2017年3月1日星期三

Topics for 105-02-Week 2

Backlash over plan to park oil barges by NYC

BERGEN COUNTY, N.J. — Just north of the George Washington Bridge near the preserved banks of Palisades Interstate Park lies a 715-acre section of the Hudson River that could soon become a virtual parking lot for the scores of oil barges that travel the waterway.

The U.S. Coast Guard is evaluating a proposal that would allow up to 16 barges to drop anchor in the middle of the river between Alpine and Yonkers, N.Y., to accommodate an expected increase in the amount of oil hauled to and from Albany, N.Y.

It is the largest and southernmost of seven proposed anchorages on the Hudson, and has galvanized local officials, residents and environmental groups in New York. They say the plan is an environmental threat that will “re-industrialize” the river, make it unsightly and increase the risk of an oil spill. Supporters say it will make the river safer by having more places to anchor with increased traffic.

The issue, however, has gone largely unnoticed in New Jersey even though more people live along the state’s 26 miles of waterfront than ever before. Of the 10,212 comments sent to the Coast Guard about the project, few came from New Jersey.

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“It’s the forgotten river for so many here, but this proposal will affect New Jersey, no question,” said Gil Hawkins, president of the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association, who lives in Leonia. “When you go to the Palisades and look down and see these giant oil barges instead of small boats or eagles hunting fish, maybe then people will realize how important this issue is.”

Over the past five years, the Hudson River has become a major transportation route for crude oil, with millions of gallons transported from upstate New York to refineries, including Bayway in Linden. The crude originates from the oil boom in North Dakota and is shipped by rail to Albany, where New York officials have allowed the amount handled at the city's port to triple to 2.8 billion gallons annually.

While it is a boon for domestic oil production, it has raised concerns about the risk of a spill on the recovering waterway, though oil barges are required to have double hulls and there have been no major spills on the river. A tanker carrying crude ran aground near Albany in December 2012 and ruptured its outer hull but did not spill any of its 12 million gallons of oil.

All of that barge traffic has created a logjam on the river even though there are already anchorages near Yonkers. The Maritime Association of the Port of New York/New Jersey, a coalition of 25 tug, barge and oil companies, submitted a proposal for additional anchorages last year to the U.S. Coast Guard’s district office in Boston.

The association says the anchorage system on the Hudson needs to be updated to meet the needs of “larger size and higher volumes” of barges. It says tugboats and barges make up more than 10 times the amount of other ship traffic on the Hudson and will only grow after Congress last year lifted a 40-year-old ban on exporting domestic oil.

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“Having the ability to safely anchor vessels when circumstances demand it protects the waterway, it doesn’t threaten it,” wrote executives of the United Sandy Hook Pilots’ Benevolent Association, which represents 74 pilots.

But the majority of comments came from opponents, including state lawmakers, town councils, county officials and environmental groups in New York. Many former industrial towns in the lower Hudson have transformed themselves into bedroom communities using the river as an attraction for housing, restaurants and parks.

The comment period closed in December but public meetings may soon be scheduled. The Coast Guard said they are still reviewing the comments, the number of which caught officials by surprise. If approved, anchorages wouldn’t go in until next year at the earliest, said Chief Warrant Officer Allyson Conroy, spokeswoman for the Coast Guard’s New York office.

“We have to go through 10,000 comments,” Conroy said. “That’s not an easy task and we don’t want to rush the process.”

A review of a database containing the comments did not find any New Jersey lawmaker or environmental official weighing in on the issue. The only New Jersey-based advocacy group to submit comments is the state chapter of the Sierra Club, which said the risk of a spill would be a “tragedy threatening millions of people along the river.”

Over the past three decades, New Jersey’s side of the river has seen a residential boom with mostly high-priced condominiums, townhouses and apartment buildings being built on former factories and shipyards. The towns that make up that waterfront — Fort Lee, Edgewater, North Bergen, Guttenberg, West New York, Weehawken, Hoboken and Jersey City — have seen a population increase of more than 90,000 people from 1990 to 2015, according to the latest census data.

The “Yonkers Extension Anchorage Ground” would span 19,200 feet from Alpine in the south to just across the state line in the north. The barges would be anchored off the 117-year-old Palisades Interstate Park, whose commission told the Coast Guard that they oppose the plan.

Park officials expressed concern that the barges would be an environmental risk parked next to natural and historic landmarks. They said it would impact recreational boating from the park’s marinas in Englewood and Alpine. “We believe these anchorages will negatively impact … our mission to protect the resources we hold in public trust,” James Hall, the commission’s executive director, wrote to the Coast Guard.

Supporters say the anchorages would not be the risk that some are making them out to be, saying the anchorages are not de facto parking lots.

We “understand many local communities on the Hudson have made investments to their shoreside infrastructure to improve the quality of life for their residents,” wrote Brian W. Vahey of the American Waterways Operators. “Towing-vessel operators recognize that the Hudson River is a shared waterway, and they conduct their business in a way that is respectful of other stakeholders."

There will likely be public meetings on the issue scheduled soon, Conroy said.

Hawkins hopes it will attract more attention from New Jersey. The Hudson has had several environmental victories over the last few years from a massive cleanup of toxic PCBs to the shelving of a proposed desalination plant in Rockland County.

“It never ceases to amaze me that when one thing gets straightened out another thing comes along,” Hawkins said. “These people are pushing the limits of a river. To demean a natural heritage river for a parking lot for barges, you might as well put garbage scows on it.”

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/nation-now/2017/02/26/backlash-over-plan-park-oil-barges-nyc/98459252/

Structure of the Lead:

WHO-not given

WHAT-An oil barge in the background on the Hudson River, off the New Jersey riverfront.

WHERE-Hudson River

WHEN- 02/15/2017

WHY-not given

HOW-Among those objecting to the proposal is the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, which is concerned about an increase risk of oil spills, more ship traffic and noise and light pollution. The barges would be anchored next to the park in Alpine.

keywords:

Palisades 木柵
Interstate 洲際
accommodate 容納
anchorages 停泊
waterfront 海濱
Congress 國會
Extension 延期
Operators 操作員
stakeholders 利益相關者
heritage 遺產

Topics for 105-02-Week 1

France’s ‘Burkini’ Bans Are About More Than Religion or Clothing

WASHINGTON — There is something inherently head-spinning about the so-called burkini bans that are popping up in coastal France. The obviousness of the contradiction — imposing rules on what women can wear on the grounds that it’s wrong for women to have to obey rules about what women can wear — makes it clear that there must be something deeper going on.

“Burkinis” are, essentially, full-body swimsuits that comply with Islamic modesty standards, and on Wednesday, Prime Minister Manuel Valls of France waded into the raging debate over the bans in some of the country’s beach towns, denouncing the rarely seen garb as part of the “enslavement of women.”

This, of course, is not really about swimwear. Social scientists say it is also not primarily about protecting Muslim women from patriarchy, but about protecting France’s non-Muslim majority from having to confront a changing world: one that requires them to widen their sense of identity when many would prefer to keep it as it was.

“These sorts of statements are a way to police what is French and what is not French,” said Terrence G. Peterson, a professor at Florida International University who studies France’s relationship with Muslim immigrants and the Muslim world.

While this battle over identity is rising now in the wake of terrorist attacks, it has been raging in one form or another in French society for decades, Professor Peterson said. What seems to be a struggle over the narrow issue of Islamic dress is really about what it means to be French.

During France’s colonial era, when it controlled vast Muslim regions, the veil became a “hypercharged symbol,” Professor Peterson said. Veiling was treated as a symbol of Muslims’ backwardness, and Frenchwomen’s more flexible standards of dress were seen as a sign of French cultural superiority, views that helped to justify colonialism.

Colonialism set France up for the identity crisis it is experiencing today by ingraining a sense of French national identity as distinct from and superior to Muslim identities — and, at the same time, holding out the promise of opportunity to colonized Muslims, who began migrating in large numbers to France. The resulting clash has often played out in debates over clothing.

The veil remained a potent symbol of difference as colonialism collapsed after World War II and Muslims from colonized countries flocked to France. But now, that difference was within a country trying to sort out its own postcolonial identity.

Over generations, the veil became more common among France’s Muslims, as a religious practice and, perhaps, as a symbol of their distinct cultural heritage. It was a visible sign of the way that France itself, as well as its role in the world, was changing.

As a result, the veil became a symbol not just of religious difference, but of the fact that people of French descent no longer enjoyed exclusive dominance over French identity. France had become a multicultural and multiethnic nation, where traditions meant very different things to different people.

The colonial-era symbolism of the veil as a sign of Muslim inferiority made it a convenient focus for arguments that the “traditional” French identity should remain not only the dominant but also the sole cultural identity in France.

Burkinis may seem frightening because they are seen as threatening that particular type of French identity by expressing an alternative form of identity — in this case, as Muslims. Many French, rather than believing that those two identities can coexist, perceive them as necessarily competitive.

There is even a pejorative French word for the introduction of these alternate identities, “communitarianism,” the growth of which is seen as a national crisis.

Muslim clothing items such as the veil or burkini have become symbols of the fact that French national identity is no longer the sole domain of the demographic groups that lived there for centuries. Rules like this summer’s burkini bans are meant to prevent the widening of French identity by forcing French Muslims not only to assimilate, but also to adopt the narrower, rigid identity.

This is a method that France has been using for decades, to repeated failure.

John Bowen, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, said France tended to experiment with such restrictions at times when it was struggling with both domestic and international tensions relating to Muslims and the Muslim world.

This began in 1989 with the so-called affaire du foulard (“affair of the scarf”), in which three French schoolgirls were suspended for refusing to remove their head coverings. Ostensibly, this was because the scarves were visible religious symbols and thus ran afoul of the French rule of laïcité, or secularism. But laïcité had been on the books since 1905, with head scarves nonetheless by and large permitted.

What changed, Professor Bowen wrote in a book on the subject, were events elsewhere in the world that made Islam seem like a particularly pernicious force. In 1989, Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie. Around the same time, some Algerians formed the Islamic Salvation Front, a hard-line Islamist party and later insurgency.

Banning head scarves from French schools became a way to deal with the anxiety arising from those domestic and foreign events, and to stake a claim to protecting French values.

Head scarves in schools returned to the national spotlight in 1993 and 1994, as the French authorities worried that young men from Algerian immigrant families would join the Islamist insurgency in Algeria. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, veils were once again a focal point for fears of Muslim communities that were isolated from mainstream French society and culture.

And this summer, France is reeling from a series of deadly terrorist attacks, and is increasingly concerned about young French Muslims’ traveling to Syria to join the Islamic State or other jihadist groups. Once again, some in France view the drive for assimilation as a national security issue.

The veil is an especially potent symbol of anxiety over assimilation because wearing it is a choice. Whereas fixed characteristics like race or skin color do not imply any judgment on French culture or values, clothing implies a decision to be different — to prioritize one’s religious or cultural identity over that of one’s adopted country.

Garment bans are meant, in effect, to pressure French Muslims to disregard any sense of communitarian identity and adopt the narrowly French identity that predates their arrival. But trying to force assimilation can have the opposite effect: telling French Muslims that they cannot hold French and Muslim identities simultaneously, forcing them to choose, and thus excluding them from the national identity rather than inviting them to contribute to it.

France does have another choice: It could widen its national identity to include French Muslims as they are. This may feel scary to many French, more like giving up a comfortable “traditional” identity than gaining a new dimension to it. In the absence of accepting this change, there is a desire to pressure French Muslims to solve the identity crisis, but decades of this have brought little progress — and significant tension.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/19/world/europe/frances-burkini-bans-are-about-more-than-religion-or-clothing.html

Structure of the Lead:

WHO-Manuel Valls

WHAT-A woman wearing a “burkini,” a full-body swimsuit designed for Muslims, at a Morocco beach.

WHERE- Frence

WHEN-AUG,18,2016

WHY-France’s ‘Burkini’ Bans Are About More Than Religion or Clothing

HOW-noy given