[CPEO-MEF] Hello Lenny!

[Marilyn Bardet <mjbardet@sbcglobal.net>]

Title: Hello Lenny!

Hello again, Lenny!

After all these many years, I'd like to have my name removed from the CPEO listserve.  I'm swamped with messages! Since I've served my "tour of duty" since 1996?sounding the community alarm, forming a CAG and RAB and helping to oversee the ordnance and non OE cleanup of Tourtelot and the Arsenal? and since the Tourtelot project is coming to a successful close--FINALLY!!-- I feel my work locally is nearly finished.  (There are a few last questions about how to handle problem of soils that were removed from the Tourtelot site prior to 1995 that were discreetly distributed to properties then being developed in surrounding neighborhoods, and also, I'm still on the Arsenal RAB with FUDS cleanup which is now somehow more or less in suspended animation). 

So--in the last year and a half, I've been turning  to other looming, more than enough ominous, national/local concerns-- the impending energy crisis and climate change and what we can do about it. I've done lots of reading, which began with Richard Heinberg's "The Party's Over" (great intro to energy crisis and "peak oil"). Latest read: James Gustav Speth's "Red Sky at Morning", which thoroughly documents what's happened since first global environmental assessment was written in 1980 for Jimmy Carter. Speth lays out the scope of global environmental degradation and climate change problem and the complex approaches that have to be quickly developed, with a kind of "now or never" scenario for action at all levels.  He says we've got a perfect storm brewing, with the energy and water crises about to hit globally, and these, coupled with the crisis of global warming.  He says we have about 20 years or less to tackle the CO2 buildup problem. 

Thus, I've invested in solar system for our house, have started raising vegetables and am following developments via the Post Carbon Institute, based in Vancouver BC and headed by Julian Darley. Check out their website and also his 
<GlobalPublic Media.com> for latest interviews with experienced independent oil geologists about  "oil peak" and also the problem of natural gas supplies?getting LNG to the US which is running out of  gas fast. Last year, I helped fight with Vallejoans against the Bechtel/SHell plan to put a highly dangerous LNG terminal facility and 900 megawatt power plant at the tip of Mare Island, right next to a major population center. We were successful in stopping it!!

You and Aimee and the listserve were invaluable guides to me, especially in the first years, when we were groping for basic information about "UXO" cleanups and EPA standards for cleanup for residential use. Certainly, I learned we were pioneering the privatized military cleanup for residential here in Benicia, and setting a state-wide standard for ordnance cleanup. 

At this writing, about 82 houses have been built in a section of Tourtelot called "D-1". Those lots had been excavated, with sidewalks and lampposts in place, before any cleanup had been designed, let alone carried out. The subsequent cleanup of the entire site involved bulldozing all those prepared pads and sifting the soils and then re-grading the lots. I must say, I got satisfaction knowing that the developer had gotten tripped up trying to jump the gun, getting those initial housing pads excavated and prepared for housing starts prior to the formal investigation that began in 1997.

Anyway, Lenny, thanks again for all the support long ago, and for the continuing work you do on behalf of communities with much worse problems than we had, that are struggling still to get clean ups funded and accomplished.

My best to you and Aimee and CPEO-- all the RAB members.

Vote and vote often!!
--Marilyn Bardet



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