled for his work. Skeptics and scientific groups applaud his endeavors, while some on the other side blame him for Hurricane Katrina. For building such stellar momentum in the direction of reason and progress, and for his commitment to carry on, we honor Zack Kopplin as our Truthdigger of the Week.

Zack Kopplin:

GateKeeper50hotmail:

 

TAGS: barbara forrest biology bobby jindal conservatism creationism darwin evolution intelligent design kitzmiller vs. dover area school district louisiana louisiana science education act new orleans orleans parish school board religious right sb 70 science zack kopplin



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