February 2008 Archives

A mountain yellow-legged frog from the San Jacinto Mountains is among several being raised at a San Diego Zoo research facility in Escondido to help the endangered amphibians survive. (The Press-Enterprise/Frank Bellino)

In honor of Leap Day, we're talking frogs, at least a little bit for this out and about posting.

And you can see some of the rarest ones at the Living Desert in Palm Desert, where a new amphibians exhibit opened in November.

But this weekend, which is bound to be another nice one, is about learning everything from road cycling, to bird-watching to water-wise gardening. And most of the events are free.

On Saturday morning, you can learn the basics of road cycling at the REI in Rancho Cucamonga.

And on Sunday, beginning bird walk techniques will be taught by the local Audubon chapter along the Santa Ana River at the Hidden Valley Wildlife Area. The goal of the slow-paced event is to teach participants enough basic birding techniques and identification skills to feel comfortable birding on your own or joining the group for longer trips throughout the year.

Also on Sunday, the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden will celebrate Arbor Day, which is officially on March 7. They say it's a chance to learn about the rich heritage of native tree species. You can even get a tree passport and migrate through a variety of learning activities, games and craft projects.

And on Tuesday night, Pam Pavela will talk about water-wise gardening at the Sierra Club's monthly meeting in Redlands. The meeting is open to anyone. Pavela is a water conservation specialist for Western Municipal Water District, where a demonstration garden gives folks an idea of the kind of plants that use less water.

Emperor penguins as shown in the documentary film "March of the Penguins." (Hallmark Channel)

A conservation group, including a lawyer who lives in the Inland region, filed suit against the Bush administration for missing a deadline this week to decide whether to consider protecting 10 penguin species threatened by climate change.

The news comes as Dale Hall, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service — which would make a decision on the penguins — is set to testify today to a House Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies on another polar animal: the polar bear.

The same group, the Center for Biological Diversity, has been pushing for federal protection of the polar bear, saying climate change is melting their sea ice habitat. A decision on that one is expected any day now, said Kassie Siegel, an attorney for the group who lives in Joshua Tree.

As for the penguins, Siegel said time is running out for them as abnormally warm ocean temperatures and diminished sea ice is decreasing the amount of food for them. Her group first filed a scientific petition in November 2006, and a decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is now more than two months overdue, she said.

So far, the Galapagos penguin that lives off Ecuador is the only penguin species currently listed under the Endangered Species Act, Siegel said.

I put a call into some folks at the wildlife agency in Washington, D.C., and will update this when I hear back from them.

Merry Schroeder, 70, of Sante Fe, New Mexico, flies over the Coachella Valley after viewing proposed wilderness areas in the surrounding mountains. (The Press-Enterprise/Jennifer Bowles)

You've probably heard about Doctors Without Borders, and maybe even Angel Flight, professional doctors and pilots who donate their services to help the poor with medical issues. But Lighthawk was a new one even for me.

Turns out there's a group of pilots in the country who volunteer their time, planes and gas to run flights over lands at risk of mining, logging or urban sprawl. With headquarters in Wyoming, they take politicians, environmental groups and media folks like me on bird's eye tours.

"I feel passionate about it," said Merry Schroeder, a pilot who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and has been flying for Lighthawk since 1987. "You can see things from the air you can't see any other way."

Spry at 70, Schroeder was taking local politicians and other folks out of the Palm Springs International Airport this week to see nearby terrain that is proposed as federal wilderness in a bill sponsored by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and U.S. Rep. Mary Bono Mack, R-Palm Springs. You can find a map and details about the proposed wilderness areas here .

As for Schroeder, she's flown over the Rio Grande and down to the Mexican Border for the Smithsonian Museum to monitor snow geese. Nearly half of the flights by Lighthawk are over Central America, she said. In places like Belize and Costa Rica, they fly over rain forest and the coast, help monitor endangered sea turtles and other species and look for intrusions into protected parks, said Schroeder's affable husband, John, 71. He calls himself her ground crew.

How did Schroeder get involved? As a flight instructor and commercial pilot, she's had the opportunity to see damage wrought to the ground from up above. She recalled the first time she noticed what she called environmental devastation.

"I looked down and saw a riperian area that was devastated by overgrazing," she said.

Los Angeles International Airport. (Associated Press/Ric Francis)

Just how much air pollution is generated by a plane taking off and landing and taking off again at one of the nation's most busy airports? Plus add in all those tourist-carrying shuttles belching exhaust and the on-the-ground equipment aimed at making sure the runway traffic goes smoothly.

Those questions will be answered by a first-of-its-kind study in the nation that will be launched this summer. It will look at toxic sources of pollution generated by operations at Los Angeles International Airport and the impact on nearby communities. I bring this to your attention not just because most of us take flights out of LAX, but a study like this may reveal similar knowledge about airports and cargo ports here in the I.E.

The Board of Airport Commissioners that governs LAX and Ontario International Airport voted Monday to fund the $2.15 million study at LAX and to hire an independent expert, Jacobs Consultancy.

A draft environmental impact report for the LAX master plan had concluded that “the health effects associated with these pollutants, particularly chronic respiratory diseases such as asthma, have been found to be prevalent among certain minority populations who may also have less access to healthcare.”

Laurie Kaye, a policy analyst for Environmental Defense and a member of the LAX Coalition for Economic, Environmental and Educational Justice, said the study will provide "vitally important data to protect children who live, play and attend school near LAX."

Supporters said an elementary school sits directly beneath the flight path and a lack of airport mitigation funding over the past decade has left children sitting in classrooms with windows not strong enough to protect them from the noise and air pollution.

A group touring the Colorado River stops off at a dam that creates Copper Basin, one of the main reservoirs on the aqueduct system. (The Press-Enterprise/Jennifer Bowles)

We first reported that an environmental catastrophe was in the making a little more than a year ago when quagga mussels had invaded the Colorado River Aqueduct. Today, the tiny but destructive mollusks have made it all the way to Lake Mathews near Riverside and Lake Skinner near Temecula. Both lakes are connected to the aqueduct system.

Here, pictured to the right, is Copper Basin, one of the reservoirs near the Colorado River that holds water that goes to urbanized areas of Southern California. As I took my tour with several folks this past Friday and Saturday, we sat on a barge that waded through the scenic reservoir. One of the maintenance mechanics told me quaggas are everywhere, and that in fact they were clinging to the barge itself.

Meanwhile, tanks of chlorine were on the side of the reservoir in a staging area. The aqueduct will be shut down next month for maintenance and for a quagga search-and-destroy mission. They are the same mussels that, along with their cousins, the zebra mussels, have caused billions of dollars of damage in the Great Lakes. The size of a thumbnail, the mussels clog water pipes, change the ecosystems of the lake and require constant removal.

If you have a boat and use any of the Colorado River lakes, check out this link that explains how to help prevent the further spread of the quaggas.

Along for the two-day tour hosted by Metropolitan Water District and Eastern Municipal Water District were two Riverside County Planning Commissioners, John Roth and John Petty; along with a representative of the Building Industry Association; Randy Record, a San Jacinto farmer and Metropolitan board member; and several folks from the Perris and Hemet area.

A great egret flies along the Prado Wetlands near Corona earlier this month. (The Press-Enterprise/Carrie Rosema)

While I'm dilly-dallying along the Colorado River this weekend checking out one of the Inland region's major sources of water, the weekend should be a good one for getting out and about in between possible showers here and there.

With the wildflower season under way, reports are coming in that the hot spots in our region are between Twentynine Palms and Amboy, and the southern part of Joshua Tree National Park. And, the reports say, the sand verbena is showing shades of purple in the Coachella Valley.

Have you ever gone hiking and seen footprints in the dirt and wondered which animal made them? On Sunday at the San Bernardino County Museum, you can learn just that as part of a family fun day.

And the local Audubon chapter is sponsoring a bird-watching trip Sunday at the San Jacinto Wildlife Area, with much ado about waterfowl and birds of prey.

I did my first open-ocean, mile-long swim off beautiful La Jolla last fall and I do the occasional spinning classes at the gym, but I doubt I could do a triathlon. Running is just not my thing any more. But I thought some of you might be interested that the REI in Rancho Cucamonga is hosting a free event Monday night when you can learn about the basics of triathlon training for those with the ambition.

And for your calendar, I noticed the San Gorgonio Wilderness Association is hosting the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour at the University of Redlands towards the end of March. But tickets are available now for the event, which features films about mountain culture and the environment. Click the above link for more information.

If you want to know more about great egrets, as pictured here, here's a link with some interesting tidbits.

And if you catch the arrivals at the Academy Awards this Sunday evening, there will be some celebrity-filled, environmentally friendly vehicles pulling up to the red carpet. They'll include GMC Yukon Hybrid, the zero-gas and zero-emissions Chevy Equinox Fuel Cell and the FlexFuel E85 ethanol-compatible GMC Yukon. It's a Hollywood trend. Some of the same cars were at the Grammys earlier this month.

Water flows though the Colorado River Aqueduct in the Southern California desert in this undated photo.

You've most likely heard the term carbon footprint. But what about water footprint?

In these times of drought, I thought I'd let you know about a Web site where you can find out how your water use stacks up against the average American. That number, by the way, is 1,189.3 gallons per day. So I used the H2O calculator on the Web site to find out my own water use and you might be surprised what is taken into consideration.

Not only does it ask the length of your showers, how you wash dishes, how many loads of laundry you do per week, it also asks if you are a vegetarian. Turns out if you eat meat and dairy foods, you indirectly consume over 1,000 gallons of water each day.

It's eye-opening too, because it takes into account things you might not associated with water. For instance, it asks how much plastic you recycle because it takes 24 gallons of water to make a single pound of plastic, and over a hundred gallons to make a pound of cotton.

At the end, it suggests ways to cut down your water use. Of course, getting the biggest bang for your buck in terms of saving water is outside. Watering your garden and your lawns can account for up to 60 to 80 percent of a home's total use.

I bring up the issue of water because I'll be embarking tomorrow on a two-day tour of the Colorado River Aqueduct and other facilities along the waterway that bring the life-sustaining resource to the Inland region. The river is in the grips of an eight-year drought, though water officials tell me this year the snowpack is better than it has been in more than a decade.

One of the biggest questions I get from folks is why doesn't anyone talk about the impact of population growth on the environment, and now of course, climate change.

Just recently, a reader in Sun City wrote me to ask how a ban on new lawns isn't already in effect because Riverside County is only going to get bigger as far as population is concerned. He was responding to a story about worsening water supplies.

But today, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. is hosting a two-hour symposium on Population and Climate Change: Relationships, Research and Responses that will be Web cast starting around 9 a.m. Because 76 million people are added to the planet each year, according to the center, it is vital to understand the impact on climate change.

You can read a paper here that talks about how birth control programs can be inexpensive and should be part of a long-term strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by preventing unintended pregnancies.

So why is the subject taboo?

I posed the question to Marilyn Hempel of Redlands, who since 1994 has published a quarterly news journal, the Population Press, about population and the environment.

"I think partially it's because Americans have an exaggerated sense of personal freedom. So the choice of having children is extremely personal and Americans get very uncomfortable when people try to tell them what they can and can't do."

Hempel says one just has to look at our air pollution, traffic congestion, lack of open space in Southern California to know what population growth does to an area. She says the United States is not only the fastest-growing industrialized nation but the most wealthy and most consumptive. And that, she said, will lead to more petroleum products being used and therefore add to the amount of greenhouse gas emissions.

"Every added American is a burden on the planet," she said. "It's sad but it's true."

Pretty strong statement - what do you think?

Ice cream happens to be one of my favorite subjects and when I heard that Haagen-Dazs was coming out with a new flavor this week and launching a campaign to help the environment, I thought I would share the news.

The Oakland-based ice cream company reached into its vintage recipe box to resurrect the new flavor, Vanilla Honey Bee. As you may guess, the new flavor is part of an effort to help bring attention to the plight of the honey bees.

Haagen-Dazs is giving $250,000 to UC Davis' Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility and Pennsylvania State University for research into Colony Collapse Disorder and sustainable pollination. More than 25 percent of the Western honey bee population has vanished and insect scientists still don't completely understand why.

Turns out, honey bees pollinate key ingredients in nearly 40 percent of all Haagen-Dazs ice creams flavors, including strawberry, raspberry and one of my favorites, vanilla swiss almond.

"This actually is the first time we've ever adopted a cause," Diane McIntyre, public relations manager for Haagen-Dazs, told me on the telephone. "We feel really strongly about this. We're dedicated to pure ingredients. And if these ingredients weren't available, we wouldn't be able to make some of our flavors."

McIntyre said a new Web site will be launched today, www.helpthehoneybees.com as part of a campaign to bring the issue to people's attention.

The nameplate for a Ford Escape hybrid.

It's President's Day, so maybe the federal holiday will make you think about another upcoming federal deadline: April 15th.

And going green can come in handy that day. It isn't just good for the environment, come tax season, it works for your pocketbook too. Check out a list of breaks you might be eligible for.

I don't know about you but I have certainly noticed a heck of a lot more hybrid cars on the roads. You can get up to $3,000 in tax credits if you bought a Ford Escape SUV or a Mercury Mariner SUV last year.

Also there are breaks for saving energy in your home. If you upgraded your home's insulation, windows, doors, metal roof, water heater, or heating or cooling system last year, you may get a credit of up to $500 off your taxes. And if you're considering making some of these changes to your home, check out the chart on this link to see what you'll save in cash and carbon dioxide emissions.

Also, donations to qualified non-profit groups, such as those dedicated to educational or scientific purposes or the prevention of cruelty to animals, are tax deductible.

(Bob Killen)

With this week's whacky weather _ from almost balmy to cold, gusty and even snow _ this weekend should be a return to perfect conditions for getting out and about.

This Saturday, a daylong wildflower celebration is taking place at the visitors center of the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument. On tap are photography and landscape workshops, guided hikes and more. Sand verbena, Arizona lupine, chuparosa, desert dandelion, desert sunflowers should be blooming, organizers say.

If you're out hiking or exploring the Mojave Desert, the Kelso Depot Visitors Center at the Mojave National Preserve is hosting a fine art photography exhibit starting Saturday and running through May 19th. The Back to Loneliness collection of photographic prints by Bob Killen focuses on the preserve's Ivanpah Mountains. You can see an example of his work to the right.

On Saturday, you can also catch a class on wildflower and macro photography hosted by the REI in Rancho Cucamonga. Click here for details.

As for me, I'm going to hit the slopes. Here's the latest snow report from the resort at the top o' the San Berdos.

On Sunday, the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Gardens in Claremont s hosting its Winter Bird Festival. That happens to coincide with the 11th annual Great Backyard Bird Count, which runs from today through Tuesday. Anyone can count birds wherever they are and enter their tallies online at www.birdcount.org. The count is led by Audubon and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

There's a junior ranger essay contest sponsored by the National Park Service; and by Monday you can nominate a friend or groups to be honored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for working to protect public health and the environment.

On Tuesday, the public is invited to hear local historian and hiking guide author John Robinson speak at the Sierra Club’s Los Serranos Group meeting in Upland. Tuesday’s subject will be his most recent book, “Gateways to Southern California Indian Footpaths, Horse Trails, Wagon Roads, Railroads and Highways."

Humpback whales near Point Carolus at the mouth of Glacier Bay, Alaska. (AP Photo)

If you're a humpback whale, that would be 5,000 miles. Kind of reminds of that old Proclaimers song.

Anyhow, that's the distance the whales travel from the poles to the steamy waters of their tropical breeding grounds near Hawaii, Australia, Fiji, and other South Pacific islands.

And that is the longest migration of any mammal, according to an article in this month's Smithsonian Magazine.

Humpbacks are among the world's largest creatures, weighing as much as 50 tons and growing as long as 50 feet.

In a competitive pod, the article by Virginia Morell says, "a female is accompanied by males vying to mate with her. The contests can be violent — the suitors often attack each other underwater — and the pod grows or shrinks as the melee attracts newcomers and drives others away."

"We watch the whales surface and spout, their black backs arching above the waves almost in unison as they breathe and dive. They're packed tightly together, like a team of motorcycle toughs, and they churn the water white and foamy. Sometimes a male surges ahead, breaking high above the waves to reveal its long, winglike pectoral fins.

"It's his way of showing her — and his competitors — his energy and strength," adds researcher Lou Herman. "He's likely to be the one swimming the closest to her, too, and guarding her, keeping the other males away."

"We think the females choose a particular male," says Herman, "but we don't know that for certain, and we don't know what male attributes the females prefer."

Hmmmm! Interesting. But a nice tale from the natural world on Valentine's Day. Click the above link to read the entire story.

Following the nationwide "teach-in" on climate change on Jan. 31, high school and college students across the country voted on the best ways to combat the warming trend. And the winners were announced today as the founder of the event, Focus the Nation, speaks tonight here in the Inland region.

Eban Goodstein, an economics professor at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon pictured here, will be speaking at 6:30 p.m. at UC Riverside in a talk that is free and open to the public. Click here for details.

The top response to the online poll offered by Focus the Nation was to invest in clean energy. That got 12.95 percent of the vote, barely edging out what they termed "cleaner cars, California-style." What was interesting is that capping carbon dioxide emissions, taxing global warming pollution and no new coal plants with out "capture and sequestration" got fewer votes.

As for Goodstein, you can read a recent Time article about him and why he thinks it's important for students to get involved.

Goodstein said in another article that he was alarmed that his 16- and 19-year-old daughters were growing up amid an environment that seemed to be deteriorating.

"The sense of urgency kept getting ramped up," Goodstein said. "Americans get that global warming is real, but very few people recognize the critical nature of the decisions that'll be made in the next few years."

Goodstein said that Focus the Nation is less about individual "green" habits than it is about a national push to pass laws stemming fossil fuel use and about encouraging investment in energy-saving technology.

King penguins raise their young on Possession Island in the Crozet Archipelago in the Indian Ocean near Antarctica. (Bloomberg News)

Another alarming report about penguins and global warming, and this one from French scientists.

King penguins declined in the 19th century when they were hunted by sailors who used their fat as stove oil. They live in colonies on the Crozet Archipelago, French islands more than 1,000 miles north of Antarctica.

Since then, king penguins have rebounded to about 2 million breeding pairs, said Yvon Le Maho, a physiologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research and lead author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

But, the report said, they could be wiped out in the coming decades if the surface temperature of the Southern Ocean rises 0.47 degrees Fahrenheit. And that is even below the projected rise of of 0.72 degrees over the next 20 years.

Essentially, the problem is that the penguin's main diet, small fish and squid, depends on krill. Krill, which are tiny crustaceans, are extremely sensitive to temperature rise. The French scientists found that warmer temperatures led to fewer adult penguins surviving to return to the colony to raise their young. Because of that, chick mortality rose by as much as 50 percent.

If you remember, two Inland attorneys, including Kassie Siegel, from Joshua Tree were among the three folks who petitioned the U.S. government to list 10 penguin species on the nation's endangered species list due to global warming concerns.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last summer found listing “may be warranted” for 10 of the 12 species. The king penguin is not among those species so I put a call into Siegel this morning to see if this report would lead to the group seeking protection for them as well.

Siegel, though, has been busy testifying before Congress on the polar bear issue, and whether the Arctic mammals should be protected as a species threatened with extinction due to climate change. That announcement is expected any day now.

Stay tuned on that one.

Water flows down the rocks at Arlington Falls on the border between Riverside and Corona. (The Press-Enterprise/Silvia Flores)

Forget the Grammys, the Inland region is having its own awards ceremony tonight and no one less than the Terminator is giving the keynote speech.

Gov. Schwarzenegger will be in Riverside tonight to give a keynote speech at dinner to raise funds from one of the Inland region's best-known conservation groups, the Riverside Land Conservancy. Awards will be given out to Riverside County Supervisor Marion Ashley, Jane Block, one of the region's veteran environmentalists and a conservancy board member; and Ali Sahabi, head of SE Corp., who built the Dos Lagos development in south Corona and started the Green Institute for Village Empowerment known as GIVE.

The evening, however, is sponsored by a lesser-known group known as the Inland Empire Waterkeeper. You can read the story about the group here, and check out a video that shows an unusual site near Riverside, an actual waterfall that the Waterkeeper and others are hoping to preserve.

There's an interesting connection here, since the group is affiliated with the national Waterkeeper Alliance, whose chairman is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the cousin of the governor's wife, Maria Shriver.

Climbers make their way to the top of Intersection Rock in the Hidden Valley area of Joshua Tree National Park on Thursday. (The Press-Enterprise/Ramon Mena Owens)

It's going to be a fantastic weekend all around to get out and about in the deserts and mountains with great weather on tap.

In the mountains, you can help the San Bernardino National Forest count bald eagles at many of our lakes. And further down the road, the forest and California Department of Fish and Game among others are looking now for volunteers for a bighorn sheep survey in the San Gabriel Mountains. But you need to sign up by Feb. 15.

That mountain range once held an estimated 740 bighorn sheep, which made the San Gabriel population the largest population of desert bighorn sheep in California, according to state and federal biologists. The numbers declined over 80 percent through the 1980’s but appear to be on the increase, with recent estimates of about 300 bighorn sheep. Call the Lytle Creek Ranger Station at 909-382-2851 no later than next Friday, to sign up and receive a volunteer packet.

And this from one of our local fly fisherman, Bob Kreider out in Banning. The Fisheries Resource Volunteer Corps is looking for volunteers to remove trash from streams in the San Bernardino and Angeles national forests, do aquatic insect studies, help with preservation efforts and more. You can check how to volunteer by clicking here.

And if you're down in Corona shopping at The Promenade Shops at Dos Lagos on Saturday afternoon, you can catch children and teens from the Christian Arts and Theatre performing "Wonderful World." The 40-minute environmentally themed skit is part of a series of plays at the outdoor ampitheatre that are free and open to the public.

Later on in the week, a book discussion on Edward O. Wilson's "The Future of Life," will be held at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the San Bernardino County Museum. And it's free. The book by the Pulitzer Prize winner takes a look at the uncertainty of Earth’s biodiversity, but gives an upbeat road map for how people can conserve it. Participants should bring their own copies of the book, they won't be for sale at the museum.

And if you're out and about at one of our state parks, the California State Parks Foundation recently launched a free statewide photo contest designed to generate enthusiasm about California’s 278 state parks. It's a year-long contest with monthly winners and a grand prize. You can check out some of the recent entries here. Some of them are stunning!

A surfer leaves the water at Trestles surf beach in San Clemente on Feb. 1. (Associated Press/Chris Carlson)

You may have read or heard that the California Coastal Commission yesterday rejected plans to build a six-lane toll road through San Onofre State Beach. It's known for a famous surf spot called Trestles and for a popular preserve.

But you may not know one of the stories behind the story.

Taking off from the YouTube presidential debate last summer, surfers, campers and environmentalists used the format to voice opposition to the tollway in the last few months. In all, nearly 600 videos were produced. You can watch some of the videos here.

And there are some that look almost professionally produced like this one.

Commission members were given the links to the videos in the weeks leading up to the vote, said Bill Bradley, a spokesman for the Save San Onofre Coalition. The coalition includes Defenders of Wildlife, Surfrider Foundation, the Sierra Club and the California State Parks Foundation.

The vote by the commission was a major setback for the Transportation Corridor Agencies, which sought the extension of the 241 toll road as an alternative to Interstate 5. One official said the vote wasn't necessarily the end of the project.

But I have to wonder if cyberspace videos are a new and effective tool for environmental groups to build momentum for their cause. What do you think and has anyone ever used YouTube for a cause here in the I.E.?

Sometimes when there are big news events (Super Tuesday, deadly storms, etc.), important stories get left out of the spotlight. But this one bears mentioning.

A study published online this week in the journal Pediatrics reports that infants and toddlers exposed to baby lotions, powders and shampoos carry high concentrations of hormone-altering chemicals in their bodies that might have reproductive effects.

Phthalates are man-made chemicals and of increasing public importance because of potential toxic effects to the developing endocrine and reproductive systems, the study said. They are used in the manufacturing of a wide variety of industrial and common household products. The chemicals are found in plastic products such as children's toys, lubricants, infant care products, chemical stabilizers in cosmetics, and personal care products.

Some scientists theorize such changes in hormones could lead to fertility problems and male reproductive disorders, according to this newspaper article. You can also see what cosmetics industry officials said about the study.

So where does that leave parents I wondered?

Generally speaking phthalates in lotions and powders are used to help retain scents and help increase absorption. So a good rule of thumb is to use unscented products, or to use personal care products on babies only if really necessary. Also, you can look for products that actually say 'phthalate free'. That's according to the study's author, Dr. Sheela Sathyanarayana, assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington.

Desert bighorn sheep are seen climbing the Marble Mountains in the Mojave National Preserve in eastern San Bernardino County. (Associated Press)

Not to keep harping on climate change ... but I always like to keep you apprised of things going on in the I.E. And this one looks promising.

On Friday, the Mojave Desert Land Trust and Defenders of Wildlife are hosting the first-ever conference on climate change and the California deserts. They say they wanted to have such a symposium because the deserts could be the region's first area to feel the impacts from a warming planet. It will be held in Joshua Tree, and the hosts are asking for a $5 donation, with light food provided.

Issues to be tackled include climate change and its effects on water, wildlife and how local communities can help solve the problem through sustainable practices.

One of the speakers will be John Wehausen. He's an associate research scientist at the University of California White Mountains Research Station in Bishop. Having studied desert bighorn sheep for years, Wehausen will talk about the need to develop long-term databases for wildlife to understand how to best protect the animals from a warming planet.

Robert Wilkinson will talk about the impact of climate change on water, always a precious resource but even more so in the desert. Wilkinson is an adjunct instructor for water policy at the UC Santa Barbara Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management.

And Micah Lang from the U.S. office of Local Governments for Sustainability, will introduce folks to the group that assists cities in adopting policies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve air quality.

Sounds interesting!

And on a related topic, don't forget about Lester Brown's talk tonight in Riverside.

This election year is sure to be interesting no matter which party you are affiliated with. And with Super Tuesday happening tomorrow, I thought I'd let you know of a survey you can take that matches you up with the presidential candidate who holds the most similar views as you do. That's if you still have some uncertainty.

A friend of mine in the newsroom took it and was surprised by the result; I did the same, and also was somewhat surprised and it got me thinking .... So it's through American Public Media' Web site. Click here to see the survey.

It's wide-ranging on subjects but includes two items related to the environment.
_Do you favor or oppose federal regulation of greenhouse gases?
_Do you support federal assistance for the production of ethanol and/or biofuel as an alternative to oil?
The only problem is you have to answer yes or no. There's no room for "I don't know."

Also if climate change is an overriding issue for you, be sure to check out the California League of Conservation Voters Web site if you want to see the candidates views on the issue.

Also for more local coverage, be sure to check out the Press-Enterprise's political page.

Either way, cast your vote tomorrow!

Frank Moore casts his line along the fly-fishing only section of the North Umpqua River near Steamboat, Ore. (Associated Press/Jeff Barnard)

It should be a great weekend all around the mountains and deserts, with plenty to do out and about in the I.E.

And you don't have to go to Montana to find well-experienced fly fishermen to learn the craft. Looks like the Deep Creek Fly Fishers are starting up their 2008 classes in Riverside Saturday at Fairmont Park with a fly-tying class. They ask only for a $5 donation to defray costs. Click here for details.

And the snow-capped mountains are still beckoning skiers and boarders. Check out this ski resort's snow report for an idea of what's happening on the slopes.

Althought tonight's Starry Safaris at the Living Desert is already booked, they have openings next weekend. You can check here for future dates for the fun family adventure.</