As the mayoral election of 2009 approaches in the midst of the gravest economic crisis of last 75 years, I’m wondering if we’ll hear candidates parrot the old line about “inevitable” material growth, or if they’ll really start to explore steady state sustainability.

Steady state economics emphasizes qualitative growth over quantitative growth. A steady state economy grows quality of life, not population, not geographic size, not material consumption. It is based, to some extent, on a mature concept of a satisfying “enough” replacing a dangerous too much.

Qualitative growth, of course, is subjective. But it is also quantifiable. It stresses wages over profits, rewarded effort over exploited labor, local business over international trade run by rootless enterprises. It has its focus on the arts, education, a high quality of public life, local entrepreneurism, on food, on discourse, parks, libraries and on resource conservation.

It’s not surprising that steady state economic theories are are moving back into American consciousness during these dire times.

Adbusters magazine’s current issue — “The Big Ideas of 2009″ — has awarded the great spokesman of steady state economics, Herman Daly, the Man of the Year award for 2008. Since the 1970s, Daly has been attacking orthodox economics for its “critical flaw,” failing “to take into account how economic processes consume resources and generate wastes.” Daly sees orthodox economic activity, Adbusters wrote, as a “growing sub-set, of a non-growing planet.”

Daly wrote that “current economic growth has uncoupled itself from the world and has become irrelevant. Worse, it has become a blind guide.”

Daly’s book “Steady State Economics,” was first published in l977. It had a powerful influence on the environmental movement of the time. But was always considered a “fringe” idea by those ran the show.

But Daly is not crank. He’s a professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, a former senior economist at the World Bank, working on environmental economics, and the winner of numerous international awards, including the Honorary Right Livelihood Award, which has been described as an “alternative Nobel Prize.”

A discussion of steady state economics sounds like just the topic Albuquerque’s 2009 mayoral race needs if it hopes to become serious about the troubled world we’re living in.

I don’t mean, though, an idealized about face in our local approach to livelihood. I do mean, however, a discussion on how we can infuse our local economic thinking with steady state ideas, incentives, and solutions to problems.

I’m wondering if we’ll hear any new ideas this year from any candidate? Will candidates directly address the current, and sure to be long-lived, recession? Or will they talk about the present as if it were the past, urging growth, growth and more growth, offering TIDDS to every developer, vowing to create lustrous new urbanist settlements in the wild open spaces miles and miles from town? Or will some candidate catch our imagination, and step up to address the crisis that this city, along with every other city in America, is in?

What would stepping up mean? Might it mean being brave enough to discuss economics as if reality mattered? Might it mean proposing a moratorium on sprawl development, realistic water rationing, incentives for infill development, empowering neighborhoods to protect themselves from predatory builders, public investment in more and more mass transit, resurrecting the regional stock exchanges of the 1930s to support local business and agriculture, actually cleaning up Cold War water pollution from Kirtland and Sandia Labs, working arrangements with local banks to finance recycling operations with the city as a guaranteed customer, creating a local senior teaching core to stimulate younger students to think productively about the future.

Would stepping up mean, perhaps, actually giving serious consideration to embracing at least some ideas from the concept of a steady state economy in Albuquerque, allowing us to grow qualitatively, if not quantitatively, as this world-changing economic and environmental crisis unfolds?

Qualitative growth is not negative; it’s not a failure caused by material hardship. It is another way to make a living while making a life that better fits the environmental and economic realities of our times.

I can think of nothing I’d like better than to see candidates talk meaningfully about the economic analyses of Herman Daly.

Adbusters describes Daly’s views: Humanity, he argued, “had to shift to a steady-state economy, one in which demands placed on the ecosystem would remain safely in bounds. This would imply shifting economic policy from a focus on stoking growth, where the scale of physical demands on ecosystems perpetually increased, to a focus on development, meaning humanity would have to learn to make wiser use of a modest and more stable level of material taken from the environment.”

By contrasting “development” with “growth,” Daly means, I think, emphasizing quality of life, a developmental approach to living, rather than physical and material quantitative growth.

Adbusters believes that “Thanks to the overwhelming evidence natural scientists have amassed demonstrating that if we want to avoid catastrophic climate change, humanity must stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, mainstream economists are grudgingly coming to accept the fact that there are ecological limits to our growth afer all.”

On a macro scale, Daly feels bailouts of failing industries are “merely a way to keep the growth economy from failing a little longer while allowing it to continue degrading the planet…. Instead, we need to redesign our laws and institutions to foster an economy that remains within biophysical limits… Of course the growth economists will howl that such measures would slow the growth of the GDP. I say so be it –- growth has become uneconomic, and we have limited time to bring the economy into line with the biosphere’s carrying capacity.”

Daly considers the earth as a whole to be in something like a steady state, not static, but with the inflow of radiant energy from the sun equal to the outflow of energy, until the trapping of greenhouse gases. “The closer the economy approaches the scale of the whole Earth, the more it will have to conform to the physical behavior mode of the Earth,” Daly writes in Adbusters. “That behavior mode is a steady state -– a system that permits qualitative development but not aggregate quantitative growth.”

One practical way of bring that about, Daly says, is to tax “what we want less of [depletion and pollution] and ceasing to tax what we want more of (income…) -– as the bumper sticker puts it ‘tax bads, not goods.’”

It would be a major political stunner to hear a viable candidate for the mayor’s job in Albuquerque proposing to heavily tax what we don’t want -– sprawl development, excessive water use and air and water pollution for starters -– and ceasing to tax, and even giving incentives to, what we want -– water conservation, infill development, local agriculture for starters.

That would be a candidate I could support.

Illustration by Keith Lewis

ALBUQUERQUE — For a look back on 2008 from an environmental perspective, I made an extremely unscientific poll of green leaders who were unlucky enough to get caught by my phone calls this week as they were stuck in the office, walking through shopping malls, dealing with screaming children or merely trying to have a nice breakfast at the coffee shop that I call my office.

I asked all of these people to talk about what they thought were the biggest environmental stories of the year. They mentioned Tax Increment Development Districts, the proposed Desert Rock power plant, river otters, the destruction wrought by all-terrain vehicles in national forests and a new law allowing concealed weapons in national parks. But mostly they wanted to talk politics. Like everyone else, environmentalists were consumed by the 2008 elections and the sea change coming to the Legislature, Congress and the White House.

Here’s their choices for the top environmental story of the year.

The 2008 Elections

Sandy Buffett, executive director of Conservation Voters of New Mexico

“The big winner in the 2008 elections was New Mexico’s air, land and water. There was some coattail effect from Obama in November, but not in the June primaries. The candidates we supported won by talking to voters about clean energy and ensuring we’re not compromising public health, clean water and air. So to now have new friends and champions who understand why we need to protect the resources and special places that make New Mexico great means we can move beyond defense against industry lobbyists and hopefully move toward making positive change. [For example,] in the legislative session there will be a green jobs bill and there will be an attempt to reform the TIDD policies to close the loopholes that allow greenfield sprawl developers to grab subsidies intended for infill development.”

Buh-bye Bush!

Jim Baca, New Mexico Natural Resource Trustee and a director of The Wilderness Society

“There’s no question, Bush leaving office is the biggest story of the year. Electing people like Barack Obama, Tom Udall, Martin Heinrich — that’s big news for the environment. … And we’ll get rid of people like [Vice President Dick] Cheney, who wanted to start drilling in the Valle Vidal. With this election we’ve done a complete reversal of how we’re going to approach these problems. Obama is not a guy who understands western public lands issues, so his appointments will be very important. [Secretary of the Interior nominee Ken] Salazar is neutral — not good or bad — but he’s experienced.

“The next important picks will be for jobs that are not Cabinet-level: the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Minerals Management Service. They’re really important, but they don’t get any attention. We’ll know how good Obama’s administration will be [when they're announced]. At the very least I think they’ll stop the bleeding.”

The Economic Crisis

Joanie Quinn, education and marketing coordinator at the New Mexico Organic Commodity Commission

“I think the biggest story of the year has been the effect of what I insist on calling the economic ‘depression’ on efforts to mitigate climate change. To me, that’s the big one. We can either look at this as an opportunity to really start moving in directions that will support carbon reductions as we fight our way out of the economic crisis, or we can be blinded by the crisis and fall into business as usual.”

Drill, Baby, Drill!

Eric Jantz, staff attorney for the New Mexico Environmental Law Center

“Definitely the Santa Fe ordinance for oil and gas development in the Galisteo Basin. That’s huge because it’s one of the first times there’s been a grassroots democratic movement to get government to really regulate the oil and gas industry. The industry has historically had a lot of dispensations from the federal and state government. The Santa Fe County ordinance is one of the first, and best, where a community has said, ‘Look, we’re not necessarily opposed to energy development but we want to do it on our terms.’ The ordinance sets out a long-term plan for oil and gas development in Santa Fe County, rather than the piecemeal development that’s happened in most of the West. It lays out a plan and process for oil and gas developers to follow. It also takes measures to protect public health and safety, and that’s coming more and more to light as oil and gas production expands to communities where people are living. It’s a model for other areas in the state and in the country and it’s easily translatable to other kinds of resource development, like coal mining and uranium mining.”

New Hope for Endangered Species

Nicole Rosmarino, wildlife program director at Wild Earth Guardians

“There really is no more important issue in endangered species than whether you give protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) or not. Now we can see the tangible results of [politicization at the Fish and Wildlife Service]: for more than two years no new species were listed. We have 300 species that are awaiting protection and we’ve seen proposals but we’ve seen no new listings. The Bush administration was able to be very successful at accomplishing one of its main goals, which was to fundamentally obstruct ESA enforcement. A void of leadership at the Department of the Interior enabled people to ravage science and deny endangered species protection. Officials were actually competing to take credit for reversing protections on Gunnison’s prairie dog!

[Secretary of the Interior nominee Ken] Salazar will have to clean house. We hope that the next director of Fish and Wildlife does not come from within because that agency is absolutely contaminated. We need an outsider to come in and reform the service. Politics can’t interfere with listing decisions.”

The recent $700 billion bailout may have helped major industries and financial institutions, but what if billions of dollars were channeled into a green stimulus plan? A federal green stimulus plan that supported renewable energy and efficiency would foster new industries, create millions of new jobs and help solve climate change.

It would also improve the health of millions of Americans.

Ed Mazria, a prominent New Mexico architect, has come up with a sound and compelling plan. By investing a relatively small amount, $170 billion, in energy efficiency for buildings over the next three years, people like you and me will save $203 billion in energy bills and 2.5 million jobs will be created. This plan can be put into place immediately, and the investment will pay immediate dividends. Equally compelling, this plan will dramatically cut our dependence on coal-generated electricity –- reducing air pollution and slowing global warming.

Coal plants currently account for more than one-fourth of our nation’s global warming pollution, and emissions have been linked to birth defects, heart attacks, strokes, asthma and other respiratory diseases. Particulates formed from power plant emissions are responsible for nearly 24,000 premature deaths annually, more people than are killed by drunk drivers each year. And in New Mexico, 26 rivers and lakes currently have fish consumption advisories as a result of mercury emissions from coal plants.

The threat to public health from mercury, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides is serious enough to warrant immediate action. Yet this threat pales in comparison to the financial and health costs from unchecked global warming. With American coal plants alone adding over two billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year, we must ask ourselves: what are the costs of not quickly enacting climate change legislation and investing in a new energy economy?

As we consider the future prospects for our economy, we should be asking our policy makers: What are the costs of more frequent extreme weather events like Katrina or an increasingly unstable food supply? What are the costs to New Mexicans posed by a major loss of fresh water due to reduced snowpack from global warming? Can we afford a resurgence of malaria and other infectious diseases? Is there a dollar amount that can be attached to the likely extinction of a quarter of the world’s land species?

If we want to avoid runaway climate change and jumpstart the economy, we need to phase out coal. We know we can do this by investing in efficiency and renewable energy — green industries that will create millions of jobs and protect public health.

The New Year, the new Congress, and the new President offer enormous hope and possibilities for our nation. This is a critical time for our nation. We can address and solve our biggest challenges, simultaneously transforming them into our biggest opportunities.

Editor’s note: This commentary was also signed by Norty Kalishman MD, Larry Schreiber MD and Robert M. Bernstein MD.

Mario Burgos is mad about that bailout money. “Billions gone just like that. What do we have to show for it?” he asks. And it’s a damn good question.

Cheryl Rofer at WhirledView has an interesting series of posts on nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants. Rofer writes: “The bottom line is that the American proposal was surprising to the Russians (and to me as well), and that the talks are dead until we have a new president. To greet that new president, Russia has offered some carrots and some sticks.” Click here if it’s been a while since you thought about START I.

And over at Cocoposts, the topic of the day is SunCal and its plan to desalinate water found deep in its Albuquerque-area land. “What makes the idea of deep water drilling and treatment good, is just that - theidea of it. Just the potential to continue on, repeating patterns of desert golf courses and auto dependent sprawl, enables the brokering in development to continue,” Coco writes.

Also, did you know it’s the fourth day of Kwanzaa today? Barelas Babe is blogging about it over at Duke City Fix.

The secretary of the Interior, as the head of the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Mineral Management Services, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and enforcer of the Endangered Species Act, is the most important federal position tasked with the protection of America’s terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. This is not a trifle. In my opinion, Sen. Ken Salazar is not a great choice for that position. Here is why:

1. Mr. Salazar has done little to halt oil and gas drilling on Colorado’s Roan Plateau. Yes, he has protested. Yes, he has “discouraged” the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) from opening the area to drilling. But this falls far short of what is needed. Salazar has failed to introduce or support federal legislation to protect this area from destruction and protect the local people from the toxic effects of the drilling. This is a crying shame. The Roan is one of the most incredible places in my home state. That it will be industrialized is nothing short of a calamity.

2. Mr. Salazar strongly supported former Interior Secretary Gale Norton when George W. Bush nominated her to the post. Norton, a former lobbyist for the lead-paint industry, is the source of all the problems Interior faces today. Those problems include Interior employees having sex with oil company executives in exchange for oil and gas leases. And worse. This was a decidedly poor judgment call on Salazar’s part (he also strongly supported Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General, as Time magazine recently recalled, “even escorting Gonzales into the U.S. Senate on the first day of his nomination hearings.”)

3. Mr. Salazar has consistently supported the interests of the oil and gas industry above the need for conservation and alternative energy sources. He maintains very strong industry ties. He voted (like Obama) for the appalling 2005 energy bill. He voted to end the offshore drilling moratorium; he voted against the repeal of tax breaks for Exxon-Mobil and voted against increasing Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards.

4. Mr. Salazar has consistently supported corporate welfare for the ranching community to the detriment of the environment. He has, again and again, pushed rancher subsidies. He has fought endangered species protection. As Colorado attorney general, he threatened to sue the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for even thinking about listing the black-tailed prairie dog as endangered.

5. Mr. Salazar voted against a very popular bill that would have forced the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to consider climate change impacts when planning water projects.

6. Mr. Salazar got the American taxpayer stuck with the bill for cleaning up the Summitville Mine Superfund site.

7. Mr. Salazar supported the bill to allow guns in national parks. Ugh.

8. Native Americans have never been too impressed with Mr. Salazar. Interior has a big impact on Native American populations, and they will need a strong advocate in charge at Interior.

9. Finally, Salazar pushed for the elevation of William Myers III to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Myers, a long-time lobbyist for the ranching industry, is widely considered to be one of the most anti-environmental judges around. This is a guy who argued to allow a company to mine cat litter on ground considered sacred by Native Americans. This was a guy with Abramoff connections. This is a guy who sees the Clean Water Act as some sort of fascist pronouncement.

To be fair, Obama could have chosen worse. Salazar has a decent score with the League of Conservation Voters. He has voted for wilderness bills, and he has supported tax breaks that encourage conservation on private lands. While we already see agribusiness and mining groups praising the choice, at least the Republicans won’t be able to call him an environmental extremist. That must be worth something.

What concerns me is Mr. Salazar’s judgment. We know how things work in D.C. We know that the oil and gas industry will have unfettered access to the secretary of the Interior while citizen groups will have to go through the low-level staffers to get their message heard. Will someone who supported Alberto Gonzales and Gale Norton have the ability to make wise decisions when it comes to protecting water, air, wildlife and public lands?

Mr. Salazar is not a visionary. He is not a change agent. Mr. Salazar has a very interesting and compelling story as a fellow Westerner. However, from my viewpoint, he has little interest in protecting biodiversity and even less interest in a fossil fuel-free economy. This is not the change we need.

The best we can hope for now is that Mr. Salazar will prove us wrong.

Please Mr. Salazar, prove me wrong.

Jim O’Donnell is a fourth-generation Coloradoan from Pueblo. He is a former oil and gas industry employee and was a leader in the fight to protect New Mexico’s Valle Vidal. He lives near Taos, N.M., where he is a principal in the firm Collaborative Green.

For some perspective on the future of the Department of Agriculture under an Obama administration, I called Winne at his home in Santa Fe. His book is a careful investigation of the links between hunger, food and poverty, including ideas for how to close the gap between the haves and the have-nots. (Full disclosure: My review of the book is blurbed on the paperback edition. I called it ”Fearless, intelligent, and surprisingly funny.”)

The transcript of our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

NMI: OK, so Vilsack comes from Iowa, where every square inch of land is covered with either an ear of corn or a pig. What’s wrong with corn and pork?

MW: There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. The question will be how well can he relate to everything else. I once had a colleague in Iowa who challenged Vilsack when he said, “I want Iowa to become the food capital of the world.” [My colleague] said, “How about Iowa becoming the food capital of Iowa?” We need to be turning our attention to feeding our own people and doing it in a way that’s good for their health, good for the economic viability of agriculture and good for the environment. The job has what I call a triple bottom line. Previous secretaries have not acknowledged that triple bottom line and that’s where I think he’ll have to pay extra attention.

Why would a secretary of agriculture from a state dominated by industrial agriculture be good or bad for New Mexico, where most farms are small?

If Vilsack’s not capable of transcending Iowa agriculture the whole country is in deep doo-doo. But I think he is capable.

Santa Fe author Mark Winne is a member of the New Mexico Food Gap Task Force.

Some of our bigger challenges in New Mexico are in rural counties where the USDA has a very strong role in providing for economic development. Iowa also has many counties that have lost a lot of population, where there’s not a significant amount of economic activity going on. But one thing Iowa has done well over the last 10 to 15 years is diversify their agriculture. There’s a lot more going on there in terms of rural activity, with innovative food and agriculture projects, and new programs to develop more value on farms. That’s exactly what we need more of in New Mexico, innovation and economic development. There’s a new agriculture out there — it’s now just as much about the consumer as it is about the farmer and rancher — and the secretary of agriculture will have to respond to that.

You recently wrote that industrial agriculture’s phone calls are always the first to be returned by the secretary of agriculture. How would you re-sort the secretary’s stack of little pink ‘While You Were Out’ slips?

The order should be based on the weight of the public interest. If there is someone who has an issue or an interest that will transcend the immediate needs of a single agricultural sector, then that should come first.  People calling from a low-income community in Pittsburgh who don’t have a supermarket within five miles from where they live, or small farmers going out of business because they don’t have markets, those are the calls that I would take first.

For the last few weeks leading up to the nomination, author Michael Pollan was quite vocal about his desire for Obama to rename USDA, the “Department of Food,” or at the very least the “Department of Food and Agriculture.” Were you on board with that?

USDA is the largest welfare program, if you want to call it that, in the federal government. It has the food stamp program and 15 nutrition assistance programs. But there’s rarely any link between these assistance programs and the other side [of the department], which is about food production, and there’s very little relation to health. Food equals health and there’s been very spotty attention from USDA to that connection. That’s where their thinking has to change. The job of USDA is not just providing enough calories for the nation, which is what their focus has been for so long, it’s now about providing healthy calories.

But is local food healthy food?

Yeah, local food is healthy food, but it’s also healthy for local economies. It’s also, generally speaking, healthier for the environment. Local food travels less distance, burns less energy, and puts money back into the local economy. Assuming you’re producing fruits and vegetables, then it is also healthier food. It’s not healthier if we’re putting up a high-fructose corn syrup plant in the middle of New Mexico…

Here’s the thing: Unless by “local” we mean “grown in my garden,” locally grown food in New Mexico isn’t always terribly affordable. So how does it benefit us to have more local arugula for sale at the Santa Fe Farmers Market?

I wasn’t aware of an arugula deficit! I think that what we’re talking about is increasing local production to the point where it will enter the mainstream market, not just a boutique market, which we too often associate with our farmers market. And the Santa Fe Farmers Market is a lot more high-end than, say, the Española Farmers Market.

But right now demand for locally grown food exceeds the supply. [The University of New Mexico] is interested in buying more locally produced food. There are dozens of school districts that are buying locally or want to buy locally. We know the demand is there, but so far it’s the supply that isn’t there.

We want to be able to increase production so that it remains profitable for farmers and becomes more affordable for institutional and individual buyers. For example, Whole Foods is starting to buy from New Mexico farmers and  it wants to see those farmers grow in size. That’s good but it doesn’t do much for the other 90 percent of us who don’t shop at Whole Foods. The overall movement has to be oriented toward the mainstream. I think that’s where USDA has to play a leading role.

I know you want to use more federal money to buy locally grown food for use in school meals, but how can we rationalize that when New Mexico apples are always going to cost more than apples from Washington state?

Actually, the price for apples in season is generally the same or lower than those coming from Washington or some other region. The problem is that New Mexico lacks infrastructure, the coolers and the distribution system, so [taking advantage of locally grown food] is really difficult. The amount of cold storage in this state has declined 20 percent in the last three or four years. Once that equipment degrades beyond the point of no return, new capital investment is required and that money isn’t here. That’s where the public sector has to intervene. State and federal dollars have to be used to revitalize the infrastructure that’s been in decline since World War II.

You have said that USDA should create an Office of Community Food Systems. What exactly would that office do?

It would put under one roof all of the interests and programs that look at specific communities and regions with the goal of making sure that everybody in that area has access to good, healthy, affordable food. Right now you could probably make that happen if you went to every single bureau within USDA, but you’d kill yourself trying to do it. Those resources and that know-how are there, but they’re scattered across the entire playing field of USDA, which is the second largest department in the federal government.

As people’s needs change and we begin to see that we’ve lost control of our food system and USDA has served the agriculture industry more than it has served the people, we’re looking at locally based solutions. How do we better utilize our food assistance dollars? How do we conserve local resources?

But everything at USDA is a silo, if you will. Every department exists in a silo and has a different administrator and these folks don’t talk to each other. Their job is to administer their program and they don’t ever say, “How do we bring all this together so Bernalillo County can feed people?” It’s not a holistic enterprise at all. So we’re looking at how we can begin to pull all this together in a community concept. That idea was picked up [during the Clinton administration]. We need to take that idea and ratchet it up.

According to the press release from Global Green USA, Richardson was given the award for “aggressively push[ing] clean energy as Governor of New Mexico.”

The governor and probable soon-to-be commerce secretary received the award for policy design in New York City.

The press release continued:

There are no taxes on hybrid vehicles, groundbreaking incentives for solar, wind, biomass, biodiesel, and distributed-generation fuel cells, and New Mexico has agreed to abide by the limits of the Kyoto Treaty. During Governor Richardson’s run for President in the 2008 campaign he was dubbed “the energy President” because he insisted the most important national issues involve America becoming energy independent and reducing green house gas emissions. He called for a 90% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and a 50 mile per gallon fuel economy standard by 2020. As Secretary of Energy, Richardson championed environmental responsibility and clean and renewable technologies.

He was not actually dubbed “the energy president” — some of you may know he did not win the primary, let alone the general election, which is necessary to become president in our country — but he did repeatedly say the he wanted to be known as “the energy president.”

I guess he’ll have to settle for “the energy secretary of commerce.” But it just doesn’t roll off the tongue as much as “the energy president.”

The award show was also a benefit for Global Green USA, and raised $450,000 for “greening affordable housing in New York City and across the U.S. including projects with Habitat for Humanity; the sustainable rebuilding of New Orleans including the landmark Holy Cross Project; and creating green schools nationally that improve test scores and save schools money on rising energy costs.”

No word if Richardson attended the afterparty, which Beanstockd — a Web site that describes itself as “Where entertainment and environmentalism make sweet, sweet love” — said “popped off at newbie Soho lounge Greenhouse, NYC’s first LEED certified nightspot.” This means it has everything from organic vodka to recycled LED strobe lights.

The Canada Lynx is cute! And can kill a deer. Photo by Josh More

The U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Thursday that it has begun the process of offering endangered species protection to the Canada lynx, a big furry cat that is protected in other states. As NMI has noted, the animal was reintroduced to Colorado 1999, and since then, approximately 60 of the cats have wandered into northern New Mexico. At least 14 have been killed.

The service was required to make a determination on the lynx as a result of a lawsuit brought by the Western Environmental Law Center on behalf of several environmental groups, including WildEarth Guardians.

“This is stage one, when they say ‘This has sufficient merits for us to consider it and we’ll take 12 months to mull it over further.’ If they issue a positive finding in 12 months then they will change the listing status for the lynx in New Mexico,” says Rob Edward, carnivore recovery director for WildEarth Guardians.

Why did WildEarth Guardians have to sue the federal agency to protect the lynx? “Well, the short answer is that we’ve been working for the last eight years under the Bush administration, which had no interest in doing much of anything for endangered species.”

The longer answer, Edward says, is that “The Fish and Wildlife Service is functioning under political pressure or simple budget pressure and they have to push back on things that they don’t have the budget or political cover for.” Like protecting the big furry lynx.

While Edward is hopeful that conditions for endangered species will improve in an Obama administration, he is less than pleased about Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar, Obama’s nominee for Department of the Interior.

“We’re going to have to take a wait-and-see approach at this point. … [Obama] could have done much better than [Salazar],” Edward says. WildEarth Guardians and other groups had pushed for the nomination of Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva, a progressive member of the House Natural Resources Committee and the chair of the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forest and Public Lands.

“We certainly hope that Secretary Salazar will be much more of a friend to endangered species… than his voting record and actions would indicate,” Edward says.

While you wait to see what kind of Secretary Salazar will make, if confirmed by the Senate, you can amuse yourselves with this neat-o chart of lynx distribution in the West. Lotsa dots in New Mexico!

Lynx have been moving into northern New Mexico since 1999.

President Bush’s appointees at environmental and health regulatory agencies have let ideology trump scientific and statistical analysis, critics allege. His picks for top posts at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of the Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration have faced a steady stream of complaints from Democrats, public interest groups and scientists themselves.

Obama has signaled throughout the campaign season and during the transition that he plans to break from the Bush mold. In appointing Steven Chu, head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as energy secretary on Monday, Obama said, “His appointment should send a signal to all that my administration will value science, we will make decisions based on the facts, and we understand that the facts demand bold action.”

In response to a series of question from a grassroots organization called ScienceDebate2008, Obama, the presidential candidate, vowed to “restore the basic principle that government decisions should be based on the best-available, scientifically-valid evidence and not on the ideological predispositions of agency officials or political appointees.”

The group, whose members included Chu, is dedicated to raising awareness of science and technology policy issues.

Obama’s emphasis is understandable Examples of unscientific decision-making over the last eight years have not been hard to find.

EPA has lost several lawsuits because it has poorly controlled mercury, smog and other pollutants and refused to regulate emissions that contribute to global warming. Stephen Johnson, Bush’s third EPA chief, has ignored EPA scientists and, last year, he blocked California from enacting its own greenhouse gas motor vehicle emission standards. The state has sued EPA in federal court.

In 2007, the White House came under fire for editing a CDC report on the effect global warming would have on public health.

James Holsinger, Bush’s second-term nominee to become surgeon general, was blocked by the Senate because of a position paper he wrote for the United Methodist Church that he wrote arguing that male homosexuality was unnatural and unhealthy. “When the complementarity of the sexes is breached,” he wrote in 1990 “injuries and diseases may occur.”

Illustration by Matt Mahurin

Democrats have criticized the FDA under Bush for everything from salmonella outbreaks to lack of oversight of drug companies. Earlier this year, when FDA officials told Congress that Bush’s budget was sufficient even though Democrats were offering more money, House Energy and Commerce Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.) let FDA chief Andrew von Eschenbach have it.

“[Y]ou’re not the first fella I’ve had to skin for not doing his job and coming up here and defending an indefensible situation,” Dingell said. “I want to maintain my respect for you but I can’t maintain my respect for you if you keep toe dancing around the hard facts that curse you with the inability to do your job because you don’t have resources.”

So far among the science-oriented agencies, only a new EPA administrator has been chosen. On Monday, Obama announced he’d like the job to go to Lisa Jackson, chief of staff for New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine and the state’s former top environmental official.

Jackson and the rest of Obama’s environmental team won wide praise among scientists and liberal bloggers for the pick.

“Today’s appointments suggest a new dawn for America’s role as a leader in research and innovation to address the world’s great challenges,” wrote Shawn Lawrence Otto, the CEO of ScienceDebate2008, a grassroots group that tried to inject discussion of science policy in the election. “We were founded by scientist-statesmen, their voice is what has always made us great, and frankly, it’s good to see it back in the policy process,” he wrote.

Some advocates want Obama to elevate his science advisor, the appointee who will head the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, to cabinet rank much like the national security advisor. In past administrations, this position has gone to physicists, and whether Obama departs from that mold remains to be seen.

“Having that person at place at the table will signal to the public that science is back in the process rather than sidelined and that’s been a theme that Obama has sounded during the campaign,” Mary Woolley, the president of Research America, a research advocacy group, said.

Centers for Disease Control
The Washington Post reported last month that Obama is unlikely to keep Julie Gerberding, the embattled CDC chief. Several names have been floated to take Gerberding’s place.

They include Jeffrey Koplan, a member of Obama’s transition team charged with reviewing the Department of Health and Human Services; Bill Corr, the executive director of the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids; and Nicole Lurie, a public health expert at the RAND Corporation. Corr has worked on Capitol Hill and served as chief of staff at HHS. Lurie served as the deputy assistant secretary for health at HHS from 1998 to 2001.

For science advocates, the most important criterion for the next CDC chief is that he or she restore intellectual rigor to the policy-making process and insert the agency into the administration’s internal debates about how to combat climate change.

“We need CDC to become engaged in the federal climate science program,” said Rick Piltz, the founder of Climate Science Watch. “They’ve never been a player as it pertains to how public health is affected by climate change. [CDC needs] a focused program of research and assessment.”

Food and Drug Administration

Last week, a leading House Democrat encouraged Obama to clean house at the FDA.

“The current FDA senior management blocked clinical trials, drove dedicated medical professionals out of the agency, and lined their pockets with outrageous bonuses,” Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) wrote to Obama last week. “A new Commissioner or Interim Commissioner must bring the Agency back to the forefront of science, integrity, and transparency.”

During the campaign, Obama vowed to allow the FDA to regulate tobacco. Giving the FDA new authority to regulate tobacco would vastly expand its power. While Stupak severely criticized Bush’s FDA chief, von Eschenbach, a spokesman from Stupak’s office said he had not pressed Obama to nominate anyone in particular.

The candidate’s FDA administrators, according to news reports, include Cleveland Clinic cardiologist Steve Nissen and Joshua Sharfstein, the chief of Baltimore’s publichealth department.

Another possibility is Harold Varmus, the former National Institute of Health director and a Nobel Prize winner. He is now the CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and a member of the Obama transition team.

The biggest challenge for the next FDA administrator “is regaining the public’s trust,” said Rick Weiss, a former Washington Post science reporter who is now with the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. Weiss says that FDA has lost the public’s confidence during the past several years after drug related scandals and food safety crises.

One avenue Obama could take, Wisee suggested, is to depart from the tradition that the FDA chief is a medical doctor.

“Obama could break that mold with someone who doesn’t have a conventional background that might be more relevant to the modern FDA,” Weiss said, adding that a candidate might have expertise in the law or food safety issues.

Surgeon General

The surgeon general spot is rife with potential for missteps. President Ronald Reagan’s appointee, C. Everett Koop, was controversial among liberals at first for his views on homosexuality but eventually won their grudging respect and alienated some on the right for waging war on HIV-AIDS and smoking. President Bill Clinton appointed Joycelyn Elders, whose off-hand comment about masturbation drew heaps of criticism from Capitol Hill and forced her resignation.

Under the Bush administration, the surgeon general has been relegated to a bit player in public health debates, especially in Bush’s second term. Not only does the office not have a permanent occupant, but former Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), a heart surgeon by training, became the White House’s chief health advisor.

The office can elevate its stature in an Obama administration depending on who is appointed to the job, but Woolley would like to see more resources directed to the nation’s top doctor.

“The new surgeon general [should be] equipped with a real office rather than just an assistant or two and an office [to have a] bigger impact,” she said.

In an interview with Fox Sports, Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s incoming chief of staff, joked about naming Dr. J, the basketball star Julius Erving, as surgeon general. Obama is more likely to consider the Emanuel household for a highly qualified candidate for one of the government’s public health posts.

Emmanuel’s brother, Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the nation’s leading bio-ethicists, is an oft-mentioned candidate for a presidential appointment.

Another possibility is that a “Friend of Barack”, or FOB, could end up as the nation’s next surgeon general. Eric Whitaker was a graduate student at Harvard’s public health school when Obama attended the law school. Whitaker became the chief of the Illinois Department of Public Health and worked at the University of Chicago’s Hospital with Michelle Obama.

So far, Whitaker has let it be known that he wants to serve in the administration, but not just yet.

Another Chicagoan under consideration, according to the Chicago Tribune is, Dr. Gail Rosseau, Rosseau is chief of surgery at the Neurologic and Orthopedic Institute of Chicago and an assistant professor of neurosurgery at Rush University Medical Center.

Obama has plenty of allies in the scientific community, but political appointments requiring a background in science and medicine are among the toughest to fill.

“Among the biggest burdens with appointments in these fields are federal salaries. Many scientists are not personally wealthy and have to take pay cuts to work in government,” Cal Mackenzie, a political scientist at Colby College who is an expert in the appointment process, said.

Scientists are also less likely to go to Washington because of “the risk or fear of falling behind as basic science moves steadily forward,” he said.

But because these agencies have been under political and budgetary constraints for the past eight years, Mackenzie also said that the chance to turn the agencies around and be a part of the Obama administration could attract enough competent candidates to provide Obama with a choice.

In his fourth annual Pogie Awards, David Pogue listed some cool tech ideas from this year — not necessarily the best products. “In fact,” Pogue writes, “sometimes they’re terrific ideas wasted on dumb products.” So what are these great tech ideas?

The first idea on the list of the awards is something timely for the Christmas season — “frustration-free packaging” from Amazon.

You know how so many products come in clear hard plastic packages, impossible to open without a flamethrower and the Jaws of Life? Everybody complains about them, but nobody does anything about it.

Until now. Amazon.com figured: “Hold on a sec — those are anti-shoplifting packages. But we don’t have a shoplifting problem — we’re mail order!”

The annual Christmas tradition of searching for a hacksaw to open up the plastic packaging may soon be a thing of the past. Unless you buy that iPod at Best Buy. Pogue does note, however, that the frustration-free packaging is only on a small number of products currently. But that could change by the time Santa Claus comes to your house in 2009.

Another one is timely for iPhone owners who live in cold climes. The Freehands gloves solve the problem of texting with gloves on — by a flip-back tip on the thumb and index finger that allows you to text or send that e-mail from your BlackBerry with ease.

Or as Pogue writes, “Tap away, get your text message out, then flip the tips back on before you get BlackBerry frostbite.”

And to charge those BlackBerries and iPhones, Pogue cites the mini-USB charging jacks that now can be used to charge your portable device from your computer. My BlackBerry is charging via one right now. “It’s the dawn of the universal, fully interchangeable power cord,” Pogue declares.

A pretty good year for technology ideas if Pogue’s list is any indication.