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Nov. 14, 2002
Mission
to Afghanistan
by
GEOFF S. FEIN
As Afghanistan struggles to
recover from decades of civil war, years of harsh rule by the
Taliban and an intensive U.S. bombing campaign against Al-Qaeda,
one Trinidad woman is hoping to bring some relief.
Later this month, Frederica
Aalto, 58 [in photo below
right], international advocate
for Six Rivers Planned Parenthood in Eureka, will travel to the
war-torn country with a small team of social workers. Their mission:
to introduce family planning to a shattered country and, more
particularly, to assist Afghani women who have no access to pre-
and post-natal care -- and who were denied medical attention
altogether under the Taliban.
 Aalto's
journey, which will last a month, has caused a stir at Six Rivers.
"It's a huge deal. We are very excited," said Debbe
Hartridge, director of education and public affairs for the group.
"We are really moved that (Aalto) can take her experience
and involve the agency in a positive way to interact with the
world."
Aalto first became familiar
with the plight of Afghani women during a visit to the Middle
East three years ago.
It is not unique for a family
planning agency to have an international family planning advocate,
Hartridge said. Six Rivers Planned Parenthood has had projects
in Nicaragua, China and the Caribbean. But it is unusual to send
someone to Afghanistan.
The trip to Afghanistan won't
be cheap. Aalto estimates it will cost about $12,000. To date
they have raised $6,000.
Aalto has received numerous
small grants, including a $3,000 matching grant from Humboldt
State University physics Professor Richard Stepp. Venture Strategies,
a Bay Area venture capital firm, has also given money. And the
medical community is providing donations and assistance -- doctors
and pharmacies have donated gloves, toothbrushes, topical antibiotics,
ibuprofen, eyeglasses and stethoscopes.
"We have enough for [plane]
tickets," Aalto said. "The rest of the money will pay
for medical supplies and equipment."
Accompanying Aalto will be Aghaghia
Rahimzadeh, 32, an HSU graduate student. Rahimzadeh is going
as both a translator and photographer.
Once Aalto and her group return
home, they'll begin developing a program to establish networks
for marketing and distributing birth control pills and drugs
to treat post-partum hemorrhage. They also want to set up a system
to train practitioners in techniques to control bleeding after
miscarriages -- a leading cause of death among many Afghan women.
The exact nature of this larger
effort won't become clear until after the initial visit to Afghanistan,
which Aalto described as a "reconnaisance project."
"The shape of the project
will be determined by what we find [in Afghanistan]," Aalto
said.
Although Aalto isn't sure how
much the project will cost, she did apply for a $100,000 grant
from the Packard Foundation. The foundation turned her down last
May.
"It's a long and sometimes
discouraging road," Aalto said of fund-raising.
Any kind of help would be significant
in Afghanistan, where chronic warfare has set back the country's
development by centuries. Coming to power in the 1990s after
years of civil war, the Taliban had a strict fundamentalist interpretation
of the Koran. Under the regime, women could not work, go to school,
appear outdoors without a male relative as an escort, or be seen
in public without a burka -- a full-length, head-to-toe outfit
that only exposed a woman's eyes.
Aalto said burkas and scarves
are far from the biggest problem that besets Afghan women.
"Bleeding to death is,"
she said.
The Taliban's religious policies
prevented women from getting medical care because men and women
were not allowed to share medical facilities and male doctors
were not allowed to treat women.
"There has been no medical
treatment for women dating back to the Afghanistan civil war,"
Aalto said. That war took place through much of the 1980s.
Because of the lack of medical
attention, the average life span for an Afghan woman dropped
to 44 years. "That's appalling," she said.
Afghanistan has the highest
death rate among women in the world. Many of the causes of death
among Afghan women are treatable, Aalto said.
The grim situation for Afghani
women was not helped by a Bush administration decision last year
to cut funding for international family planning.
To enter Afghanistan, Aalto
and her team must first travel to Iran. Once there, Aalto will
hook up with several Iranian doctors who will accompany the team
for the final leg of the trip.
According to Aalto, Iran has
a more progressive family planning program than the United States.
In fact, Iran received a United Nations award for having one
of the best family planning programs in the world, she said.
Iran's efforts have paid off.
The country has gone from an average of six children per household
to two, Aalto said.
"They have had the fastest
drop in fertility in human history in the last 15 years,"
she said.
Aalto hopes to transplant some
of Iran's programs into Afghanistan. The fact that both Iran
and Afghanistan share similar religions and languages should
be helpful, Aalto said.
In 2000, Aalto set up a similar
program in Iran when she took medical supplies to Tehran, the
nation's capital. But she knows the trip to Afghanistan will
be quite different.
Afghanistan is far from becoming
a unified nation. It isn't so much a country as a series of tribal
areas, Aalto said. She and her group are going to go to the Herat
province, a relatively stable area inside Afghanistan, near Iran
and friendly with Iran, she said.
Aalto said she doesn't think
about the possibility that the war on terrorism could impact
her effort.
"If you are not willing
to take a risk in life, you can't achieve big things," she
said. "In these times when all we hear about is war and
terrorism, you shouldn't neglect the things that cause terrorism,
such as poverty."
Aalto also has a wealth of experience
promoting family planning programs around the world. Eight years
ago she took her first trip to the Middle East to attend a United
Nations conference on population and development in Cairo in
1994.
Although this will be Aalto's
first trip to Afghanistan, she is quite familiar with the misery
that country's population has gone through. In 1999 she toured
Afghan refugee camps in Iran with the international aid organization
"Doctors Without Borders." Aalto learned first-hand
just how terrible the situation was for refugees. At the time,
Iran was overloaded with people experiencing war, famine and
poverty in Afghanistan, she said.
Aalto saw women suffering from
malnutrition, children suffering from rickets, and mothers and
their babies suffering from a variety of ailments.
"If you see how Afghan
people suffer, you realize you can't sit back," she said.
Aalto will be giving a presentation
on her trip on Nov. 18 at 7 p.m. at St. Alban's Episcopal Church,
1675 Chester Ave., Arcata.
by
GEOFF S. FEIN
Forty-eight votes. That's the
margin of victory that separated Peter LaVallee and City Councilwoman
Cherie Arkley after last week's election for the mayor of Eureka.
While some voters may have assumed
from those results that LaVallee was the clear winner, the margin
of victory was so close that it's conceivable Arkley may emerge
as the victor.
LaVallee has not declared victory,
nor has Arkley conceded defeat. Arkley, who said last week that
"I'm okay either way it goes," has also not called
for a recount.
Nonetheless, the county is conducting,
as it does after every election, a labor-intensive hand count
of all ballots -- not just for the mayor's race, but for all
races. Election workers want to be certain that every ballot
has been counted and that no one voted twice.
More importantly, perhaps, they
are still tallying votes -- the remaining 1,100 absentee
ballots turned in at precincts on election day. Those ballots
are from all across Humboldt County, not just Eureka. But conceivably
there could be enough votes for Arkley to snatch victory from
LaVallee's grasp.
A laborious process
Voters won't know the final
outcome until the middle of next week at the earliest, although
strictly speaking the county has 29 days from Nov. 5 to certify
the election, said Lindsey McWilliams, Humboldt County's chief
elections official and the county administrative services director.
"This isn't about stuffing
ballots into a (vote) counting machine," he said, explaining
that the final tally will take time.
One reason is that it will be
up to six county election workers to account for all the ballots
issued and those that were returned. McWilliams likened that
task to balancing 90 different checkbooks with 400 transactions.
"We have to go through
every box, every package, from every precinct," McWilliams
said.
Absentee ballots have to be
checked for signatures. Provisional ballots -- ballots that are
in question for one reason or another, such as when a voter submits
an absentee ballot and votes at a precinct -- have to be checked
against precinct records (McWilliams didn't say how many such
ballots there were). And the county is required by law to do
a manual recount of 1 percent of precincts and a recount of single
race ballots, such as the Blue Lake City Council election.
"The manual recount helps
affirm the integrity of the machine count," McWilliams said.
Counting the ballots with write-in
candidates will also add to the outcome's delay. Voting machines
won't accept those ballots so they all must be counted by hand.
And if the write-in candidate's name is valid, that ballot will
be added to the final numbers.
Defective ballots must also
be hand-counted. Those include ballots where two or more candidates
in the same race are selected -- for example, if someone voted
for both LaVallee and Arkley in the Eureka mayoral race. There
are also ballots with corrections or selections erased. McWilliams
estimates there are between 200 and 300 ballots where a voter
has erased a selection.
To make matters worse, since
election day McWilliams has spent a good portion of his time
fielding phone calls from the media and candidates. Seems in
the wake of Gore vs. Bush there are a lot of people seeking an
explanation as to how the process works.
"Part of my job is to educate
folks," he said. "To leap to a finish in particular
races doesn't serve the process well. The integrity of the election
is most important."
An apparent upset
Weeks before the election, it
seemed that Arkley, given her name recognition and financial
resources, was a shoo-in. Many thought that the support given
by her and her husband, Rob, of various projects in Eureka --
such as the boardwalk development and Sequoia Park Zoo -- would
propel her to the top spot in Eureka's city government. Even
some of the mayoral candidates -- there were seven in all --
conceded privately that Arkley would most likely win.
Arkley got a jump on her opponents
--- she was the first to put up signs along 4th and 5th streets,
in Old Town and downtown, and elsewhere as well. It seemed
in many parts of Eureka that around every corner was a red, white
and blue Arkley-for-Mayor sign.
Humboldt State Professor John
Travis, who teaches courses in government and politics, said
that City Councilman Jack McKellar probably took some votes away
from Arkley, because, like Arkley, he is politically conservative.
One reason for LaVallee's seeming
success is that he conducted an intensive door-to-door campaign
while Arkley did not.
LaVallee said on election
night that his victory was due to a large-scale effort
to personally meet homeowners and residents in the old-fashioned
way, by pounding the pavement, going door-to-door. He was assisted
by Humboldt County Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Bonnie Neely
and Eureka City Councilman Chris Kerrigan, both of whom went
door-to-door on his behalf, along with a cadre of volunteers.
In all, LaVallee and his supporters covered an estimated 85 percent
of the city.
Jeff Leonard, whose victory
in the 3rd Ward City Council election surprised many, said he
also did a lot of door-to-door campaigning. He said he found
that voters wanted to get to know the candidates. While making
his rounds through Eureka neighborhoods, voters often invited
Leonard in to their homes to talk politics.
"I spent time watching
television with people for 15 to 20 minutes and talking about
city government," Leonard said. "We live in a small
area. People feel like they want to know who they'll vote for."
Another key factor may have
been money.
Arkley spent more than twice
as much on the campaign as LaVallee, yet apparently lost -- which
raises the question of whether spending big in her case backfired.
Some of the other candidates, along with others, felt that spending
$54,000 to get elected to an office that pays only $625 a month
was an attempt to buy the election.
In Eureka's 3rd Ward City Council
race, Charlene Cutler-Ploss spent approximately $30,000, easily
outspending her rivals; yet it was Leonard, who spent only $6,000,
who won the seat. Leonard won by 147 votes.
"I certainly think it shows
that unlimited dollars aren't a guarantee for a win," he
said. "But I saw how critical it is to have funds to run
a campaign."
Like Arkley, Cutler-Ploss relied
on the services of the Cox Rasmussen Co., a Eureka consulting
firm, to help get the word out about her campaign, paying the
company approximately $26,000 for its services. In contrast,
Leonard did almost everything on his own.
"I did everything by myself
on my home computer," he said.
Leonard made his own buttons,
wrote his own radio commercials, created his own campaign brochure
and relied on the Internet to get his message out. Like many
candidates, Leonard set up a website for voters to access his
platform, issues and his background. He got about 645 visits
to the site. He believes the margin of victory was due in part
to his website and an extensive e-mailing campaign.
Leonard also relied on an extensive
letters-to-the-editor campaign. He said the letters were a huge
benefit to getting him elected.
"[Letters to the editor]
are becoming one of the best grassroots strategies for getting
the message out," he said. "Voters look to see who
wrote the letter and whether it is negative."
Crazy
for the dunes:
Conservation group expands its mission
by
ANDREW EDWARDS
Salt and sand whips in a tangy
melange across your lips. The waves pound a steady, rolling growl.
Under your feet the sand slides, crunching with every step. To
the west, the wind beats against frothy whitecaps that come tumbling
onto a seaweed-strewn beach; the strand continues on as far as
the eye can see, disappearing finally into the misty vastness
of an overcast fall day.
All around are rolling hills
of sand, cemented together with long grasses and a mat of other
plants that merge with forest and marsh inland. These are the
dunes, a strip of habitat only one mile wide and 34 miles long
that is probably one of the most ecologically diverse areas its
size anywhere.
This particular spot -- the
110-acre Manila Dunes Recreation Area -- has come under the protection
of one of the more esoteric environmental organizations in Humboldt
County, the Friends of the Dunes. This year the group is celebrating
its 20th anniversary and expanding its mission in key ways. But,
with all the other unique habitats in Humboldt, what's so special
about the dunes?
"You've got it all, it's
incredibly diverse, bay, forest, open dunes, hollows. It's so
appealing to be able to be on an open sand dune one moment and
the next to be in a forest with trees and lichens and mushrooms,"
said Carol Vander Meer [in
photo below left], a biologist
and the group's executive director, in an interview at their
Manila office. "I'm sorry, I get a little crazy about them.
I'm into it, what can I say?"
 This
year the group's operations -- traditionally focused seaward
-- include Humboldt Bay. Their volunteers now staff the new visitor
center at the Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge at the bay's
southern tip.
In addition, they have become
a land-trust. They have yet to acquire any land of their own,
but are looking into several options -- including purchasing,
or at least getting permission to restore, the private land on
either end of the Manila dunes.
The Friends were originally
a volunteer program associated with the Nature Conservancy, which
owned the Lanphere Dunes. But in 1995, when the conservancy decided
to pull out of Humboldt County and hand over its dunes to the
U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the volunteers had a decision
to make: dissolve or continue.
"It was difficult,"
Vander Meer said. "There was a lot of dedication to the
Nature Conservancy itself."
But eventually they decided
to incorporate as their own separate non-profit organization
and continue the work of conserving the dunes.
Since then the group has grown
by leaps and bounds, going from a budget of $5,000 per year when
it started out to over $90,000 per year now.
 Their
operations have increased right along with their budget. They
run a dune education program with local schools called Bay to
Dunes; docents lead groups of children on educational explorations
from the Manila Community Park on Humboldt Bay to the Manila
Dunes. They have a college spring break program where students
come out from around the country to camp at the Manila Community
Center and restore the dunes for a week. Volunteers lead one
or two dune walks every weekend. In addition, they send out dune-restoration
teams every weekend to work at returning the dunes to their natural
state.
And what might that be? Well,
most of the dunes in Humboldt County have been covered over with
one of three extremely aggressive invasive species: European
beachgrass, which was supposed to stabilize the dunes but has
now taken them over; the ice plants, succulents imported as ship
ballast in the 1500s; and yellow bush lupine, planted to stabilize
railroad lines and now nearly ubiquitous along Humboldt's coast.
"What we do is like weeding
a giant garden," Vander Meer said.
They're making space for the
two federally listed endangered plant species that call the dunes
home: the Humboldt Bay wallflower and the beach layia.
A lot of the Friends projects
revolve around providing "place-based" education to
local residents -- making people feel truly at home in the natural
world that surrounds them, and connecting them to it and the
larger natural world.
"I feel strongly that it
is very simple and elementary," Vander Meer said. "[People]
need to connect and develop a sense of place. To connect with
the dunes is a way to help develop a place in your environment.
If you know an area and connect, you can truly become a part
of it."
Arcata
scientist blows whistle on the Klamath
by
KEITH EASTHOUSE
Had Michael Kelly got his way,
there would have been more water in the Klamath River this summer.
And if there had been more water, 33,000 salmon and steelhead
might not have died at the end of September in the largest fish
kill to hit the river in memory.
Late last month, Kelly, an Arcata
resident and a biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service,
filed a complaint under the federal Whistleblower Protection
Act. Why? Because he is accusing the Bush administration of pressuring
federal scientists last spring to endorse a plan that provides
insufficient protections to coho salmon, a federal threatened
species.
In an eight-page written statement
that is the core of his complaint, Kelly said that "political
pressure appears to be the reason" that his agency accepted
a plan that gives priority to diverting water to farmers in Southern
Oregon. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation plan, which will govern
water diversions from the Klamath for the next ten years, won't
provide adequate amounts of water for coho salmon "until
the ninth year," Kelly charged.
"The proposed action clearly
created a risk to the species by delaying adequate conditions
for up to nine years, during which time it would not be known
whether the species would maintain itself," Kelly said in
the complaint.
The whistleblower act shields
Kelly from being demoted or terminated by the fisheries service
because of his complaint, which essentially charges the government
with violating the Endangered Species Act. Kelly did not respond
to questions sent to him via e-mail.
Kelly, 37, has worked at the
fisheries service for two years. Prior to that, he was a biologist
with the Arcata office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Karen Schambach, the California
director of the Sacramento-based nonprofit Public Employees for
Environmental Responsibility, said Kelly does not want to talk
to the press "because he doesn't want this to be about him.
"He's not trying to become
a hero or create a sensation. He's just an idealistic person
and biologist who wants to see his agency do the right thing."
Kelly initially contacted Schambach's
group this summer, prior to the fish kill, to explore the possibility
of filing a whistleblower complaint. When the fish kill happened,
Kelly contacted Schambach again and decided to go ahead.
Most of the fish that died were
chinook salmon, which do not have federal protection, but some
coho perished as well. Scientists believe the fish died of gill
rot, a disease related to low water levels and warm water temperatures.
A federal study on the die-off is in the works.
Kelly was "technical lead"
of a team that wrote a biological opinion pertaining to how much
water should stay in the Klamath for fish -- and, by implication,
how much should go to irrigators.
The April 1 opinion was rejected
by the reclamation bureau, as was a revised document submitted
more than two weeks later that called for weaker but "still
minimally adequate" flows, as Kelly put it in his complaint.
But even that was rejected,
which led to a meeting on April 29 in which the reclamation bureau,
according to Kelly, made it clear that recommended flows for
fish were going to be cut by 43 percent.
That approach, which determined
flows in the river beginning this summer, was essentially rammed
down the throat of the fisheries service, according to Kelly.
He said biologists were not even given an opportunity to analyze
whether the plan could jeopardize the existence of coho salmon
in the Klamath. It is that lack of analysis, according to Kelly,
that constitutes a violation of the Endangered Species Act.
Jeff McCracken, a spokesman
for the reclamation bureau, has argued that the flows called
for by his agency are based on a report by the National Research
Council, a scientific body. "That was the best available
science from the top scientists in the country."
In his complaint, Kelly charged
the Bush administration with "dictating" how federal
scientists should interpret the research council report.
Legal
wrangling continues
The Garberville-based Environmental
Protection Information Center has asked Judge John Golden to
hold the Pacific Lumber Co. in contempt for continuing to log
in apparent defiance of an earlier court order.
The environmental group also
wants the judge to immediately halt logging pending the contempt
motion.
"We're concerned that since
this has drug on for so long that we need to see something right
now," said EPIC director Cynthia Elkins.
The request for contempt charges
is the latest development in the legal wrangling that began in
August, when Judge Golden issued a stay on Pacific Lumber logging
permits because the paperwork on which the permits were based
was either missing or incomplete.
The environmentalists interpreted
the stay to mean that the company must halt all logging. The
company has maintained that the stay applies only to permits
issued after the ruling.
Judge Golden recently rejected
a "motion to enforce" filed by environmentalists, saying
that his order has enough authority to enforce itself.
Still pending is a motion by
Pacific Lumber to remove the stay altogether on the grounds that
it is causing the company and the community undue economic hardship.
By its own account, the company
has been logging over 1 million board-feet of lumber (about 200
logging truck-loads) a day since the order came out.
The sea
takes a child
Four-year-old Peter Kautzmann
of Orick was washed out to sea last Thursday when a rogue wave
surprised him and his parents as they walked along the beach
at Dry Lagoon State Park after dusk on Thursday.
His parents managed to make
it back to dry land, but as of Tuesday the boy has yet to be
found.
The Coast Guard initiated a
search in conjunction with the Humboldt County Sheriff's Department,
but were unable to locate the boy, who is presumed dead.
"We did some extensive
searching with the helicopter, and unfortunately we were not
able to locate the boy," said Coast Guard group duty officer
Brent Verhulst, who oversaw the operation, in a phone interview.
The search has been called off
pending new information.
Attacking
sudden oak death
Humboldt County is teaming up
with 11 other counties in California to lobby in concert for
state and federal funding to fight sudden oak death.
Speaking before the Board of
Supervisors Tuesday, County Agriculture Commissioner John Falkenstrom
said he's concerned that recent rains could spread the disease.
Falkenstrom said he expects
to find more positive test results from samples taken from trees
in southern Humboldt County.
Originally found in oak trees
in Marin County, the disease has spread up and down the coast
and has reached Humboldt County. The announcement some weeks
ago that the disease had been detected in coast redwoods and
Douglas firs alarmed the timber industry. But some researchers
believe the risk to redwoods, one of the most commercially valuable
of all trees, is limited.
Coast live oak, black oak, tanoak,
madrone, bay laurel and buckeye -- all common in southern Humboldt
County -- are known to be infected by the canker-like pathogen.
Humboldt, Alameda, Contra Costa,
Marin, Mendocino, Monterey, Napa, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa
Cruz, Solano and Sonoma counties have all been struck by the
disease. So has a county in southern Oregon.
There is no historical evidence
of the disease in California. Sudden oak death was either introduced
to the state or it evolved here, said Yana Valachovic, forest
advisor with the University of California Agriculture and Natural
Resources cooperative education program in Eureka.
Rains arrive
Heavy surf and high winds slammed
ashore late last week as the first winter storm of the season
hit the Humboldt Bay region.
Power was out for hours north
of Eureka when a major transmission line went down last Thursday
evening. Power was restored in Arcata within a couple of hours,
but some homes in outlying areas of the county were without power
until the following night.
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