buried treasure: the new global gold rush
A Survival Guide for the Planet • published by the natural resources defense council
today’s toxic special HOW THE FDA FAILS TO PROTECT THE FOOD WE EAT FRESH FRUIT SALAD Cantaloupes from a Colorado farm leave 29 dead
HEALTHY VEGGIES One-third of all produce contains pesticide residues
CRUNCHY COOKIES Mercury is discovered in high-fructose corn syrup YUMMY PEANUT BUTTER Salmonella outbreaks in 2008 and 2009 sicken hundreds, kill nine
winter 2012 /2013 w w w.one arth.org
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contents
Onearth magazine
volume 34 number 4 winter 2012/2013
FE ATU RES
35 Air Apparent by Susan Freinkel
d e pa r t m ents cover story
28
What we know about rising
There’s only one thing that can give Coloradans a true Rocky Mountain High: snow.
concentrations of atmospheric CO2 is largely due to Dave
17 FRONTLINES
Keeling. Now his son Ralph is
A new, natural weapon in our unending war with insects. Plus, one man’s dangerous crusade in pot-growing country.
taking our understanding of climate change to the next level.
Q&A Ted Genoways interviews Gus Speth, whose spell in jail after the Keystone XL protests planted the seed of a new book.
40 Flying the
Friendlier Skies
by Katherine Rowland and Bryan Christie Design
24 the synthesist
The number of airline passen-
by Alan Burdick Imagine a world in which electronics were designed to be biodegradable—think of it as creative self-destruction.
gers will double worldwide in the next two decades. Fortunately, a new generation of cleaner, greener airports and
26 think again
planes is on the drawing board.
42 Buried Treasure by George Black
Our craving for gold appears to know no bounds. As giant
In the coldhearted calculus of making a profit, it is perversely logical for food corporations to risk making hundreds of people ill when the worst they can expect is a warning letter.
mines proliferate in the developing world, the result is not only environmental devastation but
Out to Lunch
increasingly violent conflict.
by Barry Estabrook
ins ide nrd c
keep us safe. But the egregious influence of industry lobbyists, a lack of rigorous scientific testing of the
by Frances Beinecke
food supply, and an unwillingness to punish those
12 the deans list
who put our health at risk add up to a picture of an
60 dispatches lisa shin
The Food and Drug Administration is supposed to
10 view from nrdc by Bob Deans
Eat those leftovers, America; tainted drinking water; and more.
8 From the Editor 14 WHERE ONEARTH
agency that is conspicuously failing to do its job.
Cover: Photograph for OnEarth by Lisa Shin. Styling by Echo Hopkins.
by Kim Stanley Robinson Geoengineering sounds like something from a science fiction novel, but we actually do it every day.
55 reviews
Mention melting ice, and most of us think of the Arctic. But the magical web of life at the opposite end of the planet is also at risk.
64 open space
by David Gessner The richest thoughts about nature come in slow, leisurely fashion. Try expressing them in 140 characters.
onearth online visit onearth.org
Read the digital edition of the magazine on your computer, e-reader, or tablet device, and access complete back issues at onearth.org/digital
winter 2012/2013
onearth 1
A publication of the
n a t u r a l r e s o u r ce s d e f en s e c o u nc i l Douglas S. Barasch
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Relax at Playa Blanca, after exploring Panama’s vibrant city, Pamana’s rainforests, and Panama Canal
Contributing Editors Bruce Barcott, Rick Bass, Michael Behar, Alan Burdick,
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onearth is a quarterly magazine of thought and opinion on the environment. It is open to diverse points of view; the opinions expressed by contributors and the editors are their own and not necessarily those of NRDC. NRDC does not endorse the products or services that are advertised in the pages of onearth.
A bout N RD C NRDC is a national nonprofit organization with 1.3 million members and online activists, and a staff of lawyers, scientists, and other environmental specialists. NRDC’s mission is to safeguard the earth: its people, its plants and animals, and the natural systems on which all life depends. NRDC Office s 40 West 20th St. New York, NY 10011 212-727-2700
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onearth (issn 1537-4246) (volume 34, number 4) is published quarterly by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 40 West 20th St., New York, NY 10011, and printed by The Lane Press, South Burlington, Vermont. Newsstand circulation through Disticor Magazine Distribution Services; info@disticor.com. Copyright 2012 by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Periodical postage paid at New York and at additional mailing offices. NRDC Membership dues $15 annually. onearth is available to all members of NRDC upon request. Library subscription $8, one year; $15, two years; $22, three years. Single copies $5. To e-mail a change of address: nrdcinfo@nrdc.org. postmaster: Send address changes to onearth, 40 West 20th St., New York, NY 10011.
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Find links to everything on this page at onearth.org/web
4co nn ec t wi th us Get our newsletter onearth.org/newsletter On Facebook onearth.org/facebook On Twitter twitter.com/onearthmag On Tumblr onearth.tumblr.com
4mee t the edi tor 4W E B E X C L U S I V E S Soap, or Snake Oil?
Triclosan, the main ingredient in many liquid soaps, doesn’t kill more germs than regular bar soap and might even be bad for you (it’s an endocrine disruptor, like BPA). Yet the industry is still pushing it on hospitals and consumers—while the government washes its hands of the matter. onearth.org/13win/triclosan
Why Big Ag Loves the Drought
Even as crops wither and die, big midwestern farming operations are harvesting record profits this year. How can that be? Editor-atlarge ted genoways revisits his family’s roots in Nebraska farm country to investigate. onearth.org/13win/drought
Not in My Wilderness
Top left: everett collection/shutterstock; RIGHT: Shira Golding
As wind power and natural gas drilling push their way toward the stunningly beautiful Rocky Mountain Front, how do we decide what is too beautiful to develop—even for potentially cleaner energy sources? onearth.org/13win/wilderness
4F E A T U R E D
BLOGS
Compute This! DAVID GESSNER finds that
our tweets, “likes,” e-mails, and digital photo albums have a bigger impact on the physical environment than you might think. onearth.org/13win/data
4mos t po p ular Death on the Firelines As Oceans Turn Acidic, Scientists Report a Strange Finding: Hope The Forest Service Is Fighting Every Fire This Year. But at What Cost? From Crocs to Cowboys, Saving Florida’s Wild Life Bears Want to Eat Your Candy, Parasites Want to Eat Your Brain, Orangutans Just Want to Borrow Your iPad
More online-only stories: onearth.org/webexclusives
onearth.org/blog a Guilt-free drink? Wouldn’t it be nice if the plastic cups at your favorite café would simply biodegrade like a stalk of celery? JOE FASSLER finds that’s easier said than done. onearth.org/13win/plastic
Sure, environmental news can sometimes bring you down— toxic spills, raging wildfires, cute critters gone extinct. That’s why we so appreciate associate editor MELISSA MAHONY, with her deadpan humor and eye for the absurd. Mahony’s artful editing of our Today OnEarth news roundup and her weekly menagerie of the planet’s coolest, weirdest animals will keep your spirits up and your brain pulsing with solutions. Follow her on Twitter: @mahony128 O W NERSHIP STATE M ENT Statement of ownership, management, and circulation (required by 39 U.S.C. 3685) of OnEarth, published quarterly and owned by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., President, Frances Beinecke; Editor, Douglas S. Barasch, 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011. Known bondholders, mortgages, and other security holders owning or holding one percent or more of the total amount of bonds, mortgages, and other securities: None. The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for federal income tax purposes have not changed during the preceding twelve months. The average number of copies printed of each issue during the preceding twelve months was: A. Total number of copies printed: 136,381. B. Paid and/or requested circulation: (1) Paid/ requested outside-county mail subscriptions stated on Form 3541: 129,417; (2) Paid in-county subscriptions: 0; (3) Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors, counter sales, and other non-USPS paid distribution: 2,419; (4) Other classes mailed through the USPS: 0. C. Total paid and/or requested circulation: 131,836. D. Free distribution by mail: 1,115. E. Free Distribution outside the mail: 0. F. Total Free Distribution: 1,115. G. Total Distribution: 132,951. H. Copies not distributed: 3,430. I. Total: 136,381. I certify that the statements made by me above are correct and complete. DOUGLAS S. BARASCH, Editor
winter 2012/2013
onearth 5
Pax OnEarth 3rd pg ad 2012.ƒ_Pax On Investing ad 10/30/12 1:57 PM Page 1
contributors Barry Estabrook (“Out to Lunch,” p. 28) is the author of Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit and a two-time winner of the James Beard Foundation Award for food writing. Estabrook’s home is a 30-acre farm in Vermont, where he keeps hens, taps maple trees, and brews hard cider from his own apples. Bryan Christie DEsign (“Flying the Friendlier Skies,” p. 40) produces illustrations, maps, and graphics about everything from beetles to football injuries. Led by the awardwinning illustrator Bryan Christie, the New York–based studio aims to represent ideas, not just objects. Recent clients include National Geographic, Wired, and Scientific American.
Around the world,
an efficiency revolution
is underway.
We can no longer take finite natural resources for granted. Population growth, urbanization, rising consumption and climate change are all exacerbating resource scarcity. Whether it’s energy, water, food or materials, resource efficiency has become an economic imperative.
Ron Haviv (“Buried Treasure,” p. 42) has photographed for magazines including Vanity Fair, Fortune, and Vogue. The cofounder of the photo agency VII, which is dedicated to documenting conflict, he was a central character in Freelance in a World of Risk, a National Geographic film on the dangers facing war photographers.
By investing in companies around the world that are delivering solutions to critical resource and environmental challenges, the Pax World Global Environmental Markets Fund is designed for investors
seeking to capture the returns associated with this new reality. our paper and printing
onearth is committed to environmentally sound publishing practices. Our text stock contains a minimum of 30 percent postconsumer waste and is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring that the world’s forests are sustainably managed. Our cover stock contains a minimum of 10 percent postconsumer waste.
estabrook: trent campbell; haviv: Clay Enos
Gretel Ehrlich (“Bipolar Disorder,” p. 55) is the author of 13 books, including In the Empire of Ice: Encounters in a Changing Landscape, which portrays the impact of a warming climate on indigenous Arctic peoples. She has also written for the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, and Outside.
Less is more. Global resource scarcity is creating real opportunity for investors.
As global population growth and rising consumption place increased demand on scarce natural resources, the Pax World Global Environmental Markets Fund (PGRNX) invests in companies around the world that are
developing innovative solutions in such areas as energy efficiency, water infrastructure and waste management. We believe these companies and technologies are fast becoming major drivers of global economic growth. The transition to a more resource-efficient, lower carbon economy is underway. The Pax World Global Environmental Markets Fund seeks to help investors take advantage of it. Visit www.paxworld.com/GEM to download our free whitepaper, Resource Scarcity and the Efficiency Revolution.
Equity investments are subject to market fluctuations. The Fund’s share price can fall because of weakness in the broad market, a particular industry, or specific holdings. Emerging market and international investments involve risk of capital loss from unfavorable fluctuations in currency values, differences in generally accepted accounting principles, economic or political instability in other nations or increased volatility and lower trading volume.
Before investing in a Pax World fund, you should carefully consider the fund’s investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses. For this and other important information about the fund, please obtain a fund prospectus by calling 800.767.1729 or visiting www.paxworld.com. Please read it carefully before investing. Distributed by: ALPS Distributors, Inc. Member FINRA (12/12)
editor’s letter the scientist and the president
O
ne year ago, I was sitting down to write my editor’s letter in the
Dou g las S . b aras c h
8 onearth
winter 2012/2013
Poon Watchara-Amphaiwan
aftermath of a freak storm that brought a foot of weirdly early snow to my upstate New York neighborhood, damaging thousands of trees, downing power lines, and causing Halloween to be canceled. The date: October 29, 2011. One year later—to the day—another freak storm arrived, and it left a much larger swath of destruction in its wake. It seems we have crossed some invisible threshold to a new climate era, where the abnormal is normal. Perhaps the only solace is that Sandy arrived during the final days of presidential campaigning, elevating climate change (and its disastrous consequences) in the national debate. Perhaps, it was tempting to think, this storm could be a game changer, a Scientists are tearing their hair out in tipping point. exasperation. They are drowning in Scientists everywhere certainly hope so, as many of them are practically teardata, and their forecasts are dire. Where ing their hair out in exasperation. They are the policies to avert these outcomes? are drowning in data, and their forecasts are dire. Yet where are the policies to avert the very outcomes that keep them—and us—awake at night? One such climate scientist is Ralph Keeling, profiled in this issue by SUSAN FREINKEL. Keeling, intriguingly, is the son of Charles David Keeling, the pioneering figure whose Keeling Curve—the fruit of decades of meticulous and exhaustive data collection—demonstrated that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was increasing rapidly and alarmingly. His son, using the same painstaking methods, is now trying to figure out where exactly all those CO2 molecules are ending up. They enter the atmosphere, yes, but are also absorbed by the sea and the land (trees, plants, soil). What precisely is the earth’s capacity to store this excess CO2? To answer that question, and thus to more accurately forecast our planetary fate, Keeling’s research focuses on measuring oxygen molecules in the atmosphere—which occur, interestingly, in a sort of inverse relationship to CO2. Keeling, like his father, who passed away in 2005, conducts his research at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Tony Haymet, the director of Scripps, once commented that it is as if Michael Jordan had a son who was also a point guard with the Chicago Bulls. One family, two superstars. What remains to be seen is whether the younger Keeling will make a discovery of the same magnitude as his father’s. One thing that distinguishes Ralph Keeling from his father is that he, like other researchers of his generation, has become more outspoken, more political about our failure to confront climate change before it is too late. Perhaps, now that President Obama has won reelection, they will not feel quite as though they are shouting into the void. On the night of his victory, the president declared: “We want our children to live in an America that isn’t… threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.” You know, a lot can get done in four years…
view from NRDC
n November 6, Americans REelected a president who made expanding clean
energy and strengthening environmental safeguards a cornerstone of his first term. President Obama won even though the fossil fuel industry doubled down on the election: oil, gas, and coal companies spent more than $200 million in ad campaigns, and former Governor Mitt Romney said he’d roll back clean air standards, push for more coal power, and ignore climate change. Despite the ad blitzes and the anti-environmental rhetoric, voters ultimately rejected this backward-looking agenda. Even Romney seemed to recognize the trend—too late—and to increasingly espouse more moderate positions on issues such as clean energy Obama has already proposed during the waning days of his campaign. limits on carbon pollution from new Energy played a central role in the power plants; now he has to finalize election, receiving more coverage in camthose safeguards and set limits paign ads than any issue except jobs and the economy. And voters consistently for existing plants favored clean alternatives: a September survey by Public Policy Polling found that for every energy issue the two presidential candidates differed on—reducing air pollution, expanding renewable power, limiting carbon emissions—voters overwhelmingly preferred President Obama and his plan to move America toward a more sustainable future. They realize that clean energy technologies, such as wind and solar power and cars that go farther on a tank of gas, will enhance public health and create new jobs. Obama must capitalize on the public’s support of these common-sense solutions. He can start by demonstrating bold and sustained leadership on climate change. The ravages of Hurricane Sandy, the midwestern drought, and the western wildfires reveal the pressing need to protect our communities from carbon-fueled loss and destruction. Obama has already proposed limits on carbon pollution from new power plants; now he has to finalize those safeguards and set limits for existing plants. It’s also time to extend incentives for new wind and solar development, and to offer Americans greater protection from smog and soot. With the headlong rush to extract natural gas, the government must develop safeguards for fracking operations, which can pollute our lands, water, and air. In addition, we must strengthen existing protection of our waterways and wilderness. The Obama administration has taken the first steps toward these goals, but we will have to work hard to push them over the finish line. Congress is still home to Tea Party stalwarts—the Republican-controlled House has voted repeatedly to weaken environmental standards— while the fossil fuel industry continues to pour money into the political system. NRDC’s scientists, lawyers, and advocates will fight back, but we need your help. Raise your voices: let the White House and Congress know you support strong environmental leadership. The Obama administration moved forward with its carbon limits for new power plants in part because Americans sent more than three million comments in favor of them. Now let’s create the same momentum for similar breakthroughs.
francEs beinecke, President
1 0 onearth
winter 2012/2013
Matt Greenslade/photo-nyc.com
O
america has spoken, so let’s get down to work
Create Your Own Lasting Legacy You can create a lasting environmental legacy by including NRDC in your estate plans. A gift through your will, trust, retirement plan or life insurance plan will help preserve our magnificent natural heritage for generations to come.
For information on how to include NRDC in your estate plans or to let us know you’ve already done so, please contact Michelle Quinones, Lead Specialist, Gift Planning, at 212-727-4552 or email her at legacygifts@nrdc.org
Photo: Š Tim Fitzharris/Minden Pictures
See the back cover to learn about the Legacy Challenge!
www.nrdc.org/legacygift
the deans list
by bob deans
Presidential campaigns term gains and help make us the global leader in cleancan seem to take more than energy technology. Right away, the president should push they give, taxing our patience, Congress to extend the production tax credit that provides insulting our intelligence, and 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour to renewable electricity sources generally setting us all on edge and is due to expire at year’s end. Wind generates 4 percent through what can sometimes feel of our electricity; that can grow to 20 percent, the Energy like a ceaseless deluge of attacks, Department says, by 2030. The benefits—a welcome cash denials, obfuscation, and deceit. crop for heartland farmers and ranchers, an economic shot in The presidency itself, though, is the arm for cities and towns, renewable energy and cleaner about leadership, the ability to air for everyone—more than justify the two-penny tax break. Presidents since Richard Nixon have talked about reduclay out a vision of where the country needs to go and ing our reliance on foreign oil. Obama is actually doing it. a road map to take us there. In his first term, President Obama provided that vi- On his watch, imports have fallen to 42 percent of our oil sion well enough to earn the highest honor the voters supply, down from 57 percent when he was elected. One award: reelection. Over the next four years, there are reason is that U.S. oil production is up 25 percent since few greater opportunities for us as a nation than to shift Obama took office. Natural gas output also has risen, to its highest level in histo a clean-energy futory. Much of both is ture that can break Obama has already made a good coming from underour dependence on start by pushing for public investments ground shale deposfossil fuels, restore its cracked open by U.S. leadership in the in energy efficiency and renewable power hydraulic fracturing, world economy, and and insisting that industrial polluters or fracking. Unfortustrike a blow against reduce their carbon emissions nately, Congress exclimate change, empted this industry which helped set the stage for Superstorm Sandy and the harm it inflicted on nearly a decade ago from essential environmental safeguards. Giving fracking a pass on these vital protections the eastern seaboard. These goals transcend ideology and cross partisan lines. has put our communities, health, and environment at unThey are so thoroughly embedded in the national interest conscionable risk. That needs to be fixed. None of this will be easy. Obama faces a House of Repthat to fail to attain them would pose a genuine threat to our security, prosperity, and very way of life. Obama has resentatives fundamentally unchanged from the one that already made a good start, pushing for public investments voted more than 300 times over the past two years to block, in energy efficiency and renewable power and insisting that delay, or water down needed measures to advance our industrial polluters reduce the carbon emissions, mercury, energy future and safeguard our environment and health. Making progress will require a new kind of relationship beand other toxic chemicals they spew into our air. That’s an important reason for his November win. After all, tween Congress and the president. Somehow, the partisan the president and his opponent laid out starkly different divide must be bridged, so the two can work together for visions of our energy future. Obama pledged to continue the good of the country. That, too, requires presidential his strategy to increase domestic energy production while leadership, as much in a second term as in the first. protecting our environment and health; improve the efficiency of our cars, workplaces, and homes; and expand our Bob Deans, NRDC’s associate director of communications, is a use of wind, solar, and other sources of renewable power. veteran newspaper reporter and a former president of the White His opponent focused instead on the fossil fuels of the past. House Correspondents’ Association. His most recent book is Reckless: Obama has a historic opportunity to build on his first- The Political Assault on the American Environment.
1 2 onearth
Winter 2012/2013
illustration by bruce morser
A Twenty-first-century agenda
where onearth
Slopes and dreams
Near Telluride, Wilson Peak looms large as an icon of winter grandeur.
V
Colorado’s very lifeblood is cold, white, and powdery By stephanie paige ogburn
isit the Grand Mesa—the 11,000-foot-high tabletop NEAR
Grand Junction, Colorado—on a clear day after a blizzard, and you’ll understand how the phenomenon of mountaintop snow informs one’s sensory experience of my state. To the south, the white-tipped San Juans scrape against the blue sky; to the west, the dusting atop the nearby Book Cliffs looks like the foam on a giant latte. Snow defines all that you see and hear: it beautifully burdens evergreen boughs drooping beneath its weight; it forms the blank canvas on which tracks left by skiers and snowshoe hares combine to make a minimalist artwork; it muffles the cries of mushers and the yelps of their dogs as they race toward a far-off finish line. The Rockies bisect my state like a spine, providing skeletal support for tourism, one of Colorado’s biggest industries. In a good winter, weekly storms deposit multiple feet of the snow prized by sports enthusiasts of all stripes—whether vacationing families, hot-dogging terrain-park habitués, or Nordic-style trekkers who insist that real winter sport entails schlepping a loaded sled from one remote cabin to the next. Near Denver and other Front Range cities, resorts offer endless variations on a theme, from kid-friendly skiing lessons to night skiing. But if you’re closer to the San Juans than to the Rockies—or if you’re just more of a scaler than a schusser—Ouray Ice Park, two hours west of Grand Junction, provides an opportunity to engage with nature in a novel way. There aren’t too many states in the union where you can climb a frozen waterfall. Colorado is one of them.
sos
Plowing Ahead Colorado’s ski industry is dependent
on a reliable supply of snow, but climate change is predicted to alter the state’s snowfall patterns and lead to warmer winters. Nationwide, snowfall last winter was at its second-lowest level in 21 years; in Colorado, the shortage was reflected in a 15 percent drop in ski-resort visitors from the previous winter. The organization Protect Our Winters leverages the popularity of winter sports to draw attention to the ways climate change is threatening their continued existence. Since being founded by the professional snowboarder Jeremy Jones in 2007, it has engaged in a multi-pronged advocacy effort that includes lobbying for clean air legislation, partnering with other groups on economic impact reports, and sending well-known athletes into schools and other community institutions to raise awareness. protectourwinters.org
Stay at the Fireside Inn in Breckenridge, a homey B&B near Main Street offering easy access to Summit County’s major resorts. firesideinn.com soak sore après-ski muscles in a steaming, mineral-rich pool at Glenwood Hot Springs, an hour’s drive from Vail and Aspen. hotspringspool.com sip a hoppy Paint It Black Honey Coffee Stout at the Strange Brewing Co., in Denver’s artsy Lincoln Park neighborhood. strangebrewingco.com 1 4 onearth
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alaska stock images/national geographic
frozen assets
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s c i e n c e b u s i n e s s n a t u r e t e c h n o l o g y c u l t u r e p o l i t i c s
i thought we had such chemistry
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by kim larsen
New (and safer) insecticides can thwart crop-destroying pests by sexually frustrating them to death. And taking a cold shower won’t make a bit of difference.
The field of synthetic semiochemicals represents a kind of rearguard action in the war. Organisms naturally emit semiochemicals to would be funny if it weren’t such a serious business. influence the behavior of other organisms. There are many subsets We are hapless Goliaths perennially outmaneuto this class of substances, but for the purposes of pest control, chemivered by these disease-carrying, crop-destroying, cal ecologists deal mostly with pheromones, which carry important soul-crushing Davids of the animal kingdom. Even messages between individuals within a species. when we do manage to execute Producing pheromones in a lab makes it possible an impressive assault, the offendFor more coverage of environto alter or interrupt those messages. When syning mosquitoes or lice or potato mental science and green tech thetic sex pheromones of the tomato pinworm are beetles eventually return fire by visit onearth.org/scitech attached to tomato vines, for example, the male is developing resistance to the poison we’ve attacked bewildered to the point of impotence: he doesn’t know with whom to them with. While they wait for us to develop even stronger poisons, mate and he dies a bachelor—whereupon the pinworm population surely they must chuckle to themselves as all the evidence of negative quickly subsides, and the tomato harvest flourishes. environmental and health consequences piles up.
andrew syred/science source; STATISTICS: pesticide action network (1), etc group (2,3)
umanity’s crusade to control insects
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number of pesticide products currently on the U.S. market, in thousands
.org
44
dollar value of the global Market for pesticides, in billions
10
number of firms in control of 90 percent of the global market for pesticides
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good finds
Unlike conventional insecticides, semiochemicals aren’t poisons. Their target populations show no sign of developing resistance, and they harm nothing but their intended victims. “As a tool in integrated pest management, they’re vital,” says Allard Cossé, an entomologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Semiochemicals, he adds, can help reestablish equilibrium in monoculture environments, where insect pests aren’t confronted with the predators that would keep them in check in natural environments. Since they are copies of naturally occurring phenomena, synthetic pheromones can’t be patented. Instead, commercial developers funnel R&D into the design of distribution systems, which can. One of these companies, California-based ISCA Technologies, has developed a system it calls Specialized Pheromone and Lure Application Technology, or SPLAT. Pheromones are volatile: if they are not
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Semiochemicals represent a kind of rear-guard action in the war against insects
a sound idea Wood scraps found on the floors of furniture workshops, once bound for the landfill or the burn pile, have been given new life as unique, hand-polished earbuds. The wooden tips are acoustically superior to plastic or rubber and help to deliver distortionfree sound. $30 at griffintechnology.com
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applied to the right surface under the right conditions, their unique properties will quickly deteriorate. SPLAT sidesteps such pitfalls by using a formulation viscous enough to adhere to bark or other plant surfaces, but thin enough to be dispersed via caulking guns, backpack sprayers, even tractors and airplanes. (Most pheromonal lures must be affixed by hand.) “In many cases,” says Agenor Mafra-Neto, a chemical ecologist and CEO of ISCA, “it’s possible to achieve season-long control with one application.” His formulation is biologically inert, biodegradable, and capable of withstanding heavy rain and sunlight. ISCA has been conducting SPLAT field trials in Idaho and Wyoming that deploy a hybrid formulation of attractant pheromones and a conventional insecticide. The target is the mountain pine beetle, an arthropod that has devastated pristine pine forests in vast swaths of western North America. Initial trial results are promising: four dollops per tree will deter infestation, Mafra-Neto says. Meanwhile, even if we’re far from enjoying the last laugh in our epic struggle with rapacious insects, let’s at least indulge a chuckle over the thought of a pine beetle attempting to mate with a dollop of SPLAT. kim larsen is a Brooklyn-based journalist. Her last article for OnEarth, “Common Sense in Kansas,” appeared in the Fall 2012 issue.
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unchain my art Uncommon Goods is the aptly named source for hundreds of unique gifts, many of which are made from sustainable or recycled materials—like this inventive bike-chain bowl, designed and made by Graham Bergh. $84 at uncommongoods.com
without reservations
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t’s quite a dilemma: you want to visit some
natural wonder threatened by climate change (like Costa Rica’s rainforest, above). But to get there you have to board a carbon-spewing Airbus and fly halfway around the globe, thus hastening the demise of that same natural wonder. What to do? You could try taking a carbon-offset vacation—just one of the things that Greenloons, a travel website dedicated exclusively to eco-tourism, can help you arrange. Since it links only to operators that have been certified as legitimately supporting conservation efforts, minimizing pollution, or furthering sustainability, its range of choices is more limited than what you’ll find at a site like Travelocity. But when you do find a tour that works with your dates, budget, and interests, you can rest assured that you’re booking a genuinely green—and not just a “greenwashed”—experience. One part of the Greenloons site, a blog that invites visitors to post mini-essays about their trips, offers a refreshing break from the snark to be found on many other travel websites. And folks staying closer to home will appreciate the links to sustainabilityand conservation-related volunteer opportunities. greenloons.com —Justine E. Hausheer
out with the new, in with the old
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n his new book, Upcycling Celebrations, creative-reuse guru and eco-chic trend spotter Danny Seo applies his philosophy of crafting new goods from old things—think fabulous party lanterns made from plastic bags, or handmade crayons that resemble fancy chocolates—to a variety of holidaythemed decorations and gifts. $12–$18 at various brick-and-mortar and online booksellers.
paradigm lost A veteran of the environmental struggle urges Americans to draw a new social map—by connecting the dots In the summer of 2011,
350.org founder (and OnEarth contributing editor) Bill McKibben asked a small group of environmental leaders to consider lending their names to an open letter calling for a large-scale protest of the Keystone XL pipeline. Ted Genoways It was to be held outside the White talks to House. Among those approached gus speth was James Gustave “Gus” Speth, a co-founder of NRDC, a senior adviser to Presidents Carter and Clinton, a former dean of Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and a longtime administrator of the United Nations Development Programme. But the invitation came with a catch: McKibben anticipated that the protesters might be arrested. And in fact, the first wave of protesters—of which Speth was a part—were not only arrested, but spent three days in the District of Columbia jail, often in leg irons and handcuffs, crowded 15 or more into a 6-by-9-foot cell. When called upon by his fellow prisoners to help pass the time, Speth, who was 69 at the time, spoke of how their opposition to Keystone could potentially coalesce into a bona fide grassroots movement. Those ideas became an important part of his new book,
happy warrior
photograph for onearth by steve bronstein
Gus Speth was jailed after protesting the Keystone XL pipeline.
America the Possible: Manifesto for a New Economy. He and I spoke recently in Washington, just a few blocks from the White House, the site of his arrest. Tell me about your time in jail.
We slept on stainless steel plates— there was no bedding—and we literally had bread and water to eat and drink. But our spirits were high. We told a lot of jokes.
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corporate farming has led to depopulation and economic stagnation, before terminating in an all-black community in Houston. A trajectory like that does suggest that you can’t organize effectively to oppose certain environmental threats if you’re not also addressing some of these other issues.
The environmental community has got to confront these issues—such as the stark levels of
People are despairing about things happening at the national and international levels. They’re saying: ‘Let’s do something locally.’ And our arrest galvanized a lot of attention. It morphed into two more weeks of protests—and then [that November] into a gigantic circling, two bodies deep, of the block around the White House. At the end of our incarceration, when we thought we were going into court, they took us down to these large holding cells underneath the courthouse. And that’s when you saw it: hundreds of mostly black young men, moving through this so‑called criminal justice system. We knew we were going to be walking out into broad daylight any minute—they dropped all the charges against us—but we also knew that those kids were going to be bouncing around in that system for a long time. That’s one thing that struck me about your book: the way you openly link the environmental agenda to social justice. Not long ago I interviewed Robert Bullard (see “Truth to Power,” OnEarth, Fall 2012), a pioneering figure in environmental justice. He described the Keystone XL pipeline as a project that starts by despoiling the land of Canada’s First Nations tribes, then cuts through parts of the United States where
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inequality we face and economic insecurity—because they can be powerful determinants of environmental outcomes. If you place them off limits, you’re really saying that you’re not willing to deal with factors that could affect the achieving of our goals. You have to ask yourself, “What is an environmental issue?” Well, one way to answer that question is: water pollution, air pollution, climate change. But another way of answering it is to say that an environmental issue is any issue that has a big impact on environmental outcomes. That’s a ver y different way of looking at it. You’re acknowledging something that makes some people uncomfortable. There has been a tendency in the broader environmental movement to try and paint “the environment” as something that can and should be outside the political process so it appeals to members of both parties. You’re essentially saying, “No, this is something that we should claim as a progressive cause.”
The absence of bipartisanship on environmental issues is a tragedy. Republicans and Democrats worked together closely on the
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government we’ve had lately is clearly a big part of the problem. There’s a feeling out there that politics is not responding to real national needs. Harold Meyerson, writing in the Washington Post, said, “In America, major liberal reforms require not just liberal governments, but autonomous, vibrant mass movements.” I believe that. But what are the forces that drive transformative change? The first is when people are not only fed up with what they see going on around them but also see the problem as a system. To recognize—when you have problems in the economy, in society, in the environment, in politics—that it’s the system, stupid.
Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. One of the best people working on both was a man named Tom Jorling, who’d been brought onto the staff of what was then the Senate Public Works Committee by John Sherman Cooper, a Republican from Kentucky. But just take a look at who’s been voting which way on clean air issues lately. I think it would be great to see a revival of bipartisanship, but the Republican Party has been moving away from the center, and the Democratic Party has tended to move to the right just to stay in the game. One-sixth of the country now lives in Read the latest news about the poverty or is on Keystone XL pipeline controversy food stamps; 15 What signs are at onearth.org/keystonexl percent of the you seeing that workforce is unemployed or un- people are finally starting to come deremployed or has dropped out together in this way? of the labor force. When you have You’re seeing it in cities like such vast economic insecurity, Detroit, where there’s a lot of it’s easy to mobilize opposition excitement about how to go to environmental measures that about rebuilding the commulook like they might cost jobs. nity. You’re seeing it in the way the co‑op movement has taken You discuss the crucial need to form off, the way the cooperative idea partnerships that would bring pro- is being emphasized in many community-development corgressives with different ideologies porations and communitytogether in common cause. But how can you make those sorts of rela- development financial institutions. Right now there’s a drive tionships more than just fleeting ones, rooted in a single issue? How to create a public bank in the District of Columbia modeled can you craft a durable coalition? on the Bank of North Dakota [a In the book I talk about the need for a fusion of progressive state-owned bank—the only one forces—the need for a common in the country—that has made identity, a common platform, a reinvestment in local projects one more systematic approach to mes- of its chief missions]. There’s just a lot of ground-up saging. One springboard to that vision of progressive fusion might building going on right now, bewell appear after this election. I cause people are despairing about suspect a lot of people are going things happening at the national to be really fed up with the political and international levels. They’re saying: “Let’s do something loprocess they just went through. There’s actually a strange and cally.” And so it’s happening. The ironic bit of truth to Ronald Reagan’s list of things we could begin to famous statement: “Government move on right now is real, and it’s is not the solution to our problem. big. We don’t have to wait around Government is the problem.” The for some magic moment.
.org
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no pane, no gain Could the same windows that let in light during the day power the lamps we use at night?
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long-imagined renewable-energy technology —a clear, super-thin photovoltaic cell—is one step closer to becoming a part of our lives. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have developed a transparent film that’s capable of harvesting the sun’s rays, and already there’s talk of transforming the flat surface of almost any building into a practically invisible solar array. Yang Yang, the lead researcher behind the film’s development, believes the technology will soon be cheap enough to mass-produce. At some point, he says, the material—which is made of a light-sensitive polymer—could be applied like a coating onto windows, building components, and even electronics during manufacturing. Because it absorbs only infrared, or invisible, light, the film remains penetrable to visible light, meaning that it can be placed over a clear window without affecting the transparency of the glass. (This represents an improvement over existing solar films, whose opacity has made them appropriate only for tinted or gridded windows.) Silver nanowires transmit light energy gathered by the polymer layer—currently, about 4 percent of what’s available. That’s far less than the 20 percent that can be captured by other kinds of photovoltaic cells. But with certain refinements—which the scientists affirm are within reach—the film’s capacity will be boosted to 10 percent, putting it “clearly” on the —CHASE SCHEINBAUM path to competitiveness, they say.
illustration by john w. Tomac; right: photograph for onearth by Timothy Archibald
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the fisher king
Ecologist Mourad Gabriel holds one of the threatened animals he researches.
smoking them out To study an elusive species, Mourad Gabriel must track it down—and evade angry pot farmers
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By sharon levy
iking through the Northern California
woods in the course of doing his job, Mourad Gabriel frequently encounters angry men who are unhappy to see him. They’re marijuana growers, illegally using federal and tribal lands in remote, hard-to-reach locations. And their reactions to seeing him may range from yelling at him to brandishing their pistols or Kalashnikov rifles and posting his home address on a cannabis blog—along with the ominous observation that “snitches end up in ditches.” Gabriel isn’t with the Drug Enforcement Administration or any other law enforcement agency. He’s a wildlife disease ecologist nearing the completion of his doctorate at the University of California, Davis, who has spent a decade studying fishers—furry, elegant predators the size of large house cats. Fishers once roamed our northwestern forests in abundance, but their numbers have dwindled dramatically in the region. Now Gabriel, 38, believes he has unlocked the mystery as to what’s keeping this species from bouncing back. And his discovery, alas, is what has outlaw pot growers reaching for their guns (or computer keyboards).
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“I’m not focused on the pot plants,” Gabriel says. “What makes my blood boil is the environmental damage being done on public land.” Hit hard by fur trapping and the logging of the forests they favor, fishers had all but vanished from their historic range by the early twentieth century. Gabriel describes them as an “umbrella species,” meaning that they tend to be good indicators of their ecosystem’s overall health. By studying the remaining fishers closely, biologists can get a sense of how other members of their ecosystem are faring. In 2004 Gabriel was engaged in a study of predators on land owned by the Hoopa tribe in northern California’s Humboldt County. To his surprise, the fisher population on the reservation had declined precipitously in the years since a survey was made in the 1990s. Gabriel knew that fishers need mature forest to survive: they rest and raise their young inside the cavities found in the trunks of very old trees. The reservation still boasted plenty of ancient oaks, chinquapins, and Douglas firs. Why, he wondered, weren’t more fishers living there? “Some of the fishers we were radio-tracking had died of rodenticide poisoning,” Gabriel recalls. “I couldn’t imagine how that had happened, since fishers live far from cities or farm fields.” He made the connection to
The result could be a biologically devastated forest—where no fisher or bobcat hunts and no bird sings
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APPROPOS
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Pasadena Central Park
What it’s called:
BirdLog North America Compatible with:
Apple, Android What it does: Allows
birders to record sightings from anywhere in the field and to submit them to eBird, an online checklist run by Cornell University and the National Audubon Society How much it costs:
$9.99
SPOTLIGHT If your elevator pitch to a major Hollywood studio requires you to explain the mechanics of hydraulic fracturing, it helps if your name is Matt Damon. Promised Land, a fracking feature written by co-stars Damon and John Krasinski, opens nationally on December 28.
HAVE A BRIGHTER XMAS
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t’s that time of the year when blinking bulbs are everywhere, but holiday lighting can be a Grinch when it comes
to the grid. Incandescent displays steal vast amounts of electricity; were we to shift to light-emitting diode bulbs, or LEDs, we’d save enough to power 500,000 homes for a year. (LEDs also last 10 times longer than incandescents.) Now one company, Holiday LEDs, is making the changeover easy: just mail in your old incandescent lights for recycling and get 25 percent off any one of its —J.E.H. LED holiday-lighting packages. holidayleds.com
EMISSION CREEP 28 lbs
= Fine-Particle Emissions
42 grams
(lbs/MMBtus)
30 grams
= Smoke
(grams/hour)
7 grams
4.6 lbs
1.4 lbs
Conventional Fireplace
Traditional Wood Stove
EPA-Certified Wood Stove
the warmth given off by a wood-burning fire is one of life’s
great joys, but of home-heating methods on the rustic end of the spectrum, fireplaces are the most polluting. Switching to a wood-burning stove cuts fine-particle emissions and smoke emissions by as much as 85 percent and 25 percent, respectively; switching to one of the newer, EPA-certified wood stoves cuts them dramatically further.
graph statistics: environmental protection agency; above: illustration by katherine streeter
industrial-scale marijuana farms after some members of the Hoopa tribal police showed him photos of grow sites they had dismantled after raids. Pesticide containers were scattered across the landscape, their poison baits marked with countless scratches made by the gnawing teeth of mice and rats. The pot growers, it soon became clear, were spreading large amounts of rodenticide around their plants to protect them from tiny pests. The rodents were living for several days after eating the poison—just long enough to be preyed on by fishers. Gabriel began to document the stunning quantities of rodenticide that were peppering the 144 square miles of the Hoopa reservation. On one grow site near the reservation, 90 pounds were discovered. He calculates that 10.5 pounds (the amount he found at one of the first sites he studied) is enough to kill 12,542 deer mice or 1,792 wood rats—and anywhere from 5 to 28 fishers. Over the next eight years, on both Hoopa and national forest land, the rodenticidelinked casualties kept piling up. In addition to legal pesticides that are already in wide use, significant amounts of banned pesticides, including DDT and carbofuran, have been found at abandoned sites. Gabriel has also seen signs of illegal clearcutting and stream diversion. “No law seems to sway these individuals,” he says. His research has led him to conclude that the same rodenticides killing fishers pose a grave threat all the way up the forest food chain. If the problem is left unaddressed, he says, the result could be a biologically devastated forest—one where no fisher or bobcat hunts and no bird sings. As he continues with his research, he has also begun collaborating with a group that works to clean up contamination at dismantled grow sites. “The rogue pot industry is a human problem,” he says. “And we’re going to need a human solution.”
you’re onearth enter our photography contest
winner: Brandie Soria-Bell camera: Canon Rebel T3i about THE photo: Soria-Bell found this cluster of damselflies on her first outing to Skiatook Lake, in the rolling hills outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The insects had gathered on roots protruding from the shallows at the water’s edge. She took the photo with a zoom lens from about two feet away.
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Share your best photographs of life on earth with us: images of wildlife habitat, but also human habitat and wherever the two meet (harmoniously or inharmoniously). We’re looking for scenes with a strong visual point of view, attitude, and, of course, beauty. The winning photo will be published in OnEarth magazine, and the runnerup will be featured online at onearth.org. submit your photos and see contest rules at onearth.org/photocontest
Contest winner will receive a FREE trip for two to any Caravan Tours destination: Costa Rica, Guatemala, Canadian Rockies, Grand Canyon, Nova Scotia, New England & Fall Foliage—valued up to $5,000. Second-place winner will receive a pair of Vanguard Endeavor ED binoculars (value: $425). winter 2012/2013
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the synthesist
by alan burdick
he notes, is that they don’t need to perform their function for very long; when a device has finished its job, someone has to go in and fish it out. “But you solve that problem if it dissolves over time,” he says. “We quickly realized that the broader concept was a design paradigm itself.” Obsolescence could be baked right into the device. Creating transient electronics meant thinking in layers. For a substrate, Rogers chose silk, which is flexible and already approved by the Food and Drug Administration for biomedical use. On top of that would go the actual electronics; for a material, he turned to magnesium, which offers good conductivity and is biocompatible. For semiconductors he went with ultra-thin sheets of silicon, which degrades into salicylic acid, a substance that occurs naturally in the bloodstream, in oceans, and in groundwater. As a whole, the device would be water soluble and biologically benign. To keep the device from dissolving immediately, Rogers decided to wrap it in a further layer of silk. Although silk, too, dissolves, it does so less quickly in crystalline form. By tweaking the crystal just so, scientists can program the rate of dissolution on a scale ranging from seconds to weeks. In a recent paper in the journal Science, Rogers described several transient devices—each roughly the size of a penny, flexible, and sliverthin—his team has created for demonstration purposes. One, a heater, can be implanted at a wound site to kill bacteria and stimulate healing, and then simply left in the body to dissolve. He has also created tiny power coils, solar cells, radio-frequency antennae, temperature sensors, and even a rudimentary—we’re talking 8 pixels by 8 pixels—camera. n 1932, in the MIDST of the Great Depression, “We’re already overwhelmed with the range of possibilities,” Rogers a real estate broker named Bernard London offered a radical recovery plan: throw stuff away. As London says. He envisions, for instance, a new breed of environmental sensor: saw it, the economy was stalled because people held scientists could monitor the cleanup of a chemical spill, say, by airon to their cars and shoes and homes for too long. He dropping a hundred thousand tiny devices, each of which could take proposed “a system of planned obsolescence,” where- complex readings, transmit data wirelessly, and then melt harmlessly by the federal government would stamp an expira- into the soil or ocean. (Rogers’s research is funded in part by the Defense tion date on consumer goods; to avoid paying a tax, Department, so one also can imagine a self-destructing army of miniature people would discard, buy new, and stimulate the market. “Com- spy cameras and listening devices.) Biodegradable consumer products would seem to be an obvious modities should have a span of life, just as humans have,” London wrote. “When used for their allotted time, they should be retired, next step, and might go some way toward reducing the growing mountains of electronic waste. But that’s no small challenge. A gadget and replaced by fresh merchandise.” as sophisticated as a smartphone is made of numerous materials. “It The notion of planned obsolescence is now deeply ingrained in would take a long time to develop all the transient consumer culture. In the 1950s, its definition was counterparts,” Rogers says. “But it’s a good goal.” refined by the industrial designer Brooks Stevens, For more on science, technology, A compostable cell phone, were it ever to come who described it as “the desire to own something a and their impact on the environment, about, would be the perfect embodiment of Brooks little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necgo to onearth.org/scitech Stevens’s vision of planned obsolescence: too good essary.” Now, we discard things long before they’re not to buy, just good enough not to last. Silicon wafers, from which worn out. This is especially true for electronics, which are subject to the whims of fashion yet are physically “designed to last forever,” notes integrated circuits are made, will dissolve in water if sliced finely enough; Rogers just happens to be the first person to bother doing it. John Rogers, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois. “The useful lifetime of the device has nothing “We’ve tried to show that the amount of silicon being used is far more than you actually need,” he says. As always, even at the microscopic to do with the electronics.” Rogers’s solution: biodegradable—or, as he calls them, transient— scale, we find that we could do more with less. electronics. The idea came to him several years ago, “more out of necessity than anything else,” he says, when his team began working Alan Burdick, a senior editor at the New Yorker and a regular OnEarth conon implantable medical devices. The problem with many of them, tributor, is the author of Out of Eden (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
making degrade
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illustration by jesse lefkowitz
.org
under repair, forever
T
by kim stanley robinson
he term geoengineering is
relatively new. It follows and alters the word terraforming, coined by a
science fiction writer 70 years ago to denote the act of making another planet more Earth-like. When I
was writing my own Mars trilogy of novels in the 1990s, I described the deliberate alteration of that planet to give it an Earth-like biosphere; as I did so, it occurred to me that we were already doing to Earth what my characters were doing to Mars. 2 6 onearth
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But to say that we were “terraforming Earth” was painfully ironic, suggesting as it did that we had damaged our home planet so badly we now needed to take drastic steps to restore it to itself. When geoengineering entered the lexicon, many bristled at the word’s hubristic implication that we had the knowledge and power to engineer anything so large and complex as our planet. Still, the term has stuck, and it has essentially come to mean doing anything technological, on a global scale, to reduce or reverse the effects of climate change. Defined this way, the idea makes almost everyone uneasy—including the scientists who introduced it, most of whom agree that the best solution to our climate problem remains rapid decarbonization. But these scientists have also noticed that our progress on this front hasn’t been good. We lack the political mechanisms, or maybe even the political will, to decarbonize. So people are right to be worried, and some of them have therefore put forth various geoengineering plans as possible emergency measures: problematic, but better than nothing. Objections to geoengineering appeared immediately. Many people have expressed doubt that the proposals would work, or believe that a string of negative unintended consequences could follow. Merely discussing these ideas, it has been said, risks giving us the false hope of a “silver bullet” solution to climate change in the near future—thus reducing the pressure to stem carbon emissions here and now. These are valid concerns, but the fact remains: our current technologies are already geoengineering the planet—albeit accidentally and negatively. Consider that significant percentages of the world’s wetlands have been drained, and large swaths of its forests cut down. Ecosystems have been devastated by overdevelopment. We’ve raised atmospheric CO2 levels by about 100 parts per million, and average global temperatures have gone up accordingly. Our oceans have soaked up so much of the carbon we’ve dumped into the atmosphere that the seas have measurably acidified. On land, hundreds of species have gone extinct. And far worse damage is sure to follow if this inadvertent geoengineering campaign of ours is allowed to continue. For the rest of history, we will be required to work at repairing the damage we’ve already done to the biosphere. Geoengineering, then, has become our ongoing responsibility to life on this planet, including all human generations to come. All of which leads to the question: can we actually design and accomplish any geoengineering projects that would mitigate or reverse climate change? Putting aside issues of political capability, are any of these projects physically possible? The answer appears to be: yes, some of them are. Maybe. Some of the most talked-about proposals entail removing CO2 from the atmosphere, or not letting it enter in the first place. One of them calls for trapping it and storing it deep underground. The concept behind carbon capture and sequestration has already been demonstrated to work; many scientists think it merits further study. And to those who say our most urgent goal is holding atmospheric carbon levels as close as possible to 350 parts per million, it’s attractive for obvious reasons. Another oft-discussed idea involves shooting sulfur dioxide particles into the upper atmosphere in order to reflect incoming sunlight back into space. While this, too, would appear plausible from a mechanical standpoint, the veneer of plausibility only adds to serious concerns
illustration by john jay cabuay
think again
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about unknown secondary effects, as well as worries So geoengineering the atmosphere looks iffy For more on the controversies surthat by taking an action such as this one, the root at best; geoengineering the oceans even worse. rounding geoengineering proposals, issue—our need to curb carbon emissions—would What about the land? We’ve been altering our landvisit onearth.org/geoengineering remain unaddressed. As a result, this is one of the scapes for thousands of years, of course, so there’s most controversial geoengineering plans to date. It practically glows ample “proof of concept.” But just as technology has aided us in the with the hubris of weird science; it scares people. task of deforesting and draining our wetlands, so too does it now When ideas move from the atmosphere to the ocean, they get even provide us with the capability to do things like reforest and rescarier. One of the most hotly debated sequestration plans would have hydrate. Thinking about such potential reversals makes me believe us dumping iron dust into the ocean to promote algal blooms, which the definition of geoengineering should be broadened. Our actions would eventually sink, taking their carbon load with them. Last July a have a global impact; it’s good to be reminded of this by giving that California entrepreneur and geoengineering advocate tried doing impact a name. Were we to take up hybrids and electric cars in great this off the coast of British Columbia—and found himself in trouble numbers, for example, could that be considered geoengineering? Unwith Canada’s environmental ministry, the U.S. National Oceanic and der an expanded definition, absolutely. Whatever we do as a civilization Atmospheric Administration, and the broader scientific community. of seven billion is inevitably going to have a geoengineering effect. Among their concerns is that actions like his could disturb the ocean’s What about that number, seven billion? Could stabilizing our populanutrient balance and food chains. But they also worry about accelerating tion count? Again, yes. And we know of one good way to achieve this ocean acidification—a problem for which there exists no geoengineer- goal: promoting women’s legal and social rights. Wherever they exing solution. Some have proposed dumping pulverized limestone into pand, population growth shifts toward the replacement rate. This parthe ocean to neutralize its acid; the United Kingdom’s Royal Society, ticular geoengineering technology nicely illustrates how the word however, has concluded that the amount required would be equal to technology can’t be defined simply as machinery; it includes things like the White Cliffs of Dover, and then some. This is a fine addition to the software, organizational systems, laws, writing, and even public policy. Were we to change our lifestyles in order to conserve resources, parade of images that feature prominently in the eco-disaster subgenre of British science fiction, and it reminds us of an important lesson: we could that be thought of as geoengineering? Consider the example of Zurich, which is hoping to become a 2,000 Watt Society. The city govsimply don’t have the power to reverse all that we’ve done. ernment is embarking on a grand experiment, encouraging citizens to live on 2,000 watts of electricity per person, per year—what each of us would have were the world’s electricity distributed equally. (Right from nrdc going underground now Americans average more than 10,000 watts a year, Bangladeshis about 200.) Zurichers who have participated report no diminishment in their quality of life; on the contrary, they say that their lives have There has been much debate recently about certain carbon been augmented by new feelings of accomplishment and virtue. sequestration proposals, which some people regard as geoAs a science fiction novelist trying to write the realism of the twentyengineering. Which ones are scientists most intrigued by? first century, I’m convinced that these broader definitions of geoenCarbon sequestration can include a range of activities, but it gineering better describe what we’ll all be doing in decades to come. most commonly refers to the geologic sequestration of carIn my books I’ve imagined people salting the Gulf Stream, damming bon dioxide, whereby the gas is captured at a source (such as the glaciers sliding off the Greenland ice cap, pumping ocean water a power plant) and injected into subsurface rock formations. into the dry basins of the Sahara and Asia to create salt seas, pumping When this is done at carefully selected and properly operated melted ice from Antarctica north to provide freshwater, genetically sites, the carbon dioxide can be stored underground permaengineering bacteria to sequester more carbon in the roots of trees, nently. Some people might well place this in the category raising Florida 30 feet to get it back above water, and (hardest of all) of geoengineering, but at NRDC we view it as a much more comprehensively changing capitalism. established technology than the term connotes. In fact, this These fictional methods range from promising to risky to crazy. All of type of activity simply mimics natural geologic processes; them make for interesting stories, I hope—and also compel us to think the main difference is that in this case, the process is sped about what we can do to help Earth’s biosphere, both individually and up so that it occurs over tens rather than millions of years. collectively. We have many opportunities to act; those actions scale up. The CO2 is trapped both physically (in the pore spaces of the If we take advantage of the opportunties, we’ll be creating a permaculrocks) and chemically (by reacting with subsurface rocks and ture that works in balance with our planet over the long haul. We’ll all be fluids to form new minerals). Unlike other, more experimengeoengineers—without ever even having to try any of the more dangertal geoengineering schemes, geologic carbon sequestration ous experiments we now think of when we come across that word. is an important tool that can be used right now to help curb climate change.—BRIANA MORDICK, an oil and gas science fellow based in Washington, D.C.
Kim Stanley Robinson is the award-winning writer of more than a dozen science fiction novels and short story collections.
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the Food and Drug Administration, the federal agency charged with protecting our health, is a miserable failure
All of his life,
by barry estabrook
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Paul Schwarz had been active and healthy. When his family imagined the various ways the decorated veteran of World War II might eventually die, they never imagined that the cause would be a piece of cantaloupe. On Tuesday, September 13, 2011, Schwarz complained to his daughter Janice of abdominal pains and a slight fever. She took him to his doctor, who said it was likely a case of stomach flu. By Thursday the symptoms had worsened, and Schwarz had developed diarrhea. Janice took him to the emergency room. Once again flu was the diagnosis, and he was sent home. For a time, his condition improved. He called his son, also named Paul, that Sunday and cheerfully assured him that he’d eaten a big breakfast and felt a lot better. But on Monday morning the younger Paul received an urgent phone call. His father had photographs
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shin
cover story
been rushed to the hospital by ambulance, unable to move his legs. In the coming weeks his behavior grew erratic, and he began thrashing in his bed, hollering and behaving like a drunk. Usually gentle, he was combative with the nurses. “The devil has a hold of me and won’t let go,” he screamed. During a lucid moment, after Schwarz’s condition had stabilized, two of his nieces visited and had an animated chat with him. But after they left, Schwarz, who normally had a sharp mind, turned to Paul and asked, “Who were those people?” Within a month, Schwarz no longer recognized his son. By then the doctors had determined that he was suffering from invasive listeriosis, an infection caused by Listeria monocytogenes, a bacterium transmitted by eating contaminated meat, dairy products, and produce. The pathogen can lead to bacterial meningitis, an infection of the covering of the brain and spinal cord that causes headaches, confusion, and convulsions. It kills about one in six of those infected. Children, the elderly, people with depressed immune systems, and pregnant women are most vulnerable. On December 18, 2011, after a drawn-out decline, Paul Schwarz succumbed. He was 92. Schwarz grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, during the hardscrabble years of the Great Depression. In 1943, when he was 19, he married his 18-year-old sweetheart, Rosellen “Rosie” Clouse, and then marched off to serve as an infantryman in the Pacific, returning home a sergeant with two Purple Hearts. He and Rosellen purchased the house where she still lives in 1953, and raised five children. Schwarz was known for a loud, ready laugh and a twinkle in his eye that foreshadowed some practical joke. He remained active, playing golf until age 88, eating healthfully, accepting the occasional drink, and making sure that he and Rosellen, who was suffering from early-stage Alzheimer’s, took their prescribed medications. Devout Catholics, they attended church every Sunday. After Mass they would dine at the same family restaurant, where they always shared a fruit bowl—grapes, peaches, pineapple, banana, and, fatefully, the cantaloupe. Schwarz was only one of more than 100 patients suffering similar symptoms at the same time in 28 states. Eventually, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) would attribute 139 illnesses, 29 deaths, and one miscarriage to listeria in the late summer and early fall of 2011, making this outbreak of food-borne illness the most lethal in the United States since 1924. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) oversees food safety for most meat and poultry products, but the Food and Drug Administration is charged with keeping the rest of our food supply safe. For the Schwarz family, the FDA had clearly dropped the ball. The 2011 listeria outbreak was not an isolated case. The
United States is experiencing what amounts to an epidemic of food-borne illnesses. According to the CDC, there are about 48 million cases of food poisoning a year, leading to more than 128,000 hospitalizations and more than 3,000 deaths. E. coli in spinach and fruit juice, salmonella in eggs and jalapeño peppers, listeria not only in cantaloupes but in cheese and bagged lettuce—the toll from food-borne bacteria is mind-numbing. With the exception of E. coli infections, the rate of outbreaks from other pathogens tracked by the CDC has been rising since 2007. The decline in E. coli–related illnesses is in part the result of strong actions taken by the Department of Agriculture in 1994. Following an outbreak caused by tainted hamburger from the Jack-in-the-Box fast-food chain
FISH FROM ASIA Imported seafood is often farmed with drugs banned in the United States.
even when it does uncover health violations at foodprocessing plants, the fda takes
action in only about half of the cases that killed four children, the agency declared E. coli 0157:H7, the strain that sickened the children, an adulterant, making it illegal for companies under USDA jurisdiction to sell food contaminated with the bug. Meat producers took measures to eliminate it from their facilities. But potentially fatal bacteria other than E. coli have yet to be declared adulterants. Some of the FDA’s deficiencies can be attributed to the haphazard manner in which it has grown. In contrast to the Environmental Protection Agency, which was created in 1970 to bring all federal environmental activities into a single, powerful unit with a clear mandate, the FDA expanded and occasionally contracted over decades in response to crises and pressure from public interest groups and corporate lobbyists. The agency originated in 1852, when it consisted of a single chemist working in the Department of Agriculture. It had no regulatory duties until 1906,
this article was made possible by the jonathan and maxine marshall fund for environmental journalism 3 0 onearth
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illustration by bruce morser
when muckraking journalists’ horror stories about food-processing facilities inspired passage of the Federal Food and Drugs Act. In 1937, hundreds of deaths from a new sulfa drug propelled passage of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to prevent similar health disasters. In the 1950s and 1960s, laws addressing pesticide residues, food additives, and color additives gave the agency greater control over food safety. It would be impossible for any government agency to prevent every case of food poisoning. But there are systematic problems with the FDA that threaten the health of anyone who consumes food in the United States. In report after report, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, has uncovered woeful shortcomings at the agency. Its product recall process is ineffective and confusing. It has done a poor job of dealing with the overuse of antibiotics in livestock feed. It lacks the scientific capacity to perform its duties. Even when it does uncover health violations at food-processing plants, the FDA takes enforcement action in only about half of the cases and almost never imposes fines. In the coldhearted calculus of turning a profit, it is perversely logical for corporations to risk making hundreds of people ill when the worst they can expect is a warning letter. “It’s like doing 100 miles an hour on a lonely stretch of highway in Montana,” says William Marler, a Seattle-based attorney who has represented food-poisoning victims in court for 20 years. “Yeah, you might get caught, but in reality the chances of that happening are zero.” By the time doctors diagnosed Schwarz, the FDA had zeroed in on the source of the listeria—cantaloupe harvested from a farm in Colorado owned by the brothers Eric and Ryan Jensen. Inspectors descended on Jensen Farms three times during September 2011. Conditions could hardly have been more favorable for bacterial growth. Listeria thrives in moist areas. There was no system for pre-cooling the cantaloupes when they were brought in from the fields; this allowed condensation to form on the rinds of the melons as they were refrigerated. Water stood in puddles on the floor. The washing and drying machinery had been designed to handle potatoes, not melons, and was jerry-rigged in a way that made it all but impossible to clean. Corrosion, dirt, and “product buildup” remained on the equipment even after it had been taken apart and supposedly sanitized. Finally, Jensen washed its fruits in water only, using no chlorine or any other antimicrobial solution that might have killed the listeria before the cantaloupes reached consumers. Jensen issued a recall, but by then the damage had been done. On October 18, more than a month after its initial investigations, the FDA issued a warning letter to the company, which would file for bankruptcy in mid-2012. If there ever was an example of too little too late, this was it. The FDA considers fresh produce to be “high risk” and therefore a priority for inspection. But until people started dropping dead, the Jensen facility had never once in its 20-year history been inspected by the FDA. Like most produce companies, Jensen used third-party auditors to certify its handling systems. On July 25, at about the same time the first people were being sickened by contaminated
from nrdc drug addiction
jonathan kaplan Senior policy analyst for NRDC’s health and environment program and an expert on sustainable food Barry Estabrook’s article talks in detail about fresh produce and imports of seafood. Does the FDA do a better job in other areas, such as protecting the safety of our meat? In a word, no. We’re very concerned that the agency has done so little to curb the livestock industry’s addiction to antibiotics. Eighty percent of those sold in the United States go to industrial feedlots and other livestock operations. The vast majority are used on a routine basis on animals that aren’t sick, to make them grow faster or to compensate for poor sanitation, animal stress, and crowded conditions, all of which can be avoided with better practices. This routine use of antibiotics at low levels on entire herds and flocks can breed antibioticresistant bacteria, or “superbugs.” These can make their way to us through meat; through people who work with livestock; and via air, water, and soil contaminated by livestock operations. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria now pose a serious threat to humans, and nearly every major medical organization in the country has sounded the alarm. What is the FDA doing to protect people from these superbugs? Amazingly, very little. In fact, the public record shows that the FDA has been ignoring this issue for four decades. An FDA task force recognized the problem in 1972, yet the agency has banned only a handful of drugs, representing a small fraction of all livestock antibiotic use. NRDC sued the FDA and won two landmark rulings in federal court earlier this year. The judge ordered the agency to stop the use of two widely used classes of antibiotics in livestock and to start reviewing the health risks posed by others that are medically important. The FDA’s response has been to appeal the latest ruling and announce new “voluntary guidance” that suggests ways for industry to reduce antibiotic use but imposes no actual requirements. We’ll continue to litigate the appeal and advocate for genuine reform. Presumably consumers themselves can play a role in this. Consumers who still want to eat meat can have a huge impact by voting with their pocketbooks. Buying organic meat is one option; another is meat that is produced without antibiotics, especially if it carries a seal that says “USDA Process Verified.” It’s also a good idea to follow safe meat-handling and cooking guidelines (see foodsafety.gov), because fresh meat is often contaminated with harmful bacteria. For example, half of the retail fresh chicken breasts sampled by the FDA in 2010 contained antibiotic-resistant E. coli bacteria.
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cantaloupe, one such auditor, a representative of Bio Food Safety, a Texas-based company whose website advertises “quality service at an unbelievable price,” visited Jensen for four hours and blessed the plant with a “superior” rating of 96 percent. The FDA often seems to adopt a “see no evil” approach to
potential problems. In 2010, eggs from two Iowa-based companies, Quality Egg and Wright County Egg, both owned by Austin “Jack” DeCoster, sickened almost 2,000 people in 11 states with salmonella, a bacterium that produces fever, stomach cramps, and diarrhea and can result in death. The outbreak led to the recall of 550 million eggs, the largest such recall in American history. When FDA inspectors visited DeCoster’s facilities in August 2010 after determining that its eggs were responsible for the outbreak, they found barns infested with mice, flies, and maggots. Manure pits were leaking. In other areas manure was piled eight feet high, blocking doorways. Hens used the fetid heaps as convenient ramps to access laying boxes. Wild birds, potential carriers of salmonella, fluttered about. The barns were littered with dead, decaying chickens. There were disturbing links between the Iowa outbreak and one that occurred in the Northeast in 1987, which sickened 500 and killed 9. Both were caused by eggs from farms owned by DeCoster. In the early 1990s, Maryland regulators banned the sale of DeCoster eggs in the state after they were found to be contaminated by salmonella. The company had so many environmental and safety violations that Iowa declared it a “habitual” offender. Despite these red flags, the FDA did not inspect DeCoster’s Iowa barns until after the 2010 outbreak came to light. And when its inspectors discovered “serious deviations” from food safety laws, the agency’s punishment, if it can be called that, was a warning letter saying that failure to initiate prompt “corrective actions” could lead to “regulatory action being taken.” In November, one month after the letter was mailed, the FDA allowed DeCoster to resume selling fresh eggs. Following a 2007 salmonella outbreak in which 425 people in 44 states were sickened by peanut butter produced by ConAgra and sold under the Peter Pan and Great Value brands, the FDA intensified its inspection activity at peanut-processing facilities. Unfortunately, the agency missed a plant owned by the Peanut Corporation of America in Blakely, Georgia. It was a deadly omission. In 2008 and 2009, products from that plant sickened 714 people in 46 states and Canada and took the lives of 9. When they did arrive, FDA inspectors found mold on the walls and processing equipment covered in slime. Investigators for a congressional committee turned up something even more worrisome: internal e-mails indicating that Peanut Corporation’s owner, Stewart Parnell of Lynchburg, Virginia, not only knew about the salmonella at his plant, but ordered products that had tested positive for the bacterium to be shipped. “Turn them loose,” Parnell wrote in one message to a plant manager. Results showing contamination were “costing us huge $$$$$.” In a rare instance of prosecutorial vigor, the FDA, which lacks authority to file criminal charges on its own, teamed up with the Justice Department to pursue a case in early 2009. Yet three years have passed with no charges being filed. In the meantime, the lawsuit-besieged Peanut Corporation filed for bankruptcy. “I have never seen a clearer case that demanded criminal prosecution,” William Marler says. In fact, during the past 20 years, the FDA has only once succeeded 3 2 onearth
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in pursuing a significant criminal case, according to Marler. In 1998, Odwalla, a fruit juice bottler based in California, pleaded guilty to 16 misdemeanor charges and agreed to pay fines totaling $1.5 million. Hardly an onerous penalty, given that the company’s E. coli–tainted apple juice killed a Colorado toddler. Three years later, Odwalla’s owners sold out to Coca-Cola for $181 million. It’s one thing for a cash-strapped, chronically under-
staffed bureaucracy to overlook unsanitary conditions at far-flung food-processing facilities. It’s entirely another to ignore the scientific findings of one of its own researchers. Renee Dufault was a U.S. Public Health Service officer who had worked happily for nine years at the FDA. Her career began to unravel, however, when she tested samples of high-fructose corn syrup for mercury contamination. It was a reasonable precaution. Caustic soda is used to manufacture HFCS, and some chemical companies use mercury to produce caustic soda. It stood to reason that the syrup could contain residues of mercury,
“Turn them loose,”
wrote the owner
of the Peanut Corporation of America. Results showing contaminated
products were “costing us huge $$$$$.” a neurotoxin especially potent in fetuses and young children. Sure enough, Dufault’s results revealed that more than half the samples she had tested contained mercury. These preliminary studies were not extensive enough to determine whether the mercury was present at dangerous levels, but Dufault felt that the presence of any mercury was worrisome and warranted further investigation. Dutiful bureaucrat that she was, Dufault followed FDA protocol and in 2005 brought her findings to the attention of the agency’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. The center’s reaction caught her off guard. “I was told to stop investigating,” she said in an interview from Hawaii, where she is now the executive director of the Food Ingredient and Health Research Institute. The Center for Food Safety said it would follow up, but failed to do so. Putting public safety ahead of her career, Dufault, now 54, decided to publish her work, even though she realized that doing so would mean taking early retirement with a greatly reduced pension. Her paper appeared in the journal Environmental Health in early 2009. The FDA has yet to take any action on the mercury problem. When asked to explain why the agency has balked, a spokeswoman declined to comment. But Dufault thinks she understands the reason. “Corporations can have too much to say about how the FDA operates,” she said. “If an industry group has enough clout, the FDA is going to be deferential—and when I was investigating mercury in high-fructose corn syrup, those people did have clout. From a political standpoint, sometimes no action is the safest action—unless there are enough deaths to warrant it.”
specific food safety problem to a specific ingredient. If the agency cracks down too hard and issues too many rejections, companies might not bother to notify the government at all, leaving it—and the public it is supposed to protect—in the dark. The FDA’s responsibilities also include
FARM-FRESH A salmonella outbreak led to the recall of 550 million eggs in Iowa.
The agency has further reason to take a see-no-evil attitude toward high-fructose corn syrup. The compound falls into a category called “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS. When it was established more than a half-century ago, the designation provided a reasonable solution to a potential regulatory nightmare. It was a way for food manufacturers to introduce new products containing ingredients that were universally considered safe, such as salt, sugar, pepper, caffeine, and potato starch. But thousands of less familiar chemicals have entered our diet under the GRAS umbrella. Some, such as the artificial sweetener cyclamate, have been found to have potential health risks and taken off the market. The loophole of all loopholes is that food corporations are allowed to determine on their own whether a substance belongs on the list, without seeking approval from or even informing the FDA, as long as they act on the authority of an expert—including one on their own payroll. According to the Pew Health Group, some 10,000 compounds are approved for use in foods, and 3,000 of them have been declared as GRAS by the food industry. The agency doesn’t even know what those compounds are, and the industry does not have to reveal that information. The Government Accountability Office condemned GRAS in a 2010 report. “Once a GRAS substance has entered the marketplace,” the report said, “FDA would find it difficult to identify that substance as the potential source of a food safety problem, especially if FDA is unaware that the substance has been determined to be GRAS.” It concluded that it would be “difficult, if not impossible” to trace a
inspecting seafood sold in the United States. Eighty-four percent of that seafood is now imported, and half of the imports are from Asia. Fish farmers there are able to produce tremendous volumes of shrimp, catfish, and tilapia in grossly polluted and overcrowded ponds, thanks to antibiotics and fungicides banned in the United States because they can cause antibiotic resistance or spark allergic reactions when consumed by humans, or because they are carcinogens. The agency is supposed to keep drug-tainted fish out of our food supply. But according to the GAO, it is failing miserably, or hardly even trying. In 2009 the FDA tested only 1 out of every 1,000 imported seafood products—for 16 chemicals. By contrast, Canada tests 50 out of every 1,000 products for more than 40 chemicals; Japan tests 110 out of every 1,000 for 57. This lack of oversight not only leaves the American public vulnerable, but threatens the country’s once-thriving catfish-farming industry. Bill Battle, until recently the president of the Catfish Farmers of America, a trade group, is a tall, plainspoken man. He patrols his farm in the Mississippi Delta, about an hour’s drive south of Memphis, in a brawny 4x4 pickup splattered with reddish mud and dust. At feeding time, the surfaces of his ponds boil with fish gobbling down their daily rations of corn and soybean meal, sprayed from nozzles on the backs of trucks. Battle’s father, who began the operation in 1969, was one of the pioneers in a business that would spread across Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, employing 13,000 and generating $16 billion in economic activity. But according to Battle, the good times are over. In the past year, he has had to sell 500 of his 3,000 acres. The 200 employees at Pride of the Pond have had their time slashed from five to three days a week. And several of his ponds are dry and empty for the first time, their cracked bottoms waiting to be plowed and planted in cotton and soybeans. “This industry is shrinking big-time,” Battle tells me. The problem is competition from cheaper, Asia-raised fish. Battle doesn’t begrudge the foreign farmers the advantages of warmer weather and less expensive labor, but he strongly objects to their being allowed to sell fish in this country that are raised with the help of chemicals banned here. “I wouldn’t be cutting back hours, selling land, or draining ponds if the FDA had done their job,” he says. The state of Alabama became so frustrated with the FDA that it initiated its own testing program for imported seafood. The results are cause for concern. According to Lance Hester, director of the Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries’ food safety section, of the 258 samples tested between 2002 and 2010, nearly half were positive for banned drugs. American producers eventually lobbied to have jurisdiction over the inspection of both imported and domestic catfish moved from the FDA to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which has a more robust inspection system. The winter 2012/2013
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away-with-it mentality: ‘We’ll wing it because the FDA won’t show up.’” One reason for this attitude, he says, is that the agency “carries a very small stick” with which to punish violators. “The civil and criminal penalties are not in proportion to the situations that food companies can get themselves into, especially if they have been careless or malevolent,” he says. In 2007, Acheson and a group of associates from within the agency drew up a plan that would radically realign its efforts. Known as the Food Protection Plan, it would shift the FDA’s focus from responding to If there is an enforcement arm for food safety in the food-poisoning outbreaks to preventing them. It called for the creation United States, it’s trial lawyers like Marler, an intense workaholic of clear standards and for training food industry personnel on how to who estimates that his firm, Marler Clark, has won more than meet them. Inspection would play a part, but site visits would be targeted, $600 million for clients since he filed his first lawsuits in the early their frequency based on the risk of a product’s poisoning people. “Some 1990s. In one tongue-in-cheek blog post, Marler suggested that pros- products like bananas—because their fruit is packed in a protective ecuting executives of food companies that sicken their customers be skin—are inherently safe,” Acheson explains. “Other products, like privatized to him. “I would be willing to put people in jail for poisoning lettuce, spinach, and tomatoes that are right out of the fields, are less people, and I would do it on the cheap—perhaps for the fun of it,” safe. Some places you do need to visit regularly; others you could go in he wrote. Then he listed several existing laws that any moderately every five years and you would be fine.” The plan would also speed up competent government prosecutor could use to put executives of and streamline the agency’s response to outbreaks. The Food Protection Plan became the basis for the Food Safety wayward food companies behind bars. Marler wages his war against contaminated food from lavish offices on Modernization Act, which was passed in early 2011 but has not fully the 28th floor of a skyscraper in downtown Seattle. The walls are covered taken effect because it has been held up by the White House’s Office with framed newspaper and magazine clippings chronicling his victories. of Management and Budget—a puzzling delay, since the law is supGiven his reputation and plush surroundings, a first encounter with Mar- ported by both the food business and the administration. Although ler can be disorienting. He favors faded cargo shorts, dress shirts with the act grants the FDA the power to revoke the registration of an sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and running shoes that look as if they offending company, preventing it from selling its products, sterner should have been replaced many, many miles ago. He spikes his con- civil penalties and higher fines included in some early drafts of the versation with salty language that you’d never hear in a courtroom. And bill were stripped out by legislators, Acheson says. While the law is his office is dominated by a stuffed boar’s head, its mouth open to reveal estimated to cost $1.4 billion over five years for food safety, a proper system would cost $10 billion, Marler estimates, comparing the act four sharp, curved, four-inch-long tusks—a gift from a satisfied client. As Marler sees it, the FDA is being slowly starved of the re- to “a sparkling brand-new building that has no people working in it.” The current policy of relying on third-party audits, such as those sources and manpower required to fulfill its mandate. In the 1970s the agency conducted 35,000 inspections of food-processing plants carried out at Jensen, the Peanut Corporation, and DeCoster, is a “complete and utter joke,” in Marler’s view. “It’s a each year. Today, it inspects fewer than 8,000, cover-up. People think it means that inspections ocalthough the number of facilities under its jurisdicFor more coverage of local food cur, but all that’s happening is that the skids are tion has skyrocketed. and other issues important to being greased to get product to market. Everyone Recognizing that business-as-usual was failing, the your health, see onearth.org/food knows it’s a scam.” FDA began drawing up a plan to improve its perforAcheson is more circumspect. He says that with a good auditor, mance following a series of outbreaks in 2006, according to David Acheson, who served as associate commissioner for foods at the agency third-party inspections can be effective, but concedes that the lack of before leaving to become a consultant to the food industry in 2009. The oversight causes problems. Marler finds an inherent conflict of interest FDA, like many government departments, is linked to the groups it in the auditing system. Companies that are being inspected pay the regulates by a revolving door for senior employees. Michael Taylor, the inspectors. Those who are too strict will not get repeat business. Lenient current deputy commissioner for foods, was formerly a vice president ones will always be welcomed. “A better system would be to have public of Monsanto. Mitchell Cheeseman, now a Washington, D.C., attorney officials do the audits,” he says. But that would mean spending more representing food companies, was the acting director of the Office of money, which is unlikely in the current climate in Washington. “We just haven’t had the size of crisis to hit that critical mass where people Food Additive Safety. Acheson says that the agency has a “huge problem with a lack of are outraged enough to pressure politicians,” Marler says. Or maybe the plague of food-borne illness in this country has yet personnel, which is a direct consequence of a lack of money.” The FDA employs about 1,000 food inspectors, who have to cover 421,000 to affect the right people. “It’s mind-boggling,” says Paul Schwarz of registered production facilities. The Department of Agriculture, by his family’s experience with Listeria. “After all my dad gave for this comparison, has about 7,000 inspectors for about 7,000 facilities. A country, the government was not there for him when he needed it. I USDA inspector is present at every operating slaughterhouse or poultry keep asking, why did it happen to him? To us? The answer is that you processor. “If you look at the enormous number of places that are grow- never know when it will happen to someone close to you. Nothing is ing, processing, manufacturing, holding, distributing, or selling food, perfect in life, but you can try to do the best you can, and we’re not versus the number of inspectors at the FDA, inspections simply are doing that. Maybe it will take a congressman losing a loved one before not going to happen very often,” Acheson says. “This can lead to a get- food safety gets the attention it deserves.” 2008 Farm Bill made this change, but no action has been taken to implement the switchover. Battle suspects that the government is reluctant to let American catfish farmers disrupt trade and diplomatic relations with Vietnam, which supplies more than three-fourths of the catfish imported into the United States. “I guess politics trumps food safety,” Battle says. “Apparently, we are going to let [Asian fish] come here and possibly kill people—and certainly kill the industry.”
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a legacy fulfilled Charles David “Dave� Keeling, left, in 1988; below, his son Ralph.
Air Apparent By susan freinkel
photographed for onearth by Zen Zekizawa
fifty years ago, his father ushered in the era of climate science. today, ralph keeling is discovering how the winds have changed.
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On an overcast June
morning Ralph Keeling unlocks the gate to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography pier and heads out onto the long concrete runway jutting over the Pacific Ocean. The sounds of traffic and other land life soon fade into the white noise of the waves and the wind. The pier was built for ocean research, but these days it is used nearly as much by scientists like Keeling, who are probing the atmosphere above it rather than the waters below. At the tip of the pier, more than one-fifth of a mile from the shoreline, he has placed a collection of air samplers: square, funnel-like devices on tall poles that continuously draw in cool ocean air and pump it back to his lab on shore, where he analyzes the contents. For more than 20 years, Keeling has been searching for tiny changes in the patterns of the earth’s own breath, fluctuations in how the planet absorbs and emits the oxygen and carbon dioxide that make up our atmosphere. Usually the changes are rendered in units of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas that typically comes to mind when we think about
for the first time,
Ralph felt drawn to atmospheric science. He appreciated the beauty of exact measurements. And he finally grasped the importance of the changes his father was documenting. climate change. Indeed, Keeling’s late father, Charles David “Dave” Keeling, was the scientist credited with first proving that we are filling the atmosphere with unprecedented amounts of CO2. Dave Keeling spent decades carefully counting the CO2 molecules in the air; his long and meticulous record documented how carbon levels were rising at an alarmingly relentless rate. The graph of that rise, an incline known as the Keeling Curve, became the icon of climate change science. Ralph Keeling, however, is tracking a different quarry. Rather than focus on carbon dioxide, he measures levels of oxygen in the air. He has found that they, too, are changing, a discovery that has helped pin down how—and how well—the planet is storing the carbon we generate and release. This information is vital for researchers and policymakers trying to predict how quickly CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere may rise, and what that portends for the earth’s climate. Atmospheric measurements demand extreme precision and a certain degree of obsessiveness, yet Ralph Keeling comes across as mellow and good-natured. At 55, he still has a boyish look about him: on the day I visit his office at Scripps he’s dressed in a fleece, jeans, and Tevas, his sandy hair flopping loosely over eyes framed by large tortoiseshell glasses. He laughs easily and is patient with explanations. His office is all business—mostly; aside from photos of his children 3 6 onearth
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and their artworks, the walls are covered with graphs and memos and whiteboard equations. (There are also two surfboards, which he rarely uses anymore thanks to ear troubles and an unforgiving schedule.) An adjoining room is filled with books from his father’s library. “I never look at them,” he says. “I just can’t throw them out somehow.”
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ome sons agonize over whether to go into the family business, but that decision didn’t seem to trouble Ralph, Dave Keeling’s second-oldest son. The Keelings were, and remain, a close-knit family; with five children growing up in a small three-bedroom house in Del Mar, California, “we kind of had to be,” says Ralph. His father was dedicated to his work but rarely brought it home. “We were more a musical home than a science-y home,” he recalls. Everyone played an instrument, and evenings often turned into small-scale classical music recitals. Ralph’s proficiency on the violin earned him a spot in the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, which helped him pay his way through Yale. From early on, it was clear Ralph shared his father’s left-brain inclination. He exhibited a mechanical bent and a knack for thinking through complex problems and arriving at elegant solutions. When his younger brother complained that he was too small to climb the big elm in the backyard, Ralph worked out a precise sequence of moves that would allow him to get himself up its branches. In college Ralph studied chemistry and physics, although by the time he graduated, he’d also developed an interest in earth sciences. Unable to choose between graduate work in that field or in physics, he chose a program at Harvard that would allow him to study either. Even so, a year in, he still wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. He decided to join his family in Bern, Switzerland, where his father was spending a sabbatical working with researchers who were trying to extract CO2 trapped in ancient ice cores. The goal was to determine prehistoric atmospheric carbon levels and thus give much-needed context to modern-day concentrations. Ralph joined Dave in the lab. Until then, Ralph had felt little interest in real-world experimental work. But he enjoyed “working with people and gadgets and physical objects,” he says, and decided that being in a lab as part of a research team would offer a fuller, more balanced life than sitting alone in a room and playing around with theorems all day. For the first time, he felt drawn to the world of atmospheric science. He began to appreciate the beauty of exact measurements. And he finally grasped the importance of the changes his father was documenting. Even then, he says, he could sense that those atmospheric shifts portended “the end of an old age and the dawn of a new age” for the planet. He wanted to be on the front lines of that dawning. “No other field had that kind of urgency,” he recalls. Of course, his father was the very figure who had first imbued the field with that sense of urgency. Scientists had long known that burning fossil fuels caused air pollution. But there was no accurate way to measure just how much CO2 we were emitting; indeed, most
portraits by zen sekizawa; archival photographs courtesy of Ralph keeling; illustration by bruce morser
scientists assumed that carbon levels varied so widely from place to place that there was no point in trying to measure them. Dave Keeling was a young postdoc at Caltech when, in 1953, he resolved to try anyway. Unable to find any instrument suitable for the task, he decided to build one, drawing on a 1916 article that described a manometer, a machine that could precisely measure very small quantities of gas. Then he began analyzing air samples he collected in glass flasks from remote western locations, including Death Valley and peaks in the Cascades. Contrary to what the textbooks taught, he found that the amount of CO2 in the air was surprisingly uniform: everywhere he conducted his tests, the background level was about 310 parts per million. If levels really were constant around the world, Dave realized that he could use his methods and machines to track global changes in atmospheric CO2. Starting in 1958, he set up sampling stations in several places, including Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano. Later he would add seven more stations to create a network that covered the Pacific from pole to pole. He very quickly made two important discoveries. First he found that CO2 levels in the Northern Hemisphere followed a distinct seasonal pattern. They fell during the spring and summer, as plants and trees grew and pulled in CO2 for photosynthesis. Then they rose in the fall and winter, as plants died or shed their leaves and released their carbon load into the atmosphere. (A similar pattern occurs south of the equator, but because there’s less land mass there, the phenomenon is more subtle.) Dave had tapped into one of nature’s fundamental cycles: the ceaseless circulation of carbon among land, air, and water. He soon realized that humans had significantly disrupted that natural cycle through the burning of fossil fuels. Within two years of recording these atmospheric carbon levels, Dave discovered that the amount of carbon dioxide was slowly but incontrovertibly rising, by about one part per million per year. (That rate has now doubled.) When he first published his findings, in 1962, he was counting 315 carbon molecules per million. Ice-core studies would later show that preindustrial levels had hovered around 290 ppm, before shooting up in the twentieth century. For more than five decades after that groundbreaking finding, Dave doggedly tracked CO2 levels and kept entering the data, extending the line of his graph upward. By the time he died in 2005, the count was at 380 ppm. In June 2012 it was measured at 395 ppm—the highest level in 800,000 years.
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ut the Keeling Curve tells only part of the story. As Dave Keeling himself recognized, CO2 isn’t accumulating in the atmosphere at the rate it ought to be, according to energy industry records of annual emissions. Rather, only about half of the carbon dioxide we release into the air each year stays there. So where is the rest of it going? How much is being absorbed by the oceans? How much by plants and soil on land? Getting these answers right is of critical importance. The oceans can absorb and “lock up” carbon for as long as 1,000 years, whereas forests and other land-based carbon sinks have much smaller (meaning shorter) storage capacities. As Ralph Keeling’s Scripps colleague Jeff Severinghaus puts it bluntly, the exact whereabouts of all that unaccounted-for CO2 determine how long we can keep “soiling our own nest.” Experts refer to this as the puzzle of “the missing sink.” Ralph first heard about it as a high schooler, when he and his father were
from nrdc measuring up
lisa suatoni Senior scientist in NRDC’s oceans program, based in New York, and a specialist in fisheries management and ocean acidification Ralph Keeling studies the relationship between oxygen and CO2 in the air, on the land, and at sea. How do rising concentrations of atmospheric C02 affect oceanic oxygen levels? The careful attention paid to the oxygen-CO2 relationship by Ralph Keeling and others has highlighted an important effect of climate change on the world’s oceans. The rise in atmospheric CO2 is warming their waters, leading to the loss
of oxygen in the oceans’ interior and causing the expansion of “oxygen minimum zones”—regions where oxygen levels are too low to support many forms of marine life. Substantial deoxygenation has already occurred in the North Pacific and tropical oceans. Wherever it has occurred, it has dramatically influenced the composition of marine communities. Taking measurements over a long time—as Ralph Keeling does, and as his father did before him—is sometimes dismissed as “routine monitoring.” How important is it? Because of the the methodical, consistent, and precise monitoring done by scientists like the Keelings, we now understand just how profoundly human activities are impacting the earth. From a scientific perspective, simple but accurate measurements taken over long periods can lead to important discoveries—think of the Keeling Curve. And from a social and public policy perspective, we need to understand what, exactly, it is
that we’re changing. Just as a doctor measures the temperature, pulse, and blood pressure of an incoming patient, scientists must be able to identify the earth’s key vital signs and monitor them continuously and carefully. Long-term measurements are key to making, and explaining, the diagnosis. Given its importance, how can we make sure this kind of science gets adequate funding and institutional support? Historically, these long-term observations were among the duties of agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But given how tight research budgets are these days—not to mention how vulnerable they are to the whims of politicians—a diversity of funding sources and strategic partnerships should be established to ensure long-term stability. A good model is the Federal Ocean Acidification Research and Monitoring Act (FOARAM) of 2009, which established a research apparatus linking federal agencies, state agencies, and scientists studying ocean acidification. We need to make sure that programs like this are well funded, and then we need to replicate them to help solve our other climate-related problems.
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talking one night at the kitchen table. At the time, Ralph could barely comprehend what Dave was saying. But some years later, as Ralph was getting ready to return to graduate school from his time in Switzerland, he remembered that conversation—and remembered, too, his father’s idea for solving this most vexing of riddles. One avenue worth exploring, his father had suggested, might be to measure changes in levels of atmospheric oxygen. In the air, carbon and oxygen are typically coupled in a see-sawing relationship: when the level of one goes up, the level of the other goes down. Plants on the land use photosynthesis to absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen, for instance, while fire—including the burning of fossil fuels—consumes oxygen and releases carbon dioxide. In the ocean, however, the two molecules generally don’t teeter-totter in this same way; the ocean can absorb CO2 through complex chemical reactions that don’t result in a corresponding release of oxygen. Thus, Dave had hypothesized, by comparing the respective amounts of each molecule in the atmosphere, it might be possible to calculate how much carbon the land was absorbing. The remaining fraction would be the amount taken up by the ocean. Settling back into his lab at Harvard, Ralph decided that trying to
after years of tests,
it was thrilling to witness his machine doing what he had hoped it would do. It was “like creating the first microscope,” he recalls. “You’re creating a lens onto something you haven’t seen before.” measure oxygen levels would be, as he put it, a “fun” dissertation project. Not many people would see the fun in such a formidable challenge. For one thing, oxygen is far more abundant in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide; the former makes up 21 percent of our air, whereas the latter—for all the damage it does—accounts for much less than one-tenth of 1 percent. Ralph would need to detect changes of just a few molecules per million, meaning he would have to make measurements that were orders of magnitude more precise than his father’s. If Dave had been forced to invent the equivalent of a dime-store magnifying glass, Ralph would need the equivalent of an electron microscope. And yet no such instrument existed. So once again someone with the last name of Keeling was called upon to design and build the right tool for the job. “It took a lot of chutzpah to think he could do it,” says Ralph’s former lab mate Darin Toohey, now a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. The missing sink, he adds, “was the biggest question at the time” for atmospheric scientists. Other scientists, most of them full-fledged professors, were trying to measure oxygen levels, but no one had yet figured out a workable technology for doing so. It was clear from the outset that any project 3 8 onearth
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of this scale would need outside funding—rarely granted to graduate students—and would entail many more years of research than what was typical for a standard Ph.D. dissertation. Ralph knew what he was getting into; still, the five years he spent working on his machine, from 1981 to 1986, were by his own admission lonely and often discouraging ones. Not even his father could help, since Dave had no expertise in the methods Ralph was exploring. Dave was pleased to see Ralph follow in his footsteps, but he had never been the kind of father to impose direction on his children. If anything, “there was a part of him that wanted to let me have some distance,” Ralph recalls. That remained true even after he joined the faculty at Scripps in 1993, setting up shop right down the hall from Dave. While Dave was chatty about his own work, he didn’t initially seem interested in Ralph’s. “At some point he said to me, ‘I need to figure out what you’re doing,’” Ralph says. “And he began urging that we work together on something. Which we never did, sadly.” What Ralph had been doing was creating a machine so adept at capturing the most minute atmospheric changes in oxygen levels that, in the words of Scripps geochemist Ray Weiss, “he out-Keelinged Keeling.” Ralph’s colleagues were impressed by the creativity behind the device. “It was outside-the-box thinking,” says Paul Wennberg, an atmospheric chemist who as a graduate student had worked in the same Harvard lab as Ralph and now teaches at Caltech. Drawing on his physics background, Ralph knew that air slows the speed of light—but at different rates, depending on the specific composition of the air and the wavelength of the light. His device, a highly specialized interferometer, can detect those variations in speed and translate them into readings of the air’s oxygen content. Indeed, the device can pick up changes in oxygen concentrations of as little as 0.0001 percent. The first time Ralph knew for certain that his machine would work was on October 25, 1986—which just happened to be the night that Game 6 of the World Series was being played between the New York Mets and the Boston Red Sox. He has joked that he saw the oxygen levels over Boston drop at the moment Red Sox first baseman Bill Buckner bobbled a ground ball, an error that ended up costing his team the game. (In fact, Ralph says, his interferometer picked up oscillations in his own breath when he leaned over the intake tube to check on it.) After years of tests and trials, it was thrilling to witness his machine doing exactly what he had hoped it would do. It was “like creating the first microscope,” Ralph recalls. “You’re creating a lens onto something you haven’t seen before.” “It was a real breakthrough,” says Pieter Tans, head of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s Carbon Cycle Greenhouse Gases Group in Boulder. The interferometer now sits in Keeling’s lab at Scripps. It’s a stainless steel box about seven feet tall, with a glass front and what looks like a giant ray gun inside, where gas molecules and light beams meet. It connects, via stainless-steel
piping, to glass flasks filled with air samples from 10 field stations up may be increasing, but it is still only a fraction of the amount we keep scattered from Antarctica to the Arctic Circle. pouring into the air. “It’s hard to see how any piece of this—the oceans, Since he first started measuring atmospheric oxygen levels in 1989, the land—is going to save us from major climate change,” Ralph says, “as Ralph has concluded that they’re dropping, following a downward long as we keep burning fossil fuels at something like present rates.” The slope that resembles the inverse of his father’s famous curve. It’s what land may in fact constitute an unusually adaptive and generous sink, but you might expect in a world full of combustion engines that suck in its ability to bear our massive carbon burden is limited. Meanwhile—even oxygen and blow out CO2. And yet, given the teeter-totter relationship as the land does the best it can to help out—atmospheric CO2 levels keep between these two gases in our atmosphere, oxygen levels aren’t fall- rising. The Keeling Curve inches ever upward. ing nearly as fast as one would expect them to—the big tip-off to the powerful role played by the land and its plants in carbon absorption. hen Ralph first arrived at Scripps, he had This discovery represented the biggest clue to date in the mystery published very little, and some on the faculty worried of the missing sink, and resolved a long-simmering debate between he would be a one-trick pony, obsessively focused oceanographers and terrestrial ecologists. The former had always on oxygen measurements in the same way his father insisted that the seas simply weren’t capable of accepting all that had single-mindedly tracked CO2. But Ralph has pursued a broad unaccounted-for CO2, while the latter had maintained that the land research agenda. He has studied Antarctic ice to discern ancient was already under such assault from things like acid rain and defor- circulation patterns in the Southern Ocean and taken measureestation that, if anything, it was generating excess carbon, not storing ments of atmospheric argon concentrations to get a better handle it. Ralph’s measurements made it clear that the land was, in fact, the on how the ocean is warming. With a colleague he is working to missing sink. But the data also contained a surprise. Not only is land the monitor local emissions over Los Angeles as part of a program more active of the two sinks, he discovered, but its rate of absorption that shows cities how well they’re meeting their emissions targets. He is also running his father’s carbon monitoring program, a job that is actually increasing. The plants, trees, and soil on our land, he says, fell to him after Dave died suddenly of a heart attack in 2005. As the are absorbing “more CO2 now than they did 20 years ago.” Indeed, the land’s capacity to store carbon seems to be growing, steward of the Keeling Curve, Ralph has to ensure that the ongoing despite the terrestrial ecologists’ (correct) assertion that it is releasing mil- collection of data remains pristine—and also funded, in this era of budlions of tons of CO2 through deforestation and the global warming–related get cuts. “It’s a tough time for these measurements,” he says, echoing thawing of the permafrost. “All that is happening,” Ralph says, “but this is a frequent complaint of his father, who had to scramble for funding the interesting part of the story: something even bigger is going on, in the throughout his career. Taking measurements “is not viewed as sexy,” direction of plants taking up more CO2—and growing faster.” Evidence he says. “And as much as it’s widely recognized as being important, of this phenomenon is coming in from various sources, he says, in addi- the fact that it’s not sexy means people don’t want to put money into tion to his own oxygen measurements. He mentions carbon levels that it.” Federal funding agencies, Ralph says, tend to be more interested have been recorded at one monitoring station in Point Barrow, Alaska. in sponsoring new measuring systems than in supporting existing There, the CO2 drawdowns in the summer—when boreal forests pull ones. What’s more, scientific grants are awarded on a short-term time in carbon dioxide to help them convert sunlight into energy—are about frame—whereas Ralph is following the long clock of the earth itself. 45 percent higher than in the past. It’s as if the forests are breathing more The planet’s slowly changing physiology simply can’t be captured and rapidly. “Somehow, the land is engaged in stronger photosynthesis and calculated in the space of a five-year grant. Yet the need to keep a close eye on the atmosphere has never been metabolic activity than it was 50 years ago,” Ralph says. greater. A small chart taped above Ralph’s desk predicts The reasons for this aren’t yet clear. It could be a that the global CO2 count will pass 400 ppm in May of result of the fact that CO2 can act like a fertilizer, spurFor more on recent advances ring growth. Studies in which researchers bombard 2014—though it could be even earlier, he says. Were in climate science, go to onearth.org/13win/climate a growing forest with CO2 have shown as much. But carbon emissions to stabilize at current levels, delayed effects could still push the count to at least 500 ppm. those studies are little more than local snapshots, whereas Ralph’s work gives us “the global picture,” says William Even he has a hard time imagining the future in a world swaddled by so much carbon. He envisions more bouts of extreme weather and wars Schlesinger, president of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. Ralph himself is uncertain what all this means. On the one hand, “we fought over increasingly scarce resources. Mostly he just foresees the may just be headed for a more jungly world,” he says, meaning that our instability of a ceaselessly changing climate, which is perhaps the most remaining forests could become denser. On the other hand, it may indi- chilling prospect of all. “There’s a standard story of human struggle: the war story,” he cate that we are moving more rapidly to the point of saturation—where the land will cease to serve as a carbon sink and become, instead, yet says. Tales of horrible conflict usually conclude with denouements another source of CO2 emissions. Indeed, many climate change models that suggest redemption and rebirth, like the ending of Gone With forecast such a shift. But Ralph doubts it will happen anytime soon. “It the Wind. “You go out and fight a war. Then the war is over, and you wouldn’t surprise me to see the land acting more and more strongly as go back to Tara and start farming again; you start building again,” he a sink,” he says. The pattern so far firmly supports this idea. “If you look says. “But this isn’t that kind of story. This is where we’re cut adrift. over the last hundred years, that’s what’s been happening,” he asserts. We can’t go back home again.” Still, no matter how active and resilient the world’s forests prove to be, they can’t compensate for the damage humans keep inflicting on the Susan Freinkel is the author of the book Plastic: A Toxic Love Story. Her last atmosphere, he warns. The amount of carbon that the land is mopping article for OnEarth was “In Each Shell a Story” (Summer 2012).
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FLYING the friendlier skies by katherine rowland
I
illustration by Bryan Christie Design
n our globalized world, more people are taking
to the skies all the time. In emerging economies, the growth has been dramatic: between 2007 and 2010, passenger volume in China increased by almost 50 percent—another 84 million fliers. In a number of smaller countries, growth has been even more rapid, with passenger numbers doubling in the Philippines, Turkey, and Vietnam; tripling in Ukraine; quadrupling in Hungary. According to NASA, air travel now accounts for 4 percent
of greenhouse gas emissions. Commercial carriers in the United States alone burn nearly 20 billion gallons of jet fuel each year. Ideally, of course, we could cut down radically on the amount we fly. But that isn’t likely to happen. Instead, a range of technical innovations—some already in operation, others still on the drawing board—will steadily alter the face of commercial aviation, both on the ground and in the air. Boeing’s Blended Wing and MIT’s Double Bubble are just two possible visions of the kind of aircraft we may be flying in the future.
solar panels On-site generation of renewables, like the solar arrays that are already in place at Denver International and are planned for Chicago’s O’Hare, is beginning to offset the energy demands of major airports.
winglets The winglet—a slight upward flap at the plane’s wingtip—was originally conceived in response to the 1973 oil crisis. Now in widespread use, it saves millions of gallons of fuel by increasing lift and thrust.
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biofuels Commercial carriers responsible for 25 percent of global aviation fuel use have resolved to develop sustainable alternatives to conventional jet fuel. In April 2012 the first biofuel-powered Boeing 787 flew across the Pacific.
satellite navigation The Federal Aviation Administration is moving away from ground-based radar in favor of the GPSbased NextGen navigation system. Already in use by some major airports and airlines, NextGen will increase fuel efficiency by creating more direct landing patterns and relieving air traffic congestion.
blended wing Boeing won’t stop building conventional passenger jets anytime soon. But in the search for a more environmentally friendly aircraft, the company’s experimental manta ray–shaped plane blends wings and fuselage together. By lessening drag, this design reduces fuel use at cruising speed. Engines mounted high on the back of the plane will be quieter.
double bubble MIT is developing a green plane that will use 70 percent less fuel than a Boeing 737. Nicknamed the Double Bubble for its dual-fuselage design, the craft, made of lighter composite materials, will increase the passenger-to-fuel weight ratio.
fuel efficiency The Double Bubble has skinny, low-swept wings that reduce resistance; engines placed at the tail to increase propulsive efficiency; and a turned-up nose that alters the plane’s fore-aft balance, allowing a smaller tail to reduce drag.
runways About 10 percent of airplane emissions occur on the ground or during takeoff and landing. Taxiing on a single engine, shorter taxiing paths from the terminal, and runways laid out in parallel will all help to save fuel. Runways built on a slight incline— adding momentum during takeoff and reducing reverse thrust during landing—will further improve efficiency.
pits of the world The Cripple Creek and Victor gold mine, 10,000 feet up in the Colorado Rockies, is nestled in the crater of an extinct volcano.
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Even though the sacristy was dimly lit, the man from
Celendín kept his sunglasses on, because he had been blinded in one eye by a police bullet. All around, scores of peasant protesters were bedded down for the night on bare mattresses. Outside, under a glittering three-quarter moon and scudding clouds, student hunger-strikers were huddled in pup tents against the evening chill. Women in the tall white straw hats, rust-colored shawls, and multiple petticoats of the northern Peruvian highlands were stirring huge cauldrons over a wood fire. One of them ladled me out a warming plateful of some unidentifiable stewed fruit. The walls and railings around us were covered with posters, most bearing the words Conga No Va! The literal translation—Conga Will Not Go Forward!—doesn’t quite capture the raw force of the sentiment, which is closer to this: Conga—a giant new gold mine, majority-owned by the Newmont Mining Corporation of Denver—Go Home! The colonial church of San Francisco in Cajamarca, 350 miles north of Lima, had been under occupation for a month, and no set designer could have fashioned a tableau more pregnant with symbolism. Up the block, a silent phalanx of riot police with shields, helmets, visors, nightsticks, and guns. And just beyond them, the cuarto del rescate— the ransom room—a place on which the entire history of the Americas pivoted. The conquistador Francisco Pizarro came here in 1532 and took the Inca emperor, Atahualpa, as his prisoner. Have your people fill this room once with gold and twice with silver, he said, and you will be released. It was done. Pizarro ordered Atahualpa garroted regardless, and the Inca empire collapsed. Since those distant times, the business of gold has been transformed. The days are long gone when a miner could reach into his pan and pull out a gleaming nugget. The modern gold mine is an open pit many hundreds, even thousands, of feet deep where infinitesimal flecks of the precious metal are embedded in millions of tons of rock and must
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be flushed out with sodium cyanide diluted in millions of gallons of water—the “heap leach” method. As these mines have grown bigger and the technological challenges more complex, few can make the necessary investment. Power is concentrated in an ever-smaller number of big corporations, such as Newmont. Yet other things, starting with geology, have remained constant. The Peruvian Andes form part of the spine of the Americas, much of it of volcanic origin, which stretches from the rainforests of Alaska to the glaciers of Patagonia and bears, close to the surface and temptingly accessible, a wealth of gold, silver, copper, and other valuable metals. Characteristically, the places that hold these treasures have five things in common: they are beautiful, they are remote, they are environmentally fragile, they are the ancestral home of indigenous peoples, and they have a tendency to produce violent conflict.
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The protests against Conga had simmered for years.
Unlike many people faced with the prospect of a mega-mine, the cajamarquinos had actually lived next door to one for the better part of two decades, and so had some idea of what to expect from another. Yanacocha, in which Newmont also holds a majority stake, lies about 20 miles north of town. It is the largest gold mine in South America; in 2011 it produced an astonishing 1.3 million ounces, worth about $2 billion. I went out early one morning to see Yanacocha with a local farmer named Gomer Vargas, a wisp of a man with sculpted features that suggested his distant Asian ancestry. Dressed all in black and wearing sandals, one might have taken him for a foot soldier in the Vietcong. We drove up twisting dirt roads, traditional Peruvian harp music playing on the car radio, through a checkerboard landscape dotted with scrubby patches of grazing land and plots of wheat and pigeon peas. We passed a couple of For Sale signs in one forlorn hamlet. Vargas blamed
illustration by bruce morser
the mine’s consumption of water. “Cattle raising has suffered,” he said. “Down in Cajamarca, people only have running water for two hours a day.” And then, abruptly, we were on blacktop. There were yellow center lines, guard rails, white marker posts, signs that told you not to use your cell phone while driving and that seat belts can save lives. Yanacocha. A few weeks earlier I’d visited a big mine in Cripple Creek, Colorado, the property of AngloGold Ashanti, the world’s third-largest gold producer. I’d stared up at the sky from the bottom of the 800-foot-deep pit; watched the colossal mechanical shovels and haul trucks at work; seen the black pipes, like outsize garden hoses, snaking up the towering ziggurat piles of ore-bearing rock to deliver the cyanide. So I thought I knew what awaited me here. But Yanacocha was on a whole other scale. The mine workings stretched for seven solid miles, one fathomless terraced hole after another, with a kaleidoscope of toxic tailings pits in shades of cerulean, lime, ocher, orange, lapis, and kelly green. (This is where Google Earth really comes into its own.) There was evidence here and there of efforts to reclaim the mined-out areas, tufts of grass planted at intervals like a questionable hair transplant on a bald head. We stopped at one of the heap leach piles. The cyanide here was applied not by hoses but by sprinklers, such as you would use to water a lawn or irrigate a farm field. The spray was drifting toward us on the breeze, so we kept our distance. A company sign by the roadside read: El hombre es el unico guardián de su naturaleza—cuidemos nuestro mundo. Man is the only guardian of his nature—let’s take care of our world. From the moment it opened in 1993, Yanacocha inspired deep mistrust. The most traumatic incident occurred in 2000, Vargas said, when a mine truck spilled 333 pounds of mercury in the village of Choropampa. People scooped it up with their bare hands and took it home in jars; children delighted in their shimmering new playthings; hundreds of villagers sickened. Soon afterward, Newmont carried out an internal audit that showed 20 serious environmental violations at the mine. The CEO was warned that senior officials risked criminal prosecution. Now Newmont and its partners planned to invest $4.8 billion in a new operation, Conga, a few miles to the northeast of Yanacocha, smack on the headwaters of five local river systems. The statistics were prodigious. Over its projected 17-year operating life span, Conga would yield almost 12 million ounces of gold and 3.1 billion pounds of copper. There would be two main pits, each more than a mile wide. The tailings would cover almost three square miles. Four lakes would be drained to gain access to the ore-bearing rock, to serve as waste pits, or to provide water for the mine’s operations. Legend says that the largest of them, Perol, is where Atahualpa’s treasure was hidden; when the moon rises over the mountain, it is said, the lake is radiant with the glow of gold from its depths. Newmont’s 10,000-page environmental impact assessment was approved in 2010 after an accelerated review, and last November the ongoing protests turned violent. Police used live fire. The man from Celendín lost his eye. The government declared a state of emergency. The Ministry of the Environment produced an internal report slamming the EIA, but official statements denied that any such report existed. In December the prime sacred waters minister resigned and the cabinet fell apart. Laguna Azul is one Under pressure, the government eventuof four high-altitude ally agreed to an independent review, calling Andean lakes that may in three experts from Spain and Portugal. be drained to make way Their report was made public in April. Three for the $4.8 billion Conga days later, President Ollanta Humala, who gold and copper mine.
from nrdc alaska’s big dig
Joel Reynolds NRDC’s western director, based in Santa Monica, and director of the organization’s work on the proposed Pebble Mine in Alaska
There’s a contentious battle right now over the Pebble Mine, which would produce huge amounts of copper, gold, and molybdenum. What are the main environmental concerns? If it’s built, the Pebble Mine would be one of the largest in North America. It would be located on Bristol Bay, at the headwaters of the most productive wild salmon fishery in the world. And it would contaminate the watershed, decimate native species, and destroy communities that have been sustained by salmon for thousands of years. This is a classic example of the wrong mine in the wrong place. Under the Clean Water Act, the Environmental Protection Agency has a rarely used “veto authority” over projects that would cause unacceptable harm to waterways and fisheries. Is the agency likely to exercise that authority in this case? Nine federally recognized tribes from the Bristol Bay region have asked the EPA to intervene to protect their communities and the salmon fishery. Because the environmental record of large mines has consistently been one of failure—all big mines eventually leak contaminated waste—there’s no question that, over time, development of Pebble would poison the ecosystem. The EPA’s legal authority to protect Bristol Bay is unequivocal, and the potential for irreparable harm—even if the mine were to operate perfectly, which large mines never do—is clear. The only question is a political one: will the EPA choose to exercise its authority in the face of aggressive opposition from a majority in the House of Representatives that has repeatedly attacked the agency? We’re doing all we can to encourage the EPA to act. But you also have many state politicians claiming that the mine enjoys majority support among Alaskans. That’s totally false. In contrast to many other development projects in Alaska, the Pebble Mine is unpopular both locally and statewide. Public opinion polls over the past several years have consistently shown that more than 80 percent of residents of the Bristol Bay region oppose the mine. Statewide that number has ranged between 57 percent and 60 percent. The reason is simple: commercial and recreational fishing are a critical economic engine for Alaska and its people. While mining has historically enjoyed public support in the state, Pebble is different because of the unacceptable threat it poses to the Bristol Bay fishery. The developers’ assurances that the mine will not harm that fishery are simply not credible.
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had taken office a year earlier promising to rein in abuses by foreign mining companies, delivered his verdict: Conga Va—though with modifications. Newmont was asked to explore ways to preserve two of the four threatened lakes, find alternative sites for dumping its waste rock, and enlarge the artificial reservoirs it proposed to build to compensate local communities for their lost water. I asked one leader of the protests what he thought of these concessions. I might as well have asked him to stand on his head in a tailings pit. “This means the total extermination of our water,” he snapped. “There is nothing to discuss.”
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There are multiple sides to every story, of course.
So that evening, I sat down first with Marco Arana, one of the animating spirits of the movement against Conga, and then with Fredy Regalado, regional coordinator of the Grupo Norte, the consortium of mining companies operating in northern Peru. Arana is a small, stocky man, a Franciscan priest. He speaks softly and with a slight lisp, projecting a quiet, deep-rooted indignation. After his ordination in 1989, he told me, he was sent to a poor rural parish near Cajamarca. The peasants informed him that there were some gringos in the vicinity and they appeared to be digging holes, guarded by armed men of threatening demeanor. Springs were drying up. Then, after Yanacocha began operations, cattle fell sick and people complained of rashes and pinkeye. Eventually, after the mercury spill in 2000, Arana and others formed an organization called Grufides, specializing in environmental protection, conflict resolution, and technical training for farmers. Enough, said the bishop of Cajamarca. Father Arana was removed from his parish and transferred to a teaching post in Lima, then told to go to the Vatican and remain there for seven years. Being a man who does not take kindly to what he considers an injustice, he came back after two. But his problems were only beginning. “We are believers in
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nonviolent resistance,” he said. “But the intel- no common ground ligence services began to tap my phone. They Above, a state of emeraccuse me of instigating violence. There have gency was imposed in been threats against my family. I always travel Cajamarca after recent by taxi. I never sleep alone.” protests turned violent. Regalado, meanwhile, a physician and expert Franciscan priest on infant malnutrition, presents the kinder, Marco Arana, right, has gentler face of the mining industry. Yet he gave been a leading critic me no more reason than the protest leaders of Newmont’s mining to think that this dispute would be resolved operations in Peru. through dialogue. In describing the ambitions of the Grupo Norte, he was implicitly throwing light on the larger unease of the cajamarquinos. Huge as Conga and Yanacocha might be, they are only part of a much bigger picture. Nearby, two Chinese companies are planning to invest almost $4 billion in a new copper mine. Next to that, the London-based company AngloAmerican is developing another big copper deposit. The dream is to transform the Cajamarca region into one of the world’s great mining complexes. Mining already accounts for 61 percent of the country’s export earnings; it is the driving force behind the “Peruvian miracle,” which has produced economic growth rates comparable to those of China and India. What government could say no? “There’s really no reason for this fight,” Regalado said as he flashed through his PowerPoint slides—graphs, pie charts, tables of social indicators, photos of mining equipment, colorful folk festivals, kids with laptops. “It reflects a historic mistrust based on the unsafe, unscientific mining methods of the past and the low level of education among the people.” Since the early problems at Yanacocha, he continued, Newmont had cleaned up its act. If people were still angry, the fault did not lie with the company. Two decades of mining had brought only limited improvements in people’s everyday lives, he acknowledged, despite the millions of dollars in taxes and royalties that had flowed into the
region. The problem was that the local authorities had no idea of how to make use of the bonanza. Rather than investing in social infrastructure, the politicians either left the money sitting in the bank or lavished it on prestige projects—sports fields, spiffed-up parks—which made them look good but brought few tangible benefits. Yet the mining companies took the blame. People expected benign paternalism, and didn’t understand the flow of money. I could see the logic of his argument; it perfectly illustrated the legacy of centuries of underdevelopment.
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Next day, a young man named Heriberto Huamán Villanueva,
a 20-year-old peasant-turned-law-student, took me up to the Conga site. He wore a heavy sweater and a red chullo, the typical Andean woolen hat with earflaps, against the biting morning air. As the road rose to 12,000 feet, well above the tree line, the lagunas began. We climbed to the top of a rocky hill and looked out over a chain of small, irregularly shaped lakes, dotted across the high grassland like blue amoebas. “My father used to tether his horse and sleep up here when he was taking his produce to market in Cajamarca,” Huamán said. The road dipped sharply into a narrow valley, and a larger lake came into view, flanked on one side by an elongated, steep-sided mass of dark rock. There was a modest trout farm here, and two men were drying nets by the water’s edge. “This lake is called Namococha,” Huamán said. “But people also call it Laguna el Cocodrilo, for the shape of the rock. There is a legend from the time of our ancestors about a giant
crocodile that could destroy the world. So they prayed to the gods for deliverance, and the gods turned the crocodile into a mountain.” Close to the mine site, we stopped for lunch at the home of a peasant. He took us to see a nearby spring seep. There was only a feeble trickle of water, even though the rainy season had just ended; five months of drought lay ahead. The problems had started as soon as Newmont began to sink its exploratory boreholes, the man said. “We don’t want gold or silver,” he complained. “Only our water. Do you see anyone here wearing jewelry of precious metal?” His sister was crouched nearby, electric blue skirts billowing over her Wellington boots, scooping out black mud from a dried-up irrigation channel with her bare hands. She
stood up, glaring, and launched into a tirade against the evils of the mine. There was a barred gate at the entrance to the Conga site, with a half-dozen black-clad police toting automatic weapons. But they let us through after a perfunctory document check. Huamán particularly wanted me to see the Laguna Azul, one of the lakes that Newmont had proposed to use as a waste pit. It was a gorgeous sheet of water, aptly named—azul means blue—and perhaps half a mile wide. He stooped down near the edge to show me a plant that exuded a thick, clear jelly. “We call this uñuigán,” he said. “It’s good for colds and stomach upsets.” He plucked another stalk. “Valerian,” he said. “Mix it with milk and you go straight to sleep—poom! And that one over there is Puya raimondii. You mash it up to make a poultice. When it hardens you can use it like a plaster to set a broken arm.” He rolled up his trouser legs, waded into the shallows, and scooped up a few mouthfuls of the icy water. Then he looked out over the blue lake, turned to me, and said, “Así es nuestra cultura.” Such is our culture. The problems began at the second checkpoint, where the guards interrogated us for 45 minutes. Eventually the chief of security was called in. There was a brief conference. He waved a hand at us. Leave. Now. On the way back to Cajamarca, the driver’s cell phone rang. I saw him blanch. “Two dead?” he said. In fact it turned out to be three, and then later five, after two more died of their injuries, all shot by police that afternoon during a protest in nearby Celendín, the hometown of the one-eyed man I’d met in the church. In Cajamarca, mourners were screaming at the fixed ranks of riot police. A woman had lit a row of candles on the sidewalk, tracing a line of demarcation between the two hostile groups. A young girl was weeping. She told me that one of the dead in Celendín, a boy of 17, had been a classmate. Events unraveled rapidly after that. More riot police blocked off the entrances to the plaza and chased us through the steep cobbled streets. The inevitable groups of infuriated young men charged the police lines, firing rocks from slingshots. Tear gas canisters rained down on us. I smeared my nostrils and cheekbones with Vicks VapoRub, a more effective antidote than the vinegar that sympathetic residents were tossing down from their wooden balconies. Later we watched as white pickup trucks loaded with police slowly circled the plaza. Others began to tear down the Conga No Va! posters. One of the vehicles slowed down and a policeman pointed his tear gas pistol in my face and screamed at us to go home. Amid the chaos, a cluster of about 40 people, led by Father Arana, sat cross-legged on the sidewalk holding candles and singing “The Sounds of Silence” in Spanish. Hello darkness, my old friend. The state of emergency was reimposed at midnight.
B
Bob Moran, who is a hydrogeologist and geochemist by
profession, may know more about the impact of hard-rock mining than anyone alive. I went out to see him at his home in Colorado, which is perched on the shoulder of a mountain above the town of Golden and looks down, appropriately enough, on the narrow valley of Clear Creek, where the Colorado gold rush began in earnest in January of 1859. The prospector who made that first strike came here for the same reason men have always craved gold. The lustrous, untarnishable metal is value incarnate, the ultimate expression of wealth, power, and prestige. It’s the stuff of Olympic medals, Oscar statuettes, altar monstrances, winter 2012/2013
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the crowns of kings. But does gold have any real intrinsic worth? Or is it valuable only because we perceive it to be valuable, like tulips in seventeenth-century Holland? Gold has some utility in the electronics industry, as an efficient conductor of low-voltage currents, and it commonly occurs in association with copper, which has myriad industrial uses. But for the most part we continue to mine it to satisfy our demand for the ostentatious display of wealth. Moran has been immersed in the world of mining for 40 years. He started out as a government scientist, then had a lucrative career as a corporate consultant. Latterly, with mines like Yanacocha and Conga spreading to the remotest corners of the world, he has found himself on the other side of the fence, his skills sought after by those who suddenly find themselves facing the prospect of a giant mine in their backyard. He is a slimly built man, pushing 70 now, with a mop of white hair and a beard to match, and eyes that dance with energy and good humor. Irish eyes, the cliché would say. He speaks in a rich, emphatic baritone. His father—whom he describes as “a larger-than-life character who got into lots of fights”—was the district attorney for Mono County, California, where he achieved renown by uncovering illegal diversions of water by the city of Los Angeles, a virtual sequel to the movie Chinatown. “He brought suit against the city—and won,” Moran said. “He took me to the places where the diversions were happening, and I learned the first rule of water: it flows toward money.” Moran got his doctorate at the University of Texas. “It was very good on straight formal geology,” he said, “although all the money came from the oil industry, and most people went into the oil business.” Nevertheless, he had no political epiphany, no desire at that time to take up cudgels against corporate power. Instead, he took a job in Colorado with the U.S. Geological Survey. It was 1972, and the dirty legacy of mining had finally crept onto the national agenda. The Environmental Protection Agency was two years old, the Clean Water Act was brand new, and people were beginning to think seriously about how to enforce it. “There were hundreds of miles of streams in Colorado that were contaminated, much of this being from gold mining,” Moran told me. “And there were rules now, so how were you going to respond? But the cool thing was that we were producing real technical data—and doing it with public funding.” The new federal regulations were not the only significant development for the mining industry at that time. In 1971 Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard, which Alexander Hamilton had established 180 years earlier. By 1980, with gold now a freely tradable commodity and an attractive hedge for investors during tough economic times, the price had soared from $35 to $850 an ounce. So two things were happening at once: mining corporations were expanding their reach to reap the windfall profits, but they were also obliged to show compliance with the new environmental rules. Moran found that his scientific expertise was suddenly in great demand, and from the late 1970s through the mid-1990s, as an independent consultant, he built a client list of Fortune 500 companies: Kerr McGee, Union Carbide, Anaconda, Gulf & Western, W. R. Grace. The fees were
fabulous. “I’m billing any number of hours I wish,” he said. “As a young guy, you’re seduced by this. You’re flying high.” Over time, however, doubts began to nag at him. “I began to see the Clean Water Act as a kind of Trojan horse,” he said. “The corporations saw the potential for liability, so they moved to control the data.” He saw companies spending tens of millions of dollars to keep contaminated sites off the federal Superfund list; he saw his data massaged by lawyers in court, or locked away in a safe if they were considered too sensitive for public disclosure. “We could run the EPA in circles because we had the firepower, the money, and the resources,” he said. “The deck was stacked. It was sleazy dealing, and I’d had enough.” Even though the corporations could outmaneuver the EPA, they still chafed at the regulatory hoops they had to jump through. They looked increasingly to Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where there were lower labor costs and few government regulations or enforcement powers, and a little money under the table could help grease the wheels of business. There were huge fortunes to be made by those who could afford the 9- and 10-figure investments required for the new mega-mines that were proliferating in the developing world. Historically, the peaks and troughs of the gold market had mirrored the state of the world economy, but the new century brought an unprecedented bull market. The price of gold rose for 10 straight years until, in 2011, it peaked at almost $2,000 an ounce, driven by the demand for luxury goods in China (which buys more than 500 tons of gold a year for jewelry alone) and the economic boom in India (which is now the largest consumer of gold in the world).
does gold have any real intrinsic worth? or is
it valuable only because we perceive it to be valuable, like tulips in seventeenth-
century holland?
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I
If the EPA scientists and regulators were outgunned by
wealthy corporations, the imbalance of power in a place like Peru was infinitely greater. Starting in the mid-1990s, Moran was answering his phone to a different kind of caller: not-for-profits; governments eager for the wealth the mines could bring but nervous about surrendering their sovereignty; and local, often indigenous communities with long and bitter memories of foreigners showing up to appropriate their riches. “I severed all my corporate ties,” he told me, “and I have more work today than I’ve ever had in my life.” Over the past 15 years he has provided independent data for clients in 40 countries—from Guatemala to Kyrgyzstan, from Indonesia to Argentina. Moran visited Peru professionally for the first time in the mid-1990s. It was one of his last corporate consultancies. “It involved a huge mine in the northern Atacama Desert,” he said. “They were sucking out their water from lakes 15,000 feet up in the Andes, and all of it was running off as waste down a dry quebrada and ending up in the ocean. The campesinos were so desperate for water that they were tapping into the mine tailings to irrigate their land.” He came again in 2001, this time contracted by Oxfam America, to analyze a Canadian project that called for the diversion of a river and the forcible relocation of 14,000 people. During one of his subsequent visits, he was summoned to the office of the minister of energy and mining. “There was a roomful of
suits, but no one would give me their business card,” he recalled. “The minister said, look, we have a big problem here. How would you like to be our independent expert? To me it was a clear attempt at bribery.” Word of Moran’s reputation reached Father Marco Arana in Cajamarca, and he invited the American to visit. “I could see right away that Conga was a disaster waiting to happen,” Moran said. He returned in the wake of last winter’s violence, this time to examine Newmont’s environmental assessment of the project and help the community ask the right questions about its likely impact. “What we were looking for was impartial scientific information,” Arana said. “To us it wasn’t only a matter of what the market wants. It was a search for an ethical alternative.” “The companies say I’m anti-mining,” Moran told me, “but that’s bullshit. To me it’s a question of fairness, of leveling the playing field.” The starting point, he said, is baseline data, so you know what conditions are before mining begins. “How much water is there in the rivers, lakes, wetlands, springs, and wells? What’s its quality? What’s the aquatic biology and the soil chemistry? What can you grow? Without those studies, it’s impossible to determine whether the impacts of mining are acceptable, and therefore to give informed consent.” Moran also invariably asks whether the company will pay for the water it will use, as local farmers customarily do. (The answer is often no.) Will it make the required tax and royalty payments on the volume of gold it produces? (Ditto.) And without independent data, how do you even know if it’s telling the truth about what that volume is? “After all,” he said with a twinkle, “remember what Mark Twain is supposed to have said: a mine is a hole in the ground with a liar standing next to it.” I asked him what the biggest environmental hazard is once a mine is in full production. Thinking of that sinister spray drifting toward me on the
Andean breeze, I assumed he would say cyanide. But he shook his head. “Sure, heap leach tailings are highly toxic,” he said, “and cyanide is a major problem if there’s a catastrophic event like the Baia Mare spill in Romania in 2000, which moved all the way down the Danube to the Black Sea. It’s also the symbolic association with things like Zyklon B. But to me the bigger problem is the slow, chronic, long-term harm that comes from the crushed waste rock. At one mine site in Spain, there was evidence of continuous acid drainage going back 8,000 years.” So Moran always poses the same question: are government regulators holding companies liable for the treatment of contaminated water after a mine closes—which may cost hundreds of millions of dollars? “If not,” he said, “you’re just dumping those costs on the public, on your grandkids.” Moran spent most of February in Cajamarca, poring over Newmont’s data and traveling up to the Conga site at dawn to take field measurements. His critique of the environmental impact assessment was ferocious. “In many ways, it is an insult to the public and the regulators,” he wrote. It was disorganized and incoherent; the technical quality of the analysis would be unacceptable in a developed country; it was based on false assumptions and rosy projections; it failed to consider the experiences of countless similar mines around the world; liability for post-closure cleanup was ignored; and so on and so on for almost 30 bullet-pointed pages. Backed by Moran’s reputation, the report was not something the feeling betrayed Peruvian government could ignore, and it was Peruvian protesters say instrumental in the decision to call in a panel that President Ollanta of foreign experts. For opponents of Conga, Humala has abandoned meanwhile, it was reassurance that their fears his earlier promises to rested on a solid scientific foundation. hold mining companies “Moran gave a talk in Cajamarca, and people more accountable.
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pitched battle From the Inca capital of Cuzco to the Amazon to the streets of Cajamarca, pictured here, Peru’s anti-mining protests have often turned violent.
came from all over,” Marco Arana told me. “It was the first time they’d heard directly from a real expert. He spoke with simplicity, but also rigorously. So the communities saw him not only as a scientist but as a friend.” An intelligent man, the peasant said when he showed me his driedup spring seep, in the characteristic clipped-off Spanish of the native Quechua speaker. He knows his wells, his springs, his water sources. While Moran was working on his report, critics of the mine invited him to join a protest march from Cajamarca to Lima. He declined. “I never let myself get aligned with any political group, because it compromises my technical credibility,” he told me. “It takes them a while to understand, but you’re much more powerful if you keep your politics private. I just load the gun. I don’t aim it, and I don’t fire it.”
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Conga was a cautionary tale of ALL that can GO WRONG IN
a poorly regulated environment beset by cultural misunderstanding. And other countries hoping to profit from the gold boom—like Peru’s neighbor to the north, Colombia—had begun to ask, could it happen here? Like Peru, Colombia is heavily freighted with the legends of gold. Even the Bogotá airport is called El Dorado. Forty miles to the north is a volcanic crater lake, Guatavita, that is the origin, it is said, of the legend of the golden man—a priestly ruler, the zipa, who coated himself with gold dust before plunging into the water. Now AngloGold Ashanti, owner of the mine I’d visited in Colorado, has discovered a massive gold deposit in Colombia and is planning to open a multibillion-dollar mine called, appropriately, La Colosa. To make the parallels with Peru even more unnerving, the town where it would be built, in the central Andean department of Tolima, is also called Cajamarca. (The name, I was told, means cold country in Quechua.) Moran first came to this other Cajamarca in 2009, contracted by a Dutch peace group, IKV Pax Christi, which had been working there for five years. The town is in the historic heartland of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a tenacious guerrilla group that has built a massive war chest from cocaine, kidnappings, and payoffs from illegal gold mines. “You often find drug mafias where there’s gold,” Moran said. “In Central Asia, my Russian colleagues say, every dissident army is paid for by illegal gold. It’s like conflict diamonds in Africa.” When AngloGold Ashanti showed up in 2007, IKV Pax Christi’s concerns naturally expanded into the likely impact of industrial-scale mining operations. And much as Father Arana had done in Peru, it asked Moran to provide his independent expertise. “AGA were very cooperative,” he said. “They escorted me on a tour of the site. But when the newly appointed president of their Colombian operations, Rafael Herz, said there were no problems at La Colosa, I asked him, ‘Have you ever actually worked in a mine?’” The answer was no. (Herz’s background is in the energy industry.) Moran said that the likely conflict over water, coupled with the presence of the FARC, made La Colosa especially worrisome. The future mine site is nestled among steep, forested mountains on the headwaters of the Río Coello, which nourishes Colombia’s most important rice-growing region. It is also an area of extraordinary biodiversity. Only three countries in the world contain more species: Colombia ranks number one in amphibians, number one in birds, and number two in butterflies. The richest area of all is the central Andes. A group of Tolima activists made the four-hour drive to Bogotá to recount to me their experiences of working with Moran. They had followed his advice to take a firsthand look at comparable mines 5 2 onearth
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elsewhere in Latin America, said Luís Carlos legacy of gold Hernández, a scientific adviser to a local group The mountains around called Ecotierra. He was one of a delegation Bob Moran’s Colorado who traveled first to Yanacocha and then to an home are still littered AngloGold Ashanti mine in Brazil. This they with relics of a century saw as something of a Potemkin village. It was a and a half of mining. much smaller enterprise than La Colosa would be, and its use of water presented no threat to local food production. “We felt as if we were in paradise,” Hernández said, “that this mine had been handed down by God, and that God must surely be a Brazilian.” Yanacocha, however, left them “shell-shocked”—Moran’s word—and the protests in Tolima gathered force after they reported back, culminating in a march of 30,000 people this June. The tone was deliberately non-confrontational, said another member of Ecotierra, Renzo García. “These are joyful celebrations of our culture,” he said. “We can’t let ourselves be stigmatized as radicals.” (Although that will happen anyway, Moran said, when I told him the story later. “As my grandfather used to say, they speak about my drinking, but not my thirst.”)
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The challenge at La Colosa is related to securing an
unequivocal social license to operate,” says AngloGold Ashanti’s most recent annual report, and that was the main topic of a long conversation I had with Rafael Herz. “Obviously the conflict in Peru worries us,” he said. “But this is a very different situation. AngloGold Ashanti is not the problem here. The rice industry uses several hundred times more water than La Colosa would. It’s very inefficient. We can actually help them with better water management techniques, like regulating the supply during the dry season.” And the Tolima protests? “Look,” he said with a note of impatience, “they’ve invented a hundred reasons to oppose us. But it’s an artificial conflict, and besides, it’s premature. There’s been no real tradition in this country of modern, high-tech metal mining. Petroleum is more important right now, and coal. Until recently it hasn’t been possible to exploit the gold reserves because of all the internal violence—the FARC, the narcotraficantes, the right-wing paramilitaries. But we’re in a new phase now, and the
environmental sensitivity of the mining industry has been transformed in the past 10 years. We won’t start production at La Colosa until we meet all the necessary standards.” Which begged the question, of course: could a developing country like Colombia codify and enforce those standards quickly enough to head off the explosion? After all, Peru hadn’t. “I don’t want to sound like too much of a nationalist,” Herz answered. “But there’s a high degree of government oversight and independence here. Colombia wants to attract mining, so it’s been careful to prepare the right institutional framework. This country has a technocratic tradition. What it needs is more experience.” Herz’s aides pressed some reading matter on me as I left. Concerned about the long-term impact of mining? Here’s a booklet about the restoration of worked-out mines: 101 Things to Do With a Hole in the Ground. Botanical gardens … movie sets … a theme park … a wedding venue … a golf course … a mushroom farm … And the water problem? Please, take a copy of our book Aguas Adentro—In the Water, a dual-language coffee-table tome filled with gorgeous photographs of waterfalls, soaring green hillsides, the tumbling rivers of Tolima; a volume of such extravagant proportions that I wondered if it might cost me an excess baggage charge on the flight home.
anglogold ashanti has discovered a massive gold deposit in colombia and plans to open a multibillion-dollar mine called, appropriately, la colosa
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opportunity to test Herz’s confidence in the competence of the Colombian government. The atmospherics weren’t encouraging. When I arrived, the only thing on the whiteboard was a packing list: sunblock, insect repellent, hats, long pants and long-sleeved shirts, sunglasses (for gringos). The mood in the room was oddly desultory, as if the participants weren’t sure how to take advantage of the presence of a visiting expert of Moran’s stature. There was also a certain air of defensiveness, especially from a team of scientists from the environment ministry. “You’re telling me all the reasons why we can’t do an audit. Now tell me how we can,” Moran teased them after one awkward exchange. Toward the end of the last session, he asked to see the maps they’d be using for their inspection of the Drummond mine. An embarrassed official mumbled that they didn’t actually have any. “We should have had maps six months ago!” Moran exclaimed. “Now we’re hostage to whatever we get tomorrow. And we have no Plan B.” People stared at the table, fiddled with their cell phones. But then he just grinned his Irish grin and started whistling the song from the crucifixion scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian: “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”
I
i caught up with bob moran again at the offices of the
Contraloría, Colombia’s equivalent of the U.S. Government Accountability Office. It was the day after the killings in Peru. This was his third trip to the country in the past year, and he was here this time at the request of Sandra Morelli, the head of the agency, to train her regulators and staff scientists—“loading the gun” for them—and then to spend another week collecting independent data at a working mine. The original idea had been to focus on gold. But the plan changed: they would be dealing with coal instead. As Herz had said, this was a more mature industry. (Colombia is the world’s fifth-largest exporter of coal, shipping it through the Caribbean port of Santa Marta.) But the industry was also reeling from recent scandals over the evasion of royalty payments, gross violations of air quality standards, and other environmental abuses. “The Contraloría probably saw coal as the low-hanging fruit,” Moran said. In any case, his techniques were just as applicable to coal as they were to gold. So the goal now was to “pre-audit” a mine owned by the Alabama-based Drummond Company, in Colombia’s sticky, steamy northern lowlands—a dry run for the real thing later in the year. I sat in on the last two days of the training, seeing this as a good
I went upstairs to Sandra Morelli’s office, which was big
enough for a game of touch football. “I’m glad to hear that Señor Herz is so dedicated to the food security of the Colombian people,” she said with heavy irony, when I told her about my visit to AngloGold Ashanti. Morelli is a constitutional lawyer, a former member of the Andean Commission of Jurists, and a person of formidable energy. She is the first to admit that she is a neophyte on environmental issues, but she is a zealous fighter against inefficiency and corruption. A recent photomontage in one of the Colombian papers depicts her as Joan of Arc, dressed in chain mail, bowstring drawn. When I said I’d just arrived from Peru, she grimaced. “What happened there is a warning for us,” she said. “There’s going to be a huge problem at La Colosa. Most of the population of Tolima depends on that water. How do we know we can trust the company’s data? The rice industry doesn’t want this mine. If we don’t get the social aspect of this right, we’re going to end up in the same position as Peru.” She raised an eyebrow when I said that Herz seemed confident that any problems could be headed off by AGA’s commitment to socially responsible mining and the government’s independent monitoring skills. “The environment has ceased to be a national priority in recent years,” Morelli sighed. “There are only 16 full-time government inspectors for more than 6,000 mines—and those are just the legal ones.” She complained that regional offices were understaffed and often incompetent, lacking basic data about the impact of the extractive industries—even when this was a matter of public scandal. The Contraloría has been studying the mining and energy industries since 2005, she went on. “But we’re still quite primitive, very backward in our professional standards and technical skills,” she said. “That’s why we brought in Moran. Plus there’s a lot of corruption. Government agencies are infiltrated by nefarious interests. Many officials are in bed with the corporations or the guerrillas or the paramilitaries.” Morelli herself has received death threats. She uses words like predatory to describe the mining industry. The coal mines in northern Colombia, where Moran was now headed, epitomized the challenge. “We just did an audit of the port of Santa Marta,” she said. “It was a disgrace. They were dumping in the winter 2012/2013
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project I worked on in Peru was killed in the end. Same thing with a mine in Patagonia, in Argentina, where the company had to write off an investment of $700 or $800 million. That gives me real pleasure. Although of course these are countries where you can buy a hit man for a hundred bucks, so that makes you a bit nervous.” Next morning, Moran headed north to the Drummond mine, and I made the pilgrimage that is obligatory for every visitor to Bogotá: to the Museo del Oro. Each gallery displays the genius of pre-Columbian goldsmiths from a different part of the country. One contains artifacts from Tolima, where AngloGold Ashanti hopes to develop the La Colosa mine. Tolima specialized in simple, flat pectorals denoting shamanic power, with men taking on the attributes of birds, bats, and jaguars. But the centerpiece of the collection is the golden raft of the Muisca, who inhabited the area around Bogotá. Less than eight inches by four, it shows in intricate, three-dimensional detail the zipa of legend, coated in gold dust, surrounded by his the golden man priests and acolytes, ready to throw himself into The raft of the Muisca, the lake, the ceremony legitimizing his spiritual which is more than and temporal authority over his subject people. 3,000 years old, is the The power of the golden man crumbled, of finest surviving example course, in the face of the greater power and of the skills of prepurpose of the European invaders. In Peru, Columbian goldsmiths. the conflict had felt equally irreconcilable. PowerPoints and expanded reservoirs seemed beside the point. For one side, water could be measured in cubic feet and acreage of cement; for the other it was a matter of identity. It reminded me of something one of the environmentalists from Tolima had said: It’s like trading your kidneys for a dialysis machine. But an irreconcilable conflict is not necessarily an immobile one. While geology remains static over the centuries, history does not. The empire of the Incas had fallen, but the killings in Celendín on that July afternoon did not tamp down the anger of Atahualpa’s descendants. In the end it was By our last night in Bogotá, Moran looked exhausted. Over the Peruvian government that blinked, ordering the suspension of the beers in a dingy hotel restaurant, we talked more about what had Conga project the following month. A spokeswoman at Newmont’s Denver headquarters told me that “Conga is still in our plans, but movhappened in Peru. He shook his head and said, “I’ve seen people killed in half a dozen ing ahead on a very measured basis.” Pursuit of “the necessary social environment” would continue. But with polls showing almost 80 percent countries now, but five at one time is unusual.” I felt I had to ask him the hardest question of all. He had come into a of cajamarquinos opposing Conga, the company’s multibillion-dollar bitterly polarized situation, and the opponents of the mine had felt that investment seemed to hover somewhere between the back burner and their grievances were vindicated by his findings—even though these the mortuary slab. When the man from Celendín lost his eye last winter, were much more nuanced than their anger. He had never suggested, Newmont stock was trading at $70; when the Cajamarca poll was taken for example, as the activist in the church of San Francisco had put it, in August, it was down to $29. Bob Moran’s credo is that when the playing field is leveled a little, that Conga would mean the “total extermination” of their water. So did with all parties having access to the science and the data, power he feel any responsibility for the way events had unfolded? He seemed thoughtful rather than offended by the question. and purpose may yet settle into a more even balance. As AngloGold Ashanti says, it’s all about securing an unequivocal “No,” he said. “You can’t think that way. You can social license. And for the captains of the new gold never tell how things will play out. I’ve worked with Read George Black’s column about boom, that license may be something that can no environmental advocates risking personindigenous groups that wanted mining projects al safety. onearth.org/13win/gblack longer be taken for granted. to go forward. On the other hand, that Canadian ocean. There were oil and grease spills. They were using ancient, unsafe vessels flying under flags of convenience.” “Only 3 percent of mine permits are ever denied, and they’re usually granted on the companies’ terms, even in environmentally sensitive areas,” Morelli continued. “Royalties are set way too low, in the name of ‘investor confidence.’ There’s a fear that if we ask them to conduct their activities in a responsible manner, they’ll take their business elsewhere and take the jobs with them.” I’d heard that kind of talk in Peru. During the standoff over Conga, Newmont made the threat quite explicit: block this project and we’ll switch our investment to Indonesia or Ghana. This is a global boom. I was suddenly aware that Moran had entered the room and pulled up a chair next to me. He said to Morelli, “Drummond just denied us access to the mine.” She frowned. “They have no right to do that. We have a written agreement.” She turned to an aide and said, “Check it.” He thumbed around on his BlackBerry for a minute, then nodded. She picked up the phone. “Mauricio,” she said—Mauricio Cárdenas, that is to say, the minister of mining and energy. “Sandra Morelli. I have a problem.” Another call, and a young army colonel materialized behind me, impeccable in braids and epaulettes and mirror-bright shoes. “I need transportation and security for these people.” She issued her instructions with a kind of weariness; how ridiculous, what a waste of everyone’s time, to be forced to deal with this nonsense. The colonel snapped his heels and left. “I imagine you must have a lot of disagreements with the government,” I said. Morelli just smiled and said, “I don’t have to be in agreement with them. My job is to monitor them.”
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Lost Antarctica Adventures in a Disappearing Land by james mcclintock Palgrave MacMillan 256 pp., $26
bipolar disorder
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The Arctic may get all the publicity, but life under the southern ice is just as magical by gretel Ehrlich
ip a gallon jug into Antarctica’s Southern Ocean and you will
lift to the surface a sample of polar fecundity. James McClintock tells us in his astonishing book, Lost Antarctica, how a single bathtub-full of water from the seas around the Antarctic continent will give you 5,000 separate organisms, and a cubic mile of the water will deliver 27 trillion sea butterflies, his favorite creature of the cold Southern Ocean, where he has worked as a marine biologist for 27 years. McClintock is happiest when his head is underwater, and he writes with immense affection about his aqueous world, giving us intimate details about its extraordinary beauty and layered complexity. His prose is easygoing yet precise, humorous and elegant. After his first dive under the ice, in 1985, he wrote: “Descending to a depth of about 20 feet, the sea ice above me glowed, filtering sunlight to the depths…. Across the seafloor, peach-colored soft corals spread out amid cream-tinted sponges standing three to four feet tall like ancient Venetian vases. Giant marine worms and twelve-inch-diameter sea spiders added an element of absurdity to the landscape. Bright red sea urchins carpeted the seafloor, and red and yellow starfish nestled among them…. Tiny orange sea butterflies swam about, flapping their wings, and a Weddell seal, attracted, perhaps, to the breathing hole beneath our dive hut, approached.” These are the words of a man in love with his work. In Lost Antarctica, McClintock showers us with ebullient
descriptions of the entire ocean ecosystem—Adelie penguins, Weddell and ringed seals, king crabs and krill, amphipods, copepods, and phytoplankton—weaving an intricate picture of life under the polar seas that surround Antarctica. His words are fueled with admiration for the life habits of these plants and creatures, their cooperative and predatory ways of interacting, and the intricacy of their interlaced communities. McClintock’s research projects have included marine invertebrate reproduction, chemical ecology, and ocean acidification, and he is our capable guide, our Virgil, leading us down, down under the ice into the spiraling depths of a cold, wild ocean in a narrative that is at once curious, thrilling, and strange. Welcome to the world of 1,500-year-old sponges; of dancing soft corals that do the backbend and skitter across the ocean floor; of the sea butterfly, Clione antarctica, a winged snail that is abducted by tiny amphipods to ride on their backs and protect them from predators, since sea butterflies don’t taste good. Welcome to the world of water-column filter feeders—krill—that can descend thousands of feet to forage on the seafloor. Welcome to the world of Antarctic planktonic communities made up of bacterioplankton; phytoplankton; copepod and amphipod crustaceans; and zooplankton such as krill, jellyfish, and salps, which McClintock describes as “jellylike sea squirts about the size and shape of a walnut.” They
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reviews all have important roles, including transporting carbon to the deeps, absorbing carbon dioxide, and recycling nutrients. Welcome to the world of shelled sea-butterfly sex, in which the all-male population mate, store sperm, then change into females that fertilize themselves. And welcome to the spiraling depths where huge populations of zooplankton feed on phytoplankton and, in turn, feed the larger, topside residents of Antarctica— whales, seabirds, and penguins. Reading McClintock is like eating a 20-course meal. The largesse of the Southern Ocean’s minutiae is almost too much to comprehend, and so is the extinction of its trillions of inhabitants. Sixty-seven species of hyperiid amphipods, only a quarter inch long, have been found in the Antarctic seas; copepods, which propel themselves in awkward, jerky motions with their dual antennae, are so abundant they may represent “the largest biomass of any animal on the planet.” McClintock reminds us that the Southern Ocean is “a dynamic ecosystem in rapid transition” and that the Antarctic is shifting from a polar desert to a moist, warm environment with cloudier days, stronger winds, and reduced sea ice. In other words, it is experiencing the same changes we are seeing in the Arctic. The news is mostly about the Arctic these days, not Antarctica, because the Arctic Sea has reached an historic sea ice minimum, having lost a chunk of seasonal ice the size of Alaska and Canada combined. The surface of the Greenland ice cap turned to slush this summer, icequakes are becoming common when massive pieces of ice break off, and rainfall resulting from thawing Siberian permafrost has caused unprecedented flooding in Arctic Alaska. Across 5 6 onearth
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from our contributors
Desert Air By George Steinmetz, Abrams, $60 ON ASSIGNMENT FOR ONEARTH (“THE PLANE TRUTH,” SPRING 2011), the photographer George Steinmetz captured dramatic images of the area around Yellowstone National Park from a single-engine Cessna and a two-seater helicopter. In Desert Air, he takes to the skies in an even more precarious craft: a paraglider that weighs less than 90 pounds and flies at 30 miles an hour, the lightest and slowest motorized aircraft in the world. Skimming—floating might be a better word—low over the surface, Steinmetz has photographed some of the strangest and most remote places on earth. Desert Air takes him to “hyper-arid” areas such as the Ennedi region of the Sahara, which is punctuated by sudden surprises like the oases and saline lakes of Ounianga Serir, a UNESCO World Heritage Centre in northeastern Chad.
the polar north, from Greenland to Siberia, a 20,000-year-old Inuit culture is vanishing as a result of disappearing ice. Seasonal sea ice used to be routinely 10 or 12 feet thick in March; now it can be as thin as seven inches. Stormy waters and changing currents are altering the migration routes of marine mammals and seabirds and causing thin ice to break up even in spring temperatures that can reach 59 below zero. We’d hoped Antarctica was exempt from such startling destruction, since it is 500 miles from the nearest human habitation and is wrapped tight by the cold, muscular Antarctic Circumpolar Current. It is exempt from “oil rush”
fever and out of range of the airborne pollutants, including soot and methane carried north from the industrial nations of Asia, that add to the heating up of the globe. But the news from the bottom of the world is just as dramatic, and McClintock describes an
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Read our review of Fen Montaigne’s acclaimed book Fraser’s Penguins. onearth.org/13/win/penguins
open ocean ecosystem and a marine food web as intricate as any found in the polar north. The waters of the Southern Ocean move into every major ocean basin. Thus there is nothing “local” about climate change at either
pole or anywhere in between. While extolling the beauty and treachery of Antarctica’s icescape, McClintock quietly shows us its vulnerability. As ice recedes, so do the under-ice communities— plantations of phytoplankton that harvest sunlight and feed and nourish others. He does not bludgeon us, but helps us see (as with the huge eyes of the Themisto, a hyperiid that hitchhikes on jellyfish and dines on phytoplankton, copepods, small krill, and sea butterflies and is fed upon by whales, fish, squid, and birds) the fragility of it all. McClintock gives us enough mesmerizing detail to map out the trophic cascade of extinctions
and its repercussions on the entire planet as land and sea heat up and methane and water vapor spew into the atmosphere. Both Arctic and Antarctic ecosystems are robust but small. Once one thread or one species is pulled out, the interwoven whole begins to collapse. Notice the title of the book: Lost Antarctica, not Losing Antarctica. Halfway through you realize you are reading a diary of disaster. Chapter 5 begins, “The most common sea butterfly in the seas of Antarctica—the lovely Limacina antarctica—is poised for catastrophe.” By page 117, McClintock begins to give us the hard stuff. He explains the link between the acidification of the ocean and the reduced sequestration of carbon dioxide, a positive feedback loop that intensifies the upward trend of heat and parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. He shows us how quickly planetary biodiversity thins out as Adelie penguins lose their habitat, plankton communities die, whales starve, ringed seals without ice and snow cover fail to raise their young, and king crabs, relocating to warmer waters, annihilate rich, 1,000-year-old marine communities by gobbling up all the echinoderms. As the intricacy of the web comes apart and diversity begins to shrink, so does the latitude that enables living beings to survive (if one food source dries up, another will be close at hand). Biodiversity is a condition of life. It not only enlarges whole ecosystems, making them roomy, but also describes how imagination, creation, and fruition are bundled together as one: the same seed equals the same fruit. Lost Antarctica is many things. It reads like an adventure, almost addictive in its generosity of detail. It is a scientist’s affectionate memoir as well as a book of instruction about the consequences of abrupt climate change. When sea ice and snow cover disappear seasonally from bodies of water, islands, and continents, their dark surfaces are
no longer able to radiate solar heat back into space, and open oceans and uncovered land become heat sinks. Every plant and animal in Antarctica is ice-evolved. As the earth warms, there is no cold place left for them. Genetic evolution takes thousands of years. With abrupt climate change, there is not time enough to adapt. Lost Antarctica is a kick-in-theass compendium about how dire this “unofficial” global emergency has become. Now that we know things are falling apart at both poles, life in the mid-latitudes suddenly seems much shakier. We understand that we are losing the natural air conditioners of the planet; that birds, fish, pinnipeds, whales, amphipods, echinoderms, zooplankton, and phytoplankton are being thinned; that the rich Southern Ocean may eventually contain only king crabs and barnacles, and after they’re gone, it will become a sterile sea; that our interglacial paradise is gone and life as we have known it will never be the same. This whole book is a kind of watery prayer for the unsavable. We mourn for the sea butterflies and krill, the Adelie penguins and ringed seals that are losing their habitats, and for scientists
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Boom, Bust, boom A Story About Copper, the Metal That Runs the World BY bill carter Scribner, 274 pp., $26
There’s nothing quite like
a company town. Bill Carter, who lived for a decade in the old copper-mining center of Bisbee, Arizona, says that such places create “a kind of corporate Stockholm syndrome,” with their culture of paternalism and the siren song of cradle-to-grave, generation-togeneration job security. Until they crash, that is, as most do in the end. Mining towns are an extreme example: no matter how arduous the working conditions, how terrible the scars left on the land, the
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As ice recedes, so do the under-ice communities—plantations of phytoplankton that harvest sunlight and feed and nourish others
like James McClintock, who have given themselves to exploration and research with such abiding affection. We mourn for him because he has shared his discoveries, anecdotes, and thoughts with his students, colleagues, and readers so generously and is now forced to witness the loss of life in the waters he loves most. We mourn for the inhabitants of the place itself, this extraordinary polar continent and its wild seas.
industry creates a perverse kind of pride, a feeling that the stuff you are digging up makes the world go round. Which in the case of copper may literally be true. Carter arrived in Bisbee long after the mine closed in 1975. But he lives with the nagging fear that its owner, Freeport-McMoRan, the world’s largest copper producer, may one day decide to reopen it. He also has to cope with the bitter legacy of the past, as he learns
when tests show alarming levels of arsenic and lead in his vegetable garden, the result of toxic emissions from the old smelter and the use of mine waste to grade Bisbee’s terraced home lots. That discovery sets him off on a journey through the world of copper, with field trips to Mexico, Alaska, and the screaming melee of commodity trading floors in New York, and countless interviews with miners, mine executives, and mine opponents. Threaded through his richly textured account are two existential questions. The first, prompted by his anxiety about Freeport’s future plans, is like the old song by the Clash: “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” The second is whether he can reconcile his mounting disgust with copper with the reality that avoiding it “would take nothing short of a monastic effort.” Carter hates what he sees, but he also hates hearing the inconvenient truth. Copper doesn’t grow on trees, one mining company official tells him pointedly; the only way to get it is to dig it up, which is an inherently filthy business. And we couldn’t live without it. The world uses 20 million tons of copper a year. (With the market price hitting $10,000 a ton in 2011, we’re talking about $200 billion here.) The reason is the metal’s near-miraculous attributes: it’s an excellent conductor of electricity (and does the job much more cheaply than silver, gold, and platinum); it doesn’t rust; it even has naturally antimicrobial qualities (hospitals have started using it on doorknobs and bedrails in an effort to cut down on infections). Without copper there would be no cars, no cell phones, no computers, no televisions. Some of the statistics almost defy belief: a giant Caterpillar truck that hauls rock out of an open-pit mine, for example, contains a ton and a half of copper—in its radiator alone. More problematic still, copper is vital to a future clean-energy revo-
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reviews
walkable city How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time
lution. As mining executives never tire of reminding him, all those wind and solar farms will gobble up vast amounts of the stuff. If you’ve ever seen an openpit copper mine, you will find Carter’s righteous anger entirely understandable. The question is where that anger leads him. Such is the ugliness of the industry that he sees little moral distinction between car toonish figures like Robert Friedland—aka Toxic Bob (“Earth is his playground. And mines are his personal sandpits.”)—and modern executives with their earnest talk of sustainability. Meeting one affable CEO (an organic gardener in his spare time), Carter can barely restrain himself from smashing a beer glass in the man’s face. “No matter how nice they are,” he writes, “in the end they will take what they can get.” And, he implies, get what they want. Well, perhaps. We may be stuck with copper, but effective regulation and community opposition can still limit the damage. Where the environmental threat is egregious, big mines can be, and have been, stopped (see “Alaska’s Big Dig,” p. 45). In the end, Carter resolves both of his moral dilemmas, if reluctantly. If we want to be part of “modern civilization” (and he basically does), doing without copper is unthinkable. Answering the second question—remain in Bisbee or leave—turns out, as we kind of suspect all along, to be easier. If Freeport wants to reopen the mine, no force on earth will stop it, Carter decides. So he and his wife opt for their own version of the precautionary principle. “Bisbee, I love you and all your quirkiness,” he writes. But family comes first, so “now I must say good-bye.” —George Black 5 8 onearth w i n t e r 2 0 1 2 / 2 0 1 3
BY Jeff speck Farrar, Straus and Giroux 288 pp., $27
Back when I lived in Los
Angeles, I would often take guests visiting from out of town on private sightseeing tours around the city. Inevitably, during the downtown portion of the tour, they would marvel at the postapocalyptic emptiness of the streets and sidewalks. How, they would ask, could the urban core of one of the world’s biggest and
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citizens came together each day in the town square as they walked to jobs, schools, markets, and appointments. Urban spaces were designed to reinforce feelings of safety, comfort, and cohesion, which made everybody happy: merchants whose customers liked to window-shop, priests whose parishioners were more likely to drop in for vespers, friends with more opportunities to meet by chance on the street, saloonkeepers eager to reward all those parched throats. But at some point during the last century, planners felt compelled to choose between the vibrant, pedestrian-scale cities we have been inhabiting for millennia and those that could accommodate heavy streams of automobile traffic. They chose cars. Speck sorrowfully describes how traffic engineers have often inadvertently compounded the very problems they were trying to solve by basing their plans on specious theories that deny human nature. He cites, for example, the phenomenon of induced demand, in which “increasing the supply of roadways lowers the
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Before citizens drove cars, urban spaces were designed to reinforce feelings of safety, comfort, and cohesion, which made everybody happy
most culturally significant cities be so utterly devoid of energy, of street life, of any life? This question is at the heart of Walkable City, a new book by Jeff Speck, a city planner. Speck operates as something of an itinerant pathologist, traveling around the country helping cities fix their most intractable health problems: out-of-control congestion, unsafe streets and sidewalks, the vexing puzzles of parking policy. The civic-minded principle of walkability is Speck’s Hippocratic oath. Before they drove cars,
time cost of driving, causing more people to drive and obliterating any reductions in congestion.” This, he says, explains why so many road expansion and improvement projects end up increasing traffic jams, commute times, and general human misery. His own treatment protocol for ailing cities is encapsulated in his “Ten Steps of Walkability,” a list that recognizes walking as but one choice among many—and one that won’t be selected unless it is deemed “useful, safe, comfortable and interesting.” In em-
phasizing choice, Speck makes a decent case for reclassifying urban planning as a sub-branch of economics. But if many urban planners subscribe to a top-down model whereby decisions about transit, architecture, and infrastructure are handed down from a rigid central authority, Speck is much more of a free marketeer. At the same time, he’s not above manipulating the marketplace a little. His proposals would topple “the twin gods of Smooth Traffic and Ample Parking” by doing things like removing traffic arteries from cities, which has already occurred in Portland, Oregon, San Francisco, and Milwaukee. Drivers in these cities “did not pop up elsewhere, clogging surface streets; people just found other ways to get around, or felt less compelled to be mobile.” He also supports congestion pricing, which charges drivers for operating cars within high-traffic zones during rush hours—a strategy that has brought relief to cities like London and São Paulo. Our addiction to cheap parking has resulted, Speck believes, in city codes that divorce what should be a prized commodity from its market value and instead treat it as a public trust to be subsidized and shared. By making spaces more scarce and raising rates to reflect their actual worth, cities would enjoy the double benefit of increased revenue and less congestion as drivers opted to carpool, take public transportation (assuming it’s available), and—yes—walk. Walkable City synthesizes a number of ideas into a system with the potential to reshape our cities by reshaping our behavior. A century of top-down urban planning has brought us sprawl and desolate downtowns that no one wants to be in after work hours. Maybe it’s time to turn citizens in a slightly new direction, and then let them vote—this time with their feet. —Jeff turrentine
The Green Gifts online gift catalog provides a unique alternative to traditional presents. It’s a fun and easy way to shop for friends and family while sharing your passion for wildlife and the environment.
Give Green Gifts: www.nrdcgreengifts.org
Photo Š Lisa & Mike Husar/TeamHusar.com
Give a big bear hug to someone special this holiday season.
Dispatches news and views from the natural resources defense council
trashed Our food waste has hidden environmental consequences.
when Good Food goes bad A recent report reveals the extent of our wasteful ways, all the way from the farm to our fork
W
e may lovingly handpick our
tomatoes at the local farmers’ market and buy only organic brands of ketchup. Even so, according to a new NRDC report, Americans waste a prodigious amount of food. Indeed, an astounding 40 percent of food produced in the United States goes uneaten. Food is lost at every stage of the farm-to-table journey. Take produce: the report estimates that 7 percent of planted fields in the United States go unharvested each year. Some fruits and vegetables are never harvested because of damage from pests, disease, or bad weather. (Consider this summer’s record-setting drought.) Produce also goes unpicked when farmers can’t find buyers, or when prices are so low they don’t even cover the cost of harvest and transport.
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Even produce that’s harvested may still be thrown out simply because of its appearance: it isn’t the right color, size, or shape, or it has other imperfections. If a peach isn’t pretty enough, it doesn’t make it to the store. Grocery stores are another source of food waste. Heaping displays of fruits and veggies that are designed to entice consumers crush produce at the bottom. Milk and dairy products with sell-by dates—which are not the same as expiration dates—are often pulled from the shelves well before they would spoil. Prepared foods are also an increasing source of food waste, as groceries keep their buffets fully stocked until closing time, resulting in many trays of discarded edibles. A staggering amount of food waste, however, occurs in restaurants and in our own homes. American families throw out a significant portion of the food they buy, according to the report. “Imagine walking out of the grocery store with three bags of groceries, then just
opposite: charles bertram/lexington herald-leader/mct via getty images; Right: sue oliveira; Top right: noah clayton/getty images
leaving one in the parking lot,” says Dana Gunders, a food and agriculture expert at NRDC and the author of the report. “A lot of people are trying to be conscious eaters, but this issue just isn’t on their radar,” she says. Even when consumers buy organic and limit meat consumption, they often buy and cook more than they can eat. Restaurants often contribute to the problem by featuring extensive menu choices and oversize portions. Diners leave 17 percent of their meals uneaten, and 55 percent of those leftovers aren’t even taken home, according to the report. Discarded food wastes not only money but other resources. Agriculture occupies vast tracts of land, and 80 percent of all freshwater used in the United States goes to food production. Fertilizers and pesticides degrade the land and water, creating environmental nightmares like the Gulf of Mexico’s massive dead zone. “If that food is not even getting eaten in the end, it’s a terrible use of our resources,” says Gunders. “And that is a particular concern when you look forward to our future food demand.” The environmental consequences also extend to landfills, where food waste from all steps in the farm-to-table journey accounts for 20 percent of the total volume. As it rots, the waste generates an astonishing 23 percent of the country’s emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Gunders’s report offers numerous suggestions for reducing food waste. Relaxing appearance criteria, distributing unsold produce to food banks, and reducing portion sizes in restaurants and at home could all help. Another idea: educate consumers about expiration and sell-by dates, which are not regulated by law and often imply that food has spoiled prematurely. “Even a little bit of awareness could go a long way,” Gunders says. —Justine E. Hausheer
ranch hand The Sangre de Cristo
Mountains of Colorado and New Mexico are home to Rio Grande cutthroat trout and Gunnison sage grouse, candidates for protection under the Endangered Species Act. The range rises more than 14,000 feet, and its gushing rivers and aspen-filled meadows make it a place of staggering beauty. Yet significant portions of the area are not
Safe to drink? Millions of Californians drink tainted water.
suing for cleaner water
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subject to federal conservation protection because they are privately owned. But this past fall, Louis Bacon, an environmentalist and the owner of two ranches in the area, signed documents allowing the government to protect a portion of his property from future development. The 265-square-mile conservation easement is the biggest donation ever made to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In signing over the lands, Bacon spurred the government to create the 390-square-mile Sangre de Cristo Conservation Area. “It’s imperative to protect the San Luis Valley from encroaching development before it is too late,” says Bacon. “I wanted to ensure the Trinchera Ranch landscape is preserved for future generations to enjoy.” The conservation area will be a safe haven not only for the cutthroat trout and sage grouse, but for the federally protected southwestern willow flycatcher and other migratory birds. “It’s a tremendous conservation achievement in a region that is a part of our Greater Rockies BioGem,” says Joel Reynolds, NRDC’s western director. —C.S.
hirty-one million Californians drink water
tainted with unsafe levels of hexavalent chromium, a contaminant that can cause cancer, according to the Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C.– based advocacy organization. This metal, which is often used to add color to dyes, paints, and plastic, is also a by-product of industrial processes, such as the welding of stainless steel. The toxin leaches into surface water and groundwater through spills, dumping, or runoff from steel and pulp mills. Once in the water, it is difficult and expensive to remove. Hexavalent chromium first came to public notoriety in the film Erin Brockovich, based on the 1996 lawsuit that Brockovich, then working as a law firm clerk, helped bring against the Pacific Gas and Electric Company. The suit alleged that the company had dumped contaminated water from a natural gas pipeline facility in Hinkley, California, threatening the health of nearby residents. Before going to trial, the energy utility settled for $333 million. Although hexavalent chromium is less harmful when ingested than inhaled, studies have shown that people exposed to water containing it suffer increased rates of stomach and liver cancer. Yet no federal or state laws restrict the carcinogen’s presence in drinking water. Fortunately, this pattern of inaction may soon end. In August NRDC, in conjunction with the Environmental Working Group, sued the California Department of Public Health over the absence of such limits. Filed in Alameda County Superior Court, the suit seeks to force the health department to comply with a state law requiring it to set a maximum allowable amount. “We want the court to set a binding, speedy schedule for the department to finalize this drinking water standard,” says Nicholas Morales, a legal fellow with NRDC. Back in 2001, California lawmakers demanded that something be done to protect the public from hexavalent chromium and gave the health department two years to set a limit for the pollutant in drinking water. Despite that mandate, the department says it will not impose a limit for several more years. “They are moving way too slowly,” Morales says. If the California court rules in favor of NRDC, the effects could ripple far beyond the state. “Once the agency establishes the limit,” Morales notes, “it will set a model for other states and —Chase Scheinbaum the E.P.A. to follow.”
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TRUTH SQUAD
Right Whales Wronged
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he Navy plans to build a 500-square-mile undersea warfare training Range (USWTR) adjacent to critical habitat and the only known calving ground for endangered North Atlantic right whales. A Georgia court recently denied NRDC’s motion for summary judgment in a lawsuit that challenged the Navy’s reckless decision. OnEarth asked Taryn Kiekow, a staff attorney in NRDC’s marine mammal protection project, to weigh in on the judge’s reasoning.
Her Biggest Love when monica duclaud visited
In considering the magnit ude of the threat of ship strikes on right is m f o r a whales, the Navy reviewed the E urpyh egm r is ly d e a t h ve historical record of ship strikes by the Navy during Navy oper ations in the Jacksonville Operatin g Area. Based on this record, the Navy submits that in its sixty (60) year history of training in th e area, other there has not been one in Yeah, but stance ! ships have of a Navy vessel striking a whale. The historical record also indicates that the Navy has already placed pr ot ec ti ve measures into practice to avoid harming the right wh ale. W o ef u ll y in ad eq u at e!
* There are only
300 to 400 North Atlantic right whales left, and the death of just one whale from non-natural causes could jeopardize the future of the entire species, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service. This is the only place where these whales give birth.
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* The Navy doesn’t know where whales are located in the USWTR area and is only now conducting studies to determine the effects of operations. But these will come too late—after construction begins.
winter 2012/3013
* The Navy’s primary * There have been
other instances of ship strikes over the years, most notably a federal research vessel striking a right whale in 2009.
means of protecting whales is visual monitoring. But research has cast doubt on the ability of shipboard observers to detect whales, particularly as visibility decreases in low light or high seas. Right whales are difficult to see because they are dark and lack a dorsal fin.
friends in the Bay Area 25 years ago, she knew she belonged there. “It was not only physically beautiful, but the environmental movement was part of the life and culture of the city. I thought, ‘These are my people.’” DuClaud had grown up in one of the world’s most urban places— Mexico City—but she always has had a profound love for animals and the natural world. A graphic designer by profession, she is an environmentalist at her core. She has supported many organizations over the years, carefully evaluating their strengths and weaknesses. Her commitment to NRDC, which dates back to 1989, has deepened the more she has learned. “NRDC has a balanced approach—passion supported by deep scientific understanding— that yields results,” she says. That’s why DuClaud has extended her annual support of NRDC through a bequest in her will. “My big, big love is for living creatures,” she says. “I won’t be here, but I want the animals, plants, and humans who come next to inherit a beautiful world, a thriving planet.” She adds, “I made my bequest because I’m confident NRDC will be around for the next 100 years. I know my legacy is going to continue.” For information on how to leave your own lasting legacy, contact Michelle Mulia-Howell, director of gift planning, at legacygifts@nrdc.org or 212-727-4421.
who we are
what we do
behind the wheel
Roland Hwang was instrumental in the adoption of new fuel standards.
SHIFTING GEARS A car enthusiast drives home the point that fuel efficiency is good for the environment and business
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by laura fraser
eople are sometimes surprised to learn
that Roland Hwang loves cars. But it’s true: he’ll rave about automotive design, he passionately devours car magazines, and he admits to relishing the feeling of driving out on the open road. But the San Francisco–based director of NRDC’s transportation program really lights up when the subject turns to the new technologies credited with revving up the U.S. auto industry while simultaneously doubling our current average fuel efficiency. Hwang, 48, is a principal architect of the new fuel standards that President Obama announced in August, which mandate that American-made automobiles get an average of 54.5 miles per gallon by the year 2025. Within five years of being fully phased in, this doubling of fuel efficiency is expected to reduce U.S. fuel consumption by 3.1 million barrels of oil a day and cut emissions by an amount equivalent to the reduction we’d see if 85 million cars were taken off the road. “Doubling fuel efficiency is the single biggest action this country has ever taken to reduce carbon pollution and oil dependency,” says
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Hwang. But the road to this point, he admits, has been a long one. One milestone was reached in 2002, when Hwang worked with California lawmakers to craft a bill dramatically increasing fuel efficiency in that state. More than a dozen states ended up adopting the California standards, and by 2007 a series of court victories had paved the way for a federal move. Adding to the momentum were rising fuel prices and unease over our reliance on foreign oil. Soon the idea of increasing fuel efficiency was attractive not just to environmentalists, but to lawmakers, consumers, and carmakers. In 2009, President Obama brought together automakers, labor unions, and environmentalists to set the first of two nationalstandards benchmarks: raising the fuel efficiency of new cars and trucks to 35.5 mpg by 2016. The second benchmark—last August’s—reflects the fact that tech-
nology, economics, geopolitics, and concern for the environment have converged to make fuel efficiency the only way forward. To gather support for the new standards, Hwang had to show carmakers and the United Auto Workers why they made good business sense. “Fuel efficiency is getting the U.S. auto industry back on its feet,” he says. The union knew that new technology could mean new jobs; Hwang collaborated with the UAW on a 2010 study showing how increased fuel efficiency could create up to 150,000 jobs by 2020. Today, American cars are getting up to 40 mpg—and the industry is competitive again. The cars of 2025 won’t look all that different from cars today, Hwang says. He predicts that 90 percent of them will still be gasoline powered; what will change dramatically is how much more power will be squeezed out of the fuel that goes into them, thanks to technologies like direct-injection engines, dual-clutch transmissions, and variable valve timing. Hwang believes that our rides will be just as zippy and powerful then as they are now. “The definition of power isn’t 12 cylinders and 1,000 horsepower anymore,” he says. He points out that today’s Toyota Camry can out-accelerate a late–1980s Ferrari 308GT. (“And that was Magnum P.I.’s car!” he exclaims.) In the end, the question is unavoidable: what kind of car does Roland Hwang drive today, at home in San Francisco? “I take the bus,” he deadpans. “I like to drive, but I don’t like traffic.” To read Roland Hwang’s blog, go to switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/rhwang
photographed for onearth by Jonathan Sprague
fieldwork
open space THE wireless woods
accused. Felt that the way I’ve been living lately, with all my high-speed whom I greatly admire. When I suggested that we gadgets and fast-twitch thoughts, is somehow deeply flawed. As if I exchange cell phone numbers, he told me he’d re- had forgotten the importance not just of privacy but of deep retreat. What does it mean if we wake to check our messages, if we walk sisted buying one, and then he quoted Henry David Thoreau: “It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.” with phone in hand and plugs in ears, not leaving time to ruminate, His tongue was partly in cheek, as was Thoreau’s time to let our thoughts progress the way thoughts do in one’s own when he wrote those words, since Henry was referring to his decision quiet brain? Will we get to the point where doing anything for a long time—going for a walk, sitting alone, not to buy a doormat for the cabin. But reading a book, writing a book—starts when I saw my friend again this sumto feel unnatural and, worse, boring? mer he had a cell phone in hand, “for Maybe boring is necessary for creemergencies.” And so we all, even the ation. Walking, for instance, can be awmost resolute, slide down the slippery fully dull. But it’s also the time when our slope. First no doormat, then what? best thoughts come. What is forgotten Like Thoreau, I have traveled a good is that despite the boredom, or perhaps deal in Concord. During my last visit I because of the boredom, something is was in the midst of a book tour, which gained by periods of both uninterrupted consisted mostly of manically waving concentration and unfocused mulling. my arms around and yelling, “Hey, look Which would be a fine way to conat me,” and which required almost conclude this piece, the Puritan minister stant updating of my all-important status declaiming from his Concord pulpit, if on Facebook and Twitter, not to mention not for one other small detail I rememmy blogs and my website. It seemed of ber from that day. Walking had done vital importance that everyone know its work, legs spurring mind, and the what I was doing at every second. If words were coming. I said I had left not...well, if not, then what? Oblivion? my electronics behind, but there is Despite my electronic commitone device I’m rarely without. I pulled ments, I did manage to make it to my microcassette recorder from my Walden. I also made it to Emerson’s pocket and proceeded to record most house—where a fellow member of of the thoughts you have just read. the house tour, a man with a prow of a This is my preferred way of capturnose, turned out to be Ralph Waldo’s I thought of those great nineteenthing my words, though I know it belies great-great-grandson—before strolling century writers, envying their my role as a critic of technology. After across the street to Wayside, where homes, their space, their periods of a while I turned off the machine and Nathaniel Hawthorne once lived. There I found a sign at the bottom of solitude, the slower pace of their days stared up at a row of blazing yellow beech trees, but near the end of my a steep hill announcing that up above was “the Larch Path where Hawthorne trod daily... to formulate as he walk I felt more words coming. These were shorter sentences, and I paced to and fro the plots for his marvelous romances.” I hiked up the recognized them right away for what they would become. As I spoke hill, kicking up the humus of the previous year’s leaves topped with to myself, I already suspected what I would confirm when I got back that fall’s lighter layer, and thought about how, for many people, walk- to my car: the cluster of words was approximately 140 characters long. Later I tweeted thusly: ing is connected to creation, our minds working better in movement. Some things do not come fast. These things we do in quiet. We do them Inspired, the next morning I left cell phone and computer behind and headed out to Flint’s Pond, a favorite haunt of Thoreau’s. As I by ourselves. We work at them long and hard. We hope they will endure. walked I thought of those great nineteenth-century writers, and found myself envying their homes, their space, their periods of solitude, the David Gessner is a contributing editor to OnEarth and the author of eight slower pace of their days. And I felt, in a small and un-malicious way, books, including The Tarball Chronicles and My Green Manifesto.
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illustration by Tatsuro Kiuchi
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BY david gessner
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Announcing the NRDC Legacy Challenge
Photo: © Carr Clifton/MindenPictures.com
Let us know you’re including NRDC in your estate plans and a member of our Board of Trustees will contribute up to $10,000 to help save wildlife and wildlands! You’ll be protecting our natural heritage right now and for generations to come. If NRDC already has a place in your plans, please let us know so that we can take advantage of this wonderful opportunity.
www.nrdc.org/legacygift
To take the Legacy Challenge or learn more about it, please contact: Michelle Mulia-Howell, Director of Gift Planning at 212-727-4421 or legacygifts@nrdc.org