It would be trite of me to try to adequately address anything surrounding hurricane Katrina in the short time I have to slap together a post, but I did want to 1) draw attention to a couple things and 2) get a post up here, since I haven’t posted anything in several days. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to deal with Katrina more properly soon. Instead, I’m going to point to two non-related things on the ‘net, each of which I would like to say more about, but for neither of which I have adequate time to do so.

The first is a recent editorial from the New York Times, dealing with potential changes to National Park policy. This is something that I with I had an actual news piece or other press release on, just to verify the substance of the editorial, but alas I do not. Even so, it sounds pretty bad:

Within national park circles, this rewrite of park rules has been met with profound dismay, for it essentially undermines the protected status of the national parks. The document makes it perfectly clear that this rewrite was not prompted by a compelling change in the park system's circumstances. It was prompted by a change in political circumstances - the opportunity to craft a vision of the national parks that suits the Bush administration.

Some of Mr. Hoffman's changes are trivial, although even apparently subtle changes in wording - from "protect" to "conserve," for instance - soften the standard used to judge the environmental effects of park policy.

But there is nothing subtle about the main thrust of this rewrite. It is a frontal attack on the idea of "impairment." According to the act that established the national parks, preventing impairment of park resources - including the landscape, wildlife and such intangibles as the soundscape of Yellowstone, for instance - is the "fundamental purpose." In Mr. Hoffman's world, it is now merely one of the purposes.

The second is something I’ve been meaning to post on for a long time, but about which I haven’t really been able to come up with anything novel to say other than “whoops!” The fact is that the number I cited for Portland, Oregon’s alleged progress with climate change was apparently dead wrong. I guess somebody forgot to carry the one, or some other “trivial” error. I intended to say more, but it’s been a bit since I looked at the press release, and the website is apparently undergoing some server issues. I’ll try to say more later today if the site is back on line.

In order to offer credit/a disclaimer, this was brought to my attention by Rich Page, who works with the Cascade Policy Institute (I’ve included a link even though the site is down as of this posting), the same organization that I believe discovered and published the error.