Nonprofit News and Comment

CONSERVATION & ENVIRONMENT

“Couple claim wrongful firing by Rockland Institute.” By Stephen Betts. Bangor Daily News. April 12, 2013. A Washington couple has filed a lawsuit claiming they were fired by by a Rockland organization that provides services to islands, after the husband and wife reported alleged illegal activity. The lawsuit comes, however, less than two months after the Maine Human Rights Commission unanimously voted to find there were no reasonable grounds to find that the Island Institute of Rockland or the Port Clyde Community Groundfish Sector retaliated against James and Susan Frank of Washington. The lawsuit on behalf of the Franks was filed Thursday in Knox County Superior Court against the Island Institute and Port Clyde organization — both of which are non-profit corporations. The commission voted 5-0 at its Feb. 25 meeting to clear the organizations after Susan Frank argued her case before the board, according to the minutes of the human rights commission meeting. Island Institute President-Elect Rob Snyder said he welcomes the opportunity to respond to the couple’s claim, but he had not seen the lawsuit which has yet to be served on the Island Institute. He pointed out the ruling by the human rights commission.

ENVIRONMENT & CONSERVATION

“Real-Estate Crash Aids the Green Movement.” By Laura Kusisto. Wall Street Journal. February 10, 2012. The real-estate crash left pockets of the region’s rural areas littered with the remnants of would-be golf courses, shopping centers and luxury subdivisions that never got off the ground. But the market swoon has yielded an unexpected upside for environmentalists. Land trusts—nonprofit organizations that buy open fields, forests and other untamed properties to preserve them as open space—say they’ve received dozens of calls from developers over the past few years willing to sell them properties in upstate New York, Connecticut and New Jersey at discounts of up to 90%. The Scenic Hudson Land Trust Inc. recently bought a 185-acre parcel of land across the river from the Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site in Dutchess County. The trust had coveted the tract for years but balked at the price tag. The developer, Jacob Frydman, chief executive of United Realty Partners, planned to build 175 homes and a shopping center on the site. When Scenic Hudson approached him during the boom years, he offered to sell them the land for $10 million. But after the market crashed, Mr. Frydman said he saw things a bit differently. “By the time 2008 rolled around, it became pretty clear to me that even though I thought this was exceptionally valuable, it was going to be a couple of years before the market caught up,” he said. The trust ultimately bought the majority of the site for just over $2 million. Even more than previous downturns, the recent recession has created unique opportunities for land trusts to grab properties at cheap prices because land values in rural areas once ripe for second-home development and golf courses have taken a steep dive in the housing crisis.

ENVIRONMENT & CONSERVATION

“Small non-profit works to reduce massive sewage spills into San Francisco Bay.” By Paul Rogers. San Jose Mercury-News. January 23, 2012. Every year, winter rains like the recent storms that have soaked the Bay Area help fill reservoirs and perk up lawns. But they also carry an ugly downside, causing aging sewage systems to back up, overflow and malfunction, endangering human health and polluting San Francisco Bay. Last year, a staggering 17.5 million gallons of raw or partially treated sewage spilled in the nine Bay Area counties — enough to fill 26 Olympic-size swimming pools — and 95 percent of it flowed to the bay, lakes or streams. But with little fanfare, a small nonprofit group is steadily turning the tide. Over the past five years, San Francisco Baykeeper, with a staff of eight people, has filed 10 lawsuits under the Clean Water Act, seeking to force dramatic reductions in sewage spills. The group has won every one, securing settlements that are forcing 20 cities from the East Bay to Silicon Valley to invest tens of millions of dollars replacing miles of cracked pipes, boosting inspections and cleaning up their operations. “We have the worst polluters on a path to success,” said Deb Self, executive director of the San Francisco-based group. “It’s a quality-of-life issue. There shouldn’t be areas where there is sewage in the streets and playgrounds and flowing into the bay. These are not conditions we should have in this country.” The group took advantage of a 2006 law passed by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that requires every public agency running a sewer system in California to file monthly reports showing how many spills their systems suffered and how much was spilled. The reports are tallied up in a database and posted on the Internet. Baykeeper began ranking the roughly 100 cities in the Bay Area by their rate of spills. It hired lawyers and began suing them under the Clean Water Act, one of the nation’s most powerful environmental laws — and one that gives regular citizens, rather than just government agencies, the authority to sue polluters.

ENVIRONMENT & CONSERVATION

“Andy Falender steps down from Appalachian Mountain Club; After 23 years, he reflects on his proudest achievements, biggest regrets, and favorite hikes and huts.” By Doug Most. Boston Globe. January 8, 2012. After 23 years leading the Appalachian Mountain Club, Andy Falender of Lincoln steps down this month. He reflects on his proudest achievements, biggest regrets, and favorite hikes and huts.

ENVIRONMENT & CONSERVATION

“Habitat goes green and saves new residents some green.” By Anne Paine and Bob Smietana. USA Today. January 3, 2012. Antonio and Christie Miller of Nashville can smile when they talk about their utility bills. So can Casey Greer. That’s because they’re residents of new Habitat for Humanity homes that were built to meet top energy-efficiency standards. Habitat for Humanity, a non-profit organization tht built 4,800 homes in the United States and Canada last year, as undertaken a national effort to build low-energy homes that are both affordable and green. Habitat homeowners say it’s paying off. Going green earned the Nashville, Denver and Goshen, Ind., Habitat programs the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2011 Energy Star Sustained Excellence award for dedication to reducing greenhouse emissions through energy efficiency. Matt Clark, Habitat for Humanity’s national director of construction technology, says that the non-profit has about 1,550 affiliates nationwide. Each is asked to build homes that meet Energy Star’s requirements for energy efficiency, though specifics about how houses are built are left to the local groups. The idea behind the program, Clark says is simple: Habitat builds homes for low income families. More-energy-efficient homes mean lower monthly bills.

ENVIRONMENT & CONSERVATION

“L.A. Audubon Society booted from its park perch; After decades of operating in West Hollywood’s Plummer Park, the group has been evicted as part of a controversial $41-million park renovation.” By Hailey Branson-Potts. Los Angeles Times. December 20, 2011. After decades of operating in West Hollywood’s Plummer Park, the Los Angeles Audubon Society has been evicted as part of a controversial $41-million park renovation. Los Angeles Audubon for years has had an office and bookstore in the Great Hall/Long Hall building, a community center built by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. Now it’s all slated to be bulldozed to clear the way for added green space. Los Angeles Audubon is now looking for a new headquarters, and employees — including two full-time staffers — are working out of their homes, said Travis Longcore, the group’s president. The group’s library has been packed up and put in storage. “It’s certainly been a blow to our chapter and the historic role of our chapter,” Longcore said. “It’s hard to come to grips with the fact that the Los Angeles Audubon is without a place.” Los Angeles Audubon has been operating out of the park since 1937 and has kept its headquarters in the park since the 1940s, according to the Western Tanager, the society’s newsletter. The group, which has more than 2,100 members, still holds its regular meetings and evening programs at the park and elsewhere.

ENVIRONMENT & CONSERVATION

“Francis H. Cabot, 86, Dies; Created Notable Gardens.” By Margalit Fox. New York Times. November 27, 2011. Francis H. Cabot, a financier and self-taught horticulturalist who created two of the most celebrated gardens in North America and helped preserve scores of others, died on Nov. 19 at his home in La Malbaie, Quebec. He was 86. In 1989, Mr. Cabot founded the Garden Conservancy, a nonprofit organization based in Cold Spring, N.Y., that works to preserve America’s most extraordinary private gardens. A son of the New York branch of one of Boston’s storied families, Francis Higginson Cabot Jr., familiarly known as Frank, was born in Manhattan on Aug. 6, 1925. After serving with the Army occupation forces in Japan at the end of World War II, he received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard in 1949. Mr. Cabot began his career as an executive assistant at Stone & Webster, the engineering and investment banking company of which his father was a vice president. He became a partner at Train, Cabot & Associates, an investment and venture capital concern, in 1959. He became a gardener, he said afterward, to relieve the pressures of venture capitalism. In the late 1980s Mr. Cabot, by then a consummate plantsman, visited Ruth Bancroft, renowned in horticultural circles for the “dry garden” — thousands of cactuses, succulents and shrubs — she began in the 1950s on her property in Walnut Creek, Calif. By the time of his visit, Mrs. Bancroft was in her early 80s. Worried that her garden would die with her, Mr. Cabot founded the Garden Conservancy. To date, the organization has helped preserve more than 90 gardens.

ENVIRONMENT & CONSERVATION

“Stringing Up Gibson Guitar; Environmentalists and trade protectionists set a trap for American businesses.” By Kimberley A. Strassel. Wall Street Journal. November 25, 2011. The story here is about how a toxic alliance of ideological activists and trade protectionists deliberately set about creating a vague law, one designed to make an example out of companies (like Gibson) and thus chill imports—even legal ones. The Lacey Act was passed in 1900 to stop trade in illegal wild game. Over the years it has expanded, and today it encompasses a range of endangered species. It requires American businesses to follow both U.S. and foreign law, though with most Lacey goods, this has been relatively clear. Think elephant tusks, tiger pelts or tropical birds. That changed in 2007, when an alliance of environmentalists, labor unions and industry groups began pushing for Lacey to cover “plant and plant products” and related items. Congress had previously resisted such a broad definition for the simple reason that it would encompass timber products. Trees are ubiquitous, are transformed into thousands of byproducts, and pass through dozens of countries. Whereas even a small U.S. importer would know not to import a tiger skin, tracking a sliver of wood (now transformed into a toy, or an umbrella) through this maze of countries and manufacturing laws back to the tree it came from, would be impossible. Which is exactly what the Lacey expanders wanted. The drive was headed up by a murky British green outfit called the Environmental Investigation Agency. The EIA is anti-logging, and, like most environmental groups, understands that the best way to force developing countries to “preserve” their natural resources is to dry up the market for their products. They would prefer that wood be sourced from the U.S. and Europe, where green groups have more influence over rules. The EIA was joined by labor unions such as the Teamsters and industry groups such as the American Forest and Paper Association. As Mark Barford of the Memphis-based National Hardwood Lumber Association told one news outlet: “We need the protection of the Lacey Act. . . . Our small, little companies cannot compete with artificially low prices from wood that comes in illegally. . . . This is our Jobs Act.”

ENVIRONMENT & CONSERVATION

“A Dude Ranch Rests Hopes on a Rockefeller Deal.” By Kirk Johnson. New York Times. November 18, 2011. — John D. Rockefeller Jr. fell in love with the West here, and left his fingerprints all over the place. Beginning in the 1920s, a company disguised as a hunting club but fueled by Mr. Rockefeller’s millions quietly bought tens of thousands of acres with the goal of conserving and preserving a staggeringly beautiful corner of western Wyoming, a process that culminated in 1950 with an act by Congress incorporating Grand Teton National Park. Now a federal lawsuit, ostensibly over the concession contract for a historic dude ranch operating in the park, is resurrecting old questions about the Rockefeller legacy and the unique creation story of a place that historians say was very much shaped around one man’s vision. The patchwork of deals, promises and betrayals that was formed in making Grand Teton — hugely controversial a few generations ago, after the secret land acquisitions became public — have resurfaced. Old ways of doing business in the West, with a handshake and a nod, have bumped against the modern mantra of competition, efficiency and markets. At the center of the dispute is a family called the Turners, who have hosted legions of dudes — a term, at least here, owing nothing to hipsters — for five generations at a place called the Triangle X Ranch. The Turners began a guest and guide services operation on the wilderness site in 1926, during the golden age of dude ranching, before the advent of motels, car camping and Interstate highways. The Triangle X is the last dude ranch concession inside any United States national park, according to the Dude Ranchers’ Association, a trade group. In September, the National Park Service, citing a 1998 federal law requiring competition for business concessions in the parks, finally threw open the contract for running the Triangle X Ranch to bidding. Until then, the family had been granted extensions of its previous contract. The family, led by John F. Turner, the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the administration of the elder President George Bush, fired back last month with a lawsuit in Federal District Court in Cheyenne. The suit accuses the Park Service of violating contractual promises first made by Mr. Rockefeller’s land agents in 1929 when the family sold the Triangle X property to Mr. Rockefeller’s Snake River Land Company — promises that the suit says were made concrete and inviolate in the 1950 act of park incorporation. “We had no choice but to stand up for a family legacy of 85 years,” Mr. Turner said.

“Brune new chairman at Sierra Club.” By Dan Berman and Darren Samuelsohn. Politico.com. November 18, 2011. Carl Pope will resign next month as chairman of the Sierra Club after 17 years, to be replaced by Executive Director Michael Brune. The move comes as the environmental lobby recovers from last year’s death of climate legislation on Capitol Hill and the GOP takeover of the House. Greens have even split at times from President Barack Obama, most recently threatening to abandon the president’s 2012 presidential campaign if the Keystone XL pipeline was approved. Brune downplayed the change in leadership, framing it as a lengthy transition that began when he joined the organization as executive director in 2010. “This announcement doesn’t come amid discontent or division,” Brune told POLITICO, noting Pope has been making plans to give up the top job since January 2009. “It’s the end of a process that’s been a long time coming.” Jack Darin, director of the Sierra Club’s Illinois chapter, said the group has seen big changes over the last two years. “But I don’t think it’s primarily as a result of the change in leadership. I think there’s an intensified interest in moving beyond fossil fuels, oil and coal, but I think that trend was headed that way before Carl left.” Brune “feels fully like he’s got his legs under him. We’re off charging,” Darin said. Darin added he didn’t expect the Sierra Club to incorporate the kinds of direct action protests that Brune was known for at the Rainforest Action Network. After all, the Sierra Club’s charter states that the club won’t practice civil disobedience. But Brune has already taken a stronger line with the Obama White House, always a difficult dance for environmental groups who spent eight years fighting George W. Bush tooth and nail.
Related story:
“Sierra Club leader departs amid discontent over group’s direction; Sierra Club Chairman Carl Pope, whose leadership has stirred dissent, steps down. Some believe the organization has compromised its core principles.” By Louis Sahagun. Los Angeles Times. November 19, 2011.