Tim is facing ten years in prison on two felony charges for derailing an illegal sale of public land from the outgoing Bush administration to private oil and gas developers.
A full year after I disrupted the BLM oil and gas auction, I still have no regrets for my actions. The legal case against me continues.
This kind of trial is nothing but intimidation-- and the best answers to intimidation are joy and resolve. That’s what we’ll need in Utah.
Read joint letter explaining the urgent need for solidarity on February 28.
See: "Student Disrupts Government Auction of 150,000 Acres Of Wilderness For Oil & Gas Drilling."
See: As climate crime continues, who are we sending to jail? Tim DeChristopher?
HUGHESVILLE, Pa. — At first, Raymond Gregoire did not want to listen to the raspy voice on his answering machine offering him money for rights to drill on his land. They want to ruin my land, he thought. But he called back anyway a week later to hear more.
By the end of February, he had a contract in hand for $62,000, and he pulled together a group of 75 neighbors who signed $3 million in deals.
“It’s a modern-day gold rush in our own backyard,” Mr. Gregoire said.
Property owners at a seminar in Clarks Summit, Pa., on negotiating with gas lease companies.
Fracture drilling workers run machinery on a farm outside of Pittsburgh. Companies are risking big money on rural Pennsylvania, producing billions of dollars' worth of natural gas.
A television commercial about global warming from Environmental Defense and the Ad Council.
Start with the Introduction to the Feature Articles on NASA's Earth Observatory web site to see how scientists explain rapid climate change. The beauty of Earth's cities at night affirm our need for energy.
Global Warming and rapid climate change? There is room for denial, ask anyone who has been given a terminal AIDS or cancer diagnosis. But we are one big family with too many secrets. The U.S. and other nations cannot continue to exempt the military from environmental standards.
Perhaps our accepted ideas about the origin of oil will change as we discover life at the Earth's core and get more data from new missions beyond the Earth. What if we discover that the extraction methods and new technology that have given us hydraulic fracturing are destined to be obsolete? New research following in the footsteps of Thomas Gold's out-of-the-box thinking may lead us down a very different energy path.
The oceans and atmosphere are partners in creating Earth's climate. There is still much that remains to be discovered about the relationship between the geology underlying the oceans and Earth's climate.
See: Ocean and Climate Change Institute : Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
See: Public Supports Consumer and Environmental Protections, Polls Show
Exon, N. “Scientific drilling beneath the oceans solves earthly problems.” Australian Journal of Maritime and Ocean Affairs 2, no. 2 (2010): 37. (PDF)
Hayman, N. W, W. Bach, D. Blackman, G. L Christeson, K. Edwards, R. Haymon, B. Ildefonse, M. Schulte, D. Teagle, and S. White. “Future Scientific Drilling of Oceanic Crust.” Eos: Transactions of the American Geophysical Union 91, no. 15 (2010): 133–134.
See: Criticism: Tragedy of the commons | Wikipedia
More significantly, criticism has been fueled by the "application" of Hardin's ideas to current policy issues. In particular, some authorities have read Hardin's work as specifically advocating the privatization of commonly owned resources.
Consequently, resources that have traditionally been managed communally by local organizations have been enclosed or privatized. Ostensibly, this serves to "protect" such resources, but it ignores the pre-existing management, often appropriating resources and alienating indigenous (and frequently poor) populations. In effect, private or state use may result in worse outcomes than the previous management of commons.
Ostrom, E., J. Burger, C. B Field, R. B Norgaard, and D. Policansky. 1999. Revisiting the commons: local lessons, global challenges. Science 284, no. 5412: 278.
Victor L. Ponce. Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" Revisited or We Are All In the Same Boat.
Another example of a typical commons is groundwater. Nobody really owns the groundwater; it is technically up for grabs. However, individual pumping of too much groundwater can result in the depletion of the resource, to say nothing of other related effects or losses, such as land subsidence and salt-water intrusion...Eventually, depletion by a few means depletion for all.
See: USGS. Land Subsidence
Victor Ponce is a Professor of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering at San Diego State University.
See: Marcellus-Shale.us. December 2, 2009. "Dunkard Creek Fish Kill."
Adding together the component partial utilities, the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another... But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons.
Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit -- in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.
I would like to focus your attention not on the subject of the article (national security in a nuclear world) but on the kind of conclusion they reached, namely that there is no technical solution to the problem.
An implicit and almost universal assumption of discussions published in professional and semipopular scientific journals is that the problem under discussion has a technical solution. A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality...
...It is our considered professional judgment that this dilemma has no technical solution.
See: J. B. Wiesner and H. F. York. "National Security and the Nuclear-Test Ban." Sci. Amer. 211 (No. 4), 27 (1964).
See: The Tragedy of the Commons. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in:
Jean-Marie Baland and Jean-Phillipe Plateau. (1996). "Halting degradation of natural resources". Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Rome, Italy.
The present work is concerned with the topical issue of natural resource management. It does not deal, however, with broad-spectrum environmental concerns such as protection of wilderness areas (for example, the south pole), air or water pollution, etc., but focuses on local ecosystems. What distinguishes local-level resources from larger ecosystems is that:
(1) they are susceptible of appropriation by relatively small units (including individuals) and
(2) they can lead to rivalry in consumption in so far as yields of these resources are clearly perceived as subtractable. This book thus addresses the question as to how these local or village-level natural resources (as contrasted with global commons) can be most efficiently and equitably managed. In other words, can we find guidelines or sound theoretical principles for an optimal long-term exploitation of local resources (forests, irrigation water, pastures, lakes and rivers, sea areas, etc.)?
Disturbing evidence highlighting rapid processes of resource depletion, particularly so in developing countries, has stimulated a lot of theoretical and empirical works during the last decades. Moreover, relevant theoretical tools (such as game theory) have been developed independently of environmental concerns which have potential applications to this field.
