BEAT's Blog

The following was submitted on December 7 to the Berkshire Eagle as a Letter To The Editor by Jane Winn, Executive Director of BEAT.

On the evening of December 1 in Great Barrington an informational and organizational meeting of concerned citizens was held to discuss proposals by GE to locate PCB dumps in the southern Berkshires.  Thank you to Tim Gray of the Housatonic River Initiative and to Phyllis Skaller for organizing this meeting.  Because I was videotaping the event, I didn’t have an opportunity to speak.  I would like to take this opportunity to make a few of points.

The consent decree, under which the cleanup of the first two miles of the river proceeded, provided no opportunity for creative responses to problems as they arose.  The agreement locked us in to bad decisions made before the process even started, which meant that there was no mechanism for responding to issues as they arose and the public was completely locked out of the process. Read more…

The ICOET (International Conference on Ecology and Transportation) is amazing. There are people from Mexico, Canada, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Cameroon, Norway, Portugal, France, Sweden, Taiwan, Ghana, India, Republic of Korea, Nigeria, and Switzerland, all working to help wildlife get across roads. I especially liked the photographs of wildlife crossing rope bridges over roads in Australia – sugar gliders and marsupial possums.

I am sorry I missed Pittsfield Green Drinks tonight, but I was there in spirit. BEAT is a member of the TransWild Alliance, a group of conservation advocacy organizations working to protect wildlife and natural resources from the devastating impacts of highways and associated development. And I went out with other TransWild Alliance members for our own version of Green Drinks here. All our conversations revolved around wildlife and roads. Very interesting!

Tomorrow we go on field trips around the Duluth area to see what great projects have been implemented here.

Good night from Duluth,
Jane

I am writing from the International Conference on Ecology and Transportation in Duluth, MN at the west end of Lake Superior. The conference doesn’t really start until tomorrow (Monday 9/14) but I checked in this evening and attended the screening of “Division Street” with the filmmaker, Eric Bendick. Actually, we only screened 40 minutes of the film, but enough to decide that this would be a great film to bring to western Massachusetts to try to raise awareness and start a discussion about the impact of roads on wildlife here. (As you know, BEAT is already working to decrease the impact of roads on wildlife.)

The filmmaker said that the farthest away you can get from roads in the continental US is about 21.2 miles. Roads are everywhere!

The conference should be interesting with speakers from around the world talking about what is being done in their area to decrease the impact of roads on wildlife.

More tomorrow once the conference is really underway!
Jane

BEAT has been warning the City of Pittsfield about the dangers of undersized culverts. As I said in a previous post,

“BEAT has also been arguing to apathetic ears that Pittsfield has been installing undersized culverts at road crossings. We hate to say ‘we told you so,’ but part of the flooding is a result of the city being unwilling to force engineers to do a little extra work or spend a little extra money. Apparently the city would rather force homeowners to go out and buy sump pumps.”

Here’s an amazing video from Freeport, Maine that underscores the danger of undersized culverts. The video was captured by WMTW.com photojournalist Kevyn Fowler in Freeport, Maine during a storm. It shows the collapse of a road when water flow exceeded the capacity of a culvert. The culvert makes its appearance at the very end of the video.