Drill Our Way Out?

We Cannot Drill Our Way Out   By Frank Schiavone With less than three percent of the worlds oil reserves (21 billion barrels on shore), our nation simply doesn’t have enough oil to impact the global market or drill our way to lower prices at the pump. Lacing the Arctic Refuge and our spectacular coastlines with oil rigs would boost oil company profits, but it would impoverish our natural...

Reducing Environmental Impacts

Reducing The Environmental Impacts of Development   By Frank Schiavone The State Legislature passed the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) in 1970. The legislation was enacted to provide public agencies with the tools they need to regulate development, minimize environmental damage, and provide each of us “a decent home and satisfying living environment”. The law explicitly states...

Man’s Impact

What We Do To Our Planet We Do To Ourselves   By Frank Schiavone When it comes to the footprint we leave on this ever-shrinking globe, we humans wear some pretty big clodhoppers – size 13, triple wide. From space, man’s impact on our world is clearly visible. Bill Mckibben in his book, The End of Nature, writes that there is nowhere on Earth that man’s reach is unfelt. Even our aerial...

Biodiversity

Biodiversity and Why it Matters   By Frank Schiavone Habitat and species loss is a major challenge in Southern California. In fact, Southern California has been identified as one of eight “hot spots” worldwide where species loss is occurring at unprecedented rates. Many of the plant and animal communities here rank as some of the most threatened in the world. According to a nationwide...