October, 29 2009, 04:10pm EDT
Land Speculator Michael Winer Wins 2009 Rubber Dodo Award
His Wall St. Firm Pushing Largest Developments in California and Florida Imperiling Dozens of Endangered Species, Including Condors on Tejon Ranch
LOS ANGELES
The Center for Biological
Diversity announced today that the winner of its third annual Rubber
Dodo Award is Michael Winer, portfolio manager for the giant
real-estate investment firm Third Avenue Management, LLC ("TAREX").
The Rubber Dodo is awarded each year to the person who has done the
most to drive endangered species extinct. The 2007 winner was
Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne; the 2008 winner was Alaska
Governor Sarah Palin.
Winer is deserving of the 2009 award for
his leadership of TAREX, the largest stockholder in companies
developing the largest pieces of private land remaining in Southern
California and Florida. These regions are also home to some the
highest numbers of endangered species in North America. In
California, TAREX is pushing the Tejon Ranch Company to pave over
thousands of acres of federally designated California condor
habitat. In Florida, TAREX is pushing the St. Joe Company to flood
tens of thousands of acres of the Florida Panhandle with high-end
developments.
"Under Winer's money-obsessed leadership,
TAREX has become the poster child for unsustainable,
endangered-species-killing sprawl," said Adam Keats, director of the
Center's Urban Wildlands Program. "He specializes in finding
massive, remote estates far from urban centers and turning them into
a sea of condos, malls, golf courses, and resorts. There is good
reason that even Wall Street commonly calls TAREX a 'real-estate
vulture'."
In California, Winer has been a driving
force behind the Tejon Ranch Company's bid to build two new cities
50 miles north of Los Angeles. Tejon is the largest parcel of
private land in California and the last remaining unprotected
wilderness-quality land in the region. The Tejon development has
been likened to dropping a city the size of Boulder, Colorado into
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
"Mr. Winer, more than almost any other
single individual, is responsible for the reckless speculative
investment strategies that have led to the current development
pressure facing Tejon Ranch," said Keats. "If Tejon Mountain Village
gets built, our children will very likely never be able to witness
the majesty of the California condor soaring over its ancient core
habitat. Meanwhile, we'll all be stuck holding the bill for the
project's smog, traffic, water use, and wildfires, while Mr. Winer
and his investors make off with the profits."
In Florida, Winer has targeted the
relatively remote Florida Panhandle, making TAREX the largest
investor in the St. Joe Company, which owns 800,000 acres there. In
order to leapfrog over existing development areas, St. Joe has
pushed the Federal Aviation Administration to build a new airport in
the middle of its private lands.
Ignoring the impact to endangered
species, Winer and TAREX boast that the airport is "going to have a
significant impact on the development of northwest Florida, not to
mention the area around the airport that is all owned by St. Joe...
northwest Florida is ideally suited to benefit from that: it's less
expensive, less crowded and there's not a whole lot more to be
developed in any other coastal region of Florida."
Background on Tejon
Ranch
From condors to kit foxes, as many as 20
state- and federally listed species - and many others found nowhere
else on Earth - make their homes on California's Tejon Ranch.
Covering more than 270,000 contiguous acres from the Transverse
Ranges foothills across the Antelope Valley, over the southern
Sierra mountains and back down onto the San Joaquin Valley floor,
the ranch is located at the convergence of five geomorphic provinces
and four floristic regions - the only location of its kind in
California. It houses federally designated California condor
critical habitat, hosts 23 known types of plant communities, and
serves as an "oak laboratory" for more than one-third of all
California oak species. Unfortunately, this astoundingly diverse
landscape could be the future site of widespread sprawl
development.
The ranch's owner, Tejon Ranch Company,
has already built an energy plant and an industrial warehouse
complex, and is now planning three additional developments that
would seriously compromise the land's ecological integrity. Tejon
Mountain Village would convert 28,500 pristine acres of crucial
condor habitat in Kern County into a sprawling resort. The
Centennial Project, proposed for north Los Angeles County, would
pave more than 11,000 acres of grasslands, woodlands, scrublands,
and wildflower fields, replacing them with 23,000 homes and 14
million square feet of commercial development. Finally, the Tejon
East Industrial Complex would destroy 1,100 acres that comprise a
key wildlife linkage along the San Joaquin Valley floor, including
habitat for the threatened San Joaquin kit fox.
Tejon Ranch has a long history of
hostility to efforts to bring the endangered California condor back
from extinction. While in the 1980s the last remaining wild condors
were captured on Tejon Ranch, a decade later the company sued the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to block condor reintroduction near
the ranch and to have any reintroduced birds listed as a
nonessential, experimental population without full federal
protection.
But in a show of environmental concern,
in 2008 Tejon Ranch Company agreed, in exchange for securing several
environmental groups' non-opposition to its development plans, to
grant conservation easements to about 160,000 of its 270,000 total
acres. Even though almost all of this conservation area is
un-developable, being too steep, rugged, or remote, the agreement
has given a "green sheen" to Tejon's noxious development plans.
Meanwhile, the fate of the condor in its historical wild habitat
hangs in the balance of Tejon's development plans.
The Center has proposed that, rather than
becoming yet another monument to the continuation of a speculative
real estate bubble, Tejon Ranch should be preserved as a new
national or state park and preserve, protecting a bounty of native
plant and animal communities, cultural and historic features, and
scenic vistas. See www.savetejonranch.org.
Background on the Dodo
In 1598, Dutch sailors landing on
the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius discovered a flightless,
three-foot-tall, extraordinarily friendly bird. Its original
scientific name was Didus ineptus. (Contemporary
scientists use the less defamatory Raphus
cucullatus.) To the rest of the world, it's the dodo - the
most famous extinct species on Earth. It evolved
over millions of years with no natural predators and eventually
lost the ability to fly, becoming a land-based consumer of fruits,
nuts, and berries. Having never known predators, it showed no fear
of humans or the menagerie of animals accompanying
them to Mauritius.
Its trusting nature led to its rapid
extinction. By 1681, the dodo was extinct, having been hunted and
outcompeted by humans, dogs, cats, rats, macaques, and
pigs. Humans logged its forest cover and pigs uprooted and ate
much of the understory vegetation.
The origin of the
name dodo is unclear. It likely came from
the Dutch word dodoor, meaning "sluggard," the
Portuguese word doudo, meaning "fool" or "crazy," or the
Dutch word dodaars meaning "plump-arse" (that
nation's name for the little grebe).
The dodo's reputation as a foolish,
ungainly bird derives in part from its friendly naivete and the very
plump captives that were taken on tour across Europe. The animal's
reputation was cemented with the 1865 publication of Lewis
Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Based on
skeleton reconstructions and the discovery of early drawings,
scientists now believe that the dodo was a much sleeker animal than
commonly portrayed. The rotund European exhibitions were
accidentally produced by overfeeding captive birds.
At the Center for Biological Diversity, we believe that the welfare of human beings is deeply linked to nature — to the existence in our world of a vast diversity of wild animals and plants. Because diversity has intrinsic value, and because its loss impoverishes society, we work to secure a future for all species, great and small, hovering on the brink of extinction. We do so through science, law and creative media, with a focus on protecting the lands, waters and climate that species need to survive.
(520) 623-5252LATEST NEWS
Russia's Putin Secures Another Term
The controversial leader won a record number of votes for a post-Soviet candidate even as opponents organized a protest at noon on the election's third and last day.
Mar 17, 2024
Despite protests on Sunday, Russian President Vladimir Putin won reelection with more votes than any candidate since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Exit poll the Public Opinion Foundation (POF) put the final tally after three days of voting at 87.8%, the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM) at 87%, and Russia's Central Election Commission (CEC) at 87.3%. Putin will now serve another six-year term, meaning he will have been at the helm of the Russian state for longer than any leader since Catherine the Great, surpassing Josef Stalin.
The election comes less than a month after the second anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and is likely to lead to more tensions between the Russian and U.S. governments.
"It gives me some hope to see how many people are not happy with the dictatorship, the war, with what's happening in Russia."
"For a U.S. administration that hoped Putin's Ukraine adventure would be wrapped up by now with a decisive setback to Moscow's interests, the election is a reminder that Putin expects that there will be many more rounds in the geopolitical boxing ring," Nikolas Gvosdev, director of the National Security Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told the Russia Matters project.
With most of Putin's prominent opponents either dead, imprisoned, or in exile, the elections results were considered a foregone conclusion by both friends and foes of his administration.
A Putin spokesperson said in 2023 that the election was "not really democracy" but instead "costly bureaucracy," according to CNN. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said the election was "obviously not free nor fair."
However, Russian opponents of Putin did find a way to demonstrate their position with a protest called "Noon Against Putin." The protest was called for by St. Petersburg politician Maxim Reznik, according to The Guardian. Participants were instructed to head to a polling place at noon and cast a paper ballot for one of the candidates running against Putin, or to write-in another candidate or spoil their ballot.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny had endorsed the protest before his death last month in a Russian prison, leading the Independent Novaya Gazeta newspaper to dub it "Navalny's political testament."
The action drew crowds to polling places both in Russian cities like Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Yekaterinburg and at Russian embassies around the world.
"This is the first time in my life I have ever seen a queue for elections," one woman waiting in line in Moscow told
CNN. Russian journalists reported that the lines at some stations within the country reached the thousands, according to Reuters.
Navalny's widow, Yulia Navalnaya, who had also endorsed the protest, voted at the embassy in Berlin, while several protesters gathered outside the embassy in London.
"I expected there to be a lot of people, but not this many," London-based participant Maria Dorofeyeva told The Guardian, adding, "It gives me some hope to see how many people are not happy with the dictatorship, the war, with what's happening in Russia. And we want to stop it."
Ruslan Shaveddinov of Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation told Reuters:
"We showed ourselves, all of Russia and the whole world that Putin is not Russia (and) that Putin has seized power in Russia."
"Our victory is that we, the people, defeated fear, we defeated solitude—many people saw they were not alone," Shaveddinov said
Keep ReadingShow Less
Van Hollen Says Netanyahu Spreading 'Flat Out Lies' About UNRWA
The Maryland senator defended the organization on CBS and said there was no evidence that it was a "proxy for Hamas."
Mar 17, 2024
U.S. Senator for Maryland Chris Van Hollen continued his defense of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East and its work in Gaza in an appearance on CBS News' "Face the Nation" on Sunday.
"The claim that Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu and others are making that somehow UNRWA is a proxy for Hamas are just flat out lies, that's a flat out lie," he told journalist Margaret Brennan.
The U.S. was one of many Western countries that paused funding for UNRWA after the agency announced in January that it had fired 12 staffers over Israeli allegations that they had been involved in Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel. However, some countries including Canada, Sweden, the European Union, and Australia have since restored funding. A report has also emerged that Israel tortured UNRWA staffers into falsely confessing to involvement in the Hamas attack.
"Netanyahu has wanted to get rid of UNRWA because he had seen them as a means to continue the hopes of the Palestinian people for a homeland of their own."
Van Hollen's remarks on Sunday come days after he argued for the restoration of UNRWA funds on the floor of the U.S. Senate and criticized Republican legislators who wanted to permanently end funds for the organization that supports some 6 million Palestinian refugees in countries across the Middle East, including around 2 million in Gaza.
During his speech, he pointed out that the Netanyahu government had not shared the underlying evidence that UNRWA staffers participated in October 7 with either UNRWA itself or the U.S. government. He also urged his colleagues to read a classified Director of National Intelligence report on Netanyahu's claims of UNRWA complicity with Hamas.
On "Face the Nation," Van Hollen said that the person in charge of operations on the ground in UNRWA was a 20-year U.S. Army veteran.
"You can be sure he is not in cahoots with Hamas," the senator told Brennan.
He also repeated claims that Netanyahu has wanted to eliminate UNRWA entirely since at least 2017.
"Netanyahu has wanted to get rid of UNRWA because he had seen them as a means to continue the hopes of the Palestinian people for a homeland of their own," Van Hollen said, adding that the right-wing Israeli leader's "primary objective" was preventing the formation of a Palestinian state.
However, the dismantling of UNRWA would be especially catastrophic amid Israel's ongoing bombardment and invasion of Gaza, which has killed more than 31,000 people and put the survivors at risk of famine. No other organization has the infrastructure in place to distribute the necessary aid.
"If you cut off funding for UNRWA in Gaza entirely, it means more people will starve, more people won't get the medial assistance they need, and so it would be a huge mistake," Van Hollen said.
He also said that only 14 of the agency's 13,000-strong staff in Gaza had been accused of participating in the October 7 attack.
"We should investigate it, we should hold all those people accountable, but for goodness' sake, let's not hold 2 million innocent Palestinian civilians who are dying of starvation... accountable for the bad acts of 14 people."
Van Hollen also repeated his call for President Joe Biden to condition the sale of offensive military weapons to Israel on the country obeying international law and allowing aid into Gaza. While Israel sent the U.S. a letter saying it was in compliance with the law, "the day it was signed, clearly the Netanyahu government is not in compliance, because we see that they're continuing to restrict humanitarian assistance," he told Brennan.
Also on "Face the Nation" Sunday, United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) Chief Executive Catherine Russell described the impact that a lack of aid was having on the children of Gaza.
"We know now that children are dying of malnutrition in Gaza," she told Brennan.
Russell said that not enough aid was reaching those who needed it, calling both air drops and sea deliveries "a drop in the bucket."
She also called for greater transparency into what was actually happening in Gaza and the difficulties of delivering aid.
"The world should be able to see what's happening and make their own judgments about what's going on," Russell said.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Gore Calls Out Fossil Fuel Industry 'Shamelessness' in Lying to Public
"They are continuing to do similar things today to try to fool people and pull the wool over people's eyes just in the name of greed," the former vice president said.
Mar 17, 2024
In reflecting on nearly 50 years of climate advocacy, former Vice President Al Gore said that he had "underestimated" the greed of the fossil fuel industry.
The remarks came in an interview published in USA Today on Sunday. When asked if he had any regrets, Gore responded that he had "put every ounce of energy" he had into climate advocacy, but added:
"I was pretty slow to recognize how important the massive funding of anti-climate messaging was going on. I underestimated the power of greed in the fossil fuel industry, the shamelessness in putting out the lies."
"They are continuing to do similar things today to try to fool people and pull the wool over people's eyes just in the name of greed," Gore continued.
"What's at stake is so incredible."
Gore, who tried to raise awareness about the climate crisis in the U.S. House of Representatives as early as 1981 and brought the issue to national attention in 2006's documentary An Inconvenient Truth, has taken a harsher tone against oil, gas, and coal companies in recent months. In August 2023, he said that the "climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis," and in September, he implored the industry to "get out of the way." In December, he lamented that the industry had "captured the COP process," referring to the appointment of the United Arab Emirates national oil company CEO Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber to preside over the United Nations' COP28 climate conference in that country.
In the USA Today interview, Gore also named the fossil fuel industry when asked about his greatest frustration.
"Well, that we haven't made more progress," Gore answered, "and that some of the fossil fuel companies have been shameless in providing, continuing to provide lavish funding for disinformation and misinformation."
"What's at stake is so incredible," he added.
However, Gore told USA Today that he tried not to focus on his anger, but instead on continuing to raise awareness about the crisis and what can be done about it. And he remained hopeful that his grandchildren would live in a world in which people had come together and acted in time.
"We've got all the solutions we need right now to cut emissions in half before the end of this decade," he said. "We've got a clear line of sight to how we can cut the other 50% of emissions by mid century."
He also encouraged more people to get involved with the climate movement.
"I would say the greatest need is for more grassroots advocates because the most persuasive advocates are those in your own community," he said.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular