Home, Sweet Home
When American Municipal Power announced last fall that it had canceled plans to build a new coal-fired power plant in southeastern Ohio, NRDC and its allies rejoiced. For senior attorney Anjali Jaiswal, who had helped devise the legal strategy to fight the proposed plant, it was a particularly meaningful victory. She spent much of her childhood in Ohio — "I love Cleveland!" she readily exclaims — and the battle over the power plant represents what she values most about environmental law: the ability to make real change in her own backyard. Jaiswal’s affinity for protecting the places she has called home bodes well for the planet: she’s had a lot of backyards in her 35 years. Jaiswal was born in India, but her family moved to the United States when she was just 3 years old, first to Dallas and then to Akron, Cleveland, and San Diego. By the time she was in high school, the Jaiswal family was settled in the Los Angeles area. Since joining NRDC in 2001, Jaiswal has fought and won many local battles. First based in the organization’s Southern California office, she worked to protect and improve water quality in rivers, streams, and coastal areas, waging battles that yielded immediate, tangible results. Jaiswal and other members of NRDC’s California staff have also successfully advocated for upgrades to a sewage treatment plant on the central coast, where sea otters in Morro Bay were being sickened by the discharge of dirty water. She waged legal battles to strengthen water pollution controls and to stop dairies in Southern California from dumping waste into the Santa Ana River. In the Sacramento area, she helped win the fight to require that irrigation projects leave more water in ecosystems, shielding endangered fish populations from further degradation. "We said, ‘This is the law, this is the science. You have to rule for us,’" she remembers. "It was a lot of sleepless nights and hard, hard work, but we won." Last year, as Jaiswal was immersed in state and local legal offensives, a colleague approached her about trying international work. "I was conflicted," she says. "I really like working on local issues as a litigator." But as she heard more, her choice became clear. NRDC was looking to start an initiative in India, through which it hoped to bring clean energy and efficiency technologies to a country undergoing tremendous development and modernization. As the country of her birth, it was a place full of import for her. She said yes. Jaiswal had visited India several times as an adult. In 2005 she took a leave from NRDC and spent three months in New Delhi working on pollution control through the Nehru Fulbright Indo-American Environmental Leadership Program. She was gratified by how easily her knowledge transferred to a new setting, allowing her to help with a campaign to improve sewage treatment near the Ganges River. "I knew what sewage plants looked like, their operation, their energy issues," she says. "I knew about compliance and enforcement." She also knew the country on a personal level, having visited relatives in her father’s village in Gujarat, India’s westernmost state, which shares a border with Pakistan. Her experiences there gave her a snapshot of the broad challenges India faces. One evening, she and a cousin walked out into the tobacco fields surrounding the village. Her cousin wanted to show off the village’s new power plant — a sign of progress. Jaiswal couldn’t help but see the environmental repercussions of the emissions spewing from the towering smokestacks. India and the United States have two important things in common: they have large English-speaking populations and are democracies, making collaboration easier than in other rapidly developing countries, such as China. Though NRDC’s work in India is full of potential, Jaiswal says, the challenges that lie ahead are significant: some 80 percent of the infrastructure the country will need by 2030 has yet to be built, and the number of motor vehicles on the road is expected to quadruple by 2020. The environmental ramifications of India’s path forward will be felt around the world. Jaiswal and Jacob Scherr, director of NRDC’s international program, launched the India initiative last June. Their goals include fostering U.S.-India cooperation on clean energy and climate, strengthening environmental compliance and enforcement, and incorporating energy-efficiency standards into building codes to reduce carbon emissions. "One of the great challenges in India is that there are laws on the books that are not implemented or enforced," Scherr says. "Anjali is in an excellent position to explain how we handle these problems in the United States and to translate her experiences to meet the needs in India." Jaiswal sometimes thinks back to her father’s village in Gujarat. The memory she recalls is a hopeful one — that of a relative proudly leading her up to the roof to show off a new possession, the village’s first solar cookstove.
Here is the original:
Home, Sweet Home
What meant the year 2009 for Photovoltaic Industry in the Czech Republic and what did we for it ?
Year what just ended, meant for us 21,989 MWp by us imported and 15,522 MWp what has been installed by our company on three large power plants with capacity over 3 MW and many smaller power plants.
We are one of the bigest companies in the Czech Republic specializing in photovoltaic projects. Our activities we don´t limit only to the local market but on whole Europe….
We look forward to our cooperation in the next year - 2010 !!!
NOBILITY SOLAR PROJECT, Corp.
Continue here: What meant the year 2009 for Photovoltaic Industry in the Czech Republic and what did we for it ?
Phantoms and Prey
It’s the middle of the night in central Idaho. Twenty miles from my house, hunters wait on wolves for the first time in decades. My two little sons sleep upstairs; I fill a mug at the kitchen sink. Outside, in the moonlight, the driveway pines seem tenuous, unrooted, as if they might start striding quietly past one another, swapping places in the night. Today a friend drove me to the World Center for Birds of Prey outside Boise without telling me why. He showed me a female gyrfalcon, a Swainson’s hawk, a harpy eagle; we watched a trained American crow take dollar bills from the outstretched hands of a half-dozen visitors and stuff them into a donation box. Then we crossed the parking lot to the collections building, where thousands of brown-speckled peregrine falcon eggs sit in drawers, each egg in its own box, each numbered and dated. Shards of eggs in nearby jars stand for the many nestlings that have been hatched and reintroduced into the wild. Before we left, my friend opened a steel cabinet, slid out the top drawer, and showed me a passenger pigeon. It lay breast up on its wooden tray, a paper tag tied around its left ankle: "Chicago Market, 1886." Here was a species driven from the earth in a matter of decades, a species once so numerous it migrated in flocks a hundred miles long, a species we now believe constituted more than a quarter of the bird population of pre-Columbian North America. Billions of individuals, all gone. And yet here was this one: a male with plenty of rosy cinnamon color still in his breast, his feet red, his eyeholes white with taxidermist’s cotton. Even in the flat, fluorescent light he looked as if he might sit up and flap off over the bookshelves. I blinked back tears. We count salmon at dams; we count hawks at migration bottlenecks; we conduct infrared camera surveys to count passing deer. But estimating populations of animals is brutally difficult, especially in the seas, where we aren’t sure how many species might exist, let alone how many individuals there are. Lately ecologists have been fond of writing about the "shifting baseline syndrome," a theory that argues that we measure the current state of things — the number of starlings in a town, say, or the coldness of winters — against what we remember from when we were young. What we think is baseline wilderness, runs the argument, is the wildest place we saw when we were kids. In truth, what we experienced was only a degraded version of what our grandparents experienced, which in turn was a degraded version of their grandparents’ baseline. Earth eats the bones; present swallows past; the baseline shifts. To know what is still here is difficult enough. To know what was once here is basically impossible. Who is left who can envision the United States with its original populations of bison, salmon, and whales? Who can imagine the Atlantic with the great auk, or the South with the ivory-billed woodpecker, or the Midwest with its billions of passenger pigeons? How many oysters filtered the waters of preindustrial New York Harbor? How many beavers stitched together the ancient wetlands of Connecticut? And how many Rocky Mountain wolves once loped through the Idaho midnight? Now there are about 850. Tomorrow there may be a couple fewer. Ours is a landscape aswarm with ghosts. We live in an afterworld, struggling to imagine what we’ve already lost, while we peer into a greenhouse future in which our grandchildren may have to prepare for cataclysmic droughts, massive human migrations from the coasts, and worldwide conflicts over freshwater. What is sustainability? What is hope? Here is J. J. Audubon, in 1842, writing about the passenger pigeon: "When an individual is seen gliding through the woods and close to the observer, it passes like a thought, and on trying to see it again, the eye searches in vain; the bird is gone." I think of my sons asleep upstairs. I think of that passenger pigeon, leaching his last colors into a wooden drawer. I think of the hunters, two valleys away, drowsing beside their guns, waiting for the howl.
Excerpt from:
Phantoms and Prey