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Thank you to Rachel Branch, producer of the television show Solutions Rising for including a “BEAT” series for people to learn more about the fracked gas pipelines proposed to bring gas from the fracking fields of Pennsylvania across New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire to a gas hub in Dracut, MA. The show interviews many people providing information about the proposed pipelines as well as the many alternatives to these pipelines.

When the Massachusetts Legislature refused last week to grant easements to the Tennessee Gas Pipeline Company (TGPC) for its Sandisfield pipeline project, the Company had its response ready to go. It immediately filed suit in Berkshire County Superior Court, seeking condemnation of the existing easements and an injunction allowing workers to enter the Otis State Forest. Attorney General Maura Healey issued this statement through her spokeswoman, Chloe Gotsis: “Our state Constitution protects conservation land across Massachusetts, including Otis State Forest. Any company with plans to build on or repurpose state-protected land has an obligation to fully comply with the requirements set forth in our Constitution.” As reported by Mary Douglas in The Berkshire Edge, March 20, 2016.

Needs Assessment Survey for NED Pipeline-Affected Landowners in MA, NH, and NY

All affected landowners anywhere along the NED pipeline route in MA, NH and NY are encouraged to complete a Needs Assessment survey aimed at finding out how landowners can help landowners. The survey is endorsed by a group of 19 landowners across 12 towns in MA and NH. Since it’s release, people in more than 34 towns across all three states of the pipeline route have responded.

Apply Now to the 2016 Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference

The Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference is an annual week-long gathering of writers at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf Campus, located in the green hills of Ripton, Vermont. Based on the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference model, the conference is designed to hone the skills of people interested in producing literary writing about the environment and the natural world. It is cosponsored by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Orion magazine, and Middlebury College’s Environmental Studies Program.

Sierra Student Coalition’s Grassroots Organizing Training Program (SPROG) Seeks Nominations

Young people are stepping up to take on big polluters and demand a just future for all with 100% clean energy. This summer, more than one hundred youth will take part in our award-winning grassroots leadership program, called Sprog, to learn the skills they need to win real campaigns and see real results. These training programs are run by and for young movement leaders like myself. They are appropriate for young people ages 14 and up. They don’t have to be current students. They don’t have to have previous organizing experience. The only requirements are a passion for the environment and social justice, and an eagerness to take on our world’s biggest challenges.

Global Warming’s Terrifying New Chemistry

Our leaders thought fracking would save our climate. They were wrong. Very wrong. Global warming is, in the end, not about the noisy political battles here on the planet’s surface. It actually happens in constant, silent interactions in the atmosphere, where the molecular structure of certain gases traps heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space. If you get the chemistry wrong, it doesn’t matter how many landmark climate agreements you sign or how many speeches you give. And it appears the United States may have gotten the chemistry wrong. Really wrong. By Bill McKibben in The Nation, March 23, 2016.

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Jobs

GIS Developer / Analyst – Housatonic Valley Association

Landscape Design, Installation, Maintenance, and Nursery Positions available – Helia Native Nursery and Land Design

Office Manager – Mass Audubon Berkshire Wildlife Sanctuaries

Seasonal Ranger I (West) – MA Dept. of Conservation and Recreation (Pittsfield)

Seasonal Forest And Park Supervisor III (West) – MA Dept. of Conservation and Recreation (Pittsfield)

Seasonal Forestry Assistant – MA Dept. of Conservation and Recreation (Pittsfield)

Laborer II – Long Term Seasonal – MA Dept. of Conservation and Rereation (Pittsfield)

Executive Director – Conservation Technology Information Center (CTIC)

Commissioner & Associate(s) – Egremont Conservation Commission

Office Manager, Part-time – BNRC

 

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Atty. Gen. Maura Healey warns pipeline giant Kinder Morgan to respect state Constitution

By Mary Douglas
The Berkshire Edge
March 20, 2016

When the Massachusetts Legislature refused last week to grant easements to the Tennessee Gas Pipeline Company (TGPC) for its Sandisfield pipeline project, the Company had its response ready to go. It immediately filed suit in Berkshire County Superior Court, seeking condemnation of the existing easements and an injunction allowing workers to enter the Otis State Forest.

Attorney General Maura Healey issued this statement through her spokeswoman, Chloe Gotsis: “Our state Constitution protects conservation land across Massachusetts, including Otis State Forest. Any company with plans to build on or repurpose state-protected land has an obligation to fully comply with the requirements set forth in our Constitution.”

The Sandisfield Taxpayers Opposing the Pipeline, or STOP has already filed a motion to stay the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC’s) approval of the project.

Article 97 of the state Constitution, adopted in 1972, states that “the people shall have a right to clean air and water…and the natural scenic, historic, and esthetic qualities of their environment,” with the fulfillment of these rights to be carried out through [state] parkland acquisition and conservation.

Land can only lose its conservation status if 2/3 of both the state Senate and House of Representatives vote to change it, and the so-called “disposition request” is signed by the Governor.

In addition, as a matter of policy, the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs (EOEA), Division of Conservation Services (DCR) requires the entity seeking to remove protected land status to file an Environmental Notification Form with EOEA’s Massachusetts Environmental Protection Act (MEPA) Unit.

Moreover, if the property was either acquired or developed with grant assistance from the DCR, the converted land must be replaced with land of equal monetary value and recreational or conservation utility.

TGPC is moving forward to convert land in the Otis State Forest and the adjoining 62-acre Lower Spectacle Pond to add a 3.8-mile, 36-inch diameter loop to an existing natural gas pipeline.

The Otis State Forest was purchased by the state in 2007. Gov. Deval Patrick said at the time, “The purchase of this spectacular property ensures its lasting protection and is an example of our prudent investment in the Commonwealth’s rare and irreplaceable natural resources.”

The $5.2 million dollar purchase was intended to preserve in perpetuity land that contains a 400-year-old eastern Hemlock old growth forest, rare plant and animal species, historical sites, mature deciduous woodlands, rolling meadows, and the 62-acre Lower Spectacle Pond.

Representative Peter Kocut (D-Northampton) and Senator Joan Lovely (D-Salem) attempted to bring TGPC’s easement-transfer bill to a vote. The effort fizzled, however, and HR 3690 was recommended for further study by the Joint Committee on State Administration and Regulatory Oversight.

The Department of Conservation and Recreation has refused to voluntarily cede the easements to TGPC, a subsidiary of energy titan, Kinder Morgan.

Currently, there are two underground natural gas pipelines in the area. The project would add a third, and would widen the existing corridor by “10 – 35 feet,” according to the TGPC.

Kinder Morgan spokesman, Richard Wheatley, said, “we’ve been trying for two years to get the easements. We need to begin cutting trees as soon as possible.”

The TGPC court filings state that, in order for the pipeline to be operational in winter 2016-2017, construction needs to be completed by November 2016.

Under federal Fish and Wildlife Department guidelines relating to the Endangered Species Act, tree clearing must only be done between October 1 and March 31. The filings also say, however, that TGPC has applied for an extension that would allow them to clear trees until May 1, 2016.

On March 11, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity to TGPC for its Connecticut Expansion pipeline project, which includes the stretch through the Otis State Forest.

Gas for the new pipeline is “fully subscribed,” according to the court filings. Southern Connecticut Gas Co., National Gas Co., and Yankee Gas Service Co. all have contracts.

Both state Sen. Benjamin Downing and Rep. William “Smitty” Pignatelli have opposed the pipeline vigorously. At the State House in November, both spoke strongly against the pipeline to an overflow crowd.

Pignatelli said, “We’ve been FERC’ed!” when he heard in March about the pipeline approval. He also said, “there is no doubt in my mind” that FERC will approve the 412-mile Kinder Morgan Northeast Energy Direct (NED) pipeline if a “little loop in southern Berkshire County that has no benefit to anybody in Massachusetts” cannot be stopped.

There are a number of Article 97-protected land parcels along the NED route, and removal of the Otis State Forest from constitutionally protected status would provide a disastrous precedent, in the opinion of conservationists and others.

The Natural Gas Act of 1938, the authority for the Connecticut Expansion project, provides for preemption of state and local laws and regulations.

It is not clear, however, whether a provision of a state constitution can similarly be preempted. Although TGPC references in its legal filing certain instances in Ohio and Louisiana when the Natural Gas Act trumped those states’ constitutions, the Massachusetts Article 97 provisions have never before been challenged.

STOP points out in its filings, TGPC has not secured the necessary permits from the Army Corps of Engineers under the Clean Water Act section 404 or State Water Quality certifications under the section 401 for the proposed work.

The Clean Water Act is a federal statute, and some courts have held that, as such, the Natural Gas Act does not preempt it.

TGPC received a Certificate for the project under the Massachusetts Environmental Protection Act last June from the Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs, Matthew Beaton.

The Company’s Court filings include a commitment to post a bond for $551,880, which, they state, “is equivalent to the amount the Commonwealth has agreed to by way of the mitigation package ($539,280) plus a good faith estimate of the fair market value of the permanent easements.”

_____

Editor’s Note: This posting replaces an earlier version of this story by clarifying the status of the Attorney General’s office in this matter. So far, the Attorney General’s Office has not formally filed a motion to oppose the pipeline extension through Otis State Forest but has declared its intention to defend the Commonwealth’s interests as contained within Article 97 of the state Constitution.
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Needs Assessment Survey for NED Pipeline-Affected Landowners in MA, NH, and NY

All affected landowners anywhere along the NED pipeline route in MA, NH and NY are encouraged to complete a Needs Assessment survey aimed at finding out how landowners can help landowners. The survey is endorsed by a group of 19 landowners across 12 towns in MA and NH. Since it’s release, people in more than 34 towns across all three states of the pipeline route have responded.

The survey uses the FERC definition of directly affected property owner for the purpose of this Needs Assessment, as follows:

  • Is directly affected (i.e., crossed or used) by the proposed activity, including all facility sites(including compressor stations, valve & meter stations, and all above-ground facilities), rights of way, access roads, pipe and contractor yards, and temporary work-spaces;
  • Abuts either side of an existing right-of-way or facility site owned in fee by any utility company,or abuts the edge of a proposed facility site or right-of-way which runs along a property line in the area in which the facilities would be constructed, or contains a residence within 50 feet of the proposed construction work area;
  • Is within one-half mile of proposed compressors or their enclosures or LNG facilities.

The Needs Assessment takes a few minutes to fill out and will provide information on the best way to help affected landowners:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/NEDAffectedLandowners

For more information, contact the survey organizers:

Polly Ryan, Leigh Youngblood and Carolyn Sellars
pollyryanlane@gmail.com
youngblood@mountgrace.org
casellars@gmail.com

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Apply Now to the 2016 Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference

Update: Limited space at this year’s Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference is still available! Applications will continue to be reviewed until the conference is full.

The Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference is an annual week-long gathering of writers at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf Campus, located in the green hills of Ripton, Vermont. Based on the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference model, the conference is designed to hone the skills of people interested in producing literary writing about the environment and the natural world. It is cosponsored by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Orion magazine, and Middlebury College’s Environmental Studies Program.

This year’s gathering will take place from Friday, June 3 to Thursday, June 9, 2016. Faculty will include acclaimed nature and environmental writers Belle Boggs, Jane Brox, David James Duncan, Rubén Martínez, Robert Michael Pyle, Scott Russell Sanders, Maurice Manning, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil.

Applications are being accepted now. Learn more and submit your application here.

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Sierra Student Coalition’s Grassroots Organizing Training Program (SPROG) Seeks Nominations

Young people are stepping up to take on big polluters and demand a just future for all with 100% clean energy. This summer, more than one hundred youth will take part in our award-winning grassroots leadership program, called Sprog, to learn the skills they need to win real campaigns and see real results.

These training programs are run by and for young movement leaders like myself. They are appropriate for young people ages 14 and up. They don’t have to be current students. They don’t have to have previous organizing experience. The only requirements are a passion for the environment and social justice, and an eagerness to take on our world’s biggest challenges.

Does this sound like someone you know? Click here to nominate them to attend a 2016 summer training!

For more than 20 years, Sierra Club has been training and empowering young people through Sprog — equipping them with the skills to win campaigns for sustainability, climate, and justice. I attended West Sprog in 2013, and the program gave me both the knowledge and confidence to begin organizing back home. Soon after Sprog, I started a campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline at my high school. After gathering nearly 500 signatures opposing the pipeline and hosting numerous community teach-ins, my campaign eventually gained the support of my congresswoman. Now in college, I’m using the tools that I learned at Sprog to improve faculty diversity on my campus. I look back, and I know for certain that Sprog was essential to my growth as an organizer.

New leaders are all around us and Sprog can be the stepping stone they need. Nominate a youth leader from your community today.

Thanks for all you do for our environment,

Courtney Pal
Executive Committee, Sierra Student Coalition

P.S. To find out more about Sprog, visit — www.ssc.org/sprog.

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Global Warming’s Terrifying New Chemistry

Our leaders thought fracking would save our climate. They were wrong. Very wrong.
By Bill McKibben
The Nation
March 23, 2016

Global warming is, in the end, not about the noisy political battles here on the planet’s surface. It actually happens in constant, silent interactions in the atmosphere, where the molecular structure of certain gases traps heat that would otherwise radiate back out to space. If you get the chemistry wrong, it doesn’t matter how many landmark climate agreements you sign or how many speeches you give. And it appears the United States may have gotten the chemistry wrong. Really wrong.

There’s one greenhouse gas everyone knows about: carbon dioxide, which is what you get when you burn fossil fuels. We talk about a “price on carbon” or argue about a carbon tax; our leaders boast about modest “carbon reductions.” But in the last few weeks, CO2’s nasty little brother has gotten some serious press. Meet methane, otherwise known as CH4.

In February, Harvard researchers published an explosive paper in Geophysical Research Letters. Using satellite data and ground observations, they concluded that the nation as a whole is leaking methane in massive quantities. Between 2002 and 2014, the data showed that US methane emissions increased by more than 30 percent, accounting for 30 to 60 percent of an enormous spike in methane in the entire planet’s atmosphere.

To the extent our leaders have cared about climate change, they’ve fixed on CO2. Partly as a result, coal-fired power plants have begun to close across the country. They’ve been replaced mostly with ones that burn natural gas, which is primarily composed of methane. Because burning natural gas releases significantly less carbon dioxide than burning coal, CO2 emissions have begun to trend slowly downward, allowing politicians to take a bow. But this new Harvard data, which comes on the heels of other aerial surveys showing big methane leakage, suggests that our new natural-gas infrastructure has been bleeding methane into the atmosphere in record quantities. And molecule for molecule, this unburned methane is much, much more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.

The EPA insisted this wasn’t happening, that methane was on the decline just like CO2. But it turns out, as some scientists have been insisting for years, the EPA was wrong. Really wrong. This error is the rough equivalent of the New York Stock Exchange announcing tomorrow that the Dow Jones isn’t really at 17,000: Its computer program has been making a mistake, and your index fund actually stands at 11,000.

These leaks are big enough to wipe out a large share of the gains from the Obama administration’s work on climate change—all those closed coal mines and fuel-efficient cars. In fact, it’s even possible that America’s contribution to global warming increased during the Obama years. The methane story is utterly at odds with what we’ve been telling ourselves, not to mention what we’ve been telling the rest of the planet. It undercuts the promises we made at the climate talks in Paris. It’s a disaster—and one that seems set to spread.

The Obama administration, to its credit, seems to be waking up to the problem. Over the winter, the EPA began to revise its methane calculations, and in early March, the United States reached an agreement with Canada to begin the arduous task of stanching some of the leaks from all that new gas infrastructure. But none of this gets to the core problem, which is the rapid spread of fracking. Carbon dioxide is driving the great warming of the planet, but CO2 isn’t doing it alone. It’s time to take methane seriously.

* * *

To understand how we got here, it’s necessary to remember what a savior fracked natural gas looked like to many people, environmentalists included. As George W. Bush took hold of power in Washington, coal was ascendant, here and around the globe. Cheap and plentiful, it was most visibly underwriting the stunning growth of the economy in China, where, by some estimates, a new coal-fired power plant was opening every week. The coal boom didn’t just mean smoggy skies over Beijing; it meant the planet’s invisible cloud of carbon dioxide was growing faster than ever, and with it the certainty of dramatic global warming.

So lots of people thought it was great news when natural-gas wildcatters began rapidly expanding fracking in the last decade. Fracking involves exploding the sub-surface geology so that gas can leak out through newly opened pores; its refinement brought online new shale deposits across the continent—most notably the Marcellus Shale, stretching from West Virginia up into Pennsylvania and New York. The quantities of gas that geologists said might be available were so vast that they were measured in trillions of cubic feet and in centuries of supply.

The apparently happy fact was that when you burn natural gas, it releases half as much carbon dioxide as coal. A power plant that burned natural gas would therefore, or so the reasoning went, be half as bad for global warming as a power plant that burned coal. Natural gas was also cheap—so, from a politician’s point of view, fracking was a win-win situation. You could appease the environmentalists with their incessant yammering about climate change without having to run up the cost of electricity. It would be painless environmentalism, the equivalent of losing weight by cutting your hair.

And it appeared even better than that. If you were President Obama and had inherited a dead-in-the-water economy, the fracking boom offered one of the few economic bright spots. Not only did it employ lots of people, but cheap natural gas had also begun to alter the country’s economic equation: Manufacturing jobs were actually returning from overseas, attracted by newly abundant energy. In his 2012 State of the Union address, Obama declared that new natural-gas supplies would not only last the nation a century, but would create 600,000 new jobs by decade’s end. In his 2014 address, he announced that “businesses plan to invest almost $100 billion in factories that use natural gas,” and pledged to “cut red tape” to get it all done. In fact, the natural-gas revolution has been a constant theme of his energy policy, the tool that made his restrictions on coal palatable. And Obama was never shy about taking credit for at least part of the boom. Public research dollars, he said in 2012, “helped develop the technologies to extract all this natural gas out of shale rock—reminding us that government support is critical in helping businesses get new energy ideas off the ground.”

Obama had plenty of help selling natural gas—from the fossil-fuel industry, but also from environmentalists, at least for a while. Robert Kennedy Jr., who had enormous credibility as the founder of the Waterkeeper Alliance and a staff attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, wrote a paean in 2009 to the “revolution…over the past two years [that] has left America awash in natural gas and has made it possible to eliminate most of our dependence on deadly, destructive coal practically overnight.” Meanwhile, the longtime executive director of the Sierra Club, Carl Pope, had not only taken $25 million from one of the nation’s biggest frackers, Chesapeake Energy, to fund his organization, but was also making appearances with the company’s CEO to tout the advantages of gas, “an excellent example of a fuel that can be produced in quite a clean way, and shouldn’t be wasted.” (That CEO, Aubrey McClendon, apparently killed himself earlier this month, crashing his car into a bridge embankment days after being indicted for bid-rigging.) Exxon was in apparent agreement as well: It purchased XTO Energy, becoming the biggest fracker in the world overnight and allowing the company to make the claim that it was helping to drive emissions down.

For a brief shining moment, you couldn’t have asked for more. As Obama told a joint session of Congress, “The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy.”

* * *

Unless, of course, you happened to live in the fracking zone, where nightmares were starting to unfold. In recent decades, most American oil and gas exploration had been concentrated in the western United States, often far from population centers. When there were problems, politicians and media in these states paid little attention.

The Marcellus Shale, though, underlies densely populated eastern states. It wasn’t long before stories about the pollution of farm fields and contamination of drinking water from fracking chemicals began to make their way into the national media. In the Delaware Valley, after a fracking company tried to lease his family’s farm, a young filmmaker named Josh Fox produced one of the classic environmental documentaries of all time, Gasland, which became instantly famous for its shot of a man lighting on fire the methane flowing from his water faucet.

This reporting helped galvanize a movement—at first town by town, then state by state, and soon across whole regions. The activism was most feverish in New York, where residents could look across the Pennsylvania line and see the ecological havoc that fracking caused. Scores of groups kept up unrelenting pressure that eventually convinced Governor Andrew Cuomo to ban it. Long before that happened, the big environmental groups recanted much of their own support for fracking: The Sierra Club’s new executive director, Michael Brune, not only turned down $30 million in potential donations from fracking companies but came out swinging against the practice. “The club needs to…advocate more fiercely to use as little gas as possible,” he said. “We’re not going to mute our voice on this.” As for Robert Kennnedy Jr., by 2013 he was calling natural gas a “catastrophe.”

In the end, one of the most important outcomes of the antifracking movement may have been that it attracted the attention of a couple of Cornell scientists. Living on the northern edge of the Marcellus Shale, Robert Howarth and Anthony Ingraffea got interested in the outcry. While everyone else was focused on essentially local issues—would fracking chemicals get in the water supply?—they decided to look more closely at a question that had never gotten much attention: How much methane was invisibly being leaked by these fracking operations?

Because here’s the unhappy fact about methane: Though it produces only half as much carbon as coal when you burn it, if you don’t—if it escapes into the air before it can be captured in a pipeline, or anywhere else along its route to a power plant or your stove—then it traps heat in the atmosphere much more efficiently than CO2. Howarth and Ingraffea began producing a series of papers claiming that if even a small percentage of the methane leaked—maybe as little as 3 percent—then fracked gas would do more climate damage than coal. And their preliminary data showed that leak rates could be at least that high: that somewhere between 3.6 and 7.9 percent of methane gas from shale-drilling operations actually escapes into the atmosphere.

To say that no one in power wanted to hear this would be an understatement. The two scientists were roundly attacked by the industry; one trade group called their study the “Ivory Tower’s latest fact-free assault on shale gas exploration.” Most of the energy establishment joined in. An MIT team, for instance, had just finished an industry-funded report that found “the environmental impacts of shale development are challenging but manageable”; one of its lead authors, the ur-establishment energy expert Henry Jacoby, described the Cornell research as “very weak.” One of its other authors, Ernest Moniz, would soon become the US secretary of energy; in his nomination hearings in 2013, he lauded the “stunning increase” in natural gas as a “revolution” and pledged to increase its use domestically.

The trouble for the fracking establishment was that new research kept backing up Howarth and Ingraffea. In January 2013, for instance, aerial overflights of fracking basins in Utah found leak rates as high as 9 percent. “We were expecting to see high methane levels, but I don’t think anybody really comprehended the true magnitude of what we would see,” said the study’s director. But such work was always piecemeal, one area at a time, while other studies—often conducted with industry-supplied data—came up with lower numbers.

* * *

That’s why last month’s Harvard study came as such a shock. It used satellite data from across the country over a span of more than a decade to demonstrate that US methane emissions had spiked 30 percent since 2002. The EPA had been insisting throughout that period that methane emissions were actually falling, but it was clearly wrong—on a massive scale. In fact, emissions “are substantially higher than we’ve understood,” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy admitted in early March. The Harvard study wasn’t designed to show why US methane emissions were growing—in other parts of the world, as new research makes clear, cattle and wetlands seem to be causing emissions to accelerate. But the spike that the satellites recorded coincided almost perfectly with the era when fracking went big-time.

To make matters worse, during the same decade, experts had become steadily more worried about the effects of methane in any quantity on the atmosphere. Everyone agrees that, molecule for molecule, methane traps far more heat than CO2—but exactly how much wasn’t clear. One reason the EPA estimates of America’s greenhouse-gas emissions showed such improvement was because the agency, following standard procedures, was assigning a low value to methane and measuring its impact over a 100-year period. But a methane molecule lasts only a couple of decades in the air, compared with centuries for CO2. That’s good news, in that methane’s effects are transient—and very bad news because that transient but intense effect happens right now, when we’re breaking the back of the planet’s climate. The EPA’s old chemistry and 100-year time frame assigned methane a heating value of 28 to 36 times that of carbon dioxide; a more accurate figure, says Howarth, is between 86 and 105 times the potency of CO2 over the next decade or two.

If you combine Howarth’s estimates of leakage rates and the new standard values for the heat-trapping potential of methane, then the picture of America’s total greenhouse-gas emissions over the last 15 years looks very different: Instead of peaking in 2007 and then trending downward, as the EPA has maintained, our combined emissions of methane and carbon dioxide have gone steadily and sharply up during the Obama years, Howarth says. We closed coal plants and opened methane leaks, and the result is that things have gotten worse.

Since Howarth is an outspoken opponent of fracking, I ran the Harvard data past an impeccably moderate referee, the venerable climate-policy wonk Dan Lashof. A UC Berkeley PhD who has been in the inner circles of climate policy almost since it began, Lashof has helped write reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and craft the Obama administration’s plan to cut coal-plant pollution. The longtime head of the Clean Air Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, he is now the chief operations officer of billionaire Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate America.

“The Harvard paper is important,” Lashof said. “It’s the most convincing new data I have seen showing that the EPA’s estimates of the methane-leak rate are much too low. I think this paper shows that US greenhouse-gas emissions may have gone up over the last decade if you focus on the combined short-term-warming impact.”

Under the worst-case scenario—one that assumes that methane is extremely potent and extremely fast-acting—the United States has actually slightly increased its greenhouse-gas emissions from 2005 to 2015. That’s the chart below [CLICK HERE to see the charts in the article]: the blue line shows what we’ve been telling ourselves and the world about our emissions—that they are falling. The red line, the worst-case calculation from the new numbers, shows just the opposite.

Lashof argues for a more moderate reading of the numbers (calculating methane’s impact over 50 years, for instance). But even this estimate—one that attributes less of the methane release to fracking—wipes out as much as three-fifths of the greenhouse-gas reductions that the United States has been claiming. This more modest reassessment is the yellow line in the chart below [CLICK HERE to see the charts in the article]; it shows the country reducing its greenhouse-gas emissions, but by nowhere near as much as we had thought.

The lines are doubtless not as smooth as the charts imply, and other studies will provide more detail and perhaps shift the calculations. But any reading of the new data offers a very different version of our recent history. Among other things, either case undercuts the statistics that America used to negotiate the Paris climate accord. It’s more upsetting than the discovery last year that China had underestimated its coal use, because China now appears to be cutting back aggressively on coal. If the Harvard data hold up and we keep on fracking, it will be nearly impossible for the United States to meet its promised goal of a 26 to 28 percent reduction in greenhouse gases from 2005 levels by 2025.

* * *

One obvious conclusion from the new data is that we need to move very aggressively to plug as many methane leaks as possible. “The biggest unfinished business for the Obama administration is to establish tight rules on methane emissions from existing [wells and drill sites],” Lashof says. That’s the work that Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau promised to tackle at their conclave in March—although given the time it takes for the EPA to draft new rules, it will likely be long after Obama’s departure before anything happens, and the fossil-fuel industry has vowed to fight new regulations.

Also, containing the leaks is easier said than done: After all, methane is a gas, meaning that it’s hard to prevent it from escaping. Since methane is invisible and odorless (utilities inject a separate chemical to add a distinctive smell), you need special sensors to even measure leaks. Catastrophic blowouts like the recent one at Porter Ranch in California pour a lot of methane into the air, but even these accidents are small compared to the total seeping out from the millions of pipes, welds, joints, and valves across the country—especially the ones connected with fracking operations, which involve exploding rock to make large, leaky pores. A Canadian government team examined the whole process a couple of years ago and came up with despairing conclusions. Consider the cement seals around drill pipes, says Harvard’s Naomi Oreskes, who was a member of the team: “It sounds like it ought to be simple to make a cement seal, but the phrase we finally fixed on is ‘an unresolved engineering challenge.’ The technical problem is that when you pour cement into a well and it solidifies, it shrinks. You can get gaps in the cement. All wells leak.”

With that in mind, the other conclusion from the new data is even more obvious: We need to stop the fracking industry in its tracks, here and abroad. Even with optimistic numbers for all the plausible leaks fixed, Howarth says, methane emissions will keep rising if we keep fracking.

“It ought to be simple to make a cement seal, but the phrase we finally fixed on is ‘an unresolved engineering challenge.’” —Naomi Oreskes

And if we didn’t frack, what would we do instead? Ten years ago, the realistic choice was between natural gas and coal. But that choice is no longer germane: Over the same 10 years, the price of a solar panel has dropped at least 80 percent. New inventions have come online, such as air-source heat pumps, which use the latent heat in the air to warm and cool houses, and electric storage batteries. We’ve reached the point where Denmark can generate 42 percent of its power from the wind, and where Bangladesh is planning to solarize every village in the country within the next five years. We’ve reached the point, that is, where the idea of natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to a renewable future is a marketing slogan, not a realistic claim (even if that’s precisely the phrase that Hillary Clinton used to defend fracking in a debate earlier this month).

One of the nastiest side effects of the fracking boom, in fact, is that the expansion of natural gas has undercut the market for renewables, keeping us from putting up windmills and solar panels at the necessary pace. Joe Romm, a climate analyst at the Center for American Progress, has been tracking the various economic studies more closely than anyone else. Even if you could cut the methane-leakage rates to zero, Romm says, fracked gas (which, remember, still produces 50 percent of the CO2 level emitted by coal when you burn it) would do little to cut the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions because it would displace so much truly clean power. A Stanford forum in 2014 assembled more than a dozen expert teams, and their models showed what a drag on a sustainable future cheap, abundant gas would be. “Cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by burning natural gas is like dieting by eating reduced-fat cookies,” the principal investigator of the Stanford forum explained. “If you really want to lose weight, you probably need to avoid cookies altogether.”

Of course, if you’re a cookie company, that’s not what you want to hear. And the Exxons have a little more political juice than the Keeblers. To give just one tiny example, during his first term, Obama’s then–deputy assistant for energy and climate change, Heather Zichal, headed up an interagency working group to promote the development of domestic natural gas. The working group had been formed after pressure from the American Petroleum Institute, the chief fossil-fuel lobbying group, and Zichal, in a talk to an API gathering, said: “It’s hard to overstate how natural gas—and our ability to access more of it than ever—has become a game changer, and that’s why it’s been a fixture of the president’s ‘All of the Above’ energy strategy.” Zichal left her White House job in 2013; one year later, she took a new post on the board of Cheniere Energy, a leading exporter of fracked gas. In the $180,000-a-year job, she joined former CIA head John Deutch, who once led an Energy Department review of fracking safety during the Obama years, and Vicky Bailey, a commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission under Bill Clinton. That’s how it works.

* * *

There was one oddly reassuring number in the Harvard satellite data: The massive new surge of methane from the United States constituted somewhere between 30 and 60 percent of the global growth in methane emissions this past decade. In other words, the relatively small percentage of the planet’s surface known as the United States accounts for much (if not most) of the spike in atmospheric methane around the world. Another way of saying this is: We were the first to figure out how to frack. In this new century, we’re leading the world into the natural-gas age, just as we poured far more carbon into the 20th-century atmosphere than any other nation. So, thank God, now that we know there’s a problem, we could warn the rest of the planet before it goes down the same path.

Except we’ve been doing exactly the opposite. We’ve become the planet’s salesman for natural gas—and a key player in this scheme could become the next president of the United States. When Hillary Clinton took over the State Department, she set up a special arm, the Bureau of Energy Resources, after close consultation with oil and gas executives. This bureau, with 63 employees, was soon helping sponsor conferences around the world. And much more: Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show that the secretary of state was essentially acting as a broker for the shale-gas industry, twisting the arms of world leaders to make sure US firms got to frack at will.

To take just one example, an article in Mother Jones based on the WikiLeaks cables reveals what happened when fracking came to Bulgaria. In 2011, the country signed a $68 million deal with Chevron, granting the company millions of acres in shale-gas concessions. The Bulgarian public wasn’t happy: Tens of thousands were in the streets of Sofia with banners reading Stop Fracking With Our Water. But when Clinton came for a state visit in 2012, she sided with Chevron (one of whose executives had bundled large sums for her presidential campaign in 2008). In fact, the leaked cables show that the main topic of her meetings with Bulgaria’s leaders was fracking. Clinton offered to fly in the “best specialists on these new technologies to present the benefits to the Bulgarian people,” and she dispatched her Eurasian energy envoy, Richard Morningstar, to lobby hard against a fracking ban in neighboring Romania. Eventually, they won those battles—and today, the State Department provides “assistance” with fracking to dozens of countries around the world, from Cambodia to Papua New Guinea.

So if the United States has had a terrible time tracking down and fixing its methane leaks, ask yourself how it’s going to go in Bulgaria. If Canada finds that sealing leaks is an “unresolved engineering challenge,” ask yourself how Cambodia’s going to make out. If the State Department has its way, then in a few years Harvard’s satellites will be measuring gushers of methane from every direction.

* * *

Of course, we can—and perhaps we should— forgive all that past. The information about methane is relatively new; when Obama and Clinton and Zichal started backing fracking, they didn’t really know. They could have turned around much earlier, like Kennedy or the Sierra Club. But what they do now will be decisive.

There are a few promising signs. Clinton has at least tempered her enthusiasm for fracking some in recent debates, listing a series of preconditions she’d insist on before new projects were approved; Bernie Sanders, by contrast, has called for a moratorium on new fracking. But Clinton continues to conflate and confuse the chemistry: Natural gas, she said in a recent position paper, has helped US carbon emissions “reach their lowest level in 20 years.” It appears that many in power would like to carry on the fracking revolution, albeit a tad more carefully.

Indeed, just last month, Cheniere Energy shipped the first load of American gas overseas from its new export terminal at Sabine Pass in Louisiana. As the ship sailed, Cheniere’s vice president of marketing, Meg Gentle, told industry and government officials that natural gas should be rebranded as renewable energy. “I’d challenge everyone here to reframe the debate and make sure natural gas is part of the category of clean energy, not a fossil-fuel category, which is viewed as dirty and not part of the solution,” she said. A few days later, Exxon’s PR chief, writing in the Los Angeles Times, boasted that the company had been “instrumental in America’s shale gas revolution,” and that as a result, “America’s greenhouse gas emissions have declined to levels not seen since the 1990s.”

The new data prove them entirely wrong. The global-warming fight can’t just be about carbon dioxide any longer. Those local environmentalists, from New York State to Tasmania, who have managed to enforce fracking bans are doing as much for the climate as they are for their own clean water. That’s because fossil fuels are the problem in global warming—and fossil fuels don’t come in good and bad flavors. Coal and oil and natural gas have to be left in the ground. All of them.

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Jobs

GIS Developer / Analyst – Housatonic Valley Association

Summary: The Housatonic Valley Association (HVA) seeks a skilled and motivated Geographic Information Systems (GIS) professional with strong geospatial analytical and developer skills and demonstrated expertise with ESRI’s ArcGIS desktop, mobile and server technology for the full-time position of GIS Developer / Analyst. For 75 years, HVA has been dedicated to the health and vitality of the Housatonic River, a nationally recognized, 1,245,000 acre watershed located in western Connecticut and Massachusetts and portions of eastern New York. GIS is an HVA core competency. It is essential to the work we and our partners undertake to set conservation priorities, conserve the natural character and environmental health of our communities, and protect and restore the lands and waters of the Housatonic Watershed for this and future generations.Position Description: Working out of our Cornwall Bridge, CT main office, the incumbent works closely with HVA colleagues and acts as the GIS Manager for the organization. This is a full-time position with a competitive salary commensurate with experience. The incumbent is responsible for maintaining and enhancing HVA’s natural resource and parcel-based GIS data, developing geospatial models to perform spatial and tabular analysis, and publishing cartographic products as static paper maps and dynamic web-based applications.Required Qualifications:

  • Proven capabilities with ArcGIS Desktop and ArcGIS Server
  • Experience building interactive web-based applications using Arcgis Online and/or ArcGIS FlexViewer
  • Familiarity with ArcGIS Story Maps
  • Enthusiasm to remain current in GIS technologies
  • Passion for Environmental Protection and Land Conservation
  • Willingness to assist with non-GIS related activities
  • Effective communicator in written and spoken language
  • Valid Driver’s License

Desired Qualifications:

  • Familiarity with GIS data sources for CT, MA and NY
  • Familiarity with Amazon Web Services and managing ArcGIS Server on Amazon EC2
  • Experience with GPS and mobile GIS data collection
  • Experience using Data Driven Pages, ModelBuilder
  • Experience managing ArcGIS Online Organization Account

To apply:Email cover letter, resume, examples of recent work using ArcGIS Desktop and ArcServer, and links to Facebook and Linkedin pages to: Tim Abbott tim.abbott@hvatoday.org. The position will remain open until it is filled.return to top



Landscape Design, Installation, Maintenance, and 
Nursery Positions Available – Helia Native Nursery & Land Design

We specialize in Native Plants, Ecological Landscape Design, Wildflower Meadows, Site Restoration, Edible and Fine Gardens.We are expanding and currently have full time openings in the following positions:Landscape Design – The right candidate will have a strong background, full knowledge and experience in site surveying, base mapping and design, autoCAD and SketchUP, with a good knowledge of plants, especially natives. You must be energetic, hardworking, physically fit and a positive team-oriented person.Installation Manager – We are looking for a full time, energetic, hardworking, physically fit, positive, and team-oriented person to join our landscape installation team and manage installation jobs. Experience with native plants, garden installation, small machinery, stone work and maintenance is preferred.Garden Maintenance – Come join our full time fine garden maintenance team. We are looking for energetic, hardworking, physically fit, positive, and team-oriented people to join our team.Please call 413-274-1400 to apply or email your resume to helialanddesign@gmail.com. return to top


Office Manager – Mass Audubon Berkshire Wildlife Sanctuaries

Mass Audubon is seeking an Office Manager to join our Berkshire Sanctuaries team. The position is based at Pleasant Valley Wildlife Sanctuary in Lenox, MA.

Mass Audubon’s Berkshire Wildlife Sanctuaries seeks an energetic, organized and team-oriented Office Manager based at our Pleasant Valley Wildlife Sanctuary in Lenox, Mass. The Office Manager has diverse responsibilities, including key roles interacting with the public and managing smooth, well-organized operations throughout our three wildlife sanctuaries in the Berkshires. The Office Manager plays a key role supporting other staff projects and reports to the Sanctuary Director. This is a 24 hour per week position (November-April); 30 hour per week (May-Oct.).

Responsibilities

  • Perform a variety of office management and administrative duties;
  • Manage all financial data including invoice payment, receivables, budget reconciliations, gifts and cash receipts;
  • Develop marketing and publicity materials including social media, print pieces, e-newsletter, posters and press releases;
  • Oversee online program registrations;
  • Greet visitors, answer phones and provide trail information to visitors;
  • Work with Mass Audubon headquarters staff to implement statewide initiatives for membership and information security;
  • Manage and market facility rental program;
  • Manage occasional fundraising or other events;
  • Supervise maintenance of office equipment including printers, copiers, and phone system;
  • Supervise visitor services staff;
  • Manage Canoe Meadows Community Gardens registration;
  • Manage Pleasant Valley Day Camp registration;
  • Occasional weekend hours for special events;
  • Attendance at 2-3 statewide Mass Audubon A-team meetings per year, required;
  • Other duties as required.

Qualifications

  • Excellent verbal and written communication skills;
  • Excellent interpersonal and customer relations skills;
  • Exceptional attention to detail and a highly organized approach;
  • Ability to work both collaboratively and independently;
  • Ability to manage a wide variety of tasks
  • High proficiency in Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher);
  • Basic skills in Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop and InDesign) desirable;
  • Experience managing social media and electronic newsletters;
  • BA or equivalent experience;
  • A sense of humor is welcome;
  • Valid drivers license
  • Must pass a background record check (CORI, SORI and driver’s).
How to ApplyPlease email your resume and cover letter with the subject “Office Manager Position” to:
Becky Cushing – Sanctuary Director
Job# 2708

Seasonal Ranger I (West)  (1600026F)

DescriptionAbout the Department of Conservation and Recreation: The Department of Conservation and Recreation manages one of the largest and most diverse state parks systems in the nation and protects and enhances natural resources and outdoor recreational opportunities throughout Massachusetts. DCR is a dynamic agency, and is one of the largest park systems in the nation. The DCR system includes over 450,000 acres of parks, forests, water supply protection lands, beaches, lakes, ponds, playgrounds, swimming pools, skating rinks, trails and parkways. The Department of Conservation and Recreation seeks qualified applicants for the position Seasonal Ranger I. The Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation is seeking Park Rangers to patrol facilities to promote compliance with rules and regulations, protect natural and park resources, and enhance visitor experience through providing a presence and being available for visitor information; coordinate with law enforcement officials for appropriate regulatory action; and perform related work as required. Park Rangers normally work a forty-hour week (which includes nights, weekends, and holidays). April-early June will be Monday-Friday day shift. Mid June to August will require include week-end days and may include some evening shifts. Uniforms and training are provided; park housing is not. Successful candidates must attend the Seasonal Ranger Academy.Conducts patrols, either in a vehicle, on a bicycle or on foot, effectively utilizing techniques and available resources, to enforce applicable laws and regulations, provide visitor services, assess facility resources, assist visitors with first aid, and other public services as required.Perform the crossing of school-aged pedestrians on DCR roadways twice daily in accordance with the school’s schedule.Maintain an inventory of and maintain the condition of issued equipment.Complete Bureau records, reports, files, and logs.
Attend seminars, workshops, training sessions, etc., in order to maintain proficiencies.Participates in search and rescue operations in accordance with agency policy.Provide informal and, occasionally, formal information/educational programs, demonstrations, and materials for schools and civic groups as requires, in areas such as Ranger programs, park activities and services, outdoor skills, natural and cultural history and search and rescue.Respond and assist park staff at major incidents, assist at special events, and occasionally assist at statewide incidents or functions.Position Information:  Seasonal Ranger I (00137682)Location: Mohawk Trail State Forest Complex, CharlemontStart Date: 4/24/16End Date: 11/5/16Position Information:  Seasonal Ranger I (00182451)Location:  Tolland State Forest Complex, OtisStart Date:  4/24/16End Date:  11/5/16Position Information:  Seasonal Ranger I (00137661)Location:  Moore House, AmherstStart Date:  4/24/16End Date:  12/30/16Preferred Qualifications:Knowledge of the standard procedures and techniques followed in foot, auto or other types of patrols.
Knowledge of the principles and practices of park or resource management.
Knowledge of the principles and practices of recreational programming.
Knowledge of general ecology and cultural history study, practice and principles.
Knowledge of the methods and techniques for presenting media productions, and drafting brochures and exhibits.
Ability to understand, explain and apply the rules, regulations, policies, procedures standards and guidelines governing assigned unit activities.
Ability to communicate effectively in oral expression.
Ability to give written and oral instructions in a precise, understandable manner.
Ability to speak effectively before the public
Ability to follow oral and written instructions.
Ability to gather information by examining records and documents and through observing and interviewing individuals.
Ability to accurately record information provided orally.

Qualifications This requisition will remain open until filled; however, first consideration will be given to those applicants that apply within the first 14 days.
Minimum Entrance Requirements: Applicants must have at least (A) two years of full-time, or equivalent part-time experience in park or resource management, environmental education, water resources or water supply management, or natural/cultural history interpretation or (B) any equivalent combination of the required experience and the substitutions below.
Substitutions:  I. An Associate’s degree or higher with a major in park or recreation management, natural resource management, water resources management, environmental education, or park interpretation may be substituted for the required experience.*
*Education towards such a degree will be prorated on the basis of the proportion of the requirements actually completed.
Special Requirements:
1. Possession of a current and valid Massachusetts motor vehicle operator’s license.
2. Possession of a current and valid CPR (cardio-pulmonary resuscitation) certificate from the American Red Cross or the American heart Association.
3. Possession of a current and valid standard first aid and personal safety certificate and first responder certificate issued by the American Red Cross.An Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action Employer.  Females, minorities, veterans, and persons with disabilities are strongly encouraged to apply.
Official Title: Ranger IWork Locations: Pittsfield – 740 South Street    01201Primary Location: United States-Massachusetts-Pittsfield-Pittsfield – 740 South StreetJob: Community and Social ServicesAgency: Department of Conservation & Recreation

Schedule: Full-timeShift: MultipleJob Posting: Mar 21, 2016, 12:43:07 PMNumber of Openings: 3Salary:   1,429.24 BiweeklyIf you have Diversity, Affirmative Action or Equal Employment Opportunity questions or need a Reasonable Accommodation, please contact Diversity Officer / ADA Coordinator:: Agatha Summons-Maguire – 617-626-1282Bargaining Unit: 02-AFSCME – Service/Institutional


Seasonal Forest And Park Supervisor III (West)  (160001XB)

DescriptionAbout the Department of Conservation and Recreation: The Department of Conservation and Recreation manages one of the largest and most diverse state parks systems in the nation and protects and enhances natural resources and outdoor recreational opportunities throughout Massachusetts. DCR is a dynamic agency, and is one of the largest park systems in the nation. The DCR system includes over 450,000 acres of parks, forests, water supply protection lands, beaches, lakes, ponds, playgrounds, swimming pools, skating rinks, trails and parkways.The Department of Conservation and Recreation seeks qualified applicants for the position of Seasonal Forest & Park Supervisor III. The Seasonal Forest & Park Supervisor is responsible for supervising the maintenance and operations of parks, recreation areas, parkways, roadways, pedestrian ways and parking lots for public use. The incumbent of this position determines work priorities and resources, assigns and supervises staff, compiles and reviews data concerning park maintenance effectiveness and provides reports of all activities and incidents.SPECIFC DUTIES:
Supervises the maintenance of assigned recreational areas, including such activities as roadway and parkway maintenance, grounds maintenance, building and equipment maintenance and the repair and/or removal of hazardous conditions such as unsafe trees or limbs. Determines manpower and equipment resources necessary to accomplish assigned tasks.Maintains records and prepares reports concerning assigned work to provide information and make appropriate recommendations.Coordinates the activities and work of volunteers, court-referred individuals, etc.May prepares budgets for assigned areas by projecting resource needs and preparing required documentation for agency’s budget request.Monitors the activities involved in park and roadways maintenance work.Compiles and reviews data concerning effectiveness of park maintenance activities to prepare reports for supervisorProvides on-the-job training for new employees.Prepares reports as required; maintains records and logs on such matters as time and attendance of assigned personnel; performs routine vehicle maintenance inspections; and operates motor vehicles and other park machinery and equipment as required.Inspects damage to park areas, roadways, parking lots, equipment, etc. as a result of storms, vandalism and accidents to estimate the cost of labor and materials required for repairs and/or replacementsDetermines work priorities and assigns staff to specific tasks such as spraying, watering, planting trees, cleaning catch basins, trash removal, etc.Performs related work as assigned. Ability to work in a team setting. Ability to exercise sound judgment. Required to work outdoors in all types of weather. Work varied shifts and/or irregular hours; and stand for prolonged periods of time.POSITION INFORMATION: Position: Seasonal Forest & Park Supervisor III
Location: Pittsfield State Forest, Pittsfield
Start Date: 5/1/16
End Date:  11/12/16Salaries are based upon full-time/40 hours worked per week. Work schedules and days off are at the discretion of the Supervisor. This position may require working weekends and/or holidays.Qualifications
This requisition will remain open until filled; however, first consideration will be given to those applicants that apply within the first 14 days.

MINIMUM ENTRANCE REQUIREMENTS:

Applicants must have at least (A) four years of full-time, or equivalent part-time, technical or professional experience in the field of forestry, parks or recreational management and (B) of which at least two years must have been in a supervisory capacity, or (C) any equivalent combination of the required experience and the substitutions below.

Substitutions:

I. An Associate’s or higher degree with a major in forestry, natural resources management or parks and/or recreation management may be substituted for a maximum of two years of the required (A) experience.*
*Education toward such a degree will be prorated on the basis of the proportion of the requirements actually completed.
NOTE: No substitutions will be permitted for the required (B) experience.  SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS: Based on assignment, possession of a current and valid Massachusetts Motor Vehicle Operator’s License.

An Equal Opportunity / Affirmative Action Employer.  Females, minorities, veterans, and persons with disabilities are strongly encouraged to apply.
Official Title: Forest And Park Supervisor III  Work Locations: Pittsfield-Cascade Street    012010000  Primary Location: United States-Massachusetts-Pittsfield-Pittsfield-Cascade StreetJob: Community and Social ServicesAgency: Department of Conservation & RecreationSchedule: Full-timeShift: MultipleJob Posting: Mar 11, 2016, 12:18:15 PMNumber of Openings: 1Salary:   1,758.24 BiweeklyIf you have Diversity, Affirmative Action or Equal Employment Opportunity questions or need a Reasonable Accommodation, please contact Diversity Officer / ADA Coordinator:: Agatha Summons-Maguire – 617-626-1282Bargaining Unit: 02-AFSCME – Service/Institutional

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Seasonal Forestry Assistant – MA Dept. of Conservation and Recreation (Pittsfield)

About the Department of Conservation and Recreation: The Department of Conservation and Recreation manages one of the largest and most diverse state parks systems in the nation and protects and enhances natural resources and outdoor recreational opportunities throughout Massachusetts. DCR is a dynamic agency, and is one of the largest park systems in the nation. The DCR system includes over 450,000 acres of parks, forests, water supply protection lands, beaches, lakes, ponds, playgrounds, swimming pools, skating rinks, trails and parkways.The Department of Conservation and Recreation seeks qualified applicants for the position Seasonal Forestry Assistant. Seasonal positions may be subject to the recall process and will be filled in accordance with collective bargaining agreements, positions not filled using this process will be interviewed for.Duties: Forestry Assistants work outdoors in all types of weather; work in isolated areas; may be exposed to the hazards of power tools and equipment such as chainsaws and hoists and travel for job related purposes.Assists in the preparation of forest management plans designed to provide water supply protection; assists in the interpretation of aerial photos, GPS and GIS data, and other cartographic work regarding forests; assists in the inventory of natural resources and the establishment and maintenance of state forest boundary lines.Assists in planning and supervision of timber stand improvement work by state forest crews and private contractors.Assists in the sale of wood products including preparing silvicultural prescriptions, minimizing adverse environmental impacts of harvesting, and ensuring contractual compliance by private contractors.Cooperates with state and municipal authorities during emergencies and natural disasters such as forest fires, wind or ice storms, and insect infestations.Performs related duties such as maintaining records and attending staff meetings.Specific Duties:

  • Collecting forest inventory data (CFI) including tree measurements, forest assessment, forest understory assessment, and coarse woody debris measurement.
  • Processing forest inventory data with a computer.

POSITION INFORMATION:Position: (2) Seasonal Forestry Assistant
Position 1 Location: Pittsfield Regional Office, 740 South Street Pittsfield, MA 01202
Position 2 Location: Amherst Field Office, 40 Cold Storage Drive, Amherst, MA 01004
Start Date: April 3, 2016
End Date: November 4, 2016Qualifications:Minimum Entrance Requirements:Applicants must have at least (A) one year of full-time, or equivalent part-time experience in forestry or natural resource management, or (B) any equivalent combination of the required experience and the substitutions below.Substitutions:

  1. An Associate’s or higher degree with a major in forestry or forestry management may be substituted for the required

experience.**Education toward such a degree will be. prorated on the basis of the proportion of the requirements actually completed.Special Requirements: Possession of a current and valid Massachusetts Class D Motor Vehicle Operator’s LicenseThis requisition will remain open until filled; however, first consideration will be given to those applicants that apply within the first 14 dayMinimum Entrance Requirements:Applicants must have at least (A) one year of full-time, or equivalent part-time experience in forestry or natural resource management, or (B) any equivalent combination of the required experience and the substitutions below.Substitutions:

  1. An Associate’s or higher degree with a major in forestry or forestry management may be substituted for the required experience.*

*Education toward such a degree will be prorated on the basis of the proportion of the requirements actually completed.Special Requirements: Possession of a current and valid Massachusetts Class D Motor Vehicle Operator’s License.An Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. Females, minorities, veterans, and persons with disabilities are strongly encouraged to apply.Schedule: Full-time
Number of Openings: 2
Salary:   1,547.60 BiweeklyIf you have Diversity, Affirmative Action or Equal Employment Opportunity questions or need a Reasonable Accommodation, please contact Diversity Officer / ADA Coordinator:: Agatha Summons Maguire – 617-626-1282Bargaining Unit: 09-MOSES – Engineers/Scientists


Laborer II – Long Term Seasonal (Pittsfield)  (160001F6)

DescriptionAbout the Department of Conservation and Recreation: The Department of Conservation and Recreation manages one of the largest and most diverse state parks systems in the nation and protects and enhances natural resources and outdoor recreational opportunities throughout Massachusetts. DCR is a dynamic agency, and is one of the largest park systems in the nation. The DCR system includes over 450,000 acres of parks, forests, water supply protection lands, beaches, lakes, ponds, playgrounds, swimming pools, skating rinks, golf courses, trails and parkways.The Department of Conservation and Recreation seeks qualified applicants for the position of Seasonal Planting Laborer II.The Seasonal Planting Laborer II will work outdoors in all types of weather and performs various manual labor tasks in support of the effort to plant trees in Massachusetts’s gateway cities to increase tree canopy cover for the purpose of reducing heating and cooling energy costs to residences and businesses.Seasonal staff dig and backfill tree planting holes and levels earth to grade; plant trees according to DCR Bureau of Forestry standards; load and unload tree stock from delivery vehicles; load and unload tools and equipment; maintain vehicle and equipment cleanliness.The basic purpose of this work is to perform manual tasks requiring specialized skill and the use of hand tools to support reforestation efforts.Performs various manual labor tasks, which may require some specialized skills, to plant trees.Digs holes for tree planting and plants trees according to DCR Bureau of Forestry standards.Loads and unloads trucks, physically or by use of dollies; unpacks and stores tools and supplies and equipment in stockrooms, storerooms or warehouses; and takes periodic inventories of supplies and equipment.Performs preventive maintenance on assigned equipment and tools by washing, inspecting, tightening, lubricating and by sharpening edges on all cutting tools.Performs related duties as assigned.Start date is March 20, 2016 and end date is November 19, 2016.Preferred Qualifications:Possession of a current and valid Massachusetts Class D Motor Vehicle Operator’s License.Ability to speak and write Spanish and translate materials for homeowners who speak Spanish.Skill in using hand tools such as shovels, mattocks, pry bars, bolt cutters, clippers, etc.
Ability to follow oral and written instructions.
Ability to work in a team setting.
Manual dexterity.
Physical stamina and endurance for full time, hard manual labor.
Ability to lift and carry up to 50 pounds.
Willing to work in all weather conditions.QualificationsThis requisition will remain open until filled; however, first consideration will be given to those applicants that apply within the first 14 days.Minimum Entrance Requirements: Applicants must have at least six months of full-time, or equivalent part- time experience in performing manual labor in connection with general construction or maintenance work.An Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer.  Females, minorities, veterans, and persons with disabilities are strongly encouraged to apply.Official Title: Laborer IIWork LocationsLee-Woodland RoadPrimary Location: United States-Massachusetts-Lee-Lee-Woodland RoadJob: Equipment, Facilities & ServicesAgency: Department of Conservation & RecreationSchedule: Full-timeShift: DayJob Posting: Mar 22, 2016, 4:09:37 PMNumber of Openings: 2Salary:   1,220.36 BiweeklyIf you have Diversity, Affirmative Action or Equal Employment Opportunity questions or need a Reasonable Accommodation, please contact Diversity Officer / ADA Coordinator:: Agatha Summons-McGuire – 617-626-1282Bargaining Unit: 02-AFSCME – Service/Institutional

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 Executive Director – Conservation Technology Information Center (CTIC)

CTIC OPENS SEARCH FOR NEW EXECUTIVE DIRECTORThe board of directors of the Conservation Technology Information Center (CTIC) is searching for a new executive director as Karen A. Scanlon moves to another opportunity at Dairy Management. Inc., where she’ll be helping to support the sustainability and social responsibility initiatives of the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy.“We’re sad to see her leave CTIC, but are delighted that Karen has found an exciting new role in the agricultural sustainability space,” said Alan Ayers of Bayer CropScience, CTIC board chair. “Karen has done a great job and has been very successful in moving this organization to new heights, which will ease the transition into new leadership.”“CTIC has grown significantly in size and scope under Karen’s tenure, becoming a key source of insight on conservation systems, cover crops, nutrient management and economic sustainability for farmers,” Ayers added. “CTIC’s Conservation in Action Tours have set the bar for connecting conservation-oriented people with each other and with the innovative farming systems on the ground. Additionally, the organization has dramatically increased its collaborative projects to become even more effective in building local capacity and championing conservation farming.”A search committee has begun seeking an experienced leader and manager who can step into a vibrant organization with a dedicated staff and diverse lineup of projects and programs. Candidates for the executive director position should review the job description and contact the CTIC search committee at CTIC@CTIC.ORG. For more information on CTIC, visit www.ctic.org.return to top


Summer Internships – Williams College

Summer Internships on Campus, Berkshire area & U.S. – Also: Summer Internship Funding: Check out dozens of campus and local environmental internships, all eligible for summer funding: Campus Emissions Research, Hopkins Forest Caretakers, Environmental Education, Sheep Hill environmental education, Farm Market/Ag research, Clark Art landscape internship, Environmental Analysis Lab, Hoosic River Watershed Association, Berkshire Regional Planning Commission, and more…http://ces.williams.edu/category/summer-jobs/National/Global Summer Internships: Dozens of enviro internships and research positions in the US, many developed specifically by CES alumnae for Williams students HERE​CES Summer Funding for internships and research information and application form here.Deadline: March 10 (second deadline: April 8).Position required to apply for funding.return to top


Office Manager, Part-time –
Berkshire Natural Resources Council (BNRC)

Berkshire Natural Resources Council, a private, non-profit land trust based in Pittsfield, MA, seeks an energetic and organized person to become its Office Manager.  The Office Manager supports BNRC’s programming as it pursues an ambitious conservation vision for the Berkshires.Duties of the position include general clerical work and maintenance of accounts payable, accounts receivable, bank reconciliations, financial statements, and insurance policies.  Proficiency in Quickbooks required; familiarity with real estate transactions is a plus.  20 hours per week with some flexibility; competitive salary.  Send resume to Sally Cornwell, BNRC, 20 Bank Row, Pittsfield, MA 01201 or scornwell@bnrc.net.  No phone calls, please.return to top


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