blame canada! OUR RAPACIOUS NEIGHBOR to the north
A Survival Guide for the Planet • published by the natural resources defense council
COAL ON A ROLL
Plundering america to Power THE ASIAN BOOM by george black
PLUS the man who loves bats PHILADELPHIA’S WATER REVOLUTION
fall 2011 w w w.one arth.org
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contents
Onearth magazine
volume 33
FEATURES
If you’re like us, you’ve always had a pretty sunny view of our mild-mannered neighbors to the north. Prepare for a rude awakening.
cover story
28
Q&A Business schools used to be purely about making money. Wharton dean Thomas Robertson says that’s begun to change.
Philadelphia Story
by Lindsey Konkel and Studio 2a
The ancient water infrastructure of our eastern cities is crumbling in disrepair. The City of Brotherly Love has an enlightened solution.
24 the synthesist
by Alan Burdick When freshwater meets salt water, a power dynamic ensues. Blue Energy aims to harness it.
46 The Man
Who Loves Bats
26 living green
by Joe Dolce A longtime urban biker finds the culture around him has shifted, in a way that’s (mostly) good.
by Ted Genoways
poe tr y
14 Listening to the Nightingale
by John Allman
Coal on a Roll by George Black
by David Wagoner
plenty of it. Aside from the issue of whether we
onearth online visit onearth.org
paul anderson
A giant machine out of Star Wars stacks coal for export to Asia at a shipping terminal near Vancouver, Canada. U.S. coal companies would love to do the same on our side of the border.
57 The Design of a
Summer House
Read the digital edition of the magazine on your computer, e-reader, or tablet device and access complete back issues at onearth.org/digital
8 From the Editor 14 Letters 17 FRONTLINES Fast-evolving soapberry bugs offer hope in the battle against invasive species. Plus, a pair of vegetarian scientists turned meat farmers.
44 The
Tom Kunz has spent his career studying Myotis lucifugus, the little brown bat. Now, as a mysterious scourge threatens to wipe it out, he’s struggling to save his life’s work.
fall 2011
d epa r tm ents
39 Blame Canada! by Andrew Nikiforuk
number 3
China and India are hungry for coal. Wyoming has should be digging up the stuff at all, there’s the
54 reviews
As worldwide drought becomes the new normal, it’s time for us to change our wasteful ways.
64 open space
by Emma Marris This young mom prided herself on her love of nature. That was before the cicadas came around.
i ns i de n rdc
10 view from nrdc
small problem of getting it from one place to another.
by Frances Beinecke
Warren Buffett, Goldman Sachs, the coal companies,
12 eye on washington
and plenty of others are determined to find a way.
by Bob Keefe
58 dispatches
Cover: Photographed for OnEarth by Tia Magallon.
A new preserve in Manitoba (score one for Canada), bison, and more.
fall 2011
onearth 1
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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 Editor-in-Chief Executive Editor
George Black
Douglas S. Barasch Managing Editor
Janet Gold
articles Editor Jocelyn C. Zuckerman ONEARTH.ORG editor Scott Dodd Art Director gail Ghezzi Photo Editor Meghan Hurley Editorial Assistant Copy Editors Research Interns
Jon Mark Ponder David Gunderson, Elise Marton Emily Elert Benjamin Preston, Sabrina Richards
Contributing Editors Bruce Barcott, Rick Bass, Michael Behar,
Alan Burdick, Craig Canine, Tim Folger, David Gessner, Edward Hoagland, Sharon Levy, Bill McKibben, Mar y Oliver, Sharman Apt Russell, Elizabeth Royte, Alex Shoumatoff, Bruce Stutz, Laura Wright Treadway
blog Editor Ben Jervey Online Production Dave Levitan, Auden Shim, William Tam Poetry Editor creative consultant Special Projects Advertising Director publisher Deputy Publisher Editorial Board
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Generous support for Onearth is provided by Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund The Josephine Patterson Albright Fund for Feature Reporting The Vervane Foundation The Larsen Fund The Sunflower Foundation The Jonathan and Maxine Marshall Fund for Environmental Journalism
advertising : 212-727-4577 or adsales@onearth.org Editorial: 212-727-4412 or onearth@nrdc.org Editorial Pur pose
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.
About N RDC
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.
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onearth (issn 1537-4246) (volume 33, number 3) 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 2011 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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education. leadership. change.
center for environmental policy
The Bard Center for Environmental Policy is a graduate program designed for leaders. We offer students the knowledge, tools, methods of inquiry, courage, and ambition necessary to create policies on the scale, and with the impact, that these extraordinary times demand. Our mission is to change the future.
The National Climate Seminar
Distinctive features include a modular approach to course work, close student-faculty interaction, professional internships, skills-based training, and flexible student research opportunities.
Sept. 7
Programs of Study
Oct. 5
Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism Solutions Climate Capitalism
M.S. in Environmental Policy M.S. in Climate Science and Policy Master’s International Program with Peace Corps Paul D. Coverdell Fellows Program for Peace Corps returnees Professional Certificate Programs M.B.A. in Sustainability pending approval
Oct. 19
Sharon Nunes, IBM Smarter Planet? IBM’s Climate Solutions
Nov. 2
Richard Alley*, Penn State University The Carbon Control Knob
Nov. 16
Seb Henbest, Bloomberg Politics Down Under: Does Catastrophe Drive Change?
Dec. 7
Mark Hertsgaard*, Author and Journalist Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth
Join us for the twice-monthly national conference call with top climate scientists, policy makers, analysts, and communications experts on the first and third Wednesdays of each month, at noon Eastern time. All conversations are free and open to the public.
Sept. 21 David Roberts, Grist Global Warming, Politics, and the Media
Dual Degrees M.S. and J.D. with Pace Law School M.S. and M.A.T. with Bard’s Master of Arts in Teaching Program 3+2 Program for qualified undergraduates
Mike Tidwell, Chesapeake Climate Action Network The Tea Party and Climate Strategy
*Invited To join, simply call (712) 432-3100 at the scheduled date and time and enter code 253385. All calls are recorded and available as podcasts. For more information, please e-mail us at climate@bard.edu.
Bard Center for Environmental Policy Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York tel 845.758.7073 e-mail cep@bard.edu web www.bard.edu/cep/nrdc Photos from left to right: Tobey Sanford; iStockphoto; Pete Mauney ‘93, MFA ‘00; Peter Aaron ’68/Esto; Pete Mauney ‘93, MFA ‘00; Karl Rabe
.org
volume 33
number 3
fall 2011
Find links to everything on this page at onearth.org/web
4co n nect with us Get our newsletter onearth/newsletter On Facebook onearth.org/facebook On Twitter twitter.com/onearthmag On the iPad onearth.org/ipad
4WE B
E X C L USI V ES
Is Shampoo Making You Fat?
New research suggests that our expanding waistlines could be linked to the toxic ingredients that are ubiquitous in products we use every day, from cosmetics to baby bottles. Yes, you might have to start counting chemical calories now, too. onearth.org/obesogens
Fossil Fuels Forever...
4Why Supermarket Tomatoes Suck
4You Want Superbugs
With That?
4Polar Bear Cubs Imperiled
Our five-part series reveals a new energy boom that is transforming U.S. communities as oil and gas companies hunt for dirtier, more dangerous, and costlier sources of fuel. onearth.org/fossilfuelsforever
4Poison in the Nursery 4Yellowstone River Oil Spill:
Upscale Dumpster Diving
The Shape of Things to Come?
Jeremy Seifert fed his family by fishing discarded edibles out of Trader Joe’s trash, then made a film about it—and about the astonishing amount of food that we waste every year. onearth.org/ dumpster
4F E A TU R ED ABOVE: OLEG FILIPCHUK; RIGHT: CHRIS PRICE
4mo st pop ular
BLOGS
by Loss of Sea Ice
More online-only stories: onearth.org/webexclusives
On Tumblr onearth.tumblr.com On the Kindle onearth.org/kindle Digital edition onearth.org/digital Your comments onearth.org/community Your nature photos onearth.org/photocontest Winners appear in the magazine—see p. 61 for this issue’s pick.
onearth.org/blog
in the weeds
The Royte Stuff
Follow the adventures (and recipes) of Hollywood exec turned rural gardener PAIGE SMITH ORLOFF as she learns to live cleaner, greener, and closer to the ground. onearth.org/intheweeds
Notes on waste, water, and who knows what else from OnEarth contributing editor ELIZABETH ROYTE, best-selling author of Bottlemania and Garbageland. onearth.org/theroytestuff
politics of the plate Former Gourmet contributing editor and author of Tomatoland, BARRY ESTABROOK, brings his James Beard Award-winning blog to OnEarth. onearth.org/politicsoftheplate
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contributors Ted Genoways (“The Man Who Loves Bats,” p. 46) is a six-time National Magazine Award winner as editor-in-chief of the Virginia Quarterly Review. The recipient of a 2010 Guggenheim fellowship, he has contributed to magazines ranging from Outside to Mother Jones. His work has appeared in the Best American Travel Writing series. Mark Hertsgaard (“Life in a Waterless World,” p. 54) is the author of six books offered in 16 languages, including Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future and, most recently, HOT: Living Through the Next 50 Years on Earth. His writing on politics and the environment has appeared in the Nation and Vanity Fair.
rob howard (“Coal on a Roll,” p. 28) is a Manhattan-based photographer whose portraits, lifestyle shots, and travel pictures have appeared in Vanity Fair, Condé Nast Traveler, O, The Oprah Magazine, and other publications. He has been honored by both American Photography and Communication Arts. 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.
genoways: jen fariello; hertsgaard: francesca vietor
studio2a (“The Philadelphia Story,” p. 44) is a Chicago-based 3D graphics studio founded in 1998 by Adam Kruvand and Adam Felchner. The pair has produced architectural renderings, 3D animation, infographics, and product visualization for such clients as SubZero, Architectural Record, and Robb Report Vacation Homes magazine.
Zen and the art of NO
PLASTIC
editor’s letter Things are more complicated than they seem
T
he issue of climate change seems to have a refreshing moral clarity.
Douglas S. barasch
8 onearth
fall 2011
Poon Watchara-Amphaiwan
If we continue to heat the atmosphere, we will cause lasting, catastrophic damage to the planet and to ourselves. Yet in the real world, the means to avert such disaster—the way forward—can involve some complicated twists and turns. Nothing illustrates this complexity better than the proposals for extracting coal from the American West and exporting it to China and India. For many, if not most, environmentalists, coal is simply bad—end of discussion. And that’s a reasonable stance. But the author of our cover story, OnEarth executive editor george black, reveals some bedeviling complexities in this particular real-world dilemma. “The future of the planet will rest more on influencing how China burns coal,” he writes, “than on whether [or not] we sell them more of it.” China and India, you see, are so hungry for coal that access to their own domestic reserves is inadequate to power their booming economies. China, in particular, is aggressively exploring a wide variety of energy options, from renewables to cleaner, more efficient means of burning coal; nonetheless, both China and India will continue to rely heavily on the dirty fuel for the next several decades. Black describes the many links in a potential U.S.-Asia supply chain. To transport millions of tons of coal from Wyoming’s Powder River Basin across the Pacific will require the expansion of existing mines, a massive upgrade of rail lines, and the construction of huge new shipping ports on the coast of Washington. Some powerful forces have placed their bets on this bold gamble. Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett has purchased the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway in part to convey this commodity to those as-yet-unbuilt ports. Other interested parties: Goldman Sachs, the U.S. government, and, of course, the multibillion-dollar coal companies. Arrayed in opposition, meanwhile, is (by contrast) a lilliputian, though potentially effective, band of grassroots activists eager to resist these twenty-first century barons. Whatever happens, the outcome will be globally significant—practically, politically, morally, and symbolically—and Black gives us a fascinating front-row seat to the first round in this epic battle. These pages explode some other simple assumptions. Take Canada. Many of us Americans regard our friendly neighbor to the north as a big, benign, mild-mannered, law-abiding, outdoorsy, nationally health-insured, vaguely progressive, reliably compliant ally that enjoys its ice hockey and beer. Which is why our essay by Canadian native ANDREW NIKIFORUK is kind of eye-popping. Canada, it turns out, is practically evil. Well, maybe not evil—but possibly nefarious, and certainly destructive by almost any environmental measure. Nikiforuk, who in these pages previously chronicled Canada’s filthy boom in mining tar sands, lets out a howl of reasoned indignation against the motherland. You will never look at a maple leaf or a Molson ale quite the same way again.
view from NRDC
T
his summer I got to savor the fruits of a garden
my daughters planted at our home. We ate zucchini, snap peas, and salad greens that not only tasted delicious but also gave us peace of mind: we knew our food had been grown without pesticides or other chemicals that endanger human health. Too often Americans lack that reassurance. We eat three times a day but rarely know the conditions in which our food is produced. Consider this: for more than 30 years, the Food and Drug Administration has known that using antibiotics in animal feed poses a risk to human health but has done little to eliminate this danger. Currently, nearly 70 percent of all antibiotics used in the United States are administered to healthy farm animals to speed their growth and prevent infections caused by their unsanitary living conditions. Animals receive subtherapeutic doses that are too low to treat disease but high enough to allow bacteria to become resistant to these drugs. Those resistant bacteria can spread to humans and lead to superbugs that are difficult or impossible to cure. In May, after years of failure by the government to follow its own recommendations, NRDC filed a lawsuit against the FDA to prompt the agency to withdraw approval for nontherapeutic uses of antibiotics in animal feed. Many nations, including those in the European Union, have stopped routinely administering antibiotics to healthy livestock. But political pressure here has handcuffed such efforts. As we brought our antibiotics case to court, NRDC’s newly launched Food and Agriculture Program forged ahead in its work on another critical issue: reducing carbon pollution from food production. Agriculture is responsible for 7 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States and roughly 30 percent globally. NRDC experts are working with conventional farmers and such large-scale buyers as Walmart to create a market based on less-carbon-intensive farming practices. For instance, we’ve partnered with farmers to create field-tested guidelines that will help conventional food producers use less energy, water, petroleum-based fertilizers, and other chemicals. Many farmers are embracing these practices, and American consumers, restaurants, schools, and hospitals are buying more locally grown and organic food. But to combat the political influence that has paralyzed the FDA and other agencies, we have to do more. We’re excited about the potential for this area of work and will periodically update you on our efforts to protect the public from unsafe food.
f r a n cE s b e i n e c k e , P r e s i d e n t
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nrdc in the news “‘if we don’t rein in our emissions of carbon pollution, temperatures in the Great Lakes could go up eight degrees or more by the end of the century,’ said Thom Cmar, a staff attorney with [NRDC’s] Chicago office. ‘That would be like moving Florida’s climate to Indiana.’” —From “Climate Changes Alter Great Lakes National Parks, Study Says,” Detroit News, July 14, 2011
“‘some in Congress want to yank the last safety net away from wildlife that’s hanging by a thread,’ [Andrew] Wetzler, director of the New York-based council’s wildlife and land program, said in an interview. ‘I guess they weren’t satisfied with making it easier to poison our waters and pump filth into our air, so they figure it was time to take a whack at walruses and wolverines too.’”—From “EPA Carbon Rules Delayed in House Panel’s Bill,” Bloomberg, July 13, 2011
“‘air pollution in latino communities is a big problem,’ said Adrianna Quintero, senior counsel for La Onda Verde of [the] Natural Resources Defense Council. ‘It immediately translates into increased asthma attacks, bronchitis, emergency room visits, all these things that are a tremendous burden on families and workers juggling caring for a sick child and their jobs.’”—From “Latinos Live in Some of the Most Polluted Areas of the Country,” Fox News, June 28, 2011
Matt Greenslade/photo-nyc.com
why healthy food is good for the planet
MENTORING THE ENVIRONMENTAL TALENT OF TOMORROW The Koob Litigation Fellowship
The Clark Fellowship
For the 2011 Koob Litigation Fellow Jen Sorenson, helping sue the government to protect human health from the dangerous overuse of antibiotics in animal feed is a dream job. The assignment combines her legal training with her passion for sustainable food systems. NRDC’s litigation team depends heavily on Fellows like Jen to advance all aspects of our work. Jen’s Fellowship also brings deep satisfaction to Chuck and Pamela Koob, long-time NRDC supporters who endowed the fellowship in 2006. “What makes NRDC credible as an advocacy group is its willingness to litigate when all else fails,” says Chuck. “Bringing in young legal talent is essential to achieving our goals and training the next generation of environmental defenders.” Selena Kyle, the 2006 Koob Fellow, is a case in point. Today she is an NRDC staff attorney litigating for clean air and water, sustainable fisheries and wilderness conservation.
Hiking through Yellowstone inspired long-time NRDC Member Ann T. Clark to establish the Clark Fellowship in the organization’s Montana office. Her gift is giving young people from urban areas, such as Luisa Lopez, the 2011 Clark Fellow, the chance to experience rural community life and the Northern Rockies wilderness while assisting in NRDC programs that protect the region’s incredible wildlife.
Jen Sorenson, 2011 Koob Litigation Fellow, works to protect human health and promote sustainable agriculture.
Luisa Lopez is spending a summer in Montana working with renowned NRDC wildlife expert Louisa Willcox on grizzly bear and wolf management issues.
Vermont Law School Fellowship Thanks to an anonymous NRDC supporter, each summer a student from the highly respected Vermont Law School gains experience working alongside NRDC’s skilled attorneys on real-world environmental cases.
YOU CAN SPONSOR TOMORROW’S ENVIRONMENTAL CHAMPIONS Our need for Fellows always outstrips our ability to fund them, leaving idealistic and capable young advocates on the sidelines. A donation of $5,000 will underwrite a legal, scientific or environmental advocacy fellowship for one summer. A named, permanent fellowship can be endowed for $100,000. If you would like to establish a named fund or learn more about them, please contact Jack Murray, Director of Program Development, at 212-727-4449 or at jmurray@nrdc.org.
NRDC
eye on washington
b y b o b kee f e
CONGRESS’S SNEAK ATTACK legislation to avoid attention or scrutiny. As former interior of one of the worst assaults on the secretary Bruce Babbitt recently remarked, proponents environment and public health in of these laws are pushing them through “in the shadows, recent history. Not that you would outside the sunshine generated by public knowledge.” know it, based on how little coverThis shadowy assault on the environment is taking place at age these attacks receive in your the same time that our primary government watchdog—the local newspaper or on the TV media—is being decimated. Not long ago almost every major news. Here are two examples of news organization kept one or more environmental reportparticularly egregious legislation ers on its payroll. Many were based in Washington. Today, you might have missed. financially strapped news organizations can afford only scant, n H.R. 2018, which already passed the House, would allow passing coverage of environmental policy (environmental states to sidestep federal Clean Water Act pollution standards disasters—oil spills, droughts, and floods—are another matlike those that brought Lake Erie’s dead zones back to life ter). Many newspapers have no reporters in Washington anymore, much less any devoted to these issues. Even among and kept Ohio’s Cuyahoga River from catching fire again. n H.R. 2401, the so-called TRAIN Act, would practically the remaining environmental reporters in Washington and gut the Clean Air Act. The pending legislation would delay elsewhere, “we’ve seen a lot of people shifted from having Environmental Protection Agency air-quality standards just the environmental beat to being more general assignment–type reporters,” that would prevent says Carolyn Whetzel, tens of thousands of A shadowy assault on the environment president of the Socipremature deaths as ety of Environmental well as hundreds of is taking place at the same time that Journalists. thousands of asthma our primary government watchdog— This means that, attacks every year. the media—is being decimated more than ever, it’s It would create yet the job of citizens to another government committee to review a laundry list of long-overdue stan- make sure that members of Congress know we’re still dards to limit the emission of toxic chemicals and other watching them. Our elected officials should hear from us waste from power plants, coal mines, and industrial boilers. when they vote for legislation that damages the environAnd then there is the budget cutting. Along with making ment, diminishes our air and water quality, or perpetuates drastic cuts in funding for parks and environmental protec- our dependence on fossil fuels. We should also let our local tions, House Republicans, when they return to Washington news organizations know we want more environmental in September, are expected to resurrect and attach dozens news coverage, not less. And we need to seek out other of anti-environmental legislative “riders” to spending bills. credible sources of information. One recommendation: These riders would do everything from allow coal mines switchboard.nrdc.org, which includes blogs from NRDC’s to dump more debris into our rivers to end protections for Washington-based policy and governmental affairs experts. The current Congress has shown where it stands on endangered species like wolves. That’s just a partial list. Almost every day Congress is in protecting the environment and public health. But in tosession seems to bring another nasty surprise. Most have day’s media climate, its actions are too easy to miss. That come from representatives who are scared of a Tea Party must change, or else we’ll all suffer the consequences of backlash if they don’t vote against anything that smacks of our collective ignorance. government involvement—though this is what our government is supposed to do: protect the public. Bob Keefe, NRDC’s senior press secretary in Washington, D.C., Like the Interior/EPA riders, many of these environ- worked for more than 20 years as a journalist, most recently as the mental attacks have been snuck into spending bills or other Washington correspondent for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
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illustration by bruce morser
Congress is in the middle
backtalk Your cover story, “pure
Chemistry” [Summer 2011], by Laura Wright Treadway, serves an important role in inspiring universities to develop green chemistry curricula. Having been a scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency for 22 years, I can say with certainty that green chemistry lies squarely at the crossroads of academic disciplines related to environmental and human-health issues. I do have one quibble, though: the article begins with a student collecting lint, presumably for analysis, and states that he sticks the wad in his pocket. This is bad science—the lint should at least be put in a plastic baggie, if not a sterile lab sample collection bag. I would hate for others to think that green chemistry is some kind of guerrilla effort that condones sloppy science. —LEIF MAGNUSON
that boasts of its hometown roots. Even the Lions are getting better! —TIM PRICE La Jolla, California
THE TORTOISE PROBLEM In his appraisal of the book Powering the Dream (Reviews, Summer 2011), George Black explains that author Alexis Madrigal challenges us to make a choice: “What’s more important … phasing out fossil fuels or saving the threatened desert tortoise?” The question could have been phrased this way: “Which is more important: phasing out fossil fuels, thereby saving the earth from global-warming disaster, or saving the desert tortoise for the moment and eventually losing the earth, including the desert tortoise?” The supply of fossil fuels is limited, yet our demand
onearth@nrdc.org
for energy will keep growing. Obviously, some other energy source will have to replace fossil fuels. Meanwhile, atmospheric and ocean carbon dioxide keep increasing. The only practical way to produce sustainable, clean, utility-scale power is concentrating thermal solar power in places like the Mojave Desert, as is already under way. Yes, some tortoises will have to be sacrificed to avoid losing everything. That’s called triage. —ALBERT Z. K. SANDERS East Hampton, New York
write to us
Got an opinion? Send in your thoughts by pen or by keyboard. Visit us on the Web at onearth.org. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.
Pollution Prevention Coordinator, Region 9, EPA San Francisco, California
Listening to the Nightingale
MOTOWN RISING
A flycatcher, not a thrush. Just before dawn not a harbinger or mistress, but impossible to know in the woods of home. In Croatia, I found you on a coin,
On page 49 of Matt Power’s “Motown Revival?” (Summer 2011), the author claims that “almost 20 square miles of Detroit’s land area—nearly the size of the entire city of San Francisco—has been abandoned.” San Francisco covers about 49 square miles, which means Detroit’s abandoned neighborhoods add up to less than half San Francisco’s size. —CARL STEIN San Francisco, California
The editors reply: Yup, your math is definitely better than ours. We regret the error.
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I was pleased to see your article “Motown Revival?” I grew up in Michigan, and about half my family worked for the auto industry. As an urban planner, I began to see what was happening to Detroit in the 1960s. The situation has worsened, but I still feel an allegiance to Motown. When debate raged about bailing out the auto industry, I asked friends if they realized the importance of every auto production job to our economy. Most had no clue. Though I no longer live in Detroit, I gain hope from small victories: the election of a mayor with apparent integrity and ambitions for doing the right thing; a new Chrysler ad
quietly staring at the Adriatic. In the Rhineland, you were climbing the scales, trilling above traffic. Elsewhere, you are drawn to the rose, celebrating yourself, and I congratulate my hearing, my invisible spirit that leans toward the darkness you dispel, where blessings begin to appear, petals shrug off their dew, lovers walk through fog, your distant appeal like Whitman’s widowed bird calling to his mate—this the melody of grief, the memory of storm, nocturnal scribble on the air, a pulse that signifies and withdraws as the sun dreams its way back into morning.
—John A llman
illustration by blair thornley
green chemistry
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Announcing a new community and social network where bird enthusiasts, beginning birders and experts alike can share their experiences. Post your pictures and videos, learn from leading ornithologists and help protect our natural bird habitat. WeLoveBirds.org is a joint effort of the Natural Resources Defense Council and Cornell Laboratory.
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Young and Soiled
EVOLUTION REVOLUTION
Soapberry bugs are growing longer beaks to prey on invasive plants.
Too many kids think
living with aliens
Scott caRrolL@soapberrybug.org
When it comes to invasive species, the goal has always been simply to get rid of them. But a California researcher wonders why we can’t all just get along.
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by sharon levy
pair of copulating bugs march across Scott Carroll’s palm,
the plump female dragging the smaller male behind her. The bodies of these soapberry bugs are a vivid scarlet, their wings a deep black. Carroll, director of the Institute for Contemporary Evolution and a researcher at the University of California, Davis, has spent decades studying the remarkable ways the bugs, which feed on soapberry seeds, adapt to exploit exotic plants on their home turf. He believes that native soapberry bugs can act as soldiers in the battle against invasive species. Introduced species are all around us, and many of them cause no serious harm. But some plants and animals that people have carried to new regions spread explosively, overwhelming native competitors and often destroying long-established ecosystems. One notorious example is the Asian long-horned beetle, whose larvae feed on cambium, the growth layer inside tree trunks. Since its introduction to the United States in sharon levy is a contributing editor to OnEarth and the author of Once and Future Giants: What Ice Age Extinctions
Tell Us About the Fate of Earth’s Largest Animals.
potatoes come out of a bag. So says Debra Eschmeyer, the program director of FoodCorps, a new publicservice initiative aimed at improving the diets of our nation’s schoolchildren. “We want to give them hands-on experience growing healthy food.” In her work with the National Farm to School Network, Eschmeyer—who cofounded FoodCorps with one of the filmmakers behind the documentary King Corn and a handful of other activists— often observed that children who had followed their food from seed to plate opted for carrots over sweets. Kids eat at school 180 days a year, she adds. What better place to address their dietary habits? FoodCorps volunteers, the first 50 of whom began digging in August, will build school gardens, establish links between cafeterias and sources of local, high-quality food, and lead classes on nutrition. (Each will receive a stipend and help repaying student loans.) Focusing on sites where high rates of childhood obesity coincide with low incomes (such as Flint, Michigan, and Jackson, Mississippi), FoodCorps aims to grow not just healthy kids but our next generation of farmers, policy makers, and environmental and publichealth leaders. —sabrina richards
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Cheatgrass has triggered sweeping changes in the vegetation of the West, leading to the loss of soil nutrients and to more frequent wildfires. But in another case of fast evolution, native grasses have the 1990s, the beetle has caused begun to green up earlier, allowing major damage to hardwood trees. them to compete with cheatgrass Mindful of such disasters, for scarce water supplies. many conservationists advocate Such findings raise the possibilremoving all introduced species. ity that native grasses surviving But Carroll sees a critical lesson alongside invasives might become in the story of the soapberry bug. an important source of seed for It’s time, he says, to come to restoration projects. Harvestterms with the fact that in a world ing seeds of experienced plants swamped with invasive species, would mean laborious collection many have become permanent by hand, but it could eventually residents that cannot be eradiprove a valuable addition to restocated. Using adaptable native speration. Still, Hild says, the idea will cies to help control populations likely take time to work out. “The of invasives, he believes, may be heart of Carroll’s argument will more effective and sustainable be hard for many to accept,” she than trying to eliminate them notes, “because it means we’re no altogether. He calls this concept longer striving “conciliation bifor a pristine ology—the pro“The heart of Carroll’s argument community of cess of letting go will be hard for many to accept,” notes native plants.” constructively.” Ann Hild, “because it means we’re That’s the most The beak of practical apthe soapberry no longer striving for a pristine proach in some bug is a long, community of native plants” cases, but preneedle-like venting new inprobe, used to drill through the outer wall of soapIn rangelands besieged by inva- vasions still seems most vital. Hild berry fruits (balloon vine, lychee, sive plants in the western United and her colleagues will work hard and box elder are all members of States, researchers have found to battle new exotics, including the soapberry family) and into the similar patterns among native yellow star thistle, which are now seed inside. Carroll has compared grasses. Ann Hild, a shrub-land expanding their range toward bugs living on native plants in Aus- ecologist at the University of Wyoming’s open lands. Yet even skeptics can apprecitralia and Florida with those he Wyoming, has shown that native found colonizing invasives. In each alkali sacaton grasses that have ate Carroll’s point that evolution case, native soapberry bugs living survived for decades among in- continues all around us, not least on introduced plants evolved radi- vasive Russian knapweed have in habitats undergoing invacally different beak lengths. When changed noticeably. Clumps of sion. In his lab, the entomologist the American balloon vine invaded sacaton grass look smaller, but keeps colonies of the soapberry Australia, for instance, the local their root systems have grown bug populations he has studied bugs evolved longer beaks that al- larger and are more robust. There over the years. Infant bugs—tiny, lowed them to reach its seed, held are also genetic differences be- wingless creatures of bright red— in an inflated capsule. This striking tween “experienced” grass scurry alongside adults with seedbit of adaptation took less than 40 populations that have coexisted piercing beaks. An Australian bug years. Carroll recommends de- with invaders and those that waves the wiry, newly redesigned liberately breeding long-beaked have not—and those hardened tool that allows its brethren to desoapberry bugs and releasing by life with Russian knapweed vour many millions of seeds of the them into invaded Australian cope better with another invader, invasive balloon vine. Conciliation rainforests, where balloon vine is Canada thistle. Meanwhile, ecolo- biology offers a valuable insight, smothering native plants despite gists at the University of Nevada– Carroll says—not that we must conventional efforts at control. Reno have tracked changes in give up the fight against invasive Soapberry bugs living on intro- native grasses that manage to species but that we can enlist duced plants also display dramatic coexist with invasive cheatgrass. strong allies in the wild.
F R O N TL I N E S
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changes in their rate of sexual development and in the size, timing, and number of eggs they lay. All these shifts help them adjust to the fruiting patterns of an exotic host. The balloon vine native to Florida fruits year-round, for example, but the invasive golden rain tree, enthusiastically adopted by local soapberry bugs, produces seed during a single season. Bugs living on golden rain trees now produce their young seasonally, to match the availability of seeds. These changes correlate with alterations in the bugs’ genetic makeup and echo the differences found between subspecies. “The genetic recipe for building a bug adapted to the invasive host,” explains Carroll, “has changed so much from the ancestral state that it’s a whole new flavor.”
Virginia on Their Minds lynn scharf has spent
most of her young career mapping out the territories of endangered animal species. Charlotte Formichella works for the National Park Service, gauging the impact of man’s “sonic debris” on the wilderness. Those are their day jobs, anyway. In their off-hours, the Coloradobased twentysomethings, known collectively as Driftwood Fire, have found the time to master multiple instruments, write awardwinning songs, and earn a valued spot on the indie music festival circuit. Growing up in rural Virginia, Scharf and Formichella tromped about its forests and swam its lakes while absorbing a rich music tradition at events like the Saturday-night bluegrass dance at the local firehouse. The sound on their debut CD, How to Untangle a Heartache, out this month, will draw obvious comparisons to the Indigo Girls and Gillian Welch, but the influences of the Carter Family and Earl Scruggs are also apparent in compositions featuring such typically Appalachian instruments as the banjo and the accordion. Musings on relationships intermingle with meditations on coal mines. (Visit driftwoodfire.com for concert dates and venues.) —jocelyn c. zuckerman
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Thomas Robertson wants to hold the world of finance to higher standards.
green Pinstripes Since the 2008 crash and the discrediting of Wall Street’s reckless habits, our leading business schools are making ethics and sustainability a bigger part of their curricula. Stroll through practically
any business school in the country—or any of the fast-multiplying U.S.-style B-schools overseas—and there can be little doubt that an MBA remains a hot commodity. With the start of classes now upon us, business an interview with schools are prepping for another nearthomas robertson record year. During this recession, as by Adam Aston in past downturns, applications have surged, with candidates looking to use the slowdown to upgrade their credentials. Just a couple of years ago, this bumper crop might have seemed unlikely. In 2009 the financial meltdown exposed the outsize role played by financial MBAs and math-whiz PhDs in crafting the house-of-cards investment vehicles that all but crashed Wall Street. Critics pointed to another, deeper cause: a culture of profit at all cost that had been incubated in business schools. “The really grim news for the MBA… is about more than short-term trends,” wrote Matthew Stewart in Slate back in March 2009. “The economic crisis has exposed long-standing flaws… in the very idea of business education.” If the recession hasn’t dimmed the prospects of B-schools, the crisis of confidence has spurred a flurry of curriculum makeovers 2 0 onearth
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Sustainability as a business strategy is still the exception, and there haven’t been many successful, mass-market “green” brands. Why do you think that is?
Green business is still quite young. Yet even in that fairly short time, there are some serious questions about whether you can brand green any longer, because the public is so suspicious. To some extent it has reason to be. It’s easier to recall fallen green champions who have failed terribly than it is to come up with green success stories. BP is a poster child for this. The company emphasized for years how green it was, even as the environmental concerns about its operations were mounting, and then the problem spiraled out of control with the Gulf oil spill. Companies have to
recovery, but it’s still under severe pressure. Unsound lending practices were partly responsible for the mess, and we need to scale down the role of government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in underwriting private-borrower risk. Banks should also incorporate sustainability criteria into mortgage scoring and pricing. Live in a mansion and drive a Hummer, and you’ll pay more. Live in an energy-efficient apartment and walk to work, and you’ll pay less. For more on Location Efficient Mortgages, visit nrdc.org/cities/smartgrowth/qlem.asp
left: photograph for onearth by David Deal; right: illustration by john ueland
The Clean-Up Crew
at top institutions. Ethics, of course, have come into greater focus. In parallel, there’s been a rising appetite on the part of students and faculty alike to study more sustainable approaches to business. The number of programs emphasizing social, environmental, and ethical issues has been rising steadily in recent years, according to Beyond Grey Pinstripes, an independent, biennial survey of business schools managed by the Aspen Institute. For a look at how sustainability and post-crash ethics are evolving at an elite business school, there’s no better laboratory than the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, one of the nation’s oldest and largest B-schools and an important nursery for Wall Street talent. Thomas Robertson took over as dean of the school in August 2007. As the dust from the financial crisis has settled, he has worked to boost the profile of sustainability in Wharton’s curriculum and among its staff. To be sure, Wharton remains strongly focused on finance, even as highly ranked competitors such as Michigan’s Ross School or Berkeley’s Haas School have made sustainability a core commitment. Notably, none of the nation’s top three B-schools—Chicago’s Booth, nrdc focus Harvard Business School, and Wharton, according to Bloomberg Businessweek’s latest rankings— Peter Malik appear in Beyond Grey Pinstripes. Director of NRDC’s Center Robertson says Wharton is for Market Innovation hoping to change this. Adam Aston, a freelance writer and If business schools could former energy and environment choose one thing to enhance editor for BusinessWeek, spoke retheir focus on sustainability, cently with him about sustainability what would it be? and the greening of Wharton at his Mortgages. The housing office on the school’s leafy campus market has to be one of near downtown Philadelphia. the drivers of economic
be careful. They should first ask, do green claims really differentiate our product, and should we be emphasizing that? If so, are those claims credible? Will consumers believe us? There’s a lot that can go wrong, so it’s no surprise that companies remain shy. Are you hesitant to brand Wharton as a greener business school? You don’t appear in the Beyond Grey Pinstripes rankings, for example.
Wharton has had a funny love/hate relationship with rankings in general. A predecessor of mine, along with the deans at Harvard and a few other institutions, decided some years ago to stop participating. But the ranking services rate us regardless, using information from outside sources. Beyond Grey Pinstripes is among the most demanding, because it requires that we survey the content of individual courses to identify which ones have green content. However now we’re cooperating again for the first time in a long while, and we have full-time people substantially dedicated to answering these requests. The Aspen Institute is probably the most reputable place out there ranking green initiatives in schools. It’s a good place for us to be, whether someday we come in first or thirtieth. Did you pick up any shift toward greener goals since the financial crisis?
The aftermath of the crisis has reinforced one of the longest-standing strategic pillars of the curriculum at Wharton: social impact. From environment to labor and other social dimensions of business, there’s very much a belief here that business schools must be a force for good in the world. Even so, this is the biggest school in the country. We have 4,900 graduate students plus a few hundred undergrads. And some of our alumni do still go astray. Do you have any star faculty members working on green issues?
One is our vice dean of social impact, Len Lodish, who also leads Wharton’s Global Consulting Practicum. Among other things, this sends groups of MBAs overseas to apply business skills to solving social and environmental problems. One team recently went to Botswana, for example, to help develop a sustainable funding model for a health partnership. I’d also mention Eric Orts, the director of Wharton’s Initiative for Global Environmental Leadership. Eric is a lawyer and tends to come at these issues from that perspective. He argues that business as usual is quite likely to lead to major environmental catastrophes, and he’s pushing for Wharton to get ahead of the curve on these issues. It’s clear that sustainability is here to stay. I think it has come into its own as a business priority. We all realize that we’re going to destroy the planet if we don’t get on board. In many business schools, the interest in sustainability is coming from the bottom up, from the students.
It’s true. A lot of student efforts are bubbling up here. Emily Schiller graduated with an MBA from Wharton in 2009 and chose to stay here to become the school’s first associate director of sustainability and environmental leadership.That role grew out of her involvement, when she was a student, as co-chair of Net Impact’s North America Conference, one of the nation’s largest nonprofit events focused on sustainability. She also works with our Student Sustainability Advisory Board, which takes student suggestions and so far has turned them into real savings of more than $100,000. One of their ideas now is to switch to natural cooling of our data center in winter, rather than using air-conditioning. If it’s cold outside, why not take advantage of that?
Feathers for fuel
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t Sonny Meyerhoeffer’s plastics production plant
in Mount Crawford, Virginia, only some ingredient bins contain the pea-size, petroleum-based pellets that are routinely melted down to create most of the world’s plastic commodities. The others are full of chicken feathers. This is no practical joke or shipping snafu. Feathers are rich in keratin, the same tough proteins that make up our hair and fingernails, and since last year, Meyerhoeffer’s company, Eastern Bioplastics, has been grinding and mixing the feathers, turning them into biodegradable resins and composite. Every year the U.S. poultry industry sheds up to 4.5 billion pounds of feathers, most of which head to landfills or are cooked down into feed for other animals. Justin Barone, a Virginia Tech materials scientist and Meyerhoeffer’s business partner, has spent years looking for ways to turn the fluffy castoffs into environmentally friendlier plastics, thereby reducing our dependence on oil. The Mount Crawford plant is one of the first to manufacture feather-based plastic on an industrial scale. At full capacity, which Meyerhoeffer expects to reach by the end of the year, it will replace an estimated 7,500 barrels of oil annually. (The United States currently consumes more than 19 million barrels a day.) Of course, even if every last discarded feather were churned into plastic, there still wouldn’t be enough to replace the 100 billion pounds of petroleum-based plastic products this country creates every year. But just as a combination of sustainable power sources will be needed to meet our energy needs without oil, feather-based plastics can be one prong in a larger strategy to replace traditional plastics with biological alternatives. “We’re finally realizing that we have to diversify,” Barone says. “You don’t put —mara grunbaum all your eggs in one basket.”
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animal farmers
Ralph and Kimberlie Cole tend 650 Tennessee acres.
IN PRAISE OF GRAZING Ditching your day job to raise beef cattle might not seem like the most planetfriendly move, but as this young couple will tell you, it’s all about the grass
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By stephen ornes
N 1996, when Ralph and Kimberlie fruit and vegetable production. “We just liked it Cole bought 100 acres on the scenic Cum- aesthetically,” Kimberlie remembers. “It wasn’t until berland Plateau in eastern Tennessee, nei- we moved here that we started thinking, what are ther of them knew a thing about farming. At we going to do with this?” Raising organic cattle might not have seemed the the time, they were drawing their paychecks in Oak Ridge, some 45 miles away, where Ralph over- obvious choice for two vegetarians, but soon after saw a lab that studied soil contamination and Kimber- they purchased the land, the Coles ordered some lie worked to minimize pollution for the Department chickens through the mail. “We didn’t know what of Energy. But the two scientists shared a nagging to do with the roosters,” Ralph says, “so we decided to butcher one and try to eat it.” It desire to lead more self-sufficient visit onearth.org took them hours to figure out how lives. “We became aware of how to learn how feeding antibiotics to healthy livestock is endangering human to butcher that first bird, he says, much we had to work to buy the health. onearth.org/11fal/superbugs but “we fried him that night and products we needed,” says Kimberlie, “and we decided we could produce more of it was the best thing I’d had in 17 years.” By 2002, the Coles were selling beef, chicken, turour own things and not be such consumers.” The Coles chose their plot for its sweeping green key, pork, and lamb directly from West Wind Farms, meadows and its gurgling stream flanked by lau- and in 2008 they hung up their lab coats for good. rels and hemlocks. But the soil was shallow and Over the years, they’ve meticulously grown their vulnerable to erosion—the sort of sandy loam that, herds of cattle and sheep, feeding them nothing but they quickly realized, didn’t lend itself to large-scale “good clean grass” and using rotational grazing—a
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If you’ve ever visited Vegas in the summertime, you know the American West gets hot. Insanely hot. But air-conditioning all those casinos (and hotels and restaurants and shopping malls) takes a lot of energy. Which is why a group of scientists, engineers, manufacturers, and industrial air-conditioning users have teamed up to find ways to seriously scale up airconditioner efficiency. One participant in the “Western Cooling Challenge,” a program being run by the Western Cooling Efficiency Center, at the University of California, Davis, has already developed a rooftop airconditioning-unit retrofit that uses 65 percent less energy than a conventional unit. Most air-conditioners use electric motors to compress refrigerants (such as Freon) and cool the air surrounding refrigerant coils. But all of the designs submitted to the Challenge have also incorporated what’s known as “evaporative cooling.” By drawing air through watersoaked pads, evaporative coolers lower ambient temperature by evaporation (much the way a sweating human body does). This type of cooling works best in areas with low humidity, but hybrid rooftop units (combining compressive and evaporative cooling) may prove applicable in a range of arid and semi-arid environments. Which means production levels could go up and prices come down— leaving all those casinos to pass on the savings to gamblers. Or not. —benjamin preston
left: photograph for Onearth by hollis bennett; right: iillustration by carl Wiens
Chillin’ Out West
way of systematically moving the animals for feeding—in order to avoid soil erosion and cut short the parasite life cycle, thereby keeping flies and worms to a minimum. Now a sprawling 650 acres (550 of which they lease), West Wind was among the first operations to have its meat certified under the Department of Agriculture’s national organics program. Most of the Coles’ customers buy at farmers’ markets within a 200-mile radius of their home, but the couple also sells to such upscale restaurants as Blackberry Farm, in nearby Walland, and Felicia Suzanne’s, in downtown Memphis. “I would put their steaks up against the best
grain-finished beef any day,” says Jeremy Barlow, the owner and chef of Nashville’s Tayst Restaurant, a locavore favorite. “The beauty of red meat,” Ralph says, “is that herbivores like cattle and sheep are harvesting grass, which is a crop, but it’s a crop that people can’t use. So they’re using a resource people can’t use to make food that people can utilize.” These days the Coles’ commitment to sustainability extends well beyond their livestock. They grow enough produce to feed themselves and supply a local community-supported agriculture (CSA) program; they use rainwater to meet all their farming and personal needs; and they’ve minimized their carbon emissions by
converting their delivery truck to run on natural gas. This past summer they installed solar panels, which, in addition to powering their heavy-duty freezers, generate leftover energy for selling back to the grid. (They don’t own a TV or DVD player, though Kimberlie admits they did buy a dishwasher— “but only after we saw that it uses less water than hand-washing!”) “It did take some time to get here,” says Kimberlie, looking out over the land they’ve nurtured over 15 years. “But our product is sustainable, our cattle are eating grass in the sunshine,” and the steady demand suggests they’re doing something right. After all, she says, “if it didn’t taste good, people wouldn’t want it.”
the enchanted forest “This is an ecosystem in process. You are an ecosystem in process. We think you should meet.” So begins the “field guide” to How to Build a Forest, a provocative piece of performance art that ran for two weeks this past June in New York City. Created by the art duo PearlDamour (Katie Pearl and Lisa D’Amour) largely in response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the eight-hour piece takes visitors on a surreal journey through the creation of an artificial old-growth forest. Visitors are encouraged to wander amid the Seussian landscape, consulting their guides for information on the materials’ origins and the industrial processes used to make them. How to Build a Forest will be presented at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, in New Orleans, next spring.—B. P.
Let Your Algae Bloom Any goldfish owner knows
how hard it is to keep algae out of a fish tank once it’s become a nutrient-rich broth of fish food and fish poop. But an unsightly aquarium is a trifle compared to the aquatic-life-choking algal blooms that result when manure-rich agricultural runoff, concentrated with phosphorus and nitrogen, drains into our nation’s waterways. Now Walter Adey, a scientist at the Smithsonian Institution, has discovered a way to take advantage of algae’s affinity for tainted water to use the plant as a sort of natural cleanser. At a test facility in Florida, Adey’s algae-covered “turf scrubbers” have been set in contaminated water, where they are removing nutrients from the Suwannee River watershed. And Walter Mulbry, a microbiologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, says that the phosphorusand nitrogen-rich algae harvested from the screens make a fine fertilizer. The algae “degrades as the plants grow,” Mulbry explains, “so it doesn’t leach nutrients into the groundwater at the same rate as conventional fertilizer.” Water near algae-fertilized cropland stays cleaner. And fish breathe easier. —S. R.
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the synthesist
by alan burdick
by osmosis. This raises the hydraulic pressure on the saltwater side, which drives a turbine to generate electricity. In the Dutch plant, the freshwater and salt water are channeled in close proximity through a series of tiny cells, across two membranes: one permits only the salt water’s positive sodium ions to pass through; the other allows only the negative chloride ions to pass. Separating the ions creates a potential difference: electricity. The output of each plant is meager—two to four kilowatts, about enough to run a fridge—but both are viewed as significant steps toward larger-capacity plants. Norway anticipates that blue energy will eventually supply at least 10 percent of the nation’s power. Earlier this year, Yi Cui, a nanomaterials scientist at Stanford, proposed a design that does away with membranes altogether. It’s basically a stationary battery—in practice, a series of tiny ones—consisting of two specially made electrodes, one positive and one negative, across which freshwater and salt water would flow in alternating stages. In the process, the sodium and chloride ions would be drawn out, to be stored or used as electricity. “The idea is, you charge the battery in freshwater and then discharge it in seawater,” Cui says. Because seawater contains 60 to 100 times as many ions as freshwater, the battery generates far more electricity than what’s needed to charge it. Cui imagines a power plant stationed near the mouth of a major river, where it could pull in both the salt water and freshwater it needed; its only discharge would be salty and fresh water, at a normal temperature. In theory, tapping the salinity gradient of all the rivers on earth could supply as much as two terawatts, or about 13 percent of global energy demand. In practice, blue energy will be a far smaller player, for reasons having little to do with technology and everything to do with geography. he world of waters is divided between salty and fresh. That’s no accident; a great deal of en- Rarely does freshwater empty directly into salt water; most rivers are tidal estuaries, and their salinities often mix across hundreds of miles. ergy, provided free by the sun, goes into evaporating Pumping the two waters to a single spot will require more energy than the seawater and dropping it into lakes, ponds, glaciers, and aquifers. At heart this process is an electrical amount extracted, says Richard Seymour, the head of ocean engineering transformation, as sodium and chloride ions (the research at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He puts more stock in wave power, at least for the masses. Still, he says, there are places elements of salt) are filtered out to create reservoirs of high and low salinity. That salinity difference repre- where blue energy might make sense. In Norway, freshwater falls sharply into saltwater fjords. Twenty-six percent of Holland is below sea level; its sents an energy gradient, a potential for ions to flow. One can think of existence depends on the pumps, drainage ditches, the earth as a giant battery: one pole is called “lakes visit onearth.org levees, and dikes that direct the Rhine into the sea. and rivers,” the other is called “the sea.” for online-only editions of Alan Burdick’s column, which appears Climate change will heighten that imperative, as the Wherever the two waters meet, the gradient equalmonthly. onearth.org/synthesist snowpack melts and more freshwater inundates the izes and energy is released. Imagine a 680-foot-high waterfall at the mouth of every river and a turbine dam generating power nation. “The availability of excess freshwater is unique,” Seymour says. from it; an equivalent amount of energy, scientists calculate, is freed “That might be a situation where they could afford to do it.” Blue energy isn’t everyone’s answer, but that’s okay. Over the past through salinity mixing. So why not harvest it? That has been the promise of “blue energy” since the 1950s. After decades of techno-tinkering, century, we’ve come to think about energy in monolithic terms: Coal. it’s finally seeing the light. Two years ago, Norway’s state electricity Gas. Oil. One Source Fits All. Maybe part of the shift toward clean and renewable means learning to diversify—to consider a wider portfolio of company fired up a prototype salinity-power plant along the North Sea coast; another has sprung up in Holland. And in May, a team of Stan- smaller, more local sources, blue or otherwise, that are better suited to their communities. Turning on a light switch would become more like ford University researchers announced a still-more-efficient approach a trip to the greenmarket and less like an encounter with Big Ag and all for generating blue energy. It won’t solve the world’s power woes, but the environmental costs it obscures. Let a thousand powers bloom. blue energy’s limitations turn out to be as enlightening as its potential. Generating energy from a mix of freshwater and salt water entails corralling the ions within. In the Norwegian plant, salt water sits on one Alan Burdick is a contributing editor and regular columnist for OnEarth. His side of a semi-permeable membrane, and freshwater is drawn through most recent book, Out of Eden, was published in 2005.
kind of blue
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illustration by jesse lefkowitz
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Š James Kay
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the bicycle diaries
T
by joe dolce
he car came out of nowhere.
It was 4:00 p.m. on Halloween, and the traffic near the Holland Tunnel
was shimmering in the afternoon haze. I was on my bike, minding my own business in the far lane, when I saw the black Mazda heading straight at me. Crash! That’s it, I thought, my leg will be crushed into a thousand pieces. Fortu-
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nately, the car was slung low, so instead of mowing me down, it pushed my bike out from under me. I landed on the hood with a thud. “You ran the light!” the driver screamed from his window. He didn’t even get out of the car. I was glaring at him through the windshield when I heard a voice from the curb. “No, he didn’t,” came the authoritative baritone. “You hit him. I saw the whole thing.” Spider-Man climbed off his bike and walked over to peel me off the hood. “Thanks, Spidey,” I told him, as though this were the most normal scene in the world. “Your crankshaft is shot, man,” said the superhero, dusting off his leotard. “He was going like 25 miles an hour. I’ll be your eyewitness.” I tried to get the cop nearby to file a report, but he claimed not to have seen a thing. So Spider-Man and I made our way over to the police station, where I filled out the paperwork that would eventually force the driver to replace my bike. I thanked Spidey for his efforts, but he demurred, muttering something about “biker solidarity” and setting off on his Fuji to catch up with the Halloween parade. Biker solidarity? At the time of the incident, in 2005, I’d been riding my bike through the streets of Manhattan for nearly three decades, and never once had I heard anything remotely suggestive of such a notion. I can’t remember what sort of masochistic impulse had first impelled me into the saddle, but I can tell you it was rough out there back then. I was “doored” not once but twice, and I once flipped over my handlebars and slammed onto the pavement, hearing something crack near my brain. Friends expressed little sympathy for my trauma, admonishing me for my stubborn determination to ride everywhere and scolding me for taking my life in my hands. “You’re insane,” they told me. “Suicidal.” How times have changed. These days, when I show up at a dinner or a business meeting with helmet in hand, I get a nod of respect for doing something for the planet and easing congestion on the streets. New York City’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, gets much of the credit. In the four years of her tenure, Khan has increased bike lanes by almost a third—they now run along 670 of the city’s 6,000 miles of roads—and in so doing has elevated my town into the ranks of such enlightened cities as Copenhagen and Portland, Oregon. Three types of bike lanes now worm their way through the Big Apple: the standard five-foot corridor, painted bright green; the buffered lane, which has an additional three feet outside the green zone; and the “protected path,” separated from the road by parked cars. We’re still no Oregon, with its dedicated biker’s section in the driver’s manual, or Washington, with its statewide bike-route network, but ridership here has increased 71 percent since 2006. Some 236,000 bikers ride in this town every day. Bicycling magazine recently ranked New York the eighth-most bike-friendly city in the nation. But where there are friends there are enemies, and last winter they came out in droves. The “bikelash,” as New York magazine dubbed it, began when a group of aggrieved citizens, with support from former transportation commissioner Iris Weinshall, who had stymied plans to install bike lanes that had been on the books since 1997, filed a lawsuit to force the city to remove a lane along Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. They launched a media campaign, painting “bike activists” as spandex-clad “pedestrian terrorizers” with an “agenda” to impede
illustration by Darcy Muenchrath
living green
drivers’ “rights” and mar their hallowed asphalt. They complained protected bike lanes. It’s not unlike gay marriage: pass it in New York, that bike lanes increased congestion by taking away precious road and the rest of the country will eventually follow. space and that they weren’t used enough to justify their cost. Even Do I sound like one of those two-wheels-good, four-wheels-bad bikesome local businesses chimed in, insisting the lanes were murdering huggers? I’m actually not. There are plenty of bikers who sorely test their profits by keeping pedestrians away. my nerves, cruising along with their ear buds in or chatting on their The suit was thrown out of court, but it did illustrate just how deeply phones. They’re just as hazardous as those kamikazes who charge down entrenched car culture is in twenty-first-century America. “A fibrosis of the lanes as though in the final stretch of the Tour de France. And did I bicycle lanes is spreading through mention the renegade deliverymen the cities of the world,” wrote the “salmoning” against traffic because When gas prices are exorbitant and brilliantly bonkers P. J. O’Rourke it’s the shortest path between two in the Wall Street Journal. “The points? Unsafe at any speed. cities implement congestion charges well-being of innocent motorists is Bikers won’t like this, but I’m gothat render driving a luxury that even threatened as traffic passageways ing to say it anyway: for too long, fewer of us can afford, you, too, may are choked by the spread of dull we’ve been able to exist in a sort of find yourself pushing the pedals whirs, sharp whistles, and sanctinetherworld, neither pedestrian nor monious pedal-pushing.” vehicle, which has meant ignoring Such huffing and puffing is just more CO2 spewed into the air. the rules and getting away with it. That’s changing, as I learned the If bike-bashers would roll down their windows long enough to see other morning when a cop, siren wailing, came from behind to ticket who’s occupying those paths, they’d find grandmothers, schoolkids, me for spinning along an empty sidewalk on Canal Street. “You didn’t hear the siren?” Big Blue asked, swaggering out of his car. businessmen and women of all shapes, colors, and ages. Elitists? It turns out that a good number of people pedal to work because they He was built like a Sub-Zero. A little biking would have done him good. “You were chasing me?” I asked, incredulous. can’t afford other means of transport. “It’s against the law to ride on the sidewalk.” Other facts conveniently ignored by the four-wheel brigade: even if “You tool. Why don’t you bust some 18-wheeler barreling along at cities could build more roads, it wouldn’t alleviate gridlock; studies have shown that more roads breed more cars, which breed more congestion. 80 mph? Talk about regulatory overreach—what are you going to do Bike lanes, often portrayed as a waste of municipal funds, reduce the next? Arrest people for failing to apply their sunscreen?!” I didn’t actually say that. I wanted to, but instead, I groveled. Yes, cost of maintaining roads, which are damaged mostly by heavy vehicles. Rather than creating traffic snarls, bike lanes actually calm traffic, which I said, I had been a knucklehead, and I was deeply sorry for it. The leads to fewer accidents. And, finally, the idea that less than half of New admission saved me $75. More important, it prompted a grand exYork City households (car owners) should stake claim to 99 percent of periment that involved my following the rules of the road. You’d be the city’s roads—especially when we all pay to maintain them—is vex- surprised how difficult this is. Sitting at a red light when there’s no ing, if not wholly undemocratic. But the biggest threat to bike-bashers traffic entering an intersection makes you feel incredibly stupid. So it’s is this: if bike lanes can work in a heaving metropolis like New York, probably true that bike-car relations won’t improve without the threat of they can work anywhere. Already, Chicago is following our lead with tickets at the other end. That means fining drivers who disregard bike lanes and, yes, doing the same to us bikers when we flout the rules. It can be done. In Amsterdam, when a traffic light turns red, the SHORT TA K E entire lane of hundreds of bikers brakes. You run that light and everyone—bikers, walkers, drivers—rips into you. Cars aren’t kings there, and guess what? Amsterdam still has a pulsing street life and happily crowded shops. TIME WAS, YOU COULD COME UP WITH ANY NUMBER So to those who would whinge that their precious parking spaces are of reasons not to bicycle to work. But cities across the being turned into bike lanes, I say: get used to us. In the future, when gas prices are exorbitant and cities implement congestion charges that country have added bike lanes and introduced mentorrender driving a luxury that even fewer of us can afford, you, too, may ing programs aimed at easing reluctant urbanites into find yourself pushing the pedals. In the meantime, I propose a truce. the saddle. Bike-sharing programs have taken off in Drivers, slow down. Bikers, realize that you’re no longer exempt from Austin, Miami, Philadelphia, Denver, Des Moines, and the rules. Stop at red lights, stay off the sidewalk, and for god’s sake, put on a helmet. Because let’s face it: it’s not likely a superhero will Washington, D.C., and several towns are home to co-ops be standing there the next time someone mows one of us down.
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What Are You Waiting For?
where members share tips on repairing and safe riding and also run programs to recycle parts. For information about riding to work, visit commutebybike.com.
Joe Dolce is a writer and an editor, as well as co-founder of Paper&String, a neighborhood marketing service for independent businesses in New York City.
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coal on a roll plundering america to power the asian boom by george black
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/// p h o t o g r a p h s b y r o b h o w a r d ///
hen Warren Buffett and his
fellow Berkshire Hathaway director Bill Gates visited the Black Thunder coal mine last November, they did their best to keep a low profile. This is not an easy thing to do, however, when a fleet of nine private aircraft touches down at a small county airport like the one in Gillette, Wyoming, which bills itself, not without reason, as the Energy Capital of the Nation. In the age of Twitter and Facebook, nothing stays secret for long. Even as the two famous visitors were putting on their hard-hats, miners were spreading the word, forcing the Oracle of Omaha to face the local press. All
he would say was that the visit had been “fascinating.” Investment analysts say that fascinating is Buffettspeak for a really, really big deal, and that his visit to Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, which produces almost 40 percent of the nation’s coal, cannot be seen in isolation. Just a year earlier, Buffett had wrapped up the $44 billion purchase of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway, his biggest acquisition ever. Coal accounts for more than a quarter of the company’s revenues, and 90 percent of the coal it hauls is from the Powder River Basin. Ever since the nineteenth century, coal and railroads have thrived on this symbiotic relationship: a recent issue of Trains magazine called coal “railroading’s ultimate commodity and the industry’s best friend from start to now.” Buffett’s
the long haul A coal train sets off from Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, headed for a power plant in the Midwest.
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holdings also include 90 percent of MidAmerican Energy, a utility that operates four coal-fired power plants in Wyoming. Now he was taking a firsthand look at the biggest coal mine in the country. Join up the dots. In particular, join up the dots that lead north from Black Thunder along the railroad tracks to Donkey Creek Junction, 10 miles or so east of Gillette. Most of the coal trains turn to the right here, headed for power plants in the heartland, from Michigan to Texas. But if what Buffett calls his “all-in wager” on railroads and coal pays off, more and more of them will turn to the left, headed for ports in the Pacific Northwest, and from there to Asia. It’s a grotesque idea on the face of it, digging up Wyoming to provide Asia’s booming economies with the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. But will the plan come to fruition? And if it does, how high will it rank in the hierarchy of environmental crimes?
their loads into an underground crusher, which reduces the lumps of coal to pebble size. From there the coal passes to a conveyor belt that slants upward at a 30-degree angle to feed a towering storage silo. The silo is 210 feet tall, Shannon said, continuing with the fun facts. A train was inching its way through a gap in the base of the silo, loading up. Each car carries about 117 tons of coal, she said. A “unit train” can have as many as 140 cars, hauling more than 16,000 tons in all. Between 70 and 85 of these mile-and-a-half-long centipedes leave the Powder River Basin each day, carrying enough coal to supply almost a quarter of the nation’s electricity. The words China and India never passed her lips.
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ast December, barely
a month after their trip to Black Thunder, Buffett and Gates met privately with President Obama. The White House said they discussed the he Eagle Butte mine, economy, few details given. A which belongs to Alpha month later Obama gave his State Natural Resources, is of the Union address, in which he barely a mile north of the laid out a global energy strategy Gillette airport. It is one of a trio of that some call “all of the above.” virtually suburban mines that make Nestled among wind, solar, nuclear, up the northernmost of the three disand natural gas was that uniquely tinct mining clusters in the Powder slippery phrase “clean coal.” Then, River Basin. I arranged to take a tour in March, Secretary of the Interior of Eagle Butte, meeting my guide at Ken Salazar flew to Wyoming to the Flying J truck stop in downtown announce that the Bureau of Land Gillette. She was a chipper junior Management (BLM) would hold high school P.E. teacher named four “competitive” sales (see “Why Shannon, who said she had been Coal Is So Cheap,” opposite) for working for Alpha for the past eight new leases on 758 million tons of summers. It’s the third-biggest coal Powder River Basin coal. These company in the nation, she told me would be the first of a dozen such proudly. (Peabody Energy is numauctions over the next three years, ber one; Arch Coal is second.) She with as much as 3.7 billion tons of promised lots of other “fun facts,” coal eventually up for grabs. most of which seemed to involve exVery little of this, however, would tremes of size, weight, and volume. be for domestic consumption. AlOur first stop was a fenced overthough worldwide energy-related look just off the highway. Below us was the huge west pit of the Eagle think big: Silos such as these at the Eagle Butte mine in Gillette, Wyoming, can CO2 emissions rose more last year Butte mine. Brobdingnagian elec- store as much as 17,500 tons of coal and stand taller than a 20-story building. than at any time since 1969, and the tric shovels had already scooped out use of coal grew faster than that of about 250 feet of overburden—the layer of dirt and rock that has to be any other fossil fuel, U.S. demand has actually flatlined. In 2000 coal removed to get at the coal seam—and were now dumping bucketfuls accounted for just over half of our electricity supply. By 2010 it was of coal into red-and-gray haul trucks of formidable dimensions. When down to 45 percent. Large banks and insurance companies, uncertain full, each truck lumbered off with its 240-ton load, grinding its way at about a future carbon-constrained world, are increasingly reluctant to walking pace up an incline that led to the railhead, a mile or so distant. underwrite the huge investment—as much as $3 billion—required to Standing upright by the wire fence was a tire from a LeTourneau loader: build a new coal-fired power plant, which can have a lifespan of 50 years. 13 feet high, six and a half tons, $38,000. A few yards away was a shovel Asia is a different matter. Historically, the global coal market has bucket. You could have brought one of Shannon’s P.E. classes here on been famously volatile. But companies like Peabody and Arch Coal a field trip and fit them all comfortably inside, with room to spare for the are convinced that Asian demand has triggered a “supercycle” that teacher and a couple of parents. “That’s the baby bucket,” she said. “The will last at least 20 years, and talk in the industry is of exporting more ones we use now are much bigger; they can scoop up 140 tons at a time.” than 100 million tons annually. The pivotal moment came in 2008, We drove off to see the rest of the mine. More trucks were dumping when China, which now uses almost half of all the coal burned on
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illustration by bruce morser
the planet, became a net importer for the first time. Demand in India, though starting at a much lower point, is rising even more rapidly and is likely to go on rising long after China’s appetite for coal levels off, which is predicted to happen sometime after 2030. To many people, Obama’s “all of the above” sounded like a capitulation to King Coal after climate legislation came to grief last year in Congress. But the strategy has deeper roots. First of all, the federal bureaucracy is notoriously prone to inertia, and the wheels of the BLM, which is responsible for granting mining leases, grind more slowly than most. The leases announced in March were not a new idea: the coal companies had applied for them at least five years ago. So the Obama administration didn’t push the plan forward; it simply chose not to pull it back. Nor is the commitment to “clean coal” anything new. In 2009, when the Nobel Prize–winning clean-energy guru Steven Chu was nominated to be secretary of energy, there was great excitement at his statement that coal was his “worst nightmare.” This eminently quotable phrase sat well with environmentalists, but the corollary did not. Given coal’s abundance, Chu went on, India, China, the United States, and other major consumers were not going to stop burning the stuff any time soon. And so, he said, “it is imperative that we figure out a way to use coal as cleanly as possible.” That means working closely with China (and increasingly with India, too) to minimize the harm done by burning coal that is going to be burned anyway. One quirk of this story is that Warren Buffett has no more love for coal than does Steven Chu. What appeals to him about railroads, he told Charlie Rose a week after buying BNSF, is that they are so environmentally friendly—“far, far more attractive in terms of global warming than using trucks.” But what about all the coal they carry? Rose asked. “We will wean ourselves off coal over time,” Buffett answered. “We can’t change that next week or next month or next year, but we will reduce it over time, and we should reduce it over time.” An odd set of stars have come into alignment here, in other words, and the muscle power of those involved is formidable: the federal government, which sees coal as an unpleasant but inescapable reality; the country’s leading investor, sitting on assets of $372 billion, who dislikes coal but won’t turn up his nose at a 20-year windfall for his shareholders; the big coal companies, which want to sell as much of their product as they can; and the world’s two most populous countries, which also happen to be the world’s two fastest-growing economies. But exporting all this coal means building a chain, and a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. The coal must be dug up; railroad lines must be upgraded to carry huge new volumes of freight; communities along the way must accept the round-the-clock clank and whistle and disruption of coal trains; and port facilities that don’t yet exist must be built in the Pacific Northwest, a region that is no friend to fossil fuels. Environmentalists will fight the plan at every stage, with the passion and vehemence that only coal can provoke. Will they find, and break, the weakest link in the chain?
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he biggest mines in the Powder River Basin—
which is another way of saying the biggest mines in the country—lie about 50 miles south of Gillette, and I went out to see them with Shannon Anderson, a lawyer with the not-for-profit Powder River Basin Resource Council. We headed down Highway 59, passing over dribbles of ditch water with names
nrdc
why coal is so cheap
theo spencer Senior advocate with NRDC’s climate center, based in New York City, working to advance clean energy policies
How can the largest coal-producing region in the country not be classified by the federal government as a coal-producing region? The Powder River Basin in Wyoming was certified as a “CoalProduction Region” between 1979 and 1990 because of the vast amounts of coal there and the extent of mining taking place. In 1990, the Bureau of Land Management decertified the region because mining activity had briefly decreased. But today it supplies more than 40 percent of our domestic coal and is home to the 10 largest mines in the country. So it was more than a little bizarre that the BLM earlier this year denied a petition from environmental groups to recertify the region. Certification would mean managing this public resource in the public interest, with greater environmental review, more competitive bidding for leases, and, one would hope, a livelier public debate about where more mining is appropriate. Makes sense, right? In denying the petition, the BLM said that the current system provides an “optimum” public return and need not be meddled with. What are the implications from an economic point of view? A cynic might say that the BLM was just doing the coal industry’s bidding. Without certification, it’s the coal companies themselves that define new or expanded lease proposals, not the BLM. Because a new lease usually makes economic sense only for the company proposing it, the bidding process is rarely competitive. So the price of this coal is kept artificially low, helping to box out less-polluting energy sources from the market. American citizens, through the federal government, own this resource. But taxpayers are being shortchanged—thanks, ironically, to the federal government. What about the new leases that were announced in March? Coal from the Powder River Basin now goes for about $14 a ton. That adds up to a lot of money when we’re talking about billions of tons. The BLM claims that these leases and this price reflect the “fair market value” they are required by statute to get for our coal. But how would they know? No one has conducted a serious, independent evaluation of the Interior Department’s fair market value program in more than a decade. Right now NRDC is in the midst of such an examination. Once we’ve finished, we should have a solid foundation for proposing—and advocating for—reforms to the current process.
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like Porcupine Creek and Rattlesnake Creek, before turning east onto a confusing maze of dirt roads. The topographical atlas didn’t help much. Roads that were supposed to be on the left were on the right; another seemed to run at a 90-degree angle to the direction shown on the map. “It’s easy to get lost out here because the mine companies are always moving the roads,” Anderson said. This is no one’s idea of an iconic western landscape; it may be Wyoming, but it’s not the Tetons. The topography is altogether more subtle: grassland and sagebrush punctuated by low-shouldered buttes and odd conical hills like miniature volcanoes. We saw few signs of life other than the occasional pronghorn and her wobbly-legged calves. Yet for all its starkness, the land had its own understated beauty. Much of it was the vast magnificence of the sky, which was filled on this June morning with monumental layer cakes of cumulus, deep purple-gray shading into sunlit tendrils of snowy white. During the Paleocene and Eocene this was all swamp: thus 65 million years of compacted vegetation, thus coal. For centuries the land smoked and smoldered from underground methane fires, to the wonderment of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors and early settlers. But then someone realized that beyond being an object of curiosity and geological instruction, there was a force here that could be harnessed to power the nation. The real irony of the modern coal boom in the Powder River Basin is that it is a product of the Clean Air Act and, in particular, the 1990 amendments, which took aim at power plant emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, the main causes of acid rain. The appeal of Wyoming coal is that it contains less than half of 1 percent sulfur; coal from the Appalachians can have anywhere from 3 percent to 10 percent. (This is also part of the appeal of Powder River Basin coal to China and India, 3 2 onearth
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a changing land For one small boy, this 240-ton haul truck could be part of an adventure playground for giants. For L. J. Turner, right, whose ancestors have raised cattle in Wyoming for almost a century, coal means the end of an era.
whose major cities are choking from airborne pollution.) The downside is its lower energy value, as measured in British thermal units (BTU). But that is still far outweighed by its other advantages: the seams are extraordinarily thick—as much as 120 feet—and they are close to the surface, which means that the coal can be cheaply strip-mined. The market price of Appalachian coal is five times higher. The most perverse thing about the Powder River Basin, Anderson told me, is that since 1990 the federal government has not classified it as a “coal-production region.” Many environmentalists, such as Jeremy Nichols of WildEarth Guardians, who has fought to reinstate the designation, claim that this limits environmental review to the impact of individual leases, not the cumulative effect of all mining in the region: “fugitive emissions” of dust, methane, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides; the depletion of shallow aquifers in the coal seams; loss of wildlife habitat; the difficulty of reclaiming mined land; and the greenhouse gas emissions from all those shovels, trucks, and trains. Anderson and I drove on for miles through the empty country. A colossal dragline, first cousin to the electric shovel I’d seen at Eagle Butte, would suddenly rear its head, half-concealed by ziggurat piles of overburden. At intervals there were fences and locked gates with signs that warned us to keep clear of blasting operations and to avoid contact with the toxic clouds of dust. When people first complained about these “orange clouds,” I had been told by a woman named Karla Oksanen, who lives next to the Rawhide mine in Gillette, “the companies
told us not to worry. Nitrogen was harmless. ‘There’s even nitrogen in it on U.S. Forest Service land leased for grazing. It has since dwindled Viagra,’ they said. ‘Ha ha.’ ” to one-third that size, with 200 cattle and 800 sheep sprinkled across Eventually Anderson and I came to the huge silos at Black Thunder, the treeless prairie like pepper grindings. The mines constantly nibbled where four unit trains occupied the curving tracks of the loading loop, away at the edges. “If you have leased public land,” he said, “the Feds two returning empty and two full and ready to roll, carrying a small come in and say, sorry, that’s going to be a coal mine over there—too portion of the 120 million tons of coal that the mine will produce this bad about you.” At the same time, few ranchers can resist the blandishyear—a quarter of the region’s entire output. But after that came ments of the coal companies when the offer comes to buy their deeded more miles of grass and sagebrush, with few signs acreage. When I mentioned this later to Greg Schaefvisit onearth.org of human habitation. “As you can see, no one is really fer, vice president for external affairs at Arch Coal, he for George Black’s continuing coverage of coal in his online around,” Anderson remarked. “So it’s easy to make laughed. “We’re the best retirement plan in the world column. onearth.org/theedge this an energy sacrifice zone.” for these guys,” he said. “When you see the mines coming, you have a long time to ponder your estate planning. One few people do hold on, like L. J. Turner, a woman told us, ‘Honey, I’ve been waiting for this call for 35 years.’ ” L. J. Turner never brought in riders with Winchesters, but a few 70-year-old rancher whose family homesteaded here at the end of World War I. A couple of days after my tour years ago he did run for the state senate, speaking out against the fossil of the mines, I drove out across more miles of wild and fuel industry. This is not generally considered a winning platform in empty land to visit him at his ranch, which is called Turnercrest. We Campbell County, Wyoming. The state depends on coal for 97 percent went down to his basement, a kind of private museum testifying to of its energy, and well over half of that energy is plowed right back his attachment to the land and its history. There were fossils and into the extraction of more coal and gas to produce more energy to arrowheads and guns and posters for old movies like Cattle Queen of produce more coal, and so on, in a kind of closed loop. “People won’t vote against their own payroll,” Turner said. Needless to say, he lost. Montana, starring Barbara Stanwyck and Ronald Reagan. If the mines were the first link in the coal chain to Asia, it felt The Powder River Basin has always been defined by mineral extraction, Turner told me. “Back in the 1950s, when the whole country was like a solid one. Coal seemed an unstoppable force here, and going atomic, people used to fly over and parachute in to stake uranium people like Turner were movable objects. “You know,” he said claims,” he said. “There was one rancher up on Pumpkin Buttes who as I got up to leave, “the Gillette paper was just boasting that the brought in riders with Winchesters to keep them out.” After uranium coal mines were so big that the astronauts could see them from the space station, all lit up at night. Apparently this is something came coal, and then coalbed methane. Over time, Turner went on, the ranch grew to 30,000 acres, much of that’s supposed to make us proud.”
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ext morning, back in Gillette, I had breakfast
with Wendy Hutchinson, who is the regulatory affairs manager at Arch Coal’s Black Thunder mine and is all over YouTube, courtesy of the industry-funded American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. In one video, she talks about the challenge of reconciling her ideals as an environmentalist with her work for the nation’s second-biggest coal company. To say I was skeptical would be an understatement. Call me gullible, but in two hours of animated conversation I saw not a hint of insincerity. Hutchinson spoke with the kind of passion I was used to hearing from environmentalists; if she was a fake, she was the best I’d ever met. She grew up in Ohio, she told me, camping, rock climbing, “the total Girl Scout.” Troubled by the landscape of her home state, which was disfigured by abandoned and unreclaimed coal mines, she headed out to the Powder River Basin, “thinking I’d be in a better place working inside the door than banging on it from the outside.” Hutchinson and her husband bought a ranch north of Gillette, where they keep 150 head of buffalo. She said she’d like the mined areas to end up looking the way her ranch does, that reclamation is a personal mission as well as a professional obligation. “Philosophically, I recognize that we’re not here forever,” she said. “We’re just borrowing the land.” In fact, she aspires to make the land more economically productive after mining than it was before the coal companies arrived. But turning philosophy into practice, she admits, is not always easy. The 1977 federal law that governs the operation of coal mines has an inelegant acronym—SMCRA, for the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act—and stringent standards. When a company opens a mine, it must post a bond equivalent to the estimated cost of reclaiming the disturbed acreage. If the company goes out of business, the bond defaults to the state, which then has the means to carry out the reclamation itself. Before the bond can finally be released, the mined area must be restored to its “approximate original contours” (with exceptions made for some mines, including Black Thunder, where the overburden is especially thin). Vegetation, wildlife habitat, and hydrology must all be in healthy condition. Reclamation is also supposed to be “as contemporaneous as possible”—in other words, an acre healed for an acre harmed. However, the reclamation record is dismal and not getting any better. “Before you can get final bond release, a whole bunch of questions have to be answered,” Hutchinson explained. “Is the seed mix right? Is the vegetation thriving? Have any wetlands been restored? Have the access roads been removed? Is the groundwater good?” All that can take many years. The federal Office of Surface Mining says that more than 162,000 acres have been disturbed by mining in Wyoming; barely 4 percent have cleared the final reclamation hurdle. But even then, a rancher like L. J. Turner does not believe that the land can be restored to its original condition, at least not in his lifetime. “They say they’ll give the land back to you the way it was, but it doesn’t happen,” Turner had told me. Some of the cattle that used to graze on the land taken from Turnercrest by the mines are in the Black Hills now, others are in Nebraska and Colorado, and none of them are coming back. One big reason is that the coal seams contain shallow aquifers; when the coal is removed, so is the water. “We used to have spring holes where you could fish up and down the creek for black bullheads,” Turner had said. “There used to be a world of
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willows and wild rosebushes in the pasture. As a kid I used to go down there to hunt cottontails. But that’s all gone now.”
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till, you can dig up all the coal you want, and
load up enough railcars to encircle the globe, but unless you can haul it to the Pacific and put it on a ship, the whole enterprise will be for naught. Warren Buffett’s Asia-bound coal trains would travel west from Donkey Creek Junction, up the valley of the Yellowstone River through Montana, from there to Sandpoint, Idaho, and Spokane, Washington, and thence to the Columbia River, hugging the Lewis and Clark Trail for much of the way. Sustaining such a massive increase in traffic would demand a comprehensive upgrade of the BNSF infrastructure—meaning new track, new sidings, bigger trains, new rail yards and terminals. And all along the way there are people who would like very much to stop the coal trains in their tracks.
local pride L & H Industrial, a mining supply company in Gillette, displays the main icons of the Wyoming economy.
Heading out to the Pacific Northwest, I found that my own thoughts on the matter were more complex than I had anticipated. On one hand, I’d grown up in coal country myself, in a Scottish mining town that epitomized all that was most grim about the industry. There was a certain undeniable romance in the spectacle of the black-faced miners marching through town on gala day with their gaudy union banners, preceded by kilted pipe bands. But against that there were the brown coal fogs that almost killed my mother. There was my classmate Tom Pride, who fell into a flooded subsidence pit and drowned. There was the morning the sirens had gone off—the eve of my eighth birthday—to announce the explosion at the Lindsay Colliery, which left three men dead. All this had left me with the deep conviction that the only principled thing to do with coal was to leave the damned stuff in the ground. Yet I was troubled by some of the rhetoric I heard along the Columbia River, which coupled the word coal with the word China—buzzwords that are guaranteed to stir a lot of righteous anger. There were two
assertions: one, that a ton of coal is a ton of coal and the carbon emissions are the same regardless of where it is burned; the other, that if we export coal to China it will burn more. But are those assertions necessarily true? To put it mildly, experts disagree. Thomas Power, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Montana and head of an economic consulting firm in Missoula, gave me the classic supply-and-demand argument: the more coal we put on the world market the lower the price, and the lower the price the more will be consumed. Exports from the Powder River Basin would therefore reduce the incentives for China to invest in cleaner forms of energy. Richard Morse, director of research on coal and carbon markets at Stanford University, had a very different view. Leaving aside moral and political qualms, he said, exports from Wyoming would have no discernible effect on how much coal China burns or on its investment decisions. He was puzzled that the debate about coal exports was focused so narrowly on China, with little attention paid to India. fall 2011
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At first glance the two Asian giants seem to face similar challenges: both have massive domestic coal reserves, but their coalfields are remote from the main population centers, and clogged transportation systems can’t cope with the demand. But the similarity ends there. India’s coal deficit is projected to reach 400 million tons a year by 2017, and most of the gap will be filled by imports. China is working hard to reform its markets and its infrastructure to reduce the price of its coal. “If they can bring down the cost of domestic coal,” Morse said, ”the incentive for imports will decrease.” Even then, he went on, “in terms of long-term planning, while price is a factor for the Chinese, it’s often not their primary concern.” Much more important is China’s anxiety about energy security and the fact that its grossly polluted environment is a threat to future economic growth and political stability. Slowing carbon emissions is a strategic priority, and China has been able to throw virtually unlimited resources at the problem, experimenting freely with new technologies for both coalfired power and renewable energy in a way the United States cannot. The debate about China’s plans for “clean coal” usually revolves around carbon capture and sequestration, in which CO2 from coalfired power plants would be captured before it is released into the atmosphere and then buried deep underground. But this is an expensive silver bullet, whose future remains uncertain. More immediately relevant is the new generation of coal-fired plants that China is bringing online. Without getting too technical here, such plants can operate with various kinds of combustion technology, from “subcritical” to “ultra-supercritical.” A subcritical plant achieves about 30 percent efficiency; in other words, 70 percent of the potential energy is lost as heat. With ultra-supercritical, the percentage rises into the mid-40s. Operating at that level of efficiency, a typical 700-megawatt plant could emit almost 40 million tons less CO2 over its lifetime. China is phasing out its smaller, older, dirtier, and less efficient plants as rapidly as it can, and most of the new ones will use the most advanced technology. In 2006 the overall efficiency of China’s “fleet” overtook that of the United States, and the gap is growing. Morse said that if China switched all its coal-fired plants to ultra-supercritical technology, it could reduce the carbon intensity of its power sector by
BRITISH COLUMBIA
Columbia Riverkeeper, steers clear of the word China and sticks to the trusted maxim “Think global, act local.” A tall, rangy man in his late thirties, with a square jaw and piercing blue eyes, he looks as if he would be at home strapped to a hang glider or waist-deep in a trout stream. From his office in the windsurfing mecca of Hood River, Oregon, we drove across to the north side of the Columbia. As we headed east, following the BNSF tracks as they serpentined through the spectacular Columbia River Gorge, Vandenheuvel pointed out places that were particularly vulnerable to the increase in rail traffic. Yet at the same time, the railroad itself seemed vulnerable, a potential weak link in the coal export chain. A railroad in the end is no more than two narrow strips of steel. I thought of those old movies where the French Resistance blows up a couple of feet of track and disrupts the supply lines of the Wehrmacht. The good people of Washington State are not going to reach for the dynamite, of course, but it seemed to me that Vandenheuvel was smart to emphasize purely backyard concerns—public safety, blocked road crossings, delays to emergency services, interference with passenger trains, the possible health risks from dust blowing off the trains. Each of these issues might seem parochial in itself, but taken together they might galvanize the anger necessary to stop the trains. After all, all it took for David to defeat Goliath was one well-placed stone. This escalating battle over the future of American coal may ultimately hinge on two grimy waterfront sites in Washington State. In the absence of federal carbon legislation, Vandenheuvel maintained, local and statelevel work has become critical. In April, Washington governor Chris Gregoire signed legislation that will close down the state’s only coalfired power plant by 2025, and Oregon is moving in the same direction. “It excites me to bring this fight to the Pacific Northwest, where we’ve
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30 percent to 40 percent over the next 20 years. “China is the world’s largest coal sector, the largest energy consumer, the largest source of carbon emissions,” he told me. “The volume is so massive that even a 2 percent improvement in power plant efficiency could cut emissions more than all the solar panels in the world did last year.”
Waiting their turn Empty coal cars line up on the loading loop at Arch Coal’s Black Thunder mine.
never had to deal with the power of big coal,” Vandenheuvel said, as we stopped by the tracks in the small town of Bingen, Washington. “If local communities like this raise their voices, the state government might think twice about issuing permits.” Permits for coal ports, he meant, and he had two specifically in mind. Peabody Energy has its eye on Cherry Point, near Bellingham, north of Seattle; Arch Coal has designs on Longview, 100 miles down the Columbia from Hood River and 65 miles from the ocean. Longview, an old industrial and logging port, is one of a pair of towns—the other being Kelso—divided by the Cowlitz River. Storefront signs convey the flavor of the place: “Advance Payday—up to $700 Cash Loans!” and “Jail Sucks—Bail Bonds.” Unemployment here is about 11 percent, and there was some excitement last year when a company named Millennium Bulk Logistics, a subsidiary of the Australian corporation Ambre Energy, came to town. Millennium requested a shoreline permit to operate a multipurpose export and import facility on the 416-acre site of a former Alcoa aluminum plant, next to a deepwater shipping channel and the giant Weyerhaeuser paper mill. Among the commodities Millennium said it planned to ship was a modest amount of coal, 5.7 million tons a year. The company agreed to comply with a list of conditions drawn up by the Cowlitz County commissioners to mitigate the environmental impact of the project, and in November the permit was approved. End of act one. The chairman of the commissioners, George Raiter, told me that he had no misgivings about the decision. “This is private property, and we have no legal right to keep out a company that we don’t like,” he said. “Look, you have to be realistic. Personally, I’d rather not have coal. We’d prefer to have Intel or Google here, but we don’t have that choice. This is a mill town, always has been. It’s hard to expect Google to move in across the street from Weyerhaeuser.” Two local women, members of an organization called Landowners
and Citizens for a Safe Community, took me to look at the Millennium site. Gayle Kiser, the group’s president, lives on a 150-acre farm where she raises chickens and cows, keeps bees, and makes home-brewed beer. Sandy Davis, the secretary, is married to a former welder at the Alcoa plant. “I’m a citified country girl,” Davis said, “and she’s a certified country girl.” Both of them were wearing red buttons the size of drinks coasters with a slash through the word coal. “This was always a headache property,” Davis said, as we walked around the fenced perimeter of the proposed coal port. It was not a pretty place. When Alcoa shut down its aluminum operation, a company called Chinook Ventures moved in, promising to clean up the contaminated site. In fact, Chinook was fined repeatedly for failing to control chemical emissions, for improper storage of hazardous materials, and for spilling petroleum coke into the Columbia. Chinook left in 2009, and in came Millennium, which presumably couldn’t be any worse. Three weeks after the approval of the permit, a group of environmental organizations, including Earthjustice and the Columbia Riverkeeper, filed an appeal. They argued that the county commissioners had interpreted their mandate too narrowly; they should have taken into account the entire life-cycle impact of the coal that would be shipped through Longview, including the carbon emissions produced by burning it in Asia. Raiter told me he was amazed when the Washington Department of Ecology said it was sympathetic to this expansive argument and would intervene in the case. This was where the real fun began. The discovery process turned up the kind of documents lawyers love, buried away, as such things often are, among thousands of pages of pabulum. In its confidential overview of the project, Millennium made it clear just how difficult it had been to find a suitable site. The major publicly owned ports— Portland, Seattle, Kalama, Tacoma—had all said no to coal. The only operating coal port in the region, Westshore Terminals, just over the fall 2011
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Canadian border, had no room for expansion. Arch Coal had agreed t the end of my day in Longview, Gayle Kiser to ship a meager 2.5 million tons through another Canadian facility, drove me back across the Columbia, using the bridge but that was stuck away in northern British Columbia. that brings in commuters from Rainier, Oregon. It was Reading Millennium’s high-minded bromides about ethical business the afternoon rush hour, and the bridge was jammed practices, integrity, and transparency, and then turning to its internal with traffic. In front of us was a fully loaded logging truck. “A lot of my e-mail traffic, one could only chuckle. One message stressed that to sell friends are logging truck drivers,” Kiser said. “I wonder how they’ll the project to the state and the county commissioners, “the port should feel when the roads are blocked all day by coal trains.” be referred to as a bulk materials handling port and not as ‘primarily a For anyone desperate to slow global warming and convinced that coal coal port.’ ” The true intent, in fact, was “in the short and medium term is the core of the problem, as it is, there seemed to be two paths to choose [to] develop a 20mtpa [million tons per annum] coal terminal. This will from, both impeccably principled. One was to tolerate no compromise be the largest coal terminal on the U.S. West Coast…. In the longer with coal, to stop it whenever and wherever it raised its filthy head. term Ambre plans to develop a 60mtpa coal terminal”—more than 10 The other was to work with anyone, anywhere, to mitigate its impact. times the amount it had mentioned to the Longview commissioners. Nothing I’d seen on my journey from the Powder River Basin to the Not a word of this in public, warned another Columbia had lessened my aversion to coal; e-mail: “We are at too sensitive a juncture to I still felt the same way I had as a kid of 8. It raise the plans…[T]he risk to the current grieved me to think of L. J. Turner losing his permit path is too large.” land to pits that were ugly as sin, and of the Shamed by these revelations, Millennium pronghorn, the most graceful expression withdrew its application. Yet given the poof wildness in the American West, losing tential profits to be made from the Asian a little more of its habitat. And it galled me boom, the big coal companies have shown to think of Peabody and Arch Coal getting no sign of being deterred by the fiasco. In their way through sheer muscle power, no January, even as the appeal was under way, matter how sincere Wendy Hutchinson was Arch Coal laid out $25 million for a 38 perabout restoring the mined land. cent stake in the Longview project, and in Intellectually, if grudgingly, I could see March Peabody signed a contract to export the logic of “all of the above,” and I found up to 24 million tons a year of Powder River Richard Morse’s argument persuasive: that Basin coal through Cherry Point, although the future of the planet will rest more on that site has no permit to operate either. influencing how China burns coal than on It’s at Cherry Point that the next act in the whether we sell them more of it. Coal might drama is now being played out. The promise be our worst nightmare, but we live in a of jobs is richer there than in Longview, and grossly imperfect world, full of bad choices. organized labor badly wants the terminal. Yet none of this means that we have to The state’s Democratic Party establishment export the stuff. The bottom line, it seemed is impaled on a dilemma: its antagonism to me, was neither emotional nor intellectual to carbon versus the political third rail of but political. The fight against the coal termiunemployment. And bigger financial in- fair warning: At Peabody’s North Antelope Rochelle nals in Washington State is a line drawn in terests are involved than in Longview: not mine, sirens give advance notice of blasting operations. the sand. In the absence of federal legislation only Peabody and Buffett’s BNSF but also and a global treaty, the states that have held Goldman Sachs, which holds a 49 percent share in SSA Marine, the fast on carbon are crucial. If Washington were to buckle to the pressure Seattle corporation that plans to develop the site. to build coal ports in Longview and Cherry Point, it would send the On the other hand, said the economist Thomas Power, who follows worst possible signal to the world about the firmness of our intentions. regional politics as closely as he does world coal prices, big cities like As Kiser’s car idled, immobile, midway across the bridge, I glanced Seattle and Portland have already taken a stand. “If other small towns over the parapet to the north, past the dirty plumes of smoke from the in Washington and Oregon are desperate for the jobs,” he said, “the Weyerhaeuser plant to the dismal structures of the abandoned Alcoa bigger ports may tell them, we turned this business down and we don’t aluminum plant, which might soon be piled high with coal. To the want you to create the same mess we were trying to avoid.” south was the publicly owned Port of Longview. Four colossal white In the opening salvoes of the fight over Cherry Point, SSA Marine objects lay in a row on the ground, bigger even than the trucks and has shown the same lack of adroitness that Millennium displayed in draglines at the Black Thunder mine. Longview. It told the commissioners of Whatcom County, Washing“Blades for wind turbines,” Kiser said. ton, that all it needed was a revision to a shoreline permit it had been “Where do they come from?” I asked. granted back in 1997. Well, actually, no, said the commissioners. “Hard to say,” she answered. “Could be Denmark. Could be China.” That was for 8.2 million tons of “mixed bulk shipping” annually. Wind in, coal out: the word irony hardly seemed enough. This is for 54 million tons of coal, and the site is twice as large. As in Longview, round one to the environmentalists, although the George Black is OnEarth’s executive editor. His next book, Empire of Shadows: battle is surely far from over. The Epic of Yellowstone, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2012. 3 8 onearth
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Stalled Car Wash CafĂŠ, East Jefferson Avenue, Detroit
BLAME CANADA! when we think of our northern neighbor, what comes to mind is a nation of enlightened, outdoorsy people who love hockey. try thinking instead of A rapacious behemoth run amok by andrew nikiforuk
photographs by Mark hooper Summer 2011
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ebraska rancher Randy Thompson
says he has big issues with Canada, or to be precise with TransCanada. The Calgary-based corporation, which bills itself as a “leading energy infrastructure company,” wants to build a $7 billion pipeline to transport ultraheavy bitumen from the Alberta oil sands across the Great Plains. The controversial 36-inch Keystone XL pipeline would not only cross the largest freshwater aquifer in North America (the Ogallala) but slice through Nebraska’s unique Sand Hills and cut across 80 acres of Thompsons’s land by the Platte River. “I can’t imagine anyone, anywhere, who would want an oil pipeline of this magnitude running directly through their water supply,” the rancher says. Having previously thought of “our neighbors to the north” as a friendly and fair-minded bunch, Thompson was stunned by the company’s arrogance. When he said that it wasn’t welcome on his land, TransCanada, which still doesn’t have a federal building permit, sent him two letters threatening to impose eminent domain if he didn’t agree to a deal. “They make you know from the git-go that they are in charge and that if you say no, they’ll bring in the big lawyers and courts and condemn your property,” Thompson says. “They violated my constitutional rights.” After he told the company to stay off his land, on the very day his mother died last June, TransCanada had the gall to send a bunch of flowers to the funeral signed “Keystone Pipeline.” Thompson told the mortician to throw them in the garbage. Before the pipeline came calling, Jane Kleeb, director of Bold Nebraska, a local activist group, also had a benign view of Canada as a forested country with funky rock bands such as the Barenaked Ladies. But then she watched TransCanada lobby against Nebraska pipeline regulations, allegedly make illegal donations to political candidates (the state’s governor and attorney general had to give the money back), and shower hundreds of thousands of dollars on the state fair and community groups. “I no longer see Canada as an environmentally friendly place,” Kleeb says. Nor, today, does much of the world. Although Canada pretends to be a jolly green giant, it is actually a resource-exploiting Jekyll and Hyde. Whenever global demand for metals and minerals booms, Canada takes on a sinister personality. And whenever export markets shrivel, the country temporarily retreats into a kindly figure with no memory of the misdeeds of his alter ego. But for most of Canada’s history, the nasty Mr. Hyde has dominated the nation’s economic life as a hewer of wood, a netter of fish, a dammer of rivers, and a miner of metals. The world’s second-largest country (after Russia) even traces its origins to a British business monopoly: the Hudson Bay Company, which set up the dismal pattern that persists today by emptying the nation’s forests and rivers of furs to feed Europe’s luxury hat market. Next
came dried and salted cod, which cheaply fed slave plantations in the Caribbean and the American South. Then came trees. At one point Canada pulped 90 percent of the world’s newsprint (and polluted most of the nation’s major waterways in the process). It also dug up the uranium employed in the world’s first atomic bombs. Now it’s bitumen. David Schindler of the University of Alberta, a Minnesota-born farm boy and now one of Canada’s foremost water scientists, traces Canada’s brief metamorphosis from unabashed natural resource developer to green icon solely to a series of political reforms in the 1970s and 1980s. That’s when Canada led the world in fish and water science and acted boldly on acid rain, phosphate pollution in lakes, and protection of the ozone layer. A few United Nations peacekeeping missions combined with a reputation for politeness created the illusion that Canada was something more than a clearcut logger or asbestos miner. But many of the most successful environmental initiatives of those decades, such as the government’s Freshwater Institute, have since been severely trimmed, ignored, or disbanded. Incredibly, Canada, home to the world’s third-largest supply of renewable freshwater, has no national water protection plan or legislation along the lines of the U.S. Clean Water Act. In 2007, the right-wing government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper created a council focused on economic competition, dispensing with the office of chief science officer in the process. Harper, who took office in 2006, has also restricted media access to government scientists, especially on climate change issues. In 2007 the Harper government created an agency, the Major Project Management Office, charged with ensuring “timely” regulatory review of megaprojects in order to accelerate exports; the Keystone XL pipeline was one of the earliest projects green-lighted by the new office. The MPMO now lists 34 gold, uranium, bitumen, and nuclear projects approved or under review. (In 2010 the government also opened a northern office to provide “pathfinding guidance” for, among other things, a $4 billion iron ore mine on Baffin Island in the Arctic. This is just one of many developments planned to industrialize Canada’s thawing north.) “The government is all about greenwashing, and about telling people how good we are,” Schindler says. “It worked for a while but it’s not working anymore.” Canada’s growing disdain for environmental regulations and standards neatly coincides with the latest global commodity boom. As China, India, and the United States have demanded more minerals and oil, Canada has answered the call by digging and drilling furiously. About 75 percent of Canadian exports now go to the United States. “Saudi Canada” became America’s top oil supplier in 1999 and now accounts for 20 percent of all U.S. oil imports.
NOBODY WHO HAS SEEN THE GIANT OPEN-PIT MINES AND SURREAL LAKES OF MINING WASTE HAS A RATIONAL ADJECTIVE FOR THE CRUDE VENTURE
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Canada also supplies the United States with large amounts of natural gas and hydroelectricity as well as one-third of the uranium used in U.S. nuclear power plants. Whenever Canada exhausts one resource, it plumbs the landscape for another marketable staple. After the spectacular collapse of Canada’s Atlantic cod fishery due to overfishing in the 1990s, many of the industry’s 35,000 workers found employment halfway across the country, digging up bitumen in Fort McMurray, Alberta. Because Newfoundlanders make up 30 percent of the boomtown’s population of 80,000, migrant workers now call the place “Newfoundland’s second-largest city.” In the 1930s the Canadian political economist Harold Innis described this peculiar and volatile pillage of resources for foreign markets the “staples theory” of development. More recently, the U.S. political scientist Terry Lynn Karl documented how governments dependent on revenue generated by a succession of staples—whether they be oil, diamonds, or gold—become dysfunctional. Addicted to easy resource dollars, they tend to lower taxes and, over time, to place the interests of the resource over those of their citizens. Ultimately, resource revenues undermine statecraft and democracy alike. Most people associate this “resource curse” with poor African countries, but Canada suffers from a longer-lasting version of the fever. “On the Canadian list of fundamental freedoms,” says Mel Watkins, a prominent Canadian economist, “the very first is to export anything, anywhere, regardless of the consequences.” The environmental implications of such short-term thinking are predictable. The government of Canada itself reported in 2008 that there was a “lack of will” to enforce or even fund the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. Moreover, annual reports by Environment Canada, the country’s subdued version of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, routinely highlight negative trends for water quality, air quality, and greenhouse gas emissions. Between 2005 and 2007, 58 percent of the nation’s 176 long-term water monitoring stations reported water quality as “fair,” “poor,” or “marginal.” A 2008 report from the Conference Board of Canada, an independent business research group with few green credentials, ranked Canada’s environmental performance 15th out of 17 industrial nations. Canada, for example, earned a grade of D for unsustainable fishing practices, profligate water use, and grotesque levels of municipal waste. It was at the bottom of the list for emissions of hazardous volatile organic compounds. Thanks to intensive energy use, forestry, and fossil fuel production, the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions stood at 22.6 metric tons per capita, nearly double the average for the 17 nations in the study. The report concluded, “Without serious attention to environmental sustainability, Canada puts its society and its quality of life at risk.”
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itumen, a black, viscous crude, is Canada’s
latest Hyde-like sensation. Nobody who has seen the giant open-pit bitumen mines and surreal lakes of mining waste along the Athabasca River (which are visible from outer space) has a rational adjective for the crude venture. Nevertheless, Bruce March, the president of Imperial Oil, a Canadian subsidiary of ExxonMobil, hails the project as “the engine of the Canadian economy.” The nonpartisan U.S. Council on Foreign Relations attributes the resource’s rapid development to the low taxes and royalties paid by oil firms as well as a political
nrdc
the call of the wild
Liz Barratt-Brown Senior attorney in NRDC’s international program, specializing in the protection of wildlands in Canada
Most of us have an image of Canada as a benign, green place, but Andrew Nikiforuk pretty much debunks that myth. That’s also been Canada’s image of itself—as this vast country, full of spectacular mountains, forests, and wildlife, with people going about life in an orderly and thoughtful way. But look more closely and you’ll find a raging resource-extraction war, much like what happened in nineteenth-century America. Instead of individual robber barons, in Canada enormous companies mine, log, dam, extract oil and gas, and fish out some of the last wild places that remain on our continent. The Canadian author and environmental activist Margaret Atwood doesn’t mince words. She says, “Canada is built on dead beavers.” Yet the Canadian government largely turns a blind eye to the destruction—until someone puts a bright, unflinching spotlight on it. Given the scale of the problem, what has NRDC been able to accomplish since it began work on Canada 30 years ago? By joining with our Canadian and aboriginal allies, we’ve taken the debate to an international level—over mining dirty tarsands oil in Alberta’s boreal forest, logging the last soaring cedars in British Columbia’s coastal rainforest, and damming and reversing the flow of mighty rivers in Quebec and Manitoba for hydropower. You can get the Canadian government to act eventually, but often only after an agreement has been hammered out among environmentalists, aboriginal communities, and industry. We’ve brought hundreds of thousands of our members and activists into the battle, as well as brandconscious companies that buy paper, wood, or fuel originating in Canada. And this carries weight because the United States is the largest market for Canada’s natural resources. As you said, those fights are all about saving the last wild places on the continent. Give us a couple of examples. More than five million acres have been protected in British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest under a plan that includes local aboriginal economic development, and another two million acres in the heart of the boreal on the Manitoba-Ontario border, under a plan put forward by the Poplar River First Nation. These battles won’t end—the tar sands are the biggest one yet—but we are slowly but surely trying to change the paradigm of extractive industry and better protect what remains of this splendid “native land.”
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culture “skeptical of environmental regulation.” In the past decade oil barons from around the world have spent $200 billion to achieve a production rate of nearly two million barrels a day. Just preparing the sticky and messy resource creates waste piles of seven million metric tons of petroleum coke (a coal-like waste product) per year, as well as mountains of sulfur. Processing bitumen into a synthetic crude also currently consumes one-fifth of the nation’s natural gas supply—and all to produce a fuel whose carbon footprint is 17 percent to 23 percent larger than that of conventional light oil. Prime Minister Harper, the son of an Imperial Oil accountant, has described the megaproject as “an enterprise of epic proportions, akin to the building of the pyramids or China’s Great Wall. Only bigger.” Over the next 30 years Canada’s bitumen miners will excavate 1,850 square miles of forest, digging enough 250-foot-deep holes to swallow up the state of Delaware. The highly profitable industry has already created enough toxic sludge—six billion barrels—to cover New York’s Staten Island or Washington, D.C. in several feet of waste. Instead of restoring a land of low-lying boreal wetlands and peat bogs, the miners have a legal mandate to create something called “equivalent land capability.” This vague term translates into an engineered landscape made up of manicured, grassy hills and fake lakes containing tons of mining waste. The scale and pace of the endeavor have shocked Americans and Europeans alike. Canada has failed to conduct a basic risk and liability analysis of the oil sands from which the bitumen is extracted, and in 2008 the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development roundly criticized Canada for not properly assessing the project’s cumulative impacts or saving its oil wealth in a dedicated pension fund. While oil sands executives have attempted to rebrand Canada as a “clean” or “responsible” energy superpower, a government-appointed panel examining the state of environmental monitoring of the bitumen industry—co-chaired by Hal Kvisle, former chief executive of TransCanada, no less—found in 2011 that the existing monitoring system was “not a credible program because much of it is run by industry.” At the same time, the U.S. Congressional Research Office, having bluntly described the harmful impact of bitumen mining on forests, wildlife, water quality, and greenhouse gas emissions, warned that oil sands development could strain bilateral relations between Canada and the United States. Yet the Canadian government, which subsidizes the industry to the tune of $1.4 billion a year (the province of Alberta contributes another $1.1 billion), has been shameless in its defense of bitumen exports and pipelines. Diplomats have vigorously opposed both U.S. federal and state laws on carbon emissions and asked Big Oil to do likewise. The Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., objected to the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 because restrictions on the use of high-carbon fuels by the U.S. military might jeopardize bitumen exports. Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs fought hard—though in the end unsuccessfully—against California’s low-carbon fuel standards. Canadian government officials have lobbied so forcefully for the Keystone XL pipeline that a congressional aide likened one Canadian diplomat to an “aggressive car salesman.” Similarly, Canada has broken one international promise after another on reducing its own greenhouse gas emissions. It first abandoned its commitments to cut carbon pollution under the 4 2 onearth
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Kyoto Protocol, then proposed a made-in-Canada plan, but then backed away from that, too. Canada now ranks last among G8 countries on climate action and repeatedly wins the “Fossil of the Day” award conferred by environmental activists at U.N. climate conferences. In one State Department cable released by Wikileaks, the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, David Jacobson, noted that Prime Minister Harper (known as a diehard climate skeptic) had attended the December 2009 U.N. Climate Conference in Copenhagen only “somewhat grudgingly.” In an earlier cable Jacobson had commented that Canada’s Environment Minister, Jim Prentice, had expressed shock at European criticisms of “Canada’s dirty oil,” as well as “the negative consequences to Canada’s historically ‘green standing on the world stage.’” Prentice told Jacobson that he would step in and regulate the industry if Canada’s image took further beating. But Prentice left government in 2010 for a job in banking, and his successor quickly declared that bitumen was “ethical oil”—a phrase coined by Ezra Levant, a former tobacco lobbyist and convicted libelist. “Canada used to be a leader in climate change policy and action,” says Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria, one of Canada’s leading climate change researchers. But that was before it became America’s number-one oil supplier. Now, Weaver says, “Canada has an ideological agenda all built around the export of one resource.”
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anada’s bitumen trade is a reminder that
mining remains, in the words of the Mining Association of Canada, “central to Canada’s economic brand.” The nation serves as corporate headquarters for 75 percent of the world’s exploration and mining companies. It is the number-one global producer of potash, the number-two miner of sulfur and uranium, and the third-largest exporter of diamonds. It also ranks among the world’s top five producers of aluminum and nickel. You name it: they dig it. Canada’s diamond mines typically require the destruction of entire northern lakes, and it is actually legal to drain a trophy trout lake and turn it into an impoundment for mining sludge. Although the federal Fisheries Act, arguably Canada’s greenest legislation, forbids the dumping of fish-killing pollutants into surface waters, a loophole in the law allows government officials to turn lakes into “tailings impoundment areas.” Since 2006 Environment Canada has listed 13 lakes as candidates for waste mining disposal. When not digging up their own backyard, Canada’s energetic engineers and drillers are busy abroad, with almost half their investments concentrated in Mexico, Chile, and the United States. In the 1990s Noranda, then one of Canada’s largest mining companies, proposed building a gold mine three miles from the Clarks Fork of the Yellowstone River, just outside Yellowstone National Park, where it planned to store toxic mining waste in a pond the size of 70 football fields. The plan sparked widespread protests, which eventually forced President Bill Clinton to impose a moratorium in order to protect America’s first national park… from Canadian miners. Now, another Canadian firm, Denison Mines, wants to dig up parts of the Grand Canyon for uranium. (Denison’s chief executive, Ron Hochstein, describes a temporary mining ban in the area as a frustrating example of “purely pandering to the environmental and popular vote.”)
Canadian miners have become infamous for the conduct of their overseas operations. A confidential 2009 report commissioned for the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) discovered that mining companies committed four times more violations of the corporate social responsibility standards developed jointly by the Canadian government and industry than did any other country. Mining accounted for 34 percent of the 171 major incidents recorded since 1999. “Of these events,” the report said, “60 percent were related to community conflict, 40 percent to environmental degradation, and 30 percent to unethical behavior.” Canadian nickel and gold mines have sparked bloody clashes with local landowners in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. After an independent video caught the eviction of Mayan villagers by the Canadian-owned Guatemalan Nickel Company, the Canadian ambassador to Guatemala, Kenneth Cook, defended the company by saying the photographs were fake and that one of the protesters was a paid actress. A Canadian court later found Cook guilty of slander for his remarks. Barrick Gold Corporation, the world’s largest gold producer, recently made headlines when its security guards in Tanzania opened fire on local rock scavengers, killing seven people. Barrick, whose corporate headquarters are in Toronto, counts former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney among its board members. It’s instructive that the Canadian parliament voted down a Responsible Mining Act in 2010, which would have established standards of conduct for Canadian mining companies overseas. Perhaps no commodity better illustrates the aggressive lengths to which Canada will now go to defend its extractive Hyde than asbestos. Starting 100 years ago, Canada quickly cornered the global market in the “magical mineral” or “Canadian gold,” and for decades Europeans and Americans innocently used the fiber to bind cement, insulate ships and buildings, and make shingles. Asbestos even insulated coffee pots. Between 1910 and 2003 more than 90 percent of the asbestos imported into the United States came from Canadian mines largely owned by the U.S. firm Johns-Manville. But after asbestos workers started to cough up blood, and scientific studies confirmed the mineral’s deadly qualities, most industrial countries banned the trade. In 1974 New York lawyer Steven Kazan filed a lawsuit against Johns-Manville on behalf of a California asbestos worker. That action started a flood of litigation that eventually bankrupted
Canadian asbestos mines and related U.S. building-product firms. But Canada’s asbestos industry, though battered, still has a thriving market in Asia, where occupational health standards are more lax. The industry now plans to expand one giant Quebec mine with $58 million worth of taxpayers’ money. The Chrysotile Institute, an asbestos-lobbying group that receives Canadian federal government funding, claims that its product is safe if used properly—even as Canada continues to spend millions of dollars to remove asbestos insulation from government buildings in Ottawa. Last year, unnerved by these double standards, Oman George, an occupational health worker from India, accompanied an Asian delegation to Canada asking for an asbestos ban. “Canada finds asbestos too dangerous to use, but it wants to export it to developing countries,” George said. “That’s like telling everyone that Canadian lives are more important than those in India, Indonesia, and everywhere else where the asbestos mined in Quebec will be exported.” In June, the Canadian Medical Association and Canadian Labour Congress were stunned when Canada became the only G8 nation to object to adding asbestos to a global list of hazardous substances. The listing, which requires consensus, merely requires that importers acknowledge that they have been notified of and understand the health risks. “We once occupied a niche as the deal brokers, the environmental stewards, and the ethical guys, and we no longer have that,” says Andrew Weaver, the University of Victoria climate scientist. “We’ve lost our reputation. Critics now put us in the same basket as the petro states of the Middle East.” Back in Nebraska, those like rancher Randy Thompson who have experienced the bullying tactics of TransCanada officials and other Canadian lobbyists for the Keystone XL pipeline would surely agree. Thompson acknowledges that “the United States has been guilty of similar if not worse things around the world.” It’s just a shame, he reflects, that both Canada and the United States “and the big businesses they get into bed with” can make us all “look like the south end of a mule going north.” In Canada’s case that obstinate mining mule is definitely heading south, kicking and biting any American that might stand in the way. It is not a pretty or neighborly sight.
CANADIAN DIPLOMATS HAVE VIGOROUSLY OPPOSED U.S. FEDERAL AND STATE LAWS ON CARBON EMISSIONS AND ASKED BIG OIL TO DO LIKEWISE
Andrew Nikiforuk is a Canadian journalist. His latest book is Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing North America’s Great Forests. fall 2011
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The Philadelphia Story
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oncealed beneath the streets of our great cities
are thousands of miles of pipes and tunnels that carry away our wastewater. In big eastern cities such as Philadelphia, this system can date back to the nineteenth century. As urban populations have expanded and streets have been paved over, the volume of domestic sewage and contaminated rainwater after storms often overwhelms our treatment plants. These combined sewage overflows can’t be allowed to back up into city streets, so they only have one place to go— into our waterways. Cities can spend billions maintaining and
by lindsey konkel
upgrading this antiquated gray infastructure—or they can follow Philadelphia’s lead and turn instead to green infrastructure. The principle is simple: instead of struggling to cope with the volume of water rushing through the sewers, prevent it from getting there in the first place by capturing it and filtering it slowly and naturally through the soil. Over the next 25 years, Philadelphia will cover one-third of its paved areas with “green acres” of trees, vegetation, and permeable surfaces, at a total cost of $2.4 billion (a savings of billions over the gray alternative), in a bid to become America’s greenest city.
RAIN CATCHERS
Philadelphia has begun to distribute free barrels and planters that catch rainwater from downspouts. It can then be used by residents to water their lawns and gardens.
LEAFY STREETS
Trees and other plantings, which may be linked by underground trenches, can store rainwater in their roots or allow it to evaporate from leaves and branches.
RIVER OF SEWAGE
i l l u st r a t i o n b y st u d i o 2 a
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Contaminated water enters the sewers from two sources: domestic wastewater from toilets, sinks, showers, and dishwashers; and runoff from rainfall, which rushes into storm drains laden with oil, trash, debris, and pathogens from animal waste.
VERDANT ROOFTOPS
Building owners in Philadelphia who install gardens on rooftops to reduce the amount and rate of runoff can qualify for tax credits of as much as $100,000.
A WALK IN THE PARK
Water can be captured, and the city further beautified, through a variety of techniques: rain gardens, swales, groves of trees, and artificial wetlands.
To learn more about NRDC’s water program, visit switchboard.nrdc.org/ waterprogram.php. For details of Philadelphia’s plans, go to switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/llevine
LIVING PAVEMENT
New developments will have to build in green infrastructure to capture the first inch of rainfall, and existing ones will be given fiscal incentives for retrofits. Compacted gravel, porous recycled plastic, or mosaic patterns of cement blocks that filter water through cracks would all be just as solid as traditional blacktop.
FOULING THE WATERS
Treatment plants purify the sewer inflow, but rainstorms can overwhelm their capacity, releasing untreated sewage into urban waterways. Philadelphia’s green infrastructure plan would capture 85 percent of this stormwater before it enters the sewer system.
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The bat net This specimen of Myotis lucifugus has been waylaid temporarily to be analyzed and measured.
the man who loves
BATS tom kunz fights to save a vital but misunderstood creature from extinction
by ted genoways
photographs by floto + warner
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om Kunz switches on his
headlamp and climbs into the hayloft. Weak sunlight streams through a clouded pane, casting a yellow glow over a square of plastic stretched out on the wooden floor. “There’s some fresh stuff here,” he says. The sheet is dotted with pellets of bat guano, the size and shape of scattered grains of wild rice. Kunz plucks one up between his finger and thumb to show me. “You can see how little these are.” Little, in this case, is good—very good. Little pellets mean little bats. Little brown bats, to be exact, Myotis lucifugus, which is what Kunz, founding director of the Center for Ecology and Conservation Biology at Boston University, has come looking for. Kunz has been coming to this barn, just outside Peterborough, New Hampshire, on and off, since the early 1970s. Francis Carr and now Carr’s widow, Ruth, have allowed hundreds of visits to their property; one of Kunz’s former doctoral students, Scott Reynolds, conducted a 16-year continuous study here that has helped to create one of the most valuable bat population baselines in the region. From 1995 through 2008, a relatively stable number of little brown bats—150 to 200 adult females—arrived here each summer, clustering along the ridge beam to give birth and nurse their pups. Crystallized trickles of urea clinging to the rafters like stalactites (“piss-cicles,” Kunz calls them) still attest to how numerous the bats once were. But in 2008, the number of breeding females dropped noticeably, and then fell precipitously in 2009. By 2010, the bats were all but gone. Only five years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine the disappearance of the little brown bat. If you stood outside in the gathering dark of a summer evening in nearly any part of the nation, in the city or the country, you would see flapping shadows glean and hawk the night sky as they patrolled for insects. Indeed, a major reason little brown bats became so numerous is precisely because they adapted so well to our presence. Though they naturally hibernate in caves, they thrived in the mine shafts of Pennsylvania coal country and the graphite mines of New England. Though they historically used hollow trees for maternity roosts, they adapted equally to the attics of drafty Victorians and the peaked roofs of hand-hewn barns. Our damming of creeks for mills and rivers for power, our irrigation ditches and stock tanks for crops and cattle, even our swimming pools and well-watered lawns—all created breeding ponds for the insects little brown bats feed on. In years past, when scientists like Kunz wanted to study Myotis lucifugus, it was a relatively simple proposition: the bats had multigenerational loyalty to particular hibernation caves and warm-weather roosts, and these spots were thickly and predictably populated. All that started to change in February 2006, when a pair of researchers working in a restricted-access area of Howe Caverns, a heavily trafficked tourist attraction near Albany, New York, came upon room after room of dead bats, their bodies piled on the dirt floor, faces talc white. The powdery growth, previously unknown, was eventually classified and named Geomyces destructans—“the destroying fungus”—and the mass mortality it caused was termed white-nose syndrome. But the 4 8 onearth
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batman forever Tom Kunz, left, and his student Nate Fuller at the bat shed in Moore State Park, where roost modules have stabilized a maternity colony.
coinage is something of a misnomer, because the real killer appears to be the way the infection attacks wings. The fungus causes enough irritation of the paper-thin skin between the long digits to rouse bats from hibernation, which in turn boosts their metabolism and burns critical fat reserves, making it nearly impossible for them to survive the cold months. Those bats that do manage to winter through emerge with wings so ravaged they look moth-eaten, which limits the aerial acrobatics that all bats need to hunt and lowers the chances that females will put on enough weight to nurse pups. This piling-on effect—killing larger numbers of bats in winter caves, starving others in the spring, and stunting the numbers of new pups in the summer—has had an exponential effect. By 2009, more than a million bats of six different species had died from the syndrome, and new evidence of its spread is reported all the time—to the south into Tennessee and South Carolina, westward into Ohio, Missouri, and Oklahoma, radiating northward from upstate New York into four Canadian provinces. There seems to be no defense; once the fungus arrives in a hibernation cave, the death toll can exceed 90 percent within three years. This was enough to push Kunz and his colleagues last summer to
predict the extinction of the little brown bat in the Northeast by 2025 and to forecast a similar threat for any other region the syndrome reaches. For those who would shrug off the loss of insect-eating bat populations, Kunz and his team calculated that the bats already wiped out by white-nose syndrome would have consumed roughly 700 metric tons of insects each year. If the fungus spreads to the vast cornfields of Illinois and Iowa or the cotton country of Texas, the economic effects could be crippling. Kunz estimates that white-nose deaths could cost American farmers anywhere from $3.7 billion to $53 billion each year in pesticides. Some scientists are skeptical of Kunz’s estimates, but as the fungus spreads, he insists that there is no time for equivocation. “We suggest that a wait-and-see approach to the issue of widespread declines of bat populations is not an option,” Kunz and his co-authors wrote in an editorial in Science magazine in March, “because the life histories of these flying, nocturnal mammals—characterized by long generation times and low reproductive rates—mean that population recovery is unlikely for decades or even centuries, if at all.” But, as new information emerges, Kunz also believes that a simple hammer-and-nails approach may offer a partial remedy: the “roost
module,” a wooden box containing narrowly spaced baffles. Roosting females can nestle into the tight crevices, well insulated and better able to retain heat. The fungus can’t survive above about 68 degrees Fahrenheit—much lower than an active bat’s body temperature of well over 100 degrees. It’s only when bats go into torpor during hibernation and their body temperature drops to near ambient levels that they fall prey to the fungus. While it may not be possible to keep cave-dwelling bats warm during hibernation, Kunz believes that the chances of recovery and reproduction for each spring’s survivors would improve if they had these snug places to roost during summer nights. Kunz snaps some pictures of the guano pellets on the plastic sheet, evidence that there may be a small group of survivors returning. Once outside, he strides up to Ruth Carr’s back deck, where she is sitting with her sister and brother-in-law, visiting from Florida. “I’ve got a picture to show you,” Kunz calls out as he approaches. “Bat poop.” He hands her the small point-and-shoot camera and says, “I don’t know how many there are here, but…” He trails off. What follows that “but,” left hanging in the air, is the fall 2011
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healing touch Nate Fuller measures damage to the wing of a little brown bat from white-nose syndrome.
unknown itself. He understands that even widespread, successful use of roost modules may not return bat numbers to previous levels, at least not any time soon, but it’s the first glimmer that there may be a way to stave off a wave of extinctions that could envelop the continent. For the next few June days, I will join Kunz as he goes from the Carr property to a series of barns and attics where he has been monitoring bat populations for most of his career. He hopes to see whether the roost modules his team has installed are having any effect. What we will find is both encouraging and alarming. The modules appear to be more effective than anyone could have hoped, but as the fungus spreads the need for more of them is growing pressing. For Kunz, now in his seventies and working on what he vows is his last research grant, the final attempt to unravel the mystery of white-nose syndrome is not just a capstone to a career; it’s a last-ditch effort to save several species of bats he has spent a lifetime trying to understand.
most of them Boy Scouts and high school athletes, the last of a breed that pre-dated the lab rats most biologists are today. They were drawn to the sciences by a love of the outdoors and propelled upward by a surge of federal funding during the space race. As we drive from Peterborough to Boston University’s Sargent Center in Hancock, New Hampshire, Kunz takes me, step by step, through his early years—the path that led him to the University of Kansas. He entered college thinking he wanted to be a football coach and was cocaptain of the Central Missouri State College varsity squad. Even now, Kunz has the carriage of an athlete; he is soft-spoken and earnest but also assured and purposeful, like a player walking the field before a game. As a senior, he became an avid caver, spelunking all over the Ozarks. On one trip his headlamp caught a glint of something shiny on the cave ceiling. Kunz pulled down a bat tagged with an aluminum band that had been embossed with the words “U.S. Fish and Wildlife visit onearth.org Service” and inscribed with a number. He copied down for our ongoing series about endangered and flat-out interesting species. the information and sent it in, only to discover that the ’ve known Tom Kunz since I was a kid. onearth.org/specieswatch bat had been banded by Richard F. Myers, a professor More accurately, he’s known me—or at least the back of my head, as I rushed off into the flock of sons and of biology at Central Missouri State. Soon after, Kunz joined Myers on daughters that trailed the attendees of the annual gathering of a three-day field trip on the Niangra and Current rivers, stringing filmy the American Society of Mammalogists. Kunz and my father, mist nets over trails and small streams to catch bats. Kunz was hooked. Hugh Genoways, are both past presidents of the society and were He went on to a job teaching high school biology in Shawnee Mission, grad school buddies at the University of Kansas in Lawrence—two Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City. After the Soviets launched Sputnik, the National Science Foundation members of a legendary cohort there. Thirty-two C. Hart Merriam Awards for outstanding research contributions to the science of mam- decided that secondary science education was of paramount impormalogy have been granted over the decades, and six of the recipients, tance, and many colleges and universities began offering summer including Kunz and my dad, were either young professors or doctoral institutes for high school teachers. In the summer of 1964, Kunz took two students together at K.U. in the late 1960s. They were country boys, courses—advanced ecology and research in biology—at the University
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illustration by bruce morser
of Nebraska. For his research project, he chose to collect bats along the tree-lined streams south of Lincoln. But he didn’t have a mist net, so he used his father’s old .410 shotgun and brass casings hand-packed with birdshot to blast 23 specimens out of the sky. (“It was probably more,” he confides, as we exit off the main road and up a windy path into the trees, but he lost several bats before he realized that he had to shoot them as they flew straight overhead, lest their bodies disappear into the brush and dim light of dusk.) He quickly identified four of the species he had collected, but he couldn’t match another to any available description, and the study collection at the University of Nebraska, at the time, was scant. He discovered that a recent doctoral student at the University of Kansas, J. Knox Jones Jr., had written a dissertation titled “Distribution and Taxonomy of Mammals of Nebraska.” It was to be published as a book, but it was still in press, so Kunz decided to take his mystery bat to Lawrence for comparison against Jones’s collection. When he arrived, Kunz learned that Jones was on a research trip to Nicaragua, but E. Raymond Hall, the legendary author of the twovolume Mammals of North America, guided Kunz through the rows of specimen cases to the Nebraska bats and handed him a copy of Jones’s dissertation. Kunz eventually figured out that he had found a juvenile evening bat—Nycticeus humeralis—a previously uncollected phase, from a locality that represented a significant range extension. Hall was impressed. In 1967 Kunz enrolled in the doctoral program in systematics and ecology, with Knox Jones as his dissertation director. He graduated four years later and accepted a teaching and research position at Boston University, where he has been ever since. We roll down the windows as we arrive at the Sargent Center, B.U.’s environmental education facility. We pass cottages marked “Burroughs” and “Thoreau” and “Whitman,” but the last one is marked “The Mossy Grotto.” It was so dubbed by one of Kunz’s graduate students in the 1970s, and it wasn’t until years later that Kunz learned the name had been selected from a list of euphemisms in the back of a Playboy. One of Kunz’s current students, Nate Fuller, arrives just behind us. He looks like a Viking with a thick red beard and hair to match, tied into a ponytail that reaches the middle of his back. We carry our gear inside before doping up with mosquito repellent and heading to another barn where Kunz has studied a colony of little brown bats over the years. Fuller and I stretch out on our backs in the grass, looking up at the peak of the barn poking into the sky like the prow of a ship. The wooden planks tick as they cool, and soon we can hear the scratching of bats moving inside. We click handheld metal counters as each bat drops from the eaves and sweeps out in a scythe-like arc along the edge of the trees. By the time it’s full dark and the stars are out, we’ve counted fewer than 10 bats—from a maternity roost that, until recent years, numbered nearly 800 adult females. We return, grave and quiet, to the cabin. Kunz hands around Heinekens and asks Fuller for a look at the latest draft of an article they are co-authoring on the effects of white-nose syndrome on wing tissue. They pore over the language awhile, tightening sentences. Eventually Fuller sits down to show me what they’re working on. He flips through a series of digital images of ravaged wings, some turned to Swiss cheese by the fungus. But then he shows me a series of follow-up photographs of the same bats only weeks later. The wings are scarred but healed. This dramatic healing is cause for optimism: just two years ago, Kunz and one of his students, Jon Reichard, published a paper expressing concern that “conspicuous scarring and necrosis on the wings of
nrdc science and politics
Sylvia Fallon Senior scientist in NRDC’s Washington, D.C., office, specializing in endangered species issues
At least two bat species have been proposed for endangered species protection as a result of white-nose syndrome. What has the U.S. government been doing in response? The Fish and Wildlife Service has developed a framework for a coordinated response across federal agencies, states, and outside organizations in investigating the cause of white-nose syndrome and acting to control its spread. This is a good first step, but what is really needed right now is more research. The U.S. Geological Survey has been conducting much of the scientific research on the disaster. What kind of research is needed? Scientists are working to answer all kinds of questions about white-nose syndrome. They are just beginning to identify individual bats that seem to have survived the disease to get a sense of whether the species that have been so devastated will be able to recover. And they are also exploring treatment options that wouldn’t affect the entire ecology of the cave systems where bats roost. The disease has been around for five years now. Why do we still know so little about it? Many experiments require results to be replicated over more than one season. There are also many technical and logistical challenges to working with bats, both in the field and in the laboratory. So this work takes time. Most important, though, this research takes money. Scientists have told Congress that they would need about $50 million to address the most basic questions. So far Congress has appropriated only about $2 million. What is NRDC doing about the white-nose syndrome crisis, and what can individuals do to help? NRDC has been working to persuade Congress of the importance of funding research and providing support to combat white-nose syndrome. Research funding is clearly still a challenge, but this year both the House Natural Resources Committee and the secretary of the interior recognized white-nose syndrome as a priority issue. People who want to help can tell their representatives that they support more funding. They can also help spread the word about the importance of bats to our ecosystems and the disaster that is unfolding.
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WNS-affected bats that survive hibernation may have lasting consequences for survival and reproductive success during the active season.” The nagging question, Fuller explains, is whether even the brief period of healing hampers the bats’ hunting ability, preventing the females from putting on sufficient post-hibernation weight to reproduce and ensure the growth and survival rate of their pups. It’s possible, too, that the hairless scar tissue will further lessen the bats’ ability to navigate in cluttered environments, since the small hairs on the wings are associated with minute sensory organs. But it’s also possible that this healing could be a pathway to population recovery. To get a clearer picture, Kunz and Fuller have decided to conduct a summerlong study of bats at the largest colony they know of, in the attic of an old roadhouse in Canaan, New Hampshire. We’ll arrive there by dinnertime tomorrow. Fuller looks over at Kunz, who has fallen asleep with his computer still open in his lap. As Fuller and I get ready for bed, Kunz rouses. When I slide into my bunk, he is still reading by the light of the only lamp in the cabin.
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t’s early evening by the time we arrive at jeff and
Carol Majewski’s gravel driveway in Canaan and pull around to the kitchen entrance in back. It’s been a long day of stopping and talking to anyone whose property once sheltered maternity colonies of little brown bats, and mostly the word has been discouraging. Few have seen any signs of bats in the past year or two, but all seem open to the idea of someone from Kunz’s team returning in the coming weeks to install roost modules. Stepping out of the truck, we’re greeted by a pair of barking dogs—a boxer named Otis and a bullmastiff named Cleopatra. Jeff Majewski, a gregarious guy with a booming voice, is close behind. The Majewski home is a sprawling L-shaped Greek Revival structure, built in 1831 as a hotel, with top-floor views of the nearby lake and long, Shining-esque corridors. After that it was a stagecoach stop known as Dole’s Tavern, then a luxury summer resort called the Lucerne, before becoming the main dormitory for the Cardigan Mountain School and then Canaan College. When Kunz first passed by here in the early 1970s, it had been taken over by a charismatic guru and a gaggle of dropout coeds, who had turned the place into a commune. But what caught Kunz’s eye were the soaring recessed-gable pediment and the rows of dormer windows; these would afford bats easy access to the building’s cavernous attic, and the lake would provide all the insects nursing mothers would need to feed their young. His hunch was dead-on: inside Kunz found a maternity colony of 850 adult little brown bats—one of the largest known maternity colonies in New England—and he has continued to intermittently conduct research on this colony ever since. But he hasn’t been back here since white-nose syndrome kicked into high gear three years ago. Majewski volunteers his worry: some weeks ago he threw out his back while working on the house, and every night since he has soaked in the hot tub outdoors. In all those evenings, he hasn’t seen a single bat. When Majewski opens the door to the attic stairs, we see the body of a bat pup, long dead and decomposed, on the bottom step. At the top of
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the staircase, the attic unfolds into the darkness, light from the paned windows overhead pooling on the boards nailed down the middle of the joists. There are shards of broken glass from a window that blew out in the winter. It should be easy for bats to come and go, but the conical mounds of guano are an ashy gray, nothing like the fresh brown pellets we saw in the loft of the Carr barn. Kunz tells us to stay put and presses ahead into the darkness. He returns just a few seconds later. “It doesn’t look good, guys,” he says.“There is some black poop here, but it could have been last year’s, could have been a couple of years ago, but relative to the really old stuff…” Before he can finish, high-pitched chatter comes from the roof peak. Kunz steps back into the darkness and scours the ridge beam with his headlamp. “Did you find one?” Majewski calls. “One,” Kunz answers. “How sad,” Majewski says, finally. “Well, it’s very sad,” Kunz agrees, “but other colonies have declined by 100 percent. At least we’ve got one bat out of a thousand here.” Kunz means to be encouraging, but his voice has turned discernibly somber. “I mean, we were crossing our fingers that there were some survivors up here.” He pauses a beat in thought. “Very depressing news,” he says. Fuller is silent as we wend our way back to the ground floor and out onto the back deck. His summer research project has vanished before his eyes. Majewski suggests a round of beers. “We’re going to hang out and count,” Kunz says, “but if we had a beer, we might actually count more bats.” Everyone laughs, and it’s beers all round. But as we stand in the driveway and watch the sky go from deep blue to black and the stars, one by one, wink into view, without a sign of a single bat, it’s hard not to get the sense that we’re sitting vigil for some terrible tragedy that no one else seems yet to have noticed.
each bat is dropped into its own muslin holding bag, most of them hand-sewn from bat-covered halloween fabric
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wenty-four hours later and a state away,
darkness is starting to settle into a grove of soaring oaks overspreading a stand of lush purple rhododendrons in Moore State Park in Paxton, Massachusetts. Nate Fuller leads a small crew of students hoisting a triple-high bat net some 30 feet in the air, while Tom Kunz and I stretch a single net, effectively sealing off the flight path of bats from a shed where a colony of roosting little brown bat females are preparing to go out for their evening feeding. Kunz has been studying the population dynamics of this colony since the 1970s; back then, the bats were roosting in the remains of a blacksmith shop just down the hill, overlooking the stream trickling out from Eames Pond. When park officials proposed removing the tumbledown ruins because of safety concerns, Kunz came up with a plan to relocate the colony. “We took some of the wood—the old, bat-smelly wood—out of the old building,” Kunz says, “and used some of it to build the shed, thinking that they would be familiar with the odor and might come back.” Holes were cut into the sidewall and a section of the eave to permit easy entrance
and exit—and to allow Kunz’s team to emplace cameras to keep an show me her speckled skin. “So that’s not so bad,” he says. “That’s just accurate, ongoing census of the colony without human interference. splotching. I think what the skin does is sort of expel the fungus by The plan worked perfectly: for 15 years the bats thrived here and sloughing it off. And then what’s left are these little spots.” actually grew in number. “Before 2008, it was a very robust colony,” Fuller assigns this bat a score of 1, signifying the least damage, on Kunz says, “before white-nose syndrome.” a scale devised by Kunz’s team. He’s instantly cheered by this. Still, data from recent studies at this site are encouraging. Although “You got a fat body,” Fuller says, in a tone most people reserve for the Paxton colony is definitely down from its peak population, the babies or puppies. “Look how fat you are.” The bat, like most of those numbers recorded in 2009 and 2010 and so far in 2011 have remained to follow, is pregnant. stable. Kunz’s team also reports strong indications “that there may be The rest of the hours of the night, until well past midnight, are spent survivors of WNS that will persist and may increase if suitable roosting in the unglamorous repetition of data collection. I slip an aluminum sites are made available for small residual colonies.” Since 1998, four band from a plastic string, record the number, and hand the band to back-to-back roost modules have been installed inside the Paxton bat Kunz, who clips it onto a bat’s forearm. He reads me the forearm length, shed—and now the hope is that wing-damaged survivors may be able slips the bat into a small manila envelope for weighing, and assesses to recover quickly enough to mate, perhaps with bats unaffected by its reproductive state. Then Fuller photographs each wing and, after white-nose syndrome. sometimes consulting with Kunz and Reichard, calls out the score. The prospect of a resistant bat is no longer a pipe dream. Investigating I write all of this down and then hand Kunz a new band. It becomes the theory that the fungus was introduced to Howe Caverns by a foreign mechanical and allows little space for conversation amid the calling and visitor or an American caver, a group of European scientists published repeating of data. By the time the final numbers are recorded, everyone a study in April reporting is exhausted—and the work of that Geomyces destructans not breaking down the gear and only is present in Europe but hauling out still remains. is widespread and common. Nevertheless, the mood is Though it had never been much brighter than it was last identified before it began killnight, and Kunz, though spent, ing American bats, scientists seems buoyed by what we’ve now have strong evidence—in seen. He suggests that we load many cases laboratory confirup and drive back to his home mation—of the fungus in the in Wellesley, Massachusetts. caves of 15 European counAs we drive, he reflects on the tries. The geographical range past few days. The devastation is roughly 1,500 miles wide at the Canaan site is hard to and 1,200 miles from north autopsy report Parts of dead bats await analysis in Tom Kunz’s laboratory. stomach; he and Fuller had to south. More important, the hoped to conduct a study of European team observed the fungus on eight different species from the white-nose-affected growth rates to compare with previous studies genus Myotis, but not one displayed any ill effects. This gives American conducted at the Canaan site in 1982 and 2000. It will be hard—maybe scientists hope that the American species of Myotis and other white- impossible—to conduct the proposed study at another location. Still, nose-affected bats could develop resistance—if they survive this initial he’s encouraged by what he sees at Paxton; the colony may not be outbreak. increasing, “but it hasn’t dropped there over the past three years,” At the research station in Paxton, Kunz’s team has just finished he says, “in contrast to all other sites that we’ve studied, except the opening the mist nets and tied off support poles when bats start hit- other site that has a roost module in it.” Now, at the Carr barn in ting the mesh. They tangle and roll in the gauzy threads, squeaking Peterborough, there appears to be more guano this year than in the with anger and confusion, while Kunz and Fuller work quickly to free past couple of years. Maybe that colony, too, is starting to build up— them. Jon Reichard is also on hand from Curry College, where he perhaps from some resistant individuals. “Only time will tell,” Kunz now teaches. Everyone on Kunz’s team wears blue surgical gloves, says. “We’ll continue to monitor it over the next several years to see cycling through them to prevent spreading the fungus from one bat whether there’s a recovery.” to the next. Each bat is then dropped into its own muslin holding bag, As we turn onto the interstate back toward Boston, Kunz’s mind is most of them hand-sewn from bat-covered Halloween fabric that was on how to increase the production of the roost modules. The design a birthday present to Fuller from his mother. is so simple, he says, that teachers and Boy Scout leaders could have Once we have collected roughly 30 bats, we move to a camp table kids make them. Perhaps inmates in the prison system could make set up on a concrete slab under a sheltering maple. One of the stu- roost modules instead of license plates. Although it may not seem dents hangs the clutch of bags over a low limb while Fuller sets up to like much, it’s the first sign of hope that bat biologists have had since photograph the wings of the captive bats and Kunz adjusts a caliper white-nose syndrome emerged five years ago. There’s no way to be and calibrates the scale to measure and weigh each specimen, band certain the plan would work, that survivorship and reproductive rates it, and then determine whether it is pregnant or lactating. I’m given would rise, but it’s something. the clipboard and the responsibility of recording data. “We cannot ensure,” Kunz says, “but at least we can encourage.” Taking the first bat from a bag, Fuller stretches out her wings to And, for tonight, that’s a start. f a LL 2 0 1 1
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Reviews
wordsimagesideas
Barnett begins her hopeful, instructive book, Blue Revolution, by reporting the grotesque selfblue indulgence found in Granite Bay, California, an upscale suburb revolution east of Sacramento where Unmaking America’s backyard swimming pools and Water Crisis waterfalls lead residents to use by CynthiA barnett nearly 500 gallons of water per Beacon Press, 229 pp., $26.95 person each day, compared with a national average of 150. Aiding and abetting such waste is the city’s policy of flat water rates: residents pay the same no matter how much water they use. California’s water vulnerabilities and wastefulness are mirrored around the world, and again climate change exacerbates the problem. In Asia, at least 500 million people obtain some of their drinking and irrigation water from the glaciers atop the Himalayas; NASA scientist Yao Tandong has estimated that 40 percent of these glaciers will disappear by 2050. In South America, most of the glaciers atop the Andes are Facing a future of permanent drought, it’s time to change our wasteful ways expected to disappear by 2030. Floods attract more media attention (witness the TV coverage by mark hertsgaard of the June 2011 floods in the U.S. Midwest), but history suggests hen I think of my 6-year-old daughter and how she and the rest of her generation will spend their lives coping with mounting that globally, drought will be the climate change, nothing worries me more than water. Water, it’s often overriding danger as climate said, is life, and nowhere is this truer than in California, where Chiara and change intensifies in the years I live. Control of water has shaped the Golden State’s history, enabling ahead. “Floods kill thousands, the mega-growth of our great cities, transforming the Central Valley into drought can kill millions,” goes the an agricultural superpower that produces most of America’s fruits and adage recited by Robert Wilkinson, a professor of vegetables, creating personal fortunes for some and ruin for others, and provoking visit onearth.org environmental endless trickery and squabbling along the way. It was in California, after all, that Mark for more reviews of books and movies, including Revenge of the Electric Car. studies at the Twain penned his imperishable line, “Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over.” onearth.org/reviews University of Modern residents of California often forget that the state is a desert; the next 50 years will remind them. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected that record California, Santa Barbara. But much can be done to avoid drought “will become the norm” [my emphasis] across the western third of the United States by 2050. Rising temperatures will also shrink the snowpack atop the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains, the worst scenarios. Task number which currently supply roughly 40 percent of California’s water. In Yosemite National Park, “the way one is to halt the global warming things are going, [the] glaciers will be entirely gone within a few decades,” according to Greg Stock, a that drives climate change. Even geologist with the National Park Service. “If they dry up, I don’t know of any way to replace that water.” as we do so, however, we must Meanwhile, humans make matters worse through their reckless consumption of water. Cynthia recognize that the laws of physics
life in a waterless world
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W
and chemistry ensure that average global temperatures will keep rising for at least another 50 years no matter how quickly emissions decline. Thus my daughter and the two billion other people around the world who are less than 20 years old have been involuntarily conscripted into what I call Generation Hot. If the members of Generation Hot are to survive this unhappy fate, all of us must pursue a dual strategy that experts summarize as “avoid the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable.” That is, we must reduce global warming soon enough to prevent unmanageable impacts—for example, 80 feet of sea-level rise—and at the same time we must adapt to the impacts that are already unavoidable. In the case of water, humans will have to master a difficult balancing act, for climate change will bring not only more extreme droughts but also stronger storms and therefore fiercer floods—in other words, both too much water and too little. The good news is that cuttingedge leaders around the world are already making impressive progress, as Barnett reports. And some of the most extraordinary results have been achieved in some of the unlikeliest of places. Even by the bloated standards of the United States, San Antonio, Texas, had long been a water glutton. Average daily per capita consumption was 225 gallons. In 1991 environmentalists sued the Department of the Interior and the Fish and Wildlife Service, arguing that overpumping of the city’s aquifer was endangering fish and salamanders. Two years later, a U.S. district court judge agreed and ordered San Antonio to make “a fundamental change” in water management. City planners responded by waging a war on waste, and soon discovered that greater water efficiency is the cheapest, most environmentally friendly way to find new water—just as improving
energy efficiency is the greenest, most lucrative source of new energy. The local public water utility initiated a program called Plumbers to People that fixes leaky pipes of low-income residents for free. And—surprise!—the real estate industry pitched in too. Most airconditioners are water-cooled; large commercial units can guzzle thousands of gallons a day, much of which drips off as condensate. Rex Poppy, an engineer for one of San Antonio’s leading property companies, devised a way to recycle this condensate (and save considerable amounts of water and money) that became standard local practice. Most remarkably, San Antonio got all stakeholders, even irrigators, to support a city ordinance that made it outright illegal to waste water. New homes and businesses were thenceforth required to install high-efficiency toilets and appliances, while irrigation was allowed only in certain places and only between the hours of 8:00 p.m. and 10:00 a.m. As a result, local per capita water consumption fell to 115 gallons a day—half the city’s previous rate and well below the U.S. average. The advocacy group Alliance for Water Efficiency, one of the unsung heroes in Blue Revolution, praises San Antonio’s efforts as the farthest-reaching in the nation. Still, such enlightened selfinterest is not spreading quickly enough to save America’s aquifers from unsustainable rates of depletion, Barnett asserts.Which raises a question: if saving water makes so much sense, why isn’t everyone doing it? Barnett’s explanation is that America lacks “a water ethic.” Drawing on Aldo Leopold’s championing of “a land ethic” in A Sand County Almanac, Barnett seems to mean a mix of legal strictures (such as the judge’s ruling in San Antonio), economic incentives (such as charging progressively higher rates to heavier users), and above all civic sentiment (just as littering has in recent decades
come to be shunned as an antisocial act, so should wasting water). Just how to foster a water ethic is, alas, not fleshed out in enough detail in Blue Revolution, though Barnett does identify some of the chief obstacles. Individual complacency is partly to blame. The average American has come to take clean, abundant water for granted; per capita consumption today is four times what it was in 1950. One of the not-so-fun facts reported in this book is that lawns—which Barnett defines to include not only grass around homes but also sports fields and highway median strips—have become America’s single largest crop by planted area. As much as 19 trillion gallons of water a year are used to irrigate this “51st
f r o m
o u r
state.” Corporate greed, political grandstanding, and other institutional scourges are even bigger culprits. America tends to spurn water efficiency, Barnett argues, because “politicians want to bring home visible new projects…. Check out any multimillion-dollar water project in the nation, and behind it you will find a powerful set of backers whose profits are directly proportional to its size.” Developing a water ethic was the root of the turnaround in San Antonio, Barnett claims, and the same has been true in the Netherlands and Singapore, two foreign success stories recounted here. Such an ethic cannot be imposed solely from above, judging from the examples in Blue Revolution,
c o n t r i b u t o r s
One-Two Punch contributing editor
David Gessner has pulled off the rare feat of publishing two books in two months, both originating in work that first appeared in OnEarth and onearth.org. The Tarball Chronicles (Milkweed Editions, $15) recounts his travels in the Gulf of Mexico in the months following the April 2010 BP oil spill. My Green Manifesto (Milkweed Editions, $24) grew out of a canoe trip down the Charles River in Massachusetts—the inspiration for the old Standells hit, “Dirty Water—and lays out, with Gessner’s trademark wit, a vision of environmentalism that is fresh, passionate, and unafraid of challenging conventional wisdom.
Empire of the Beetle By Andrew Nikiforuk Greystone Books, $17.95 Canadian journalist Nikiforuk, whose story “Blame Canada!” appears in this issue, chronicles the ravages of the mountain pine beetle on our Rocky Mountain forests.
The Secret World Of Whales By Charles Siebert Chronicle Books, $16.99 In this latest product of NRDC’s collaboration with Chronicle Books, Siebert introduces young readers to the magic of the largest creatures on the planet.
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reviews
though visionary leadership (and the occasional lawsuit) are important. Rather, recognizing the finite, irreplaceable nature of water and valuing it accordingly must be nurtured at the grass roots. The ethic begins in conversations with relatives, neighbors, and co-workers and spreads outward and upward from there. It took three years of public discussion for San Antonio to hammer out its pathbreaking
water ordinance, but because all stakeholders felt represented in the process, the new approach— or ethic, if you prefer—enjoys widespread support and seems unlikely to be reversed. While cautioning that no two localities will implement the ethic in exactly the same way, Barnett does sketch some of the essential principles. Americans should “value water, from appreciating local streams to pricing water right.” We should “work together to use less and less— rather than fight each other to grab more and more.” We
should “keep water local” and “leave as much as prudently possible in nature… so that our children and grandchildren, with the benefit of time and evolving knowledge, can make their own decisions about water.” Turning these ideals into reality will take political will and courage, Barnett acknowledges. If Blue Revolution fails to provide a blueprint for how to achieve this transformation, its on-theground reporting nevertheless demonstrates that the tools are there, ready to be grasped. In the name of Generation Hot, let
the nature principle BY richard Louv Algonquin Books, 320 pp., $24.95
some teachers at my son
s p o t l i g h t
Hidden Alaska By Michael Melford and Dave Atcheson National Geographic, $24 The life cycle of the salmon—birth, migration to salt water, return to their natal river, spawning, and death—is one of the most spellbinding sagas in the natural world. When this male sockeye dies, its body will contribute life-sustaining nutrients to the pristine ecosystem of Bristol Bay, Alaska, which is home to one of the greatest salmon runs and commercial fisheries in North America. However, Bristol Bay is now at risk from proposals to develop a giant copper, gold, and molybdenum mine. The Pebble Mine would be centered on a two-mile-wide open pit, transforming a roadless wilderness into a hellish moonscape of waste rock, storage pits, earthen dams, access roads, pipelines, and power lines. In this exquisite book, National Geographic photographer Michael Melford’s stunning images of the Alaskan landscape and its wild residents show us what is at stake.
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Willie’s elementary school started planting crops at a local farm this year. A few days ago, Willie and I joined a work party there. It was quite instructive. The farm is a 20-minute walk from school. It’s next to a busy road. The earth is more rock than dirt. The farm is not, in other words, perfect. And yet, after about 20 minutes of digging in a row of potatoes, my son looked at me and said simply, “This is the best.” I agreed. If Richard Louv’s new book is to be believed, Willie and I had just stumbled upon an important truth: the nature we need is the nature that is nearby. The green spaces right here in our neighborhoods and in our cities are absolutely necessary to our well-being. We just have to learn to see what’s in front of us. In The Nature Principle, Louv asks us to give up the notion that nature is some ideal place that’s out there somewhere, something to be visited annually at the nearest national park. Instead, he wants us to experience the good-enough nature that surrounds us. Only then, he says, can we save ourselves and our communities from the spiritual
Illustration by blair thornley
disconnection and emotional poverty that plague modern life. Louv first traversed this territory in Last Child in the Woods, a book with a killer title and an urgent message: kids need nature. Parents and educators readily took up Louv’s newly coined phrase “nature-deficit disorder,”which he used to describe the host of ills that grow from “the broken bond between our young and nature.” Now Louv has followed up with The Nature Principle. A kind of Last Child in the Woods for not-so-small people, the new book presents a comprehensive vision of how all humans need closer contact with nature and how we can go about making it happen. Louv’s Nature Principle holds that “a reconnection to the natural world is fundamental to human health, well-being, spirit, and survival.” And he goes on: “The twenty-first century will be the century of human restoration in the natural world.” This may sound grandiose and overwhelming, but Louv has, it seems, thousands of notions about how it might be done. He pours forth ideas both familiar and frankly outlandish, some his own, but mostly gathered from thinkers all over the world: park rangers as health paraprofessionals, helping connect the sick and infirm with nature; a citizennaturalist brigade, providing bird counts and tree counts and fish counts to support scientists; the eco-village movement, which builds environmentally sensitive housing developments; home gardens as the crucibles of a resurgent biodiversity; button parks, which take advantage of whatever tiny pockets of open space might be found in cities. Louv’s enthusiasm is infectious. He comes across as a delighted curator, unable to help himself from bringing us all the news he can find of this growing international movement to connect people with nature. He
gives us a million reasons to go outside and removes every excuse for staying in. If Louv had his way, the woods—and parks and farms and Willie’s vegetable garden—would be filled with grown-ups and children alike.
—claire dederer
demon fish Travels Through the Hidden World of Sharks BY juliet eilperin Pantheon, 320 pp., $26.95
I once held a live shark
in my bare hands. Admittedly it was a juvenile, but despite its age, it still made my arms shake and my knees weak as two-and-ahalf feet of pure muscle thrashed desperately in my grip. The researchers I was accompanying did the hard part, measuring the young scalloped hammerhead, clipping a tiny piece of its tail to record its DNA, and punching a bright blue tag through a fin in the hopes that they—or another research team—would one day meet it again. All I had to do was remember their most important piece of advice: keep your fingers away from the mouth. This was in 2001, at the end of the infamous “Summer of the Shark.” As a reporter for the Carolinas’ largest daily newspaper, I was doing my part to help feed the media’s insatiable shark frenzy. The decade since then has brought an explosion in
knowledge about—if not respect for—sharks, as new tagging and satellite tracking technology has transformed our understanding of their life history and biology. In the words of one researcher, “If you read shark books from a decade ago, large tracts of them are incorrect.” Juliet Eilperin’s Demon Fish remedies that situation by bringing shark science into the present. In her survey of recent discoveries—sharks engage in longer migrations than previously thought, dive deeper, and can reproduce asexually when necessary, for starters—Eilperin begins to do justice to an animal that appeared 200 million years before the dinosaurs and plays a vital role in the health of our oceans. As befits a newspaper reporter (Eilperin is a longtime Washington Post correspondent), her writing is more matter-of-fact than literary. But the sheer volume of information she uncovers, and the plight and importance of her subject, keep the book moving forward with a momentum that sharks might envy. The tragedy is that even as we learn more about sharks, we’re losing our chance to study them further. A staggering 73 million are killed every year to supply the growing demand—mainly in Asia—for shark fin soup, a dish
that’s more about social status than taste. When sharks suffer, so do our seas—and so do we. A 2007 study in Science provided convincing evidence that several shark species off the Atlantic seaboard had declined by more than 97 percent since 1970, resulting in an explosion in the population of their prey species, including the cownose ray. Rays eat huge amounts of oysters, clams, and scallops; by 2004, their appetite had forced North Carolina to close its century-old scallop fishery. We may never lose our selachophobia—our fear of sharks— but, as Eilperin makes clear, we also need them. As more shark species become endangered, scientists have begun to use computer models to simulate a world without sharks. As ever in a complex ecosystem, there are winners and losers when a top predator is deleted from the data set, but without sharks, the oceans quickly start to become something we wouldn’t recognize today. It might not make sense on a gut level to protect creatures we also fear, but in doing so, we also protect ourselves. Just remember the advice I got on that trip 10 years ago: hold on tight and avoid the teeth.
—scott dodd
The Design of a Summer House The lintel should be level with the ground. Even one stair, one step, would be a reminder of going somewhere else. Shutters and glass and a roof would interfere with what can fly— the birds, the insects, the air itself, the sun, moonlight, starlight, all of which should be welcome while you lie down on your summer garden bed with a view requiring only two of your eyes, a house for falling asleep without half trying, for waking up without trying at all. —B y D av i d Wag on er
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Dispatches news and views from the natural resources defense council
watery world A new law safeguards a vast boreal landscape of pristine lakes and wetlands.
the Majesty of manitoba preserved In a historic agreement, a First Nation has helped protect a vast wilderness crucial to the planet’s health
T
he remote RESERVE OF THE Poplar River
nation occupies a tiny cranny of the vast boreal forest that circles the Northern hemisphere like a verdant tonsure, stretching across Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia’s upper reaches. During summer, people and supplies access this small eastern Manitoba community by air or river barge. In winter, a temporary road carved from snow and ice leads to Poplar River. The Ojibwe who call this home have hunted and fished here for thousands of years. A healthy boreal forest is essential not only to its inhabitants but also to the planet, says Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, a senior NRDC attorney who has been fighting for boreal forest protections for seven years. Often referred to as “the lungs of the earth,” the boreal’s conifers absorb carbon and release oxygen. Canada’s boreal forest holds 200
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million acres of fresh surface water and about a quarter of the world’s wetlands. Peat forming in the cold and soggy conditions sequesters more than 147 billion tons of carbon; only the earth’s oceans contain more. “It’s a big place with big wildlife,” says Casey-Lefkowitz. The region teems with brown bears, caribou, and moose. Ocean-living fish swim up its web of rivers to spawn. In order for Canada’s boreal forest to remain ecologically viable, large, intact swaths of the forest must be protected from fragmentation and damage caused by logging, agriculture, hydropower, mining, and other industry. Despite the Canadian boreal’s size—some 2.2 million square miles—it cannot withstand damaging human activity forever. Changes in water flow from hydropower dams can alter the composition of soil and accelerate carbon release. Manitoba’s electric power is supplied primarily by the natural gas and hydroelectric utility Manitoba
Hydro. A series of Manitoba Hydro dams strung along the Nelson River transformed Lake Winnipeg into an enormous hydroelectric reservoir, its water level adjusted by engineers. At the lake’s northern end, the Pimicikamak Cree Nation watched as erosion from water-level fluctuation destroyed its ability to subsist off land that had sustained its people for millennia. A 1978 treaty with Manitoba Hydro promised remittance for damage to lands the Cree steward, but these promises were broken. In 1996, after winds damaged two hydroelectric transmission lines running to the west of Lake Winnipeg, Manitoba Hydro proposed building a new transmission line to the east through one of the boreal’s largest unbroken sections in Canada. Fearing the damage to caribou migration and pristine wilderness that such a corridor threatened, the Ojibwe of Poplar River decided to resist. In historic legislation passed in June, Poplar River First Nation, after a 12-year struggle, secured environmental protection for more than 3,100 square miles of boreal habitat, an area large
Did You Know…? You can defend the environment while receiving guaranteed payments for life with an NRDC Charitable Gift Annuity.
left: Garth Lenz; right: Courtesy of Gus Speth
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enough to fit Delaware and New York City. The Asatiwisipe Aki Management Plan, named for the Asatiwisipe River watershed, the Poplar River band’s traditional homeland, limits mining, logging, and hydroelectric development. Poplar River First Nation intends to initiate sustainable development, such as eco-tourism, that both respects its culture and preserves the land. The plan is a triumph for “cultural values and environmental values,” says Greg Selinger, Manitoba’s premier. It is also groundbreaking because First Nation representatives led the planning process—and succeeded. Previous attempts by First Nation bands typically faltered; after the provincial government trumpeted its conservation goals, public pressure would fade before real progress was made. This time, explains Casey-Lefkowitz, NRDC and other environmental groups kept the Poplar River fight in the public consciousness, giving Manitoba leaders the political support they needed to “do the right thing.” This legislation recognizes not only that water, trees, and birds deserve protection but also that heritage is worth preserving. “Poplar River had a vision,” says Virginia Petch, an archaeologist who helped Poplar River youth excavate pre-European First Nation settlements and gather oral traditions from elders. “It’s wonderful to see it come to fruition.” The nearby Bloodvein River band began to negotiate similar legislation in July, the second step in a broader plan. NRDC and Poplar River, together with the Manitoba government and Ojibwe First Nations, are working toward establishing a larger area as a UNESCO World Heritage site, to increase international recognition for the boreal’s preservation. They call it Pimachiowan Aki, or “The Land That Gives Life.” —Sabrina Richards
HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD
J
ames GustavE Speth is getting to know chickens pretty well and considering adding a few sheep to his experiment in growing his own food. Moose stroll through his yard, and occasionally the bird feeders fall victim to a peckish bear. A co-founder the VISIONARY of NRDC and former dean Professor Gus Speth of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Gus Speth now lives in a tiny New England town and teaches environmental law at the Vermont Law School. As he works on his new book, he surveys acres of forest rather than Yale’s famous Gothic spires. If the man who spent six years traveling the world as the administrator of the United Nations Development Programme seems to be slowing his pace, rest assured: Speth remains relentless in his pursuit of new remedies for what ails the planet. And visionary. Speth’s first foray into environmentalism was inspired by the belief that a clean environment is a human right. He envisioned a public service law firm that would achieve for the environment what the NAACP Legal Defense Fund did for civil rights. John Adams, one of Speth’s NRDC co-founders, describes him as one of the “thought leaders” for the fledgling organization, attracting early political support to NRDC and spearheading litigation to enforce the Clean Water Act. After seven years at NRDC, Speth joined President Jimmy Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality to “work on environmental issues from the inside”—the first of many career moves in pursuit of new channels for environmental activism. “My own philosophy keeps me from staying at any job too long,” explains Speth in his warm Southern accent. “I don’t want to run out of ideas and steam.” When Carter left office, Speth again saw an opportunity to create what “didn’t exist—an environmental think tank,” he explains. In 1982 he founded the World Resources Institute, which studies global environment and development. After he left WRI in 1993 to join the U.N. Development Programme, he traveled to developing countries to help implement programs that alleviated poverty while also protecting the environment. Beginning in 1999, his decadelong tenure at Yale gave Speth a chance to mold the next vanguard of environmental activists. Along the way, he has written two influential books, Red Sky at Morning and The Bridge at the Edge of the World, which argue that voracious consumerism is outstripping the planet’s resources and that only a change in economic values will promote sustainability. “We need to dethrone GDP,” Speth says. Mere GDP growth mainly enriches corporations, not communities, individuals, or the environment. Speth is working to build new institutions to “knock growth off its pedestal,” he says. One such organization, the New Economics Institute, envisions a “post-growth” economy. Fellow institute board member Neva Goodwin says Speth is “guided by very deep experience and knowledge” that enable him to appreciate the “scale of the problem.” Yet Speth’s optimism doesn’t wane. “Passion,” Goodwin says, “is his top attribute.” —S. R.
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BETWEEN THE LINES
A Mercury Cleanup Begins
In March the Environmental Protection Agency released proposed guidelines for limiting mercury emissions from power plants. The rules are the first national standards for power plants since the 1990 Clean Air Act identified mercury as a toxin that needed regulation; they will be finalized in November. NRDC experts discuss the implications below.
Our country is littered with hundreds of aging, dirty coal plants. The EPA’s toxics and other rules will finally lead to the cleanup or retirement of these dinosaurs. Lives will be saved and jobs and economic opportunities created as the development of the clean energy economy accelerates.
Coal-burning power plants are the largest source of mercury emissions in the United States and the largest source worldwide as well. With these rules, the United States has an opportunity not only to improve our own environment but also to show global leadership on controlling this key source of mercury.
In the eight states surrounding the five Great Lakes, there are more than 144 coal-fired power plants, pumping some 13,000 pounds of mercury into the air every year. These plants are by far the leading source of mercury deposition into the Great Lakes and Midwest rivers, lakes, and streams.
Shannon Fisk Air and Energy, Chicago
Susan Keane Health, DC
Thom Cmar Midwest Program, Chicago
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Children are particularly vulnerable to air pollution from power plants. By cutting emissions of hazardous air pollutants, the EPA’s proposed standards will prevent up to 120,000 cases of childhood asthma and decrease the number of acute bronchitis cases among children by 11,000 each year.
Starla Yeh Market Innovation, NY
Roaming Free Ranchers in Montana’s Gardiner Basin have long feared that wild bison roaming in Yellowstone National Park will transmit brucellosis—a disease that can cause pregnant cows to abort—to their domestic cattle. That overblown concern historically led to extreme actions by the government agencies that manage Yellowstone bison. When bison left the park each winter, they were often captured and slaughtered or chased back into the park. But recent science shows that the risk of cattle’s catching the disease from bison is almost nil. “It’s absurd to spend tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars just to scare bison off their seasonal habitat,” says Whitney Leonard, a wildlife advocate for NRDC in Montana. NRDC and other stakeholders have worked to ensure that bison managers consider up-to-date science when making decisions. Responding to these efforts, federal and state government agencies recently adapted their policy to allow bison to roam more freely outside Yellowstone. Leonard explains that the expanded grazing area allows the Yellowstone herd greater access to food at a critical time of year. Ranching interests feeling threatened by the more permissive rules have sued the state of Montana to reverse its recent policy changes. NRDC has intervened in the suit to make sure wild bison can continue to roam outside the park. —benjamin preston
left: keane: Matt Greenslade/photo-nyc.com; above: vassil
emisuld reduce o w e l u r s c (Hg), d toxi ng mercury i d The propose u l c n i , s es…. avy metal nd acid gas a , l e k sions of he c i n romium, and ury arsenic, ch urce of merc o s t s e g r a l s are the m the air Power plant mercury fro e c n O . r i a e it o the s can chang m s emissions t i n a g r o o r er, mic c form that reaches wat highly toxi a , y r u c r e m her power into methyl cury and ot r e M . … h s i n f ronment and builds up i ge the envi a m a d o s l a d fish. ions streams, an , plant emiss s e k a l s ’ n natio pollute our to power e available r a s e i g e t a str luding limits, inc A range of … n o i s s i m e eet the injection plants to m dry sorbent , s r e b b u r c s ystems, injection s wet and dry n o b r a c d e t tiva systems, ac es. s u and bagho t emisle would cu u r s c i x o t r consed f particula o [T]he propo e r a t a h t cts llutants their] effe [ g n i sions of po d u l c n ildren … i cern for ch emory. ning, and m on IQ, lear
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SWITCHBOARD:// Online news analysis
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/epepper/have_you_ever_tried_to.html
Washington politics can affect almost everything—from taxes to the endangered blunt-nosed leopard lizard. As it was readied for consideration in the House, this year’s Interior Department appropriations bill (H.R. 2584) sought to gut federal funding for listing new threatened and endangered species. But on July 27, things took a last-minute turn for the better when 37 Republicans joined with virtually all Democrats to vote against the “extinction rider.” As NRDC legislative advocate Elly Pepper pointed out earlier this summer, it’s important to maintain the integrity of the Endangered Species Act. Have you ever tried to explain extinction to a kid? It’s not easy. They just can’t fathom that something could be completely erased from nature. The permanence of extinction is hard to wrap your head around, which is why it’s so disturbing that the GOP tried messing with a law that prevents extinction through a must-pass budget bill. The 2012 House Interior appropriations bill contained a rider that would bar all new listings of endangered spe-
show us your nature
cies and critical habitat designations, but allow delisting and downlisting species. In defending the extinction rider, Republicans claimed that they were just trying to modify the Endangered Species Act to make it more effective and more manageable for the Fish and Wildlife Service to implement. So why did the provision prevent any new species from being protected and prohibit the Fish and Wildlife Service from doing its job? A Harris Interactive Poll conducted this year found that 92 percent of respondents agreed that decisions about wildlife management and protection should be made by scientists, not politicians. Further, 90 percent agreed that the Endangered Species Act has helped hundreds of species recover from the brink of extinction. Kids don’t understand extinction because it’s just so horrible. On the other hand, politicians don’t understand just how horrible it is. We must continue to emphasize to them that once these plants and animals are gone, we can’t bring them back.
Submit your photos at onearth.org/photocontest
Morning catch To capture this image of a black-crowned night heron, John Rivard made almost daily sunrise visits to Florida’s Largo Central Park Nature Preserve, edging a bit closer each morning to the bird’s favorite branch until it grew accustomed to his presence. He took this shot from 15 feet away. The bird is the most aggressive of the herons native to Florida, often eating the young of other birds, mice, large frogs, and snakes.
Gas Sippers President Barack Obama
announced an agreement with 13 automakers in July to strengthen pollution and fuel-efficiency standards that would require all new cars and light trucks to deliver 54.5 miles per gallon (mpg) by 2025. But these new standards would not have been possible had California not passed a 2002 law that tightened its own vehicle greenhouse gas emissions standards, which had the effect of raising fuel efficiency for cars sold in the state. Thirteen other states had followed suit by 2007, giving the president the political leverage to push for more stringent federal rules. “Everything you see today can be traced back to what NRDC and California accomplished in 2002,” says Roland Hwang, NRDC’s transportation program director, adding that NRDC co-sponsored California’s legislation and later lobbied on Capitol Hill to garner support for tougher federal standards. The federal government strengthened car and light truck pollution and fueleconomy standards in 2009 to require a 35.5 mpg average for the 2016 model year. NRDC estimates that the tougher standards will cut U.S. oil consumption by about 1.5 million barrels per day by 2030, almost as much as the country imports from the Persian Gulf. The tightened standards will also generate about $80 billion in consumer fuel savings by 2030. The federal government and the California Air Resources Board—which earned a seat at the table for its role in pioneering improved standards— will review automakers’ —b. p. progress in 2018.
Fall 2011
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fieldwork
who we are
what we do
our wild heritage,” and to the hurt that its loss might evoke. She will never forget the day during her freshman year at the University of Southern California when, sitting in an introductory environmental studies class—the only science course the then–broadcast journalism major had intended to take—the professor talked about how the oceans had become lit-
These days, the mom-to-be regularly flexes those relationship-building muscles as she advocates for NRDC’s oceans initiatives. She makes it a particular point to give voice to the people whose lives are directly affected. To mark the one-year anniversary of the Deepwater spill, for example, she organized a congressional briefing at which
ocean’s ONE Regan Nelson chose to focus on the planet while still in college.
Consider the SEAS A scuba-certified Michigan native looks out for the world’s waters, and the people who depend on them
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JOCELYN C. Z U C K E R M A n
arly last May, Regan Nelson sat on a
23-foot skiff in the Gulf of Mexico, watching dolphins surface through the shimmery slick and fighting off the nausea-inducing reek of oil. NRDC’s senior oceans advocate had flown down from her Washington, D.C., home to take the measure of the damage from the Deepwater Horizon spill, and while she recalls lamenting the countless shrimp likely to be contaminated and the marshes already despoiled, what haunted her most was the sound of the man behind the wheel. Captain Corey O’Neill had built his boat by hand in his backyard, and as he stood there pointing out his preferred haunts for landing redfish and speckled trout, his voice cracked with heartbreak. Having grown up hunting and foraging with her dad in the Michigan woods, Nelson related instinctively to O’Neill’s “deep connection to
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tered with plastic. “When you’re from the Midwest,” she says, “you get taught very early on that you have to take responsibility for i your actions. It was like, wait a minute—we have a responsibility to make sure these types of attacks don’t continue. I mean, this is just wrong.” Nelson arranged to spend part of her sophomore year in the Caribbean, where she did research among the reefs of the Turks and Caicos Islands and met with locals to talk about their fishing habits and economic challenges. Back in California, she switched her major to environmental studies, and after graduation she moved to Washington State to work in forest conservation. Monitoring cutting was one part of the job, but Nelson spent the bulk of her time organizing “working groups” that brought together such traditional adversaries as loggers, tribal members, conservationists, and the U.S. Forest Service. The goal was to figure out strategies for restoring the health of the forests while also ensuring the well-being of local communities.
the owner of a Gulf fishing lodge and the wife of a fisherman explained how their lives had been upended by the disaster. Nelson also has been working with a scientist at NRDC to advocate for the creation of an international network to monitor carbon dioxide in the oceans. As levels of CO2 in the atmosphere increase, seawater is becoming more acidic; this shift in pH balance threatens the survival of marine animals. Nelson is concerned about how people dependent on seafood for their diets and livelihoods will cope with consequences that she says are more imminent than most of us realize. She also gets her point across by writing on Switchboard, the NRDC blog, and for the Huffington Post. “People only have so much energy to put toward thinking about these issues,” Nelson says, so you have to focus on how to capture their attention. “Lots of folks have an attachment to their fishing heritage, for instance. Tapping into that emotional connection to nature reminds you why this is important, and why you do it.”
left: PHOTOGRAPH FOR ONEARTH BY DANUTA OTFINOWSKI; OPPOSITE: Charles Schwieger
“When you’re from the Midwest, you get taught very early on that you have to take responsibility for your actions. It was like, wait a minute—this is just wrong.”
NRDC Board of Trustees
a look ahead Diana Adams clearly recalls
the day in 1970 when a young John Adams (no relation) walked into the public relations office in New York City where she was working as a writer. The NRDC founding director and former president had come to ask her help in publicizing his new organization. “I sensed his commitment to the environment right away,” she recalls.“I grew up on a farm in Dutchess County,” Diana Adams says, “a verdant part of New York State rimmed by the beautiful Hudson River, where you were not allowed to swim because it was so polluted. Early on I had a sense that something must be done to prevent people from carelessly, often greedily, taking down magnificent old trees and paving over fields. Ever since then, I have been impressed with every NRDC campaign, every victory.” Adams decided that the capstone of her decades-long association with the organization should be a bequest in her will for NRDC. “Conservation is not just for my family but for generations to come,” she says. “Concern for the environment will ensure a legacy for each of us.” 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.
Daniel R. Tishman, Chair Frederick A.O. Schwarz, Jr. Chair Emeritus Adam Albright, Vice Chair Patricia Bauman, Vice Chair Robert J. Fisher, Vice Chair Alan Horn, Vice Chair Joy Covey, Treasurer John H. Adams, Founding Director, NRDC Richard E. Ayres Anna Scott Carter Susan Crown Laurie P. David Leonardo DiCaprio
John E. Echohawk Bob Epstein Michel Gelobter, Ph.D. Arjun Gupta Van Jones Philip B. Korsant Nicole Lederer Michael Lynton Shelly B. Malkin Josephine A. Merck Mary Moran Peter A. Morton Wendy K. Neu Frederica Perera, Ph.D. Robert Redford Laurance Rockefeller Jonathan F. P. Rose
NRDC Staff president Frances Beinecke eXECUTIVE Director Peter H. Lehner PROGRAM STAFF: Wesley Warren, director; Action Fund: Heather Taylor-Miesle, director; Matthew Howes, Corry McKee; Air & Energy: Dale Bryk, director; Ann Alexander, Christina Angelides, Evelyn Arevalo, Mona Avalos, Jamy Bacchus, Max Baumhefner, Kaid Benfield, Drew Bennett, Terry Black, Uchenna Bright, Pierre Bull, Ralph Cavanagh, Allison Clements, Brandi Colander, Lisa Copland, Emily Davis, Donna DeCostanzo, Pierre Delforge, Natisha Demko, Amanda Eaken, Kristin Eberhard, Lara Ettenson, Deborah Faulkner, Shannon Fisk, R ishi Garg, David Goldstein, Vignesh Gowrishankar, Nathanael Greene, Ashok Gupta, Justin Horner, Noah Horowitz, Roland Hwang, Alexander Jackson, Richard Kassel, Valerie Keane, Kit Kennedy, Elizabeth Landeros, Noah Long, Daniel Lorch, Deron Lovaas, Luis Martinez, Sierra Martinez, Peter Miller, Simon Mui, James Presswood, Marissa Ramirez, Robin Roy, Laura E. Sanchez, Thomas Singer, Brian Siu, Rebecca Stanfield, Luke Tonachel, John Walke, Sharianne Walker, Margaret Waltner, Devra Wang, Sheryl Warzecha, Samantha Wilt; Center for Market Innovation: Peter Malik, director; Judith Albert, Greg Hale, Philip Henderson, Radhika K hosla, Kevin L ev y, Christine Luong, Yerina Mugica, Douglass Sims, Cai Steger, Samir Succar, Alisa Valderrama, Starla Yeh; China: Barbara Finamore, director; Hoober Hu, Ruidong Jin, Hyoung Mi Kim, Yang Li, Yuqi Li, Alvin Lin, Zixin Lin, Mingming Liu, Runhui Liu, Jingjing Qian, Junxia Su, Jun Tian, Alex Wang, Yaling Wang, Qi Wu, Christine Xu, Xiaoli Yan, Mona Yew, Anne Zhang, Xiya Zhang, Yao Zheng; Climate Center: Daniel Lashof, director; Radha Adhar, Peter Altman, Jamie Consuegra, David Doniger, Meleah Geertsma, Grace Gill, David Hawkins, Kelly Henderson, Antonia Herzog, Laurie Johnson, Franz Matzner, George Peridas, Adrianna Quintero-Somaini, Jake Schmidt, Theo Spencer, John Steelman, Lucy Swiech-LaFlamme; Government Affairs: David Goldston, director; Richie Ackerman, Marc Boom, Lisa Catapano, Andrea Martin, Ann Notthoff, Ellis Pepper, Robert Perks, Lindsey Reed, Victoria Rome, Scott Slesinger, Melissa Waage, Health: Linda Greer, director; Diane Bailey, Dana Gunders, Sarah Janssen, Jonathan Kaplan, Avinash Kar, Susan Keane, Kim Knowlton, David Lennett, Daniel Rosenberg, Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, Jennifer Sass, Gina Solomon, Monique Waples, Mae Wu; International: Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, director; Carlota Arias, Elizabeth Barratt-Brown, Carolina Herrera, Anjali Jaiswal, Amanda Maxwell, Shravya Reddy, Jacob Scherr, Elizabeth Shope; Land & Wildlife: Sharon Buccino, co-director; Andrew Wetzler, co-director; Charles Clusen, Sylvia Fallon, Debbie Hammel, Nathaniel Lawrence, Whitney Leonard, Amy Mall, Bobby McEnaney, Helen O’Shea, Rebecca Riley, Justin Sherman, Matthew Skoglund, Janet Stringer, Katie Umekubo, Johanna Wald, Louisa Willcox, Craig Dylan Wyatt, Sami Yassa, Carl Zichella; Litigation: Mitch Bernard, director; Irina Petrova, corporate counsel; Joshua Berman, Lisa Busch, Aaron Colangelo, Robert F. Kennedy, Selena Kyle, Ben Longstreth, Nancy Marks, Cassie Rahm, Andres Restrepo, Lucia Roibal, Aaron Schaer, Joya Sonnenfeldt, Jennifer Sorenson, Jared Thompson, Michael Wall, Vivian Wang; Midwest Regional: Henry L. Henderson, director; Thomas Cmar, Jennifer Daly, Mary Hanley, Melissa Lupo, Nicholas Magrisso, Dylan Sullivan; Nuclear: Christopher Paine, director; Thomas B. Cochran, Geoffrey Fettus, Matt
Sylvia Earle, Ph.D. James B. Frankel Hamilton F. Kean Charles E. Koob Ruben Kraiem
Thomas W. Roush, M.D. Philip T. Ruegger, III Christine H. Russell, Ph.D. William H. Schlesinger Wendy Kirby Schmidt James Gustave Speth Max Stone James Taylor Gerald Torres Elizabeth Wiatt George M. Woodwell, Ph.D.
Burks B. Lapham Maya Lin Michael A. McIntosh, Sr. Daniel Pauly Nathaniel P. Reed
honorary trustees Dean Abrahamson, M.D., Ph.D. Robert O. Blake Henry R. Breck Joan K. Davidson
Cruz Reynoso John R. Robinson John Sheehan David Sive Frederick A. Terry, Jr. Thomas A. Troyer Kirby Walker
McKinzie, Jonathan McLaughlin, Robert S. Norris; Oceans: Sarah Chasis, director; Jonathan Alexander, Seth Atkinson, Alison Chase, Karen Garrison, Marisa Kaminski, Leila Monroe, Regan Nelson, David Newman, Bradford Sewell, Lisa Speer, Lisa Suatoni, Marina Zaiats; Science Center: Christina Swanson, director; Briana Mordick; Urban East: Mark Izeman, director; Johanna Dyer, Eric Goldstein, Allen Hershkowitz, Darby Hoover, Albert Huang, Richard Schrader, Kate Sinding, Elinor Tarlow; Urban West: Joel Reynolds, director; Gregory Gould, Lizzeth Henao, Michael Jasny, Taryn Kiekow, Melissa Lin Perrella, Adriano Martinez, Damon Nagami, Lauren Packard, David Pettit, Gopi Shah, Zak Smith, Morgan Wyenn; Water: David Beckman, director; Ben Chou, Jon Devine, Steven Fleischli, Noah Garrison, Rebecca Hammer, Karen Hobbs, Carol James, Anna Kheyfets, Lawrence Levine, Michelle Mehta, Barry Nelson, Douglas Obegi, Edward Osann, Katherine Poole, Tracy Quinn, Monty Schmitt; COMMUNICATIONS: Phil Gutis, director; Cathryn Bales, Ynés Cabral, Edwin Chen, Robert Deans, Linda Escalante, Rachel Fried, Alba Garzon, Dylan Gasperik, Lisa Goffredi, Apolinar Gonzales, Elizabeth Heyd, Daniel Hinerfeld, Serena Ingre, Valerie Jaffee, Robert Keefe, Francesca Koe, Jessica Lass, Kathryn McGrath, Joshua Mogerman, Jennifer Powers, Kimberly Ranney, Carlita Salazar, Auden Shim, Katherine Slusark, Lise Stevens, Suzanne Struglinski, William Tam, Lisa Whiteman, Lauren Zingarelli; onearth Douglas S. Barasch, editor-in-chief; George Black, Scott Dodd, Janet Gold, Jon Mark Ponder, Jocelyn C. Zuckerman; DEVELOPMENT: John Murray, director; Gina A. Abramo, Coretta Anderson, Spencer Campbell, John Cavanagh, Christine Corcoran, Elizabeth Corr, Justin Courter, Maria DeRiggi, Caitlin Driscoll, Sarah Edwards-Schmidt, Travis Eisenbise, Robert Ferguson, Katherine Gibson, Nancy Golden, Shari Greenblatt, Courtney Gross, Ashley Honeysett, Jennifer Iselin, Rita Itwaru, Patrick Kiely, Ying Li, Kelly McGonigle, Elizabeth McNulty, Nancy Metzger, Peter Meysenburg, Emily Moyer, Michelle Mulia-Howell, Shaniqua Outlaw, Matthew Perrin, Caroline Pronovost, Michelle Quinones, Lynne Shevlin, Shannon Slanker, Missy Toney, Tammy Tran, Julie Truax, Steve Van Landingham, Denise Vazquez, Catherine Vega, Nicole Verhoff, Marc Vigliotti, Desrene Walton, Marian Weber, Marianna Weis, Nick Wolf; Membership: Linda Lopez, director; Jean Bowman, Claire Brandow, Darlene Davis, Lillian Fernandez, Amy Greer, Alex Hernandez, Katharine Houston, Jordan Kessler, Jennifer Lam, Gina Trujillo, Marie Weinmann, Joyce Yeung; FINANCE AND OPERATIONS: Judith Keefer, director; Finance: Hiawatha Barno, Annette Canela, Dorothy Clune, Jeff Cruz, Debby Fuentes, James Hands, Sharon Hargrove, Lauretta Hoffler, Eunice Jean-Paul, Alex Liu, Shih-Chang Lu, Apurva Muchhala, Vivek Nadarajah; Administration: Jackie Albarran, Sasha Alleyne, Sonah Allie, Umar Al-Uqdah, Brian Anderson, Sarah Brailey, Larisa Bravette, Anita Brennan, Willa Bugnon, Angela Calderon, William Christie, Tianya Coachman, Matthew Cohen, Genie Colbert, Lasans Crawford, Angeliki Ebbesen, Leslie Edmond, Matthew Eisenson, Mimose Elie, Mercedes Falber, Sevi Glekas, Brian Gourley, Anthony Guerrero, Sung Hwang, Brian James, Rodrigo Jaramillo, Leslie Jones, Vera Korol, Rene Leni, Felicia Marcus, Marisa McFarlane, Malia Palakiko, Leonard Patterson, Penny Primo, Ann Roach, Roseann Rock, Stephanie Sandor, Abby Schaefer, Robyn Spencer, Milagro Suarez, Vivek Varughese, Bradley Wells.
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open space the summer i got buzzed
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BY emma marris
My terror of cicadas plunged me into an existential crisis. I preach summer, I awoke to one of nature’s true wonders, the gospel of connecting with nature right in your own backyard, rather an explosion of giant insects. From North Carolina than fixating on spectacular nature far away via documentaries about across to Arkansas and up into Missouri and Illinois, elephants or sharks. Now I was afraid of my own backyard. Eventually, I got a temporary prescription for clonazepam, an antiBrood XIX cicadas, the “Great Southern Brood,” began emerging from underground, molting, fly- anxiety drug. Flying high on our pharmaceutical bounty, I could hang ing, singing their rhythmic songs—and landing on me. That is when out the laundry, take my daughter to the lake, and remove the cicadas that landed on me with only the mildest spike of adrenaline. wonder turned to panic. But what does it mean when one Cicadas spend those 13 years suckof nature’s greatest wonders—and I ing on tree roots, molting and remoltreally think of the periodic emergence ing until they are two inches long. Then of cicadas as the insect equivalent of they tunnel out, climb up the nearest a wildebeest migration or a sandhill tree or other vertical object, and molt crane superflock gathering at dusk on once more, leaving behind an exquithe Platte—drives me to drugs? sitely detailed exoskeleton that glows At first, I was heartily ashamed of golden in the sunlight. As adults, they myself. I felt as if I had failed some test are red-eyed and equipped with transparof biophilia. But then I thought about ent wings, with which they clumsily fly wolves. In their seminal 1998 paper callto ear-splittingly loud lek trees to mate. ing for a rewilding of North America, Then they die, rot, and enrich the soil, Michael Soulé and Reed Noss spoke feeding the trees they once consumed. about ecological reasons for restoring My first Brood XIX cicada landed on missing carnivores. They also talked me as I left the house to get the paper. about how predators supply “human I flailed. I screamed. Its hooklike legs opportunities to attain humility.” had got stuck on my shirt. It was panWolves aren’t just beautiful or ecoicking too, buzzing loudly in distress. I logically important, in other words; finally pried it off and bolted back to the they are also terrifying. Fear is a value house, my heart racing. The next time they provide. Nature isn’t supposed to one mistook me for a tree, as they so be a pleasing production number filled often do around anything even vaguely with charming creatures and pretty vertical, I screamed again. And worse! I would make a plants. Wild nature can frighten, hurt, I tried to shake off my irrational terprisoner of my toddler daughter, kill. And when we lose nature, we lose ror. Cicadas don’t sting or bite, unless in whom I hoped to inculcate a fear along with beauty. you hold them quietly long enough to I’m not going to lie; the pills were make them think you are a suckable lifetime love of nature. great. I was arguably a better mother: tree. I tried to tough it out, but dreaded after-dinner walks. The bugs were everywhere. After a few days, I gave laid-back, relaxed, able to slow down to my daughter’s pace. But I don’t up and stayed inside. I read that the emergence was to last six weeks. I think she noticed a thing. The cicadas are all fertilizer now and the despaired. I would be a prisoner in my own home for half the summer. pills are back on the shelf. Adele and I can romp outside without fear. And worse! I would make a prisoner of my toddler daughter, in Playing in our suddenly much less threatening yard, I realize that I have whom I hoped to inculcate a lifetime love of nature. Adele had no fear done exactly what I advise us all to do. I have experienced the nature of cicadas. She picked them up gently and let them roam around her that is all around us in a deep and visceral way. I didn’t have to drive to pudgy limbs. It was only after witnessing my transparent fear and at- Yellowstone to “attain humility.” I found fear in my own backyard. tempts at nonchalance when she brought me the wriggling, buzzing insects as gifts (“Oh, thank you, dear! Why don’t you put him on the Emma Marris is the author of Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a ground?”) that she began to handle them with some suspicion. Post-Wild World. She lives in Columbia, Missouri.
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illustration by eleftheria alexandri
very 13 years it begins. One morning this
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